Ozzy Osbourne has released a charging, new anti-drug anthem, “Straight to Hell.” The track features all the hallmarks of a classic Ozzy song: foreboding lyrics, a walloping, bluesy riff, and, of course, a jaw-dropping guitar solo — performed this time by Slash.
“You’re flying higher than a kite tonight/You’ve took the hit and now you feel all right,” he sings between crushing riffs. Then he takes the perspective of the drugs and sings, “I’ll make you scream/I’ll make you defecate,” and caps it with the king of trademark laughs he originated on the song “Black Sabbath.” The tune will feature on Osbourne’s upcoming Ordinary Man album, due out in early 2020.
The song follows up the release of the heavy, gothic ballad, “Under the Graveyard,” which was Osbourne’s first new solo song in nearly a decade. He revealed then that he had recorded the album with Post Malone producer Andrew Watt, who also played guitar on the album. Guns N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan and Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith also played on the recordings. The record is due out early next year.
Osbourne had not planned on making a new LP this year, since he was supposed to be on his No More Tours 2 tour, but after a number of health issues sidelined him, he agreed to record a guest spot on Post Malone’s hit, “Take What You Want.” He found the experience invigorating, and when Watt suggested they make more music together, Osbourne quickly agreed.
“This is quite possibly the most important album I have done in a very long time, probably since No More Tears,” Osbourne said in a statement around the release of “Under the Graveyard.”
The singer is still recovering from his injuries and has postponed all touring until the next North American leg of the No More Tours 2 trek, which will kick off in May. He has said that he was unsure if he’d be ready to hit the stage by early next year, but he made a surprise appearance at Post Malone’s concert at the Forum on Thursday, where he sang “Take What You Want” with the rapper. It was his first time on a stage since his New Year’s Eve Ozzfest. He will be joining Post Malone again this Sunday for a performance of the song at the American Music Awards.
Paul McCartney has shared two infectious new songs “Home Tonight” and “In a Hurry,” a pair of unreleased tracks from the Egypt Station sessions. They will be included on his Record Store Day Black Friday release.
Both tracks, recorded with producer Greg Kurstin, illustrate that the 77-year-old rock legend’s pop prowess hasn’t diminished, with “Home Tonight” and “In a Hurry” both incorporating McCartney’s trademark Beatlesque melodies with more modern techniques.
Although excised from Egypt Station’s 16-song track list — and left off the album’s ensuing deluxe edition — both tracks are worthy of the lavish release they are about to receive: Following their digital debut Friday, “Home Tonight” and “In a Hurry” will feature on an exclusive double A-side 7-inch picture disc single for Record Store Day’s Black Friday event on November 29th.
“The limited edition vinyl picture disc will feature new and exclusively created artwork based upon the parlour game exquisite corpse along with a lyric insert,” McCartney’s website said of the release.
It was also revealed this week that McCartney would serve as one of the headliners at the 2020 Glastonbury, making him the oldest headliner in the festival’s history.
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Leonard Cohen wrote and recorded until near his final breaths — the work, it was understood, was keeping him alive. Arriving three years after his death, Thanks for the Dance is a surprise, a sort of séance as shiva, a magnificent parting shot that’s also that exceptionally rare thing — a posthumous work as alive, challenging, and essential as anything issued in the artist’s lifetime.
Completed by his son and collaborator, Adam Cohen, it can be considered of a piece with You Want It Darker, issued just before his father’s death in 2016. The new record builds on fragmentary recordings from those sessions, and similarly, longtime friends and collaborators provide coloring. Foremost is Javier Mas, playing Moorish lines on Spanish Laud and guitars (including Cohen’s own) that triangulate the words of this New World Jewish poet with Old World European and Middle-Eastern music in a way that reverberates as wry, and maybe hopeful, geopolitical metaphor.
You hear the effect strikingly on the single and lead track, “Happens to the Heart,” which engages sexual politics rather than geopolitics. A personal, vaguely rueful song about the business of poetic fatalism and “selling holy trinkets,” it’s carried on atmospheric piano by fellow Canadian Daniel Lanois, Cohen unfurling cryptic rhymes like a cantorial MC. “Had a pussy in the kitchen/And a panther in the yard,” he offers, “In the prison of the gifted/I was friendly with the guards.” The song turns into an interrogation in which no one emerges innocent, the singer included. One provocative verse seems to be a reference to Joshu Sasaki, the #MeToo-ed zen master who Cohen studied with and served for many years. “No fable here, no lesson/No singing meadowlark” Cohen concludes, disgust and weary disappointment rippling across his skeletal baritone, “Just a filthy beggar guessing/What happens to the heart.”
