“(Brave New) World Series” — premiering exclusively below from Denver punk group Bud Bronson & the Good Timers’ upcoming sophomore album — does involve baseball’s fall classic. But it’s not about balls, strikes or which teams might meet in a few weeks’ time. READ MORE…
The author Tom Robbins says that he “hesitated not much longer than it would take to pop open a can of Budweiser” when Ben Lee approached him with a pitch to turn Robbins’ 2009 book B Is For Beer into a musical theater piece. But Lee remembers things a bit differently as the duo prepares for the Oct. 12 release of the all-star B Is For Beer: The Musical album — whose track “Everything Is Better With Beer” ft. Jon Cryer premieres below.
“It was just a very gradual thing,” Lee tells Billboard about the project, which is coming out some eight years after he first approached Robbins with the idea. “I think Tom was cautious. While I think he likes the idea of mainstream success and recognition, he’s not someone particularly willing to alter his creative impulse for the sake of the masses. So I think he was like, ‘OK, who is this guy calling me?’ and it played out for a number of years before our friendship developed and we began to have these great phone calls about all these things we’re both interested in and (B Is For Beer) began to gain momentum.”
The B Is For Beer musical idea was actually a lightning strike moment, starting when Lee was on a family vacation in Portland and found Robbins’ book in a store. Robbins was inspired to write it after seeing a New Yorker cartoon in which a publisher dismissed a writer’s idea, saying that, “‘I don’t think a children’s book about beer would sell.’…I decided then and there to prove the fictitious publisher wrong.” Reading the book, Lee himself had “a very intuitive moment of ‘I’m gonna make a musical of this book.’ It was one of those bizarre things I think artists don’t find so bizarre, ’cause a lot of our life……READ MORE
“Fisher, in fact, spent part of his time in Israel working for The Jerusalem Post and also established dual citizenship there. Throughout Does The Land Remember Me? he sings from the perspective of both sides — he lived in Israel during the unorganized so-called “Lone Wolf Intifada” attacks — though the title track voices the concerns of an elderly Palestinian who was among those who lost his home when Israel was established during 1948.”
Baby Robot Media is a music publicity and media service agency with employees in Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta & New York and represent musicians from all over the world. We specialize in promotional ( PR ) campaigns for albums, singles and videos, tour press, radio, music video production, music marketing, social media campaigns, Spotify campaigns and creating promotional content. Our mission is to help great unknown bands reach a wider audience and to help already successful artists manage their brand identity and continue to thrive. Our music publicists have over 50 years of combined experience in the music industry. We are known as one of the best in the business.
Sara Rachele is “almost done” with her third album, which she hopes to release this fall. But “Scorpio Moon,” the sole track completed for the set so far — and premiering below — is so strong she didn’t want to wait to have people hear it.
“I’m really proud of it,” the singer-songwriter, who resides in a 1979 Airstream Bus, tells Billboard. The song was inspired by a friend’s troubled romantic situation but became “a warning song against mistakes and not heeding warnings — and if we have any choice at all in the matter,” according to Rachele. She recorded it, and most of the album’s other songs, in Brooklyn with Binky Griptite and other members of the Dap-Kings, co-producing it with keyboardist Spencer Garn.
“I generally record straight to tape and it’s fun because that kind of freaks out players of every caliber,” Rachele says. “But I knew these guys knew what to do. It was like getting to drive a really fast car and you put it in gear and it ends up doing its own thing. When I got there I went into the bathroom and looked at myself and thought, ‘You can’t screw this up. Get it together! This is your job, go in there and do it!’ But it turned out to be really a pleasure.”
Rachele has done additional recording in Los Angeles and East Atlanta Village, where she resides, and hopes to release the album this fall. “Scorpio Moon” is indicative of the rest of the material, she says, likening it to “Dusty Springfield with a little bit of a Southern drawl” but also a contemporary attitude that makes it more than retro or nostalgic.
