Big Thief guitarist Buck Meek is one month out from Haunted Mountain, his third solo studio album and his first via 4AD. Meek has been gradually mounting his album rollout for the better part of two months, beginning with the title track in late May and “Paradise” in late June.
As that pattern would suggest, Meek wasn’t going to let July end without releasing another single. His latest is “Cyclades,” a folksy nostalgic tune filled with vivid anecdotal lyricism about his dad’s past motorcycle crash in Siskiyou County and his mom’s similarly scary experience in Greece.
“These are all true stories, or at least as I was told, or remember them being told,” Meek wrote on Instagram. “There’s a thin line between history and mythology. Our lives are made of an endless myriad of unfinished stories, of every encounter of billions of people at the center of thousands of years in each direction. the telling is secondary.”
Meek also announced new tour dates across the US, Japan, and Korea. Tickets for his added US dates will go on sale beginning this Friday, July 28, followed by Korean shows going on sale on August 1 and Japanese shows on August 8. All dates and ticketing information can be found here.
Listen to “Cyclades” above.
Haunted Mountain is out 8/25 via 4AD. Find more information here.
Warning: This post contains some minor spoilers about Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One, which is good and which you should go see on as big a screen you can find.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny opens with a bizarre sight (and sound): A de-aged Harrison Ford as a younger Indy…who surreally speaks with the gravelly rasp of an 80-year-old man. In another timeline it wouldn’t have been the only summer movie this year to sport de-aging tech. At one point the Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One crew toyed with using it on Tom Cruise for scenes set about 30 years in the past. They thought better of it. But if they had they would have done the same for another actress a handful of years younger than him.
In a new interview with Empire (as caught by /Film), director Christopher McQuarrie reveals they thought about casting Julia Roberts as Ethan Hunt’s doomed lover, seen in flashbacks that take place before he joined IMF. Explains McQuarrie:
“I said, ‘OK, if I were doing this sequence, it would be Tom in, say, 1989. It would be Tony Scott’s ‘Mission: Impossible.’ That’s who would have been directing the movie before Brian De Palma, you know, in that era. We looked at ‘Days of Thunder’ and we looked at the style of it, and we started thinking what would it look like if Tony Scott had shot this, and who would it have been? I looked back at who was the ingenue, who was the breakout star in 1989? And right around then was ‘Mystic Pizza.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God. Julia Roberts, a then-pre-“Pretty Woman” Julia Roberts, as this young woman.’”
Eventually cooler heads prevailed — that and bills for what using de-aging tech would look like, on top of Robert’s potential payday. McQuarrie realized that “if you put two of them in a shot together, or three of them in a shot together, it would have been as expensive as the train by the time we were done.”
And so they did the cheaper, simpler alternative: They kept the flashbacks short and hyper-cut, so you never see young Ethan Hunt’s face, nor that of Esai Morales’ baddie.
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One is now in theaters.
On Wednesday, July 26, former Air Force Intelligence Officer David Grusch testified to Congress before a House Oversight subcommittee. Per the Associated Press, Retired Maj. Grusch asserted that “the US is concealing a longstanding program that retrieves and reserve engineers unidentified flying objects [UFOs]” and “likely has been aware of ‘non-human’ activity since the 1930s.” The Pentagon has denied his claims.
According to NBC News, Grusch also claimed “he has interviewed individuals who have recovered ‘non-human biologics’ from crashed UAPs” — opting to use “non-human” in favor of “alien.”
After the news broke, Lizzo tweeted (or Xeeted?), “Aye.. I know there’s a lot of pop culture news and memes going on rn but… THE GOVERNMENT JUST STATED *UNDER OATH* THAT THEY ARE IN POSSESSION OF UFOs AND NON-HUMAN ALIEN BODIES YALL WTF.”
Aye.. I know there’s a lot of pop culture news and memes going on rn but…
THE GOVERNMENT JUST STATED *UNDER OATH* THAT THEY ARE IN POSSESSION OF UFOs AND NON-HUMAN ALIEN BODIES YALL
In January, Samia released Honey, her sophomore album. “The whole record watches the singer/songwriter stepping into the most confessional version of herself as possible,” wrote Uproxx‘s Danielle Chelosky at the time. “The vignettes are endearing; it’s particularly relatable on the title track, when she sings about going to a Porches show in Brooklyn after a long week.”
