Today is Record Store Day, which according to Wikipedia is happening in the U.S., the UK, Ireland, Mexico, Europe, Japan and Australia. An anonymous reader shared this report from The Los Angeles Times: 420 isn't just for stoners. This year, Record Store Day — the worldwide celebration for independent record shops that typically happens every third Saturday of April — falls on the storied day... [A]udiophiles and vinyl collectors will converge at participating stores to search for one-of-a-kind wax and CD releases by artists new and old, along with other one-of-a-kind items.... This year's event brings in roughly 400 anticipated titles including a live recording of Talking Heads from a 1977 performance (featuring seven previously unheard songs), a 12-inch vinyl release of Daft Punk's "Something About Us (Love Theme From Interstella 5555)", an unreleased live solo recording of "The Godmother of Rock n' Roll" by Sister Rosetta Tharpe (from 1966) and a 10-year anniversary edition of Freddie Gibbs & Madlib's "Piñata." Also, this year's Record Store Day ambassador, Paramore, will release a remix version of its 2023 album, "This Is Why" and Cheech and Chong will reissue the soundtrack for their 1978 film, "Up in Smoke," on smoky green vinyl just in time for 4/20... [E]ven if you're not interested in copping a special release, it's still worth checking out what your favorite record store has to offer on April 20. You'll find events like in-store DJ sets, pop-up shopping experiences and in-store performances. The event features Record Store Day exclusives (not otherwise available), as well as specially-pressed commemorative editions (which will see a later release on plain black vinyl). American Songwriter lists some of the highlights: A special limited edition "miniature turntable" and four 3-inch singles of the Beatles' songs played 60 years ago on the Ed Sullivan show. A four-LP set of a 1989 Grateful Dead concert A limited edition "expanded" edition of Elton John's album Caribou with a disc of bonus tracks. A 12-inch EP previewing the upcoming box set edition of John Lennon's Mind Games album, including a song Lennon wrote for a 1973 Ringo Starr album which also featured George Harrison. A white-vinyl pressing of seven Rolling Stones tracks recorded last October — including the live debut of four songs later released on their new album Hackney Diamonds. (One track is a duet with Lady Gaga) You can see the full list here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

'Record Store Day' 2024 Includes Talking Heads, Daft Punk, Cheech & Chong, Beatles

The Tortured Poets Department depicts a spell of post-breakup mania against the perfect backdrop of the Eras tour – a thrillingly immature reality undermined by safe music

As The Tortured Poets Department (TTPD) finally sees its official release, the intention behind the title remains as enigmatic as it was when Taylor Swift announced it two months ago. The title track seems to mock one such tortured poet who carts a typewriter around and likens the budding couple to Patti Smith and Dylan Thomas. “We’re modern idiots,” Swift laughs. The album’s aesthetic wallows in anguish and Swift’s liner notes and social media captions are littered with self-consciously poetic proclamations. And the erratic period captured in the lyrics couldn’t be further from a life of cloistered studiousness.

TTPD depicts a manic phase in Swift’s life last year, the reality behind the perfect stagecraft of the Eras tour. Wild-eyed from what sounds like the slow dissolution of a six-year relationship, she lunged at a once-forbidden paramour with a taste for dissolution, a foul mouth and a well-founded bad reputation. The latter, she makes clear as she sings repeatedly about flouting paternalistic and public censure, was a central part of the attraction: “He was chaos, he was revelry,” Swift sings on But Daddy (evidently about the 1975’s Matty Healy).

Continue reading...

Lloyds Bank says more than 600 of its customers have been tricked by fraudsters so far

A rise in fraud cases involving Taylor Swift fans desperate to buy tickets to her sold-out UK shows has prompted Lloyds Bank to issue an “ urgent warning ” after more than 600 of its customers were scammed.

With the superstar due to arrive in Europe next month , the high street bank said its data suggested that UK fans had lost more than £1m to fraudsters so far.

Continue reading...

After slogging through poverty, indifference and Hannah Montana impersonations, the US singer is an award-winning sensation and selling out a UK tour. She explains why her genre is going mainstream like never before

You get the sense the country music establishment really had no choice but to embrace Lainey Wilson: that she wasn’t going anywhere until they did. When the singer-songwriter arrived in Nashville in 2011, she parked her 20-foot bumper pull trailer on a studio’s lawn and anchored it with rocks. Then 19, she had lived country music all her life. But Nashville is what they call a “10-year town”, rarely a place of instant hits and TikTok fame. Wilson had to do it the old-fashioned way: a decade of graft, rejection, false starts, handing out CDs in the streets, gigs, tours and playing to the same crowds over and over.

