(NEW YORK) — Donations have poured in from thousands of “World News Tonight” viewers in the wake of our report on Southern Madagascar, a country on the verge of the world’s first climate change-induced near-famine in modern history.
Unlike other countries, where extreme hunger and near-famine conditions are caused by war, conflict, or isolated weather events, southern Madagascar is facing these conditions because of a years-long drought caused by climate change.
The conditions there make the land here too arid to farm and leading to crop failure. The severe lack of rain has led to depleted food sources and dried-up rivers. Climate change has also led to sandstorms affecting these lands, covering formerly arable land and rendering it infertile.
“World News Tonight” anchor David Muir and his team traveled to Madagascar to report on the worsening situation, as aid organizations and the Malagasy government rush to fill in the gaps of food and water in this region.
Since our report aired Monday, the World Food Programme said they received support from more than 22,000 donors, raising $2.7 million, which will go towards helping the people of southern Madagascar.
Arduino Mangoni, the deputy country director of the World Food Programme in Madagascar, told ABC News he had “never seen people, especially children, in this situation that we’re seeing here.”
“As they cannot plant, it’s affecting their food security,” Patrick Vercammen, the World Food Programme’s emergency coordinator here, told Muir during a visit to Akanka Fokotany, an affected village. “Having sandstorms in this kind of landscape is not something usual and having the effects of sandstorms shows that nature is changing, the environment is changing, and the climate change is affecting this area more than the rest of Madagascar.”
The situation has led to widespread malnutrition affecting more than 1 million people, and pockets of what the United Nations classifies “catastrophic” food insecurity signaling deepening hunger.
Madagascar has produced 0.01 percent of the world’s annual carbon emissions in the last eight decades, but it is suffering some of the worst effects.
“It is not fair…these people have not contributed to climate change because they do not have electricity, they do not have cars etc., and they’re paying probably the highest price in terms of the consequences of climate change,” Mangoni said.
The children are the most affected, with at least half a million kids under the age of five expected to be acutely malnourished, according to the World Food Programme and UNICEF.
In fact, the agencies say about 110,000 children are already in severe condition, suffering irreversible damage to their growth.
As the country enters the lean season – that dangerous time during which people wait for the next successful harvest — the need to provide food to those at risk of starvation has become more urgent. Aid workers warning that, without action, they could run out of food resources by the end of the year.
The World Food Programme is working together with the Malagasy government to alleviate some of the most acute needs in this region; prevent and treat children experiencing malnutrition; and build infrastructure and knowledge to make the population of southern Madagascar more resilient in the face of drought. They’re supporting more than 700,000 people in dire need, and the need is expected to grow.
Thomas Rhett returns with the first taste of a fresh batch of music this week, releasing his nostalgic new single, “Slow Down Summer.” The song’s lyrics follow a couple who are soaking up every minute of their summer love together, knowing that when the weather cools, so will their relationship.
“I wrote this song from the point of view of two people who are in love during senior year of high school. I envisioned them headed off to different schools and they’re starting to understand that the moment the weather starts to change, they’ve got a 99-percent chance this relationship is not going to work,” the singer explains.
The song is off his newly-announced album, Where We Started, which will arrive in early 2022.
On his social media, Thomas shared an update about that project — or rather, projects. “So, last year and this year on the road, me and my team have been writing so many songs, and what we have decided to do is to put out two albums next year,” he reveals.
Where We Started will be out first, he goes on to say. Then, in the fall, he’ll release Country Again: Side B, the follow up to Side A of that project, which came out in April.
“I’m so pumped. I cannot wait for y’all to hear these songs, and I cannot wait to play them for you live on the road next year,” Thomas continues. “But until then, y’all get excited. Tell your friends, tell your parents, tell your dogs…tell anybody!”
Next up, Thomas is headed to the 2021 CMA Awards, where he’s a performer as well as a nominee.
While some people choose to have an Elvis Presley impersonator to officiate their wedding, others — like Kal Penn — let their dreams tell them who should have the honor. And, apparently, he had a vision that Cardi B would marry him and Josh, his partner of 11 years.
