Elvis Costello and Nick Lowe Make for Dream Team at Orange County Tour Stop: Concert Review

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic For years, the radio world has looked to two different sets of radio charts — the Billboard rankings, which are currently powered by BDS, owned by Luminate (formerly known as Nielsen Music), and separate charts from the airplay monitoring service Mediabase. But that dueling-charts era is coming to an end. Luminate announced Thursday morning that, beginning in December 2022, use of BDS will cease and Luminate will begin partnering with Mediabase, which it says is “known widely as the music industry standard across labels, publishers and management companies,” for the charts published in Billboard. That will finally create an end to the confusion of whether a song has hit No. 1 on one or both charts in a given format. Of course, in the case of very close calls at the finish line, this will also mark the end of a time when songs had a shot of claiming a No. 1 at either Billboard or Mediabase.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic When Fox’s “Monarch” premiered to strong ratings following an NFL game on Sept. 11, there was a big sort-of-maybe cliffhanger: Can the Susan Sarandon character, touted as a series lead, really be as dead as she appeared to be at the end of the pilot? But there were other questions, too. Like: Will this be a series in which the characters are portrayed as having originated a lot of the big hits of country and pop, from “Family Tradition” to “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” to “Born This Way”? Will the middle American audience be completely down with a story that has an out lesbian character vying to become a country superstar? Do parallels with Naomi Judd’s story feel as eerie as we think they do? And did the pilot make all those millions of viewers want to come back when there’s no NFL lead-in?

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The lineup of five honorees for CMT’s Artists of the Year special has been set, with Walker Hayes, Carly Pearce and Cody Johnson being celebrated on the annual show for the first time, joining previous honorees Luke Combs and Kane Brown. Filmed, as always, at Nashville’s Schermerhorn Symphony Center, the 90-minute “CMT Artists of the Year” will air on CMT Oct. 14 at 9 p.m. ET/PT after being taped in the week. The non-competitive show is a more intimate complement to the larger-scale, fan-voted CMT Awards, with honorees being selected by the network from among the artists deemed to have made the most collective impact during the preceding year.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The most famous “family tradition” in country music would have to be the intergenerational legacy of the Hank Williams clan. Right now, though, there’s another scion of Nashville royalty making good as a third-generation success: singer-songwriter Mitchell Tenpenny, who made modern chart history by managed to have two different No. 1 country airplay hits within the last month. But the rhetorical questions made famous by Hank Jr. — “Why do you drink? Why do you roll smoke?” — don’t apply in this case, as Tenpenny’s forebears in the business are a pair of strong but morally upstanding women: his grandmother, the late Donna Hilley, who capped a 31-year career at Sony/ATV Music Publishing by serving as CEO from 1994-2005, and his mother, Debbie Tenpenny, who currently works at Sony Music Publishing.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic It’s practically unheard of for artists in the rock realm to publicly announce their setlists before shows have even gone on sale, but Elvis Costello has taken things a step or two beyond that. In announcing a 10-night stand he’ll be doing in New York City in February, Costello said he would be performing at least 200 unique songs over the run, and revealed partial setlists containing 10 of the 20-plus numbers he plans to perform each night, touching on every famous or obscure part of his career. The 10 shows will take place over a two-week period Feb. 9-22, 2023, at Manhattan’s intimate Gramercy Theatre. Tickets go on sale for Citi card members today and to the general public on Friday. A 10-night pass is being offered on top of tickets for the individual shows.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The lineup for the 2023 Stagecoach Festival includes one very familiar veteran of the festivities, Luke Bryan, who will be making his fourth headlining appearance in the California desert, along with two stars who have made regular appearances at the festival but have moved up into headliner slots for the first time, Kane Brown and Chris Stapleton. Goldenvoice announced the performers and dates for the ’23 gathering Monday morning, just a little more than four months after the 2022 festival took place. The next fest will take place April 28 – 30, 2023, with passes going on sale Friday at 10 a.m. PT. Prices for passes range from $389 for advance general admission to $1,499 for the GA standing pit and $1,999 for prime reserved seating.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Freddie Freeman was hitting homers down in San Diego, so it was up to visiting superstar Lady Gaga to keep the on-base percentage exceptionally high Saturday night at Dodger Stadium, site of one of the last stops on her “Chromatica Ball” outing. Surprises were few, this many weeks into a mega-tour whose production values were already known among the legions of Little Monsters who’d long since put curious paws to Googling Gaga’s setlists and setpieces. Anyway, knowing what’s coming doesn’t quash the overpowering effects of a savvy performer who’s determined to look as cold as inhumanly possible while also, conversely, sounding like the warmest superstar you’ve ever encountered. Does that count, in ballplaying terms, as a slider?

