Classic Rock News

Some of today’s top musicians are opening up about their voices in a new book set for release this September. 

The Singers Talk – The Greatest Singers of Our Time Discuss the One Thing They’re Never Asked About: Their Voices features interviews with artists like Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Nicks, Roger Daltrey, Chrissie Hynde, Michael Stipe, Brian Johnson, Dionne Warwick and more, all discussing one of the keys to what made them famous: their vocal chops.

Written by Jason Thomas Gordon, the lead singer and drummer for the Los Angeles-based rock band Kingsize, the book also discusses several famed voices that are no longer with us: Stevie Van Zandt talks about Little Richard, producer Butch Vig discusses Kurt Cobain, Nile Rodgers shares thoughts on David Bowie, Jimmy Iovine discusses Tom Petty and more.

The Singers Talk will be released September 5, with proceeds going to a good cause. All royalties will be donated to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which was founded by Gordon’s grandfather, famed entertainer Danny Thomas.

The Singers Talk is available for preorder now.

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Paul McCartney gave fans insight into his songwriting process in his bestselling book The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, and now, fans will be able to hear him talk about his songs in a new podcast premiering this fall. 

McCartney: A Life In Lyrics will feature The Beatles legend and his The Lyrics collaborator Paul Muldoon chatting about the creative process, with each episode focusing on a specific song from the rocker’s more than 60-year career.

Season one will consist of 12 episodes, with Sir Paul discussing such songs as “Eleanor Rigby,” “Let It Be,” “Penny Lane,” “Live and Let Die,” “Helter Skelter and more. Season two will consist of another 12 episodes to follow in February 2024.

“When we listened back to the tapes, we realized there was something very special happening in these conversations,” Muldoon explains. “It was McCartney unfiltered.”

McCartney: A Life In Lyrics will drop weekly wherever podcasts are available.

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Pete Townshend’s magnum opus Life House — parts of which became The Who‘s 1971 album, Who’s Next — will finally be released as he intended when he first started working on it over 50 years ago.

Dropping September 15, the Who’s Next/Life House Super Deluxe edition will feature a whopping 155 tracks, with 89 songs that have never been released and 57 fresh remixes. That includes Townshend’s Life House demos, various session recordings and two complete concerts from 1971: one recorded at London’s Young Vic theater and one recorded at San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium.

Townshend had hoped to tell one story with Life House but eventually scrapped the project, instead evolving it into Who’s Next. In a statement about the new releases, he describes the story as a “portentous polemic about the coming of a nation beaten down by climate issues and pollution.” 

The story also features a sort of proto-internet called the grid, to which people are forced to plug into for entertainment.

Noting the timeliness of his concept, Townshend writes, “Songs that depicted a dystopian world in which faceless corporations control our lives may have been fiction at the time, but they have come to be more like documentary.” 

The Super Deluxe edition will be released as a 10-CD set, with a 100-page hardcover book, new sleeve notes, the newly commissioned Life House – The Complete Graphic Novel, which tells the story behind project, plus concert posters, programs and more. The novel will also be available separately in a limited edition of 1,000 signed by Townshend and Roger Daltrey. 

Also coming is a limited-edition four-LP set that includes the 1971 San Francisco concert, a two-CD set and various other vinyl configurations.

All are available for preorder now.

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Billy Joel performed the final concert at New York’s historic Shea Stadium ahead of its demolition.

The show, a culmination of a two-night stand at the home of the New York Mets, saw Joel welcoming several guests, including Tony Bennett, Garth Brooks, Steven Tyler, Roger Daltrey and Paul McCartney, who was driven to the stage by the same groundskeeper who drove The Beatles when they played Shea in 1965.

A documentary of the shows, Last Play At Shea, premiered in 2010 at the Tribeca Film Festival and later played at Citi Field, the stadium that replaced Shea. A CD and DVD of the shows were released in March 2011.

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Green Day‘s set at Canada’s 2023 FEQ festival featured the surprise debut of a new song.

The track called “1981” finds frontman Billie Joe Armstrong singing, “She’s gonna bang her head like 1981.” Fan-shot footage of the performance was posted by the @GreenDayInc fan account.

Green Day revealed in November 2022 that they were working on a new album. Prior to that, they shared several videos teasing something to an entirely different year: 1972, which is the year that Armstrong, bassist Mike Dirnt and drummer Tré Cool were all born.

The most recent Green Day album is 2020’s Father of All… They also put out a trio of one-off singles in 2021: “Here Comes the Shock,” “Holy Toledo!” and “Pollyanna.”

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The Police guitarist Andy Summers kicks off The Cracked Lens + A Missing String tour on Friday, July 21, and fans should expect more than just Andy performing his classic tunes onstage.

“Essentially, I guess it’s what you would call a multimedia show,” he tells ABC Audio, noting it’s a combination of his photography, stories from his book Fretted and Moaning and his music.

“I play some solo guitar pieces. I do a section of Brazilian music, which is very nice,” he says. “Then it ends, of course, with an insane rendering of some Police songs,” noting he encourages fans to sing along to those classics.

