Before the release of Demi Lovato’s new Peacock series Unidentified with Demi Lovato this week, the singer is opening up about their experiences with UFOs and extraterrestrial beings.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Demi says in making the show, they now believe they may have been abducted by aliens at one point.
“We were looking into [abductions], and as I started talking to these abductees, I was realizing that I had some very similar experience[s],” Demi says. “I had an experience where I feel like I astral-projected in my sleep, and I’m realizing that maybe it wasn’t that and it was possibly that I went somewhere.”
The unscripted series features Demi, their skeptical friend Matthew and their sister Dallas, as they visit known UFO hot spots, talk to experts, examine alleged “secret government reports” and interview people who’ve had first hand encounters with E.T.s.
Demi says they hope that people will watch with an open mind and realize that these “beings” are nothing to fear. “You would think that I would be freaked out, but what I have found in these experiences is the love, and there’s no fear,” they say.
Demi adds, “I think they’re very caring, very intelligent beings that are just looking out for the best interest of our planet, because we need some help.”
All four episodes of Unidentified with Demi Lovato debut September 30 on Peacock.
Maren Morris is bidding a fond farewell to the Girl era as she welcomes in new music.
During an appearance at Pilgrimage Music & Cultural Festival in Franklin, Tennessee, just outside of Nashville on Saturday, Maren revealed that it was her final show before she releases new music. She followed up the claim with a social media post with photos from the stage, writing, “End of an era” with a blue heart.
She bared even more of her heart on her Instagram Stories, citing the past two years since Girl was released, along with the COVID-19 pandemic, as “quite possibly, the most formative years of my existence thus far.”
In addition to growing in her marriage with husband Ryan Hurd and becoming a mother to one-year-old son Hayes, Maren says she also developed a closer relationship with her fans.
“I am ready to rest and recalibrate so I can finally give birth to what I’ve been toiling away at for the last two years. It is my happiest work. I can’t wait to share it,” she reflects, adding, “I love you, I do.”
Following its release in 2019, Girl spawned three singles: the chart-topping title track, crossover smash “The Bones,” and current single “To Hell & Back.”
Maren and Ryan’s first duet, “Chasing After You,” is currently climbing into the top 10 on country radio.
(NEW YORK) — In 2009, when Dashauna Priest was just 9 years old, her third grade class project was to write letters of gratitude to military veterans. Priest’s letter was sent to Frank Grasberger, a World War II veteran, and he’s kept it ever since.
“It meant so much to me and touched my heart so much,” Grasberger told “Good Morning America.” “Keeping it with me made me feel like I was with her, protecting her.”
In addition to the note of thanks, Priest drew a helmet with flowers coming out of it and an American flag on the letter, which Grasberger said “really touched” him.
“I felt like how could such a young girl understand what war was and how could she be so kind writing to someone she didn’t even know?” he said.
Grasberger knew he wanted to meet Priest immediately after reading the letter but was unable to find her, he said. Jill Pawloski, an employee at VITALIA Senior Residences in Strongsville, Ohio, where Grasberger lives, stepped in and tracked Priest down on social media.
“I reached out and sent her a private message explaining the situation,” Pawloski told “GMA,” adding that Grasberger was unaware that she was searching for Priest on his behalf. “I then asked her if she’d be interested in coming to our community to surprise Frank and without hesitation she said yes. I was thrilled and so full of joy that I could do this for Frank. He has such a huge heart and I knew this would fill his heart up.”
Priest, now 21, told “GMA ” that Pawloski’s message went to the requests folder on Instagram, which she “usually doesn’t open” but for some reason did that day.
“It’s so ironic because two weeks before I had opened up my memory box and went through it and I actually picked up [Grasberger’s] letter and read it,” Priest said. “So when she had messaged me, I had opened it around 12 at night and I actually cried because it was like, ‘Wow, this is crazy I just read the letter.'”
In response to Priest’s original letter, Grasberger wrote her a letter back in 2009, but he said he “never knew if she ever received it.”
After 12 years, the pair were able to finally meet on July 23 of this year. With the help of Grasberger’s family, Pawloski was able to keep the meeting a secret from Frank so that it could be a surprise.
“We told him that someone was coming in to interview him about his story,” Pawloski said. “We were all in tears watching [them] meet for the first time. It was beautiful and heartwarming and showed what a little act of kindness can do for two strangers.”
“Oh God, I was in shock like it couldn’t be the girl,” Grasberger said. “I never thought I’d find her let alone see or meet her. It was amazing. I went through a box of Kleenex.”
