Author: "EmilyCassel"

Here at OurStage there are few things that we enjoy as much as music, but one of our obsessions that comes pretty damn close is our love of food. So imagine our delight when several musicians announced new, culinary side projects. Train released a Petite Sirah wine that will finally let fans know what “Drops of Jupiter” taste like, AC/DC announced a line of fine wines named after their hits—including “Highway to Hell” and “You Shook Me All Night Long”—and former Blur bassist Alex James is now selling his cheeses in the UK.

We did a little digging and as it turns out, the relationship between musicians and foodies is very strong. Yes, plenty of artists offer ways to get your drink on like a rock star (Sammy Hagar has his own brand of tequila), but many are restaurant owners, chefs and even critics! From giants like KISS Coffeehouses and Jimmy Buffet‘s Margaritaville Cafes to smaller, quainter cafes like Moby‘s adorable Teany in New York City, artist-owned eateries have been popping up all over the place. Even J. Lo got into the restaurant game a few years ago; unfortunately, the Mexican eatery “Madre’s” closed its doors in 2008 after six years. (Still better than Britney‘s joint “Nyla,” which lasted less than a year.)

Continue reading ‘Tasty Tracks And Tasty Treats’

After Lady Gaga‘s lackluster “Edge of Glory” music video, it was nice to see Mother Monster returning to truly WTF-inducing form on the video for “You and I.” Two words: Mermaid. Sex. Gags kindly explained to MTV just how, exactly, a mermaid would have sex with a human, saying, “Well, that’s actually part of what the metaphor is—you can’t… No matter what you do, there’s this giant boundary between you and someone else. So that’s what it’s about, perceiving in your imagination that there’s something magical inside of you that you can make it work.”

Okay, sure, that sounds like a plausible explanation. And as an added bonus, it got us thinking about the sexual metaphors in some of our favorite songs. So if you’re looking for tunes with sexy references that are less obscure than mermaid intercourse but slightly subtler than “Let’s Get It On”, we’re here to help.

Continue reading ‘That Song’s About Sex?!’

Maroon 5 frontman/The Voice judge Adam Levine had some choice words for American Idol last week, saying that while he agrees the show is a “cultural institution,” it also deliberately hides the sexual orientation of its contestants. He told Out magazine that, “What’s always pissed me off about Idol is wanting to mask that, for that to go unspoken. You can’t be publicly gay? At this point? On a singing competition? Give me a break. You can’t hide basic components of these people’s lives.”

Levine went on to say that The Voice was completely open to contestants regardless of their sexuality, and added that the NBC show is “for a different type of person.” You could say that Levine is only saying this to make his show look better and win over some of Idol’s longtime fans, but this isn’t the first time the prime-time juggernaut has been called out for being less than gay-friendly. Of course, the last time the issue came up those claims of homophobia were directed at the voters (that’s us, America), not at the show itself.

When Adam Lambert lost in 2009, it was a shock; there was little question that he was more talented than winner Kris Allen. (Allen even admitted it, saying, “Adam deserves this. I’m sorry.”) Jim David wrote a feature called “Adam Lambert Loses, Homophobia Wins” for the Huffington Post where he pointed out that, while Lambert never discussed his sexuality on the show, the Internet did it for him. Photos of Lambert making out with another guy went viral, and talk show host Bill O’Reilly asked if a potential Lambert victory would be a “problem” for America.

Continue reading ‘American Idol – “Masking” Their Gay Contestants?’

Last week, Blink-182 devised a pretty clever way to engage their fans and promote their newest single “Up All Night”. Instead of releasing their own video for the first single from the upcoming album Neighborhoods, Blink searched the Internet for the best unauthorized fan videos that used their music, then compiled them to create a masterpiece. With toilet paper, skateboard tricks, brief claymation and kids playing brooms for guitars in a men’s restroom, the vid clearly bears Mark, Tom and Travis’s goofy sense of humor. But the band wasn’t alone as they scoured YouTube to find the best fan-made clips. As they reveal in the video’s intro, the gang partnered with AT&T to create “The Blink-182 Film Festival You Didn’t Know You Entered.”

