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Rufus Wainwright has announced his upcoming album Folkocracy will arrive June 2 and released its lead single “Down in the Willow Garden” on Monday. The track features Brandi Carlile, and is described by Wainwright as a “blatantly brutal and masochistic” folk ballad.

“I chose us a cheery little number — not! The song is so blatantly brutal and masochistic that I had to sing it with a woman. Sadly, we still live in a violent world,” Wainwright said in a statement. “The amazing thing about so many folk songs is that, content wise,...

No need to send out a search party for the “Searchin’ My Soul” singer. It’s true that Vonda Shepard has kept a low profile of late, not just during the pandemic but for a few years before it, not having released an album of new material since 2015’s “Rookie.” But she’s back with her 13th studio album, “Red Light, Green Light,” titled in part for the stop-and-go feelings a lot of us might have experienced during the past two and a half years. For Shepard at least, who has touring dates now lined up on the east coast and in Europe to follow the new release, all systems are go, again.

For the still-curious who never really checked out Shepard’s discography outside of the “Ally McBeal” music, which she produced as well as sang (four of her 13 studio releases are “McBeal” soundtracks), the new album is a...

Right up until he joined Fleetwood Mac in 2018, Neil Finn felt it was very likely that Crowded House would never make another record. The band’s lineup had shifted several times over the years, founding drummer Paul Hester was dead, and an attempt to record a follow-up to 2010’s Intriguer a few years prior to that was such a fiasco that Finn decided to shelve the entire project.

“I felt like there needed to be a sense of occasion to bring Crowded House back,” the singer-guitarist says on the phone from his native New Zealand.

Crowded House dropped shared their new song “Playing With Fire,” the latest single from the Australian band’s upcoming album Dreamers Are Waiting, due out June 4th.

[Find the Vinyl for the Album Here]

“This song was formed out of a Crowded House jam, live in the studio but then evolved its character through many twists and turns during quarantine in 2020,” singer Neil Finn said in a statement. ” ‘Playing With Fire’ carries within it the contradiction I often feel on joyous occasions, the presence of hope together with an impending sense of doom.”

The “Playing With Fire” video finds Crowded House — Neil,...

Crowded House have announced their first new studio album in more than a decade, Dreamers Are Waiting. The follow-up to 2010’s Intriguer, the LP will be released on June 4th via BMG and is available to pre-order here.

The band also dropped a new video for the LP single “To the Island.” The Neil Finn-directed clip was filmed in New Zealand, Los Angeles and Ireland. The visual features each bandmate in different locations before they meet up at a gig. They drive, canoe and rappel their way to a mysterious club,...

Crowded House have dropped their first new music in more than a decade with their new single, “Whatever You Want.” The accompanying video stars Mac DeMarco.

In the endearingly goofy Nina Ljeti-directed clip, DeMarco awakens on his couch half-dressed, contemplating the night before. It appears he is suffering from a relatable imposter syndrome and seems to feel he bombed, and perhaps got bombed, in front of a lot of people. As he studies himself in a mirror disapprovingly, he receives words of encouragement from a statue. Other items — including a garden gnome,...

Rufus Wainwright released the video for the charming, folksy “You Ain’t Big,” the latest single off his upcoming album Unfollow the Rules, slated for July 10th.

The clip opens in the style of an old film, complete with a scene in an editorial office as a man discusses how he overcame his anger: “How would you feel if you were me?” he says. “You needed to get back to the grassroots, get a little closer to people.”

The video features vintage postcards of heartland cities in the United States.

Rufus Wainwright honors Joni Mitchell in the new single “Damsel in Distress.” The singer-songwriter also announced a new album, Unfollow the Rules, out April 24th via BMG.

“Damsel in Distress” is accompanied by an animated clip that features a woman in bellbottoms sauntering through landscapes with the song’s lyrics displayed in the clouds. “Yes, I remember smiles/Yes, I remember wiles,” he sings over reverb reminiscent of Radiohead’s The Bends. “Behind the Square of Sloan/Under the English moon within the Chelsea sky.”

According to Wainwright, the track...

Rufus Wainwright dons a drag persona inspired by Anna Wintour in the new music video for “Trouble in Paradise,” out Tuesday. The stark visual shows Wainwright in various stages of transformation into the character, culminating in an ominous shot of what appear to be the recent fires in Los Angeles.

“Trouble in Paradise” is the lead single for Wainwright’s upcoming studio LP, his first since 2012’s Out of the Game. (In 2015, he released the soundtrack to his original opera, Prima Donna, followed by 2016’s Take All My Loves, a...

“Someone wrote in the paper that the president was like a character out of a Randy Newman song. And there’s some truth in it,” said the artist in question, headlining the Hollywood Bowl Sunday night. Newman did have some material to offer that speaks more directly to recent geopolitical events (like “Putin”), but in this case, he was introducing a 1983 oldie, “My Life is Good,” a crude portrait of conspicuously uncouth consumption that feels far less over-the-top than it once did. “This,” he told the crowd, “is a song where… it’s as if President Trump went to a parent-teacher meeting.”

As is the case for pretty much every Newman performance, at times you might wonder if a laugh track was being piped in: Did folks guffaw so loudly at the “Let’s drop the big one” lines in 1972’s “Political Science” because they were only just hearing it for the first time,...

Today, Fleetwood Mac unveiled a new, iTunes-exclusive Ep "Extended Play," making it the first time in 10 years the rock troupe has released new music. The set includes fresh tracks "Sad Angel," "It Take Time" and "Miss Fantasy," which were written by Lindsey Buckingham and produced by Buckingham and Mitchell Froom. Plus, there's "Without You," a re-worked Stevie Nicks song from the Buckingham Nicks years; according to the band's website, it was rediscovered through the power of new media, "a lost song... which had been missing and happily rediscovered when someone posted an early demo of it on YouTube." The Mac's...

Musician and acclaimed songwriter Ron Sexsmith is set to release Forever Endeavour, his latest full-length, on Feb. 5 via Cooking Vinyl. The album will feature 12 original tracks and was produced by Mitchell Froom. This will be his first release since last year’s Long Player, Late Bloomer. The first track from the album, “Nowhere to Go,” takes a lighthearted approach to the down-and-out feeling of being stuck in a rut. Check out this exclusive live performance video, which begins with Sexsmith explaining the songwriting process behind “Nowhere to Go.”...

Walt Disney Animation Studios' "The Princess and the Frog" tells the story of a beautiful girl named Tiana, a frog prince who desperately wants to be human again, and a fateful kiss that leads them both on a hilarious adventure through the mystical bayous of Louisiana. It stars Broadway and movies actress, Anika Noni Rose, as the voice of Tiana.

In an interview, Rose (Anr) as well as Oscar-winning composer Randy Newman (Rn) talk about their experiences when they were involved in the production process. While Rose gushes that the part when Tiana sings "Down In New Orleans" is very inspiring, Newman shares the creative process when he has to create a song to make an alligator playing the trumpet seems natural.

"The Princess and the Frog" Blu-ray and DVD will be available for purchase in U.S. stores on March 16.

Q: Randy, how different is it to write for a movie?...