“It’s a little bit of a throwback,” Rachele acknowledges, “but I hope it’s not too stuck in something that’s been done previously. It’s definitely going to have a ’60s vibe, but really I’m just trying to do the best I can. I have a really high standard, but there are mistakes in the recordings and often times the most beautiful art comes from the mistakes, and that can be the most interesting parts of the record for me. And I think the people I work with feel the same way.”
Baby Robot Media is a music publicity and media service agency with employees in Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta & New York and represent musicians from all over the world. We specialize in promotional ( PR ) campaigns for albums, singles and videos, tour press, radio, music video production, music marketing, social media campaigns, Spotify campaigns and creating promotional content. Our mission is to help great unknown bands reach a wider audience and to help already successful artists manage their brand identity and continue to thrive. Our music publicists have over 50 years of combined experience in the music industry. We are known as one of the best in the business.
After nearly eight years fronting the psychedelic rock trio the Wans, Simon Patrick Kerr is getting quieter with his first solo album, from which the track “Songbird” is premiering exclusively on Billboard today (June 12).
On Doldrums, due out July 20, the Irish native shows off his Americana roots and the influence of singer-songwriters such as Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt. “It’s definitely quite a departure, sound-wise and song-wise, from the band,” Kerr tells Billboard. “It’s quite a vulnerable record for me song-wise. My parents moved to Nashville when I was 11 to pursue songwriting and people like John Prine and Guy Clark became family friends and sort of showed me the ropes on how to write a son. From 18 to 23 I was writing a lot of folk songs, before I started playing rock and roll music. Now I’m back to writing this music.” READ MORE…
Baby Robot Media is a music publicity and media service agency with employees in Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta & New York and represent musicians from all over the world. We specialize in promotional ( PR ) campaigns for albums, singles and videos, tour press, radio, music video production, music marketing, social media campaigns, Spotify campaigns and creating promotional content. Our mission is to help great unknown bands reach a wider audience and to help already successful artists manage their brand identity and continue to thrive. Our music publicists have over 50 years of combined experience in the music industry. We are known as one of the best in the business.
“If you had to choose one song to send to aliens in space who were going to destroy the earth — so it has to be something that proves the inherent good of humanity — which song would you pick?”
This question was posed last week by Karen Pittelman, singer/songwriter and leader of Karen & the Sorrows, who are preparing to release their second album, The Narrow Place, on Aug. 25. “Lately I’m thinking ‘As’ by Stevie Wonder,” she muses. “It shows a possibility for the redemption of human beings.”
Pittelman is a walking genre-agnostic musical encyclopedia, and she enjoys these sort of deep dives into pop, exacting about small details and sweeping in scope. During the course of a two-hour conversation — that grows to encompass the racist underpinnings of genre boundaries along with the greatness of, to name a few, Stevie Nicks, Waylon Jennings‘ drummer, songwriter Rod Temperton, guitarist George Benson and producer Quincy Jones — while fighting the din of clattering plates at Four & Twenty Blackbirds, a pie place in Gowanus, Brooklyn, she throws out heaps of these juicy pronouncements:
“I feel like Huey Lewis is under-appreciated. Everyone’s like, ‘he’s so hokey’ — he’s fucking solid.”
Or, “If you can’t fucking choose Nile Rodgers always, then your way of life is no good.”
Or, “The way people freaked out over [Beyoncé’s] ‘Daddy Lessons’ was fascinating — there’s no argument that anybody can make with any credibility to say that’s not a country song. Whatever definition of country you want to use, that fits. Oh, so it has horns? Is ‘Ring of Fire’ not a country song? That’s a bananas argument. Why is there this investment in saying that country music is a white genre?”
Baby Robot Media is a music publicity and media service agency with employees in Los Angeles, Memphis, Atlanta & New York and represent musicians from all over the world. We specialize in promotional ( PR ) campaigns for albums, singles and videos, tour press, radio, music video production, music marketing, social media campaigns, Spotify campaigns and creating promotional content. Our mission is to help great unknown bands reach a wider audience and to help already successful artists manage their brand identity and continue to thrive. Our music publicists have over 50 years of combined experience in the music industry. We are known as one of the best in the business.