“You don’t want what I’m gonna put you through,” Adam Levine teases on “Best 4 U,” the groovy throwback track that kicks off Maroon 5’s sixth LP, Red Pill Blues. You can’t blame him for the warning. With their ironclad grasp on the Top 40 (each of their albums has gone platinum, if not multiplatinum), the band isn’t exactly one you seek out. Instead, Maroon 5 come to you — in […]
Once, about 6,000 years ago, Eminem sounded genuinely playful: “I’m interesting! The best thing since wrestling!” he proclaimed brightly. Today, gaunt and mean-eyed and forever so fist-clenchingly serious that he seems on the verge of squinting himself into a black hole, Marshall Mathers senses, maybe, that he’s not that interesting anymore. “Walk on Water” is his latest joyless trudge of a power ballad that pairs a softly crooned hook with fuming, escalating verses of rage-spittle—a […]
The 51st CMA Awards were held in Nashville on Wednesday, with Garth Brooks taking home the night's top honor of Entertainer of the Year for the sixth time in his storied career. Brooks, who triumphed over Chris Stapleton, Keith Urban, Luke Bryan and Eric Church, returned from hiatus in 2014 and launched a sprawling world tour that will continue through the end of 2017. Brothers Osborne and Chris Stapleton wound up […]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZHf3dDVcmg Neil Young reteams with Promise of the Real for a new album titled The Visitor, their second studio LP together following 2015's The Monsanto Years. The album, due out December 1st, comes just three months after Young released Hitchhiker, his long-lost LP of acoustic songs recorded over one night in August 1976. Young and Promise of the Real also shared the album's first single "Already Great," a rumbling, tongue-in-cheek response to Donald Trump's […]
In the spring of 1983, Art Garfunkel stepped out of his New York apartment building and began a walk across North America. The journey was conducted across 40 installments (always picking up exactly where the last one ended) and took him 14 years to complete. The whole time, he had a small notepad and pen in his back pocket. "I'd stay at two-star inns during the night," he says. "And when inspiration […]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBZThuWGLJ4 Sia unwrapped her joyous new holiday song, "Santa's Coming for Us," which is the first single off the singer's upcoming, Everything Is Christmas. "Santa's Coming for Us" falls into the uptempo category as Sia sings about the joys of Christmastime. "Singing to the deer in the skies/ Singing every jingle, jingle, jingle tonight/ Singing to the moon setting free/ You're the angel on the top of my tree," Sia intones in her […]
The first few weeks of the new season at the Jacksonville Symphony have been very exciting. We welcomed a group of nine new musicians – an unusually large number all at once. Including exactly half the wind section, it’s been fascinating to hear the sound of the orchestra change with the addition of new voices. My job is to work with the musicians by describing what I hear in rehearsals […]
Spotify just announced a new program called RISE, intended to “identify and break the next wave of music superstars.” The promises of the program are a little vague, but Spotify says its hand-picked artists will be aided with “multi-tiered marketing” and “editorial programming,” including social promotion, a special “mixed-media” RISE playlist, “bespoke” videos about their life stories, and some kind of platform-sponsored “experiential” events. Reached for comment, a Spotify representative clarified that […]
Pink was dominating the charts with spunky, real-talking anthems back when today's slow-sad divas were in preschool, and her seventh LP is a reminder of that. The title track and the strummy "Whatever You Want" are vintage Pink, with juicy hooks and pop-rock muscle; "I Am Here" underscores its EDM-powerment message with a gospel choir. Trauma's chilled-out middle sags, but "Revenge," her bad-romance duet with Eminem, is an early shot […]
