Good morning Radicals! For those out at the Iowa State Fair for Slipknot, I hope you’ve recovered from what was an incredible show! Lou Brutus was on-site to document the momentous occasion, and even made the stage introduction!
Foo Fighters are preparing to headline the massive Reading and Leeds festivals in the U.K., and the band is seeking fan input on what their set list should include.
Reading and Leeds is set to take place on the weekend of August 23rd through the 25th, with Foo Fighters performing at Leeds on Friday, August 23rd and Reading on Sunday, August 25th.
Ahead of the event, Foo Fighters are asking fans what iconic tracks they want to see the band play, asking on Twitter, “So what songs do you wanna hear? #RandL19.”
Other acts slated to headline the prestigious English festival weekend include The 1975, Post Malone and Twenty One Pilots, with dozens of other artists also scheduled to perform.
Hellyeah has released a new song called “Perfect,” taken from the band’s sixth studio album, Welcome Home. The track showcases the band’s different influences, starting off with a stripped back country-blues stomp before the full instrumentation kicks in. Musically, it’s one of the band’s most accessible songs.
Welcome Home is due out September 27th. The disc marks the group’s final effort with drummer Vinnie Paul Abbott, who passed away more than a year ago. “Perfect” is the fourth song to arrive from the album, following “333,” the title track and “Oh My God.”
The band was nearly finished with the album when Abbott died in 2018 from heart problems. They decided to finish the LP as a tribute to the legendary drummer, and recently they welcomed Stone Sour‘s Roy Mayorga to the lineup for the foreseeable future.
Singer Chad Gray told us not long ago how the band prepares new songs to put in the show: “We’ll all get in a room, and we just kind of start with the first song and we just hammer that out a couple of times, kind of work the bugs out of it, and it starts sounding more and more like that song. Something that we always do, we get together and we play through every single song and we work all the bugs out of every single song.”
Hellyeah is currently on a North American summer trek that brings the band to Wichita, Kansas on Tuesday (August 13th). While on tour, the band is donating proceeds from ticket sales to the American Heart Association, raising awareness for heart disease.
Halestorm frontperson Lzzy Hale commemorated the 22nd anniversary of the band’s first talent show performance, on August 9th, 1997, with a post on Instagram this past Friday (August 9th) that featured an early photo of her and her younger brother, Halestorm drummer Arejay Hale.
Hale wrote, “Lil’ bro Arejay and I entered ourselves in a talent show in Schukill County Pennsylvania. We played one song we’d written called ‘Love Is Power,’ complete with a drum solo in the middle (would you expect anything less?). We took home a third place trophy, losing to the tap dancing cowgirl in true Spinal Tap fashion, but that day changed everything.”
She continued, “We were just kids, but we knew there was something special. You don’t choose music, it chooses you, and this path chose us . . . We didn’t believe in destinations or an end goal. Still don’t. It was, and still is about riding this highway of endless possibilities.”
Hale told us a while back that she never imagined as a teen that her band would inspire the devoted following they have today: “I get wonderful, wonderful, heartfelt letters about what our music and what we stand for means to everybody and that’s something that, when I was 13, I never even thought anybody would ever say that to me. So just know how much we really appreciate them enabling us to do what we love every single day.”
Hale’s post included a variety of photos from that talent show period, including publicity photos of the pair and a look at their six-song cassette titled Forecast For The Future. The cassette comes with credits thanking Dad “for the bass parts” and Mom for the “great backup vocals.”
Halestorm and Godsmack will join forces for a month-long U.S. tour in the fall. The trek will kick off on September 20th in Green Bay, Wisconsin and end on October 18th in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Saint Asonia singer Adam Gontier and guitarist Mike Mushok told HardDrive Radio in a new interview that Godsmack frontman Sully Erna is not the only outside musician the band collaborated with on its upcoming sophomore album, Flawed Design.
Gontier explained, “We did go outside and work with a few different people — Sully and (vocalist) Dustin Bates from Starset. It was really cool. We actually wrote some with (guitarist) Keith Wallen from Breaking Benjamin as well. (It was) primarily Mike and myself, but it’s always cool to sit down with guitars and get different ideas from different people too.”
Sully Erna collaborated with Saint Asonia on “The Hunted,” the first single from Flawed Design. He also appears on the track. Gontier said, “‘The Hunted’ is a song about struggling to find your place in life. It’s a solid representation of the direction Saint Asonia is headed.”
Flawed Design is due out this this fall. The new disc follows up the band’s self-titled 2015 debut, which featured the Top 10 radio tracks “Better Place” and “Let Me Live My Life.”
you’re pathetic. – Chrissy Teigen https://t.co/jCy9Ftp3CD
— christine teigen (@chrissyteigen) August 9, 2019
Kid Rock was called out on social media on Friday (August 2nd) after sending a crude tweet about Taylor Swift, implying her recent decision to speak out about LGBTQ rights and other political issues is a ploy to be cast in movies.
Rock, a diehard supporter of Donald Trump, tweeted, “Taylor Swift wants to be a democrat because she wants to be in movies….period. And it looks like she will suck the door knob off Hollyweird to get there. Oldest move in the book. Good luck girl.”
Swift has became politically engaged in recent months, after she was criticized heavily for her silence during the 2016 election. She told Vogue in a new interview, “Unfortunately in the 2016 election you had a political opponent who was weaponizing the idea of the celebrity endorsement.”
Rock was immediately slammed on Twitter for his comment, with Chrissy Teigen calling him “pathetic” and his one-time collaborator Sheryl Crow telling him to “spread love, not hate.”
A user named Adam Best wrote, “Literally any rock is better than Kid Rock. Fraggle Rock, Jailhouse Rock, The Rock, Chris Rock, a small rock that flew up from the road and cracked my windshield.”
ProPublica’s Jessica Huseman called out Rock on his alleged “working class” background, writing, “Kid Rock has crafted a careful imagine of himself as trailer park rapper from Detroit turned rich man of the people but his dad was a millionaire and his childhood was spent riding horses and picking apples on his estate.”
At press time, neither representatives for Rock nor Swift had issued any comment.
Well, that’s a wrap for now! Have a great day everyone!
