• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Verzuz Battle Online

  • Home
  • Upcoming Verzuz Battle
  • NEWS
  • Music Festival
  • DMCA
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact US

Uncategorized

How David Bowie, long thought ambivalent to country music, became a writer on a Chris Young song

July 24, 2023 by admin

Country star Chris Young’s latest single, “Young Love & Saturday Nights,” is a vivid love letter to summertime weekends, old trucks, and dive bar bands

ByMARIA SHERMAN AP Music Writer

July 24, 2023, 9:26 PM

LOS ANGELES — Country star Chris Young’s latest single, “Young Love & Saturday Nights,” is a vivid love letter to summertime weekends, old trucks, dive bar bands, and crushes. And it might sound immediately familiar: The guitar lick that opens the track is lifted directly from David Bowie’s 1974 hit “Rebel Rebel.”

Bowie is credited posthumously as a songwriter on the track, making it one of the genre-melding icon’s few forays into country music — noteworthy, because Bowie himself was not quite a fan of the genre.

“I think the only music I didn’t listen to was country and western, and that holds to this day,” Bowie told NPR’s Terry Gross in 2002. “It’s much easier for me to say that, the kind of music I didn’t listen to was pretty much that.”

So how did Bowie, who died in 2016, end up on the track?

Warner Chappell Music became the custodian of Bowie’s musical legacy — acquiring the worldwide rights to over 400 of his songs, including “Rebel Rebel” — when the company purchased his extensive music catalog in 2022.

Ben Vaughn, president and chief executive officer of Warner Chappell Music Nashville, says his team asked songwriter Jesse Frasure to “get creative using elements from Bowie’s catalog to write a new country song. He ended up doing an interpolation of ‘Rebel Rebel’ and the demo he turned in was an instant smash.”

“Getting the call from Bowie’s estate and Warner Chappell to creatively explore his catalog was an exciting day,” Frasure said in a statement. “Interpolations to me are a way of tipping a hat to my heroes and maybe even introducing their music to a new audience.”

He added that it is an honor to have Bowie’s music “be heard in the country genre.”

WMC A&R executive Spencer Nohe then pitched the song to Young’s team while their legal counsel, Steve Butler, negotiated the deal.

Young writes many of his own songs, but when he first heard the demo written by Ashley Gorley, Josh Thompson and Frasure, he knew he wanted to record it.

“It tackles universal themes that a lot of people can related to. That’s the end goal of the song: to make you feel like you’re in it,” Young told The Associated Press. “And the fact that David Bowie’s catalog got picked up and they decided to do something special like this, and list him as a songwriter on the song, is a really cool thing.”

But how would Bowie himself feel about the posthumous collaboration?

“Hate is a strong word,” said Tiffany Naiman, UCLA’s director of music industry programs and an expert on Bowie, of the icon’s feelings toward the genre. “I think he had a very difficult relationship with certain parts of America including country music.”

It might have not been his thing, she said, but that didn’t mean he never listened to country music. She urges listeners to consider Bowie’s documented love of Elvis Presley, who began his career as a country star, and Bowie’s cover of the country track “It Ain’t Easy” by Ron Davis, recorded during his 1971 “Hunky Dory” sessions and released on 1972’s “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.”

Young himself told the AP that he doesn’t think his song is “introducing David Bowie to a new genre.”

Source

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Electronic music festival Making Time ∞ returns to Philly’s Fort Mifflin with over 100 DJs and artists

June 20, 2023 by admin

Making Time ∞ returns to Philly’s Fort Mifflin for the electronic music festival’s biggest lineup yet.

More than 100 artists and DJs will perform across five stages at the former Revolutionary War battlefield, with electro and house acts Jamie xx, Helena Hauff, Overmono, Octo Octa and Eris Drew, and DJ Koze headlining the summer festival from Sept. 22-24.

The third annual Making Time will feature more than 100 artists and DJs, with headliners Jamie xx, Helena Hauff, Overmono, Octo Octa and Eris Drew and DJ Koze taking the stage.
The third annual Making Time will feature more than 100 artists and DJs, with headliners Jamie xx, Helena Hauff, Overmono, Octo Octa and Eris Drew and DJ Koze taking the stage.Courtesy of Phobymo

The first Making Time at Fort Mifflin debuted in 2021, with LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy headlining the one-day festival.

Underground DJs like Jersey Club legend UNIQU3, Japan’s DJ Nobu, Ben UFO, Optimo, and others will also take the stage to light up the crowd at the 42-acre site. But beyond the rave, Making Time ∞ will include “ant-festival” experiences for audiences to enjoy.

ADVERTISEMENT

According to a press release, there will be “ambient, downtempo and experimental pop tones” via performances from Carmen Villain, Colleen, Hailu Mergia, LARAAJI, and other artists. Brooklyn community music hub The Lot RADio will host a livestream stage, and one of the site’s “casemates” will be converted to “chill-out rooms” filled with records from local music collectors and DJs.