The Designated Survivor actor took to Twitter to share his wild dream, saying Cardi was on his flight and that, when he fell asleep, he “had a dream that she officiated our wedding on the plane and the three of us walked out of LAX holding hands.”
The “WAP” rapper pounced on Penn’s tweet, telling him he should have said hello and then nonchalantly slid in, “I’m licensed to do that sooo……..let me know.”
“You’re the best. Was gonna say hi but didn’t want to be disrespectful,” Kal, 44, gushed in response, adding that he saw her do not disturb light was on before jumping to the matter at hand, “Let’s do it! We’re down if you’re down!”
Cardi confirmed that she was indeed “down” to officiate their nuptials and remarked, “I’ll get my suit.”
Penn broke the news about his relationship and his upcoming wedding in his new book, You Can’t Be Serious, which he published on Tuesday.
Ozzy Osbourne has premiered a new video for “Flying High Again,” a single off his 1981 solo album, Diary of a Madman.
The clip features an animated collage of paper cutouts of archival images of Ozzy and guitarist Randy Rhoads. Diary of a Madman was notably Rhoads’ final album before he was tragically killed in a 1982 plane crash at age 25.
You can watch the “Flying High Again” video streaming now on YouTube.
The RIAA triple-Platinum Diary of a Madman celebrates its 40th anniversary this Sunday, November 7. An expanded digital reissue of the album, including a previously unavailable live recording of “Flying High Again,” is out today.
Meanwhile, a special blue-swirl vinyl edition of Diary of a Madman will be released November 12 exclusively at Walmart.
(NEW YORK — This report is a part of “Rethinking Gun Violence,” an ABC News series examining the level of gun violence in the U.S. — and what can be done about it.
The United States has a gun violence epidemic, and it’s not one shared by its peers. The nation that by one estimate has more guns than people has the highest rate of firearm deaths compared with other high-income countries. Mass shootings, an all-too-common occurrence in the U.S., are also exceedingly rare in peer countries — where governments have often been quick to pass gun reform in the wake of such tragedies.
“Compared to the other peer countries, basically what we have is lots and lots of guns, particularly handguns, and we have by far the weakest gun laws. Not surprisingly, we have huge gun problems,” David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, told ABC News. “I think if we had basically the gun laws of any other developed country, we’d be better off.”
It’s unclear if gun prevalence definitively impacts gun violence, though research by Hemenway’s center has found links between a large number of guns and more firearm homicides,suicides and accidents. The implementation of new gun restrictions has also been associated with a drop in firearm deaths, a 2016 review of 130 studies across 10 countries found.
The U.S. is “not necessarily a more violent society than others,” Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, told ABC News.
“What we have is unique access to a technology that changes the outcome — firearms,” he said.
It’s not uncommon to compare the U.S. with other developed countries, especially after yet another horrific mass shooting. There are developing countries with higher rates of firearm deaths than the U.S., though comparing gun violence among peers helps to control for other factors, Hemenway said. And while there are lessons in other nations’ policy measures that could help address the problem here, because the U.S. is on such a different plane when it comes to civilian gun ownership, it will also take more research and multiple, targeted solutions to address the scope of the problem, experts said.
“Other countries do better. We should be able to figure out how to do better,” Hemenway said.
Watch ABC News Live on Mondays at 3 p.m. to hear more about gun violence from experts during roundtable discussions. And check back next week, when we look into what some gun owners say could solve the gun violence issue.
American disease?
The U.S. has become so synonymous with its gun culture, that when Australia was working on enacting tighter firearm policies after its deadliest mass shooting ever, known as the Port Arthur massacre, then-Prime Minister John Howard pointedly said, “We do not want the American disease imported into Australia.”
