Good morning Radicals! Here’s what’s up in the world of rock and roll today:
Halestorm singer Lzzy Hale has defended Greta Van Fleet over accusations that the Michigan rockers have ripped off Led Zeppelin, telling Rolling Stone that “a lot of kids should be reintroduced” to the style of rock and roll that Zeppelin was famous for.
Despite the fact that Greta Van Fleet has managed to sell out shows all over the world, the quartet has been criticized for channeling a sound uncannily similar to Zeppelin, with singer Josh Kiszka drawing criticism for allegedly copying Robert Plant‘s vocal style.
Asked if she was a fan of the group, Hale responded, “I am, because I was that age once. I started (Halestorm) when I was a kid too. I know people dog on them about how they sound similar to Zeppelin, but at the same time, when we first started putting our stuff into the world, didn’t we wear our influences on our sleeves?”
Hale added, “I’ll take it, because Led Zeppelin is awesome and I think a lot of kids should be reintroduced to this. Just by being up there and playing instruments — they plug in, play and actually sing — it’s a great thing for kids to see.”
Slipknot and Stone Sour singer Corey Taylor spent much of the last two years keeping quiet about his personal life, but he’s not holding back anymore. In a Tuesday (January 8th) post on Instagram, Taylor gushed about girlfriend Alicia Dove, calling her “everything I ever wanted and more.”
Taylor wrote, “She’s my best friend. My confidant. My push and pull, my warm kiss and my welcome home. She’s everything I ever wanted and more, all rolled up into the most beautiful woman in the world to me . . . I love you so much, my Queen. Here’s to many more years together.”
Taylor hooked up with Dove, who is a professional dancer and a member of the all-girl dance group Cherry Bombs, after the breakup of his eight-year marriage with Stephanie Luby. Rumors of Taylor’s possible romance with Dove gained strength in the fall of 2017, with Taylor going public about it early last year.
Taylor has spoken in the past about knowing when a relationship has gone south: “At the end of the day, it’s really about having the strength to do what’s right for you in your heart, and not just give in and hope that things could be okay. You have to know yourself enough to be able to turn away from a situation and go, ‘You know what? This is gonna hurt for a long time, but I’m gonna be okay. If I stay here, it’s gonna be more painful than I could ever imagine.’”
Taylor and Luby were married in November 2009 in Las Vegas, where Taylor still lives. Taylor divorced his first wife Scarlett — whom he married in March 2004 in a small ceremony in Des Moines, Iowa — in early 2007. Taylor has two children.
In other Slipknot news:
Corey Taylor has confirmed that he will spend the next couple of months at a Los Angeles studio recording the new SLIPKNOT album for a tentative summer release. The band is once again collaborating with producer Greg Fidelman who engineered and mixed SLIPKNOT‘s 2004 album “Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses)” and helmed the group’s last disc, 2014’s “.5: The Gray Chapter”.
Although Rick Rubin was credited with producing “Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses)”, Coreyhad previously described Fidelman as the “unsung hero” of the album. “To me, [Greg] was the other producer,” Corey said during an appearance on Dean Delray‘s “Let There Be Talk”podcast (hear audio below). “[Rick was a] nice guy — absolutely nice guy. However, Fidelmanwas there soup to nuts with us, man. He was there from sometimes six in the morning till four in the morning — I mean, every day, when we needed him. And was like that on ‘.5’, the last album, too. And he produced the [new SLIPKNOT] song ‘All Out Life’ that we just put out. So we have a great rapport with him. He gets us, he challenges us, but he also knows when to get out of the way and just let us be us. So we have a great relationship with him.”
According to Taylor, he and his bandmates make it a point to not surround themselves in the studio with “yes men” who will only tell them what they want to hear.
“The best thing you can have is somebody who’s not afraid to tell you that that idea is shit,” Corey said. “And I feel like too many bands do that — they don’t have anybody pushing them; they have nobody challenging them. Because they get to a point where they think, ‘Well, I don’t need anybody to fucking tell me… I’m talented enough. Look at all these people who love me. I obviously know what I’m doing.’ But that’s not the case. You forget that the albums that people loved you on, there were other people helping you do that. It’s a collaborative effort. I am not gonna sit here and try to take credit for anything. I do what I do, but I also have people who help me. And that’s the best way to do it — you have to have that open mind, you have to have that open heart and that open creativity to understand that listening to an idea takes 10 seconds. If you just dismiss it out of hand, then you may be missing that one moment, that hero moment, that can fucking make everything come together. And that’s what I love about the collaborative effort when it comes to working with a producer. And Greg knows exactly how to throw those little bombs out there to push us. He infuriates us sometimes, but at the same time, I’d say nine times out of 10, he’s right. And that’s what’s so killer. And he doesn’t do it all the time — he’s not trying to get input on every tune. He’s, like, ‘This could be better. This… You need to work on that. But this is all fucking killer.’ So he knows what we’re trying to go for, he knows what we aspire to be, and he helps us get there.”
Taylor also once again touched upon his disappointment of working with Rubin on “Vol. 3: (The Subliminal Verses)”. A few years ago, Corey publicly bashed the Grammy-winning producer as “overrated” and “overpaid,’ and saying he would never work with Rubin again “as long as I fucking live.”
