This has GOT to be a joke, right? But hey, if Jesse Ventura can be a governor, I guess ANYTHING is possible!
Billboard and other media reports Kid Rock said yesterday (Jul 12th) he plans to run for the U.S. Senate in 2018. Rock, whose real name is Robert Ritchie, intends to run as a Republican in his home state of Michigan against Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow, who is up for re-election next year. Rock has launched a campaign website at kidrockforsenate.com and also tweeted, “I will have a major announcement in the near future.” (Editor’s note: He has an album coming out.) Some on Twitter were wondering if the campaign was real, since clicking to buy merchandise on the site directs you instead to a Warner Bros. Records page — suggesting the whole thing could be a ruse to promote a new album.
A possible run by Rock was floated earlier this year by a local Republican activist named Wes Nakagiri, who suggested Rock would make a good candidate because he “has name I.D., is an out-of-the-box idea, and would kind of get rid of that stodgy Republican image.” After the campaign website went live with the slogan “Are you scared?” featured on the homepage, Rock wrote on Twitter, “I have had a ton of emails and texts asking me if this website is real…The answer is an absolute YES.”
Rock told us not long ago that he has little time for the music industry these days: “In my older age, I’ve grown very impatient with a lot of things in this business. I don’t bitch about it, I just try to knock it out and get the work done where I have to. But you know, really at this point I just want to play music and put out records and play live and, you know, kind of cross my fingers that the people enjoy it.”
Lou Brutus is on his way to Rockfest in Cadott, WI for the weekend. And he will be with Brent Smith among scores of other rock stars. News this morning comes out of the Shinedown camp…..they plan to complete its new album by the end of the year for a tentative Apr 2018 release. The first single from the effort should make its online debut in Jan. The timetable for the band’s follow-up to 2015’s Threat To Survival was revealed by singer Brent Smith and bassist Eric Bass during a Jul 11th interview with our Springfield, IL affiliate, radio station WQLZ.
Smith said that work on the band’s sixth studio album began back in January, with Bass explaining, “Right now we’ve written 17 songs altogether, of which we feel really strongly about a handful of them that we feel certain that we like that will be either on the record or really close to it. So we’re gonna get in and start tracking those while at the same time continuing to write other songs for the record.”
Bass added this marks the first time the band has “ever tried to write, tour and record all simultaneously.” Although Bass has produced tracks for the group before, this will be the first time that he produces an entire Shinedown album on his own. He said, “Normally I’m not a proponent of self-produced bands and that sort of thing, but I think this band has a different mentality and a different approach to things.”
Smith said a while back why he thinks Shinedown’s music connects with its fans: “The songs that you admire and the ones that make you, quite frankly, wake up in the morning, they’re your story in a lot of ways. When you connect with a song, it’s because inside that song, it means something very special and it’s very poignant just for you.“
Smith revealed that they’re “90 percent sure” that the new LP will be a concept record, adding, “The band’s never done this before, and taking in that type of an atmosphere sonically is really taking an audience on a journey.” Shinedown is currently on a summer U.S. tour that stops in West Fargo, ND on Friday (Jul 14th) and Rockfest in Cadott, WI on Saturday. The trek comes to a close on Aug 9th in Ventura, CA.
Nickelback fans turned the tables on the band’s many haters and explained why they love the quartet in a new video issued by Vice. While it can be hard to find somebody who will admit to buying one of the 50 million copies of Nickelback records that have sold over the years, Vice went straight to a concert by the band and found plenty of fans there willing to talk, including an entire group of dudes wearing white shirts with frontman Chad Kroeger’s face on the front.
One young woman said, “There’s two types of people in the world: People who admit they like Nickelback and people who are just liars.” When asked to name their “Nickelback” — a band they hate — fans had a number of different responses. One of those was Theory Of A Deadman, whom Kroeger himself discovered but fans deemed a “Nickelback knockoff.” (NOOOOO! We love those guys!)
Kroeger told us that keeping Nickelback’s fans happy is always the priority: “We set the bar pretty high, you know, for ourselves and our fans because they’re always in the forefront of our mind when we’re creating new stuff, and we love giving our fans what they want. It’s tough because picking out a Nickelback fan’s tricky, you know, ’cause they’re all over the map and they all like something different. So trying to keep all of them happy, it’s a challenge.”
Nickelback’s ninth studio album, Feed The Machine, entered at Number Five on the Billboard 200 album chart two weeks ago, notching its seventh Top 10 debut. The new disc has spawned three singles so far in the title track, “Song On Fire” and “Must Be Nice.”
Prophets Of Rage have released “Living On The 110,” the second new song from the supergroup’s upcoming full-length album. Prophets Of Rage guitarist Tom Morello said about the track, “‘Living On The 110’ is a song that speaks to the issue of homelessness. The 110 is a freeway in Los Angeles and living beneath it are thousands of homeless people. Bentleys and Rolls Royces roaring by are literally driving on top of the poor and their makeshift homes, a picture-perfect analogy for the grotesque economic inequality that plagues our times.”
One of the band’s two vocalists, B-Real, added, “‘Living on the 110′ opens the eyes of those that don’t see the ever growing problems of the poverty stricken.”
Prophets Of Rage’s first full-length LP is self-titled and due out on Sep 15th. Other cuts on the record include “Radical Eyes,” “Unf**k The World,” “Legalize Me,” “Hail To The Chief,” “Strength In Numbers,” “Fired A Shot” and five more.
The band features Morello, bassist Tim Commerford and drummer Brad Wilk — all previously with Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave — as well as B-Real from Cypress Hill and Chuck D and DJ Lord from Public Enemy. Prophets plays songs from Rage, Public Enemy and Cypress in addition to original material. The group made their live debut in May 2016 in Los Angeles.
And finally today, Blabbermouth reporting my friend Maynard James Keenan spoke with “The Joe Rogan Experience,” the podcast hosted by UFC personality and stand-up comedian Joe Rogan, the Tool frontman explained for the first time why it is taking so long for the group to get the material written and recorded for its long-awaited follow-up to 2006’s 10,000 Days album.
Speaking about his bandmates, Adam Jones (guitar), Danny Carey (drums) and Justin Chancellor (bass), the singer said (see video below): “Their writing process is so drawn out. And I’m sure there’s a lot of reasons why the delay has been long. Their process is very analytical, and I think, at some point, maybe because so much time has gone by from the last album, there has to be a little bit of fear in here. [You think to yourself] ‘Is this record gonna be as good as the last one?’ The anticipation now is… Now the pressure is huge, so I’m sure there’s some of that [that] goes into play.
“As far as the way that Danny and Justin and Adam write, it’s a very tedious, long process. And they’re always going back over things and questioning what they did and stepping back and going back farther and going forward and, in a way, they’re laying a foundation, they’re putting in the footings for a house. So I can’t write melodies until the footings are in place. I can’t write words until the melodies are in place. I can’t build walls and then start decorating this place until the foundation is in place. ‘Cause if they keep changing the foundation, changing the footings, the melodies change, and then the story, of course, isn’t getting written. So that’s where we are. There’s a lot of footings that keep shifting — lots of awesome footings, but they keep changing. And they keep changing their minds. So I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing; it’s just their process.”
According to Maynard, part of the reason the members of TOOL have taken so long to come up with new material is the fact that they are set in their ways after two decades of commercial and critical acclaim. Read more here.