In 1996, Martin Bryant used a semiautomatic rifle to shoot and kill 35 people and injure another 23 near a popular tourist resort in Port Arthur, Tasmania. In the wake of the shooting, all states and territories adopted the National Firearms Agreement, which, among other things, established a national gun registry, required permits for gun purchases and banned all semiautomatic rifles and semiautomatic and pump-action shotguns. A government buyback program also retrieved some 650,000 now-banned firearms.
In the years since the NFA, gun deaths in Australia decreased, most significantly gun suicides, a RAND Corporation survey found. The review concluded there was weak evidence to support that it had an impact on firearm homicides overall, though noted there was a decline in female firearm homicide victimization after adoption of the NFA, which included a provision denying gun licenses to people subject to a domestic violence order. A 2018 study by the University of Syndey also found that Australia only had one mass shooting in the 22 years since the NFA reforms, compared with 13 in the 18 years prior.
Mass shootings have similarly prompted Switzerland, New Zealand and, on several occasions, Canada and the United Kingdom to quickly enact gun reforms. These measures have ranged from bans on semiautomatic firearms to longer purchase waiting periods to stricter background checks and national registry requirements.
In the U.S., where guns are more accessible, the firearm death rate per 100,000 people in 2016 was nearly four times that of Switzerland, five times that of Canada, over 10 times that of Australia and 35 times that of the United Kingdom, according to a 2018 study published in the Journal of the American Medicine Association. Americans are notably more likely to be killed in a gun homicide, suicide or unintentional shooting than in other high-income countries, a 2015 study in the American Journal of Medicine found. Rates of nonlethal crimes and overall suicides are similar among the countries, but the U.S. does have a higher homicide rate overall, “fueled by the firearm homicide rate,” according to the study.
“What other countries have done demonstrates that you can have policymakers react quickly after a horrific tragedy to make the country and communities safer from gun violence,” Chelsea Parsons, vice president of Gun Violence Prevention at the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan policy institute, told ABC News. “I think we sometimes in this country, we’re too accustomed to federal policymaking being almost an impossibility when it comes to an issue like gun violence. But the experience of other countries just shows that it doesn’t have to be this hard.”
Unique challenges toward reform
The number of guns in the U.S. is unparalleled; the country has less than 5% of the world’s population, but 40% of the world’s civilian-owned guns, according to a 2018 report by the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey. There were over 393 million firearms in civilian possession in 2017 — or 120 per 100 persons, the highest rate globally, the report found. That’s more than double the second-highest rate, in Yemen, at nearly 53 per 100 persons.
For Joel Dvoskin, a forensic psychologist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine who specializes in violence prevention, reducing gun ownership to levels seen in peer countries is “literally impossible.”
“The horse is already out of the barn, as they say,” Dvoskin told ABC News.
Efforts to address the problem at the national level may be hindered by no one government agency taking “overall responsibility” for it, he said. “Our system’s spread out across a bunch of different agencies.”
The U.S. stands apart from nearly every country in the world, not its just peers, with a constitutional right to bear arms — though that doesn’t mean the federal government can’t ban certain firearms or enact other restrictions, according to Allison Anderman, senior counsel and director of local policy for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
“Gun advocates use the Second Amendment as a defense to any and all gun laws, but it’s not legally accurate,” Anderman told ABC News. “The Second Amendment, at least as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court, permits a whole host of gun regulations, including assault weapons bans.”
Universal background checks, a key effort among gun control advocates, is a “really basic” law abroad that the U.S. lacks but nearly all Americans support, Parsons said. The massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012, where 20 children and six adults were gunned down, appeared to be a watershed moment for gun reform. But four months later, legislation to expand background checks failed to pass the Senate due to what then-President Barack Obama blamed on lies by the “gun lobby and its allies.” A reintroduced bill passed the House in March and is currently before the Senate.
“The difference between the United States and other countries isn’t the Second Amendment, it’s the gun lobby and the power of the gun lobby in this country, and an extremist ideology among red states, essentially, that prohibits any meaningful action,” Anderman said.
