A week before the Grammys, Mumford & Sons had no idea they'd be sharing a stage with Bob Dylan. "It was surreal," says the folk-rock quartet's singer, Marcus Mumford, 24. "I was staying with my friend in California, and every night, we'd stay up until three listening to Dylan. Then I get a call: 'You're playing the Grammys with Bob Dylan.'" The British crew — whose breakout debut disc, Sigh No More, just went platinum — ended up stealing the show with a passionate rendition of their tune "The Cave," driving their album back up to Number Two. Mumford, taking a cigarette break from a writing session for the band's second album, checks in from London.
Were you excited to back Dylan on "Maggie's Farm"?
The initial idea was that we'd play the Grammys with the Avett Brothers — one of our favorite bands in the world — and "a legend of music." When our manager said, "It's Bob Dylan," I got out of bed and ran outside and jumped around like a madman! You can imagine the reaction of someone who probably wouldn't be playing music at all if it wasn't for Dylan....
The Foo Fighters have been playing intimate shows to preview material from their upcoming album Wasting Light, but at a gig last week in Cologne, Germany, Dave Grohl and crew delivered a blistering set that featured the LP in its entirety. A crisp bootleg of the show has surfaced online. Check it out HERE!
"We're gonna be here a while so get comfortable," says Grohl at the start of the show, which was organized for contest winners of German radio station 1Live. "It's gonna be a long fucking night! Ready?" And with that…they're off, delivering a non-stop 98-minute set that starts with the tinnitus-inducing riffs of "Bridge Burning" and wraps with the Foo's classic anthem "Everlong." ...
Shark humor has its time and place, but not when I'm snorkeling somewhere called Shark Bay. At the Heron Island Research Station, a laboratory on the teardrop-shaped atoll 45 miles (72 km) off Australia's east coast, the suntanned, chirpy station manager gives a parting wave to the three students who are taking me out for my first look at the legendary corals of the Great Barrier Reef. "Just don't get eaten, will you?" she says. Ha-ha. Happily, there are no sharks in Shark Bay that morning; in fact, there's not a whole lot of anything. As I follow the students' snorkels, we pass over circular beds of brown, monochromatic coral and empty expanses of rippled sand. A handful of small, glimmering fish hover in the water column, but they're the only life we see during an hour-long swim. Where are the schools of coral trout? The famed Maori wrasse? Wading back to shore, one of the students shrugs: "Sorry there wasn't more."...
Zara from mikeshinodaclan.com just tweeted this concert review from Linkin Park's show in Dallas. It's pretty on point and funny at all the right places, so read! Thanks, Zara!
I’m not saying he’s not a man’s man, but Chester Bennington used to drive a sparkly silver PT Cruiser. I know this because he used to live next door to my good friend, and he did not utilize his parking garage. But perhaps he doesn’t need a fancy SUV; he has the grandeur of a world tour, and an arena full of cheering fans that live for the sensation that is Linkin Park. A show postponed by a bout of illness, the size of the audience at American Airlines Center has not been thwarted. “You ready to have some fun?” Chester asks the crowd. As the band opens with “Faint,” his vocals prove to be a bit ahead of the beat, but unharmed, nonetheless. ...
On Feb. 25, I posted a blog arguing that nuclear weapons are the most important and urgent environmental threat today—even more important than climate change caused by greenhouse gasses. I received quite a bit of feedback from environmentalists—many of whom took umbrage with my thesis.
Interestingly, no one argued that the predictions of climate change following a limited nuclear war (50-100 Hiroshima-sized bombs) was unsound—after all, scientists use some of the same climate modeling techniques to predict the global cooling from nuclear fallout and soot as they use to chart the future of global warming from carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases. Many environmentalists felt simply that the chances of nuclear war were so small that worrying about its effect on the climate was a waste of time. Joe Romm's sentiments on the Climate Progress blog were typical: "So the scenario being offered is that some accident or other event leads to India and Pakistan suicidally using most of their nuclear weapons on each other. Something to worry about? Absolutely. Likely? Not terribly. Preventable through the political efforts of U.S. environmentalists? Gimme a break!"...
Little Survey: What Was Your First CD?