The music world lost one of its great voices on May 29 when B.J. Thomaspassed away at age 78 of lung cancer. Now, in celebration of the hitmaking pop-country artist, a collection of updated versions of many of his classic songs will be released on vinyl for the first time this Friday, July 30.
The album, which was recorded in 2001, includes renditions of Thomas’ chart-topping singles “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” and “Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song,” as well as other hits including “Hooked on a Feeling,” “I Just Can’t Help Believing” and “I’m So Lonesome (I Could Cry).”
Here’s the full track list of The Very Best Of:
“Hooked on a Feeling”
“Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head”
“I Just Can’t Help Believing”
“I’m So Lonesome (I Could Cry)”
“Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song”
“No Love at All”
“Rock and Roll Lullaby”
“Back Against the Wall”
“No Other Baby”
“To Be Loved”
“What’s Forever For”
“Call It a Mountain”*
“Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me”
“Ballyhoo Days”*
Bonus Track:
“100% Chance of Pain” — with T.G. Sheppard*
(DALLAS) — The University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma have notified the Big 12 that they will not renew its grant of media rights in 2025, according to a joint statement.
“Providing notice to the Big 12 at this point is important in advance of the expiration of the conference’s current media rights agreement,” the statement said. “The universities intend to honor their existing grant of rights agreements. However, both universities will continue to monitor the rapidly evolving collegiate athletics landscape as they consider how best to position their athletics programs for the future.”
Multiple media reports have said Texas and Oklahoma are looking to move to the SEC.
“Although our eight members are disappointed with the decisions of these two institutions, we recognize that intercollegiate athletics is experiencing rapid change and will most likely look much different in 2025 than it does currently,” said Big 12 Commissioner Bob Bowlsby in a statement. “The Big 12 Conference will continue to support our member institutions’ efforts to graduate student-athletes, and compete for Big 12 and NCAA championships. Like many others, we will use the next four years to fully assess what the landscape will look like in 2025 and beyond. The remaining eight institutions will work together in a collaborative manner to thoughtfully and strategically position the Big 12 Conference for continued success, both athletically and academically, long into the future.”
According to ESPN, next up for Texas and Oklahoma will be to let the SEC know they want to join the conference. 11 of the conference’s 14 schools would then need to vote them into the league.
Rich Fury/Getty Images for Coachella for Coachella for Def Jam Recordings
In a video captured by The Shade Room, DaBaby brought out Tory Lanez during his Rolling Loud festival performance Sunday night in Miami Gardens, Florida. While performing at the Hard Rock Stadium, the Charlotte, North Carolina, rapper brought out the Toronto artist in a masked-up costume.
“I’ll give somebody out here a million dollars if they can guess who in here,” DaBaby said to a packed crowd. “I got a million dollars right now if you can guess who…Who you think?”
DaBaby then pulled the head off of the costume, revealing Tory Lanez, who allegedly shot Megan Thee Stallion in both of her feet in July 2020. Lanez immediately hopped into performing his single “SKAT,” which also features DaBaby. Many were puzzled and surprised at Tory’s appearance, which came shortly after Megan’s performance of “Cry Baby” and “Freak Nasty.”
As previously reported, DaBaby and Megan went back and forth on Twitter last month regarding a recently filmed music video for “SKAT.” Megan also took issue with DaBaby retweeting the post, writing, “I guess DaBaby and Tory Lanez are cool now bc they both shot somebody and don’t have to do no jail time.”
Lanez is the alleged shooter in an ongoing case stemming from the night of July 16, 2020, where Megan was shot while exiting a vehicle in the Hollywood Hills. In regards to the shooting, Lanez, born Daystar Peterson, pleaded not guilty during a court appearance last November to charges of assault with a semiautomatic firearm, personal use of a firearm and carrying a loaded, unregistered firearm in a vehicle.
(INDIANAPOLIS) — Indianapolis Colts head coach Frank Reich has tested positive for COVID-19 and will miss the start of training camp, the team announced Monday.
The first practice of training camp is on Wednesday.
“I’m excited for training camp, however, I’m disappointed I won’t be there with the team as we start,” Reich said in a statement. “I’m fortunate to be fully vaccinated and I’m asymptomatic. I’m feeling well and I’m looking forward to returning as soon as I’m medically cleared.”
Reich is entering his fourth year with the team and has a 28-20 record.
Colts general manager Chris Ballard told reporters Reich will still be involved with the team when quarantining.
“Frank’s still a part of it,” Ballard said. “With everything we learned a year ago with Zoom, he’s still involved. He’s in meetings through Zoom, he’ll be in team meetings through Zoom, he’s in contact with the coaches, we have staff meetings every morning, and he’s in constant contact with everybody.”
Ballard did not give a timeline for Reich to return to the team.
According to ESPN’s Adam Schefter, this month 13 staffers and four players across the NFL have tested positive for the coronavirus.
Ariana Grande can barely contain her excitement about her upcoming stint on The Voice.
