Ice Cube has parlayed a hardcore rap career into an entertainment empire that spans movies, television and product endorsements. But the former N.W.A. member and solo artist known for groundbreaking albums such as “AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted” and “Death Certificate” has no plans to switch up his politically charged style. While mainstream rap drowns in escapist tales of cars, clubs and fancy cribs, he says fans can expect “vintage Ice Cube” on his forthcoming album, “Everythang’s Corrupt.”

“Everything that you’ve ever gotten from me, I deliver on this record,” he says. “My style is straight street knowledge. I don’t really cater to what’s going on in hip-hop or what’s going on in the industry, so to speak. I just dial in on Ice Cube fans and try to keep them satisfied, and everybody else gotta get in where they fit in. I don’t want to have to worry about no program director here or no A&R there. That makes it a drag, and being independent, I can just go in the studio and do what I feel.”

While he wraps up his 10th album, the actor, writer, producer and director is in talks with distributor New Line Cinema to close out the “Friday” franchise with final installment “Last Friday.”

“We’re trying to get it done,” he says. “New Line has really been neutered by Time Warner, so they can’t do as many movies as they usually do per year. So it’s just a fight to get ‘Last Friday’ on their schedule. They only got three or four movies to do a year, and urban comedy is probably low on the totem pole.”

Cube — born O’Shea Jackson — is also working on a feature film about Compton collective N.W.A. that will reunite him with “Friday” director F. Gary Gray. He says the movie could hit theaters by mid-2014, and the cast may include his son O’Shea Jr., a budding rapper who goes by the moniker OMG (Oh My Goodness).

“I want my son OMG to play me. He looks like me and he can act, so he can do it,” Cube says. “I just had to meet with [Gray] and Dr. Dre to work on the script and keep getting it tighter and tighter, so we’re in the process of casting the movie now, so it’s full steam ahead. This N.W.A. movie, it’s still my dream. That’s what I’ve been dying to make.”

As for his current project, Ice Cube is on tour with a bill being dubbed as Kings of the Mic, featuring Public Enemy, LL Cool J and De La Soul.

He isn’t shy about revealing who his favorite emcee on the tour is. That’s because it’s his favorite rapper of all-time; Public Enemy’s Chuck D.

“It’s like being on tour with your big brother,” Cube says. “He’s just one of those dudes who — pound for pound, lyric for lyric — has done the most out of any emcee, because he ain’t just rapping no bulls—. … It’s something real. And even when rapping about bulls— is popular, I mean he still stick to what he do. That’s great. For artists like myself, and him being one of my peers and me really looking up to Chuck, it’s good that he sticks to the script.”

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After taking some time off between Rogue Wave records, Zach Schwartz (aka Zach Rogue) and company are back on tour supporting their recent LP “Nightingale Floors,” their fifth full-length, and first on Vagrant Records.

“I needed a break in general, you know — from everything,” says Schwartz. “Just being on the road with ‘Permalight’ — to play those songs live was not easy to do and it didn’t seem to sound like us. I didn’t like the trajectory of where we were going live and I had to take some time away and get some perspective. I did this band called Release the Sunbird and I also scored a TV show for HBO [“On Freddie Roach”]. I think both of those experiences are what led me to make ‘Nightingale Floors’.”

“Permalight”, Rogue Wave’s 2010 release was seen by many to be a marked departure from the band’s signature sound — including Schwartz, himself.

“Everything is a reaction to something else,” he says. “We started to do ‘Permalight’ and I had all of these physical problems where I couldn’t move my body and I had lost feeling in my hand, so I felt that I wasn’t able to do any playing. At the time I wanted to make really rhythmic dance-beat music because I was excited to just be playing again. The problem is we are not really a dancey band. It’s great, but it’s not great for us. We’re supposed to be a little more loose — that’s our sound — and it ebbs and flows. We don’t have perfection; we have expression. It was an experiment and I’m glad we did it, but I think ‘Nightingale Floors’ is much closer to how we play.”

Schwartz says his hand hasn’t totally healed, but he’s feeling better.

“I try and bandage it. It’s not as bad as it was, which was great. There’s some things; my hand is still numb, but I’ve learned to deal with that and I’m not bedridden. Well, not yet,” he says.

Together with longtime collaborator, Pat Spurgeon, Rogue Wave are back to that summertime sound that has come to define the band’s catalogue. But look deeper and you’ll realize that the poppy hooks and inherent hopefulness that ease into their breezy melodic instrumentation often mask the melancholy of the lyrics that lurk underneath their swooning harmonies. No strangers to bad luck and tragedy, besides his own personal health problems, Rogue lost his friend and former bassist Evan Farrell in complications following a house fire, and Spurgeon almost lost his life from kidney failure.

“These are songs about letting go, of the past and trying to have control over things that you can never, ever control,” says Schwartz. “You can’t control the fact that you’re going to die. Everyone you know is going to, and all you can do is just accept it and really live. Maybe I was crying in my whiskey when I was writing it, but maybe it ultimately ended up different than that. With music, there’s always a duality of what’s being said and how it’s being said. You can hear a sad and brutally honest song, but it can make you ironically feel good. You can feel happy through someone’s misery. If you feel that these songs sound happy, I’ll tell you you’re crazy because I wasn’t talking about happiness. But that’s why music is interesting. That’s why people like music and that’s why we play music.”

On the core of the band
“It’s always about me and Pat, ever since we met. Either we’re on parallel [levels] or if I’m doing a vocal track he’s on some weird instrument tracking onto his computer or 4-track machine. We pull all the tracks together we like and mix them up… like salad. We’re a salad band. A quilty salady band.”

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Veteran British rock bands Motorhead and Black Sabbath were crowned the kings of heavy metal on Monday, winning the top accolades at the UK’s top metal music awards, the Metal Hammer Golden Gods.

Motorhead, best known for their 1980 hit “Ace of Spades,” received the Golden Gods awards at the 11th annual ceremony for making a significant contribution to the rock and heavy metal industry over nearly four decades.

Black Sabbath won the award for best album for “13″ which soared to No. 1 in the British charts on Sunday, giving the band their first No. 1 album in nearly 43 years, which is a record interval between chart-toppers.

“I’m in shock!” Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne told the Official Charts Company. “The success of this album has blown me off my feet. We’ve never had a record climb the charts so fast.”

The band, scheduled to begin a U.S. tour this summer followed by concerts in South America and Europe later in the year, also won the award for best UK band.

“From honoring the lords of our world — Black Sabbath — and the crown princes of rock ‘n’ roll — Motorhead — as well as today’s most cutting-edge acts, there’s simply no other event like it,” said Alexander Milas, editor of Metal Hammer magazine that organizes the annual awards.

Motorhead frontman Lemmy, 67, who is the sole constant member of the band set up in 1975, received the Golden Gods award from Duff McKagan.

The best new band award went to Bleed From Within, while the best international band was named as Stone Sour, from Des Moines, Iowa.

French metal band Gojira, previously known as Godzilla, won the award for best live band while the best song prize went to the American rock band Coheed and Cambria for “Dark Side Of Me.”

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Those Carters sure know how to create a buzz.

After posting a cryptic image of the signature Roca-A-Fella chain and a Samsung Galaxy 4 phone displaying the message, “NBA Finals Game Five. Tune In Turn Up The Volume” on his Life + Times website, Jay-Z announced the release of his 12th studio album, “Magna Carta Holy Grail,” on July 4.

Aside from its rapidly approaching release date, what’s interesting about the album is that it has already gone platinum. Samsung reportedly partnered with the hip-hop icon for a $20 million deal and has paid him $5 million for the first million copies of the “Magna Carta” album. The first million Samsung Galaxy users, including those with the S III, S 4 and Note II, will be able to download the album days before its actual release.

In the promotion video, which aired June 16 at 9:15 p.m. EST, Jay-Z explained his expectations for the partnership.