The third annual Making Time will feature more than 100 artists and DJs, with headliners Jamie xx, Helena Hauff, Overmono, Octo Octa and Eris Drew and DJ Koze taking the stage.
The third annual Making Time will feature more than 100 artists and DJs, with headliners Jamie xx, Helena Hauff, Overmono, Octo Octa and Eris Drew and DJ Koze taking the stage.Courtesy of Phobymo

Making Time partner and Philly-based visual art shop Klip Collective will add to the enthralling music experience by casting light installations on Fort Mifflin’s moats, casemates, buildings and mounds.

“Fort Mifflin is such a special place,” founder and Philly DJ David Pianka, better known as Dave P, said. “It’s such a unique location for a futuristic musical experience like this. There’s so much space and freedom to be as creative as possible. I can’t do that at a club. I could only do that here and it has been so much fun.”

Tickets for the festival will go on sale Friday at 10 a.m. For pricing and pick-up information, go to dice.fm.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Avenged Sevenfold unleashes pent up energy, new music at Kia Forum

June 10, 2023 by admin

The Huntington Beach-based metal band is out in support of its latest record, “Life is But a Dream…,” which dropped on June 2.

Avenged Sevenfold fans waited a long time to see the Huntington Beach-based metal band play a gig near home.

“There are so many friends and family here … we probably know half of you,” vocalist M. Shadows told the sold-out crowd at Kia Forum in Inglewood Friday night after the quintet blasted through its 2007 hit “Afterlife.”

The arena concert marked A7X’s first proper headlining gig in Los Angeles County since 2009, but the band did headline Irvine Meadows at the Uproar Festival in its native Orange County in 2010. The band also played an intimate fan appreciation show at the Hollywood Palladium in 2013 in support of its “Hail to the King” album and in 2016 played a livestreaming show with a few lucky local fans in attendance atop the Capitol Records building in Los Angeles for the launch of its album “The Stage.”

A7X was scheduled to play Kia Forum for the first time back in 2018 on its End of the World Tour with supergroup Prophets of Rage, however the jaunt was cut short as Shadows contracted a viral infection that left him voiceless and he developed a blood blister on his vocal folds.

He sounded fantastic Friday night in Inglewood and the fans were definitely happy that the long wait to see the band perform live was over.

Before the show started, the house music warmed up the crowd. Tons of metal fans in black T-shirts weren’t too cool to dance along to “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-a-Lot and a full on sing-along broke out during the Backstreet Boys “I Want It That Way.” With those vocal cords ready to go, A7X hit the stage with “Game Over,” the first taste of its new record “Life is But a Dream …,” which dropped on June 2.

In all, the band slipped in seven new songs during its 17-song set on Friday. Though they’ve played a couple of festival gigs and a quick pop-up show in Las Vegas in the past two months, these are the first shows for the band since 2018. They really did mix the new in with the old tried and true, live debuting the song “Mattel” after the opening, but bringing old school fans back into the fold with “Afterlife” and “Hail to the King.”

As a whole, the new record has a running theme when listened to in order and in its entirety. Broken up into fragments for a live show there are a few standouts like “We Love You” and “Nobody,” but in the encore the band delivered three more new songs, “G,” “(O)rdinary” and “(D)eath.”

All three of the latter have their own distinct vibe, especially “(O)rdinary,” which sounds like something a composer scoring a movie in the ’80s would have dreamed the distant future of music to sound like. Fans did moan and groan a bit when the band exited the stage after a three-song encore and let the instrumental new title track, “Life is But a Dream …” play until the house lights came up.

Filed Under: Uncategorized

‘Deep Dive’ Documentary Series To Explore Music’s Greatest Untold Stories

May 7, 2023 by admin

TIME Studios has been granted exclusive access to Universal Music Group’s unrivalled music archive for the series, which will feature stories about Bob Marley, Ella Fitzgerald, The Who, and more

TIME Studios will shine a light on some of music’s greatest untold stories in the upcoming Deep Dive documentary series, which will see it exploring the depths of the Universal Music Group vaults.

The label group owns history’s largest music archive, housed within the renowned Iron Mountain Entertainment Services’ archival facility.

A groundbreaking new behind-the-scenes, non-fiction series, Deep Dive will bring history to life as it unearths for the first time previously untold stories from original recordings, master tapes, never-before-seen photo negatives, filmed performances, album art, and music videos that had long been only rumored to exist.

The Deep Dive documentary series follows years of media speculation and unfounded rumors about what might have been lost in a 2008 fire at the Universal Studios backlot. Following the incident, UMG initiated a massive, multi-year effort to inventory the vast collection of musical recordings and artifacts.

Through awe-inspiring and emotional storytelling, Deep Dive not only celebrates the treasures discovered within Iron Mountain and UMG’s vaults around the world but also spotlights the incredible team of music archivists, curators, and producers who have dedicated their careers to preserving, protecting, and caring for these rare items. The series will uncover the archival proof of the moment an artist pivoted: when a hit was born, an emotional reality was faced, or a loss was recognized.

