Search Results for: pete wentz

Troubled British singer Amy Winehouse is the perfect poster girl for the current state of the music industry. Music isn’t her problem. Everything else is. That’s exactly the same situation that the music industry – faced with lagging sales, a lack of star power and defection from its biggest moneymakers – finds itself in these days. And when the music industry has problems, the Grammys – celebrating their 50th anniversary Sunday – do as well. Winehouse and her stunning R&B revivalist debut “Back to Black” (Universal Republic) are up for six awards; she’s the only artist nominated in all four… Read more »

Between them, sisters Jessica and Ashlee Simpson have had one high-profile divorce, an embarrassing lip-synch scandal, plastic surgeries both obvious and subtle, blame for a Dallas Cowboys loss, and an impresario father looming over it all. Each shot to prominence – and up the pop charts – by taking the primrose path of MTV reality shows. Each has had shining success at selling records, followed by abject failure. And that’s just a sampling. If you’re a celeb-watcher (or football bettor), it’s juicy stuff. If you’re a Simpson sister, it’s beginning to look like a critical mass of negativity. Of late,… Read more »

Ashlee Simpson is no more of a threat to Fall Out Boy’s success than Pete Wentz’s affinity for eyeliner. So says the band’s guitarist Joe Trohman, who didn’t take kindly to a New York Daily News gossip item about a source telling OK! that the younger Simpson sis was “poison” to the pop-punk rockers, and could possibly be part of the reason why 2007’s Infinity on High didn’t score any Grammy nods. The group’s “pal” reportedly told the magazine that Grammy voters have been put off by Simpson since she was caught lip-synching on Saturday Night Live in 2004. “This… Read more »

The members of Las Vegas rock band Panic! At The Disco are relying less on computer software and more on their musical abilities for their next album. The as-yet-untitled release, due in stores March 25, will be the follow-up to their 2005 debut “A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out,” which has sold 1.7 million copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. “We just wanted the record to sound like four people playing a song,” Panic! guitarist/lyricist Ryan Ross tells Billboard.com. “A lot of the songs are definitely more geared toward playing live; we didn’t think about that on… Read more »

Hey, did you hear about that collaboration between Ashlee Simpson, Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump and Cobra Starship keytar player Victoria Asher? Yeah, they totally got together for a slinky little synth number called “Black and Light,” which Asher made available for download on her MySpace page earlier this week.”I recorded keys, Patrick Stump recorded the bass and drums with MIDI and Ashlee Simpson helped me with some of the lyrics,” she wrote in a blog entry about the song. “All and all pretty collaborative. It’s short, a bit dark … and yet a bit dancey.” It seemed like a… Read more »

Next week, Fall Out Boy will make their first appearance in Russia, at the B1 Maximum concert in Moscow. However, contrary to what some of their fans have been told, they won’t be appearing at an “autograph session” immediately beforehand.Several Russian Web sites claimed to be “official” Fall Out Boy fan clubs, all of which were charging fans money for memberships in return for sit-and-sign sessions with the band. “We were made aware [of several sites] setting up a fake meet-and-greet, somewhere around the band’s upcoming Moscow show, that we had to shut down,” Fall Out Boy’s manager, Bob McLynn,… Read more »

Pete Wentz was treated to dinner a few months ago by Lyor Cohen, the renowned rap promoter and U.S. music chief of Warner Music Group. Wentz, 28, is the eyelinered heartthrob and bassist of punk band Fall Out Boy; but this dinner was in celebration of the hit single just released by another band, Panic! At the Disco, which records on Wentz’s own label, Decaydance. “He asked me, ‘What do you want out of life, Pete?’” Wentz says. His answer was flip: business cards. The next day he received a stack of cards listing his name and a new title:… Read more »

Recently, Maureen Callahan wrote a piece for the New York Post about Crush Management, the NYC cadre that shepherds the careers of Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, the Academy Is … , Boys Like Girls and Armor for Sleep (or, as Callahan puts it, “basically any band that a 13-year-old girl with a blog and a Hot Topic habit obsesses over”). Aside from providing readers with some genuinely bananas quotes from songwriter/ rock-and-roll vampire Butch Walker about credibility (especially considering this is on his résumé), the article is excellent primarily because it floats the hypothesis that the artists… Read more »

Times are tough for the bangs-‘n’-guyliner set. Leading practitioners Marilyn Manson and My Chemical Romance are feuding, everyone is being labeled “emo” (and subsequently besieged by laughably uninformed nightly news reports), and Pete Wentz is dating Jessica Simpson’s sister. And now, as if things couldn’t get any worse, spooky-ooky outlet Hot Topic is ditching “dark and foreboding” for “lighter and brighter” in an attempt to halt a three-year slide in sales. “The desire is not to make the store ‘not gothic-y,’ it’s merely to reflect what’s going on in the music scene. Our store design has always reflected the music… Read more »