“It’s this duality of how do you navigate your way through this whole thing … through success, through failures, through all of this, and remain yourself.”

Keep your eyes open for super producers Pharrell Williams, Swizz Beatz, Timbaland and Rick Rubin, who are featured in the video working on the album. The promotion also directed viewers to the MagnaCartaHolyGrail.com site, which details the project, defining it as, “revolutionary.”

“Magna Carta Holy Grail” will be Jay-Z’s first solo studio album since 2009’s “The Blueprint 3.”

Follow Courtney M. Fowler on Twitter @Court_Nation.

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And this emotional video reveals just what it meant to the musicians as they gave a last public performance in Greece last week.

Campaigners say the orchestra can still be saved by public pressure and have urged all music lovers to write to the country’s ministry of culture urging a rethink of the decision to withdraw state funding.

Other leading Greek national institutions have been badly hit. Also earlier this month the country’s main state broadcasting service, the Hellenic Broadcasting Company, was faced with closure.

Already, Greece has responded to calls for austerity by selling off some of the nation’s top cultural and historical sites, including the site of the Colossus of Rhodes and stretches of pristine Aegean beaches to Qatari millionaires.

In this video, the national orchestra plays “Nimrod” by the English composer Edward Elgar, widely regarded as one of the most moving pieces of orchestral music ever written.

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The British rock band Black Sabbath’s album “13!” has given them a first British No. 1 album in nearly 43 years, a record interval between chart-toppers, the Official Charts Company said.

Black Sabbath were last at the top of the U.K. chart with their second album, “Paranoid.”

“I’m in shock!” Black Sabbath front man Ozzy Osbourne told the Official Charts Company. “The success of this album has blown me off my feet. We’ve never had a record climb the charts so fast.”

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With the members constantly working on a multitude of projects, it’s no wonder that it took so long for Transplants to release new material. To say that drummer Travis Barker, guitarist Tim Armstrong and singer Rob Aston have kept themselves busy since disbanding in 2006 is an understatement. After eight years, the trio is back with a new album, “In a Warzone,” which still blends punk rock with hip-hop, like on previous releases, but this time the focus is more on punk, says Aston. “We’ve all grown up listening to different types of music, but punk rock has always been the backbone for all of us,” he says. “I personally think that’s the best type of music we make together.”

To someone who has never listened to you before, how would you describe Transplants?

If you listen to either our first or second album, it’s a little harder to describe because there’s so much going on. There are punk rock elements, hip-hop elements, dub elements … all kinds of stuff going on. But I always tell people that we’re a punk rock band. We do what we want, and that’s punk rock.

Why did the three of you decide to produce the album yourselves this time around?

We figured that nobody knows the band better than we do. Me, Travis and Tim write all the music and lyrics ourselves. Plus, we were already doing it at Travis’ studio anyways, so it just made sense. It’s us.

Were scheduling conflicts between the three of you the main reason why it took so long to make this album?

We took a break after Warped Tour in 2005, but I guess we worked on the new album for about three years before we turned it in. Obviously it wasn’t three years straight because everyone’s busy with other projects. So we recorded when we could and we didn’t want to rush this album or turn in something half-assed. When you’re gone for a long time, you can’t come back with just anything. We had to give it our best, and that’s what we did. I think it’s our best work by far.

Is there any pressure to recreate the success that came with your last album, “Haunted Cities,” which came in at No. 28 on the Billboard 200?

We broke up shortly after “Haunted Cities” was released, so there really wasn’t a push to promote the album. It makes you wonder about what could’ve happened, you know? But at the same time, if we kept working, I don’t know what would’ve happened with the band. I don’t know if we’d still be together today, and I don’t know if “In A Warzone” would sound how it does. Maybe it’s a good thing we had that break.

Are there any guest vocalists on the new album worth mentioning?

This time around we only put a few guests on the album. We have Paul Wall on one song, and Bun B and Equipto on another. But that’s it, just three rappers. It’s kind of funny that this is a punk rock album, but the guests we have are rappers. But that’s true to Transplants form. We’ve always put people on our albums that you normally wouldn’t think would be on an album like ours.

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The Rolling Stones know they’re old, and they know you’re old too. During the first few songs on Wednesday, the video screen behind the band showed the faces of fans in the audience at the TD Garden, juxtaposed with montages of screaming teenagers from when the band was at the height of cultural relevance. The live feed didn’t capture such youthful frenzy, but the Fifty and Counting tour is not about pretending that the audience or the band members — most of whom are in their late 60s — are still young. It’s not about denying the passing of time, but celebrating what the band did in that time. Accordingly, the set was mostly comprised of songs that defined those times.

The band had difficulty getting warmed up, after entering the tongue-shaped stage through the giant set of lips that has been the band’s logo for at least 40 of those 50 years.

“It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It)” was downright bad, sounding like neither rock ‘n’ roll, nor something anybody would really like. The band didn’t come in at the right time, Mick Jagger appeared thrown, and they never found their groove throughout that song.

But when even “the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band” can mess up a song they’ve been playing for 30 years, that actually is kind of rock ‘n’ roll.

And by the time they launched into their fourth song, “Gimme Shelter,” it was intense enough to make anybody in the audience almost feel like this was the poignant music of the present. Special accolades also go to backing singer Lisa Fischer, whose contribution to that song helped make it fresh. It’s ironic that she is starting to achieve some fame for her role with the Stones and in the new film “20 Feet from Stardom,” in which she explains that she actually prefers being a background player than a star. She is clearly worthy.

From that song on, the band members achieved balance, with the intricate parts of the songs fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle, and occasionally reached transcendence. The end of “Tumbling Dice,” for instance, was sublime. And Keith Richards’ greatest skill is still finding the unexpected pockets of rhythm and knowing when not to play.

“You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” which featured the Boston University Marsh Chapel Choir, was a faithful rendering of the original; but it actually felt like Mick Jagger was sincere in his delivery of words he must have sung millions of times before. It’s also worth noting that Jagger’s voice sounded as vibrant on Wednesday night as it ever has on live recordings, and his dancing could have worn out many a rocker one quarter of his age.

Watching Charlie Watts play drums will never not be a thrill, and Darryl Jones’ extended bass treatment of “Emotional Rescue” was a testimony that of all the rock bands who dabbled in disco in the 1970s, the Stones did it the best.

The Stones were joined by a handful of special guests, most notably guitarist Mick Taylor, who played on what were arguably the Stones’ best albums and quit in the early 1970s. Taylor came out for a few of the numbers he is best known for contributing to, but his longtime replacement, Ronnie Wood, never left the stage.

Where the band were discovering new truths within “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” the final two songs of the evening, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Satisfaction” felt a little rushed. But it almost didn’t matter, because with the way that the Fifty and Counting setlist was paced by the time they’re playing these songs, you’re just marveling that while you have heard these songs so much in your life that there’s little room to unearth previously hidden meaning, it is still exciting to realize that on that stage are many of the people who first played these songs that set the standard for what rock ‘n’ roll was and still is.

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They first gained fame on YouTube, dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”. Now, the orange-uniformed men at a central Philippine jail make their big screen debut in a movie about prison reforms.

The 98-minute movie, “Dance of the Steel Bars”, was shot at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, with 750 prisoners forming the backdrop to a story about an American wrongly accused of murder and the bond he forms with a fellow inmate with a talent for dance.

“This film talks about redemption, about brotherhood,” Cesar Apolinario, a television journalist and the film’s co-director, told Reuters. “I did not only see them as brilliant dancers, but they are actually brilliant actors.”

The plot revolves around the real-life reforms carried out in the Cebu jail, where a security adviser introduced daily dance routines in 2007 to instill discipline and camaraderie.

The film was screened inside the Cebu jail on June 7.

“I’m thrilled to see it. And my family will be happy to see the film,” said one of the inmates, Macario Sambarihan.

