Rock

While Ringo Starr couldn’t celebrate his birthday with his usual party at the Capitol Records building in Hollywood, the former Beatle brought the fun online on Tuesday (July 7) to celebrate the big 8-0 safely and socially distanced. Proceeds raised during the show benefited four organizations, including Black Lives Matter Global Network, the David Lynch Foundation, MusiCares and WaterAid. On the Black Lives Matter movement, Starr took some time to note how influential Black music was to creating the Beatles’ sound. “There’s no greater act than any others can make than to stand up and be counted when you see injustice,” he said during the livestream. “I don’t have to tell you that the Beatles’ early set had a lot to do with the i...

In a different life, Rivers Cuomo would have fronted a metal band instead of Weezer. In an interview with Kerrang, the musician discussed his previous group Sixty Wrong Sausages and how he initially intended to create metal music. “I was always in bands growing up, when I was in school and when I first moved to LA,” he said. “In those days I was almost anti-punk: I did not like punk music, or the whole punk aesthetic. My attitude was pretty much exclusively metal: practice your scales, your arpeggios, use a metronome and don’t play sloppy. I was anti-nihilist, really.” “Then I got a job at Tower Records where I met this guy named Pat Finn who was 100 percent punk,” he continued. “He had a shaved head, he’d try to grab your testicles, he’d try to get the bo...

More than a year after The New York Times published a report of alleged sexual misconduct by Ryan Adams, the singer has written a lengthy apology for his past behavior. “There are no words to express how bad I feel about the ways I’ve mistreated people through my life and career,” the singer-songwriter began in his open letter, which he shared with the Daily Mail. “All I can say is that I’m sorry.” “I’ve gotten past the point where I would be apologizing just for the sake of being let off the hook and I know full well that any apology from me probably won’t be accepted by those I’ve hurt,” he continued. “I get that and I also understand that there’s no going back.” Adams went on to acknowledge that he ...

Dave Grohl joined Matt Wilkinson on Apple Music for a conversation about the time period from his early days in Nirvana through the release of the first Foo Fighters album. The interview airs on Saturday (July 4), exactly 25 years after Foo Fighters’ debut, self-titled album arrived (on July 4, 1995). Grohl admitted that when he joined Nirvana and they became “really huge really quickly,” he was still insecure that he wasn’t quite good enough for the band. “Well I mean I joined Nirvana, I was their fifth drummer, right?” he said. “They’d had a team of drummers before me and some of them were more, I don’t know, more in the band than others. So when I joined the band, I didn’t know Krist and Kurt at all. And when we first met and s...

Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour returns with “Yes, I Have Ghosts,” his first new song in five years. It’s a gentle, acoustic number with flourishes of strings. On it, Gilmour sings, “Yes, I have ghosts, not all of them dead/ Making dust of my dreams, spinning round and around, around in my head.” “Ghosts” isn’t so much a solo tune as a Gilmour family effort. The song accompanies the release of his wife Holly Samson’s audiobook for her coming-of-age novel A Theatre for Dreamers, and features daughter Romany on vocals. The audiobook format “has so much untapped potential,” comments Gilmour in a statement, “and I am surprised more musicians have not creatively collaborated with authors, narrators and audiobook producers in this way before. The two worlds seem to sea...

Tom Morello has unveiled his new song “Stand Up,” a high-octane collaboration with Shea Diamond, Dan Reynolds of Imagine Dragons and The Bloody Beetroots. On the urgent, hard-rocking track, which dropped Thursday (July 2), the collective artists rail against police brutality, racism and white privilege. “When I call the police/ Will they just kill me?/ Will they just kill you?/ When I call the police/ Will they just protect me/ ‘Cause I’m white-skinned too?/ Stand up/ ‘Cause you are standing for nothing/ Just shut up/ Cause your words mean nothing,” Reynolds screams on the chorus before trading verses with Diamond about police corruption and the danger it poses to Black lives. Proceeds from the track will be split between a number of nonprofits foc...

To ring in the big 8-0, Ringo Starr plans on celebrating online with an all-Starr broadcast benefit called “Ringo’s Big Birthday Show” next Tuesday, July 7. Starr traditionally spreads peace and love outside of Capitol Records Tower in Hollywood, Calif. for his birthday, but he’s not letting the coronavirus pandemic stop him from doing so. He recruited fellow living Beatles member Paul McCartney, Ringo Star & His All-Starr Band guitarist Joe Walsh, Gary Clark Jr., Sheryl Crow, Sheila E. and Ben Harper will host at-home performances and feature never-before-seen concert footage. Proceeds raised during “Ringo’s Big Birthday Show” will benefit these four organizations: Black Lives Matter Global Network, the David Lync...