Beck wins Grammy for Best Alternative Album

Beck, the genre-bending experimental artist whose postmodern arrangements have endured since the 1990s, won the Grammy for Best Alternative Music Album Sunday.

The 48-year-old Californian whose eccentric sound collages have won him both critical and commercial success, beat competition from fellow musical shapeshifters Bjork and St Vincent.

The 13th studio album of Beck, “Colors”, found praise for its lush soundscapes and energetic ear candy.

The album was the first for Beck since 2014’s “Morning Phase”, for which he earned three Grammys, including the coveted Album of the Year.

“Colors” is also nominated this year for Best Pop Solo Performance and won for Best Non-Classical Engineered Album. Beck boasts 20 career nominations, of which he has now won seven awards.

Two of Beck’s earlier albums, “Odelay” and “Sea Change”, are ranked as Rolling Stone magazine’s 500 greatest albums of all time. JB

source: entertainment.inquirer.net

Johnny Cash's Family Kicks Off Blowout Celebration of Country Icon's 80th

On February 26th – what would have been Johnny Cash's 80th birthday – his siblings, children and grandchildren will gather at his boyhood home in Dyess, Arkansas, to celebrate the upcoming restoration of the crumbling 1930s structure. Then they will head to the town's community center to sing and share stories about the late star. "He should've lived to 80," says daughter Rosanne Cash. "It's hard. But it's so uplifting to celebrate it this way, rather than going to a dark place about how sad it is he isn't still around."

The Dyess events will kick off a busy year for the Cash estate. This summer, a separate museum will open in downtown Nashville with the most comprehensive collection of Cash artifacts ever. On April 3rd, two lost gospel albums Cash cut in the Seventies and Eighties will be released as Bootleg IV: The Soul of Truth. A few months later, Sony will put out a huge box set of everything Cash released on Sun and Columbia Records in the first three decades of his recording career, along with unreleased music. There might even be enough late-period material left in the vaults for another volume of Rick Rubin's American Recordings series, which ended in 2010. Says son John Carter Cash, "I do believe there's enough to warrant a release he would be proud of."

The Nashville museum is being organized by Bill Miller, who befriended Cash in the Seventies. Miller, who owned a historical-documents business, helped fuel Cash's hobby of collecting signed presidential papers, while Cash supplied Miller with priceless country-music history. "There were literally thousands of pieces," Miller says of the collection. "It got to a point where I was scared to leave my house." Up to a thousand items will be on display, including Cash's prized custom Gibson acoustic, a Grammy trophy, gold and platinum records, and handwritten lyrics to "Folsom Prison Blues" and "I Walk the Line."

source: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/johnny-cashs-family-kicks-off-blowout-celebration-of-country-icons-80th-20120224

Dave Grohl Clarifies Grammy Rant

Dave Grohl is making a point of clarifying comments he made while accepting a Grammy on Sunday night for the Foo Fighters' most recent album, Wasting Light. Grohl has taken heat for complaining about a lack of "human element" in contemporary music, which has been widely interpreted as a broadside against all manner of non-rock music.

"I love ALL kinds of music," Grohl said in a statement released earlier today. "Electronic or acoustic, it doesn't matter to me. The simple act of creating music is a beautiful gift that ALL human beings are blessed with. And the diversity of one musician's personality to the next is what makes music so exciting and . . . human."

source: rollingstone.com