There is an “opportunity for change” when gun laws become a “single voting issue,” she said. It’s a tactic long employed by gun rights advocacy groups like the National Rifle Association, the country’s largest pro-gun lobby. Mobilizing its 5 million members around gun policies has been a “pivotal component to our continued influence and success,” the organization told The Atlantic in an article published in September. ABC News had reached out to the NRA for this piece but did not receive a response.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll from April found that those who strongly prioritized enacting new laws to try to address gun violence versus protecting the right to own guns were nearly even — about four in 10 in both camps. Overall, the public’s priority on enacting new gun control laws has waned — to 50% from 57% three years prior, with the sharpest decline among 18- to 29-year-olds.
“When people say that they’re fed up and they’ve had enough and they’re only going to vote for representatives who reflect their interests on this topic, then there can be change,” Anderman said.
The “uneven patchwork” of gun laws enacted at the state level is another challenge in addressing the gun violence problem, Parsons said. Research by the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence has found a correlation between stronger gun laws, such as permit requirements and waiting periods, and lower gun homicides and suicides, the latter of which account for most gun deaths in the U.S. But regulations vary widely from state to state, with red states largely having weaker gun laws, according to the center.
“You have states that have enacted really good, comprehensive, strong gun laws, but those laws are undermined by the much weaker laws of the states surrounding them,” Parsons said.
The “classic example” of this, she said, is Chicago. Illinois is neighbored by states including Indiana and Wisconsin that have comparatively weaker laws, such as a lack of universal background checks, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
“What you see is a very clear pattern of guns being illegally trafficked from some states that have much weaker laws into places and states that have much stronger laws,” she said, arguing that it makes the case for stronger laws at the federal level.
How do we live with guns?
In confronting the gun violence problem, for experts like Dvoskin and Hemenway, the conversation needs to include, “How do we live with guns?” It’s a public health approach akin to measures taken, for instance, to make driving safer or prevent smoking, and demands a broad focus.
“We’ve learned that there are limits to what you can do to prevent firearm violence if you just focus on firearms themselves,” Wintemute said. “It’s important to focus on the determinants of violence, whether firearms are involved or not.”
To that effort, Wintemute’s research program recently found a link between male gun owners with a history of alcohol charges and suicide risk, and is studying the intersection between firearm ownership and opioid use in suicide risk.
More firearms research and data are needed to find solutions in what has been for decades a federally underfunded area, Hemenway said. That could mean more studies looking at what is working in other countries to reduce gun violence. Support and funding for non-legislative approaches to the problem, such as community-based violence prevention, has also been advocated.
“With public health, it’s data-driven, so you don’t look at politics or values, you look at what the data says. And what the data says about public health, usually, is that one size never fits all,” Dvoskin said. “Different segments of the population need different strategies.”
Measures to safely live with guns, such as storage requirements, smart guns that can only be used by the owner and features that prevent guns from firing when dropped or after the magazine is removed, could also be improved, Hemenway said.
“Too many people just think gun control means taking away people’s guns,” Hemenway said. “There’s just so, so many things that we could do as a country if we wanted to reduce the problem.”
Oasis‘ Knebworth 1996 documentary will soon by streaming on Paramount+.
The film, which captures the “Wonderwall” outfit’s two historic 1996 concerts at England’s Knebworth Festival, is set to premiere on the ViacomCBS-owned platform on November 19.
“Knebworth for me was the Woodstock of the ’90s,” says Liam Gallagher, who, along with his former band mate and estranged brother Noel Gallagher, executive produced the film.
“It was all about the music and the people,” Liam adds. “I can’t remember much about it, but I’ll never forget it. It was biblical.”
Knebworth 1996 previously premiered in theaters in September. A live album and Blu-ray/DVD will be released November 19.
Art Garfunkel, the angelic-voiced singer who made up half of legendary folk-rock duo Simon & Garfunkel, celebrates his 80th birthday today.
Garfunkel began performing and recording with Paul Simon during the 1950s as a rock ‘n’ roll duo called Tom and Jerry. After breaking up for a while, Art and Paul reunited in the early ’60s and began recording acoustic folk music using their real names.