The fast-paced movie features fight scenes portraying gang wars, common in crowded Philippine prisons, juxtaposed with dance sequences in the jail courtyard familiar to millions who have viewed the inmates’ Michael Jackson tributes.

“We did not simplify the steps for them,” said Los Angeles-based dancer Cindera Che, who choreographed four dance sequences. “We want them to rise up, to our level. And they did.”

The producers are betting on the inmates’ Internet fame for the project’s commercial success. The prisoners’ dance on YouTube has been viewed by more than 40 million people, said Stu Higton, executive producer of Dubai-based Portfolio Films International.

“Dance of the Steel Bars” opened in the Philippines on Wednesday and will be distributed in Asia, the Middle East and the United States.

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We just live in it. On the eve of his new album, “Yeezus,” we look at the rapper’s awesome awesomeness.

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Darlene Love may not be a household name, but you’d know her if you heard her. As a member of the Blossoms, she recorded background vocals for many key Phil Spector songs in the ‘60s. Spector even put her front and center on “He’s a Rebel” and “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” but credited the Crystals instead. The new documentary “Twenty Feet From Stardom” highlights those, like Love, Merry Clayton and Lisa Fischer, who made a living singing backup. Today, Love, boisterous even in her 70s, enjoys a solo career singing her old songs, and in 2010 was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She’s also a Broadway staple who played Danny Glover’s wife in all four “Lethal Weapon” films.

Phil Spector wouldn’t tell people you and the other Blossoms were black. What was the reaction when the public found out?
Most disc jockeys knew that we were black. But as far as the public knew, they didn’t know what color we were. They didn’t care. They just loved the sound. As far as sessions go, no one really cared, because there were a lot of black musicians. People were telling us we were really doing something there, we were paving the way. It didn’t feel like it at the time. And now it’s like yeah, it’s paying off.

You started in gospel. Was it strange using that sound for secular music?
No, not really, we just took what we did from the gospel world to the secular world. My father was a minister. We sang in the choir, at his church, my brothers and sisters. That’s where we learned to sing harmony. We were really blessed because when I heard a song I knew what the alto part was. When you sing in a choir you sing so many different kinds of songs. It’s not one type of songs. We sang spirituals, we sang African songs. At one point we sang with Gene Autry. [laughs] And they had no idea we were black! I’m sure they thought we were white singers. We sang with Gene Autry on one of his Christmas albums. It was a lot of different kinds of voices. Nobody taught us how to sing country and western. We were able to change our sound which was really a gift.

What was Phil Spector like in the early days?
Actually, he was a great guy when we first met him! He was very calm and hadn’t lost it yet. [laughs] He came from New York to California, and the musicians, they were already great in their own right. He came to us kind of humble. He always had on a suit and tie. And we thought that was weird because nobody came to a session dressed up. He was very short, so he used to wear those Spanish shoes with the big heels, that the English people wore in the ‘60s. It was a real heel, like the heels that the matadors wear. He was so short.

What were his reasons for not crediting you with “He’s a Rebel” and others?
He had recorded with the Crystals in New York, but he didn’t necessarily want that same sound. But he wanted to use their name because they already had a thing going on. It was easier to break a new reord with them than with me. Phil didn’t have as many groups as Motown had. He only had three or four gropus, and he was interchanging all of them. Motown was trying to make stars. Phil spector was trying to be a star. That’s the difference.

At what point did he officially start going crazy?
It was later on in his career, after he went to London and got hooked up with the Beatles and the Stones. That’s when he started saying “I’m the producer of this record, everyone else I just use as an instrument.” Matter of fact, that’s what he said — that I’m just like any other instrument. I became an instrument and he became the ringleader. Like in a circus, cracking the whip. That’s when it started getting a little out of hand.

You later made one of his songs, “River Deep Mountain High,” which he originally recorded with Tina Turner, one of your staples.
Phil had this great song, and we listened to it. I thought it was going to be my song, because he taught it to me. The girls came in, and we rehearsed it. And we were going to go in the session and record it. And this is when he started doing these things. I did not know I was not going to be the lead on that record until Tina Turner walked into the session. That’s when I found out. [laughs] That’s what “Twenty Feet from Stardom” is about — how they did those kinds of things.

Have you talked to Tina Turner about reclaiming that song as your own?
No, no. I haven’t talked to her in years. In fact, I haven’t seen or talked to her since she left Ike. Because she was doing her own thing and trying to rebuild her career at that time. I was so happy for her when she had her big solo hit — “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” The rest is history.

I’m imagining there’s more comradery than competition with background singers.
It’s like a sisterhood. We were always happy when someone made it. Because most background singers do not aspire to be solo artists. Very rarely. The one that sticks out that most was Luther Vandross, because he became a superstar. I don’t even think Luther started out wanting to be a solo artist. He loved being a background singer. It was part of our lives to create. That’s what we were doing, we were creating different sounds. Producers were depending on different background singers. They’d put the song on, and it was just a bare record. They’d ask us, “What do you hear here? Should we do something here?” We were creating, and no one really understands that until hey see this movie.

You’ve said you didn’t find real success until you moved to New York. Typically people don’t find success till they move to the other coast.
In California, people only goes out on the weekends. That means Friday, maybe Saturday. Sunday, they got to go to work Monday. But moving to New York was a great thing for me, because people in New York go out every night of the week. They want to see somebody.

After you came back in the 1980s, you started doing acting, including in the “Lethal Weapon” films. How did that come about?
I was working in New York at The Bottom Line, and a casting director was a fan. He didn’t come to see me to get me into the movie, he just saw me as a fan. The day after he saw me he called my office and said there was a movie coming out, to see if I would be interested in being in a movie with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. And I said sure. [laughs] I got a whole new life after I moved to New York. I became a Broadway star, then I became a movie star. It was wonderful. I think everyone thought I was a figment of Phil Spector’s imagination. [laughs] People don’t know, on those records, that’s really me.

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You guys remember Steve Jobs right? That guy who dropped out of college and then went on to helm Apple (computer, heard of them?) and essentially change technology as we know it? Yeah, that guy. Well, according to the sort of bat sh*t crazy, self aggrandizing — and quintessential Kanye — New York Times interview that is currently blowing up the Internet, Kanye West is sort of like that guy. Except, you know, more important. You can all just thank Yeezus that dudes like Steve Jobs were around to pave the way for even radder and better guys like Kanye West. Also in that interview: Kanye just DGAF about album sales or winning awards or what any of ya’ll think about him. Yes, yes, noted. But what was it that true OG Shakespeare once said? Something about the lady doth protesting too much?

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ButThat is, after he gets to know if the drummers have brought their actual drum kits to his show or if they have rented them.

In this two-minute compilation, we see Letterman giving compliments to the drummers for the Black Keys, The Strokes, St. Vincent and the Silversun Pickups among others. He loves their drums! AND he is very interested in learning if these drummers’ taste in drums is serious enough that they bought them and didn’t just rent them for television.

Now that this compilation exists, how long is it until Drum Magazine taps Letterman for a Q&A? And how long until one of these artists invites Letterman to sit in with the band on one of their “beautiful” kits?

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British folk-rockers Mumford & Sons have canceled three sold-out concerts in the United States this week after announcing on Tuesday that bassist Ted Dwane needed emergency surgery for a blood clot on the brain.

The band, which won Album of the Year for “Babel” at the Grammy awards in February and the British Group award at the BRIT awards, said Dwane had felt unwell for a few days and was taken to hospital on Monday for emergency treatment.

“The scans revealed a blood clot on the surface of his brain that requires an operation,” the band said in a statement on its website.

“Ted is receiving excellent care and we are being assured that he will recover quickly from surgery.”

Dwane plays bass, drums, guitar and sings with the four-member band that formed in 2007.

The band said it was cancelling concerts in Dallas on Tuesday, Woodlands on Wednesday and New Orleans on Thursday, and would reschedule these dates when possible.

