Lil Nas X is easily one of the funniest people in music. So, when an occasion like Halloween comes around, an opportunity to come through with something comedic to show the world, all eyes are on him. Boy, did he deliver this year.
The rapper unveiled his costume in a video shared last night, and it starts out with a shot of a string hanging out of an opening that looks suspiciously like some female anatomy. Those suspicions are confirmed when the camera pans over to Nas, who drags the string as he walks away wearing a costume that can’t really be interpreted as anything other than a used tampon.
Meanwhile, Lil Nas X has been relatively quiet in 2023. In February, though, he offered some updates about his next album. As far as its release date, he said it would be “most likely summer,” but this summer came and went without a new Lil Nas X album. He also noted when asked how many songs he’s expecting to include on the project, “idk i love so many songs plus i’m still in the studio making music so it’s gone be hard to pick.” He elaborated, “it’s mostly planning now. i could easily just release music but i have to build moments around this sh*t. i have to go bigger than before!”
The easy cliché here would be to point out that Russ Bengtson has forgotten more about sneakers than most of us will ever know. The problem with this particular cliché is that when it comes to basketball sneakers specifically, I’m not sure he’s actually forgotten a thing.
From his time as editor in chief at SLAM to stints with Complex and Mass Appeal, Bengtson has spent close to three decades professionally immersed in sneaker culture. That immersion goes back to childhood, and it’s inseparable from his love of basketball. His unparalleled insight on these parallel themes is on full display in his new book, A History of Basketball in Fifteen Sneakers (Hachette), which goes Marianas Trench-deep on how the game and its footwear have evolved from the no-tech days of Chucks and set shots to the colorful, high-tech products we wear and watch today. Extensively researched and loaded with interviews with players, designers, and industry insiders, it’s a goldmine for anyone who cares about hoops, kicks, and the colorful cultural spot where they intersect.
I caught up recently with Bengtson to talk about the book and his own history with basketball and sneakers. (Fullest possible disclosure: Russ is a friend, and the guy who hired me at SLAM back when he was EIC, so I can attest to his staggering knowledge of the subjects.)
I’m probably not the only one who said to you at some point that this is the book you were born to write, but in a way it really is. I think it’s fair to say that no one else has covered basketball and sneakers as long and as prominently as you have. Did you feel like you sort of had to do this?
To a degree. I would always go to Powell’s bookstore when I was in Portland, or go to the Strand (in New York City), and relentlessly go through their basketball books, looking for out-of-print stuff. I’ve really read all the basketball books I can find, and all the sneaker books I can find — some of which I contributed to — and there just was never enough crossover. There’d be a mention of some sneaker stuff in various basketball books, but it never really got that deep into it. And a lot of the sneaker ones would cover a ton of sneakers, but not really get as deep into basketball. And I go back to, when I first tried to get a job at SLAM, part of the reason was, I wanted those first series of Jordan re-issues that came out in like ’94 and ’95, and SLAM was pretty much the only publication that covered sneakers and basketball.
From the beginning, you were responding to the sneaker coverage as well as the basketball.
Yeah, but it goes back even further, and I talk about it in the introduction — I don’t really remember whether Jordan became my favorite player because of the shoes, or if the shoes came to my attention because of Jordan. The whole sneakers-basketball thing has been inseparable for me basically since I knew about either one. To me, it’s the separation that’s artificial. I think the real story to be told is them combined.
You and I are close to the same age, and looking back to that time, as a kid, I was a hoop fan much more than a sneakerhead — my sneaker ideal was like, the New Balance Worthys, because I was a huge Laker fan. So to me, you were an outlier back then, most kids didn’t really embrace the game and the sneakers that equally. Did you have that sense?
Maybe a little bit. I think a lot of people who were into sneakers back then were into the shoes just for the shoes. I was a big Jordan fan early on — I definitely had people write in my high school yearbook about Jordan.
So back to the book. What did you learn in the process of writing this that even you were like, Damn, I didn’t know that?
A bunch of things. One of the funniest was talking to Marques Johnson, who had one of the coolest jerseys ever when he
played for the Bucks — it had his full name across the back — and he played Raymond in White Men Can’t Jump, one of the greatest roles in a basketball movie ever. Marques was one of the ten players to wear the adidas Top 10. And he hated the Top 10, which is hilarious. He started talking about it, and you could feel him kind of going back and realizing how much visceral hatred he had for this shoe. That’s something I did not see coming.