Andy says his love of photography stems from his teenage years, when he “became addicted to going to the cinema.” He says, “I thought, then, ‘I want to be a film director.’ But of course, I was a teenager absolutely obsessed with the guitar, and that sort of overrode everything.” 

He turned to photography during a tour stop in New York with The Police when he had some free time and decided to get a camera, noting after that he “never looked back.”

A new tour is not something most 80-year-olds would be considering at their age, but it sounds like there’s no stopping Summers.  

“I guess it’s a life thing everybody goes through,” he says, “but I am definitely spurred on by creativity and I don’t really see any stopping until they go, ‘OK, old guy, off you go.’”  

Andy Summers’ The Cracked Lens + A Missing String tour launches Friday, July 21, in Beverly, Massachusetts. A complete list of dates can be found at andysummers.com.

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John Fogerty made a special appearance at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado, on Friday, July 14, to join the String Cheese Incident for a set that they called the first-ever “John Fogerty Incident.”

After the jam band played a set of their own tracks, they returned to the stage with Fogerty and his son Shane to tear through a bunch of Creedence Clearwater Revival classics, including “Up Around the Bend,” “Born on the Bayou,” “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?,” “Down on the Corner” and “Fortunate Son.”

The show ended with an encore that included the classics “Bad Moon Rising” and “Proud Mary.”

“Thank you, @redrocksco and @sci_official for playing with us! It was out of this world!” Fogerty shared on Instagram. “Thanks to the fans who came out and rocked the house with us! We love getting to play at Red Rocks.” 

String Cheese Incident added, “Such a thrill! Thank you John and @shanefogerty for rocking out with us! We will never forget this one…”

Fogerty is currently on his own U.S. tour and will play Friant, California, on Friday, July 21. A complete list of dates can be found at johnfogerty.com.

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Bob Dylan is getting rid of one of his homes. In case you missed it, the Scottish Daily Express reports the “Like A Rolling Stone” singer has put his mansion in Scotland on the market.

Dylan and his brother, David, purchased Aultmore House and estate in the Scottish Highlands back in 2006 for about $2.8 million, and they are now selling it for almost $4 mil.

The home, which sits on 24 acres of land, features 16 bedrooms, 11 bathrooms, a music room, a walled garden, croquet lawn and more, along with three four-bedroom cottages that can be rented for about $1,200 a week.

According to Tom Stewart-Moore, who works for selling agents Knight Frank, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic Dylan and his brother would spend “a few weeks a year” at the estate.

“They’ve not been able to use it in recent years and that’s the reason for the sale,” Stewart-Moore says. “They bought it because it’s stunningly beautiful — and most importantly, very, very private.”

The Scottish Highlands are apparently a very important place to Dylan. In his 1997 album, Time Out Of Mind, he included a song called “Highlands,” which included the lyric, “My heart’s in the Highlands wherever I roam/ That’s where I’ll be when I get called home.”

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Queen is known for having foot-stomping anthems that the audience can sing along to, and according to guitarist Brian May, that was very deliberate on their part — although not at first.

“It wasn’t common to have a participatory concert experience with the audience when we started it off,” May shares in a new interview with Vulture. “You didn’t go to a Led Zeppelin concert and sing along. It wasn’t cool. Black Sabbath, you didn’t do that. So when people started doing it for our songs, our first reaction was, ‘Why don’t they just listen? What’s going wrong here?'”

But May says the band soon realized, “This is new. This is a phenomenon. It seems we shouldn’t be fighting this. We should be embracing it.” And that’s exactly what they did.

“I went away and wrote ‘We Will Rock You’ trying to imagine what an audience could do if they’re all crammed in and can hardly move,” he says. He notes that song and the Freddie Mercury-penned “We Are The Champions” were “deliberately angled at allowing the audience to be part of the show.”

“From then on, we became a band that was absolutely dedicated to making our shows an interactive experience,” he says. “The funny thing is that it’s become common now in all kinds of music. So it’s something I feel proud of.”

And fans will get a chance to be part of Queen’s show when they hit the road with Adam Lambert on their Rhapsody tour, starting October 4 and 5 in Baltimore, Maryland. A complete list of dates can be found at queenonline.com.

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Chicago is set to headline two new shows that will be filmed for the concert TV special Decades Rock Live, which teams classic bands with some of today’s biggest artists.

The concerts, billed as Chicago & Friends, are happening November 17 and 18 at Ovation Hall at the Ocean Casino Resort in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They’ll feature special guests Chris Daughtry, Robin Thicke, and Steve Vai, who’ll pay tribute to the band’s original lead guitarist Terry Kath, with more guests to be added.

The concerts will have the band celebrating the 55th anniversary of their debut, Chicago Transit Authority, with a set featuring tunes from the classic album as well as some of their greatest hits. The planned Decades Rock Live special is expected to air sometime in December.

“We’re looking forward to working with Barry Summers, our producer on this concert film, and celebrating Chicago’s 55th Anniversary of our debut album Chicago Transit Authority, with our fans in Atlantic City that will be filmed over two nights,” Chicago cofounder and keyboardist Robert Lamm shares. “We’ll be performing a set list of songs exclusively for these two shows, and we’re very excited to be performing with some special guests, all captured on film.”

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