Tori Amos tells People she writes songs on anything she can get her hands on. She also admits to writing in the shower. She says if the glass is right you can notate the music on the glass. Take a look:
Perez Hilton has signed a French artist named Sliimy to his new music label, Perezcious Music. Hopefully, Sliimy has better songs than this song called "Trust Me." Another Sliimy music video can be found here.
Reuters reports that Tori Amos has cut a deal with Universal Republic for a late spring/early summer 2009 release for her 10th album. Amos has been with Atlantic and Epic in the past.
Reuters says Amos is also writing a musical called The Light Princess for the British National Theater. She also released a graphic novel called Comic Book Tattoo earlier this year. Tori Amos currently has art from the comic book on her website.
There is a new in-depth book out about R.E.M. called Hello that offers an intimate and revealling look at what life is like for the band and what it is like on tour and at concerts. Here's a description of the book:
R.E.M. has risen from cult college radio status to sell more than 100 million records worldwide and be inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Released in July to coincide with their world tour and new album, the photo book captures the band both on- and offstage with rare and intimate access for the first time. David Belisle has photographed and traveled with R.E.M. for the past seven years; his dynamic images and insider's perspective capture the band's performances, recording and video sessions, but also reveal its members in personal spaces that only the band and their closest friends inhabit. Handwritten captions by the band and an introduction by Michael Stipe add context and insight to a must-have document for fans.
The AP video below shows Michael Stipe and photographer David Belisle signing copies of their new book, Hello, at a London bookstore. The book contains photographs and interviews of R.E.M on tour and in concert.
Here's a video that shows how Radiohead's unique music video for the "House of Cards" song was made. No cameras were lights were used in the music video that was basically made from data collected with various 3D plotting technologies.
US Magazinesays Kate Perry is behind "this summer's sexiest song." That US said that is good news for Perry. It's seems to be true with the sexy, alternative music video accumulating large views on the top video sharing sites. You can see the music video for "I Kissed a Girl" here. US also found out who it is that Kate Perry wants to kiss - it's Miley Cyrus.
So who's her dream same sex smooch?
"Miley Cyrus!" she says in the latest issue of Steppin' Out magazine. "She's the lucky girl. It's cool to hear through the grapevine that Miley Cyrus has my song as her ring tone."
Perry, 23, will attend August's Teen Choice Awards, which Cyrus, 15, is hosting.
"Maybe we'll have another Britney-Madonna moment on stage," Perry joked. "How hilarious would that be? Although I don't think it would help her career. However, it would definitely help mine!"
Perry's too old for Miley we think - maybe she should name someone else. She has mentioned Scarlett Johansson in the past. Yes, she is much more Kate's age. Kate Perry should have stuck with Scarlett.
Reuters reports that R.E.M., Nine Inch Nails and Stone Temple Pilots will play at the Voodoo Music Experience festival in New Orleans' City Park this October.
New Orleans' Voodoo Music Experience festival will marks its 10th anniversary in October by hosting three of the biggest bands of the 1990s: R.E.M., Nine Inch Nails and Stone Temple Pilots.
The three-day event kicks off on Oct. 24 at New Orleans' City Park; tickets start going on sale on Friday, priced at $100 for the three days.
Additional acts include hometown heroes the Neville Brothers, making their Voodoo debut, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, Irving Mayfield’s New Orleans Jazz Orchestra and the New Orleans Bingo! Show.
The exact date for the three-day concert are October 24th, 25th and 26th. You can find more information on the website located here.
Listening Post reports that Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails is looking for videos for the new Ghosts I-IV album. They can be posted on the Ghosts YouTube group.
To expand the idea of the "Ghosts" project, we're inviting anyone and everyone to create visuals to accompany the album's music. In a few months, we'll be gathering the entries we feel are particularly exceptional and highlighting them. There are no rules to this - be as creative as you like. Create a music video, or a short film, or something completely abstract. Use only one track from the album, or use multiple tracks. Only one caveat: Incorporating copyrighted materials (clips from movies, music by other artists, etc) into your video might limit our ability to feature it in the future.
To submit your video, join the Ghosts group at http://www.youtube.com/group/ninghosts and add your video to the group. Good luck, and enjoy.
Here's a video from Trent Reznor explaining it.
Radiohead also has a YouTube contest going on. PopWatch notes that they both are pitching YouTubers. It may just be a coincidence as many bands are trying to interact with YouTube users these days.
The AP discusses some of the recently released music in the video below. Gnarls Barkley has released their followup album, "The Odd Couple." The first video from that was a wild one called " ." You can read more about that music video that MTV banned here. The Raconteurs, B-52's, and Counting Crows are also releasing new music albums.
