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Tom DeLonge Talks with Guitar.com

Angels and Airwaves
Jason Tate

Tom DeLonge talked with Guitar.com:

Lifeforms is another textural expedition that opens clear water between itself and the idea of DeLonge as a three-chord thrasher. “In my earlier years with Blink it was, ‘How do I create tones that let these songs sound different from each other?’ But all I was using was a distortion pedal and every once in a while a flanger,” he says. “Now, in Angels & Airwaves, there are delay pedals and synthesizers and organic oscillations from fuckin’ modular synths. I craft songs by what’s needed, not what I’m limited to. That’s the biggest difference.”

Armor for Sleep Talk New Music

Armor for Sleep
Jason Tate

Armor for Sleep talked about the possibility of new music with Alt. Press:

I would say that since we got together for this tour, it definitely woke the band up in a way, so I guess it wouldn’t be so crazy to think about new music in the future. I think I realized something that I probably should have realized a long time ago. In terms of creating and writing, if we are thinking about what other people will think of our music, then it’s not going to be good. If we were to do new music, it would have to be something that we think will be cool in the world on its own, with no other outside influence and no other expectations. I won’t care if it doesn’t perform well or whatever. I just want to put out into the world something that could affect somebody somehow. That’s usually when we succeeded the most, when we had that mentality.

R. Kelly Found Guilty

Legal
Jason Tate

The New York Times:

R. Kelly, the multiplatinum R&B artist whose musical legacy became intertwined with dozens of accusations of sexual abuse, was found guilty on Monday of serving as the ringleader of a decades-long scheme to recruit women and underage girls for sex.

The jury in New York deliberated for about nine hours before convicting the singer of all nine counts against him, including racketeering and eight violations of an anti-sex trafficking law known as the Mann Act.

Drake Tops the Charts, Again

Jason Tate

Drake still has the number one album in the country:

Drake’s Certified Lover Boy rules the Billboard 200 albums chart for a third consecutive and total week, as the set earned 171,000 equivalent album units in the U.S. in the week ending Sept. 23 (down 28%), according to MRC Data. The album opened atop the list two weeks ago with the year’s biggest week for an album: 613,000 units.

Roblox Introduces Listening Parties, Starting With Poppy’s New Album

Poppy
Jason Tate

Tatiana Cirisano, writing for Billboard:

Over the past year, Roblox has hosted immersive virtual concerts with artists like Lil Nas X and Twenty One Pilots. Now, the gaming platform is inviting artists to stream entire albums in the metaverse through virtual listening parties.

For its first-ever listening party, Roblox is teaming with Grammy-nominated musical chameleon Poppy and her record label Sumerian Records to stream her brand-new album Flux in the gaming platform starting today (Sept. 24). Music from the album will be integrated throughout nine popular Roblox games — which collectively boast more than 3 billion lifetime visits — so that fans can listen as they dance in RoBeats, attend Robloxian High School or explore Creatures of Sonaria.

Tom DeLonge: My Life in 10 Songs

Blink-182
Jason Tate

Tom DeLonge talked with Kerrang about the 10 songs that have defined his career, such as, “Family Reunion:”

We’d had this giant record with Enema Of The State, and then we go to record its follow-up and the whole label is freaking out, because they’re scared about what we’re going to write. We had three songs for them to hear after six months to see where we’re at. It’s the head of the label and the head A&R guy, and we played them this song full of cuss words, a song that went, ​‘When you fucked Hitler did he tell you that he loved you?’, which later became “When You Fucked Grandpa,” and cover of the Macarena that went, ​‘Hey, wipe your anus.’ They literally thought that’s what we’d been doing for six months. It was ridiculous. But what I’m getting at is even when the stakes were really high and there’s a lot of pressure to follow up a really big record, doing those songs was the core of who we were – having fun, fucking with people and having a good time. And when that didn’t exist in blink was when it was really hard, because that’s the whole goal of that band.

Padres & Airwaves: A Baseball Game With Tom DeLonge

Tom Delonge
Jason Tate

Tom DeLonge talked with Spin about his upcoming Angels and Airwaves album:

While Lifeforms may not exactly channel the same band that would run nude and screaming into Dylan’s dressing room, DeLonge admits there are likely more elements of Blink-182 (and even Box Car Racer) in the new album than he’s put into his other recent work. The new album is a combination of what he’s done in the past and the music he loved growing up, including bands like Depeche Mode, the Cure, and the Who. Much like DeLonge’s day-to-day life, it covers a lot of seemingly unrelated areas, different people will focus on different things, and the veteran songwriter will somehow glide back and forth gracefully between them all thanks to his secret multitasking weapon: “ADHD,” he says, “fucking works.”