Mas contributes similarly to “The Night of Santiago,” which also showcases flamenco guitarist Carlos de Jacoba alongside Beck (Jew’s harp, more guitar), Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry, and Lanois. It’s a roving troubadour’s ballad, ancient in form and content, with Cohen as a rambler in a necktie and gun belt. It describes a fairly explicit sexual encounter (“her nipples rose like bread”) with a deceitful married woman, functioning as a sly parable that dares the listener to play morality cop. “You were born to judge the world,” he sings, in his spalted baritone croak, “Forgive me, but I wasn’t.” It’s a ballsy challenge from a guy whose legendary Casanova game might strike some as predatory. Paired with “Happens to the Heart,” it suggests a man reckoning with his past in the light of the present.
The reckoning continues with the title track, given to his lover and backing singer Anjani Thomas to record on her 2006 album Blue Alert. In her version, certain lines of the waltz were sung in first person, in a brightly wistful survivor’s melancholy, suggesting a complicated relationship that’s already weathered the worst. Here, with backing vocals by another of Cohen’s old flames, Jennifer Warnes, and along with Leslie Feist, Cohen reframes the song with his voice and circumstance into something like a farewell, to his audience and this mortal coil. Lines like “The baby you carried/It was almost a daughter or a son” shoulder a vast sense of loss, as the dance-instruction reprise of “one, two, three, one” is counted off as if by a man on his last legs, which Cohen quite literally was (he was reportedly using an orthopedic medical chair during the recording sessions, which were conducted in his living room).
“It’s Torn” recalls the central image of the Cohen touchstone “Anthem” (“There is a crack, a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in”) in a trembling voice over stately piano. “Come gather the pieces all scattered and lost,” he incants, noting “The lie in what’s holy, the light in what’s not.” The lines are delivered at a funereal tempo, fitting for a song that conjures the death of a beloved along with Cohen’s own mortality. It alludes to politics, too — “It’s torn on the right and it’s torn on the left/It’s torn in the center which few can accept” — pointedly colored by the eyes of a dying man. (Of course, Cohen’s vision could be plenty grim back when his health was fine.)
Ultimately, the most haunting songs are the two shortest. “Listen to the Hummingbird” matches Adam Cohen’s piano to a soundbite of his father reciting a poem just weeks before he passed, at a promotional event for You Want It Darker. Addressing sound, mindfulness, nature and God (or “G-d,” as it’s rendered in the lyric sheet), Leonard Cohen instructs the listener to attend to the world, not his words. “The Goal,” similarly, is less a song than a poetic recitation set to music. At just 1:12, it’s a final testament from a dying man who’s learned that no one here gets out alive, and no one with ambition gets everything done. It may break your heart. But, like the album as a whole, and in fact Cohen’s entire oevre, it may also sustain it.
I sit in my chair I look at the street The neighbor returns my smile of defeat I move with the leaves I shine with the chrome I’m almost alive I’m almost at home No one to follow And nothing to teach Except that the goal Falls short of the reach
Marilyn Manson has been waiting his whole life to bellow, “Father! I want to keelll you!” He gets to live out all of his Jim Morrison fantasies on a new cover of the Doors’ menacing meditation, “The End,” which he seems to be releasing as a standalone 12-inch picture disc just for the hell of it.
He gets so into it, in fact, that when he gets to the patricidal part of the band’s oedipal odyssey, he gets hung up on second half of the story: Where Jim Morrison once sang, “Mother, I want to … ” before screaming (and singing “fuck, fuck, fuck,” in the original, uncensored version), Manson takes it another step, singing “motherfucker” over and over again. The vinyl will be available March 6th, but the song is streaming now.
Manson’s cover, of course, is darker and more purposely nightmarish than the Doors’ original. It’s not quite heavy metal — it still has a chilly, dessert-rock vibe to it — but when it peaks, it turns loud and staticky, reflecting Manson’s gnashed-teeth delivery of lyrics like, “All the children are insane/waiting for the summer rain.” If the Doors version was acid rock, Manson’s is PCP rock.
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A lot of the credit to the song’s mood goes to producer Shooter Jennings. Manson said in an interview with Revolver that the song informed the work on his upcoming album. “Shooter and I also did a cover of ‘The End’ by the Doors, for a new miniseries of The Stand by Stephen King, which I’m also going to be acting in,” Manson said. “I think that sort of kick-started our process for the album and started us exploring different things.”
Manson hasn’t released any other details about his upcoming LP, but he did recently put out a creepy cover of the traditional song “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” which he had cut with producer Tyler Bates. That song has also been covered by Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Odetta and others.
“The End” is not the first time Manson covered the Doors. At the Sunset Strip Music Festival in 2012, he did a number of the band’s songs, including “Love Me Two Times,” “People Are Strange” and “Five to One,” in tribute to the group. And at a 2016 Amoeba Music in-store, he tackled “Not To Touch the Earth” with help from Johnny Depp on guitar.