Radiohead is looking for cool animated video creators and they have partnered with Aniboom to find someone to create an animated music video for any song on In Rainbows. Storyboards of video ideas need to be uploaded to the aniboom website. You can learn more here and see a list of rules here. The contest has a $10,000 prize.
An animation blog at Calico Monkey says the contest "seems like a small amount of effort for a large reward, although there's sure to be a lot of entries." More discussion is going on here on the CGI Societ's forum. Cartoon Brew has the scoop on how the video below promoting the video design contest was made.
R.E.M. has announced that it will stream Accelerate - the band's 14th studio album - in its entirety exclusively on iLike and its syndicates beginning March 24th. The iLike Worldwide Listening Party will continue through March 26th, six days before the album's North American release on April 1st, 2008. The iLike streaming deal was announced in a press release.
"Collaborating with iLike and debuting Accelerate across the Web is in keeping with the spirit and immediacy of the album," says the band's frontman Michael Stipe. "We wanted to do something superfast and super real. Music, art, and pop culture are about right now, and nothing else matters. Accelerate is our turbo-charged response to the times we live in."
"With 11 songs clocking in at just 34 minutes, Accelerate is intense and relevant, with songs inspired by the WTO riots in Seattle, the Hurricane Katrina disaster, and other topical themes," said Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike. "We are honored to play a role in helping R.E.M. introduce this album to their fans across the Web. This is our first-ever Worldwide Listening Party and R.E.M. has set a very high bar."
In many ways, Accelerate marks a break from R.E.M.'s recent albums, 1998's Up, 2001's Reveal, and 2004's Around The Sun - all finely crafted works exploring the textures and possibilities of the recording studio. Accelerate ties together the band's entire canon as part of the vision for the new album turning old dreams into a new reality.
iLike's popularity got a huge boost from being a popular application on Facebook. They've clearly been able to leverage that popularity to get a major band like R.E.M. to stream their entire album on their service before it is officially released. R.E.M. will also record a video message introducing and discussing the album that will be available via iLike for distribution across the Web.
Tina Dico is a singer/songwriter from Denmark who is starting to get some buzz. Below is the music video for "On The Run." Tina's description under the video says it was shot in Joshua Tree National Park.
This is a little video for On The Run which was the first single in Denmark. I was in L.A. in June with an afternoon to kill and me, my manager and his girlfriend drove into the Joshua Tree National Park to play around with her new camera. It was 45 degrees on this particular day and with all the running I was starting to hallucinate strange things towards the end. What do you think?
SFGate.com reports that appearing in iPod ads has been good for a Canadian band named Feist.
The Canadian band Feist was quick to realize the benefits of its Apple partnership. Headed by singer-songwriter Leslie Feist, it released "The Reminder" on May 1, a well-reviewed collection of alternative and folk songs. The record sold decently - 31,000 its first week and 21,000 the next, according to SoundScan. On Sept. 9, when its song "1234" was paired with Apple's new iPod video Nano, the band was averaging 6,000 record sales weekly for a grand total of 216,000.
During the next four weeks, as the catchy ad beamed into millions of American living rooms, weekly sales for Feist improved to 14,000 the first week, 19,000 the second, 28,000 the third and 20,000 four weeks into the ad campaign.
This is the new music video for the song "Better" from Regina Spektor's latest album Begin To Hope. Regina Spektor is a New York singer and pianist. Her website can be found here. As you can see in the video Regina appears to have found a way to clone herself. Care to share that advanced technology with us Regina?
Artist Stephanie Dosen writes songs for ghosts but people enjoy them as well. Dosen toldThe Age how she started as a songwriter but wound up on the stage.
Deciding "you only live once", Dosen threw herself into songwriting, which in turn led her to performing.
"I feel as if I've never really sought the stage but just ended up here. I think a lot of songwriters are, like me, just people who like to compose songs and aren't necessarily born for the stage," she says.
"It's the number one fear of people: getting up in front of an audience. People are more afraid of getting up on stage, talking in front of other people, than they are of death. Most people would rather die than do what I do."
After moving to London while making A Lily For the Spectre, Dosen ended up playing most every night. "It's like camping in your high heels," she says of touring.
Dosen's latest album is called A Lily for the Spectre. An entry on her Myspace page says the new album is filled with "driving cradlesongs for ghosts gone astray."
Stephanie Dosen was raised on a peacock farm in Wisconsin. One day while sifting through flotsam in the attic, she found an old guitar covered in dust. It was her secret prize. During the feather harvest, when everyone was busy, she would sneak up into the attic to compose songs for boys at school. She also wrote many lullabies for her two favorite pets, a swan and a fox.