Some of it was stuff I knew, but just a matter of perspective. To go back through some of the Air Jordan stuff, to talk to David Falk and Sonny Vaccaro, and it’s funny, I feel like both of them feel like the other gets too much credit (for Michael Jordan signing with Nike). And in talking to them, I think they’re both right. I think they misinterpret the others’ role, if that makes sense. Falk, I think, feels Sonny is trying to take the credit for getting Jordan to sign with Nike. I think what Sonny was able to do was convince Nike to go with Jordan. And even Falk knows Jordan’s success wasn’t super guaranteed. That’s still one of my favorite things: Nike signed him to a five-year deal and had an out that if he didn’t sell like a million dollars’ worth of Jordan stuff in three seasons, they could dump him for the last two years of the deal. And he sold $126 million in the first year. No one thought he would be a failure, but no one thought he would be that much of a success.
Other things… when I had initially proposed the book, I proposed the adidas Pro Model and the Superstar for the same chapter. I was like, “Well, the Superstar is just the low-top Pro Model. I can’t talk about one without the other.” What Chris Severn put me onto, as the guy who developed those shoes, was that it was the other way around — the Pro Model was the high-top Superstar. The first adidas basketball shoe was meant to be a low top. And I didn’t realize that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, despite having a signature model through adidas, that was kind of just a commercial thing — something to sell with his name and face on it. He apparently wore the Superstar until ’87. He wore the Superstar after Run DMC kind of brought it back.
You talked to a ton of guys for this. Who were some of the more memorable conversations?
Kobe was amazing. We talked in late December, 2019. I’d known him since high school, met him at the McDonald’s All-American Game. His memory of all the shoe stuff was still super, super specific — he was a guy, obviously, it wasn’t just his name on it. Kobe, because we had so many conversations over the years, I kind of knew that he’d be great.
One thing I included in the proposal was the Boston Celtics wearing black shoes because Red Auerbach insisted on getting them because they would stay clean, they wouldn’t show dirt. Jeff Twiss, a long-time Celtics PR guy, got me on the phone with Tommy Heinsohn. Again, Tommy has since passed, but talking to him on the phone was just an amazing thing, you realize the entire NBA was within living memory. And he confirmed, the Celtics would issue you two pairs of Chucks at the start of the season, and if you wanted more than that, you would buy your own. And he would make two pairs of Chuck Taylors last the entire season.
Rick Barry, who was in the ads for the adidas Top 10 as the “inventor” of the shoe — I remember that ad from like Boys Life magazine when I was in Boy Scouts. He comes off as kind of a prickly dude, he definitely feels his own era should be appreciated more, and he has a lot to say about the modern game. Called him up one day, nicest guy in the world.
Jalen Rose was great, too. I never really thought about it, but a lot of those guys were from the Detroit area, so they weren’t exactly Jordan fans, because they grew up when Isiah Thomas was the king of Detroit. They weren’t even super Nike heads like that. Off the court, Jalen was talking about wearing Pumas, because that was the more Detroit thing.
Huge question I know, but how do you assess where basketball sneaker culture is now?
In a way I feel a little Cassandra-ish about this. There was a period where I wrote a sneaker column for Mass Appeal, and I remember writing about how I thought the bubble was going to pop. And this was probably 15 years ago. And the thing is, I think I was right, but what I didn’t anticipate was what was still then pretty much a subculture becoming this mass-market thing. And I think there was a long time where most people were content to just wear whatever — to go to Dick’s Sporting Goods or Kohl’s and buy whatever, and this whole other aspect that people who were into “sneaker culture” knew about didn’t affect them. Now, everyone knows about everything.
There’s a lot of “be careful what you wish for” in this. If you told me back in 1998 that I would be able to buy literally any Air Jordan from literally any era pretty much whenever I wanted, it would be like, “Wow, really? Sign me up.” But now, you look at the glory year Jordans, I to XIV, all of those became these iconic things. And people didn’t love all of them from the start, you know? Tinker (Hatfield, Jordan Brand designer) would talk about it — if people love it right from the start, you did something wrong. You need them to sort of grow to love it. And I think what retro did is make people impatient. If they don’t love something right away, they’ll just go buy the old thing, and a new release doesn’t really mean as much anymore. Before, you would buy the new Air Jordan because it was the new Air Jordan. You might have liked one prior to it more, but that one’s gone. And I think that’s true of pretty much anyone’s line now.
