Brittany Howard has time and time again proven herself to be a powerhouse performer, whether she’s on a big stage or in a cramped office space. She brings her all in the studio, too, and now she has done so again with her new Spotify Singles release. For the two-track effort, she recorded a new version of “Stay High,” a standout from her 2019 solo album Jaime, as well as a cover of Funkadelic’s “You And Your Folks, Me and My Folks.”

Howard takes the song from the classic 1971 psychedelic album Maggot Brain and totally owns it, bringing her signature charisma to the track. Classic funk is right in Howard’s wheelhouse, and she and her band completely did the song justice here. She’s not a stranger to psychedelia, as she previously showed on her Jaime single “13th Century Metal.”

Howard subtly teased the inclusion of the Funkadelic ahead of the Spotify Singles release, sharing a photo of her in the studio and writing on Twitter, “Me and my folks recorded a @Spotify single session earlier this year in LA that’s out tomorrow! Stay tuned!”

Stream Howard’s cover of “You And Your Folks, Me And My Folks” and her new rendition of “Stay High” below. Also revisit our review of Jaime here.

Trying to map out a return for sports leagues in the United States is tricky. There’s no guarantee that it’ll be safe for games to occur as long as social distancing is strongly recommended — something that makes participating in some kind of sporting event quite hard — and figuring out the issue of whether or not fans can attend looms over everything, among a handful of other questions that would need to be answered.

In the eyes of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, there is a way that sports can resume sometime in the not too distant future. There are a few catches, though: Fauci, in a Snapchat interview with Peter Hamby of Good Morning America, believes games would need to occur without fans and with players staying in some sort of isolated area, like a hotel, where they could constantly get tested.

“There’s a way of doing that,” Fauci said. “Nobody comes to the stadium. Put them in big hotels, wherever you want to play, keep them very well surveilled, but have them tested every week and make sure they don’t wind up infecting each other or their family and just let them play the season out. People say, ‘Well, you can’t play without spectators,’ well, I think you’ll probably get enough buy-in from people who are dying to see a baseball game.”

This sort of plan has been kicked around by MLB, which is reportedly considering a bubble league in Arizona, while the NBA has reportedly floated the idea of doing something similar in a place like Las Vegas. These are not foolproof ideas, of course, and there are legitimate concerns about how feasible these things would be — especially when it comes to testing, as leagues would need thousands of tests a week at a time when the United States still is not testing nearly enough people.

Still, Fauci will presumably play a role in leagues deciding to restart, whenever that day may come, and if this is the best path forward, then perhaps we should expect serious conversations about these sorts of things rolling out sometime over the next few months.

(Via ProFootballTalk)

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The RX is Uproxx Music’s stamp of approval for the best albums, songs, and music stories throughout the year. Inclusion in this category is the highest distinction we can bestow, and signals the most important music being released throughout the year. The RX is the music you need, right now.

In an alternate timeline, Joseph D’Agostino is on the road right now, promoting the excellent self-titled debut album from his new project, Empty Country. A vividly cinematic songwriter who garnered acclaim as the frontman of the intense, ’10s-era emo band Cymbals Eat Guitars, D’Agostino spent more than a year crafting the LP, which he released via Bandcamp last month. Artistically, it’s a triumph — you simply can’t find a better-written rock record at the moment. But, as is the case for nearly all indie artists, this fraught period has inevitably hurt his career.

It would be understandable if D’Agostino allowed the current pandemic to discourage him, given how it’s taken him out of commission as a touring act for the foreseeable future, right at the moment when he’s trying to get Empty Country in as many ears as possible without the benefit of a PR machine. But when reached recently at home in Philadelphia, he seemed pleased by how the album — which ranks among the very best indie releases to come out in the first quarter of 2020 — has done so far, due almost entirely to positive word of mouth.

“I think there was a really beautiful wave of support where a lot of people just kind of woke up and were like, ‘Oh my God, these people, whose sources of income is playing live shows, now can no longer even do that and you have to help them in some way,’” D’Agostino said. “So I definitely was able to ride that nice wave of goodwill and get the record out in the early days of quarantine and social distancing.”

