Song Casting

The light show has always been fantastic. It was usually synced up to the song and the bars of light dominating the stage gave the band a great visual aspect to the show that only enhanced each song played.

Some people might complain that the amount of political text, quotes, anti-war/us sentiments and other words showed on the screen Massive Attack concert might be a distraction, but if you know Massive Attack, you know they aren’t ones to just idly play a show without pushing forward some of their own ideologies. Their fans and most of the crowd were super high anyways, so it was just a collage of colors.

One of the things people loved about the Massive Attack concert was the extended intros and outros to each song. Most people might write off Massive Attack as trip hoppy chill music, but in a live element, there is nothing chilled about it; it’s an electro-rock spectacle.

The new material sounded decent live, but clearly they were still fleshing it out as a live band and while there were good responses to Splitting the Atom and Atlas Air, Pysche, featuring Martina Topley Bird, got less of a positive response.

Overall, the Massive Attack concert was good considering it was at the Sound Academy. 3D, Daddy G and Horace Andy have insane stage presence and Daddy G and Horace Andy definitely come off as two of the coolest cats in the land. It goes without saying that Massive Attack is a must see live.

Massive Attack are a musical collective from Bristol, UK, widely considered to be progenitors of the genre known as trip hop, as well as effectively being a wider collective including other musicians that they assemble. Originally DJ’s Grant Marshall (Daddy G), Andrew Vowles (Mushroom) and painter-turned-MC Robert Del Naja (3D) met as members of The Wild Bunch, one of the first sound system collectives in Britain and a dominant force in the early 1980s Bristolian club scene.

Starting out as a production trio in 1988, with their independently-released song, Any Love, sung by falsetto-voiced singer-songwriter Carlton McCarthy, they later signed to Circa Records in 1990. Circa became a subsidiary of (and was later subsumed by) Virgin Records, which in turn was acquired by EMI.

Some of their most noted songs have been without choruses and have featured dramatically atmospheric dynamics, conveyed through either epic distorted guitar crescendos, lavish orchestral arrangements (like swelling, sustained strings or flourishes of grand piano) or prominent, looped/shifting basslines, often underpinned by high and exacting production values, involving sometimes painstaking digital editing and mixing. The pace of their music has often been slower than prevalent British dance music at the time.

It was the Foo Fighters Grammy Awards night for them; swept the 54th Grammys this year, with five new awards to their name.

The band took awards for every one of their nominations, including best rock album (“Wasting Light”), best rock performance and best rock song (“Walk”), long form music video (“Back And Forth”) and hard rock/metal performance (“White Limo”).

To top off the most successful night of their career the band performed “Walk”. The Foos left little room for other rock artists to take a win, leaving nominees like Jeff Beck, Kings of Leon and Red Hot Chili Peppers without reward for their efforts.

2012′s big winner was Adele, who dominated the ceremony with a total of six awards. She matched Beyonce’s former record of six awards in a single night for a female artist. Skrillex owned the dance categories, firmly placing him and dub step in the mainstream, and Kanye West ruled the rap categories.

The band are yet to post a Foo Fighters Grammy Awards-thank-you speech to their official website, but once the celebrations have calmed down you can probably expect a heartfelt message to supporters. They are expected to start writing a follow-up to “Wasting Light” this year.

After rocking ‘Walk’ outside the Staples Center, the band – the Foo Fighters Grammy Awards winners appeared near the end of the show for a second performance in tribute to dance and electronica music alongside Chris Brown, Lil’ Wayne, David Guetta and Deadmau5.

Chris Brown was first to take the stage with electronic artist David Guetta all ready to accompany him. Brown came out in a Run DMC-like outfit with tons of autotune and electronic filters on his voice, keeping with the theme of celebrating electronic music. Lil’ Wayne joined in for a short appearance, building on the rap/electronic performance.

After they finished their part of the performance, the camera panned throughout the crowd full of people with incredibly phallic glowing sticks and Deadmau5 ears to the Foo Fighters on the other side of the tent. They began playing their hit ‘Rope,’ inside a bright glowing box, which seemed like a completely separate performance until Deadmau5 was revealed within another glowing box next to the Foos.