And from the basketball side — it’s funny, and I’m sure you notice this too: Back when we were going into locker rooms, we would pick what to wear to go to a game. If you could blow an NBA player’s mind with a pair of shoes, the streets didn’t have a chance. I distinctly remember, we would pass out issues of the magazine, and I would give one to, like, Tim Hardaway, and he would flip straight back to the sneakers before he looked at anything else. Tim Hardaway was on Nike! He had his own shoe! But he still wanted to see what was coming. So players back then were into it, but I think with the uniform rules and there not being as much of a viable selection of what to play in…
Right, it was pretty limited what color options the NBA would allow.
And now, everything’s wide open. And again, it’s kind of, be careful what you wish for. Formerly, the All-Star Game, people would wear crazy stuff. Finals, maybe, things would get a little more open. Now, it’s just like every game is an All-Star Game. There’s no rules anymore. I look at that Kobe Grinch shoe, which people were psyched on because Kobe wore it once on Christmas Day, and then I think last Christmas or two Christmases ago, it got retroed, and a bunch of guys wore it on Christmas. And I swear, at least one player has worn it in an NBA game pretty much every day since. I feel like that makes it less special. There’s something to the idea of a one-and-done, or a shoe being available for a season and going away and being replaced by something new.
I look at LaMelo, Jayson Tatum, even Steph to an extent. Luka, Giannis, Scoot. I feel like that stuff is kind of a light at the end of the retro tunnel. Retro’s only been a thing for like 25 years. If you look at kids, I think a lot of kids are wearing signature stuff from players they like. I look at some of those shoes, and I forget — and I’m sure other people our age forget — this stuff isn’t really for us. It should be what kids in high school like now. I don’t think people our age should be dictating what’s cool to kids who are 15. They don’t remember Michael Jordan as a player.
There are kids now who don’t realize Michael Jordan was a basketball player. It’s not even that they don’t remember him, they just think of him as a brand in the same way that Chuck Taylor is a brand. Which is insane to us, but…
Right. Part of the reason I wanted Bobbito (Garcia) to write the forward to this, I look at his book (Where’d You Get Those? New York City’s Sneaker Culture: 1960-1987) as being kind of a companion, almost. Obviously, his is through the filter of New York, and mine is through the filter of basketball as a whole. He looked at the Air Jordan I as being kind of the end. And for me that was the beginning, especially being in the suburbs. But over the years, I’ve come to see his perspective, where it’s like, if you’re someone who has to determine on their own what cool is, and all of a sudden you see a brand pushing something to be cool and people just accepting it, it’s like, wait a minute, that’s supposed to be our job. It’s kind of the same way I see it now, people need to take that power back from brands, instead of just chasing whatever the latest hyped retro is.
We went to a bunch of basketball courts in New York on the day the book was published to hand copies out, and me being me, I was like, “What do I wear?” I thought about it for a while beforehand, and I was like, actually, I need to put my money where my mouth is and wear a pair of current basketball shoes. I’ve been meaning to buy a pair of Tatums for a while now, or a pair of Ja Morants, and I ended up going to Dick’s Sporting Goods — that’s another thing with me, I don’t want to buy a new model that I’ve never tried on before. I ended up getting the black and gray Tatums, wore them all day.
So we hit all these courts, and on the way home, back on Long Island, I wanted to stop at Barnes & Noble and see if the book’s there, because I hadn’t seen it on a shelf yet. So I go in, and find it. Then I go over to the music side, and there’s this dude on the same aisle, he looks down and he goes, “Yo, those shoes are hard. What are those?” He thought they were Kyries, and I’m like, “Nah, they’re Tatums.” And that’s the thing, if you buy a new performance shoe or new signature shoe, you win twice. A, they’re readily available for the most part, and B, if you wear them, people probably aren’t going to know what they are. If you get the newest, craziest retro, spend like five grand on it, people are going to be like, “Oh my god you have those,” but they know what they are. Personally, I think it’s much cooler to buy some new stuff that you like and wear that instead.
Now that Halloween is officially over, Mariah Carey is already prepared to bring fans into the holiday season through her hit song, “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” Complete with a new social media post today, the video finds Carey hilariously defrosting in a block of ice, before she starts celebrating to the track.
Considering how much of a staple it is to the winter months, many might be wondering exactly how much Carey makes every Christmas from it.
Back in 2015, the Daily Mail reported that since the hit song’s original release in 1994, Carey has earned about half a million dollars each year from it. However, other publications have thrown out differing figures when it comes to the amount.
The year prior, the New York Post had claimed that between 1994 and 2013, the song generated $50 million in royalties. With the math, it divided down to about $3.8 million a year for the pop legend.