Yes, it’s time we add music to the list of happenings, including sporting events and television premiers, that will forever be brought to you by some giant corporation. It’s evident on numerous 2011 tours—Kanye West‘s G.O.O.D. Music imprint put together a nine-date tour sponsored by Heineken, T-Swift‘s Speak Now world tour is brought to you by Covergirl and BlackBerry sponsored the Foo Fighters‘ Garage Tour.

Continue reading ‘This Music Brought To You By…’

Miley Cyrus is no stranger to controversy—when she isn’t busy creating country-pop hybrid hits, she’s getting caught on camera making offensive faces or on video taking monster bong hits. (Or facing scrutiny for smoking a cigarette or getting hacked and having illicit photos circulated around the Internet…) But she made headlines last week for a slightly nobler reason after she tweeted a picture of her new, pro-gay rights tattoo accompanied by the 18 character message “All LOVE is equal.”

Miley even responded civilly to one fan who didn’t exactly agree with the message behind the new ink, tweeting, “Where does it say in the bible to judge others? Oh right. It doesn’t. GOD is the only judge honey. ‘GOD is love.’”

If you find yourself confused by where this display of maturity is coming from, well, you probably aren’t alone. But the eighteen-year-old songstress has taken to Twitter to drop knowledge on her followers before. This June, she hopped up on her soapbox to oust Urban Outfitters after they donated to the political action committee of notoriously anti-gay senator Rick Santorum. “Love that everybody is hating on Urban Outfitters,” she tweeted. “Not only do they steal from artists but every time you give them money you help finance a campaign against gay equality. #SHADYASHELL.”

Of course, there’s always the possibility that this latest declaration is nothing but a well-timed publicity stunt. Engaging one of your fans in a theological discussion on Twitter and announcing that you’re starring in and producing a God-themed comedy two days later? Preety convenient there, Miley. And yes, it brings up the eternal question, “Why do we care about celebrity opinions, anyway?” We get it: there’s no way that starring in a Disney Channel comedy qualifies you to engage in political debate. But you have to admit that it’s pretty ballsy of the young Cyrus to risk alienating her fanbase like this. After all, what if fewer people go to see her upcoming film because of her opinion on gay rights? While she’s often the center of controversy, at least this time it’s for something she believes in, not because one of her “friends” leaked questionable video content to TMZ. You go, girl!

Transcending the legacy of a famous parent isn’t easy, especially when that parent is the most celebrated reggae musician of all time.  Yet, with all the pressure that such a family history brings, Ziggy Marley consistently lives up to his father’s musical legacy while proving his own songwriting abilities on every new record.  After more than fifteen years of recording with his siblings in The Melody Makers, he went solo in 2003. This June he released his fourth solo album Wild and Free.  We sat down with Ziggy to talk about his new album, his collaboration with Woody Harrelson and how marijuana can (really) save the world.

OS: Tell us about the upcoming album Wild and Free. What was it like to return to your usual material after releasing an album specifically for children?

ZM: It wasn’t as much fun, not like doing the kids’ stuff. The kids’ stuff was easy, light and loose. But this one’s much more serious, much more thoughtful songwriting process. Just more intense. More intense.

OS: Do you think you might do more albums for kids in the future?

ZM: I don’t know, I mean, it depends. I don’t keep planning stuff. We’ll see.

OS: You collaborated with Woody Harrelson on the title track from the new album—what was it like to record with an actor rather than a musician?

ZM: It wasn’t really collaborating with an actor. I don’t look at him as an actor. Woody’s a friend, and we share some ideas on things. So it was very spontaneous actually, and not something we had planned to do. We shared some ideas when we were doing the song, and I started inviting him, “Hey, come sing.” I didn’t think it would be on the album, but then it sounded good to me and I said, “All right, let’s put it on the album.”

OS: The pro-marijuana theme from that song is also included in the Marijuanaman comic you released on 4/20, which features a superhero who saves the world using hemp. In what ways do you think that plant has the power to save the world?