Gradually, things started to click (a publishing deal in 2017), then gather momentum (six No 1s on country radio since 2021), then snowball (a record-breaking nine nominations at the 2023 CMA awards, winning five), culminating in February when her 2022 album, Bell Bottom Country , won this year’s Grammy for country album of the year . Wilson is now one of the hottest properties in country music. An overnight sensation 11 years in the making, as she puts it. “It feels great,” says Wilson, 31, over video call, with her irresistible Louisiana twang, “because it makes me feel like maybe I wasn’t as crazy as a lot of people thought I was. Like, I told ya!”

Continue reading...

The story of two historians unleashing evil while recording a song is a strong idea and there are good moments and performances, but it is too chaotic and unfocused to resonate

Paul Duane is the film-maker who in 2011 made Barbaric Genius , a gripping documentary portrait of ex-convict, ex-vagrant and tournament chess player John Healy, whose memoir The Grass Arena is a classic of outsider art literature. Now Duane has given us this horror film which, though it begins with interesting subversive and satirical ideas, and an interesting allusion to Guillermo del Toro, finally becomes, for me, simply too chaotic, strained and unfocused.

Anna (Simone Collins) and Aleks (Charlie Maher) are social historians who travel around remote rural pubs in Ireland, recording folk ballads; they become fascinated by rumours of an old woman who lives thereabouts who can sing a thousand-year-old song, taught over generations from mother to daughter, which has never been recorded or transcribed on paper. Asking questions about her makes locals suspicious; Anna and Aleks assure one man that they are not journalists or interested in anything “political”, but he replies darkly: “There’s nothing that’s not political …”

Continue reading...

James McCartney’s acoustic ballad Primrose Hill, co-written with Sean Ono Lennon, was drawn from childhood vision in Scotland

The most famous songwriting credit in history, Lennon-McCartney, has been resurrected – though for a song written by the Beatles’ sons.

Primrose Hill, a single by Paul McCartney’s son James, has been co-written with Sean Ono Lennon: an acoustic ballad with a shuffling backbeat and ruminative guitar soloing.

Continue reading...

If you really want to know about making music, fame, exploitation, addiction, egos and challenging personalities – look to fiction. Here are our favourites

Making a movie about an iconic musician can be perilous – there are so many stakeholders with differing versions of events, and so many diehard fans looking for a perfect representation of their hero, that many music biopics end up being sanitised and glib. Look no further than Back to Black , Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Amy Winehouse biopic, for a perfect example of a film that attempts to satisfy every involved party and ended up offending a lot of fans and critics instead .

Movies about fake musicians, on the other hand, tend to have a lot more to say about making art, the struggles of fame and the music industry than most biopics. Although many of them are thinly veiled studies of real celebrities, the freedom offered by creating a character – such as Blake, the Kurt Cobain stand-in in Gus Van Sant’s Last Days – can allow for endless interrogation into the mindsets and motivations of artists. Rock mockumentaries, on the other hand, allow for the kind of true-to-life skewering of ludicrous music industry practices that could never really be shown on tape. From pop industry satires to elliptical, occasionally outright frustrating art films, here are some of the best films about fake musicians.

Continue reading...

Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the film captures the recording sessions of the band’s final album

After decades out of circulation, the Beatles’ 1970 documentary Let It Be has been restored by Peter Jackson’s production company.

Directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Let It Be captures the recording sessions of the band’s final album of the same title. It was originally released mere weeks after the Beatles officially announced their split. None of the members of the band attended its premiere in 1970.

Continue reading...

This week, Damon Albarn took umbrage at a Coachella crowd who failed to sing along. But he is far from the worst offender

When Coachella 2024 comes to be remembered by future generations, the abiding image will be that of Damon Albarn attempting to engage the crowd in a game of call and response, and then failing, and then having a bit of a go at them.

In fairness to Albarn, it was a weird booking. Blur have always fared poorly in the US. Is this the band’s fault for writing all those songs about how much they dislike America? We may never know. Either way, by berating the crowd for their ambivalence – yelling “You’ll never see us again so you may as well fucking sing it” – Blur have joined the ranks of acts who have turned against their audiences.

Continue reading...