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Brandi Carlile livestreamed some intimate performances to fans’ computer screens during the heart of the pandemic, but now that everyone is out and about again, she’s taking the livestream experience very big, with plans to simulcast a live concert, “Brandi Carlile: In the Canyon Haze — Live from Laurel Canyon,” to more than 100 IMAX screens on Sept. 28. The IMAX presentation will include a full performance of her “In the Canyon Daze” album, set to come out that same day. The forthcoming release is a full-on remake of her “In These Silent Days” album, which came out last October, this time arranged with more of an acoustic bent and the vintage Laurel Canyon sound in mind.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Here’s an awards trajectory you don’t see too often, at least in country music: Lainey Wilson has never even been nominated for the CMA Awards before, but as of Wednesday morning, she’s officially the leading nominee for 2022. Wilson came out ahead with six nominations when the Country Music Association announced the finalists Wednesday morning for its 56th annual awards show. Close behind with five nominations each was a quartet of contenders: Ashley McBryde, Carly Pearce, Chris Stapleton and songwriter/producer Shane McAnally. Racking up a four-pack of nods were Cody Johnson and writer-producer Josh Osbourne. Miranda Lambert, Carrie Underwood, Luke Combs, Hardy and Midland all came up as triple-nominees.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic When it comes to coffee-table books that survey the great album covers of the classic rock era, there are generally two kinds: those that include a lot of the work of the 1970s design team called Hipgnosis, and those that consist entirely of Hipgnosis’ work. Virtually any rock superstar who had the cachet to ask his record company to blow hundreds of thousands of dollars on a Hipgnosis cover went for the splurge of commissioning an original piece of art that might join classic LP jackets from Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin in a renaissance of 12’x12′ photographic surrealism. Only Hipgnosis could shoot a photo of a cow against a blue sky, put it on a Floyd cover (“Atom Heart Mother”), and make it look like an act of mysterious profundity on a level with the greatest works of Magritte.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic It’s fair to say that Abbey Road Studios is the most documented recording facility in the world, but only if you count the crosswalk outside. Otherwise, the nine-bedroom mansion turned studio hasn’t really had its day in the cinematic sun, the way that more modest studios like L.A.’s Sound City and Alabama’s Muscle Shoals have. Making up for that with an A-lister-filled movie treatment is “If These Walls Could Sing,” the first feature-length documentary from Mary McCartney, who has a hell of a shared Rolodex to draw upon in gathering the firsthand rock ‘n’ roll anecdotes you expect and want in a film like this. She’s also savvy enough to know that the guy working in the back gluing irreplaceable mid-century microphones back together deserves a few seconds of screen time, too.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Taylor Swift is not the only one re-recording fairly recent albums. Now Brandi Carlile has done it, although with very different reasons than the ones that prompted Swift to revisit her catalog. Carlile has gone back into the studio to redo last year’s “In These Silent Days” in its entirety, in a new, acoustic-focused version that’s been titled “In the Canyon Haze.” The newly recorded album will be out Sept. 28 and is preceded today by “You and Me on the Rock (In the Canyon Haze),” a remake that features her wife, Catherine Carlile, on harmony vocals. Carlile said that the project came about when she was looking at putting out a deluxe edition of “Silent Days” for the album’s upcoming anniversary, with bonus tracks, but settled on a way to make the entire album a bonus. The “canyon” part alludes to how the artist thinks the re-do aims for a vintage Laurel Canyon spirit in the reconfigured arrangements.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Comic actor Will Sasso is stepping in to play the title role in Audio Up’s new animated musical-comedy podcast, “The Ballad of Uncle Drank,” replacing Gary Busey, who is out of the project after being charged with criminal sexual contact in New Jersey. The 11-episode series also has a new premiere date, as it’s retooled with Sasso in the lead. Formerly set to bow Aug. 30, “Uncle Drank” is now due Sept. 13 through major podcast hosts, including all of SiriusXM’s audio entertainment platforms (including the SXM App, Pandora and Stitcher). Sasso, known for TV roles on “MadTV,” “How I Met Your Mother” and “Less Than Perfect,” joins a voice cast that includes Luke Wilson, Florida Georgia Line’s Brian Kelley, Chelcie Lynn, Billy Zane, Scarlett Burke and Audio Up CEO Jared Gutstadt.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Maybe she meant to call her new album “1979.” Taylor Swift has unveiled three additional album covers for her October release “Midnights,” each of which is being promised as only being available for the next seven days, as a pre-sale in both vinyl and CD formats. Even more than the more permanent cover that was revealed Sunday night, these album jackets very much look designed to evoke the 1970s, sometimes subtly, sometimes more blatantly. There’s the touch-tone phone. There’s the LP jacket on the floor. (Well, that one evokes the 2020s, too, but the reckless disregard for the treatment of a piece of vinyl is very retro.) And most of all, as a backdrop for not just all the cover images but the Swift webstore landing page, there is wood paneling. (It’s not just for vintage VHS porn anymore.)