Manson will be on tour next year as the main support for Ozzy Osbourne on the Prince of Darkness’ No More Tours 2 tour. It kicks off on May 27th in Atlanta and runs through the end of July. When Osbourne announced Manson as his guest on the tour, he said this in a statement: “Marilyn is killer live. He’s so fucking out there, and if I think that, then look out, we’re all fucked.”
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“A record full of love lost and explorations,” Young says. “A record that has been hidden for decades. The unheard bridge between ‘Harvest’ and ‘Comes a Time’”
Neil Young’s legendary unreleased album Homegrown will finally come out in 2020. He recorded it in 1975 and was on the verge of releasing it, going as far as commissioning cover art, when he decided at the last minute to shelf it in favor of Tonight’s The Night.
“A record full of love lost and explorations,” Young wrote on the Neil Young Archives. “A record that has been hidden for decades. Too personal and revealing to expose in the freshness of those times…The unheard bridge between Harvest and Comes a Time, Homegrown is coming to NYA first in 2020.”
Young made the announcement in a post on his Neil Young Archives website paired with a video that shows his longtime producer John Hanlon working on it. “Mr. J. Hanlon is seen here mastering Homegrown in an all analog chain,” Young writes. “This is the way records were made when we started out. This is the way we made them sound great. We were told that this was impossible now, the Homegrown tapes were too damaged to use; we had to use Digital. We didn’t agree. We did not accept. We painstakingly restored the analog masters of Homegrown.”
Young originally recorded Homegrown at a time his career when new songs were coming to him at an incredible pace, many of them inspired by his painful split with girlfriend Carrie Snodgress. Warner Bros. loved the results and felt it would be another bestseller following the relative commercial disappointments of Time Fades Away and On the Beach. “It was a little too personal,” Young told Rolling Stone‘s Cameron Crowe in 1975. “It scared me. I’ve never released any of those. And I probably never well. I think I’d be too embarrassed to put them out. They’re a little too real.”
No exact track listing has ever surfaced, but during the sessions he did record songs like “Love Is a Rose,” “Homegrown” and “Stars of Bethlehem,” which surfaced on later albums . Other songs leaked out over the years or were played it concert, including “Try” and “Homefires,” while others have never been heard before. He was joined on the sessions by Emmylou Harris, Levon Helm, Ben Keith and Robbie Robertson.
The track listing of the 2020 edition of Homegrown hasn’t been announced, but sharp-eyed fans noticed a Post-it Note on John Hanlon’s console in the video with the following songs listed on it: “Separate Ways,” “Try,” “Mexico,” “Love Is a Rose,” “Homegrown,” “Florida,” “Kansas,” “We Don’t Smoke It,” “White Line,” “Vacancy,” “Little Wing” and “Star of Bethlehem.” “We Don’t Smoke It” has never been heard by fans, but you can hear a bit of it on the announcement video.
Young has released numerous archival albums in the past few years, including Songs For Judy, Hitchhiker and Tuscaloosa. He averages about two a year that appear simultaneously in stores along with streaming services and the Neil Young Archives, but he recently revealed a major shift in direction for 2020. He’s still working out the exact details, but the plan is to flood the Neil Young Archives with unreleased material so older fans can hear everything before they die.
As the former Band member recalls the making of ‘Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll,’ he demonstrates just how much the “Roll Over Beethoven” singer meant to him
In the mid Eighties, filmmaker Taylor Hackford asked Robbie Robertson if he would appear in a documentary about one of his musical heroes, Chuck Berry. Robertson quickly said yes and agreed to serve as musical director for the concert portion of what became the 1987 picture, Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll. Although Robertson decided he wasn’t a good fit for that role — Chuck Berry was hard to handle, so he passed the reins over to Keith Richards — he still looks back fondly on the time he spent with Berry.
Robertson recently stopped by Rolling Stone, where he sat for an interview for an upcoming installment of our “The First Time” series. While he was in the office, he also recounted some of his experiences during the filming of Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll, which was reissued this week as a collector’s edition Blu-ray.
One of the special features on the release is footage of Berry poring over a scrapbook he kept from his life with Robertson. But in the interview above, Robertson revealed there was a lot more to the story, including versions of stories Berry had told the Band guitarist off camera. Robertson also recalled in the Rolling Stone interview how special it was for him to play guitar while Berry read poetry, because he realized that that was part of Berry’s process.
“My admiration for the father of rock & roll just went way up,” Robertson said of learning about the inspiration Berry took from Beat poetry. “Then he’s reciting this poem, and I’m accompanying him on the guitar, and the poem just goes on and on and on, and I hoped it would never end.”
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