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Rob Thomas announces 10th anniversary benefit concert at Atlantic City’s Borgata Hotel

September 26, 2022 by WDNY Radio

This year marks the 10th anniversary of Rob Thomas‘ annual charity concert at the Borgata Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and he’ll mark the milestone with a special one-night-only event taking place in January.

For the show, the Matchbox Twenty singer has invited some “very special guests” to perform along with him — but he is remaining tight lipped on who they are at the moment. The event is set for Sunday, January 15.

The concert benefits Thomas’ Sidewalk Angels Foundation, which he co-founded in 2003 with wife Marisol Maldonado. He explained on Twitter that his charity supports “over 20 no-kill animal shelters and animal rescues across the country” by providing them critical resources and funds.

The Grammy winner noted that COVID-19 impacted these rescues and shelters, so his charity is helping them “continue their work as well as make sure that families can continue to get the care they need for their pets.”

Tickets for the event go on sale on Tuesday, September 27, for VIP and fan club members on The Borgata‘s website. General public ticket sales start Friday, September 30.

Music notes: Ed Sheeran, Spice Girls, Lewis Capaldi, Rihanna, Sam Smith and Meghan Trainor

September 26, 2022 by WDNY Radio

Ed Sheeran is digging a remix of his song “Shape of You” with “Take On Me” by a-ha. The TikTok account @ThereIRuinedIt mashed the two songs together, but Ed wants to know, “Why is this SO GOOD?”

Ed is also working to protect the United Kingdom’s smallest music venues by teaming up with Music Venue Trust. He said in a statement, via Music Times, “Small, independent venues are so, so important to the music community, and I’ve played some of my favourite gigs of my career in these rooms. We’ve got to do all we can to protect these beautiful venues that we’ve all come to love for years to come.”

Melanie C is looking back at the Spice Girls’ infamous meetup with then-Prince Charles, now King Charles III, in 1997. Mel told People Geri Halliwell gave the royal a pat on the butt and joined Mel B in kissing him on the cheek — he didn’t mind! “Now that Charles is our King, it kind of makes it even more naughty,” she laughed. “Those naughty Spice Girls!”

Lewis Capaldi took on Britney Spears by covering her song “Everytime” on BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge. Lewis slowed down the melancholy track and made the song punch harder with his raw, emotional vocals. Fans are begging him to release it as a single.

Rihanna is the next Super Bowl halftime performer and she is going to give “1,000 percent,” a source tells Entertainment Tonight.

Sam Smith celebrated new song “Unholy” amassing nearly 30,000,000 streams. They shared a screenshot of the song’s Spotify stats to their Instagram Story and captioned it with a sobbing emoji.

Meghan Trainor wants “4 babies.” She shared a TikTok about how she learned to love her stretch marks and C-section scars, which she said made it look like “a lawnmower ran over me.” She’s now teasing, “It’s about to get crazy” with her future pregnancy plans.

Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black says he’s recovering from “serious head injury”

September 26, 2022 by WDNY Radio

Without specifying how he was hurt, Oscar-winning Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black has revealed via Instagram he “sustained a serious head injury” that “put me out of commission.”

“Showing little improvement, my doctors ordered me to shut off my brain in hopes of it healing,” he continued. “This has been a challenging, frightening time for a creative type who depends on what’s in his skull to work, care and love. And now I understand the road back will be long.”

Black explained his husband, British Olympic gold medalist Tom Daley, whisked him away to the Greek Islands to recover and “to make me shut off.”

Black, who produced the Emmy-nominated drama Under the Banner of Heaven, continued, “I can already feel this trip is a step in the right direction, and I finally feel safe sharing a bit again.”

James Earl Jones reportedly putting Darth Vader’s voice into the hands of tech wizards

September 26, 2022 by WDNY Radio

Obi-Wan Kenobi’s description of Darth Vader being “more machine now than man” is coming true.

According to an article in Vanity Fair, James Earl Jones has signed off on Lucasfilm using the AI tech from a company called Respeecher to imitate his menacing voice for the black helmeted Dark Lord of the Sith from now on.

It’s the same company that provided the voice for a 30-something Luke Skywalker, digitally de-aging 71-year-old Mark Hamill‘s voice for Luke’s appearances in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett.

Jones, 91, reportedly gave his blessing to the Ukrainian company’s team up with Lucasfilm’s Emmy-winning sound designer Matthew Wood, with the former using “machine learning” to recreate Jones’ Vader voice for the Obi-Wan Kenobi series for Disney+.

“He had mentioned he was looking into winding down this particular character. So how do we move forward?” Wood commented to the magazine.