On Wednesday, July 26, Samia made the title track all the more captivating by releasing “Honey (Maya Hawke Version),” the latest in her series of Honey Reimagined singles.
“When we were recording ‘Honey’ for the album, we added this ironic depth by turning what was originally a painful song into a kind of campfire sing along — big bouncy guitars, a happy melody, that endless refrain,” Samia said in a statement. “So I was eager to hear what Maya would do with it. Surprisingly, she stripped all of the campfire away. In her version, you can hear every bit of the desperation in how spare the production is. Exploring these new vantage points in my own work is exactly what draws me to the Reimagined concept.”
Hawke added, “It’s an amazing thing when a favorite person writes a favorite song. I was honored to be asked to cover ‘Honey,’ and I wanted to bring out the sadness I felt behind the celebration. I loved working with Will Graefe as a producer. I’ve never recorded a song without him and experiencing him as a producer was even better.”
“Honey (Maya Hawke Version)” follows “Charm You (Blondshell Version)” from late June. Per press release, Hovvdy, Ruston Kelly, and “more TBA” will also feature in Samia’s Honey Reimagined series.
Listen to “Honey (Maya Hawke Version)” above, and see Samia’s upcoming live dates below.
08/11 — San Francisco, CA @ Outside Lands Festival
08/24 — Vancouver, BC @ Hollywood Theater %
08/25 — Portland, OR @ Wonder Ballroom %
08/26 — Port Townsend, WA @ Thing Festival
09/02 — Salisbury, UK @ End of the Road Festival
09-03 — Stadbury Hall, IR @ Electric Picnic Festival
09/05 — London, UK @ O2 Forum
09/30 — Philadelphia, PA @ Mann Center *
10/01 — Columbia, MD @ All Things Go Festival
10/03 — Nashville, TN @ Ascend Ampitheater #
10/04 — Nashville, TN @ Ascend Ampitheater #
10/09 — Jacksonville, FL @ VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena
10/10 — Tampa, FL @ Midflorida Credit Union Amphitheatre
10/12 — Nashville, TN @ Paradise Festival @ Brooklyn Bowl ^
10/15 — Irving, TX — The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory #
10/16 — Oklahoma City, OK @ Beer City Music Hall &
10/18 — Boulder, CO @ Fox Theatre &
10/19 — Fort Collins, CO @ The Aggie &
10/21 — Omaha, NE @ Waiting Room &
10/22 — Des Moines, IA @ Wooly’s &
10/23 — Indianapolis, IN @ Hi-Fi &
10/25 — Detroit, MI @ Shelter &
10/26 — Pittsburgh, PA @ Club AE &
10-27 — Columbus, OH @ A&R Bar &
% with Raffaella
* with Boygenius
# with Noah Kahan
^ with Briston Maroney
& with Venus & the Flytraps
Back in 2020 when the NBA went to Orlando for the Bubble, they stopped testing players for marijuana, but it wasn’t until this summer that weed was officially taken off of the banned substance list.
NBA players have long smoked weed, hoping to dodge suspensions in testing, but now they are free to partake as much as they want. Kevin Durant, who is invested in some cannabis companies and is not exactly shy about his personal usage, was part of the push to officially remove it from the banned substance list, and had a conversation with NBA commissioner Adam Silver about it prior to the agreement.
In a recent CNBC event, Durant was asked about that conversation and what he said, and KD noted he didn’t have to say much, as he notes the commissioner smelled it at soon as he walked in and knew exactly what was up.
Given marijuana is now legal to smoke recreationally in many states, which as KD notes has removed a lot of the stigma around it, it made sense for the NBA to take it off the banned substance list. Still it’s funny that Durant effectively let the weed do the talking for him in a meeting with the commish, and now he and other NBA players can, officially, stop trying to count their drug tests to know when it’s safe to smoke unabashedly.
Of course, the Beyoncé economy extends to the internet. On Wednesday, July 26, Amazon Music released its Drop 2.0 of Renaissance World Tour merchandise, which represents “the second of the four-part exclusive online collection that is being released throughout the North American leg.”