Then, in 2017, The Economist suspected that from 1994 to 2016, that number was $60 million in total US royalties — averaging to $2.6 million annually. With these numbers getting in a similar ballpark, Carey likely gets at least a million each year off the song. This figure also doesn’t account for international sales, streaming, brand deals, and even her 2020 Christmas special on Apple TV+.
For nearly four decades, Mariah Carey has built an incredible catalog of songs. With 19 songs having reached the top of the Billboard Hot 100, her music has proven timeless. While she has a vast collection of music in her repertoire, a specific song of hers has shown to stand the test of time nearly three decades after its release. As spooky season comes to a close, holiday season is officially upon us, and this season was welcomed by Carey earlier this morning (November 1), as she shared a video of herself literally defrosting. As we enter the holidays, we can expect to hear Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” on every radio station, in every store, and pretty much anywhere music is played for the next eight weeks.
It may be tough to remember when “All I Want For Christmas Is You” first dropped, as it feels like its always been part of our lives. At this point, hearing the song everywhere is part of the American zeitgeist.
How long ago did Mariah Carey release “All I Want For Christmas Is You?”
“All I Want For Christmas Is You” first appeared on Carey’s Merry Christmas album, which was released on October 28, 1994. At the time of writing, this would make the song 29 years old. While “All I Want For Christmas Is You” has been around for nearly 30 years, it didn’t actually reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 until 2019, on the 25th anniversary of the song.
Keeping track of all the new albums coming out in a given month is a big job, but we’re up for it: Below is a comprehensive list of the major releases you can look forward to in November. If you’re not trying to potentially miss out on anything, it might be a good idea to keep reading.
Friday, November 3
Actress — LXXXVIII (Ninja Tune)
AJR — The Maybe Man (Universal)
Amor Muere — A time to love, a time to die (Scrawl)
Animal Hospital — Shelf Life (Sipsman)
Atreyu — A Torch in the Dark EP (Spinefarm)
Ava Mirzadegan — Dark Dark Blue (Team Love Records)
Bad Wolves — Die About It (Better Noise Music)
bar italia — The Twits (Matador)
Billy Joel — The Vinyl Collection, Vol.2 (Columbia Records/Legacy Recordings)
Cash Bently — Cash Corridos 3 (True Panther)
Chicago — Chicago Greatest Christmas Hits (Rhino)
Chick Corea Elektric Band — The Future Is Now (Candid)
Cody Johnson — Leather (COJO Music/Warner Music Nashville)
Cold War Kids — Cold War Kids (CWKTWO/AWAL)
Crystal Fighters — Light + ([PIAS])
Danielle Howle — Current (Kill Rock Stars Nashville)
Delilah Holliday — Invaluable Vol. 2 EP (One Little Independent Records)
Dirty Honey — Can’t Find the Brakes (Dirt Records)
Dirty Nice — Surrenderland (Chiverin Records)
Dove Armitage — Concernless EP (KRO Records)
Drop Nineteens — Hard Light (Wharf Cat)
Empty Country — Empty Country II (Get Better Records)
Mean Girls Day was last month, but November is a good time to rewatch the 2004 teen comedy. So is April. And August. Every month, really. November is also the beginning of holiday season sales, so Walmart got three-fourths of the main Mean Girls cast — Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Seyfried, and Lacey Chabert (Rachel McAdams was busy working on her next legendary line reading) — to reunite for a Black Friday ad.
In the video, which you can watch below, Lohan’s Cady Heron is a guidance counselor; Seyfried’s Karen Smith works as a reporter; and Chabert’s Gretchen Wieners is a mom (Rajiv Surendra’s Kevin is there, too). They watch the same Winter Talent Show where they performed “Jingle Bell” in high school. Now there’s a new set of mean girls terrorizing the Janis’s and Damians of the world (that part is left unsaid in the commercial, but the subtext is there).
“It was so nice being back together after all these years. It was great catching up with everyone,” Lohan said in a statement, while Chabert added, “It was wonderful to spend the day with Amanda and Lindsay. It was so much fun to reminisce and be together again after all these years.”
How will Walmart competitor Target respond? Hopefully with a EuroTrip reunion.
Brian Fallon felt a powerful impulse. He wanted to reconvene with The Gaslight Anthem, the New Jersey arena-punk band he co-founded in 2006 and then put on indefinite hiatus nine years later. Since then, he had launched a successful solo career as an introspective singer-songwriter. But at heart, Fallon still felt like “a rock guy,” he says. And now, he needed his band back.