Of course, D’Agostino by now is used to managing disasters, both universal and personal. In spite of how great the album is, Empty Country has marked a long, bad stretch of horrendous professional luck for him. Work on the album dates back to late 2017, right when Cymbals Eat Guitars was about to wrap a rocky, decade-long career marked by early indie fame and prolonged, post-buzz band disappointment. For his new group, D’Agostino resolved to move in a direction that was musically simpler and more focused on his highly visual storytelling lyrics. In Cymbals, he was already well-regarded for spinning narratives that mixed closely observed scenes taken from his own life with heavy doses of surrealism, an evocative if disorienting approach that made his songs feel like five-minute movies directed by David Lynch or Richard Kelly.

With Empty Country, he pared back his former band’s grandiosity and complicated song structures in favor of a highly stylized, alt-rock version of Americana, emphasizing sonic elements like Zena Kay’s pedal steel guitar to accentuate the anxious drama of his lyrics. The results are frequently stunning, like an early ’80s Springsteen record goosed with the extreme dynamics of prime-era Bright Eyes, with scores of deep and generous songs that demand dozens of close listens to decipher the myriad details that D’Agostino carefully places throughout, whether it’s the medium who sees her own death in “Marian” or the hollow-faced self-described sociopath with the unseemly 9/11 tattoo who narrates “Swim.”

Upon finishing the album in early 2019, D’Agostino “was ecstatic with it. I thought it was the best thing I ever did,” he said. That feeling is justified — along with 2014’s LOSE, Cymbals’ high-water creative mark, Empty Country is his richest work. However, many in D’Agostino’s professional circle didn’t agree. His manager and booking agent dropped him within 24 hours of hearing Empty Country. His attempts at shopping the album to top indie record labels also came up empty. The LP languished, and so did D’Agostino, who was already being treated for Bipolar II disorder. The shabby treatment of Empty Country sunk him even lower.

He eventually found a taker in the once well-regarded indie Tiny Engines, but that label collapsed before they could put out Empty Country amid accusations of financial impropriety from artists. D’Agostino now felt truly adrift, a feeling compounded from being prescribed an improper dose of his psychiatric medication. He even contemplated suicide, he admits.

And then came perhaps the worst blow of all: His songwriting idol David Berman, who had become a personal and artistic confidant while D’Agostino worked on Empty Country, took his own life in August of 2019, on the eve of a Purple Mountains tour that D’Agostino was set to join on select dates. To say that Berman’s death crushed him would be an understatement.

“I mean, I’ve been in therapy and everything, but I shared a lot of that with Dave, as well, deepest, darkest type stuff, and he was always very helpful,” he said. “So when he committed suicide … Just thinking about that song on the Purple Mountains record. All of them are just impossibly difficult to listen to now. But just like, ‘I Love Being My Mother’s Son.’ Because when he committed suicide, I just thought about how he must’ve just felt like a lost child. His mother was gone, and his father was a demon.”

And yet, in spite of all the adversity, the quality of Empty Country is undeniable. Thankfully it has seen the light of day, so that the rest of us can appreciate its brilliance. I talked to D’Agostino about the album, his personal and professional struggles, and his resolve to keep going.

When you were working on these songs, did you have a conceptual idea of what you wanted Empty Country to be? Did you define it against like what Cymbals Eat Guitars was?

I knew that for the new project I wanted to assume a little bit more responsibility over the whole proceeding. So I made it a point to write for every instrument and really work hard to make sure that everything was thought out pretty well. It was actually more akin to writing the first Cymbals albums than any of the ones that followed.

Cymbals had fallen into this [scene]. We did a lot of tours with bands like Say Anything and Brand New, pop-punk tours and things like that. I think that the sound of the band was influenced by the types of tours we were doing and the types of crowds we were playing in front of, and the types of career or success that we envisioned or hoped for ourselves. So with the new project, I had a resolve to not have that stuff figure into it.

