Happy Valentine’s Day Radicals!
It begins! #disturbedones
Video by Chop Em Down Films pic.twitter.com/ApiBniSJSM
— Disturbed (@Disturbed) February 13, 2018
Looks like we might be getting that acoustic EP after all? Disturbed has posted a short video online featuring footage from the band’s latest sessions at The Hideout Recording Studio in Las Vegas, Nevada with producer Kevin Churko. The presence of acoustic guitars and brush-stroke percussion in the clip might be confirmation of the group’s stated plans to record an acoustic EP before moving forward on its seventh full-length studio LP.
Frontman David Draiman told us a while back that Disturbed has never been concerned about sticking with one musical style: “Call us hard rock, call us whatever, call us anything. At the end of the day, we’re gonna be Disturbed, and we’re gonna write the music that we write. And certain people are gonna like it, and certain people aren’t gonna like it, and that’s life.”
Draiman revealed a year ago that Disturbed was planning to record an acoustic EP, explaining, “That’s something we’ve wanted to do for years that we just never had the time or the opportunity to.” An acoustic EP now could capitalize on the success Disturbed has had with its cover of Simon & Garfunkel‘s “The Sound Of Silence,” a massive hit that introduced the band to new audiences.
Both “The Sound Of Silence” and the album it was included on, 2015’s Immortalized, were certified platinum for sales of over one million copies. Immortalized ended a four-year hiatus for the quartet and was its fifth album to enter the Billboard 200 chart at Number One.
Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCready has shared footage of a recording session he did late last year with five young men who lived in foster care. The session took place at Pearl Jam’s private studio and the goal was to write and record a brand new song — which is what they did, creating a tune called “Try So Hard.” McCready explained to Rolling Stone, “This was a bunch of guys that had never met each other, so you never know how that’s going to go.”
McCready met the musicians, aged between 15 and 20, through a non-profit organization called Treehouse, which helps foster kids in Washington State graduate high school and prepare for adulthood. He was impressed by what he saw when he volunteered a few years back for the organization, saying, “They help foster kids that are in dire need of finishing their education, providing funding for summer camps and lessons, even new clothes — all the things a lot of us take for granted.”
McCready continued to help raise funds and participate in events for Treehouse, eventually putting together the idea of a recording session. The session lasted four hours, with 20-year-old Franky Price providing most of the vocal lines on the song and 17-year-old Rickardo Mendiola laying down guitar. McCready said about the results, “The song just organically happened. We were sitting around, and it was amazing that it came together the way it did . . . They created a song, and I got to play along with it.”
Pearl Jam has been writing its 11th studio LP and is heading out on European and North American tour dates this spring and summer.
Former Smashing Pumpkins bassist D’arcy Wretzky has given her first full interview in nearly 20 years with Alternative Nation, in which she slams Pumpkins frontman William Corgan for saying that she turned down offers to play with the band again. Although Corgan claimed within the past week that Wretzky had repeatedly skipped opportunities to get together, Wretzky said the opposite was true and that she was never given any real chance to rejoin the group.
Wretzky said, “(Corgan) says that he’s invited me to come out and play for all of these things, which is a complete lie. He’s never invited me to anything . . . They hired Jack Bates for this tour. I made Billy spell it out, because he was doing his nonsense double talk crap bulls**t.”
Wretzky also claimed that Corgan offered to have her come out and do sporadic appearances on the upcoming reunion tour, with Wretzky saying, “It was just unbelievable, really just disgusting. The f**king nerve, and then for him to come back and say, ‘Well, we haven’t seen you in this long, and you haven’t done this, and you couldn’t even make it to this. Everyone has shown up, and you didn’t?’ How could I, I didn’t even know you were there?”
Wretzky also addressed her long-rumored drug use, saying, “You know how they’re always telling you in school drugs will do this to you; they’ll do that to you, drinking kills your brain cells? At the time I was like good, maybe I can kill off all these horrible memories . . . I wouldn’t recommend it, it didn’t work. I count myself lucky to be alive.”
She saved her most pointed responses for Corgan, however, saying, “Billy loved to humiliate people and shame people in front of other people. It was incredibly abusive, and I was the only one who would fight back.”
Wretzky also released an exchange of text messages between her and Corgan that seem to back up the idea that she was not going to be the full-time bass player on the reunion tour or any future recordings, but more or less appear as a “special guest.”
The Pumpkins are expected to announce this Thursday, February 15th, a tour involving the other three original members as well as some new music.