But was this the right decision? Or was he just nostalgic about his past as a budding rock star whose band rose to commercial prominence in the early 2010s and then quickly flamed out? Fallon decided to reach for “the Bat phone,” as he puts it. In search of some guidance, he texted his most famous friend and biggest musical influence: Bruce Springsteen. The Boss quickly responded, and during a summit at a local pizza parlor, he urged Fallon to reignite Gaslight. Surprisingly, Bruce’s demeanor during the tête-à-tête was more “enthusiastic fan” than “wise sage.”
“He was so excited at the end of our meeting that he texted me like, ‘You’ve got to write a duet for us!’” Fallon recalled with a laugh during a recent interview. “I was like, ‘What do you mean? You want me to write a song that you sing on?’ He’s like, ‘Yeah! It’s going to be great! People are going to love it!’ He was so pumped. I’m not sure if he was more pumped than I was.”
That song ended up being “History Books,” the title track of The Gaslight Anthem’s recently released LP, their first in nine years. Coming on the heels of a 2022 reunion tour, History Books picks up where the band left off after 2014’s Get Hurt, effectively centering their signature penchant for brawny songs with outsized, heart-rending choruses. An unrepentant fan of classic rock and ’90s alternative bands, Fallon has long since abandoned the punk pretenses that marked GLA’s early work. Instead, he’s dedicated himself to making the sort of meat-and-potatoes rock that resides at the midpoint of Springsteen and Pearl Jam, a relentlessly earnest approach that regards the “Anthem” part of the band name with extreme literalism.
In our interview, I asked Fallon to reflect on The Gaslight Anthem’s career, and he responded with his usual forthright candor. There have been many ups and downs. But now, he insists, the band is in a better place than ever.
Sink Or Swim (2007)
Recorded in three days in Bayonne, New Jersey. It was at My Chemical Romance’s management offices. There’s a studio in the back there, and we had to be there when it was closed. The label we were on was just a friend — meaning it really wasn’t a label. There was this element of are we allowed to be here? It was definitely fun, because it was the first time we’d ever been in a real studio making a real record. Everything before that was either 7-inches or demos. So, for us, it was like, “There’s time to set up an acoustic guitar track? Sweet!” I remember very distinctly reading about The Killers, who had just come out with the second record, Sam’s Town. And I was sitting there like, “We’re going to end up like The Killers!” And we’re just making this sticks-and-glue record.
My grandmother had recently passed away, and her effect on me was pretty heavy growing up. Most of the time, my mom was working, so I would spend a lot of time with her. It was a typical American “No Dad” family. She would play movies all the time and she had posters on her wall, everyone from Rita Hayworth to these old radio shows, like The Shadow. As a kid, I’d be sitting there in her house, looking at these things. There would be Rita Hayworth as Gilda, and I was like, “What is this?” I would invent these stories in my head of high drama, and it just all coalesced into this thing.
We had one or two songs, and then we just wrote the rest in this blur of a winter. It was the fall time, like September or October, when we really started to get everything together, and then we recorded Sink Or Swim in February. It was before the record with “Radio Nowhere” came out. I know that it was the year before that. We all pushed each other a little bit, whereas before you would just write a song and someone would come in with it and be like, “Yeah, that’s fine.” The most important part of the show was the hang. But with this band, the most important part of the show was the show. And the songs. There was a definite air of this is going to be a real attempt and if it doesn’t work, we’re going to get jobs.
We had a talk about whether we could have acoustic songs on the record, which sounds insane but we were a punk rock band at the time. I was like, “Well, The Jam has an acoustic song.” Then somebody would be like, “Well, The Clash doesn’t.” I was like, “Yeah, but we’re not The Clash.” I’m glad that we did it, because it gave us permission to bring in the punk and the Springsteen for the rest of our career. I know it’s hard to imagine now, but back then, the people that we played for were really punks. And for all the anarchy and freedom the punks have, there’s a lot of rules.
The ’59 Sound (2008)
That was the first record we actually left home to make. For us, being from New Jersey, Los Angeles was essentially the promised land. I remember feeling very electrified. We had a real record label and a budget. We were all staying together at this really strange place where I believe Lemmy was living for a while. It was called The Oakwood. There was all these kids that were trying to be famous, and they were rude as hell. They would have their sunglasses on and they would spill stuff on you.
We were all together, all four of us in one apartment with one bedroom, and it was insane. There were cigarettes all over. Those pictures of Guns N’ Roses living in 1987, that’s us. All literally on the same couch. It was complete bedlam. We were just there by ourselves. There was no one else with us. There were no parties. We didn’t know anyone. Occasionally, [our label] SideOneDummy would have a taco truck and we’d go and hang out with them.