Priest said of the meeting: “It was amazing. He’s a very amazing person. He has a great personality. I was really thrilled to meet him. He was just full of life.”
Grasberger, along with his family and Pawloski, had another surprise waiting for them. In a full-circle moment, Priest arrived wearing her National Guard uniform as she herself has joined the military.
“No one had known I was in the military so when I showed up in my uniform it sparked something in everyone to start crying and it made me cry,” Priest said, adding that she’s not typically a crier.
“I’m so proud of her,” Grasberger said. “She’s like a third daughter to me. She has become such a wonderful nice girl. I hope her son knows one day what a difference she made in my life.”
When one is playing a god-like character, it’s safe to say you say you can’t prepare by sitting around with Pringles and Netflix. Lee Pace certainly didn’t do that to play the magnificently fit emperor of the galaxy in Apple TV+’s Foundation.
“We started shooting before the pandemic and and I was lifting a whole lot of weights, and then the pandemic started, and I basically cleared off a corner of the barn and did a bunch of yoga,” Pace tells ABC Audio about how he got into shape to better look the part. “I did yoga every day for about two hours. And that was my kind of, you know, throughout the entire quarantine, through that time.”
The regimen helped both Pace’s body, and his acting.”It was such an opportunity to think about my health, to think about, you know, this character that I was playing and really kind of think about…you know, your balance, thinking about what you’re stretching, thinking about a specific part of the body and how you can control it,” he says. I thought so much about the character and what the limits of control are, the fantasy of what control is.”
In the series, Pace’s Brother Day confronts the reality that his family’s grip over the galaxy is under threat, because he learns that every empire eventually falls.
“That’s what the character is, he’s about control,” says Pace. “It’s like, you know, trying to hold sand in your hand. It’s a slippery thing. You can try to keep it, but you won’t be able to.”
Foundation, also starring Chernobyl’s Jared Harris, is now streaming on Apple TV+.
A 25-year-old Kanye West previews a song from his debut album in the trailer for his new Netflix documentary, titled Jeen-Yuhs.
Yeezy appears with Yasmine Bey, then known as Mos Def, and they rap “Two Words” from West’s 2004 album, The College Dropout. The project was RIAA-certified four-times Platinum and remains Kanye’s best-selling project of his 17-year recording career. It features Jay-Z, Jamie Foxx, Ludacris, Common, Talib Kweli, Freeway, Twista, and the Boys Choir of Harlem.
Jeen-Yuhs has been in production for 21 years for a reported $30 million, according to Pitchfork, and will debut in 2022. A release date will be announced later.
In other news, Kanye’s Donda album falls from number two to number four this week on the Billboard 200 after debuting at number one earlier this month.
Metallica continued to celebrate the 30th anniversary of The Black Album at his past weekend’s Louder than Life festival.
For their second of two headlining sets at the event, the metal legends performed their iconic 1991 record in its entirety and in reverse order, starting with closer “The Struggle Within,” and ending the main set with “Enter Sandman.”
While Black Album singles “Sandman” and “Nothing Else Matters” are staples in Metallica’s sets, the band hadn’t played deeper cuts such as “Struggle” or “Don’t Tread on Me” in concert since 2012.
Earlier this month, Metallica released a deluxe reissue of The Black Album in honor of its 30th anniversary. They also put together The MetallicaBlacklist, a 53-track tribute compilation featuring covers of every song off the record.
Valérie Lemercier, director and star of Celine Dion-inspired biopic “Aline;” Daniele Venturelli/WireImage
Aline, the movie that’s a thinly-veiled biopic of Celine Dion, will get an American release in early 2022 after premiering earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, Variety reports.
Aline was directed and co-written by French actor/comedian Valérie Lemercier, who also stars as the title character and plays her from youth to adulthood, though Lemercier is 57. In the film, Aline is a singer from Quebec who grew up with 13 siblings, just like Celine Dion did.
The movie follows Aline as she’s discovered by a producer, who makes her a star and then marries her — just like Celine’s late husband René Angelil did. And just like Celine, she does a Las Vegas residency and has three children after struggling with infertility problems. Celine’s songs are featured, with Aline’s singing voice provided by a Celine soundalike named Victoria Sio.
When the movie opened in Cannes, Lemercier told Variety of its inspiration, “Nothing is against [Celine], but some things are invented to be more cinematic and romantic sometimes.” She also claimed Celine’s French manager O.K.’d the project, but that Celine hadn’t read the script and, at that point, hadn’t seen it.
