Shania Twain Signs With Republic Nashville, Releases First Single in Five Years, ‘Waking Up Dreaming’

A new poll has revealed how Brits start their day - with most opting for breakfast, a cup of tea or coffee, and a hot shower.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Grammy winning singer and arranger Anita Kerr, whose vocal ensemble the Anita Kerr Singers became a staple of hit pop and country recordings in the 1950s and ’60s, has died at age 94. Her daughter Kelley Kerr confirmed the death in a social media post, writing, “Such sad news and what a great loss for the music industry. Anita was a legend in her time but first and foremost she was my mother. May you rest in peace. I will forever miss you but I am comforted in knowing that you are now singing with angels. You are forever in my heart.” Kerr’s vocal arrangement sound was considered a key component in the “countrypolitan” or “Nashville sound” era of country music, in which the music saw the addition of strings and background vocals, lending lusher elements to recordings by some of the genre’s top stars, perhaps most notably Patsy Cline and Jim Reeves. The smoother take on country lent itself to less rough-hewn crossover hits.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The word “contested” shows up a lot lately in singer-songwriter Elizabeth Chan’s world, as she made headlines this summer for going to court to try to ensure that Mariah Carey is not legally granted sole possession of the “Queen of Christmas” tag, which has also been applied to her. But there’s at least one aspect of what Chan does that will likely continue to go unchallenged. With her 12th album, “12 Months of Christmas,” coming out this week, Chan further breaks her own record for having the most all-original Christmas albums in circulation of any nationally established pop artist. Although “most Christmas albums” is not the sort of record where Santa is keeping an official list and checking it twice — nor the Guinness Book, for that matter — it seems safe to say that no one else is even close when it comes to self-penned, all-new Yuletide collections, thanks to the one-a-year pace established by Chan, the only nationally recognized artist who does nothing but Christmas albums.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic California is in the house, and will be for the next three years, at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. A major exhibition, “Western Edge: The Roots and Reverberations of Los Angeles Country-Rock,” has just opened and will run through 2025. The must-see walk-through traces a history of roots music in L.A. rock that expands to include the Byrds, Flying Burrito Brothers and Michael Nesmith in the 1960s; the Eagles, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris in the ’70s; and Dwight Yoakam, Lone Justice and Los Lobos in the ’80s, among many other influential and sometimes commercially impactful figures. Variety recently visited the museum and spoke with co-curators Michael Gray, the facility’s executive senior director of editorial and interpretation, and Michael McCall, the museum’s senior editor, about why the ’60s through ’80s were a golden age for country-inflected rock in Los Angeles. The two curators also spoke about a number of the artifacts on display, from numerous Nudie’s-tailored jackets that set the visual tone for the era to key musical instruments to handwritten scores and setlists and even band flyers — see the gallery of photos below.

The Wombats have released another taste of their forthcoming EP ‘Is This What It Feels Like To Feel Like This?’ by way of a new single ‘I Think My Mind Has Made Its Mind Up’.Breaking open with a thrashing guitar melody, ‘I Think My Mind Has Made Its Mind Up’ boasts some airy yet pensive vocal runs, with The Womabts’ frontman Matthew ‘Murph’ Murphy saying of the song in a press release: “It’s a glitchy ode to the ’90s, innocence and escapism.”Take a listen below:Their forthcoming EP ‘Is This What It Feels Like To Feel Like This?’ – the follow-up to January’s ‘Fix Yourself, Not The World’ – is due for release on November 18.Announcing the release back in August, the band shared its title track alongside a breezy visualiser.Preceded by singles ‘Method To The Madness’, ‘If You Ever Leave, I’m Coming With You’, ‘Ready For The High’ and ‘Everything I Love Is Going To Die’, The Wombats’ fifth studio offering landed back in January.A four-star review saw NME‘s Mark Beaumont remark: “Anyone surprised at the trio’s continued success clearly hasn’t been listening.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Feeling like you’re having a hard time keeping up with all the new music that’s coming out? You’re not alone — even if you are, say, a computer and not just a mere mortal. Stats now show that an average of more than 100,000 songs are being uploaded to digital service providers every day. So don’t feel bad about not staying on top of things. If each of those 100K tunes lasted just three minutes (a conservative estimate by most standards), it would take over 30 years for one person to listen through all of the music released to and through DSPs in a day. New Music Friday? It’s more like New Music Nanosecond. The 100,000 daily figure was cited by the CEOs for both Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group at industry events in September, according to Music Business Worldwide, which used the staggering number as its Stat of the Week on Thursday.