This is sort of a vague comment, but Empty Country seems less bombastic and melodramatic than Cymbals. This is another dreadful term but “grown up” also comes to mind.

I think there was a conscious effort to not mellow it out and be a middle-aged guy in adult-contemporary music. But I definitely was trying to make a conscious decision to not have there be a lot of signature Cymbals moves, I guess you would call them, which are the signature Modest Mouse moves, or whatever else, that early Cymbals stuff was derived from. Just extreme loud, intense, screaming stuff, and intense bombast. I wanted this to be a little more laidback in the approach, and fewer parts, and just a little more easy-going in the song structures. Like the song “Becca,” for instance, it’s just three chords, except the bridge. Where in Cymbals I may have really tried to get 40 chords in there.

Was that motivated at all by a desire to bring the lyrics out more? Because as good as your words are, they could be hard to pick out in Cymbals Eat Guitars’ songs.

For sure. Especially on the songs that are more narrative driven like “Becca,” like “Swim,” like “Marian,” although you can still only hear 80 or 85 percent of it, if I’m being honest with myself. I always have been proud of the lyrics for most of the Cymbals stuff, so I did want them to be a little more audible, and just have the vocals fit in a way that accentuated more of what was going on lyrically rather than the wall-of-sound type approach.

I’m curious about your songwriting method, because you have lines in your songs that are so visual that they could also work in a short story or even a screenplay. For instance, the image in “Swim” of the guy with a tattoo of an airplane hitting one of the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11. Have you ever considered writing in a different format?

I’ve never really written a short story outside of the time that I spent in primary school, and a little bit of college. I used to write poetry, but now rather than thinking about what I write as poetry, I just think about it as free verse to eventually be paired and shaped into lyrics for songs, for better or worse. That’s my medium, my niche, just the thing that I feel is the best vehicle for what I do.

With “Swim,” I actually got the idea of that song from my wife Rachel. When we were living in Kensington [a neighborhood in Philadelphia], she made the observation one day when we were sitting outside on our stoop that the family across the street, our neighbors, had old faces. Not in the sense of prematurely aged, but they looked like Dust Bowl era farmers, and from that, which I thought was true, I just started dreaming up the various characters. But there’s one that stuck out, that ended up the main character person in “Swim.”

I interviewed David Berman not long before he passed last year, and he brought you up, unprompted, in our conversation, singling you out as a “very good writer.”

Wow.

I know you two had a friendship, and of course you were set to open up a few dates of the Purple Mountains tour that never occurred. How did he influence you?

He’s my idol since I was 16. I fell in love with Starlite Walker and American Water and Natural Bridge, and to a slightly lesser extent, Bright Flight, which I told him, and he understood. [Laughs.] But when I was learning to drive, and driving by myself for the first time where I lived in South Jersey to Vintage Vinyl up in Fords, New Jersey to buy records, I was listening to his music, and his lyrics were everything that I wanted to ever come close to accomplishing. At the time I also had Actual Air, and I lived and breathed his music. It was a huge deal when Tanglewood Numbers came out. I was still in high school at the time, so I was really sucked in and I was this huge fan. Everything I ever did, everything I’ve ever done, is to some degree because of, or inspired by, or just filled with the energy that he kindled in me as a teenager and young adult. So yeah, his influence can’t be overstated.

I randomly met him in Nashville at two in the morning after a show that Cymbals played in 2015 to nobody. And he just walked up, and he was just so gracious, right from the very beginning. For all the Empty Country songs, each one, he was one of maybe four or five people I would send my demos to. And Dave Berman would always be the first to respond, and he would always say something A) encouraging, but B) that would turn me on my ear, in a helpful way. I think he was a natural teacher. I do feel, for a precious couple of years, I was able to have this masterclass. But he didn’t try to exert anything, any kind of influence, to whatever I was doing, although I remember once he said to me, “You should try singing in a lower register.”

When I interviewed Berman, he specifically praised the Empty Country album, which you hadn’t announced yet. And he mentioned how good of a writer you are while also complaining that he couldn’t understand all the lyrics.

