God morning Radicals! I hope you all had a lovely weekend, and a belated Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there. Let’s take a look at world of rock:
Late Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell‘s widow and ex-wife are locked in a legal battle over the dispensation of his estate, which is estimated to be worth $20 million.
According to court documents obtained by The Blast, Vicky Cornell filed a petition to administer Chris’ estate following his death. She lists the sole beneficiaries of her husband’s last will and testament, which was signed in 2004, as herself and the Cornell Family Trust. Vicky had two children with her husband, Toni and Christopher.
However, Cornell’s first wife, Susan Silver, and the daughter they had together, Lillian, are claiming in court they are owed child support from a 2004 divorce settlement. Susan also believes she is owed a percentage of Cornell’s royalties. They want an accounting of the estate to determine just how much they are owed.
Vicky Cornell has objected to both claims and is seeking to dismiss them, but both parties are also apparently attempting to settle their issues outside of court. Some of the issues stem from college tuition payments for Lillian, who took a leave of absence from school without notifying the estate.
Chris Cornell committed suicide in May 2017 at the age of 52. He was honored last January with a tribute concert in Los Angeles, featuring performances from Metallica, Foo Fighters and many others, as well as members of Soundgarden and Cornell’s other band, Audioslave.
Christian rock act Skillet has released two more new songs, titled “Anchor” and “Save Me,” ahead of the August 2nd release of the band’s 11th full-length studio album, Victorious.
Both tracks are available on all streaming platforms now, while a third tune, called “Dreaming Of Eden,” will be available upon release by purchasing a pre-order of Skillet’s upcoming graphic novel, Eden.
Frontman John Cooper recently told Billboard about the follow-up to 2016’s Unleashed, “We got to really dig in and try anything we wanted to try . . . It’s quite a musical record. I think it’s a little bit more musical than we’ve done in a long time.”
John and and his wife, keyboard and guitar player Korey Cooper, co-produced six of the 12 tracks on Victorious and co-produced two additional songs — the most production they’ve handled for a Skillet record in their career.
Skillet and Sevendust will embark on the co-headlining “Victorious War” tour in August and September. Pop Evil and Devour The Day will also be on the bill. The tour kicks off on August 11th in Memphis.
Alter Bridge will release its sixth studio album, titled Walk The Sky, on October 18th. According to a press release, the 14-track followup to 2016’s The Last Hero is a “complete career retrospective drawing upon elements from each of the band’s previous releases to create something new.”
The first single from the LP, called “Wouldn’t You Rather,” will arrive in two weeks. Other songs included on the record include “Dying Light,” “Godspeed,” “Native Son” and “Walking On The Sky.” A song called “Forever Falling” features guitarist Mark Tremonti on lead vocals.
Tremonti has been singing lead in his own self-named solo band for several years, and he told us a while back how he got better as a vocalist the more he worked at it: “As I started pushing my voice, I started noticing that I could make myself not sound like my talking voice, and I could do things and manipulate my voice to sound a few different ways and make it dynamic. And you can’t really, you don’t really know what you can do until you start doing it. It was just fun, you know. I had a great time doing it.”
Alter Bridge will head out on a world tour beginning in September. The trek will launch in the U.S. before heading over to Europe to close out 2019. The North American dates will be announced in the near future.
The Black Keys revealed in a new interview with Loudwire Nights that the name of the band’s ninth album, “Let’s Rock,” was taken from the last words of a man who was executed in Tennessee on a day that the band was in the recording studio.
Frontman Dan Auerbach explained, “The coincidence was so strange and just so absurd,” adding that it added a darker, more absurd undertone to what on the surface sounded almost like a cliche. Auerbach said, “We can’t just do that light and fun title.”
The man was put to death in the electric chair, which is now the image on the cover of the album. Auerbach said, “People like Metallica and AC/DC have used (that image) and it looks amazing. But we’re not that kind of rock band — we just can’t be that cocky, I guess.”
“Let’s Rock” is due out on June 28th. The duo have shared three songs from the disc so far, including first single “Lo/Hi,” “Eagle Birds” and most recently “Go.”
Pearl Jam frontman Eddie Vedder recently reunited with a Dutch woman whom he had befriended after a show in 1992 — and did not see again until last weekend, after 27 years had passed.
