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Radiohead Talk With The Sunday Times

Radiohead
Jason Tate

Radiohead sat down to talk with The Sunday Times:

But now it is Radiohead again. Last summer the band met for rehearsals in London, to test the waters. They started with the first track from The Bends and tore through their albums in chronological order. Their last gig was in Philadelphia on August 1, 2018, when their children were young enough to be excited about the bowls of free sweets backstage. Why has it been so long? “I guess the wheels came off a bit, so we had to stop,” Yorke says. “There were a lot of elements. The shows felt great but it was, like, let’s halt now before we walk off this cliff.”

Fall Out Boy Talk FUTCT With Rolling Stone

Fall Out Boy
Jason Tate

Fall Out Boy talked with Rolling Stone about the anniversary of From Under the Cork Tree:

One of the things that has always been important to me, and speaks to the longevity of this record, is that we never really stopped playing any of those songs. I never wanted to. There are records that tanked, and it was really hard to play those songs because it hurt to think about ‘em. But in general, I never like to pretend a record didn’t happen. I never like to play a show without touching a record. Ever since Cork Tree came out, our sets have a substantial amount of the album. I have more respect for the album now than I did when I was a kid. Now, when I play those songs, I care about ’em a lot more than I did in 2007 because I understand what it means to people. It creates this responsibility.

Rolling Stone Merges With Vibe

Rolling Stone
Jason Tate

Rolling Stone has merged with Vibe:

Vibe, the long-running music magazine centring on rap and R&B coverage, will merge with Rolling Stone in a deal announced last week. Vibe staffers Mya Abraham and DeMicia Inman announced as the news broke that their positions had been eliminated. Rolling Stone CEO Julian Holguin said that, as part of the move, Rolling Stone would “level up [its] hip-hop and R&B coverage,” as well as investing in Vibe “across video, podcasts, long-form journalism, social media, and experiential opportunities.”

Yellowcard Chat With Spin

Yellowcard
Jason Tate

Yellowcard talked with Spin:

Yellowcard’s lean years have made all the triumphs of 2025 that much more special for Key and Mackin, and they’re determined to savor this moment and deliver something special for their audience. “We are awash in social media and instant gratification and that really has, I think, unfortunately found its way into music, forcing a lot of music to be ‘content’ instead of creativity,” Key says. “And I think our generation of bands maintains writing music for ourselves and our fans, and that goes a long way.”

Ireland Makes Basic Income for Artists Program Permanent

Money
Jason Tate

Ashley King, writing for Digital Music News:

After launching a trial in 2022, Ireland is due to make its basic income for artists program permanent starting in 2026. Under the program, selected artists receive a weekly payment of approximately $350, for around $1,500 per month. Applications are due to open in September 2026, with 2,000 spots available. Eligibility criteria has yet to be announced, but the Irish government expressed that it may expand the program to additional applicants in the future, if funding permits.

Yellowcard Talk With LA Times

Yellowcard
Jason Tate

Yellowcard talked with the LA Times about their new album:

Key says he was initially intimidated singing in front of Barker in the studio and had a few moments where negative, self-conscious thoughts were getting the better of him in the vocal booth during recording. Instead of getting annoyed, he says Barker helped ease his anxiety with a few simple words.

“Travis came into the booth, closed the door, put his hand on my shoulder, and he said, ‘You’re gonna do this as many times as you need to do it. I’m gonna be here the whole time.’” Barker was truly speaking from experience. He told Key at the time that he’d just recorded 87 rough takes of his parts on “Lonely Road,” his hit song with Jelly Roll and MGK. “That was a real crossroads for me,” Key said.

Ben Folds on Hayley Williams’s Fallon Performance

Ben Folds
Jason Tate

Ben Folds has a newsletter and he recently wrote about Hayley Williams’s performance on Fallon:

Something that’s striking from the start of “True Believer” is Hayley radically singing in her lower register. It ain’t indie baby voice and it’s not rock chick affectation.  It’s assertively at the bottom of her speaking range.  She’s not hiding.  She’s serious. This is a human being speaking her mind without blinking – taking ownership for what she’s saying.

In terms of musicality, in a world where we all assume it must be all dumbed down, especially when it’s taking up valuable ad time(!) Hayley brought the eloquence of a proper string section (arranged by Doug Peck), but she didn’t use them as props.  They occupied their own space (there were blocked upstage of her.). They had a voice, and a turn to be featured.  They weren’t buried or used like a synthesizer.  In 2025 when each symphony orchestra still might only have a small handful of black musicians (until the 80s it was ALL men, no women), this stunning section of black and brown players was as good as you’ll ever hear.

Ryan Key Talks Band Reforming

Yellowcard
Jason Tate

Ryan Key of Yellowcard talked with V13.net about the band’s recent album:

One of the things, one of the challenges that we faced with this record, particularly for me when writing lyrics, was how do we make a record at 45 that sounds like we’re 25, but we don’t sound like we’re trying to be 25. It’s a tough thing. Grounding myself in family and my past and the mistakes that I’ve made along the way. It’s funny because the song doesn’t really have this happy ending or positive turn or turn to it. It’s really more about living in that feeling of that time in your life, and that feeling of being young, and that it’s gone and it’s not coming back. Again, it was a tricky thing to try to dig up some of those themes and not have it sound forced.