Aline will be distributed by Roadside Attractions and Samuel Goldwyn Films, who brought you the Oscar-winning movies Judy and Another Round. In a joint statement published by Variety, the two companies said, “Valérie’s tour de force performance…created an enormous splash at Cannes this year, and we think American audiences will be every bit as thrilled to discover this one-of-a-kind entertainer.”
They also called the film a “love letter” to Celine. In July, Variety described it as “kooky.”
Shinedown bassist Eric Bass has tested positive for COVID-19.
In an Instagram post announcing the news, frontman Brent Smith writes that Bass is “doing fine” and is currently quarantining, and is set to return to the road once he tests negative.
“To be crystal clear everyone on the tour including bands, and crew were tested today all of which are all negative,” Smith says.
With Bass out of commission for a bit, the remainder of Shinedown — Smith, guitarist Zach Myers and drummer Barry Kerch — performed as a three-piece during their two shows this past weekend. Josh Sturm, husband of ex-Flyleaf singer Lacey Sturm, will fill in going forward.
Bass is the second Shinedown member to contract COVID-19 in as many months — Kerch tested positive back in August.
Guns N’ Roses are releasing an EP featuring the band’s 2021 singles, “Hard Skool” and “Absurd.”
The set will include studio versions of both songs — which mark the first new music from GN’R since 2008’s Chinese Democracy, as well as the first new tracks from the group since Slash and Duff McKagan rejoined Axl Rose in 2016 — as well as live versions of classics “Don’t Cry” and “You’re Crazy.”
You can pre-order the EP on CD and cassette now via GNRMerch.com. You can also grab a seven-inch vinyl single featuring “Hard Skool” and a live rendition of “Absurd.”
Meanwhile, Guns just performed the live debut of “Hard Skool” during their concert Sunday night in Baltimore. Fan-shot footage is streaming now on YouTube.
(WASHINGTON) — When Anita Hill accused then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of unwanted advances and lewd comments when she worked for him, she says it changed “just about every aspect” of her life.
Thirty years after Hill delivered testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee about Thomas, she is still a “crusader” — not just on the topic of sexual harassment but also on the larger issue of gender violence.
“I started out with sexual harassment and I thought that was the issue that I would deal with but I started hearing from people who had told me about intimate partner violence and then there are people who wrote me, [who] spoke about their experience with sexual assault and rape,” Hill told “Good Morning America” co-anchor Robin Roberts. “And what I started to understand was that there was this connection and that you couldn’t really separate them, because at the heart of it was the same problem.”
Hill’s testimony in 1991 before a panel of 14 male senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee gripped the nation. The senator who led the hearing was President Joe Biden, who, in recent years, has publicly apologized for the treatment Hill received while publicly testifying against Thomas.
Hill told Roberts she feels that Biden’s personal apology to her “wasn’t enough.”
“I’m not sure that he quite understood how much harm the Senate hearings and his control, or lack of control, of those hearings did to all of us,” she said of Biden. “I think, unfortunately, the personal apology wasn’t enough. What I really wanted was somebody who was going to commit to doing something about this massive problem of gender violence that we have in this country that’s hurting everyone.”
Thomas would go on to be confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, a position he continues to hold.
Hill writes in her new book, “Believing: Our 30-Year Journey to End Gender Violence,” that her testimony against Thomas not only changed her own life but sparked a national conversation on gender violence.
The conversation has been propelled over the past decades by actions like the Me Too movement, founded by Tarana Burke in 2006, and Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony in 2018 against then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, but much is left to be done, according to Hill.
“We can, first of all, change the narrative culturally and stop telling people, telling children, that what’s happening to them is ‘not so bad’ because that keeps people from coming forward,” said Hill, adding that more needs to be done to fix what happens once people come forward with allegations.
“I still am not at the point where I can say I advise everyone to come forward. I don’t,” she said. “What I advise people to do is understand the process that you’re coming forward into, because we still have processes that are not necessarily meant to solve the problem of sexual harassment, or rape or sexual assault. We’ve got to change the processes if we in fact want people to feel confident and trust that they are going to be treated fairly when they go into them.”
In the United States, 81% of women and 43% of men report experiencing some form of sexual harassment and/or assault in their lifetime, according to the National Sexual Violence Resource Center.
When it comes to domestic violence, nearly 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence.
Hill, whose book goes on sale Tuesday, said she still believes “change is possible” 30 years later.
“I’m believing that change is possible. I’m believing that we deserve better,” she said. “We deserve better systems. We deserve better attention. We deserve leadership that will call out and acknowledge this problem for the public crisis that it is.”
“I’m talking about the president, as well as the president and CEO of every company and university,” Hill said. “Make that commitment to use your resources to stop this problem, and I believe that we can do it.”