Yeah, he was like, “There’s been a lot of these helium boy, like Mercury Rev-type singers,” and I was like, Dave, my voice isn’t low. [Laughs.] I sing the way I sing because it’s how I sing. So he was able to get with that eventually. He realized I couldn’t change, it’s a physical thing in my throat.

You had a terrible run of bad career luck with this album before it came out. You’ve said it eventually culminated with a mental breakdown. Do you want to talk about that?

I was undiagnosed Bipolar II for my entire life, up until I was 28, and the doctor I was seeing at the time, when all the bad stuff started happening after the record was done, had me on Wellbutrin, and they upped the dose when I got extra despondent. But it kind of did the opposite of what you think a drug like Wellbutrin would do. It drove me into the ground. It was just the difference between 150 mg and 300 mg, taking more of it just made everything so much worse, and I definitely had suicidal ideation.

When something that I put so much into was rejected in the way that it was, and in combination with this disastrous medication change, I was just in bed thinking about what it would be like to have my brains smashed against the asphalt, or jumping off of the top of the house that I live in, or just smashing my face into my desk repeatedly, and knocking out my teeth, and breaking my nose, and just wanting to hurt myself and be hurt. Obviously something was very wrong on a chemical level. Thankfully, I was able to figure that out, with the help of my wife Rachel and a doctor. Once I got on Prozac, things started to become a little less bleak. I don’t know what would have happened if I wasn’t medicated through Dave’s suicide.

So this happened before he died?

It was before Dave died. I’m sure you know what he was going through. You talked to him. He was like a TMI machine as far as depression and medication-resistant depression. He and I would talk about medications and we were both on Wellbutrin and would share our experiences and just talk about what had worked over the years for him. Since I was relatively new to psych meds, he was there to be a sounding board.

After everything you’ve been through, how do you feel about making another record after this? Is that something you want to do? I would understand if you just felt like, “This is too much for me. I don’t know if I can put myself this.” But you’re also really great at it. Where are you at with that?

I haven’t finished a song in a couple of years, but that is kind of the way it’s always been. I’ll finish something on this record, and then I will bask in the glow of having finished something that I’m proud of for a while, and not put any pressure on myself, and just read a lot, and watch a lot of movies, and try and make myself happy through other people’s art. And that invariably results in something coming out. Aside from my own death, I don’t think anything is going to change that.

Especially now, the situation being what it is with social isolation and everything, I would give anything to go back to the worst attended, most brutal Cymbals show in Oklahoma City. I would do anything to go back there and to play with them. Just a rehearsal. And it hasn’t been that long. Playing shows is all I did for 10 years, and haven’t played many since 2017. I feel like when I’m in a room with these people again — with [his Empty Country bandmates] Dan, and Pat, and Rachel, and Zena, and Zoe — I am just going to be so elated just to be there.

Empty Country is out now on Get Better Records. Get it here.

After having his lyrical skills questioned time and time again, Big Sean finally stood up for himself after 2 Chainz laid claim to an accomplishment Sean wanted for himself: The best verse on their 2012 hit “Mercy.” The lead single from GOOD Music’s compilation album Cruel Summer, “Mercy” featured verses from 2 Chainz, Big Sean, Kanye West, and Pusha T and was a massive hit, with a Scooby Doo-esque video that stayed in rotation on music video countdowns and a widespread debate about which of the four rappers delivered the best bars.

According to 2 Chainz (naturally), he had the best verse on the song. In an Instagram post, he both asked and answered the question of which verse topped them all, writing in the caption: “No disrespect but I kilt all dem boys.” However, Sean took issue with Chainz’s assessment and it’s no surprise; in 2013, he similarly had a song swiped from under him after the rap internet went utterly ballistic over Kendrick Lamar’s name-calling verse on the leaked “Control.”

On the latest episode of The Rap Pack podcast, Sean explained that he just had to check his compadre over the claim. “I immediately called him like, ‘What the f*ck you talkin’ about bro?’” he says, grinning. “He was like, ‘No, no, I wasn’t talking about you, bro. I was talkin’ about the whole game. Obviously everybody on there was going crazy.’ I’m like, ‘That’s not how it seemed.’”