Andrew McMahon Developing TV Series

Andrew McMahon
Jason Tate

Paris Hilton and Andrew McMahon are teaming up for the romantic comedy series Aught to Be.

Amazon is currently developing the romantic comedy series “Aught to Be,” Variety has learned exclusively. 

The half-hour series hails from the Tornante Company, with Paris Hilton attached to executive produce under her 11:11 Media banner. Andrew McMahon, the front man of bands like Jack’s Mannequin and Something Corporate, will also executive produce, as the show is inspired by his hit song “Konstantine.”

Taylor Swift Breaks More Records

Taylor Swift
Jason Tate

Billboard:

According to initial reports to data tracking firm Luminate, the tracks on The Life of a Showgirl have generated more than 460 million on-demand official streams in the United States since the album’s release on Oct. 3. There are multiple versions of album on streaming services: a standard 12-song edition, a track-by-track commentary edition that includes the 12 songs plus commentary tracks from Swift, and a track-by-track commentary edition that has Swift’s commentary and lyric videos for each of the songs. […] The sales continue to come in to Luminate for The Life of a Showgirl and it may soon topple Adele’s longstanding record for the largest sales week for an album in the modern era. Adele’s 25 debuted with 3.378 million copies sold in its first week in 2015 — the biggest sales week for any album since Luminate began tracking data in 1991 (when the modern era of music sales tabulation began).

Yellowcard ‘Better Days’ Track by Track

Yellowcard
Jason Tate

Yellowcard broke down their new album track-by-track for Rocksound.

In Yellowcard, I think the two biggest Alkaline Trio fans would be Sean (Mackin, violinist) and myself. We spent hours in the van driving around the country listening to Alkaline Trio. When Travis Barker, who produced and played drums on the record, heard us talking about that, he kind of just said, ‘Do you want me to see if Matt will sing on the song?’ And we all just laughed out loud and said, ‘Well, yes, of course we would. We would be beyond stoked if he was a part of it’. So personally, this is one of my favorite songs on the record.

Travis Barker Runs to His Own Tempo

Travis Barker
Jason Tate

Travis Barker talked with Uproxx about running:

If I can find the flow state where I’m not thinking, then that’s the best show or the best run. For me, especially on tour, playing is one thing, and it’s very intense, and running is my escape, but it also helps me. I have to run. I have to jump rope in order to be able to play the way I want to play, and whatever comes to my head that I want to try and do for how long, I pretty much can do because I train every day and I work out every day. Some people look at it like it’s grueling, it’s painful. It’s all the things that I practice to be good at. I know it might be the hardest part of my day, but I’d rather initiate it. I’d rather start my day like that and run toward those things then have those things creep up on me. Running has been that for me. I love challenging myself, and I love the hard workouts. I love being sore. I love the blisters that come with playing drums and the bloody hands. I love the blisters that come with running. They go hand in hand, and I feel like they both train me to be a better person, drummer, and runner.

RIAA Singles Out Discord and Telegram

Legal
Jason Tate

The RIAA has singled out Discord and Telegram as “notorious markets” for pre-release piracy:

“Messaging platforms Telegram and Discord have become the primary mechanisms through which pre-release music is distributed without authorization,” wrote the RIAA. “Through private and semi-private communities, organized, global groups engage in hacking, social engineering, and other methods to obtain pre-release music and, in many cases, sell this illegally obtained material for thousands of dollars.”

The Queen of Selling

Taylor Swift
Jason Tate

Taylor Swift’s new album brought in over $33 million at the box office and 2.7 million day-one album sales.

Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl launch has shown once again that it’s Taylor’s world and the rest of us are just living in it. The special album release event dwarfed the competition at the box office over the weekend, debuting to an impressive $33 million domestic and $13 million overseas. That’s a record-breaking number for what is neither a concert film nor a documentary, but a timed promotional event for the release of her new album.

The album dropped on Friday and is already setting records. After just one day, The Life of a Showgirl has secured the second-highest weekly sales for any album since tracking of such things began in the early 1990s. Billboard’s Luminate reported that the album sold 2.7 million copies on Friday alone.

Thrice Talk New Album With Yahoo!

Thrice
Jason Tate

Thrice talked with Yahoo! about their new album:

Yeah, it was fun, especially lyrically. We decided to split the record partway through making the last record, Horizons/East. It was just Horizons at the time, and so I didn’t have a ton of time to end up theming /East as intensely as I wanted to. But knowing /West was coming, I had a couple of years to really ruminate and distill some of that. So it was actually a lot of fun, and I feel like it’s the most thematically rich, dense record we’ve done other than The Alchemy Index.

And, because the Asana shoutout made me laugh:

We use an app called Asana to share at the points that we feel like something is in a shareable spot. In the past, we’ve passed Dropbox files around, but we haven’t done that in a little bit. That was when we weren’t living in the same place, and it was harder to jam in person. So, now, it’s a bit more of, like, “Here’s this idea,” and then we jam on it.