Search Results for: Can't Stop Won't Stop

Los Angeles – Nearly 45 years after Stevie Wonder’s live harmonica workout “Fingertips, Pt. 2” topped the charts, the soul visionary’s musical charm still enthralls. From preteen wunderkind to adult visionary, his musical evolution embodies a “What’s next?” curiosity that still burns brightly as fans anticipate his first new Motown album in 10 years, which he hopes will come out in April. “Hopefully, that little boy will always stay in me,” Wonder said in a recent interview with Billboard. “The part of me that’s still eager to discover; who welcomes new, unbroken ground. When that ground is being broken, there’s… Read more »

The legal assault on music file-swappers is an unparalleled move by recording companies desperately trying to survive after failing to fully embrace digital distribution methods and driving up the cost of CDs. But record companies now risk a backlash that could damage far more than their financial results, while still not making a significant dent in music piracy, some observers say. A day after firing off 261 copyright lawsuits against individuals it accuses of each sharing hundreds of music files online, recording industry officials fielded a few calls from defendants eager to avoid paying thousands in damages. The Recording Industry… Read more »

Sum 41 are anxious for sum vacation. The group originally planned on releasing “Over My Head, (Better Off Dead)” as the third single from Does This Look Infected?, but are now questioning whether they want to continue promoting the album. “We’re kind of like, dead right now, so we’re thinking we just might stop,” singer Deryck Whibley said. “We could put out another single and keep going, but we’ve been touring nonstop for a long time and we really want a break, so I think we might want to take six months off.” And there are other reasons Sum 41… Read more »

“There are few directors I trust enough to do a Linkin Park video,” the band’s DJ and resident director, Joseph Hahn, said Thursday. Mark Romanek is one of them. On the heels of Johnny Cash’s “Hurt,” the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Can’t Stop” and Audioslave’s “Cochise,” the acclaimed director is handling Linkin Park’s new single, “Faint.” The group shot the clip at the end of April with about 1,000 fans, Hahn said at the Music Video Production Association Awards. Romanek’s treatment, based around the “I won’t be ignored” portion of the song’s chorus, features the band performing and ignoring the… Read more »

When the Eels debuted in the mid-Nineties, being a tortured artist in the slippery world of alternative rock implied some level of ironic distance. God forbid that an alt-rocker directly admit to having feelings – at least not without a little wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Eels frontman E does his share of winking, but his real-life tragedies – within a two-year period, he lost his sister to suicide and his mother to cancer – have kept the singer and songwriter more honest than your average Nineties moper. In 1998, E dealt head-on with his personal loss on the Eels’ stunning album, Electro-Shock… Read more »

Sure, his much hyped comeback album Invincible proved anything but-that’s not stopping Michael Jackson from dusting off his moonwalking shoes and gearing up to launch what will be his first North American trek since 1993’s Dangerous tour. Jackson-who has done one-off shows in recent months, including a two-night tribute to himself at Madison Square Garden last fall and a September 11 benefit concert-apparently hopes the tour will goose his flagging album sales, according to the New York Post. The singer has not publicly announced any tour, although the music world has been abuzz for months with the prospect. In January,… Read more »

Welcome to 2002: The Year of the Living Dangerously. For the record labels that is. The major labels took their sweet time and finally rolled out Pressplay and MusicNet, online music subscription services, as 2001 came to an end. The reaction thus far has been, in a word, blah. And the reaction I am talking about is not coming from consumers, it is coming from inside the industry. “The services are useless right now,” one major label executive told me. “Unless we crush file-swapping, we’ll fail online. And if that happens the industry will have to rethink its strategy beginning… Read more »

“Motivation” will be the next video from Sum 41’s platinum-selling All Killer No Filler album. The follow-up to “In Too Deep,” shot two weeks ago in L.A., will debut on MTV in late January. “It’s more about the lack of motivation,” says Deryck “Bizzy D” Whibley, the punk band’s 21-year-old singer. “It’s about what it was like growing up in our town.” Their town is Ajax, a Canadian suburb 30 miles outside Toronto. “It’s so boring. It’s just suburbs, there’s no downtown,” he explains. “As soon as you get into Ajax, it’s houses until the end, no strip malls, nothing… Read more »

MusicNet, Pressplay working out kinks in technology, licensing – now they need paying users. Although the major labels have been making strides in their efforts to deliver music to listeners’ desktops while collecting money for themselves and their artists, the road ahead is still littered with questions, and the labels’ long-promised services still are not a reality. When will music fans see them? When they do, will they be willing to pay for something they now can get for free? Can the industry shoot down all the new hotshot – and free – file-trading services? And whatever happened to Napster,… Read more »

Roc-A-Fella Records CEO Damon Dash put just a little more of a pimp stroll than usual in his confident swagger as he walked into the penthouse of Manhattan’s Hotel Giraffe Thursday night. Dash was about to show a handful of invited guests his trump card – the new Jay-Z album, The Blueprint, which features appearances by Eminem and, apparently, Michael Jackson. “I don’t want to say we’re the backbone of hip-hop, because that may sound arrogant, but it is what it is,” Dash said before playing seven songs from the LP, which comes out September 18 and features the single… Read more »