A new docuseries on soft rock is set to hit Paramount+ in the new year. According to Variety, Sometimes When We Touch: The Reign, Ruin and Resurrection of Soft Rock will debut in the U.S. and Canada on January 3.
The three-part series will feature interviews from a whole host of artists, including Sheryl Crow, The Police’s Stewart Copeland, Run DMC’s Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, Richard Marx, Earth, Wind & Fire‘s Verdine White and The Bangles’ Susanna Hoffs, as well as actual soft rockers like Kenny Loggins, Toni Tennille, Rupert Holmes and Air Supply.
The series will delve into the popularity of the music, some of which has been deemed “yacht rock” in recent years and has gained in popularity. It will focus on such artists as Loggins, Air Supply, DarylHall and John Oates, Christopher Cross, the Carpenters, Lionel Richie, Captain&Tennille and more, and will feature new and archival interviews, as well as concert clips. It promises to celebrate “the impact of soft rock while acknowledging the cringey excesses that sometimes led it astray.”
The holiday season is here and the music charts certainly reflect that, with several classic holiday tunes making the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart this week.
While Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” tops the list, four other classic tracks land in the Top 10, with Brenda Lee’s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” at two, matching the song’s highest ranking on the chart. Overall, the tune is up 15% in streams to 34.3 million, with a 26.1 million in radio airplay audience.
Landing just behind Lee is Bobby Helms’ “Jingle Bell Rock” at three, followed by Burl Ives’ “A Holly Jolly Christmas” at four. The final holiday tune in the Top 10 is Wham!’s “Last Christmas,” which this week lands at nine. The first time it reached the Top 10 was in 2020, when it peaked at seven.
One of the most popular things to do this time of year is gather with friends and family and binge holiday movies — and with that in mind, the educational research company Scholaroo wanted to see which movies were each state’s favorites.
While mainstays like Jon Favreau‘s 2004 classic Elf and Jim Carrey‘s How The Grinch Stole Christmas made the list, as one might expect, there were some surprises.
For one thing, no state picked Die Hard.
For another, Lindsay Lohan‘s new Netflix movie, Falling for Christmas, was ranked as the favorite holiday movie in eight states, including California, Florida and Colorado.
The Grinch — the 2018 animated one, not the original animated version — was the most popular title overall, named the favorite film in 23 states, including Alabama, Montana and Texas.
Home Alone was the champ in 18 states, including New York, Nevada and Massachusetts.
And while they weren’t the #1 movie, other movies ranked in the top five.
The Nightmare Before Christmas ranked fifth in Arkansas and Florida, 4th in Colorado and had its highest ranking in Hawaii at #3.
Elf was a top-five finisher in many states, including #4 ranks in Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire and New Jersey, to name a few, and ranked third in South Dakota.
Survey questions, methodology and results have not been verified or endorsed by ABC News or The Walt Disney Company.
Julian Lennon is sharing his thoughts on the 2019 film Yesterday: he has mixed feelings, especially when it comes to how his father, John Lennon, is depicted in it.
The film stars Hamish Patel as a struggling musician who wakes up after an accident to a world that has never heard of the Beatles and begins to pass off the band’s tunes as his own, making him a huge superstar.
During an appearance on Kevin Nealon’s web series Hiking with Kevin, Julian shared that he “loved” the movie, “until they put that weird bit of an impression of what Dad would look like in his 70s and 80s or whatever, up on a Scottish or Irish island,” referring to the plot twist where Patel’s character finds out in this new world Lennon is still alive and goes to find him.
Julian says the twist “kind of threw the whole film off for me,” explaining, “I didn’t get—it wasn’t necessary for me, I don’t think. And it was just weird.”
Christmas has returned to the BillboardHot 100, with Mariah Carey ending Taylor Swift‘s six-week reign at #1.
Mariah’s 1994 holiday smash “All I Want for Christmas Is You” has dashed to the top of this week’s chart for the fourth straight time in recent years, making her the only artist to do so. The song previously topped the Hot 100 for multiple weeks in 2019, 2020 and 2021.