The series will feature stories about legendary artists, including Bob Marley, Ella Fitzgerald, Marvin Gaye, and The Who. In each episode, Deep Dive will lead viewers on a musical journey, exploring intimate stories and unexpected mysteries connected to the biggest untapped treasure trove of music ever known. The first season will be comprised of 10 episodes and will be directed by Doug Pray.

“Being able to unveil incredible findings through unfiltered and insightful storytelling is what we strive for with each and every TIME Studios project,” Ian Orefice, president and COO of TIME and TIME Studios, said. “Deep Dive does just that, and we are confident that both music fans and history lovers alike will revel in the mysteries uncovered in each episode.”

David Blackman, head of Film and Television Development and Production at UMG, added: “We are privileged to have the greatest collection of musical recordings, videos, and artwork in the world–millions of assets in total–dating back to 1897 and the founding of the world’s first record label. Deep Dive celebrates the iconic artists, the untold stories, and the passionate people who devote their lives to preserving and finding new audiences for those treasures.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Darius Rucker Announces 21-Date Starting Fires Tour

March 19, 2023 by admin

As country star Darius Rucker gears up to release his forthcoming seventh solo album, the three-time GRAMMY Award winner is hitting the road for his Starting Fires Tour this summer!

The 21-date trek will kick off on June 15 at Roanoke, VA’s Elmwood Park Amphitheatre and will wrap up on October 14 at Nashville, TN’s Ascend Amphitheater. Joining Rucker as direct support for select dates throughout the stint are Americana group Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors and rising star Drew Green.

The general public can purchase tickets to the tour beginning this Friday, March 17. Fans will also have access to VIP Packages for select dates that could include premium tickets, Meet & Greets and the chance to secure a photo opportunity with Rucker, a guided backstage tour, a group photo on stage, an autographed item and much more.

See The Full List Of Darius Rucker’s Starting Fires Tour Dates Below

June

15 — Roanoke, Va. — Elmwood Park Amphitheatre *

22 — Washington, D.C. — The Anthem

24 — Canandaigua, N.Y. — Constellation Brands-Marvin Sands Performing Arts Center

July

13 — Dubuque, Iowa — Q Casino – Back Waters Stage *

20 — Jacksonville, Fla. — Daily’s Place

21 — Wilmington, N.C. — Live Oak Bank Pavilion

22 — Alpharetta, Ga. — Ameris Bank Amphitheatre

August

3 — Niagara Falls, Ontario — Fallsview Casino

4 — Bridgeport, Conn. — Hartford HealthCare Amphitheater

5 — Farmingville, N.Y. — Catholic Health Amphitheater at Bald Hill ^

10 — Sterling Heights, Mich. — Michigan Lottery Amphitheatre

11 — Milwaukee, Wis. — BMO Pavilion

12 — Maryland Heights, Mo. — Saint Louis Music Park

18 — Irvine, Calif. — FivePoint Amphitheatre

19 — Stateline, Nev. — Lake Tahoe Harveys Outdoor Arena

23 — Los Angeles, Calif. — The Greek Theatre

25 — San Diego, Calif. — Gallagher Square at Petco Park

26 — Highland, Calif. — Yaamava’ Resort & Casino ^#

September

8 — Durant, Okla. — Choctaw Casino & Resort – Grand Theater #

9 — Durant, Okla. — Choctaw Casino & Resort – Grand Theater #

October

14 — Nashville, Tenn. — Ascend Amphitheater

* denotes Drew Green as support / # denotes no support (all other dates feature Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors)

^ denotes dates on sale Monday, March 20

Darius Rucker Is Preparing To Release His Seventh Studio Solo Album, Carolyn’s Boy

The exciting tour news comes on the heels of the “Wagon Wheel” singer’s unveiling of the details surrounding his yet-to-be released new project, Carolyn’s Boy. The album’s title is an ode to Rucker’s late mother Carolyn, with fans already getting a sneak peek into the record with tracks “Same Beer Different Problem” and “Ol’ Church Hymn” (featuring Chapel Hart).

“At the end of the day, I’m really still just Carolyn’s Boy,” he said during an interview with TODAY. Along with the title, Rucker revealed the sentimental cover image this past November, a portrait of Carolyn, his late mother. “I wanted to name the record Carolyn’s Boy because Mom never got to see any of my success,” he explained. “She died before any of this happened, so it’s just another homage to the greatest woman I’ve ever known.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized

  • Page 1
  • Page 2
  • Page 3
  • Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Recent Posts

  • Doja Cat Shares Release Date for New Album ‘Scarlet’ – Rolling Stone Verzuz Battle
  • Run-D.M.C. On 50 Years of Hip-Hop and Style
  • Mitski to Throw ‘Double Features’ of New Album and Classic Films – Rolling Stone
  • Introducing Bamihan, rising star of alternative music in Nigeria’s north
  • Doja Cat Teases Something’s Coming, Says ‘All That Matters to Me Is That My Fans Know Who I Am’

Recent Comments

No comments to show.

Copyright © 2023 · Metro Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in