After Deadmau5 went solo with his brand of dubstep, the camera panned to Dave Grohl in the audience bobbing his head in sync with Deadmau5′s giant L.E.D. mouse head.

The 2012 Grammys have been all about the Foos, with two performances and five Grammys as of this posting. Will Foo Fighters rope in ‘Album of the Year?’ Stay tuned to find out.

“I try really f***ing hard so that I don’t have to rely on anything but my hands and my heart,” says Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters, the band’s frontman.

When Grohl took the podium to accept the band’s Grammy award for Best Rock Performance on Sunday, his brief speech to analog recording ruffled feathers among the electronic music community.

“To me this award means a lot because it shows that the human element of music is what’s important,” says Dave Grohl of Foo Fighters. “Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that’s the most important thing for people to do… It’s not about being perfect, it’s not about sounding absolutely correct, it’s not about what goes on in a computer. It’s about what goes on in here [your heart] and what goes on in here [your head].”

Grohl released a statement filled with his trademark humor; his perpetual burning passion for music of all genres, with a few f-bombs to boot. This was an attempt to clarify his words during the awards night.

“Well, me and my big mouth. Never has a 33 second acceptance rant evoked such caps-lock postboard rage as my lil’ ode to analog recording has,” he writes. “Ok… maybe Kanye has me on this one, but… Imma let you finish… just wanted to clarify something…”

“I love music. I love ALL kinds of music. From Kyuss to Kraftwerk, Pinetop Perkins to Prodigy, Dead Kennedys to Deadmau5… I love music. Electronic or acoustic, it doesn’t matter to me. The simple act of creating music is a beautiful gift that ALL human beings are blessed with,” he continues. “Look, I am not Yngwie Malmsteen. I am not John Bonham. Hell, I’m not even Josh Groban, for that matter. But I try really fucking hard so that I don’t have to rely on anything but my hands and my heart to play a song.”

“I don’t know how to do what Skrillex does (though I fucking love it) but I do know that the reason he is so loved is because he sounds like Skrillex, and that’s badass. We have a different process and a different set of tools, but the ‘craft’ is equally as important.”

At the end, the self-proclaimed “Davemau5” writes: “Don’t give me two Crown Royals and then ask me to make a speech at your wedding, because I might just bust into the advantages of recording to 2 inch tape.”

Adele won all six categories she was nominated in, scooping song of the year for Rolling In the Deep, which she performed to a standing ovation.

She also received Grammys for best pop solo performance for Someone Like You, best pop vocal album and album of the year for 21, and record of the year and best short form music video for Rolling In the Deep, and is one of the best Adele songs. She already has two Grammys from the 2009 awards and is now matched only by global superstar Beyonce for the most Grammy wins in a night by a female act.

Her album 21, which topped the charts in ten countries, overtook Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black after selling 3.7million copies in the UK last year.

Among her Grammy triumphs was Song of the Year, which she won with the haunting hit “Rolling in the Deep” – one of her best Adele songs, as well as Album of The Year for the global chart-topper 21.

Adele Laurie Blue Adkins, better known as Adele, is an English recording artist and song writer. The self proclaimed “heartbroken soul” singer was born on May 5, 1988 in Tottenham, London, England, and was raised by her single mother who worked as a masseuse and made furniture. Adele’s father was a ship worker who was absent from her life.

Adele’s mother encouraged the singer to discover music and Adele began singing at the tender age of four. As a youth, Adele impersonated the Spice Girls, Gabrielle, and Destiny’s Child at dinner parties, family events, and at school performances. Adele sharpened her voice and taught herself how to sing through listening to Ella Fitzgerald, Etta James, and Roberta Flack while “worshiping” pop icons like Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, and Take that.

Adele penned her first album, entitled “Home Town Glory” at the age of 16 and received formal music instruction at the BRIT School in Croydon, a performing arts school which propelled her musical aspirations and cultivated her talent.

Adele has received multiple awards including: two Grammys in 2009 for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance as well as the BRIT Awards Critics’ Choice award for her unique blend of gospel, blues, soul, and elements of disco.