The song also extends Mariah’s record of being the artist with the longest span between her chart-topping runs. The singer first ruled the Hot 100 on August 4, 1990, with “Vision of Love,” which means her songs have been consistently going to #1 for 32 years, four months and three weeks. In all, she is officially the first and only artist to lead the chart across four distinct decades.
This also means “Christmas” beats out all the other holiday songs for how long it has led the Hot 100. The song has now notched its ninth week at #1, which extends its lead from second-place finisher David Seville & the Chipmunks‘ “The Chipmunk Song,” which ruled the chart for four weeks back in 1958.
For this latest chart-topping feat, fans streamed Mariah’s hit 36.2 million times and purchased 6,000 additional copies over the past week. This also secures Mariah’s 88th week overall leading the Hot 100, making her the artist with the most career weeks in the top spot.
Rihanna claims second place with 60 weeks atop the Hot 100.
Lastly, the return of “Christmas” to #1 notches Mariah’s 19th Hot 100 leader overall, which puts her in striking range of tying — and possibly overtaking — the Beatles, who are the current record holders with 20 chart toppers.
Comedians often plumb pain to find the funny, and in Jay Leno‘s case he’s doing that literally following the fiery garage accident that left him severely burned.
As reported, gearhead Leno suffered severe burns to his face, neck and hand exactly a month ago, when he was sprayed with gasoline while working on an antique steam car; the gas ignited, and the actor was rushed to a Los Angeles burn unit.
He underwent skin graft surgery and other therapies during a 10-day stay at the Grossman Burn Center, but an interview with The Wall Street Journal shows his sense of humor wasn’t affected.
“Eight days later, I had a brand new face. And it’s better than what was there before,” he joked.
The host of Jay Leno’s Garage added, “But really, it was an accident, that’s all. Anybody who works with their hands on a regular basis is going to have an accident at some point. If you play football, you get a concussion or a broken leg. Anything you do, there’s a risk factor.”
Jay got back on stage on November 27, shortly after he was released, to a sold-out crowd at Comedy Magic Club in California’s Hermosa Beach. He joked outside the club to reporters at the time, “We’ve got two shows tonight – regular and extra crispy.”
To WSJ, the former Tonight Show host said, “You have to joke about it. There’s nothing worse than whiny celebrities. If you joke about it, people laugh along with you.”
Jelly Roll, Jackson Dean, Priscilla Block, Frank Ray and Nate Smith have been named the newest class of the Country Radio Seminar’s New Faces program.
The five promising up-and-comers will perform during the New Faces of Country Music show lineup at the 2023 Country Radio Seminar next March. The show is a cornerstone event of CRS, spotlighting new artists making major waves within the genre. Alumni of the program include Taylor Swift, Maren Morris, Luke Bryan and Luke Combs.
CRS is a multiday event held in Nashville, bringing together radio and music industry professionals for a variety of panels, workshops and performances. The New Faces of Country Music show has been a staple of the event since 1970.
CRS will take place Monday, March 13, through Wednesday, March 15. Registration is open now.
Janis Ian is retiring from performing and recording, although she’s not calling it that. The singer has revealed her most recent album, The Light at the End of the Line, which recently earned her a 10th Grammy nomination, is her last album of new songs.
Janis calls her decision not “retiring but rewiring,” noting it’s “a bittersweet moment and a grand one.” She says a virus she caught during what was supposed to be her farewell tour caused scarring on her vocal cord that has left her unable to sing; there is no treatment or cure to fix it.
But Ian insists she isn’t going to stop being creative. She plans to continue to release music, including a duets album she recorded prior to the scarring, which will include Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson. She also plans to release live performances, unheard songs and more.
(MOSCOW, Idaho) — As police investigate the mysterious murders of four University of Idaho students, an “army of analysts” are combing through the videos submitted to the FBI tip website, according to Moscow Police Capt. Roger Lanier.
“Those videos are from all over town,” Lanier said in a video statement Monday.
“As you can imagine, there’s hours and hours and hours of video, so it does take a lot of time,” he said.
It’s been nearly one month since roommates Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen and Xana Kernodle, as well as Kernodle’s boyfriend Ethan Chapin, were killed inside the girls’ off-campus house in the early hours of Nov. 13.