After their debut album, 1964’s Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M., was a failure, they split up again. Then, in 1965, producer Tom Wilson took a track from the album, “The Sound of Silence,” and added electric guitar and drums and re-released it, and it became a hit, topping the Billboard Hot 100.
The reunited duo, propelled by Simon’s songs, and Art and Paul’s harmonies, went on to become one of the most celebrated music acts in the world.
After the success of “The Sound of Silence” and through the 1970s, Simon & Garfunkel scored two more #1 hits, “Mrs. Robinson” and Garfunkel’s showcase “Bridge over Troubled Water,” and numerous other top-40 singles.
Garfunkel won five Grammys for his work with Simon, including Album of the Year and Record of the Year in 1970 for Bridge over Troubled Water and its title track.
Garfunkel launched an acting career in the early 1970s that Simon cited as a factor in his decision to break up the duo.
After the split, Art enjoyed moderate solo success. He scored a #9 hit with his 1973 single “All I Know,” written by Jimmy Webb, and his 1975 album Breakaway was certified platinum.
Over the years, Simon and Garfunkel reunited multiple times for tours and special events, but the two old friends currently are estranged.
(NEW YORK) — This report is a part of “Rethinking Gun Violence,” an ABC News series examining the level of gun violence in the U.S. — and what can be done about it.
Gun violence is an endemic problem in the United States — once again getting worse in some areas after many years of declines and persistent at high levels in others.
Despite being one of the leading causes of death, one thing that’s difficult to know is the scope of the problem, fueled in part by a more than a two-decade-long prohibition — recently changed — on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention using federal funds to “advocate or promote gun control.”
It wasn’t always this way — the CDC in 1983 adopted a public health approach to gun violence.
“At that point in time in 1983, there were two types of frequent injury deaths. One was motor vehicle crashes, and the other was gun violence,” Dr. Mark Rosenberg, CEO of the Task Force for Global Health and former member of CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, told ABC News.
During the 1990s, public and private programs conducted gun-related research — among them was the CDC’s Injury Prevention Program, where Rosenberg worked, and the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis.
But in 1996, Congress passed an amendment to the Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Bill. The bill modification, commonly known as the Dickey Amendment, prohibited the use of federal funds to “advocate or promote gun control,” leading to the elimination of all CDC funding to conduct firearm-related research — having a lasting impact still limiting what we know today about gun violence.
Even though the funding spigot has recently been turned back on, researchers are still feeling the effects of the lack of data to study gun violence. Researchers say the gun violence problem is urgent and requires an outsized solution detached from politics.
Watch ABC News Live on Mondays at 3 p.m. to hear more about gun violence from experts during roundtable discussions. And check back next week, when we look into what some gun owners say could solve the gun violence issue.
“If we can understand the causes, we can change the effects and we can change the effects for the better, so science is a way to understand the causes and the effects and the way to link them,” Rosenberg told ABC News.
Here’s what to know about the data issue around gun violence and what advocates say can be done:
Impact of the Dickey Amendment
In the early 1990s, the CDC had a $2.6 million budget dedicated to gun violence research both for internal research and for external studies.
“We started looking at, what’s the problem,” Rosenberg told ABC News. The agency studied the number of people dying from gun violence, the weapons used and the causes behind it.
Dr. Garen Wintemute, head of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, says the program received two grants at the time to conduct much-needed research on firearms.
“All of these grants made use of unique data that are collected in California,” said Wintemute, who explained to ABC News that the organization was linking gun purchases with criminal records as part of its prevention research.
But everything changed when the Dickey Amendment was introduced by former Rep. Jay Dickey, R-Ark.
Four years before the Dickey Amendment was enacted, the CDC had published its first study on gun violence. The report looked at the correlation between safety and guns, finding that having a weapon in a household didn’t necessarily result in safer outcomes, Rosenberg said.
“These results weren’t pleasing to the NRA. And so they stepped up their attack on our research program,” Rosenberg told ABC News.