ZM: The fiber of the hemp plant can be used for many different purposes. The whole plant, actually, can impact the environment in a very positive way if we use it instead of certain things we use more widely now, like cotton or trees. Cutting down trees… it can actually help the planet and help the people of the planet, because trees are very important. The seeds are the most complete protein in the vegetable kingdom on this planet. So the nutritional value is really exceptional. And it’s a weed, so it can grow very easily. In a lot of countries where there’s malnourished children or poor children, you could easily find nutrition in the seed. It also can be used to make biofuel. Thousands and thousands of uses this plant has, which can have a positive impact. Everybody’s talking about a “green revolution” and “eco-friendly” and everything—becoming eco-friendly. I just think, it seems to me, that if you really believe that idea, then you have to use this plant. It’s the most eco-friendly plant on the planet. There’s nothing more “eco” than this plant; nothing more good for the soil, nothing more good for the people, nothing more good for the environment than this plant. If you’re not using this plant, then it’s BS, really. All this eco-talk is BS. Without this plant there’s no eco, there’s no green revolution without this plant. If we don’t use it, we’re going to be stuck.

OS: How was the process of making the comic book? It seems like a lot of fun.

ZM: Yeah, I was really excited about it, because I’m into comic books and cartoons and crime-fighting superheroes and things like that. I really couldn’t wait to see it come out of the imagination, on paper. I went through with the artist and writer, scripting what the idea was and the story and the characters and how it works, all these types of things. I was really excited.

OS: Between the comic book and the recent documentary Marley African Road Trip, you’re delving into a lot of different mediums. What inspires you to branch out into other areas?

ZM: I kind of have that creativity inside of me, you know? It’s just a part of me. So it’s like, I have to find another outlet for the other ideas that I have, outside of music, and these are the outlets. The creativity doesn’t stop with music, it kind of goes on into other avenues.

OS: One of those other outlets is your reggae/dancehall label, Tuff Gong. What exciting things do you have going on with the label right now?

ZM: Um, let’s see. Just my album right now. Some stuff in the future, but nothing I can speak about right now.

OS: Keeping it under wraps?

ZM: Yeah, for now, for now.

OS: You split your time between Florida, Jamaica and California—three very different places in terms of their musical culture. How does the music scene you grew up with in Jamaica compare to the scene in the US?

ZM: Well, the music scene in general has changed. Growing up in Jamaica I started seeing it really young, and music was recorded by musicians in the studio, kind of organic. Things kind of changed, now it’s more machine music. A lot of the music now is like, the same. The same beats, the same tempos. Back in Jamaica, in the old days, music was much more free. It wasn’t about everybody trying to jump on the same bandwagon. Nowadays, that’s what it’s like, that’s what music is like. Every song has the same kind of thing… and then the industry itself changed into more of a corporate thing instead of a music thing. So a lot of artistic feeling is lost, and a lot of artistic feeling is stifled because of the corporate ideologies. It’s not about art, more the commercialization of the music instead of the art in the music.

OS: What did you learn from watching your father in the studio as a kid?

ZM: I just remember him working really hard and being into the music, being on top of the music. Working hard through nights, late nights and a lot of rehearsals. And discipline, and what it takes, and what the music means. I learned a lot of that by seeing it and watching it.

Check out Ziggy’s Web site for upcoming tour dates!

Last week, we told you about musicians like Karen O and their crazy musical side projects. (Seriously, how awesome is Goat Punishment?) This week, Tom Morello’s upcoming comic book series Orchid inspired us to take a look at the incredible visual side projects that some of our favorite multi-medium musicians are working on. Let’s get cultured!

Tom Morello isn’t the only musician getting into the comic book game—he actually got hooked up with publisher Dark Horse Comics courtesy of My Chemical Romance’s Gerard Way. Way has been working on his own series, The Umbrella Academy, since September of 2007. Currently on its 15th issue, the series follows the antics of a group of misfit superheroes who—what else—unite to save the world. We’re mostly just jealous of The Rumor’s superpower—she can instantly alter reality by lying. That would be SO USEFUL.