In a social media post on Monday, the singer teased how much fun she’s already been having as the newest coach alongside Kelly Clarkson, Blake Shelton and John Legend. She also shared a short behind-the-scenes clip of the first promo for season 21.
“hello and screaming !!!! cannot wait for everyone to see our first promo tomorrow for season 21 of @nbcthevoice !!!” she writes. “it’s…..the most ridiculous and fun.”
In the clip, Ari enters on a crescent moon and takes her place among the other coaches, who are sitting around a campfire. She’s a bit overdressed for camping, though.
“i adore these humans so much and am already an emotional wreck worrying about saying goodbye to everyone the day of the finale and nothings even happened or aired yet,” Ari continues in the caption. “but yes ! tomorrow ! first promo. i love these people and this crew and my TEAM OH MY GOD and everything about this.”
She concludes, “i can’t say anything else. but…simply cannot wait til we get started.”
Season 21 of The Voice premieres September 20 on NBC.
(LOS ANGELES) — Dry lightning is posing the threat for new fires to spark in a region already plagued by dozens of largely uncontained wildfires.
The thunderstorms could generate after moisture as the deadly monsoons in the Southwest U.S. push north to areas such as southern Oregon, where the Bootleg Fire rages on, and northern California and Nevada. Officials are concerned that the lightning strikes could generate new fires as firefighters are struggling to contain the existing blazes.
There are currently at least 89 large wildfires burning in the U.S., most of them in the West.
The Dixie Fire near the Feather River Canyon in Northern California had grown to nearly 193,000 acres by Monday morning and was 21% contained. Over the weekend, the Dixie Fire surpassed the Beckwourth Complex Fire in Doyle, California, as the state’s largest wildfire.
More than 8,300 people in Northern California are currently under evacuation orders, according to the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.
The Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon, currently the largest in the country and the third-largest in state history, had burned through nearly 410,000 acres and was 53% contained by Monday.
The Tamarack Fire near Gardnerville, Nevada, had scorched more than 67,000 acres by Monday and was 45% contained.
The monsoon strikes expected to generate dry lightning began over the weekend, killing at least seven in Utah after a sandstorm triggered by the monsoons caused a series of car crashes.
In Arizona, a 16-year-old is missing as a result of flash flooding. The teen had called 911 to ask for help after her car was stranded in floodwater, but as first responders attempted to rescue her, she was swept from her car and washed away, officials said. Phoenix is having its wettest month on more than two years as a result of the storms
Flash flooding is expected Monday in Southern California and parts of Nevada as the monsoon storms continue.
ABC News’ Sarah Hermina and Daniel Manzo contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — The chair of former President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee, Tom Barrack, pleaded not guilty Monday to charges he used his connection to Trump to illegally lobby for the United Arab Emirates.
Barrack flew across the country from California, where he was arrested last week, for his arraignment in Brooklyn federal court.
Barrack was released on a $250 million bond, secured by $5 million in cash. The judge ordered that his travel be limited to New York, California and Colorado, where he will live pending trial.
He was also ordered to take only commercial flights, with no private jets, and is prohibited from making any foreign financial transactions or from making domestic transactions above $50 thousand.
The bail package was requested by Assistant U.S. Attorney Nathan Reilly, who asked for a bail package “substantially similar” to what was imposed on Barrack in California.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
Issa Rae is officially off the market. In a sarcastic Instagram post on Monday, the Insecure creator and star revealed she had married her longtime boyfriend Louis Diame over the weekend.
“A) Impromptu photo shoot in a custom @verawanggang dress. B) My girls came to help me, but they all coincidentally had on the same dress! They were sooooo embarrassed. C) Then I took a few flicks with Somebody’s Husband,” Issa joked in the caption of her post, which included a series photos from her destination wedding in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, a commune in the South of France.
“Big thanks to @whiteedenweddings for being so gracious and accommodating and making this feel so real and special,” she added.
Rae’s marriage to Diame may come as a surprise to some of her fans. The couple has been known to keep their relationship out of the spotlight, though the Senegalese businessman has occasionally joined the actress on several red carpets over the years.
Rumors of their engagement first surfaced when Rae was spotted wearing a diamond ring in the cover photo of Essencemagazine’s April 2019 issue. It was later confirmed by her Insecure costars Jay Ellisand Yvonne Orji that Issa and Louis were indeed together and planning to wed.
“We’re very excited for her,” Orji told Entertainment Tonight at the time, with Ellis adding, “We all found out in different ways because we’re all on different text chains. We talk at different times, so we all found out at different times in different ways.”
Billie Eilish once again has the most pre-added album in Apple Music history, with Happier than Ever.
The “bad guy” star previously set the record with her 2019 debut album, WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?, which was then broken by The Weeknd‘s 2020 effort, After Hours. Now, Eilish has taken back the number-one spot with her much-anticipated sophomore effort.
According to Apple Music, Happier than Ever has tallied over 1,028,000 pre-adds. Speaking to Zane Lowe on Apple Music 1 about the record, Eilish says, “That’s nuts. Wow, that’s nuts.”