Two surviving roommates — who police said are not suspects — were home at the time and likely slept through the attacks, according to authorities. They were on the ground floor while the four students killed were on the second and third floors.
No suspects have been identified.
Lanier said police “do have a lot of information” that they’re choosing not to release to the public.
“We’re not releasing specific details because we do not want to compromise this investigation,” he said. “We owe that to the families and we owe that to the victims. We want more than just an arrest — we want a conviction.”
Police did say they’re looking to speak with the occupant or occupants of a white 2011-2013 Hyundai Elantra that was in the “immediate area” of the house on the morning of the murders.
“We’re looking for that car because we believe, through our investigation, that that car was in the area during the time of the murders,” Lanier said Monday. “The occupants or occupants may have seen something — they may not know they have seen something. So we specifically want to talk to them.”
Police urge anyone with information to upload digital media to fbi.gov/moscowidaho or contact the tip line at tipline@ci.moscow.id.us or 208-883-7180.
(NEW YORK) — Elon Musk elicited backlash from liberal leaders and cheers from some conservative ones in response to a viral tweet on Sunday that called for Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top expert on infectious disease, to be prosecuted.
The polarizing tweet, which garnered more than a million “likes,” arrived about six weeks after Musk told advertisers that he sought to make Twitter “a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner.”
Musk, a longtime critic of COVID-19 lockdowns, who has voiced a series of conservative opinions since acquiring Twitter in October, tweeted: “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”
The message to Musk’s 120 million followers appeared to attack Fauci while mocking members of the LGBTQ community and allies who sometimes state their pronouns to communicate their gender identity.
Fauci, the chief medical advisor to President Joe Biden, is the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He will step down from his current roles later this month.
Many liberal lawmakers and commentators condemned Musk’s tweet, defending Fauci and expressing support for LGBTQ people.
“I’m a big fan of Dr. Fauci and how he’s calmly guided our country through crisis,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., said. “Courting vaccine deniers doesn’t seem like a smart business strategy, but the issue is this: could you just leave a good man alone in your seemingly endless quest for attention?”
Astronaut Scott Kelly, the twin brother of Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz, tweeted to his 5.3 million followers: “Elon, please don’t mock and promote hate toward already marginalized and at-risk-of-violence members of the #LGBTQ+ community.”
“Furthermore, Dr Fauci is a dedicated public servant whose sole motivation was saving lives,” Kelly added.
Some far-right conservative leaders, by contrast, praised the message from Musk.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green, R-Ga., whom Musk reinstated on Twitter after a previous permanent ban over the spread of COVID-19 misinformation, applauded the attack on Fauci.
“I affirm your pronouns Elon,” Greene said.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent anti-vaccine activist, celebrated Musk for “looking beyond the propaganda.”
The tweet targeting Fauci came hours after Musk shared a meme that mocked Fauci over his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The comments from Musk are the latest in a series of conservative Twitter posts, including an endorsement last month for Republican candidates in the midterm elections.
Since he acquired Twitter in October, Musk has made some changes long sought by conservatives. He reinstated some formerly suspended accounts such as those belonging to Republican leaders like former President Donald Trump and Greene, and he stopped enforcement of a policy prohibiting the spread of COVID-19 misinformation.
Musk also revamped Twitter’s subscription service, Twitter Blue, allowing users to access verification if they pay a monthly fee of $8. The service was suspended after it gave rise to a flood of fake accounts impersonating public figures and brands but has since been reinstated.
A slew of major companies, including General Motors and Pfizer, have announced a pause of advertising on Twitter. Some of the companies have said they need time to evaluate their advertising presence on Twitter as the company pursues a new direction.
Musk, who said he overpaid for the platform at the purchasing price of $44 billion, faces pressure to boost the company’s revenue. Last month, he said that the company is losing $4 million each day.
On the same day as the tweet targeting Fauci, Musk endured an extended chorus of loud boos after being brought on stage at a comedy performance by Dave Chappelle at the Chase Arena in San Francisco.
A video posted on Twitter shows crowd members booing Musk while he stands on stage alongside Chappelle.
“Ladies and gentlemen, make some noise for the richest man in the world,” Chappelle told the audience.
After the boos, Musk told Chappelle: “You weren’t expecting this, were you?”