The band said it had no plans to cancel or postpone any other appearances on its current “Summer Stampede” tour of North America that started in Calgary on May 21. The next performance is scheduled for the Bonnaroo festival in Manchester, Tennessee, on June 15.

Mumford & Sons is due to perform at the UK’s biggest musical festival, Glastonbury, on June 30.

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Cher will appear on the season finale of the singing competition series “The Voice” on June 18, making her first live TV performance in more than 10 years, NBC said on Monday.

The singer and actress, who has won an Oscar as well as Grammy and Emmy awards, will perform “Woman’s World,” a new single from her album of the same name which is to be released in September, her first in 12 years.

Cher’s record-breaking 1998 single “Believe” reached No. 1 worldwide and sold more than 20 million copies, and more recently she has focused on touring, including the 2003-2005 “Living Proof” tour which totaled more than 300 shows.

The 67-year-old singer and best actress Academy Award winner for “Moonstruck” has appeared on several television talk shows, documentaries and award shows, but she last performed on television on the 2002 VH1 Divas Las Vegas special.

“The Voice,” which competes against rival broadcaster Fox’s singing contests “American Idol” and “The X Factor,” averages about 14 million viewers over its two weekly shows. It will finish its current season on June 18.

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If there’s one thing everyone who attended Governors Ball 2013 keeps talking about is the mud. Yes, it was unpleasant. Yes, it was disgusting and I probably ruined my motorcycle boots, but at the end of the day it was a music festival and we were there for the bands. (For those of you that wore white Keds – and there were far too many of you – our question is, why?)

On the last day of the festival, the sun was shining bright and the pretty young things were out on Randall’s Island. Seriously though, everyone there seemed to be 20 years old, with tiny, cropped jean shorts and a flower wreath in their hair. Everyone looked like they belonged in a Free People ad. Anyway, the mud situation had significantly improved from the day before and the lineup is what music lovers’ dreams are made of.

Unlike previous years Gov Ball 2013 had four stages with overlapping sets. This forced us to choose between bands. Some of the overlapping shows on Sunday were unfair. How can one possibly choose between HAIM and The Vaccines or between Beirut and Yeasayer? Getting from one stage to the next was also a struggle. Due to the deep mud, walking across Randall’s Island took a lot longer than normally would.

Carefully analyzing the schedule it soon became clear that most of the shows this reporter wanted to see were at the main Gov Ball Stage and the SKYY Vodka Tent.

Grizzly Bear
Credit: Mary Ann Georgantopoulos/Metro

Sunday was full of ups and downs (and we’re not talking about the times we almost fell in the mud). Bands I expected to blow my mind, were average – this probably has a lot to do with the problematic sound at the You’re Doing Great and Honda stages. It was difficult to stick through the Beirut concert, even though they are normally fantastic live.

Highlights of the day include British rockers Foals who played on the main Gov Ball stage. Despite younglings starting a mosh pit during the show, Bloc Party also put on one of the better shows of the day.

Bloc Party
Credit: Mary Ann Georgantopoulos/Metro

By 9 p.m. the crowd rushed the Gov Ball Stage in anticipation of the one and only Kanye West. Yeezus took the stage fashionably late and performed classics such as “Power,” which was quite, well, powerful, and the crowd-favorite “Heartless.” ‘Ye also teased more of his new album, which is set to drop on June 18. He played several new tracks including “Black Skinhead.”

True to his routine, Kanye also took a moment to address the crowd in one of his “rants.”

Kanye told the crowd he doesn’t care for fancy promotion of his new album and that “we just made some real music.

“When I listen to radio, that ain’t where I wanna be no more. Ad honestly, at this point I can give a f*** about selling a million records, as long as I put out an album y’all can rock to all summer.”

Given last night’s performance, it seems like we’ll be doing just that.

Follow Mary Ann Georgantopoulos on Twitter @marygeorgant

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Forty-three years ago Black Sabbath released their debut self-titled album, a collection of songs inspired by occult themes and powered by heavy-metal guitar riffs.

Now, three of the original band members — singer Ozzy Osbourne, guitarist Tony Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler — and drummer Brad Wilk, of Rage Against the Machine, are releasing a new album, “13,” and planning to tour the world to promote it.

“I never thought we’d still be going strong in 2013,” said Osbourne, whose well-publicized battles with drug and alcohol addiction and solo career led to friction with other members of Black Sabbath. “But it’s great to be back together again.”

“13,” the original band’s first studio album since 1978, is being released this week. A tour is scheduled to begin this summer in the United States followed by concerts in South America and Europe later in the year.

Osbourne said the band had tried to get back together in 2001 but nothing jelled.

This time the music flowed.

Osbourne said Iommi, who is being treated for lymphoma that was diagnosed a year ago, had great riffs and the band narrowed them down to 10 tracks.

“I think working on this album helped Tony take his mind off his illness, but he never talks about it,” Osbourne explained in an interview. “And no matter what we have to complain about, it’s nothing compared to that.”

After the band members agreed on the songs, they brought in record producer Rick Rubin to help shape the material.

Songs like “Damaged Soul,” “End of the Beginning” and the first single, “God Is Dead?” fit into the band’s canon, but others, like the jazzy “Zeitgeist,” might confound some fans.

“It was just a warm-up jam originally,” said Butler, “but Rick thought it was great, so it ended up on the album.”

Butler and Osbourne fight against the notion that Black Sabbath typifies the heavy metal sound.

“I’ve never been able to get my head around the word ‘heavy-metal,’” said Osbourne, adding that the 1970s were better for him than the 1980s. “And I kind of missed the ’90s you know — I must have been in a cocaine haze, because I can’t remember the ’90s at all.”

Osbourne said the best thing now is that the band members are alive and together and “it is a lot more fun being sober and enjoying your fellow workers.”

Over the past decade Osbourne carved out a niche on television, appearing with his family in a reality TV show that ran from 2002 until 2005. They also starred in the 2011 documentary “God Bless Ozzy Osbourne.”

Despite being together so long, Butler said the band is attracting younger fans.

“We’ve gotten older but the audience has stayed the same,” he explained, “and then you get like a few people at the back that are our age and you see all the gray hair glinting.”

For Osbourne touring now is better than it has ever been.

“It’s all right until I have voice troubles and it takes me a couple of gigs to get over the fact that I’ve been the leader of my own band for 35 years or so and that I have to step back and be a band member. It’s just getting used to it and it has worked out great in the end.”

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To those hardy enough to trek out to Randall’s Island in the torrential downpour on Friday, for Day #1 of this year’s Governors Ball, we salute you.

In contrast with 2012′s Ball, for which temperatures spiked in the 90s and the sun shone almost relentlessly, the conditions out on the island for this year’s three-day-long fest (for which they added an extra day and two stages) were, well, inclement. OK, they were downright horrible. Those (this reporter included) who were foolish enough to wear flip-flops (or any other footwear less substantial than galoshes or knee-high rubber boots) regretted it seconds after stepping off the ferry into mid-calf-high slop on Saturday afternoon.

After a full day and night of rain, with people kicking up the grounds, Randall’s Island was torn up. (In retrospect, they probably should have canceled Friday altogether, to benefit the rest of the weekend.) Where once there was grass, now were acres of mud — so deep and viscous that navigating from stage to stage became a treacherous safari, the only goal of which was to remain upright and not pitch face first in the muck. Muck that, after a full day of foot traffic and sun exposure, began to smell strongly of cow dung — as did all the people standing around in it.

But festival-goers are resilient sorts and, soon enough, shoes were abandoned (they’ll be mining footwear out of the soil on that island for months to come), as were any pretenses of staying clean. Let’s get weird, tweeted Governors Ball on more than one occasion — and so we did.

Those without boots soon went barefoot

Girls with garlands of flowers traipsed by, faces streaked with neon paint from a free face painting booth and swatches of mud like war paint. It was us versus Mother Nature and, with ten straight hours of music the prize to be won, everyone came ready for a throw-down.