ABC News reached out to the National Rifle Association requesting comment on the allegations made by Dr. Rosenberg but has not heard back.
The Dickey Amendment reallocated the $2.6 million away from gun research to other health research on subjects like traumatic brain injury, according to Wintemute.
Researchers fought the effects of the amendment, which prohibited advocacy for gun control — but which had an impact beyond advocacy because experts said they viewed vague language in the amendment as a “threat.”
“This Dickey Amendment had a real chilling effect,” Rosenberg told ABC News. “It was enough to discourage individual researchers and, at the same time, Congress took away the money we were using for the research we were doing.”
The CDC sent ABC News a statement saying it was “subject to appropriations language that states that none of the funds made available to CDC may be used to ‘advocate or promote gun control.”
“The lack of dedicated and sustained research funding for firearm injury… limited our ability to conduct research to gain understanding of how best to prevent firearm-related injuries and deaths relative to other public health problems,” it said.
Shortage of funds
Wintemute’s program suffered from a shortage of federal funds after the amendment passed. Although it was able to continue doing some research through private funding, that work was limited. He originally had around 12 people on his team but says he was left with only four, including himself, limiting the program’s reach.
While The Department of Justice still allocated some funds to firearm research under the National Institute of Justice (the DOJ’s research arm), Wintemute said it was insufficient.
For example, in 2004, a total of $461,759 was granted by the agency to three different institutes for gun-related research — a far cry from the millions normally required for extensive study.
“We had to revert to simpler, more descriptive studies that made use of available data. There wasn’t money to go out and collect data writ large,” Wintemute said.
Other institutions conducting research were also affected.
“Because of the Dickey Amendment, we had dropped firearm injuries from our portfolio,” said Dr. Frederick Rivara, an epidemiologist and professor at the University of Washington, who was conducting research on injury prevention, including firearm-related injuries.
“It really discouraged any serious firearm research,” Rivara said.
This gap in gun research led to a shortage of people familiar with the subject and a lack of data still felt by today’s experts.
“It’ll be another five to 10 years before we have anything like an adequate number of experienced researchers on the case,” Wintemute said.
Research resumes
The need for research and data collection was finally re-addressed by the federal government after the Parkland mass shooting in 2018 that left 17 dead.
After the mass shooting, an omnibus bill was signed by President Donald Trump clarifying that restricting the use of federal funds to advocate or promote gun control doesn’t ban research.
In 2019, Congress began to again allocate funds for research and data collection on gun violence and injuries.
Although the Dickey Amendment remains in place, Dickey, its author who died in 2017, saw the consequences of it on gun-related research and changed his mind, according to Rosenberg — who later became Dickey’s friend.
“Jay Dickey eventually saw the disastrous consequences of gun violence…with mass shootings with rising numbers of gun homicides and gun suicides,” Rosenberg told ABC News. “He switched his position.”
In an op-ed co-authored with Rosenberg in 2012, Dickey says he “served as the NRA’s point person in Congress” to cut the gun violence research budget.
“We were on opposite sides of the heated battle 16 years ago, but we are in strong agreement now that scientific research should be conducted into preventing firearm injuries and that ways to prevent firearm deaths can be found without encroaching on the rights of legitimate gun owners,” reads a section of the piece published in The Washington Post.
More funds needed
Federal funds are now available to study gun violence, but organizations working on policy recommendations are still struggling to conduct it.
“There is more money for research now. But what is missing is datasets,” said Josh Horwitz, executive director of the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence, referring to datasets at the federal level that could help in the research on firearms. “We destroy background check records at the federal level in 24 hours… how do you suppose to understand who’s purchasing firearms and what the implications are, if you can’t examine that data,” he added.
The nonprofit, affiliated with the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence located in Washington D.C., focuses on looking for evidence-based policy solutions and programs that can reduce gun-related violence.
“The data deficit has hurt us because we don’t understand all the solutions,” Horwitz told ABC News.
