2005

Tori Amos has confirmed plans to open a solo piano tour April 1 in Clearwater, Fla. The month-long Original Sinsuality theater outing has 14 confirmed dates, closing April 25 in Los Angeles.

Amos last toured behind 2002’s “Scarlet’s Walk,” which featured her on piano and organ backed by drummer Matt Chamberlain and bassist Jon Evans. “We always like to change it up a little,” Witherspoon adds. “So we’re going back to purely solo for the first time since 2001.”

The April dates come in support of “The Beekeeper,” due Tuesday (Feb. 22) via Epic. Fans can expect to find Amos accompanied by her B

John Langenstein, Director of Security for several prominent bands has teamed up once again with David Shulman and The Mimi Fishman Foundation to raise money for The Station Family Fund (SFF).
The newest auction, which coincides with the 2nd anniversary of the horrific fire, will be the fifth in a series of fundraisers organized by Langenstein/Shulman. To date their efforts have raised over $50,000 for the SFF.

The Station Family Fund is an all-volunteer, 501 c 3 recognized, tax exempt, nonprofit organization, founded to offer assistance and relief to people directly affected by the fire at The Station nightclub in West Warwick, Rhode Island. 100 people perished, close to 200 severely injured, and more than 60 children lost one or both parents in the horrific fire on Feb 20, 2003.

Todd King, a survivor himself of the fire, is the VP of the Station Family Fund. “As we approach the 2nd anniversary the story is further removed from people’s minds. The needs of the victims are a great as ever. It’s vital we don’t forget the families left behind. The Station Family Fund was formed to help those families, as well as the survivors”, said King.

The auction features items donated by a bands and musicians and represents a wide variety of musical tastes. In addition, every item is signed. Highlights include items donated by Paul McCartney, The String Cheese Incident, Jackson Browne, Eminem, CSN, Sting, Dave Matthews, Neil Young, BB King, and many others. A few non-musicians such as Tom Hanks are represented as well.

Historically, the auctions have featured items donated by jambands, which limited the auction’s exposure. This time will be different.
“With over thirty wonderful auction items, there is certain to be something for everyone’s taste,” says Shulman. “We are reaching out beyond the jamband audience in an effort to raise as many funds as possible for the SFF”.

The Station Family Fund will distribute every dollar raised by the auction in an effort to address the needs of the survivors and the families of victims.

“We have been overwhelmed by the support we have received, both from those donating items as well as those bidding on them. Working in the music industry, this tragedy hit me right in the heart. My desire to help those affected by the fire has only strengthened and I am more determined now than ever to help out the survivors and the families of the victims”, said Langenstein.

For more information the auction can be viewed at mimifishman.org.
Information on the Station Family Fund can be found at stationfamilyfund.org

The Boss’ 19th album, “Devils & Dust,” will be released Apr. 26, Columbia Records announced Wednesday. Several of the 12 tunes on the disc have origins stretching back a decade, when Springsteen was performing a solo acoustic tour in support of “The Ghost of Tom Joad.”

“I was so excited after playing on that tour, I’d get off the stage and go write,” the New Jersey-born songwriter tells the Associated Press.

“Then I put those songs on the shelf for a while, until I had a chance to revisit them.” And revisit the Boss has; Devils & Dust will be the rocker’s first album of new material since his Grammy-winning 2002 release, The Rising. Brendan O’Brien, who produced The Rising, returned for Devils & Dust.

This time out, Springsteen is leaving the full E Street Band behind. Like the bulk of his 1990s catalog, Springsteen recorded the new disc largely with session musicians in New York and Los Angeles, although a few E Streeters make cameos.

Source: yahoo

Coldplay’s as-yet-untitled third studio album is likely to see a June release as the band continues to tweak the final product. As previously reported, initial sessions for the album with producer Ken Nelson were set aside, with the U.K. rock act opting to start over with producer Danton Supple, who mixed Coldplay’s 2002 breakthrough, “A Rush of Blood to the Head.”

“I think we were in no hurry [to finish] because the prospect of touring again was so daunting that we felt we should take our time, and also we wanted to make sure that it was the best it could possibly be,” drummer Will Champion says in a new online newsletter on the band’s official Web site.

“But in the end, having no deadline became a problem because we never really felt the need to finish anything. As soon as we gave ourselves a proper deadline we started to be much more productive and the stuff we were doing was miles better. It’s always the same with us — the best stuff comes when we start to panic.”

Besides, Champion says the new album has “got to be better than the other two, otherwise there is no point in releasing it.”

Asked the fate of some of the new songs Coldplay performed live at the tail end of the “Rush of Blood” tour, Champion reports, “Some of them have morphed into new songs [and] some old song titles have been given to new songs, so there might be some familiar bits and bobs in there.”

The actual recording process has found Champion laying down his tracks in a variety of ways. “On one song, I played the pump organ and we all sat in a room together recording live takes,” he says. “On others, I would play the drums to a guide piano or guitar and singing and then we’d layer it up from there.”

For now, the only confirmed live dates on Coldplay’s schedule are a March 12 benefit for California radio station KCRW in Los Angeles and an April 30 headlining slot at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., although Champion hints that U.K. dates may happen in the “spring.”

Source billboard.com.

Former Soul Coughing frontman Mike Doughty will on May 3 release his debut for the Dave Matthews-co-owned ATO Records, “Haughty Melodic.” The 12-track set was produced by former Semisonic principal Dan Wilson and boasts a guest appearance from Matthews on “Tremendous Brunettes.” Other guests include N*E*R*D drummer Eric Fawcett, cellist Jane Scarpantoni and Groove Collective’s Jay Rodriguez.

Doughty tells Billboard.com that ATO is “basically my dream label” and that after years of releasing his own music, he resolved to pitch his services to the company when both he and Matthews played the Bonnaroo festival last summer.

“I burned up a big old stack of rough mixes of my record and had this fierce determination to find Dave,” he recalls. “I had no idea how to actually do this, with the different circles of important at Bonnaroo. Finally I get backstage and he literally had just finished rocking 70,000 people. The irony was that someone had given him a copy of my EP, ‘Rockitty Roll,’ a month beforehand, so apparently I didn’t even need to make all that strenuous effort to see him.”

Doughty says he knew he wanted Matthews to appear on the album, but how to fit him in was not immediately apparent. “I’ve always envied hip-hop artists, because they can come in and do a verse and make a featured appearance on someone else’s record,” he notes. “It’s difficult to do that in the context of a pop song. So I asked Dave to sing a verse of this song and just said, ‘pretend you’re Lil’ Kim!'”

As for what else listeners can expect from “Haughty Melodic,” Doughty describes the sound as “a lot like the ‘Madchester’ bands of the late ’80s, early ’90s. You ask an artist and he’s going to say something completely unlike what it actually sounds like. But to me it sounds like a very American take on that sound. It’s kind of dance-y. There’s a lot of congas. But it’s rock, you know? It’s much more rock and its much more sung than Soul Coughing was.”

Doughty is gearing up to tour in support of the album, most likely beginning in late April. “I’m not sure if I’m going to do a full band or just go out with a piano player at first,” he says.

Beforehand, fans can watch out for Doughty’s involvement in two non-musical projects. He wrote the storyline for an entry in DC Comics’ upcoming book “Bizarro World,” in which “Aquaman wants to become a folk singer. He goes to open-mic nights and tries to meet girls.”

Doughty also shot “a bunch of soft-core porn pictures of a very tattooed lady” for the Web site Suicidegirls.com. “I get to put comics artist and pornographer on my resume now,” he says with a chuckle.

Source billboard.com.