Chic’s 11th nomination was not a charm. More »
Eden xo takes on Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” and Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Listen after the jump. More »
This week’s album charts are topped by Canadian crooner Michael Bublé, who rode Friday appearance on Oprah that was keenly titled to the release of his new album, Crazy Love, to the No. 1 spot. Bublé’s album sold 132,000 copies despite only being available for three days of the sales week, which we can probably attribute to the power of Harpo Productions’ founder. But further down the chart, another act showed that Oprah’s audience is fairly, shall we say, faithful to the music recommendations she gives! More »
The harmonizers in Boyz II Men have a new all-covers album, Love, due out just in time for the holiday season, and the first single from it leaked over the weekend: It’s a super-syrupy take on “Open Arms,” the lighter-worthy ballad from arena-rockers Journey. You may notice that it sounds kind of like an American Idol audition, what with its melismas and straining and all, and there’s a good reason why: It was produced by former Journey member Randy “Dawg” Jackson, who somehow managed to modernize the circa-1982 sound of the original track, yet still make this new take on it sound as dated as a February 1998 Reader’s Digest in a dentist’s waiting room. Ah, the Idol magic is always working! Clip after the jump. More »
Matt Giraud’s background as a dueling pianist will apparently be put to use on this summer’s American Idol tour, where a version of “Don’t Stop Believin'” featuring the chapeau-sporting singer and Scott MacIntyre on piano will serve as the show’s finale. A clip of the version played at yesterday’s American Idol press preview is above. Was Michael Sarver that tic-y during the season? Why do I not remember that? Wouldn’t it have at least resulted in him sticking around an extra week or two? [YouTube via MJ] More »
After American Idol last night, Fox debuted its glee-club dramedy Glee, which had a lot of fantastic, if wince-inducing, “high school as metaphor for how depressing adult life can be” moments and the incredible comic timing of Jane Lynch. And as its big finish–which was designed to make us audience-members feel that the ragtag group of nerds, geeks, and that one jockish dude would all make it out of high school thanks to the power of song–it had a big old performance of Journey’s 28-year-old lighter-raiser “Don’t Stop Believing.” Our pal Mark Graham at New York‘s Vulture apparently had the last Steve Perry-shaped straw at that point, and he was driven to call for a moratorium on the song in his recap of the show: More »
Saturday’s “surprise guest” at the two-day parking-lot festival known as the Bamboozle was introduced with the three words “Don’t,” “Stop,” and “Believin’,” and from my vantage point in the crowd–which rendered the men muscling through four of Journey’s hits onstage into something resembling very animated Berzerk robots–I thought that I was actually watching the San Francisco band collect a big, yet sorta-strange, paycheck. As it turned out, the band that I was singing along with was actually a really, really convincing tribute band. (Of course, some smart-asses out there will assert that having Arnel Pineda on vocals makes the currently touring incarnation of Journey a cover band of sorts, but we’ll leave that alone for now.) But the surprise and its “gotcha!” aftershock were both appropriate for a festival that, despite being clad in “FUCK SWINE FLU” t-shirts as far as the eye could see, spent a fair chunk of time looking back. More »
Amazon has entered the world of charging $1.29 for certain songs, following the lead taken by iTunes yesterday and rendering somewhat irrelevant the snarky remarks of Diggsters. By and large, iTunes’ pricing scheme has resulted in popular songs having their prices jacked up; in contrast, if there’s some logic to which songs saw a hike on Amazon, I’m certainly not seeing it.