There’s even a Blink-182 story:

“It’s funny, because we’d play with all these big bands, but Blink was always just different,” DeLonge recalls, pausing with a smile to consider which ridiculous story he wants to tell this time. “One time, Hoppus ran completely naked into Jakob Dylan’s dressing room when we were playing with the Wallflowers. They’re all fancy, and he’s just completely naked with suds all over his body, dick out and everything. He goes in there and starts yelling ‘Who the fuck took my towel?! Where’s my fucking towel?!’ and then slams the door and leaves. He sounded so serious. It was some Academy Award-winning shit. Oh my god, I had a heart attack. It was the funniest fucking thing I’d ever seen. They didn’t like to joke at all. They didn’t think it was funny at all. But we were just always squeezing by, and that was kind of our way.”

Drake Still Tops the Charts

Jason Tate

Drake still has the number one album in the country:

Drake’s Certified Lover Boy spends a second week atop the Billboard 200 albums chart, as the set earned 236,000 equivalent album units in the U.S. in the week ending Sept. 16 (down 61%), according to MRC Data. The set opened at No. 1 a week ago with the year’s biggest week for an album, 613,000 units.

Drake Tops the Charts

Jason Tate

Shocking! Drake has the number one album in the country this week:

Drake’s Certified Lover Boy album makes a spectacular debut atop the Billboard 200 chart with the biggest week for any album in over a year. The long-awaited set, which was released on Sept. 3, is Drake’s 10th No. 1 and starts with 613,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending Sept. 9, according to MRC Data. That’s the biggest week for an album since the Aug. 8, 2020-dated chart, when Taylor Swift’s Folklore launched at No. 1 with 846,000 units.

Jack Antonoff Named Artist in Residence

Bleachers
Jason Tate

Jack Antonoff has been named the artist-in-residence at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music

Antonoff will kick off his residency with a 90 minute, in-depth Q&A conversation on Friday September 10 at 12:00 p.m. ET, moderated by Jason King, Chair of the Clive Davis Institute and  PAM (Producers Against Misogyny) founders and Recorded Music students Lily Amiclo and Stella Smyth. PAM is an organization created to address inequities caused by misogyny in music and to offer educational opportunities in production that foreground people who often fall to the margin in this setting.

Kanye West Tops the Charts

Jason Tate

Kanye West has the number one album in the country:

Kanye West lands his 10th No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, as Donda debuts atop the list with the year’s biggest week for any album: 309,000 equivalent album units earned in the U.S. in the week ending Sept. 2, according to MRC Data. It surpasses the year’s previous best week, when Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour started with 295,000 units (on the chart dated June 5).

Albums 4.2 Released

Apps
Jason Tate

Albums, an iOS app we’ve written about before, got a new release:

You can now subscribe to Record Labels in the Release Feed and load their discographies from their collection pages. Not just the few hundred labels Apple supports in the Apple Music API, mind you, but all the labels your little heart desires.

There is a certain genre of feature that I tell my wife about and she says “you know you are the only person who cares about that, right?” And I say “you may bag me up and put me out with the trash on the day that I release a new version of Albums where I didn’t spend a week going down a rabbit hole working on something you will correctly tell me only I care about.” 

Apple Purchases Classical Music Streaming Service Primephonic

Jason Tate

Apple:

Apple today announced it has acquired Primephonic, the renowned classical music streaming service that offers an outstanding listening experience with search and browse functionality optimized for classical, premium-quality audio, handpicked expert recommendations, and extensive contextual details on repertoire and recordings.

With the addition of Primephonic, Apple Music subscribers will get a significantly improved classical music experience beginning with Primephonic playlists and exclusive audio content. In the coming months, Apple Music Classical fans will get a dedicated experience with the best features of Primephonic, including better browsing and search capabilities by composer and by repertoire, detailed displays of classical music metadata, plus new features and benefits.

I am very excited to see what Apple does with this. Apple Music (and Spotify) are not set up for classical music and Primephonic is a fantastic standalone service for the “genre.”

Olivia Rodrigo Tops the Charts

Olivia Rodrigo
Jason Tate

Olivia Rodrigo once again has the number one album in the country:

In the tracking week ending Aug. 26, Sour earned 133,000 equivalent album units in the U.S. (up 133%), according to MRC Data. Of that sum, album sales comprise 84,000 (up 1,201%), with vinyl LP sales equaling 76,000 of that figure (the second-largest sales week for a vinyl album since MRC Data began electronically tracking sales in 1991).

Paramore Now Have Songwriting Credit on “Good 4 U”

Jason Tate

Paramore’s Hayley Williams and Josh Farro are now credited on Olivia Rodrigo’s “Good 4 U.”

Sources with knowledge of the situation confirm that Paramore leader Hayley Williams and former guitarist Josh Farro, who co-wrote “Misery Business,” are now credited as writers on “Good 4 U,” alongside Rodrigo and producer-songwriter Daniel Nigro. The listing was changed on the website of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), and Williams reacted to the update on her Instagram Story on Tuesday (Aug. 24).