Fever Ray has shared their first new single in five years – listen to ‘What They Call Us’ below.Karin Dreijer, former member of The Knife, last released music under their Fever Ray moniker in the form of 2017 album ‘Plunge’. That record followed on from Dreijer’s 2009 self-titled debut.‘What They Call Us’ was co-written/co-produced by Fever Ray alongside their brother/ex-Knife bandmate Olof Dreijer.As Stereogum notes, the song marks the first collaboration between the pair since The Knife’s 2014 team-up with Europa Europa, ‘För Alla Namn Vi Inte Får Använda’.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The family of John Prine has signed a partnership deal with RadicalMedia (“Summer of Soul”) to develop two documentaries about the life and work about the life and work of the late singer-songwriter, the company has announced. Filming will be well underway this weekend as RadicalMedia plans to shoot the week-long series of tribute concerts taking place in Nashville under the banner of “You Got Gold,” including shows at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum on Saturday and at the Ryman Auditorium Sunday and Monday. The all-star lineup for these shows is not being publicly revealed in advance. Footage for the “You Got Gold” concerts is being directed by Michael John Warren, who recently helmed the HBO documentary “Spring Awakening: Those You’ve Known” for RadicalMedia.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor LCD Soundsystem has released their first single in over five years, “New Body Rhumba.” The song features on the soundtrack of Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise,” which will be wide released in theaters on Nov. 25. The Brooklyn dance-rock band is hoping the song will be a major player in the Oscar race for best original song. Released via Columbia Records and DFA Records, James Murphy, Pat Mahoney and Nancy Whang wrote the single, which was produced by Murphy for DFA Productions. “White Noise” will open the New York Film Festival. The film is an adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel of the same name and tells the story of a contemporary American family attempting to deal with everyday life’s mundane conflicts amid an airborne toxic event.

LCD Soundsystem have released ‘New Body Rhumba’, the band’s first new song in five years.The song was created for the soundtrack of White Noise, an upcoming film directed by Noah Baumbach. The Netflix title — which stars Adam Diver and Greta Gerwig — is a film adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel of the same name, and will feature music composed by Danny Elfman.The seven-minute ‘New Body Rhumba’ sees LCD Soundsystem enlist a shouty backing choir alongside the vocals of frontman James Murphy.

Samia has announced details of her second album. ‘Honey’ will come out next year and is being previewed by first single ‘Kill Her Freak Out’.The record follows the New York-via-Nashville singer-songwriter’s 2020 debut album ‘The Baby’ and last year’s ‘Scout’ EP. It’s due on January 27, 2023 via Grand Jury.Of the new single, Samia said in a statement: “I wrote ‘Kill Her Freak Out’ at my loneliest and most delusional.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic No need to send out a search party for the “Searchin’ My Soul” singer. It’s true that Vonda Shepard has kept a low profile of late, not just during the pandemic but for a few years before it, not having released an album of new material since 2015’s “Rookie.” But she’s back with her ninth studio album, “Red Light, Green Light,” titled in part for the stop-and-go feelings a lot of us might have experienced during the past two and a half years. For Shepard at least, who has touring dates now lined up on the east coast and in Europe to follow the new release, all systems are go, again. For the still-curious who never really checked out Shepard’s discography outside of the “Ally McBeal” music, which she produced as well as sang, the new album is a chance to discover anew that she’s not just a soul-revue woman, but a distinguished songwriter when she’s out from under the covers. For those who already knew her from top-flight original albums like “It’s Good, Eve” and “By 7:30,” it’s a revisitation with a next-gen figure whose work snuggles comfortably alongside that of her piano-based ‘70s forebears.

Shania Twain has put out her new song, "Waking Up Dreaming;" the country sensations first new song in five years, and she has changed things up. She released her new song under a brand-new label, Republic Nashville, where she is the debut artist.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic A live album by Barbra Streisand that had originally been planned as her debut album in 1962, “Barbra Streisand — Live at the Bon Soir,” will finally get a release, 60 years after it was first penciled in as her recorded bow. At 24 songs, the set is undoubtedly much longer than what would have come out if Columbia had issued the live album six decades ago, as was first the plan. It comes out Nov. 4, 60 years to the week after Streisand’s shows at the Bon Soir club in Greenwich Village were recorded Nov. 4-6, 1962, just a little over a month after the 20-year-old theatrical sensation signed her Columbia deal. Ultimately the idea of releasing a live album as her debut was scrapped in favor of a 1963 studio recording, “The Barbra Streisand Album,” that had her recording 11 songs that were part of her nightclub repertoire. That decision is hard to second-guess, as her first album went on to win the Grammy for album of the year.

Noah Cyrus has teamed up with her famous father, Billy Ray Cyrus, for a new, emotional duet version of her song «Noah (Stand Still).»The heartfelt and resonant tune — the solo version of which serves as the first track on her recently released debut album — marks her first collaboration with her dad.The tune details advice Noah got from her dad amid her secret battle with Xanax addiction, which she only recently opened up about earlier this year.“Death upon my doorstep, if I took just one more step/ There’d be nothin’ left of me except these songs," Noah sings in the powerful track. «And my father told me, ‘Noah/ When you don’t know where you’re goin’/ Just stand still/ Soon enough you will.'»Billy Ray croons the second verse, before the duo harmonize for the remainder of the song, recalling the powerful guidance her father shared with her amid he battle with addiction and her recovery journey. -- a 10-track album — dropped earlier this month, and Cyrus' North American headlining tour kicks off Oct.

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 “I’ve never talked about this publicly before,” said Taylor Swift, teasing the audience as she accepted an award in Nashville Tuesday night, leading at least some of the attendees to be on the edge of their seats. And because it was an audience mostly of songwriters, they stayed there, even when the secret to be revealed turned out to have to with classifications of different types of lyrics she has kept in her head for years. She went on to say that “it’s dorky. But I also have, in my mind, secretly, established genres categories for lyrics I write. Three of them, to be exact: They are affectionately titled Quill Lyrics, Fountain Pen Lyrics and Glitter Gel Pen Lyrics. … I came up with these categories based on what writing tool I imagine having in my hand when I scribbled it down — figuratively. I don’t actually have a quill. Anymore. I broke it once when I was mad.”