“I have learned from the Ross Robinson school of production,” Corey said, namechecking the producer of SLIPKNOT‘s first two albums, the self-titled effort and “Iowa”. “I loved it. Absolutely. It’s, like, there’s a reason I’m working with him — it’s because I can’t do it on my own. I wanna learn, I want a challenge — I want that. When it came time to work with Rick, he just wasn’t fucking there. He had six different projects going on, it felt like. It’s, like, ‘Oh, I’m working with U2 now.’ And I’m, like, ‘We’re still in the fucking studio, dude.’ Honestly, it wasn’t until we finished the vocals at his house that I saw him more than once a week.”
He continued: “I won’t get into the nuts and bolts of my issues, but we got a great album out of it — one that is hard for me to listen to. Because that was the album where I really started to get sober. So there’s a lot of that I can’t listen to. However, Greg, to me, was the best takeaway from that experience — working with Greg, and then getting to know Greg. And then Greg has gone on to do fucking everything, man. He’s produced METALLICA… He does so much with so many people. The proof’s in the pudding. Greg knows how to think for himself. He’s learned some stuff from Rick, but at the same time, there are a lot of people who have worked with Rick who haven’t gone on to have the kind of career that Fidelman had… So [Fidelman is a guy] that [has] my total respect because [he] learned how to do it, but [he] didn’t go down that wormhole.”
Metallica frontman James Hetfield‘s debut as a dramatic actor in the film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, And Vile will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 26th. The film follows the relationship between notorious serial killer Ted Bundy, played by Zac Efron, and his longtime girlfriend, played by Lily Collins, who at the time had no knowledge of Bundy’s crimes.
Hetfield appears as officer Bob Hayward, a no-nonsense Utah highway patrol veteran who was the first law enforcement officer to arrest Bundy in 1975 after pulling the killer over and discovering burglary tools in his car but suspecting much worse. While Hetfield has played himself in other films and television productions, this is the first time he’ll play a character in a dramatic role.
The film is directed by Joe Berlinger, co-director with the late Bruce Sinofsky of the acclaimed 2004 documentary Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster. Hetfield told us a while back that the raw and brutally honest doc was still tough to watch: “First couple times it was difficult. There are certain scenes in the film that will always be difficult. You know, the fighting scenes — they’re always pretty difficult. They always start to get your heart pumping again, and it makes sense ’cause it pushes a certain button in me, and everyone’s got those buttons.”
Berlinger said about casting Hetfield in Extremely Wicked, “Having spent hundreds of hours behind the scenes with James and the rest of Metallica, I have experienced his charisma and powerful presence close up. It seemed only natural that he would bring that same power and magnetism to a dramatic role, so when he agreed to my pitch that he be in the movie, I was thrilled.”
The film also stars Jim Parsons from The Big Bang Theory, Haley Joel Osment of The Sixth Sense fame, John Malkovich from Bird Box and others. There’s no word yet on a release date beyond the screening at Sundance.
System Of A Down singer Serj Tankian, Avenged Sevenfold frontman M. Shadows and Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello are among the guest musicians who will appear on the upcoming album from System Of A Down drummer John Dolmayan‘s new project, called These Grey Men.
Dolmayan first announced These Grey Men in 2014, promising at the time that the project would boast a star-studded covers album and tour. He said in a recent interview about the project with SOAD Mexico, “I’m still working on it. It will be released within the next four months. All the songs are finished . . . I know it’s been forever, but it will be released. I also had two kids between it, so when I had my kids, I stopped doing everything else and just concentrated on being a father. So it takes time, but hopefully people will enjoy it.”
These Grey Men’s debut album was originally supposed to include new renditions of songs by artists such as Radiohead, Outkast, David Bowie and others, recorded by a band of all-star players led by Dolmayan. The drummer has yet to reveal the final track list.
As for what the LP will sound like, Dolmayan hinted, “It’ll definitely have a rock feel, but not limited by any genre restrictions. Listeners are going to hear a plethora of sounds and styles.”
ALL THAT REMAINS frontman Phil Labonte says that it’s “definitely weird” playing shows without guitarist Oliver “Oli” Herbert who passed away in October. “There’s never been an ALL THAT REMAINS show that Oli didn’t play,” the singer told Antihero Magazine.
Labonte went on to say that the first concert without Herbert was was especially “tough” to get through. “It’s definitely an adjustment,” he admitted. “But Oli lived and breathed metal. He loved everything about being in a band and touring and everything. He definitely would have wanted us to keep going and keep carrying on his legacy and stuff.”
Asked if it’s been “therapeutic” playing shows after such a heavy loss, Labonte said: “It’s a little too early to ask that or to answer that… I don’t know that there’s a right thing to do.
“My dad passed away in 2000,” he continued. “Me and my mom had a couple conversations about what it was going to be like. One of the things that we agreed on and decided on is there’s not really a right way to handle a loss like that. It’s difficult to say that there’s a right or a wrong way. Sure, you don’t want to do something that’s going to hurt anyone else or whatever. But if you’re not hurting someone else, the person that’s passed is passed. So, you really need to do what’s right for the people that have survived, the people that are still surviving. I don’t think there is a right or a wrong way.”
Oliver was found dead at the edge of a pond on his property in Stafford Springs, Connecticut. Connecticut police are are treating his death as suspicious.
Finally, we want to wish a Happy Birthday to Shinedown singer Brent Smith, Crown the Empire guitarist Brandon Hoover, and Parkway Drive axeman Jeff Ling! Have an awesome day!