Here are the 10 Best Adele Songs:

To Make You Feel My Love

Chasing Pavement

Rolling In The Deep

Someone Like You

Hometown Glory

Daydreamer

Set Fire To The Rain

Melt My Heart To Stone

Tired

Best For Last

A mix of tragedy and triumph helped make the Grammy Awards on Sunday the second-most-watched broadcast in Grammy’s history. The same effect was clear in record sales, with big gains for Adele, the night’s champion, and for Whitney Houston, the pop goddess whose death the day before cast a somber shadow over the ceremony.

Following a pattern familiar from the death of Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston’s music rocketed back on the charts and radio playlists as news of her death spread. For the week that ended Sunday, Whitney Houston’s death had a nearly 60-fold increase in album sales, virtually all of it digital, and equivalent boosts in track downloads and online streaming.

She sold 101,000 albums in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan, compared with 1,700 the week before, and 91,000 of those albums were sold digitally; she also had 887,000 downloads of individual tracks, up from 15,000 the week before. “I Will Always Love You,” the most popular song, was downloaded 195,000 times, and from Saturday to Monday it had 2,137 spins on the radio, up from 134 during the same period the week before, according to BDS, Nielsen’s radio monitoring arm.

Spotify, the online music service, said that on Sunday there were 2.4 million streams of Ms. Houston’s songs, up 4,000 percent from the day before.

At her peak in the 1980s and ’90s, Houston was one of pop’s dominant sellers, with 11 No. 1 hits and 55 million album sales in the United States, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. But in recent years her career had stalled, and, like Jackson’s, her public image was often more associated with tawdry tabloid headlines than with her music. Her last Top 10 hit in 2001 was a rerelease of her Super Bowl performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” from 10 years before.

With a low sales baseline Houston’s numbers last week were not enough to give her the top-selling album. Her collection “Whitney: The Greatest Hits” (Arista) reached No. 6 on Billboard’s latest album chart with 64,000 sales, up from only about 600 the week before.

Apparently, Whitney Houston’s death brought her back to the spotlight, but some in the music industry questioned how long the interest would last.

“For a few weeks, or during the course of the fascination with the news cycle, you’re going to continue to see a sales spike,” said Bill Werde, editorial director of Billboard. “But ultimately radio is going to stop playing Whitney all the time and return to playing her sometimes, and sales will probably fall back pretty substantially.”

Smashing Pumpkins have issued a statement saying that they are seeking a drummer to replace Jimmy Chamberlin, who left the band last week.

Billy Corgan and company will hold auditions next Friday (April 10) in Los Angeles. They have asked that potential candidates send their background info, photos, and performance web links via email to pumpkinsdrummer@gmail.com.

Chamberlin, who joined the band when it was originally formed in 1988 and played on all of the Smashing Pumpkins’ albums except 1998′s Adore, said last week that he decided to quit because he is no longer able to give the band all of his energy. “I can’t just, ‘Cash the check,’ so to speak,” he said.

After the drummer’s departure, frontman Corgan issued a statement saying he intends to continue performing and recording under the Smashing Pumpkins name, despite the fact that he is the band’s only remaining original member.

Dave Grohl is in baby nirvana right about now.

The former Nirvana drummer-turned-Foo Fighters frontman and wife Jordyn are celebrating the birth of their second child.

Daughter Harper Willow was born Friday in New York, weighing in at a healthy 7 pounds, 8 ounces. She’s 20 inches long and apparently takes after her dad.

“She’s as loud as hell,” says Grohl.
The Grohls, who tied the knot in 2003, named Harper after the musician’s great uncle. She joins 3-year-old big sister Violet in the couple’s brood.

Grohl’s currently on a break with the Foos since touring last year in support of their sixth studio album, Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace.

David Hasselhoff’s teenage daughters have announced they’re launching a pop career.

Taylor Ann, 18, and Hayley Amber, 16, are planning to follow in their dad’s footsteps by forming a band.

The group, which will which apparently take the same musical style of Miley Cyrus, have already started recording their debut single.