Stephanie now writes mostly for ghosts with a rusty tape player named jean-pierre that follows her everywhere. He has made it through 7 states and 2 minor sets of injuries but still holds onto her twilight written songs with happiness. The influence of the nightly peacock mewing and swan swimming can still be heard in her music.
Her new record a lily for the spectre is filled with driving cradlesongs for ghosts gone astray. She has recently teamed horses with Simon Raymonde (Bella Union Records, Cocteau Twins) who blesses a lily for the spectre with bass and filigree sounds for lost peacocks.
Dosen looks kind of ghost-like in this music video for her song "Only Getting Better."
The Sun is reporting that Nine Inch Nails singer Trent Reznor has written a tv show about the band's latest album (Year Zero) and the group is trying to pitch the idea to tv networks.
It is a concept album about the singer's forecast of the America in 20 years time, and Trevor is currently pitching the idea to TV networks.
He said: "We've got a producer on board and have met with writers.
"We're about to pitch it to the network, so we're a couple of weeks away from meeting all of the main people, and we'll see what happens."
Nine Inch Nails the tv show? Like Trent says, "If it works, it works and if it doesn't, it doesn't." Nine Inch Nails also has an official site on YouTube. There's nothing there about a tv show but here is a video of NIN performing in Stockholm, Sweden.
Sunrise Avenue has been receiving some buzz lately for their single, "Fairytale Gone Bad." Wikipedia says the hot single "went Gold in Germany after selling more than 150.000 units." The internationally-known band has recently been on tour in Finland. They blogged about it in a recent diary entry.
We took my car with Sami instead of the buss to ride free. It's so cool to wake up at the hotel and just sit an hour at the breakfast table and start driving when you feel like it. With the buss you must to have a clear schedule, it's so many guys.
The first show was at Lohja at Rantajamit (Isn't Finnish language funny ;). All was ok apart from the weather but fortunately the whole thing happened in a huge tent. The only thing I must say the Finnish festival organizers can't take care of is the privacy stuff. It's only in Finland where you get to your dressing room after the show and it's less than a minute when people are knocking the door to get autographs. Cultural thing. We drove home after the show to get deep sleep in our own beds.
Here's the video for "Fairytale Gone Bad" which has over 2 million views on YouTube.com.
This is the video for the Nunatak's song "would you do it all again." The song was written and recorded by Nunatak at the British Antarctic Survey Rothera Research Station on Adelaide Island Antarctica. Nunatak performed live from Antarctica for the Live Earth concert. You can read more about them here.
You have probably heard about Live Earth the giant worldwide concert taking place on 7-7-07 to raise awareness about the global warming problem. Rolling Stone reports that one of the bands playing is a group of scientists living in Antarctica. The group is called Nunatak.
Of the dozens of bands playing Live Earth this Saturday, one has a seriously close connection to the event's global-warming warning. When organizers looking to stage events on every continent learned they couldn't land commercial flights on Antarctica due to its fierce winter weather, the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) suggested that rather than bring in outsiders, Live Earth hire the research team's house band, Nunatak.
Nunatak is Greenlandic for "an exposed summit of a ridge mountain or peak (not covered with snow) within an ice field or glacier" - it's also the name of the five-piece band that entertains BAS's 22-person scientist team. All the bandmembers work at the BAS's Rothera Research Station "investigating climate change and evolutional biology on the Antarctic Peninsula," which has experienced an almost 3-degree Celsius climate change over the last 50 years. Tomorrow, the band will make their global debut as they perform their "two most popular tunes" outside on the peninsula in a show that will be broadcast via live feed.
Nunatak - Matt Balmer (electronics engineer, singer-songwriter and guitarist), Tris Thorne (communications engineer, fiddler), Ali Massey (marine biologist, saxophonist), Rob Wester (meterologist, drummer) and Roger Stilwell (field general assistant, bassist) - formed when the scientists were training at the BAC's headquarters before heading down to Antarctica, and the members spend time jamming when they're not outdoors researching.
NPR also has a story about Nunatak and below is a video of the band rehearsing.
The creative new video for DEE's song "Filter Factory" was shot mostly in stop motion by Jean-Francois Dugas and a small team of hard workers. The video features "150 boxes, 2137 animated photos, 1 giant rabbit, 1 vacuum salesman, 2 puppets and a dance routine."
Reuters 
There is a new in-depth book out about R.E.M. called 
US Magazine 
Reuters 
Radiohead is looking for cool animated video creators and they have partnered with Aniboom to find someone to create an animated music video for any song on In Rainbows. Storyboards of video ideas need to be uploaded to the aniboom website. You can learn more 
Artist Stephanie Dosen 
The Sun is 