Four stages and overlapping sets (in comparison to past years, when no sets overlapped and people had ample time to get from one stage to the other) meant that attendees were required to choose the bands they wanted to catch carefully — and lay out an attack plan for getting to those respective stages.

Conveniently, Governors Ball had an app for which you could do both, that let you know where your shows were at, and when. Not conveniently, the crowds flooding the island meant that cell service was limited if not nonexistent, so most of us ended up fending for ourselves. After a particularly arduous slog from Japandroids at the “Gov Ball NYC Stage” on one end of the island to see Alt-J (glad to have caught them, though, the geeky British indie-rockers are great live) at the “HondaStage” on the other, I decided to stick with shows on the “Gov Ball NYC” and “Skyy Vodka Tent” stages, both positioned on the slightly-less soggy part of the park. That said, the acoustics at “Gov Ball” (where all the headliners played) were far better than the the other stages, particularly “Honda,” at which loud conversations consistently overshadowed the music. My companions and I actually abandoned the Lumineers’ Sunday show at that stage, because the drunken chatter around us drowned out almost all of their set. Bummer.

Japandroids

Japandroids were dynamic and hyped, amping up the crowd through chummy banter and repeatedly noting how excited they were to be on the same stage that Guns N’ Roses would play a few hours later (as Saturday’s headliners opposite Nas, an odd match-up if ever there was one). This, perhaps, as a conciliatory nod to the backlash that followed the initial announcement that G&R were headlining. (Some people went as far as to start an online petition to get Axl and the gang kicked off the bill.)

The Canadian duo blazed through “Celebration Rock,” kicking off with “Fire’s Highway” and holding out on fan favorite “House That Heaven Built” until the near-end of their roughly 45-minute-long set. “We are Guns n’ Roses from Los Angeles,  California,” they shouted before one of their last songs — perhaps a nod to those in attendance who didn’t give a damn about the old heads on the bill — to which the crowd roared their approval.

As the day wore on and the crowd got drunker, navigating the increasingly sloppy terrain got, well, sloppier. I witnessed more than one person, staggering zombie-like through the mud, take a spill, arms pinwheeling helplessly. Luckily, most of those still standing were kind enough to help haul a fallen comrade up out of the ooze.

Kings of Leon’s Friday night headlining set was canceled late Friday — to the dismay and outrage of those who’d braved the weather to make it there — but they showed up for an early evening Saturday set on the “Gov Ball NYC” stage. To the delight of the crowd, and this writer, they played heavily from their back catalog, mixing old fan favorites like “Taper Jean Girl” and “Molly’s Chambers”  in among more recent jams, including a new song from their forthcoming album. KoL, though increasingly rumored to be becoming prima donnas (remember when that bird crapped all over their show?), are fantastic live, and they brought no drama to this festival. Instead, they seemed eager to please, commending the crowd for sticking it out in the mud and rewarding us with exactly what we wanted to hear.

Other highlights from the day included Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros’ mid-afternoon set — from what I hear. I stuck close to home base to catch F*cked Up’s show in the Skyy Vodka Tent, which — true to form — was like a sonic boot to the face. In a totally awesome way. The only “hardcore” band on a hip-hop and indie-centric bill, their raging set contrasted boldly with what I’m told was a jubilantly high energy showing from the Zeros.

Some people pooped out earlier than others…

By 9:30 pm, after hours spent slogging through the mud and putting back the massive 24-ounce oil cans of Fosters that were the weekend’s brew of choice, I was frankly too knackered to make it to either of the competing stages. Instead, I kicked back on a blanket we’d laid out under an overhang of trees across from the Skyy tent. From where I sat in the dark, I could clearly make out the strains of “Welcome to the Jungle” as Guns n’ Roses (whom I had high bets on not showing up) took the stage. And, well shoot, these dudes still have it. They ran through the big hits in quick succession — “Paradise City,” a rather nostalgia-inducing “November Rain” — to the crowd’s evident delight. “They sound exactly the same,” marveled a girl to her companion, from where they sat propped against the foot of a tree. Proud of you, Axl, bro. Also, they brought pyrotechnics. From where I half-sat, half-lay, nursing the last of my giant can of Fosters, I had a prime view of fireworks lighting up the night sky above the stage. A rather spectacular end to a rather unusual day.

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The Rolling Stones’ Fifty and Counting tour visits Boston for two nights this week. Since this could be the last time, we thought we’d get rock writer Stephen Davis to chronicle the band’s history with the Hub.

It started in 1964, when legendary Boston rock jock Arnie “Woo Woo” Ginsburg played Stones singles like “Tell Me” over radio powerhouse WMEX (1590 on the AM dial), one of the first stations in America to pick up on “England’s Newest Hitmakers” in the wake of the Beatles.

Summer 1966: The surging Stones, sparked by founding guitarist Brian Jones, arrived in nearby Lynn, Mass., to play a concert at the Manning Bowl. A riot started halfway into the first song (“Not Fade Away”) as teens charged the stage. The band fled amidst a fog of tear gas and flying chairs, and barely made it to the limos as the cops tried to beat back the riot.

In 1969, the Stones returned to Boston with Mick Jagger playing Lucifer, and new guitarist Mick Taylor. Now they were the self-proclaimed “Greatest Rock & Roll Band in the World,” and they proved it in Boston Garden with razor-sharp new songs like “Midnight Rambler” and “Sympathy for the Devil.” Some say the Devil called in the loan a few months later in California, when fans died or were killed at the notorious free concert at Altamont.

In 1972, The Stones returned to the Boston Garden for two nights with horns, mirrored spotlights, and a new act fashioned from Exile on Main Street. On opening night, the band’s plane landed in Providence because smoke from a race riot in Boston obscured Logan airport. In Providence Keith Richard was arrested for punching a news photographer as 18,000 restless Stones fans were entertained by opening act Stevie Wonder. While officials scrambled to spring Keith from jail, Boston mayor Kevin White famously took Boston Garden’s stage. He asked for quiet, and told the fans, “My city is in flames.” He said he was withdrawing the police guarding the concert to help contain the riot, and asked for good behavior from the Boston fans. That night the Stones arrived in Boston five hours late, but they played well, and the exhausted fans left quietly, with no incidents reported.

Summer 1975: The Stones returned to the Garden with new guitarist Ron Wood and Billy Preston in the band. They played the best rock show this writer ever witnessed, a mesmerizing display that climaxed during “Starf—er” (Ok, “Star Star”) when Mick Jagger mounted a 60-foot inflatable penis that appeared from a trap door and rode it around the stage in cosmic abandon.

The Rolling Stones skipped Boston on their 1978 and 1981 American tours, but the band rehearsed for the latter at Longview Farm studio in central Massachusetts, and opened the ’81 tour with a scorching set at Sir Morgan’s Cove, a dive bar in nearby Worcester. Capacity was about 150. No one who was there ever forgot it.

The Stones were feuding during most of the 1980s, but when they returned to Boston with their Steel Wheels tour in October 1989, they came in red hot. The concert at the Patriots’ Sullivan Stadium in Foxborough was the first of the band’s game-changing extravaganzas, with giant Jumbotron screens projecting images of the 15 musicians on stage to sold-out crowds numbering in the tens of thousands.

In 1994, with the Voodoo Lounge tour, again at Sullivan Stadium, the Stones began a long run of opening their American tours in Boston. The band would spend a month with their families at the Four Seasons Hotel on Boylston Street, while they rehearsed and prepared the intricate stage effects and lighting cues for their big stadium shows. Drummer Charlie Watts was a regular at Cambridge jazz clubs Scullers and the Regatta Bar.