The duo currently have no stage name confirmed, although The Hoff Drops is a possibility, reports The Sun.

Despite saying he will help his daughters’ career, Hasselhoff has said he does not want to become their full-time manager.

The song title “Cry Me A River” brings Justin Timberlake to mind for Generation Y. But that is likely to change thanks to Susan Boyle, the Scottish singing sensation whose Britain’s Got Talent appearance wooed millions of broadcast and online viewers.

Boyle’s moving rendition of “Cry Me A River” was uploaded to YouTube Thursday night, sparking further interest and frenzy over the extremely talented singer.

Boyle’s “Cry Me A River” is a remake of the blues standard, not Timberlake’s pop ballad. Boyle’s track went virtually unnoticed when it was independently released 10 years ago on a charity CD reported Times Online. The Whitburn Community Council in West Lothian only pressed 1,000 copies of The Millennium Celebration compilation.

The singer, who said she has never been kissed, now has an offer on the table from Britain’s Got Talent judge Piers Morgan who has said he would take her on a romantic date. Still, Boyle isn’t eager to abandon her more homely looks for an extreme makeover just because she is on the television show.

“I wouldn’t want to change myself too much because that would really make things a bit false,” she told CNN’s American Morning on Friday. “I want to receive people as the real me, a real person.”

It’s not just Boyle’s singing that has fans searching the internet for related information. Web searches for the term “gobsmacked” spiked after Boyle used the British slang meaning utterly astonished when describing her reaction to newfound widespread acclaim.

The humble 48-year-old unemployed singer who began performing in school productions when she was 12 credits her late mother as the inspiration to audition for the competition show. Boyle’s story has already won her talk show circuit interviews on CNN and Larry King Live. An appearance on Oprah is said to be in the works.

After weeks of “American Idol” running long and wrecking havoc with our DVRs and TiVos, we’ve come up with a plan to condense the entire show down — way down. We’re talking 15-minute performance nights and five-minute results nights. And if we can do it, there’s no reason Fox can’t, too.

Performance Nights:

Minute 1: Obligatory introductions of judges and Seacrest so they can show off their outfits and smile.

Minute 2: The mentor of the week gives one big gushing speech about how everyone was wonderful. No footage of them standing lamely by a piano, or a history of their accomplishments gets shown.

Minutes 3 & 4: Adam Lambert blows away all convention again with whatever this week’s theme is.

Minute 5: Simon’s comments. None of the other judges get to talk; they just have to nod or shoot angry looks at Simon for calling it either wonderful or too theatrical.

Minutes 6 & 7: Danny Gokey does his predictable Danny Gokey thing.

Minute 8: Simon says it was a bit boring, but that he understands why America loves Danny. Audience booing.

Minutes 9-12: Highlights from the rehearsal footage of the other remaining contestants. It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that Gokey and Lambert will be the finalists, so why even pretend anymore? Just do a snippets reel and the audience can vote on who the worst person of the night was.

Minute 13: The non-Gokey/Lambert contestants stand on stage while Simon gives his thoughts on who sounded the most cabaret or karaoke and who was surprisingly passable.

Minute 14: Ryan gives out all of the dial-in numbers. Cautions that these are 866 numbers and that standard text messaging rates apply.

Minute 15: Seacrest wishes everyone a good night. Kara says “artistry,” Randy says “dawg” and Paula babbles randomly, but her speech gets cut off by the start of the next show on Fox.

Results Nights:

Minute 1: Introductions of Seacrest and the judges, so Ryan can make some snarky comment about Simon and the audience applause gives him his weekly dose of validation for having an opinion.

Minute 2: Seacrest calls all the contestants who aren’t Gokey and Lambert down to the center stage and they look sad/surprised.

Minute 3: Ryan asks Simon who should go home. Simon tosses out the name of his chosen punching bag of the week. Audience booing ensues.

Minute 4: Ryan sends most of the remaining contestants back to the couch, then tells the bottom two who America hated the most.

Minute 5: The eliminee gets to sing their song, until it is cut off by a Ford commercial.