Drop 2.0 includes the “Alien Superstar” tee ($35), “Virgo’s Groove” tee ($35), “Heated” tee ($35), “Summer Renaissance” tee ($35), and the Renaissance World Tour sticker pack ($30).
The latter item “comes with 16 black-and-white graphic stickers, each with their own unique design,” and each tee takes its name from track on Beyoncé’s acclaimed July 2022 album, Renaissance. The full collection is available here.
The Renaissance World Tour landed in Detroit, Michigan for Wednesday, July 26, before tackling back-to-back nights at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey on July 29 and July 30.
Initially, the North American leg was to end in New Orleans on September 27, but the Kansas City, Missouri date had to be rescheduled due to “production logistics and scheduling issues, as reported by Deadline. It will now serve as the finale on October 1. See all of the dates here.
Far as reboots go, Ron DeSantis’ attempts to revive his floundering campaign has been going about as well as Universal’s Dark Universe. So far, the Florida governor — once seen as the guy who could finally rid the GOP of Trump, if by becoming his younger and more disciplined clone — has had to gut his staff, including a guy who spread Nazi imagery. Now he’s losing fellow conservatives after saying he’d offer a key health job to a total nutjob.
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), when asked if he would consider naming 2024 Democratic candidate RFK Jr. as his vice president:
As per The Daily Beast, DeSantis recently spoke with rightwing pundit Clay Travis, during which he shot down the idea of making Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., currently gunning for the Democratic ticket, his veep. Not that he wouldn’t use him in another capacity down the road.
“I’m aligned with him on Fauci and the corruption and the health bureaucracies 100%. And I think he’s probably done said some other things that I agree with, too,” he explained.
Does DeSantis agree with Kennedy about his recent claim, delivered at a fart-filled press dinner, that COVID-19 was a bioweapon that was “ethnically targeted” to spare Jewish and Chinese people? He was pretty vague, but he was more specific about the role Kennedy would play in his hypothetical administration that probably isn’t happening.
“And so on that regard, it’s like, okay, if you’re president, sic him on the FDA if he’d be willing to serve, or sic him on CDC,” DeSantis said.
According to Mediaite, even Republicans, who have been turning on him as his only six-week-old campaign crumbles. Among them was The National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke, who wrote, “It’s flat-out insanity for DeSantis to mention RFK Jr. within the same sentence as the FDA or CDC, let alone as a potential appointee to do anything related to medicine. RFK Jr.’s a kook who’d improve nothing.”
It’s flat-out insanity for DeSantis to mention RFK Jr. within the same sentence as the FDA or CDC, let alone as a potential appointee to do anything related to medicine. RFK Jr.’s a kook who’d improve nothing. (The full answer’s even worse than this clip.) https://t.co/cIgpo8wIGn
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) July 26, 2023
Cooke’s colleague Philip Klein called it his plan simply “embarrassingly bad.”
Aaron Sibarium, of the conservative Washington Free Beacon, sounded almost liberal, tweeting, “Far and away the worst decision DeSantis has made is playing footsie with cranks who hate modern medicine and would slow-walk vaccine development in a future pandemic.”
Desantis has said it was a mistake to waive liability for vaccine developers. But the EU’s refusal to do that is part of why it took longer for vaccines to reach Europe than Britain or the United States.https://t.co/pZ2iuO392u
“Sources say that despite the love and respect the singers have for one another, they have both agreed to end their engagement,” the publication relayed.
Meanwhile, unverified allegations that Alejandro was unfaithful to Rosalía have begun circulating. Alejandro addressed the situation with a lengthy Instagram Story on Wednesday, July 26, explaining that he would prefer not to speak publicly on such a private matter but felt compelled to dismiss any false rumors of infidelity “out of respect” for Rosalía, their families, and all they’d been through together.
Translated roughly from Spanish to English, Alejandro confirmed his and Rosalía’s engagement ended “a few months ago” and acknowledged “there are thousands of problems that can cause a breakup, but in our case, it was not because of third parties or infidelity.”
Rosalía has yet to publicly comment.
You can read Alejandro’s full statement in the screengrab below.