And so on:

The 1997 Bridges to Babylon tour, with a rip-roaring oldies set played in the middle of re-named Foxboro Stadium;

The 1999 No Security tour at the Fleet Center, which replaced Boston Garden, demolished in 1998;

The 2002 Forty Licks tour, which the Stones opened at the (tiny) Orpheum Theatre. Good luck getting in. (I didn’t). Bootleg recordings reveal a killer version of the O’Jays’ “Love Train;”

Fenway Park, 2005. The Stones constructed two four-storey corporate VIP condos, for ultra high-roller fans, around and above the stage in center field. Excess all areas.

The Rolling Stones last appeared in Boston (twice) during the Bigger Bang tour in 2006. In January they played TD Banknorth Garden. On sale, with the usual swag, were nine varieties of Rolling Stone labeled wines. In September, they sold out Gillette Stadium, which replaced Foxboro.

This week the Rolling Stones are back in Boston, this time (hopefully) rocking what is now called TD Garden. Could this be the last time?

Stephen Davis is the author of many bestselling music biographies, including “Old Gods Almost Dead: The Rolling Stones Saga” (Doubleday, 2001).

The Rolling Stones
Wednesday and Friday
TD Garden
100 Legends Way, Boston
$148-$598, 800-745-3000
www.ticketmaster.com

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Iggy Azalea is a leggy Australian blonde bombshell — not exactly the type of person you’d expect to see as the up-and-coming face of hip-hop.

But she’s no fad. The 22-year-old initially tempted hip-hop kids with smutty lyrics like “taste my Skittles” in a 2011 viral hit and followed up on her success in 2012 by being the first female to make hip-hop magazine XXL’s Freshman Class (a big deal in the industry). You may already have picked up that Azalea — real name Amethyst Kelly — is no prude, with an ease for chatting about oral sex, “vagina-ry costumes” and dropping many f-bombs in the process. It’s refreshingly charming rather than trashy, although perhaps parents wouldn’t approve of the potty mouth.

You’ve got an interesting look. What’s the thinking behind it and what are your influences?

I like bold prints and fun things like cartoons and movie characters: “Grease,” Looney Tunes, “Space Jam,” that kind of thing. When it comes to makeup, I have to have a full beat all the time – I call it “drag natural.” It’s where you have as much makeup as a drag queen but you try to make it look natural.

Are you insecure?

No, I just think why not look airbrushed? Things can always be better.

That’s a good point. F— it, why not?

[Laughs uproariously] Before I go on stage wearing open-toe shoes, I will put concealer on my toes – I’m psycho.

Why did you start rapping?

I think I just liked the aggressiveness of it and I liked that they kind of seemed to be the rebels of all the styles of music. I thought artists like Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliott, 2Pac, Ludacris and Outkast were really cool. I really liked song lyrics and I wanted to know them all. I find it annoying when song lyrics – including my own – are wrong online.

Are you a perfectionist?

Yeah, I’m meticulous.

How many times do you go over your lyrics? OCD levels?

OCD. It’ll take me a few days to even write a song and I listen to it back and there’ll be changes on my latest album – but I haven’t had time to get in the studio yet.

You use a lot of sexually charged language in tracks like “Two Times” and “Work.” Were you the rude kid at school who taught all the other kids about sex?

I was – yeah. I had a club in sixth grade, which was like a rude poetry club. I put out flyers and of course I had my contact information on this, and it found its way back to the teacher and I remember getting called to the principal’s office for it.

Can you remember any of the poetry?

I just remember one line, which was about this fat girl who was a bitch called Rebecca Dalton and I was like: “May I add as we grow older, Rebecca will become a boulder.” She was so fat [laughs].

Did you charge people to join the club?

No, I should have. I just wanted to have some friends. I only had one friend.

Why didn’t you have any friends?

It was because of my wacky fashions. They didn’t make me a good candidate for friendship. I liked my mom’s electric blue Chinese coat that went to the floor and I would wear it over everything, with green platform sneakers.

Are you a particularly sexual person and are the sexually explicit lyrics to shock?

No, they’re not to shock. I only do one vagina song per project. Like “Flash” [feat. Mike Posner] on “Glory” and “Down South” on “Trap Gold.” I just notice that our culture will never admit to being fascinated and driven by sexuality, and I find it very odd that everything is sexually driven in an undercurrent – it’s a hypocrisy.

Which is the most sexually open culture that you’ve seen?

Probably Spain. Even I was cringing in Spain. We went to this gig and they thought it was totally appropriate that I would get dressed in a room full of Egyptian art that had penises everywhere and guys having sex with goats and stuff on the wall. Then I was in this gay hotel where everything was sexual innuendo like the waiter would say, “Do you want a drink?” [makes the symbol for oral sex].

What’s the biggest blowout you’ve had with a label?

I haven’t had any fights. At [record label] Mercury the only thing that we fight about is budgets. I always want like a million dollars and they’re like ”No” and they give me about $100,000 for a video, which is fine. The biggest thing that we had a fight about was during the “Work” video where someone said my outfit was “too vagina-ry.” That person got fired; she’s not on my projects anymore.

What were you wearing?

I was going to wear this high-waisted, red leotard that was completely encrusted in rhinestone flames from the crotch. It was based on “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” so why wouldn’t I be dressed like a showgirl with a feather jacket?

Obviously you’ve got a tough girl persona for the cameras, so what’s the worst fight that you’ve been involved in?

I’ve never been in a proper fight, I’m too smart for that. [laughs] That’s for idiots. I’m not a bad person, so I’ve never done anything to make someone want to punch me. In terms of rap beef, people that yap the most are the biggest pussies and would never swing a punch at you.

You mentioned that your mom was very pleased to see your bank statements, so what’s been your biggest paycheck to-date?

I can’t say.

Ballpark figure?

I get a lot of big ones [laughs]. The biggest check I’m about to get in one go is $250,000 for something that I’m doing but most are around the $100,000 mark.

Now that you’re becoming more of a name in the music industry, do you have concerns that some campaigns will conflict with your image? Have you turned any big campaigns down to-date?

I turn campaigns down all the time, actually. I just turned one down two days ago for a global, humongous brand and it was for a lot of money because it didn’t fit with my image.

In “Work,” you mention giving blowjobs for Louboutins. What have you given a sexual favor for?

Well, I didn’t say I give them. [laughs]

Very true. Ever given a sexual favor for something?

Not directly. I did date one guy that I wasn’t actually that into but I thought he might give me good presents. But that didn’t end up working out because apparently if you want presents, you have to somehow ask for them and I could never ask for anything because I find it really shameful, so I never even got one present.

All the sex without the gifts?

[laughs] Yeah. I ended up being like “I’m not a good golddigga, so I give up.” I never tried that again.

Where did you learn to lap-dance for “Work”?

I learned on the day. I’ve never given a lap dance before in my entire life and I didn’t practice either.

It looked fairly natural.

It felt like not natural at all. It looked good but I felt like a robot.

Ever lap-danced for anyone?

No, I would be way too scared. It’s not my style I couldn’t do it. I’m too goofy, I’d f— it up.

Does playing at Chime for Change mean more to you than just being an opportunity to promote your music on a more global scale? Why did you decide to get involved?

No, definitely not because I only get to do two songs. I’ve always been involved in charities – I just don’t tweet about it. I do a lot of stuff with after school programs with kids in Los Angeles.

Are you passionate about it?

Yeah, definitely – I’m into justice for women. I had just watched a documentary before they asked me [to do Chime for Change] that was about people in Islamic countries where women have acid poured on their faces, if they don’t want to marry – and the men never get brought to justice. Also, there are never enough of these kind of things. Charity always addresses things like earthquakes and things like that but this goes on every day.

“The New Classic” is dropping in early September. What can you tell us about the album?

It’s got a lot more stories but not biographical. It’s about relationships, fame and parties. I have to do the more “twerkable songs” but “Bounce” is on there because I wanted to see how the rap-pop thing would go – it’s by far the most commercial song.

You don’t drink, so what vices do you have?

Well, I drink with a meal but it’s not exactly a vice. Men are my vice. I love being in love. I’m obsessed with being in love and when I think I have a chance of being in love I’ll abandon everything: life, career and I’m like [shouts] “Don’t f—ing call me, I’m trying to be in love.”