Despite the lack of research, experts say there is still a path forward for finding solutions to the high levels of gun violence plaguing the country.
“This is a solvable problem,” Rosenberg said. “We can find out what are the patterns, what’s the problem, we can find out the causes, we can find out what works to both reduce gun violence and protect gun rights.”
The key to finding possible solutions is focusing on science as opposed to politics, researchers say.
“Science is not advocacy, science is understanding things as they are,” Wintemute said.
While the landscape for gun-related research has improved, there is still a long way to go, Wintemute said.
For fiscal year 2022, Congress approved at least $25 million to fund gun violence research, according to the CDC. And although that represents an increase of $12.5 million compared with the last fiscal year, more resources are needed, according to Wintemude.
“Congress has not followed through,” he said.
He believes the budget for gun-related research has to match the extent of the problem and also help make up for the Dickey Amendment’s toll, including the gaps in data and expertise it created.
“To help get history out of the way and let us attack the problem with a program of research that’s adequate to the size of the problem itself we need to do away with the Dickey Amendment, even as amended,” he added.
Steve Perry‘s first Christmas album, The Season, arrives today, and finds the ex-Journey frontman putting his own stamp on holiday classics like “Winter Wonderland,” “Silver Bells” and “The Christmas Song”…gently.
“I’ve always loved these songs since I was a child, and I was really…careful to make sure that the original emotional reverence that meant so much to me when I was young stays intact,” Perry tells ABC Audio. “And so I wanted to do them a little bit different. I wanted to make them mine, but I didn’t want to walk too far away from the melodic structure…that I loved about them.”
Perry says The Season is his way of bringing holiday cheer to everyone who’s struggled through the pandemic.
“The last year and eight months or two years have been so difficult for so many, including myself,” Perry admits. “And given me such a different respect for so many things.”
He continues, “Honestly, I’m not in the music business to make money. At this point, these records I’ve been making, solo-wise, are almost like just giving back to what I’ve been given so much [of].”
To that end, Steve thinks that one particular song really sums up with the project is all about.
“For this particular period, this Christmas…it has to be ‘I’ll Be Home for Christmas,'” Perry notes. “Because it’s something everybody in their heart wishes they could have done [last year]. And perhaps now, what we’ve all been through has refreshed our reverence for how important it is to go home for Christmas.”
And does Perry see more holiday music in his future?
He laughs, “If I can pull it off — if Uncle Steve is still here — I might do that, yes!”
Here’s The Season‘s full track list:
“The Christmas Song”
“I’ll Be Home for Christmas”
“Auld Lang Syne”
“Winter Wonderland”
“What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve”
“Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”
“Silver Bells”
“Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”
Jay Ellis says he stepped into the fifth and final season of Insecure with some real life connections to his character Lawrence.
Ellis tells ABC Audio that when he started to film the new season, he and co-star Christina Elmore, who plays his ex and soon-to-be baby mother Condola, both found themselves identifying with their characters because they were both new parents in real life.
“At the time, Christina and I were the only parents on set,” he says, before explaining some of the things that new parents say to their partners. “So I think there were a lot of things that we were like, ‘Oooh, if you ever! Oooh, you bet not never — Ooh!’ … Especially new parents [who] don’t even realize they’re doing it.”
As first-time parents, Ellis says he and Elmore could easily empathize with their characters and the challenges they faced in co-parenting.
“We were realizing all these things that come up when you’re new parents that could only be 20 times more difficult if you and someone you’re co-parenting with aren’t on the same page,” he shares. “So… a lot of that stuff… came out as we got into shooting episode [three]. And just the feeling of, ‘What does it feel like for a new mother to be away from her kid, or for a new father, to be away from his kid?'”
Ellis believes that those real life connections are what make Issa Rae‘s HBO comedy series so relatable.
“Season after season, Issa and Prentice Penny would bring us into the room and they would tell us what the arc was for the season and we would talk about [our] stories — [and] how [to] infuse [them with]… what our characters were going through.”