That Hammersmith Odeon video had come out, and I was obsessively watching that. I was like, “We’ve got to do this. It’s got to be like this.” The studio that we went to was called Mad Dog Studios and I think Lucinda Williams’ husband owned it. I remember everybody being like, “This is definitely a step up.”
I remember writing “The ’59 Sound,” and I remember being done with it and being like, “Okay, this song is a lot better than the rest of the songs.” I knew that it was better, and then when we played it, I knew something was different. Then we recorded the songs, and all the people around us — like [producer] Ted Hutt and our manager and the people at SideOne — started to get nervous. It was like everyone knew something was happening. It started to feel like, “Oh my goodness, this could actually go somewhere.” Later, we got played on KROQ, and we were like, “This is nuts. This is for the Foo Fighters. This is not for us.” But we were ready for it. I was not trying to shun it at all. The punk thing that we did, we did it so hard, and it sucked. It was so bad. We slept in the worst places. All of our accommodations every day were painful. Our van was painful, it was overly packed. It’s just your typical band on the road. It was like all those photos you see of The Replacements freezing in the winter. That’s us, we did all of that. We were like, “No, this is awesome. We’re going to be in a rock ‘n’ roll band.” The only one that felt some punk guilt was probably Benny, because he came from the hardcore scene. He might have been like, “Are we lame now?” I was like, “Dude, you know what’s lame? This room. Let’s get out of here.”
American Slang (2010)
I call it the Recovering The Satellites record. Counting Crows had August And Everything After, and then Recovering The Satellites — except for “A Long December” and maybe one or two other songs — it’s all about being successful. American Slang is like, “Everybody likes us. What does that mean?” [Laughs.] You’re such an idiot at that stage of your career. Just overly self-analyzing, and reading every review of the band.
By that time, we all had apartments. A lot of us moved to Jersey City and I moved to New York. I was in love with the city, because I could never afford to live in the city. I’m thinking, “We made it!” Meanwhile my apartment was essentially one room and a closet that was turned into a kitchen. But I was like, “We freaking made it! Get ready Manhattan, we’re coming!” I imagine it was like if somebody from Iowa just all of a sudden was dropped into Los Angeles.
The songs could have ended up being terrible with the sort of mindset that we had back then, because we were all just trying to define everything. Who are we? What kind of band are we? What do we mean? Are we going to be Bruce Springsteen or are we going to be The Replacements?
It was partly turning 30, too — you’re not a kid anymore. We had some success, but we didn’t understand what that meant, because we weren’t rich. It wasn’t an overnight success. It wasn’t like we released Dookie. We just released this punk record that people kind of liked. Though, to be fair, there were magazines — especially in the U.K. — being like, “This is the second coming of rock ‘n’ roll,” or whatever. We were like, “Uh, I don’t know about that.”
When I look back now, I am so relieved that the songs retain their quality. I remember nothing but pressure about that record.
Handwritten (2012)
Except for the new record that we just made, that was the most fun I ever had making a record. It was so awesome. It was every ’90s dream that I had of grunge because we got Brendan O’Brien to do the record. He produced some of my favorite records of all time, and I would incessantly ask him questions. “What was it like recording BloodSugarSexMagik?” “What did Jeff Ament smell like?” I was obsessively punishing this man with every question I could think of, and he was so gracious. Every single day I asked some new stupid question about Chris Cornell, and he was just humoring me the entire time.
When American Slang came out, that was definitely the changing moment where we were like, “We’re not a punk band anymore.” We had just signed to a major label, so things were different. We got a publishing deal and we were like, “Whoa, I could buy a house.” You definitely had this feeling of, “Did we actually make it as a rock band?” Maybe not a famous band but we made it, we’re not going to work at the gas station anymore. And that was mind-blowingly exciting to us all.
We were in Blackbird Studios in Nashville, and Taylor Swift was in the next building over. Kings of Leon were recording the album with “Sex On Fire.” It was all famous people all the time, but none of them were peeking over their fences at us. We were all peeking over the fences like, “Is that Don Henley?”
Brendan really taught us a lot. He wouldn’t settle for anything being not in time or out of tune or anything like that. He would just make you do it 100 times. We all became a real band, because we would sit in the room and just play the song over and over again. And if one guy messed up, you had to play it again. It was the most connected we were as a band since the very beginning. No one was pulling in a different direction. We were all on this trip together. It was like grunge college.
After that record came out, and “45” was on the radio all the time, we’d look out at the audiences and be like, “I cannot believe that we did this.” It was wild, to be able to look out and see that this thing that we built was working. It was a point where you definitely felt like this could go on forever. We could be a big band now.