Any examples?

What happened last year with my career going down the toilet [laughs].

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Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran’s video for their new collabo “Everything Has Changed” is adorable, it’s — like everything else Taylor Swift puts into the airwaves — an instant earworm (can’t hate on T. Swift’s music no matter how much we’d like to), and it will doubtless spawn a thousand internet rumors that Sheeran is Swift’s new source of future break-up-sploitation song fodder… ahem, boyfriend.

The video features mini Sheeran and Swift look-a-likes falling in puppy love to the soundtrack of the duo’s sweet, lilting voices. A marriage (of sound, ya’ll, calm down) between America’s pop sweetheart and the London export darling of the moment seems only right and, while “Everything Has Changed” doesn’t have the Summer Jam 2K13 potential of last summer’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” we’re still grooving to it.

We just hope, for Sheeran’s sake, these two poppets keep it professional. Learn from John Mayer’s many mistakes Ed, LEARN FROM THEM.

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French electro-dance music duo Daft Punk held onto the top spot for a second week on the Billboard 200 album chart, staving off new entries from veteran rockers Alice in Chains and John Fogerty.

“Random Access Memories,” the highly anticipated fourth studio album from Daft Punk, sold 92,000 copies in its second week of release, according to figures from Nielsen SoundScan.

But sales of the album dropped 73 percent from last week, when it debuted at the top of the weekly Billboard 200 chart with 339,000 copies. Total sales of the album since its May 17 release are 432,000 copies.

Daft Punk’s 1970s-inspired retro record held off competition from three new albums in the Top 10 this week. Veteran rockers Alice in Chains landed at No. 2 with their latest, “The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here,” selling 61,000 albums.

Country rocker John Fogerty came in at No. 3 this week with his ninth solo studio album, “Wrote a Song for Everyone,” which sold more than 50,000 copies. The album features collaborations with musicians including Miranda Lambert, Brad Paisley and rock band Foo Fighters, singing old and new songs from Fogerty’s vast catalog.

British girl group quartet Little Mix, formed in 2011 on the U.K. edition of “The X Factor” TV talent show, saw their debut album “DNA” notch No. 4 this week, selling 49,000 copies.

Little Mix follows in the footsteps of British boy band One Direction, also formed on “The X Factor” in 2010. The band has since conquered the U.S. pop charts with two No. 1 albums and a sold-out world tour.

Overall album sales in the week ending June 2 totaled 4.8 million, down 4 percent from the same week in 2012.

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Oscar-nominated films and countless recordings have been created to honor country great Johnny Cash, but this will be the first time he travels the world forever.

On Wedneday, the United States Postal Service unveiled a Forever stamp honoring him in their Music Icons series.

His daughter, Rosanne Cash, says the idea of her father’s face adorning letters around the world is an exciting honor.

“It would be so special to him,” she says. “He’s now going to be touring the planet forever. … And that’s what he loved, he loved touring.”

She adds, “It’s the ultimate American honor, in a way.”

Roseanne Cash says the stamp will allow her father to tour the world forever.

Although the stamp was a nod to letters, Cash is active on a new communication tool: Twitter, where she interacts with other musicians and even someone, she says, who taught her to knit.

Her father, who never had an email account, would not be tweeting, she says.

“He was such a reflective person, and he enjoyed solitude a lot,” she says. “He had to interact with so many people in his daily life that when he got a chance to have solitude, he’s not the kind of guy who would have gone on Twitter and wasted the solitude.”

Cash has a new album coming out in January about the South and her relationship with the region, partially inspired by Arkansas State University restoring her father’s boyhood home.

“My heart started to swell,” she says.

The region, she says, is “really the bed of where this music came from. The connection to that music is so profound to me.”

Her last record, “Black Cadillac,” was a “totally different mindset,” she says.

“It was such a painful process, painful and liberating,” she says. “This had the richness of going that deep into the past and the future … and it didn’t have the heaviness of heart that ‘Black Cadillac’ had.”

She adds, “There’s something very celebratory about it, even though some of the songs are very dark.”

Follow Alison Bowen on Twitter @reporteralison

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Fair warning: This will probably make you feel old. The Counting Crows’ debut album, “August and Everything After,” was released 20 years ago. Crazy, right? The anniversary has also snuck up on Counting Crows frontman Adam Duritz, who says there are no plans to cash in on the milestone. Instead, the band is looking forward and embarking on a summer tour across the U.S. with fellow ’90s stalwarts The Wallflowers.

I can’t believe it’s been 20 years since “August and Everything After” came out.

For me it doesn’t really seem like that either. I would probably not think about it being 20 years at all except that people keep saying it to me. I don’t really look at it any differently than I do the other albums. It happened to sell a lot more, but that didn’t have much to do with me. The job that we were going to do on the album was done long before anybody bought 10 million copies of it.

What sticks out in your memory of making that album?

It was a difficult album to make. It’s sort of where I took over the band, and because I was very lame at being a band leader back then, that made it really hard on the other guys — because I didn’t take over the band in the best way, and that made life really hard on everyone while we were making that record. Since then we’ve done a lot of years on buses and a lot of tours and made a lot of records I really love.

Any plans to celebrate the anniversary?

I’m waiting for something more significant, some sort of trumpet fanfare to make me realize it’s been 20 years since that record came out. That really hasn’t happened, possibly partially because we didn’t do anything to mark it. We did a deluxe album years ago and we did the live album, which was just all of “August and Everything After” played live, a couple of years ago, so there isn’t really anything left to do other than make another 20-year release to get people’s money for it. But we’re not going to do that.

You guys were early adopters in using social media to connect with your fans.

I remember right when I moved to Los Angeles after we finished touring on “August and Everything After” — like 1995 —I realized at some point in there that AOL had forums for all these different bands, like message boards, and there were people on there on the Counting Crows board just talking about our music. So I went on it and told people who I was — it took a little while to convince people — and my thought was, here’s a way to talk directly to your fan base. You don’t have to go through radio, you don’t have to go through print. I mean, all of those are useful, but it’s kind of useful to be able to go yourself, too. I mean, it was social media in a way before there was social media. It never hurts to be able to go directly to people. It’s necessary now, especially if you’re going to be independent.

You’ve been pretty independent for a while. Considering the landscape of the music industry, could you ever see yourself going back to a big label?

I want to work with people who simply have a good business model, and the record companies’ business model is not particularly good. They still can only think about selling things through radio and making really expensive videos, and that’s about it. Those things are all great, but there’s more to it than that.

And also, they want to give you 10 percent and take 90, which I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t seem smart to me, especially nowadays when a lot of people are buying something that doesn’t actually exist in three-dimensional form. I know that they don’t have a lot of distribution costs making an mp3. I could make them myself. Because the first experience with the Internet for a lot of the record companies was Napster, the reaction was to try and lock all the doors after that, just in sheer terror, keep everybody out. I don’t think you can do anything about downloads. People are going to do what they can do. It’s a shame people don’t have a little more decency, but that’s life. You know, whatever, it’s fun to steal things, I guess. (laughs)

If you go

Counting Crows
with The Wallflowers
June 18
Bank of America Pavilion
290 Northern Ave., Boston
$36-$66, 800-745-3000
www.livenation.com

The post Two decades and still Counting Crows appeared first on Metro.us.

Inspiration for a song can come from just about anywhere. Even a traffic jam on the Schuylkill Expressway.

The songwriting team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff used their experiences on that particular highway to write their breakthrough hit “Expressway to Your Heart” for the Soul Survivors in 1967.

“There’s always been traffic jams on the Schuylkill, even when it opened back then,” says Gamble, who came up with the idea for “Expressway to your Heart” while stuck on the road.