According to Dutch news outlet Het Parool, Pearl Jam played a show in the Dutch city of Utrecht back in 1992. After the show, Vedder spent most of the rest of the evening talking to one particular Dutch woman, who ended up going to a cafe with him and giving him a ride back to his hotel on her bicycle. The two had an immediate connection, but never saw each other again — until last Wednesday night (June 12th) in Brussels, Belgium.
Vedder played two solo shows in Amsterdam last weekend, and at the second show, he asked, “Is the woman who gave me a lift to my hotel in 1992 maybe here tonight? . . . I am almost certain that I would still recognize her face.” No one came forward, but Het Parool investigated and found the woman, named Valeska Custers, who is now married with three children.
Custers remembered the night vividly, including that Vedder wore her backpack on the bike but forgot to give it back to her. She said she tried to meet up with the singer again at a few other Pearl Jam shows over the years, but it never happened.
This time, someone in Vedder’s band showed him the Het Parool article, and Vedder’s tour manager invited Custers and her husband to Vedder’s show in Brussels, where they finally reunited. Vedder reportedly told Custers, “You still have the same smile.” He said he kept the backpack, which contained her brother’s shirt, for years, but had lost track of it. She replied, “(My brother) says you can keep it.”
Disturbed drummer Mike Wengren has told Loudwire that the band’s new album Evolution, as well as the recent single “A Reason To Fight,” helped him get through some tough emotional times.
Wengren explained, “I lost my brother three years ago to drug and alcohol addiction. So it’s very, very personal for me and when we’re out there and we’re sharing that energy and I see people crying — I never thought when we wrote (‘A Reason To Fight’) that I would be using it myself to help to cope.”
Wengren admitted that he didn’t handle his brother’s death well at first, saying, “I think when it first happened, the first couple years I was in a little bit of denial.” He added that seeing fans respond to “A Reason To Fight” at Disturbed shows “started to open up my mind and my heart to be able to cope with it for the first time myself.”
Disturbed released a unique video for “A Reason To Fight,” which the band recorded in response to the many deaths in the music community and elsewhere due to addiction and depression. In the clip, fans give testimonials about their own experiences with both, interspersed with singer David Draiman speaking about the issue.
Draiman told us that he doesn’t need turmoil in his own life to find inspiration for songs: “I think that there’s enough going on in the world that even if in my own personal life things were harmonious, that there’s plenty to draw anger from and inspiration from, from that perspective. I mean, if you turn on the news any given day of the week, there’s enough subject matter on there where if you really pay attention to things and care enough about things, for you to take issue with, and for you to really get pissed off about.”
Disturbed is currently in the midst of an international tour, including its first-ever performance in Israel on July 2nd, and will start a new round of North American dates later that month in Minnesota.
Ghost played an acoustic version of its chart-topping rock hit “Dance Macabre” live at Belgium’s Studio Brussel, with the footage now available online. Main man Tobias Forge said about the song last year, “‘Dance Macabre’ feels like one of those songs that you want to play forever . . . It makes most people very happy when we play it and it makes us happy playing it.” Ghost will be touring Europe throughout the summer with Metallica.
At least 10 artists whose master recordings may have been destroyed in a 2008 fire at a storage facility at Universal Studios Hollywood plan to sue Universal Music Group. Attorney Howard King told the Los Angeles Times that his firm plans to file lawsuits on behalf of individual clients, saying, “Claims of the people who have lost their futures in some respects are far more significant than would be dealt with in a class action.” As many as 500,000 recordings were destroyed in the fire, possibly including master recordings from Nirvana, Soundgarden, Guns N’ Roses, Aretha Franklin, Elton John, Chuck Berry, Tom Petty, Janet Jackson, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, the Eagles, Miles Davis and many more.
Badflower has shared what’s described as a “heartbreaking” music video for “Promise Me,” the latest single from the band’s debut disc, OK, I’m Sick. The video follows a young couple from childhood as they deal with life and eventually grow old. Frontman Josh Katz said about the track, “The concept of growing old scares the hell out of me . . . This video is very important to me because it confronts those fears.”
Trent Reznor has given his approval to a second Nine Inch Nails cover performed by Miley Cyrus for a newly released episode of the Netflix series Black Mirror. A video for the first one, “On A Roll” — a reworking of “Head Like A Hole” — surfaced earlier this month, while the second cover, of “Right Where It Belongs,” was just shared by the streaming service.
Man, that’s a lot of news! have a great day!