Likening the legendary actor to a “benevolent godfather,” Jones guided Wood and his team as a very serious deadline fast approached: Respeecher is based in Ukraine, and the collaboration happened feverishly between its designers and Wood, even as the threat of Russian shelling grew.

Wood explained to Vanity Fair, the Respeecher team’s attitude was: “Let’s work, let’s work in the face of this adversity, let’s persevere.'”

Jones and his family were reportedly pleased with the results.

Lucasfilm is owned by Disney, the parent company of ABC News.

Charlie Puth to release “Charlie Be Quiet” on Friday, jokes he sings like a goat

September 26, 2022 by WDNY Radio

Charlie Puth has several things to celebrate — first off being the release of his new song, “Charlie Be Quiet.”

A clip of the track has blown up on TikTok and fans will finally hear it in full this Friday. The singer teased the good news on his account in a since-deleted announcement.

The song is about Charlie knowing he’s in love but struggling to not to let his girlfriend know he’s ready to say the “L” word out of fear she’ll leave him.

Charlie has been having fun on TikTok and sarcastically revealed he’s expanding his One Night Only Tour across Europe, with new dates added for London, Paris, Amsterdam and Berlin, because fans are interested in spending a night with him between the sheets.

Tickets for his European fans go live this Friday, September 30, at 12 p.m. local time. The tour is in support of his forthcoming album, Charlie, due out October 7.

In other Charlie news, he joked about suffering a vocal faux pas onstage while singing his hit “Left and Right.” He had been performing “in front of like 85,000 people” and joked he “started singing like a goat.” The clip shows Charlie struggling to hit the song’s high notes before mimicking a goat’s high-pitched bleat.

Despite the embarrassing onstage snafu, Charlie is in good spirits and laughed off his vocal misfortune. The singer joked in the caption, “Not so pitch perfect now huh.”

Roger Waters’ 2023 Polish concerts canceled; Waters writes open letter to Putin

September 26, 2022 by WDNY Radio

Founding Pink Floyd singer/bassist Roger Waters‘ April concerts in Krakow, Poland, were canceled by promoter Live Nation Polska and the Tauron Arena, according the venue’s official website.

The cancellation comes after Waters’ recent comments defending Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine drew the ire of Krakow city councilor Łukasz Wantuch, who has called for the rocker be declared “persona non grata” in Krakow.

In early September, Waters posted an open letter to Olena Zelenska, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy‘s wife, suggesting that Ukraine negotiate with Russia rather than continue fighting. He maintained that U.S. military support for Ukraine was prolonging the conflict.

Zelenska responded with a Twitter message that read, “It is Russia that invaded Ukraine, destroys cities and kills civilians. Ukrainians defend their land and their children’s future. If we give up — we will not exist tomorrow. If Russia gives up — war will be over.”

Roger then wrote a lengthy response to Zelenska reiterating his beliefs.

Now Waters has penned an open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin about the invasion of Ukraine.

The message reads in part, “I know some people who think you want to overrun the whole of Europe, starting with Poland and the rest of the Baltic states. If you do, f*** you, and we might as well all stop playing the desperately dangerous game of nuclear chicken that the hawks on both sides of the Atlantic seem so comfortable with, and have at it.”

He also declares, “[Y]our invasion of Ukraine took me completely by surprise, it was a heinous war of aggression, provoked or not.”

Waters concludes by asking Putin to reply to his letter, writing, “I would mightily respect you for it, and take it as an honorable move in the right direction towards a sustainable peace.”

Melissa Etheridge says Ellen DeGeneres, Ricky Martin, Barry Manilow and Jodie Foster all asked her for advice on coming out

September 26, 2022 by WDNY Radio

Celebrities coming out as LGBTQ doesn’t seem to be a big deal these days, but back in 1993, when Melissa Etheridge came out, it was. In fact, Melissa was such a pioneer that many other super-famous but closeted celebrities asked her for advice about doing it themselves.

Melissa tells The Daily Beast that Ricky Martin, Barry Manilow, Jodie Foster and Ellen DeGeneres are some of the now-out gay stars who approached her. “I had people come to me and say, ‘I see you being out,’ and they would apologize to me because they were not out,” Melissa recalls. “I would say, ‘Look, it’s very personal. It’s totally up to you, you don’t have to explain anything to me.’”

Melissa recalls that Manilow was concerned about coming out because, he said, “all my fans are women.” “I was so glad when he came out,” she notes. She says Ricky Martin was worried because he was a sex symbol. She says she told him, “Dude, it’s obvious you’re gay.”