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The lineup of performers for the 2023 Americana Honors and Awards has been revealed, with Brandi Carlile, Lucinda Williams, Allison Russell, the Indigo Girls, Chris Isaak and Lukas Nelson among those set to take the stage Sept. 14 at Nashville’s storied Ryman Auditorium. The roster includes mostly artists who are either up for the annual awards or achieving lifetime achievement honors. Other set to perform include Adia Victoria, the McCrary Sisters, James McMurtry, Sierra Farrell, the War and Treaty, Morgan Wade, Neal Francis and Phosphorescent. The longtime band leader for the annual awards show, Buddy Miller, will be back with a crew of musicians that includes the aforementioned McCrary Sisters, Don Was, Larry Campbell, Brady Blade, Jen Gunderman, Jim Hoke, Rob Burger and Lorenzo Molina.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Ingrid Andress is, by most measures, one of the most successful upstarts in mainstream country music over the past few years. After her debut album, “Lady Like,” came out in 2020, the Michigan native was nominated for best new artist at the Grammys as well as by the CMAs and ACMs. She’s a thoughtful live-wire and a media darling — those media including the press, late-night shows and, yes, country radio. Her first single, “More Hearts Than Mine,” was a double-platinum breakout hit that went top 5 at country radio, and a recent duet with Sam Hunt, “Wishful Drinking,” went top 10. She lands coveted tour spots, like her current one opening arena shows for Keith Urban all the way into November.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The 2022 MTV Video Music Awards were all about that bass Sunday night, and Flea didn’t have a lot to do with it. “VMAs, did you think I wasn’t gonna shake my ass tonight?” asked Anitta, very rhetorically, in the middle of her routine — and while most viewers were probably grateful for her concern for our concern, there was no need to fear she’d be the show’s outlier. Even the rock bands that were booked seemed to want to go into the show ass-forwards; hello, Måneskin cheek skin. (The cameras seemed to want to cut away from that singer’s pasty bottom; as you could almost hear the editors channeling Lisa Kudrow’s Aunt Sassy.) The only thing surprising in this regard, really, was the amount of robot ass in the show. Digital effects were sometimes used to bolster the supply of background dancers, or to provide giant setpieces, like the Attack of the 50-Foot Twerker that all but literally overshadowed J Balvin and Ryan Castro. When MTV is having to outsource butts to Silicon Valley, maybe it’s a sign we need to better allocate our natural supply.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Bob Dylan was announced earlier this year as having written separate appreciations of more than 60 different songs for his forthcoming book, “The Philosophy of Modern Song.” Now, the names of all 66 songs he wrote about have been revealed, thanks to the dissemination of a table-of-contents page for the highly anticipated book, which comes out in early November via Simon & Schuster. (Read the full list below.) Not surprisingly, classic songs written and/or recorded by Americans greats like Jimmy Reed, Ray Charles, Willie Nelson, Little Richard, Townes Van Zandt will come up for consideration. Less expectedly, Dylan will detour to analyze songs like Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves,” the Eagles’ “Witchy Woman,” the Fugs’ “CIA Man” and Rosemary Clooney’s “Come On-a My House.”

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The Nashville Film Festival announced the full lineup Friday for a fall gathering of filmgoers in Music City that will begin with the Brandi Carlile-produced documentary “The Return of Tanya Tucker” as the gala opening on Sept. 29 and end with director Sacha Jenkins’ “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues” for closing night on Oct. 5. The 53rd annual edition of the festival will take place both in-person and virtually, with a selection of more than 150 films that includes 38 full-length features, about 30 of which will be world, North American or U.S. premieres. Although the virtual component continues to be strong for the festival, its leaders note that of the 150 or so films in the festival, more than 50 will screen for audiences in Nashville venues, starting with the Tanya Tucker doc, which will be seen in the historic main auditorium of the city’s beloved Belcourt Theater, one of the original homes of the Grand Ole Opry. Other locations include the Franklin Theater in the nearby city of that name, and the TPAC Andrew Johnson Theater in downtown Nashville.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Stepping into Muse frontman Matt Bellamy’s Los Angeles studio is immediately surreal, on a couple of different fronts. For one thing, there’s the fact that it’s in an unmarked former storefront on a heavily trafficked urban street, so on the other side of the one-way glass, pedestrians are constantly passing by, unaware that they’re about two yards away from a rock star coming up with new songs to potentially join “Madness” or ”Uprising” guy as new KROQ-driven earworms in their heads. But apart from the street scene outside practically brushing up against his console, there’s something else about the place… “I don’t know if you remember the TV show ‘Twin Peaks,’” Bellamy inquires. As a matter of fact, yes. “Do you remember the Red Room? We’re sitting in it, basically,” he says, and sure enough, here in the front room of his studio, there is the black-and-white zig-zag flooring, the wrap-around red drapes, the minimalist lamp, the vaguely retro sitting chair…. Bellamy is a student of fantastical pop culture, so it makes sense that he’s surrounded by a Lynchian throwback space — even if the rock arias he creates here passionately reach for the sky, rather than feeling like they’re stuck in an interdimensional waiting room.