Get Hurt (2014)
Everybody hits that point where they go, “I’m not really sure what to do right now.” And you want to go against it, and be like, “No, just ignore that, keep going.” I don’t really know what we were doing there. It was sort of like everything that was working, we decided to change. Like, “Hey, I write the songs, so why don’t you guys bring in some songs?” It was like everything was backwards.
Here’s something that nobody knows: Brendan was going to do that record. What happened was our label and the band was like, “No, we’re not going to do another record with Brendan.” Especially the label. They were like, “No, fuck Brendan, you can’t work with him again.” They had some beef with Brendan. And my band was like, “He didn’t listen to us. He only listened to you.” I was like, “Yeah, but I’m listening to you, so whatever I’m saying, he’s getting it from you, too.” There was a little divide there. I didn’t make the call that I probably should have made, which is to put my foot down and say, “No, we’re going to go with Brendan.” Instead I said, “All right, we’re going to fire Brendan.” And that was the biggest mistake, because Brendan is still pissed at me about that. That ended my friendship with Brendan. I don’t think he ever got over that. But I was like, “Dude, I want to make a record with you, but my band doesn’t. What am I supposed to do? I’m in a band, man.” At the same time, I was going through a divorce. I had just gotten a house and now I’m giving the house away. That shit is weird. It’s like you get to the mountain top and then your life falls apart.
With all this said, there are still songs on Get Hurt that I really enjoy playing. We still play the song “Get Hurt” — that’s one of the best pop-oriented songs that the band ever wrote. I love the song “Stay Vicious.” I know some people really hate it but I don’t care, because to me that’s a Soundgarden song in my head. That song rips.
Every band has the time where they fall apart a little bit. Some bands don’t survive it. We got to that stage in our career and we tried to Achtung Baby it and it didn’t work. That’s just the truth. Generally, when you watch a band’s career — if they have a career that’s longer than five years — they go on this arc and then all of a sudden, the band becomes not cool anymore. Everybody has it. Green Day had it, Pearl Jam had it, everybody had it. And then they either come back up or they disappear into the ether. We felt that coming. Benny and I got together, we were in the back of the bus, and I was like, “Dude, this sucks. It’s not fun. I can’t do it.” He was like, “Yeah, I can’t do it either.” Then we called the other guys and we said, “Does anyone think this is fun anymore?” Everyone was like, “No.” All right. We need to shut this down. Then everybody was like, “Permanently?” We were like, “No, but we need to shut it down for now.” None of us thought it was going to be forever but we didn’t know how long it was going to take. Apparently, it took nine years.
History Books (2023)
At the end of the pandemic, after we were stuck inside for two years, I was like, “There’s no way that younger me would let 40-year-old me sit here with this thing in his back pocket that he could do called The Gaslight Anthem and just let it go.” I started thinking about the Foo Fighters and all these guys that are all doing things that I still think are cool, but they are not young. Or Lucinda Williams, who I think was 10 years older than me when she did Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. I was like, “There is still an avenue for us.”
Then I used the Bat Phone for the first time in my life — I’m going to text Bruce. I was like, “Dude, I need your help.” I’ve never asked him for anything in all the 10 years that I’ve known him. I’ve never, ever called him and been like, “Help me out” or whatever. And he hit me right back and was like, “100 percent. Let’s go.” We went to a pizza place and he laid it out for me. He’s like, “Listen man, you can do a solo thing and that’s cool. Your solo songs are great. And I can go do a solo thing. But if I go out with The E Street Band … ” And you know how he sells it, he says it like [affects a Springsteen voice] “The Gaslight Anthem!” And it’s this big thing, like a wind gust blows through the pizzeria and I fall off my chair. He just pumped me up. I was flipping over tables by the end of it, like, “We’re ready to go!”
In the very beginning, before I called anyone, I said to myself, “I’m going to try and write four songs.” Because I didn’t want to come back and do a tour and have everybody get excited again, and then as soon as you do a tour, everyone thinks you’re making a record. I really tried to prepare myself beforehand and make sure that I was 100 percent in, because the way that the Gaslight Anthem works is if I’m 100 percent excited, I can get everybody else excited. It’s just the way it works, because I have enough excitement for everybody.
I said, “Look, I’m not just talking here. I got songs, and I think they’re good. Here’s four of them, not just one.” I think that helped a lot. “Positive Charge,” that was the first one. The second one was “The Weathermen.” The third one was “A Lifetime Of Preludes.” The fourth one was “Autumn.”