“It’s been wonderful to see all these people finally come into themselves,” she adds. “The ones who come out do much better than the ones who don’t, or didn’t.”

Melissa also tells The Daily Beast that the TV show The L Word was based on her real-life group of friends in the late ’80s to mid-’90s, who at the time included everyone from Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts to k.d. lang, DeGeneres and Rosie O’Donnell. Another member of the group was Ilene Chaiken, who went on to co-create the show.

Melissa laughs, “I stopped watching The L Word because I lived it!”

“You keep her alive, and you set everything right”: HBO releases chilling teaser to ‘The Last of Us’

September 26, 2022 by WDNY Radio

On Monday, HBO released a teaser to its anticipated series adaptation of the hit video game The Last of Us.

September 26 is known as Outbreak Day to fans of the PlayStation hit: According to the game, it’s the day people began being infected by a deadly disease caused by the cordyceps fungus, which turns the infected into shambling, zombie-like predators.

The Mandalorian‘s Pedro Pascal stars as Joel and fellow Game of Thrones vet Bella Ramsay plays Ellie; as in the game, Joel is tasked with protecting the young woman at all costs.

The teaser, set to “Alone and Forsaken” by Hank Williams, gives some creepy peeks at the post-apocalyptic world in which they live.

There are shades of the COVID-19 pandemic in the footage — something the PlayStation hit couldn’t predict in 2013, when the first game came out. Tattered signs warning passersby of the symptoms of infection seem eerily prescient as Joel makes his way through deserted streets.

The smuggler is charged with leading Ellie out of a dangerous quarantine zone and across a post-apocalyptic United States. “You keep her alive, and you set everything right,” someone urges him in voiceover.

Ellie is immune to the disease and may be the key to reversing the plague.

Also starring Nick Offerman, Gabriel Luna and Anna Torv — as well as Ashley Johnson and Troy Baker, who respectively voiced Ellie and Joel in the game and its sequel — The Last of Us is set to debut in 2023.

Luke Combs’ wife gives update on baby Tex, says they won’t be sharing photos of his face

September 26, 2022 by WDNY Radio

Luke Combs and wife Nicole are about three months into parenthood, and their young son Tex is thriving — but don’t be surprised if you don’t see much of him on social media.

Nicole answered some fan questions in an Instagram Stories AMA and explained why it’s important to her to keep Tex’s identity relatively private.

“Not going to keep him hidden away from the world, but will not be posting his face on the internet,” she explained. “I’ve gotten a lot of advice on this & it’s for the best. I appreciate everyone being kind and understanding about this.”

She also said that Tex has been “awesome” on the tour bus, but the family is still limiting how often they take him on the road. She noted that “he takes up a whole bunk” and they designed the bus before she was pregnant, so it’s not built to accommodate a baby.

“We will probably reconfigure it,” Nicole says, and for good reason: In response to another question, she said that she and Luke probably aren’t finished having babies.

“I would love to have 4,” she says.

Luke’s been on the road quite a bit lately, due to his 2022 Middle of Somewhere Tour. He has also booked a sprawling international tour for 2023.

Harry Styles’ “As It Was” is now the longest-running #1 solo song on ‘Billboard’ Hot 100

September 26, 2022 by WDNY Radio

Harry Styles continues to make history on the Billboard Hot 100 — his song “As It Was” notched its 15th week atop the chart.

Styles’ song has a month to go before he could tie the record for the longest-running #1 song of all time — it’s currently held by Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus‘ “Old Town Road,” which spent 19 weeks in the top spot. But Harry is one week away from tying with the songs that boast the second-longest running streak on the chart.

Luis Fonsi‘s “Despacito,” which featured Justin Bieber and Daddy Yankee, and the Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men collab “One Sweet Day” both spent 16 weeks at #1.

With that said, Harry can claim the title of owning the chart’s longest-running song by a solo artist. Mariah previously had the honor when “We Belong Together” topped the chart for 14 weeks back in 2005.

That’s not the only record Harry broke. “As It Was” is now the longest-running #1 by a British act — besting Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk” collab with Bruno Mars and Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind 1997″/”Something About the Way You Look Tonight.” Those acts only spent 14 weeks at #1.

“As It Was” is now the first song in Billboard history to spend its first 25 weeks within the top three slots. The song never descended below third place since its April release.

Over the past week, fans streamed “As It Was” 13.5 million times and purchased 3,000 additional copies.

In other Harry news, his new movie, Don’t Worry Darling, is #1 at the box office. The last time an artist simultaneously had a #1 song and movie was back in 2003 when Eminem released “Lose Yourself” from his hit movie, 8 Mile.

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