Continue reading ‘Artistic License: Our Favorite Multi-Talented Musicians’

The publishers over at Creem Magazine must be a brave bunch—despite everything you hear about the impending death of print journalism, the iconic Detriot-based rock mag, which was founded in 1969 but has been published online only since 2001, is making a return to print. We’re pretty pumped to hear that the magazine credited with coining phrases like “punk rock” and “heavy metal” is making a comeback, so we thought we’d take a look at some other famous rock ‘zines and their impact on music history.

NME

First published in March 1952, NME (originally New Musical Express) was the first British paper to include a singles chart. The rag ran cover features on British bands like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones throughout the sixties, and as NME writer Ian MacDonald so modestly points out: “I think all the other papers knew by 1974 that NME had become the best music paper in Britain. We had most of the best writers and photographers, the best layouts, that sense of style of humor and a feeling of real adventure.” Although some have criticized the magazine in recent years for its lack of diversity, NME’s Web site boasts an impressive 5.3 million monthly unique users, making it the UK’s most popular magazine Web site today.

Rolling Stone

Whether you love it or you love to hate it, there’s no denying RS‘s impact on music, pop culture and even politics. Remember that little incident with General McChrystal last year? And even if you can’t believe they put Snookie on their cover or agree with the critics who think the mag is run by old geezers, let’s not forget that this is the publication that was home to some of Hunter S. Thompson’s most famous work and showed us how crazy John Mayer really is. (We just never thought we’d hear someone use the phrase “Joshua Tree of vaginas.”) As founder and current editor and publisher Jann Wenner wrote in the mag’s first issue in 1967, RS is “not just about the music, but about the things and attitudes that music embraces.” We can get behind that.

Spin

Founded in 1985, Spin acted as the anti-Rolling Stone. While they profiled rock legends like Aeorosmith and jazz legends like Miles Davis, they also featured up-and-comers like Run DMC and the Beastie Boys, and were among the first to devote significant coverage to hip hop. The magazine was also groundbreaking in its decision to include editorial contributions from musicians like Henry Rollins and David Lee Roth, and many of its writers—including hipster favorite Chuck Klosterman—used their time at the magazine as a launching pad to success in other mediums.

Billboard

You didn’t think we’d get through this feature without mentioning Billboard, did you? First published in 1894, the publication originally known as Billboard Advertising is one of the longest-running trade magazines in the world. What began as a paper for the bill posting industry soon began covering amusement parks and fairs, and in the ’20s started featuring movies. It wasn’t until the 1930′s, with the development of the jukebox, that Billboard began publishing music charts. And the rest, as they say, is history—Billboard has been publishing their “Hot 100″ since 1958, and today puts out more than 100 charts every week.

What are your favorite rock ‘zines? Let us know in the comments.

Following up a beloved album that spawned four popular singles and spent thirty-four weeks on the Billboard charts could be a stressful endeavor for a lot of musicians. But not Matt Nathanson. The San Fransisco-based singer-songwriter catapulted into the spotlight with his 2007 album Some Mad Hope, and since then he’s been everywhere—touring with the Indigo Girls, performing on Live From Daryl’s House and providing the melancholy soundtrack for primetime dramas ranging from CSI to 90210 to Vampire Diaries.

But Nathanson didn’t let the pressure of releasing a follow-up get to him, taking four years to carefully craft his most recent effort Modern Love. We caught up with Nathanson to talk about Modern Love, his new, hopeful outlook on life and the perks of being a rock star.

OS: This album as a lot to do with conflict, and you’ve even said that the title—Modern Love—is about conflicting ideas. Can you explain what you feel the conflicts are between modernity and love?