When we were on tour, we knew we had those songs, and every day we were jamming together, so we were writing more songs. It worked. Every day was just confirming it more that it was the right decision.
When I was writing for myself, I thought I had to do a certain kind of thing, I was like, “Well, I got to put on my singer/songwriter boots over here and write some singer/songwriter stuff and don’t rock too hard, because you’re not allowed to do that.” I don’t know why. If you try to boil it down to the truest sense of who I feel I am as a writer, I’m a rock guy. I like songwriter stuff and I like doing it, but the big thing that really closed the gap for me was that I realized there is nothing that I can do in The Gaslight Anthem that I would need to go and make a record solo for, because we left that avenue open back on Sink Or Swim when we did “The Navesink Banks” and all those songs. I don’t see why there has to be a difference. There doesn’t have to be a difference.
Stephen Colbert has been making new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson a regular target, and boy, is the Louisiana congressman making it easy for the late night host. Johnson’s hardcore fundamentalist views have been a gold mine for Colbert, who roasted the House Speaker for the weird Christian podcast that Johnson hosts with his wife Kelly.
Johnson has a laundry list of “extreme anti-LGBTQ views,” and Colbert went to town on the congressman’s backward thinking.
“Unfortunately, every day we continue to learn more about new Speaker of the House and wax figurine of Mike Johnson, Mike Johnson,” Colbert said to kick off the segment. “He’s also made headlines for his extreme anti-LGBTQ views. Once saying that gay marriage is a ‘dark harbinger of chaos and sexual anarchy.’ And Mike Johnson fears sexual anarchy. He believes in sexual government with three sexual branches: Man, woman, and the judiciary.”
The late night host turned his attention to the Johnson’s podcast where he landed a saucy blow on the couple.
“But Johnson’s not alone in his backward views,” Colbert said. “He hosts a podcast with his wife, Kelly, called ‘Truth be Told,’ which they say ‘presents thoughtful analysis of hot topics and current events from a Christian perspective.’ Though if Mike and Kelly are such conservative Christians, why is the latest podcast they recorded, and this is true, Episode 69.”
“Really? Really? Two Johnsons in a 69?” Colbert quipped. “You’re sending mixed messages, folks.”
Colbert then made it a point to note that Kelly Johnson is also a real piece of work.
“And Kelly is, if possible, just as weird as her husband,” Colbert said. “She runs something called Onward Christian Counseling Services, which offensively and outrageously equates being gay with bestiality. Evidently, Kelly believes it’s Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve. And don’t get her started on Turner & Hooch.”
You can catch Colbert commenting on Johnson at the 5:45 mark below:
Friends creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane shared details about their last conversation with Matthew Perry, who died over the weekend at 54 years old, on Wednesday’s episode of the Today show.
“It was great,” Kauffman said, according to the Hollywood Reporter. “He was happy and chipper. He didn’t seem weighed down by anything. He was in a really good place, which is why this seems so unfair.” She was in “total shock” when she heard the news. “My first instinct was to text him, honestly,” Kauffman added. “And then deep sadness. So much sadness. It’s hard to grasp. One minute he’s here and happy and then poof. And doing good in the world. Really doing good in the world.”
“He seemed better than I had seen in a while. I was so thrilled to see that. He was emotionally in a good place. He looked good. He quit smoking. Yes, he was sober. He learned things throughout this and what he learned more than anything is that he wants to help other addicts, and it gave him purpose.”
Following Perry’s death, Kauffman and Crane praised the actor for his “brilliant talent” in a joint statement. “It’s a cliche to say that an actor makes a role their own, but in Matthew’s case, there are no truer words,” they wrote. “From the day we first heard him embody the role of Chandler Bing, there was no one else for us.”
Last night (October 31), Doja Cat kicked off her hotly-anticipated Scarlet Tour at Chase Center in San Francisco. Over the course of the past few years, Doja has built quite an impressive catalog. However, as many of her songs and viral moments through songs like “Say So” and “Kiss Me More” took place amid the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s been awhile since Doja was able to do a full-fledged tour.
Fans (whom she assured she loves, by way of her quirky merchandise) are dying to know which song she’s going to perform on stage.
Luckily, she goes through pretty much all of her eras. On the set is “Tia Tamera” from her 2018 debut album Amala, “Say So” and “Streets” from 2019’s “Hot Pink,” “Woman” from 2021’s Planet Her, and several others. Though much of the set is comprised of songs from her most recent album, Scarlet, fans can look forward to a comprehensive, career-highlighting performance.
You can see the full setlist (per setlist.fm) below.
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