So began a string of hits and a creative vitality that has lasted to this day. The duo has penned more than 3,000 songs, including “Back Stabbers,” “Love Train,” “For the Love of Money” (or “The Apprentice” theme), “If You Don’t Know Me By Now,” “Cowboys to Girls,” “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” and “TSOP” (better known as the “Soul Train” theme). They are the architects of The Sound of Philadelphia and will participate in the How I Wrote That Song songwriting workshop on Saturday at the famed Sigma Sound studios on North 12th Street.

Hot 107.9 (WPHI-FM), 100.3 Old School (WRNB-FM) and BMI are the presenters of the event. Gamble and Huff will participate on a legends panel with James Mtume and Pop Wansel, while Oak Felder and the Phatboiz hold down the Generation Next panel.

“If you experience something, generally I feel that it’s also happened to a million other people,” Gamble says. “It’s one world and we’re one humanity and we all do the same things. If you can hit a nerve, you can reach the most people. We all drive on the expressway and we all fall in love. ‘Cowboys to Girls’ was a different angle [on love].”

Thom Bell, the Philly-based producer for the Delfonics, Stylistics and the Spinners, puts it another way.

“Every song is about love or escape,” says Bell, who is not scheduled to participate in the workshop but is working on a book with Gamble and Huff. “Even ‘Ave Maria’ is about love.”

If you go

How I Wrote That Song
Saturday, 1:30 to 6:30 p.m.
Sigma Sound
212 N. 12th St.
$15
www.seatengine.com/venue/radio-one

The post Legendary songwriting team tells you ‘How I Wrote That Song’ appeared first on Metro.us.

Sting has returned to his childhood hometown in the shadow of a struggling shipyard in northern England for a musical that will debut on Broadway next year and his first album of original material in 10 years.

The musical, “The Last Ship,” is based on Sting’s experiences of living near the Swan Hunter Shipyard in Wallsend, Newcastle, and watching the demise of Britain’s shipbuilding industry in the 1980s.

A spokeswoman for Sting on Wednesday said the musical had also inspired the rock star to produce his first album of new material in nearly 10 years, also called “The Last Ship,” that will be released on Sept. 23.

“Guest artists on ‘The Last Ship’ with roots in the northeast (of England) include Brian Johnson, Jimmy Nail, The Unthanks, The Wilson Brothers and Kathryn Tickell,” the spokeswoman said in a statement.

“The Last Ship,” set to be released on Universal Music Group’s Polydor Records, will feature 12 songs and be produced by Rob Mathes.

Sting, 61, has released 10 albums since going solo from the band The Police around 1984. This will be his first album of original material since “Sacred Love” in 2003.

As well as his music, Sting has acted in a list of films, including “Quadrophenia” and “Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels,” and appeared as himself in TV shows like “The Simpsons,” but this is the first time he has taken a major role in producing a musical.

He spent nearly three years working on the story that is focused on relationships, family and community, collaborating with Joe Mantello, the director of the hit musical “Wicked,” and John Logan, co-writer of the latest James Bond film “Skyfall.”

Sting, born Gordon Sumner, was raised in Wallsend.

The Swan Hunter Shipyard on the River Tyne was once one of the world’s leading shipbuilding operations that came under national ownership in 1977, with its construction operations wound back in the 1990s.

The post Sting returns to his childhood for new musical, album appeared first on Metro.us.

The remaining members of Stone Temple Pilots will not disband despite former singer Scott Weiland asking a court to force them to do so, and it was their legal right to kick him out because of his “destructive behavior,” their lawyer said on Tuesday.

“He’s out of the band,” Skip Miller, the attorney for the 1990s alternative rock band told Reuters, citing the quartet’s 1996 legal partnership agreement that allows a majority of band members to vote out an existing member.

The agreement also allowed the majority to retain the intellectual property rights to the band’s name.

“The three of them voted (Weiland) out for a lot of reasons,” Miller said. “They don’t want to play with him anymore. He was showing up hours late and had crazy, destructive behavior.”

Weiland, whose growling vocals and dyed red hair became a symbol of the early 1990s grunge era, was fired from the band in February. The three remaining group members sued him last month for using the band’s name to promote his solo concerts.

Weiland, 45, counter-sued last week alleging that the group’s three other members — Dean DeLeo, Robert DeLeo and Eric Kretz — secretly and wrongfully conspired to kick him out of the band.

The singer, who promoted a solo concert in Los Angeles last week featuring music from the group’s 1992 album “Core” and 1994 album “Purple,” has also asked the court for $5 million in damages as well as legally dissolving the partnership agreement.

“How do you expel a man from a band that he started, named, sang lead on every song, wrote the lyrics and was the face of for 20 years, and then try to grab the name and goodwill for yourselves?” Weiland’s lawsuit said.

“Knowing the value and goodwill associated with the Stone Temple Pilots name and that they would be unlikely to achieve any commercial success without it, the other members secretly met on numerous occasions … to wrongfully expel Weiland from the band and seize for themselves the valuable Stone Temple Pilots name and associated goodwill,” the suit added.

The singer had no additional comment, his spokesman said.

The remaining members of the band have played recent concerts under the Stone Temple Pilots name with new singer Chester Bennington, who is also the frontman of rock group Linkin Park.

The Stone Temple Pilots scored hits with guitar-heavy songs like “Plush” in 1993 and “Interstate Love Song” the following year. They disbanded in 2003 and reformed in 2008.

The post Lawyer says Stone Temple Pilots can go on without Scott Weiland appeared first on Metro.us.

Oh, hey, looks like there’s going to be a Ferris wheel at KahBang, the annual summer music, film and arts fest up in Bangor, Maine, this year. At least according to the above flyer, which was leaked (by the fest) Tuesday night and then passed around the Twittersphere. The fest turns five this year, which — if you’re a particularly tall 5-year-old — is big enough to take a spin on the wheel at most carnivals. Also, they want a pony.

No word yet if anyone will be gifting them with a mini horse in August (but we’re willing to bet our slice of birthday cake that someone shows up with a pony) but what we can tell you is that the music lineup looks damn good. If you procrastinated and missed out on nabbing your tix for Newport Folk Fest next month (everything but Friday passes now sold out) you can still get a solid dose of folk-leaning festivities in this summer.

Highlights include Oberhofer, Dr. Dog, Lucius, Lights, Paper Diamond, Break Science, Black Light Dinner Party and Aer.

Also on the bill: We’re proud to see Boston and greater Northeast artists including Mean Creek, Lady Lamb the Beekeeper, Herra Terra, Spose and the Bynars repping the local tip.

KahBang runs Aug. 8-11 in Bangor. Some tickets on sale now. See you there, with or without a pony (please bring a pony.) kahbang.com

The post KahBang Fest 2013 line-up leaked on Twitter, looks good ya’ll appeared first on Metro.us.

The talk of the Billboard Music Awards on May 19 was Miguel’s leg jump on fans. When Miguel landed from his jump his legs intertwined with a fan’s head and struck it against the stage.

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  VIDEO: Miguel kicks fans in head during Billboard music awards

A Billboard Music Awards rep at the time the fans are “absolutely OK,” but one fan’s lawyer is claiming his the injury may have caused her brain damage.

“Some of the difficulties she’s experiencing are cognitive in nature an dlead to suspicion of a neurological head injury,” Vip Bhola, Khyati Shah’s lawyer, told TMZ.

Bhola said this client should have been rushed to the hospital after the incident. Instead she was handed an ice pack to soothe a bruised elbow.

Shah is currently waiting for results to tests she took with a neurologist. Once the results are in, she will decide whether or not to sue.

On the night of the incident, Billobard told Mashable, “Yes they are absolutely OK! He was dancing and hugging them post jump.”

Miguel also addressed the tumble by tweeting, “got caught up in the moment, thank goodness Khyati is okay.”

The tweet has since been deleted and Mashable suspects it could be because it could possibly be used as evidence in a lawsuit Bhola could file.

Follow Mary Ann Georgantopoulos on Twitter @marygeorgant

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