Brett Buchanan, writing for Alternative Nation:
Original Smashing Pumpkins bassist D’arcy has sent Alternative Nation the following text message conversations she had with Billy Corgan in January, including his pitch to involve her as a guest like Steven Adler on Guns N’ Roses’ Not In This Lifetime tour.
They haven’t even officially announced their reunion yet and it’s already a drama filled mess.
Hayley Williams and Taylor of Paramore are on the latest episode of the Vinyl Soul podcast.
Justin Timberlake has the number one album in the country this week:
The set, which was released on Feb. 2 through RCA Records, earned 293,000 equivalent album units in the week ending Feb. 8, according to Nielsen Music. Of that sum, 242,000 were in traditional album sales.
Daniel Victor, writing for The New York Times:
Ending a case that electrified punctuation pedants, grammar goons and comma connoisseurs, Oakhurst Dairy settled an overtime dispute with its drivers that hinged entirely on the lack of an Oxford comma in state law.
The dairy company in Portland, Me., agreed to pay $5 million to the drivers, according to court documents filed on Thursday.
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Yesterday on KROQ Davey Havok announced that the new Blaqk Audio album will be released later this spring:
“I was talking to Jade [Puget] on the way here and he said that the 4th Blaqk Audio will likely be finished being mastered tomorrow. We’ll have the 4th Blaqk Audio out this Spring. We will tour on it. I am so excited about it. I really, really like it,” says Havok.
Fischerspooner’s new album, Sir, is streaming at NPR.
Twitter has finally reported a profit, The New York Times reports:
On Thursday, it reported a profit in the fourth quarter, the first black ink since going public in 2013. The news pushed its shares up more than 20 percent in early trading to their highest level in more than two years.
Zac Farro of Paramore and HalfNoise sat down with Noisey:
I want everything to be romantic. I romanticise everything. Look at my favourite movies. I think it’s almost a problem. That’s why I feel like I was born in the wrong time. With modern dating, you’re just texting all day, like ‘oh I just did this or did that’. There’s no magic in it anymore. I know I keep saying it, but that’s all I look for. That’s why I love playing with HALFNOISE. I love Paramore too, I’m so thankful to be best friends again with them. But with this little band, we’re all staying at this Airbnb, bumping into each other, playing together, there’s no tour manager. There’s magic left in it.
Lana Del Rey was recently interviewed for L’Official:
I like “Coachella,” actually. I put it in the song exactly the way I was thinking about it driving home. I love when I can do that. And for me, it was such a culmination of things: Seeing Father John Misty, being with his wife; realizing there was a real problem with North Korea, that it was an impending, bigger world problem. It was to the point where I did not want to go home after the festival. I stopped at this crazy place called Rim of the World Highway in Lake Arrowhead [California]. I sat there, went to the redwood grove, and really had a moment with myself.
Quincy Jones sat down to talk with David Marchese at Vulture, and it’s … interesting:
That they were the worst musicians in the world. They were no-playing motherfuckers. Paul was the worst bass player I ever heard. And Ringo? Don’t even talk about it. I remember once we were in the studio with George Martin, and Ringo had taken three hours for a four-bar thing he was trying to fix on a song. He couldn’t get it. We said, “Mate, why don’t you get some lager and lime, some shepherd’s pie, and take an hour-and-a-half and relax a little bit.” So he did, and we called Ronnie Verrell, a jazz drummer. Ronnie came in for 15 minutes and tore it up. Ringo comes back and says, “George, can you play it back for me one more time?” So George did, and Ringo says, “That didn’t sound so bad.” And I said, “Yeah, motherfucker because it ain’t you.” Great guy, though.
And:
Musical principles exist, man. Musicians today can’t go all the way with the music because they haven’t done their homework with the left brain. Music is emotion and science. You don’t have to practice emotion because that comes naturally. Technique is different. If you can’t get your finger between three and four and seven and eight on a piano, you can’t play. You can only get so far without technique. People limit themselves musically, man. Do these musicians know tango? Macumba? Yoruba music? Samba? Bossa nova? Salsa? Cha-cha?
David Benioff and D.B. Weiss are going from Winterfell to a galaxy far, far away.
It was announced today that Benioff and Weiss, creators of the smash-hit, Emmy Award-winning television series Game of Thrones, will write and produce a new series of Star Wars films.
These new films will be separate from both the episodic Skywalker saga and the recently-announced trilogy being developed by Rian Johnson, writer-director of Star Wars: The Last Jedi.
Frank Ocean recently interviewed Timothée Chalamet for V Man:
Absolutely. I’m a total “nostalgist” and Call Me By Your Name’s director, Luca, grew up in that time period. In fact, the book is set in ’88 and he changed it to ’83 because he said that was the year in your life you can hear music from. In the movie, there’s Talking Heads, The Psychedelic Furs, or just the Bach or Beethoven—those are all songs from Luca’s youth, what it was like for him in Italy in the ’80s.