In 1992, Sinéad O’Connor ignited outrage during her musical act performance on “Saturday Night Live”, when she boldly tore up a photo of the Pope to call for justice against the child sexual abuse epidemic within the Catholic Church, all while singing an acapella version of Bob Marley’s “War.”
The protest angered the network, “SNL” viewers, and even the Vatican, which risked O’Connor’s entire career. But having experienced abuse as a child at the hands of the Catholic Church, she knew she was fighting for something bigger than reputation.
“Everyone wants a pop star, see? But I am a protest singer. I just had stuff to get off my chest. I had no desire for fame,” she wrote in her 2021 memoir titled “Rememberings.”
A little over a week after the “SNL” incident, the “Nothing Compares” singer got relentlessly booed at a Bob Dylan tribute. She stood in stoic silence, taking in jeers and name-calling from the crowd.
Finally, she waved for the pianist to stop playing, then doubled down with an even more raw, more haunting rendition of “War.”
Watch the powerful moment below:
Despite the backlash, America and the rest of the world would later come to see that O’Connor was completely founded in her accusation.
Forever a “protest singer” first and a pop idol second, O’Connor would go on to lead a life full of activism, speaking out on issues related to child abuse, mental health, human rights, anti-racism, organized religion, and women’s rights.
Now that the beloved non-conformist has died at the age of 56, she will be forever remembered as a courageous champion of truth, who led with integrity above all else.
In an exclusive interview with People, actor Dennis Quaid shared how his faith led him towards the path of sobriety, and it’s a great example of the major role that spirituality—that is, the feeling of connection to something greater to yourself, not necessarily in the form of religion—plays in addiction recovery.
Quaid broke into Hollywood in 1979’s “Breaking Away,” and over the next 10 years would become a household name. But at the height of his success, a profound moment caused him to check into a rehab center.
“I remember going home and having kind of a white light experience that I saw myself either dead or in jail or losing everything I had, and I didn’t want that,” he recalled to the outlet.
.
While addiction is complex and multi-faceted, many former addicts note a sense of spiritual emptiness being a contributing factor, leading to feelings of isolation, a lack of purpose and depression, which individuals then attempt to use alcohol or drugs to fill the emotional void.
Quaid’s insights seem to reflect this concept.
“It’s a struggle,” he told People. “We’re all looking for the joy of life, and drugs and alcohol and whatever give that to you really quick…That’s really what we’re looking for, the joy of life, which is our gift, actually, the relationship with God that we all have. It’s at the bottom of it, the joy of being alive.”
For Quaid, and for many others who have gone through recovery, sobriety meant “getting back to that.”
Going back to his Christian roots, Quaid began rereading not only the Bible but other religious texts like the Bhagavad Gita and the Quran. Though he grew up as a Christian, the actor noted that only through his recovery process did he develop a “personal relationship” with his faith.
Most recovery programs do have a spiritual component involved, encouraging practices that connect individuals to a “Higher Power,” such as meditation, prayer or simply making gratitude lists.
The concept of spirituality might feel alienating to those battling addiction who equate it with religion and feel like they don’t fit into a religious framework—which could cause them to avoid seeking help at all.
However, the two are not the same. Psychiatrist Dr. Maya Spencer defines spirituality as “the recognition of a feeling or sense or belief that there is something greater than myself, something more to being human than sensory experience, and that the greater whole of which we are part is cosmic or divine in nature.”
Spirituality is a deeply personal process, which is partially why most recovery programs use the general term “Higher Power” so that anyone can assign their own meaning, be it God, the Universe, Oneness, etc. In this case, Quaid might have found peace through what he calls “God,” but others have found it in recovery using different names.
And truly, addiction recovery aside, it is awe-inspiring to think about how tapping into that mysterious, cosmic force can rewire even our most deeply ingrained beliefs in an instant. Only a month ago, on June 22, 2023, a white supremacist reported changing his entire worldview after taking part in an MDMA study and feeling a divine sense of “connection.”
All this to say—we might never be able to agree on what we’re a part of, exactly, but believing we are a part of something often helps us not take this miraculous existence for granted.
Watch Dennis Quaid’s full cover interview with People below:
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