MN: Well, it’s sort of not conflicting as much as much as it is the duality. It’s just this thing where “love” is ancient and amazing and hard to handle and difficult to understand, and “modern” is a functional concept. Modern art, modern architecture—it’s well-though-out answers to questions like the most efficient way to cool or heat a house. Modern architecture deals with that. Or, the most efficient way to build a chair. So, the idea for me was this duality of these two things that, in theory, are mutually exclusive, but actually kind of work together, and how do they work as a unit? We’re in a time now where things move so fast that if you want to buy a record you can just click a button, whereas before when I was a kid, I had to get on my bike and save up money and bike over to the record store and physically pick it up and bike home and put it on.

It’s the idea of how you can sort of have… well, not sort of. You can have entire relationships on Facebook or Twitter, without actually dealing with people one-on-one. It’s like the great human collision. Is this idea of, where does love exist? How does love function? Where does that molten part of who we are—how does that show up now in a time where the emphasis is not put on actual human contact and being face-to-face with the person or the record? You can see a whole live stream of a show on the Internet and never leave your house, when really the best part of a live show is being in that room. And I’m not saying that technology isn’t amazing, because it’s totally amazing. But it shouldn’t completely replace the experience, because what’s so amazing about these experiences is the effort extended by everyone around and the crashing together of people. So that’s what the record’s about thematically, this idea of, “Where does this stuff come up now? Where do the human parts of ourselves live in a time where we’re more and more technologically based, and moving faster and faster?”

And then sonically, the record took on a similar kind of aesthetic—acoustic guitars and a voice and really well-recorded drums. Then we took it back to the laboratory and kind of mashed it around a little bit, and kind of beat it up. We put it through the computer and messed around, so it became a similar thing—where does the organic meet the non-organic, and the greatness that can come out of that. Not saying that the record is “greatness”. But where can the heart come out of that, the humanity? So that’s a very long answer to your pretty short question. [Laughs]

Continue reading ‘Q&A With Matt Nathanson’

There isn’t anything particularly surprising about a musician being arrested on drug charges—after all, artists raging from Willie Nelson to Sly Stone have seen the inside of a courtroom in 2011 following drug-related incidents. What is surprising is the arrest of Coheed and Cambria’s bassist Michael Todd, who held up an Attelboro, Mass. pharmacy last week and walked away with six bottles of Oxycodone.

Here’s the bad news: serving a prison sentence can sometimes effectively end your career. Just take a look at Mystikal. In 2003 the New Orleans-based rapper was at the peak of his career—Tarantula had been nominated for a best rap album GRAMMY, and he appeared on hits like Ludacris‘ “Move Bitch” and Lil John and the East Side Boyz‘s “I Don’t Give a Fuck.” But that same year he was also indicted on charges of sexual battery and extortion, and sentenced to six years in prison. He was released in January 2010, but no one seems too keen to feature him now.

Luckily for Todd, it isn’t always as bad as all that. After all, aren’t these kinds of antics par for the course for rock stars? Jim Morrison’s legendary status was solidified by separate arrests for attempting to incite a riot (1962) and indecent exposure (1969). And Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’ careers certainly didn’t suffer following their 1972 arrests for assault and obstruction of justice. (Of course, those charges were later dropped.) More recently, Lil Wayne served an eight-month prison sentence after being convicted of a gun charge that, if anything, only served to increase his popularity. He stayed in touch with fans through the Web site Weezy Thanx You, and the hashtag #FreeWeezy was a constant reminder on Twitter of his plight. The rapper even phoned in his verse on Drake‘s “Light Up” from prison.

Of course, Todd probably won’t be able to submit his bass parts via prison telephone, so what does all of this mean for him and the rest of Coheed? It’s hard to say, but with two previous convictions for drug possession and operating under the influence he’s been in similar situations before. And while Todd’s future may be uncertain, collectively Coheed and Cambria should be just fine. Wes Styles will be taking over bass duties for the remainder of the group’s tour, and this won’t be the first time they’ve played without Todd—he left in 2006 to complete rehab for a heroin addiction. Coheed explained the situation with a statement on their Web site: “We are surprised, to say the least, and will address the situation with Michael after the tour. For now, we just want to have a great time out here and finish with some killer shows.”