Search Results for: AVOID

What do you do if you’ve been touring the world for the past decade and, at 25, you’re having what amounts to your first midlife crisis? If you are coming off a very public breakup with your longtime movie-star girlfriend? If you are headline news at home, but just another face in the crowd in your adopted hometown of New York? If you’re Ben Lee, you write an album of existential pop songs and call it Awake Is the New Sleep (February 22) and enjoy how you’ve turned heartbreak and the search for life’s big answers into the strongest album… Read more »

Linkin Park are saving the best for last. The final single from their 2003 album, Meteora, will be their favorite track, “Breaking the Habit.” They dig the tune so much, in fact, that they’re planning to use it as a model when they start working on their next album in October. “Creatively, ‘Breaking the Habit’ is one of the songs we’re most proud of,” guitarist Brad Delson said. “It’s so familiar, but at the same time it’s so foreign to anything we’ve ever done. It really is just a unique animal, and when we approach making the next record, I… Read more »

As if a live CD of every show on their current tour weren’t enough, Pearl Jam have begun selling a live DVD of a December club gig at the Showbox Theater in Seattle. “Live at the Showbox” is available only on the band’s official Web site and at their concerts and features the full set from a December 6 warm-up for the band’s current world tour. Though it does not have any bonus features, the live disc differs from the group’s extras-laden “Touring Band 2000” DVD thanks to the intimate setting in the 1,000-plus capacity theater. The new DVD boasts… Read more »

EMI Group Plc chairman Eric Nicoli didn’t confirm any of the myriad rumors of possible merger plans for his music major at a media confab in Gotham Tuesday, but he didn’t try very hard to dispel them, either. The British label group – which has been twice spurned by European and U.S. regulators in its attempts to link up with rival majors – would benefit from the expanded scale and geographical reach offered by a combination, Nicoli said at UBS Warburg’s Media Week event. And the regulatory skepticism, while still significant, may have been diminished somewhat by the dismal performance… Read more »

Guitarist John Mayer has a wish most musicians would not want: He’d like to make a bad record one day to see if fans would give him a second chance. Mayer says he wants to be able to flip through a rack of his CDs 50 years from now and say, “good, good, good, not my favorite, this one kinda stunk, this one was good.” He says by having bad records, it means people followed his career and let him take a chance. He also says he’d like to have people debating over which one of his records is his… Read more »

In the city of sin, Britney Spears behaved. There was no dissing of Justin Timberlake during the opening night of the second leg of the Dream Within a Dream Tour. No cigarette smoking. No… whatever vice the rumor mills have her doing this week. Things may have changed in Britney’s well-chronicled life since the last time we saw her onstage – and that’s only if you believe the gossip – but there were no signs of it Friday at Mandalay Bay. The 20-year-old headliner was the same pop princess she was at 19. Nearly every part of Spears’ 90-minute show… Read more »

Blink 182, Green Day, and Jimmy Eat World haven’t had any major accidents on the Pop Disaster tour so far, but there have been several times the tour nearly lived up to its name. Blink 182 bassist/vocalist Mark Hoppus revealed that he nearly had a Michael Jackson/James Hetfield moment when one of the pyrotechnic devices almost burned him at one of the first few shows in California. “I got a little too close to one of the pyro hits, and I smelled my hair on fire-not on fire, but it singed the back of my hair. I could smell burning… Read more »

The first rule when you’re about to drop $75 to $150 on a concert ticket should be “Do your research.” Anyone who expected a straightforward greatest-hits retrospective from Prince at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall Tuesday night will have to write their pricey ticket off as a fine for laziness. After all, any artist who is as unpredictable as Prince has historically been should warrant no less than a quick Google search for set lists. Therein, the scientific fan would find that “Little Red Corvette” and “When Doves Cry” aren’t bloody likely. Rather, much of the One Nite Alone Tour… Read more »

Looks like the Florida prison population won’t be getting a Backstreet Boy to play with. Nick Carter, the youngest (and arguably cutest) of the Backstreeters, has avoided jail time and disappointed any would-be cellmates by making a deal with prosecutors in a case stemming from a barroom altercation last month. Carter, who turned 22 last week, was arrested January 2 for allegedly disobeying a cop’s orders to leave a Tampa nightclub following a scuffle inside. On Friday, the Backstreeter agreed to enter a pretrial intervention program that, if he behaves himself, will keep him out of jail and have his… Read more »

For P.O.D. this week, Youth of the Nation (the tour) had to take a backseat to “Youth of the Nation” (the song). The spiritual rap-rockers canceled a gig in Madison, Wisconsin, Wednesday and flew to Los Angeles to shoot a video for the tune, the second single from Satellite. “Youth of the Nation,” a powerful number written the day of the Santana High School shootings in the band’s hometown of San Diego earlier this year, is scheduled to hit radio and video outlets next month, according to Atlantic Records. The track includes the verse, “Maybe this kid was reaching out… Read more »