I am leaving for vacation today! To say I really NEED this is an understatement! LOL Off to Paris and Provence! One thing to bring: Google Translate, eh? While I’m away, my trusty assistant Paulie Walnuts will take over Dirt both here and on the XL. So welcome him, ok?…..Pulse Content reports two of the biggest current bands in hard rock have posted clips of new songs online Tuesday (June 11th). First, Five Finger Death Punch has posted a 36-second snippet of a song called “You,” taken from the first half of the group’s upcoming two-record set, The Wrong Side Of Heaven And The Righteous Side Of Hell. Part one of the collection will arrive on July 30th, with the second half coming in the fall. Meanwhile, Avenged Sevenfold has also posted a new clip online that features a 30-second tease of new music. This is the third clip that the group has posted online since last month. Due out this summer, the new album will follow up 2010’s Nightmare, which earned the band its first Number One album on the Billboard 200 chart. Good stuff both! Speaking of Five Finger, Ivan Moody and Zoltan Bathory will be dropping by the hardDrive studios here in NYC next Thursday! Sorry I’m gonna miss them! And next Monday, Lou Brutus will have Kaz from Redlight King on the hotLine. They’re releasing a new song called “Born to Rise” in a couple of weeks!….Skillet has premiered a new song called “Not Gonna Die” at the website of newspaper USA Today. The track is taken from Rise, the band’s ninth studio effort, which is due out on June 25th. Skillet previously released the songs “Sick Of It,” “American Noise” and the title track, all of which reached either Number One or Two on the iTunes Rock Songs chart. “Sick Of It” has just cracked the Top 15 on the Active Rock radio chart. The band is dropping in to see me the day their album is released!….Loudwire reports Alice In Chains guitarist Jerry Cantrell was on hand at the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles to introduce the 2014 edition of Rocksmith, the video game that allows the player to plug a guitar or bass directly into an Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC or Mac and play along with the music offered in the game. Cantrell demonstrated how the 2014 edition worked, while confirming that Alice In Chains’ current single “Stone” would be one of the songs included with the new edition…Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins acted as a correspondent for the Fuse music channel at last weekend’s Orion Music + More festival, where he was given a rundown of the event by Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo and drummer Lars Ulrich, with a spotlight on the four Metallica members’ lifestyle exhibitions. The video has been posted online. (Brave Words) And speaking of Foo Fighters, my friend Dave Grohl is producing the new Dead Sara album, who have signed to Epic Records. (Should be amazing! I love that band and Emily Armstrong is a superstar!) So now when I see Dave, I will make him confirm he is a WORKAHOLIC! He was SUPPOSED to be working on the next Foo Fighters album. I guess that’s moved to the back burner for a minute, eh?….OK so I gotta go check in at Delta now. Thanks for reading today!