“I hope it doesn’t disappoint,” she adds of the album. Billie also said she hopes fans will understand that she’s still “theirs.”
“I think that the hard thing is that we haven’t done shows. I haven’t had a way to actually prove to them that I’m still theirs. And I think that that’s tough and I think that it’s made them go crazy, and I totally understand it. And I feel the same. It’s made me go crazy too,” she explains to Lowe.
Happier than Ever, which features the singles “Therefore I Am,” “Your Power” and “NDA,” arrives this Friday, July 30.
Last week, Eilish announced Happier than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles, a concert film premiering September 3 on Disney+. She launches a tour in support of the album February 2022.
(TOKYO) — Three of the four members of Team USA have advanced to the quarterfinals of surfing’s debut at the Tokyo Olympics with Caroline Marks and Kolohe Andino emerging from the waters off Japan’s Shidashita Beach with the highest scores in the opening heats.
For Andino, 27, of San Clemente, California, who holds seven USA Surfing Champion titles, victory was bittersweet because he knocked teammate John John Florence, 28, of Oahu, Hawaii, out of the competition during a head-to-head faceoff on Monday.
Andino earned the highest score in the first two days of competition with an 8.5 out of a possible 10 from the judges on a ride he described as “really rad and one for the history books.”
With waves churned up to 7 feet by a developing typhoon far north of Shidashita Beach, Andino nailed what an announcer described as a “slob frontside air reverse” in which he caught air off the lip of a wave, grabbed onto his surfboard with one hand and landed on the face of the wave in a reverse position before spinning forward.
On the women’s side, Team USA’s 19-year-old Caroline Marks and Carissa Moore, 28, of Honolulu, the world’s No. 1 ranked surfer, both moved on to the quarterfinals.
Moore, who holds four World Surfing League titles, narrowly defeated Peru’s Sofia Mulanovich, 38, in a one-on-one competition on Monday.
Marks, the sixth-ranked female surfer in the world, enters the quarterfinals after achieving the highest overall score of any woman or man in the third round of the inaugural surfing event. In her two best heats she scored an 8 and 7.33 for a combined total of 15.33.
Organizers of the first-time event have scheduled an eight-day waiting period — July 25 to Aug. 1 — to squeeze in up to four days of competition based on daily conditions — wave heights, direction, wind strength.
Kurt Korte, the international surf forecaster for the Olympic surfing event, told ABC News that conditions off the Pacific Coast of Japan are looking good for the remainder of the week. In his latest forecast for Surfline.com, Korte said surfers can expect smaller waves for the quarterfinals on Tuesday, with “peaky swell mix in the head-high range with well overhead sets.”
Korte said Tropical Cyclone Nepartak well off Japan’s Pacific Coast was easing up and not producing the bigger more challenging waves competitors saw over the weekend.
16 to surf it out in quarterfinals
Sixteen of the 40 surfers from 17 countries who qualified for the Olympics move onto the quarterfinals. But big stars in the surfing world like Florence and Australia’s Stephanie Gilmore, a seven-time world champion, were eliminated in the earlier rounds.
“It wasn’t my best performance but sometimes you’ve just got to take those heat wins and roll with it,” Moore, now the heavy favorite to win gold, said after squeaking into the quarterfinals. “It was crazy to see some top seeds bow out earlier this morning. It just goes to show that these conditions are very tricky.”
How the competition will work
The surfers qualified for the Olympics based primarily on how well they did at previous major competitions, including the 2019 World Surfing League Championship Tour, where Florence and Moore each came out on top.
The Olympic Games are exclusively a shortboard affair, meaning surfboards are less than 7 feet long, with pointy noses and usually three small fins on the underside.
A five-judge panel bases scores on a scale of 1 to 10 that can include decimal points. Competitors are judged on speed, power, snap turns and how seamlessly they flow on a wave. Judges also look for difficulty, risk and innovation of maneuvers performed, such as a barrel, or riding through the tube a curling wave makes, and aerials in which surfers ride up the face a wave and catch air at the lip.
In April, Moore wowed spectators at the Rip Curl Newcastle Cup, the second leg of the World Surf League’s Championship Tour, by nailing an aerial where she landed a reverse on the face of a wave before spinning another 180 degrees forward. The judges gave her a near-perfect score of 9.9.
Surfing fans are watching to see if Moore will perform the maneuver again on the world’s biggest stage.
In each heat, surfers are given a 30-minute window to catch as many waves as possible but must go one at a time, with the surfer closest to the peak of a wave given preference to catch it. Participants can be docked points for violating surfing etiquette by cutting in line.
The best two scores from each surfer will decide who moves on to the semifinals round and, eventually, the medal round.
Following her first day of competition on Sunday, in which Moore won a tough battle with Teresa Bonvalot of Portugal, Moore admitted to having Olympic jitters.
“I actually had a little mini-meltdown because of all the nerves and the anxiety and stuff that had built up,” Moore said during a press conference.
Since then she said she has felt a “sense of calm” with each round of surfing.
“Whatever happens, I’ve done everything I could, and now it’s time to have fun,” Moore said.