However, he says there were no hard feelings after he explained, “I was like, ‘N****, as far as ‘Mercy’ goes, I was the first one doing my verse on the song. Like, it was just the beat and I freestyled my verse. I did it without trying and Kanye was the one who loved it so much… He didn’t have no objections to that. He knew. I’ve done a lot of songs with 2 Chainz. I was gonna be like, ‘Oh OK, I got you on ‘K.O’ and ‘All Me’ and ‘Big Bank.’ But that’s my brother. We was just really kinda kidding around.”

In any case, with 2 Chainz looking for a Verzuz hit battle partner, he may have just found the perfect matchup in Big Sean. Let’s all bother Swizz Beats into making it happen.

Watch the full interview above.

Cardi B and Bernie Sanders have become an unlikely duo over the past year or so, starting with their political phone calls last summer. Around that time, the two sat down for a lengthy interview, and now the pair has reconvened for another filmed chat.

Sanders and Cardi had a livestream conversation on YouTube yesterday, and during their time together, the two talked about the coronavirus pandemic and the upcoming election. Sanders shared his thoughts about when he believes the country can return to normalcy, saying, “Nobody knows exactly, but it will probably be at different times in different places in the country. It will not be all at once. Nobody is going to turn on a switch and America returns to where it was.”

Cardi also said of Sanders’ Joe Biden endorsement, “The youth don’t really rock with Joe Biden because he’s conservative.” Sanders went on to say, however, that he’s throwing his support behind Biden because “Donald Trump is the most dangerous president in the modern history of America.

Elsewhere, Cardi spoke about Trump’s response to the pandemic, saying, “One thing that baffles my mental, right, about number 45, is that, when this coronavirus news was hitting and everything, he just kept blaming, that this was a move by the Democrats to make him look bad. That everything the Democrats do is bad propaganda to make him look bad. Honey, you don’t need the Democrats to make you look bad. You make your own self look bad.”

Watch the video above. The conversation begins at 36:55 into the video.

Cardi B is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Remember in Reign of Fire when Christian Bale and Gerard Butler act out Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader’s lightsaber duel on the Cloud City gantry from The Empire Strikes Back? So, I just reread that opening sentence and that makes quite an assumption that you are at all familiar with the 2002 Matthew McConaughey, Christian Bale vehicle, Reign of Fire. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, Reign of Fire is a post-apocalyptic movie, set in the year 2020, where dragons rule the earth and human beings are bunkered down, fighting for their very existence.

The reason I bring up that particular scene is it shows us how, in that world, stories were kept alive, even though the characters have no access to televisions or DVD players. (Even if they did, the characters would still be stuck with The Special Edition versions of Star Wars, just like we are. I assume Bale and Butler skip the CGI Jabba scene from A New Hope.) Instead, the stories have to be acted out to pass them on, as Bale’s character even takes full credit for coming up with the story in front of all the wide-eyed youngsters gathered to watch. I feel that, in our reality right now, the movie that’s acted out in our future won’t be The Empire Strikes Back. If humanity almost fully collapses, future children will gather around and watch adults act out Trolls World Tour.

I never saw the first Trolls. Before I watched Trolls World Tour, I had no idea what happened in the first movie and, now, after watching Trolls World Tour, I still don’t. The only thing that matters are the events of Trolls World Tour. (Maybe it’s fitting because I saw The Empire Strikes Back before I ever saw the original Star Wars. I digress.) I long resisted the temptations of Trolls World Tour (well, for three days or so anyway; but it sure feels a lot longer than three days so I’m going to pretend I held out for a month) before finally succumbing to its beautiful siren song of “new content.”

It certainly feels like an important movie. The gist being that it’s the first movie that was slated for a theatrical release that, instead of delaying indefinitely, wound up being, instead, pumped straight into our homes, in exchange for a monetary fee. And there is something kind of exciting about watching it at home in a, “Oh, this was supposed to be in theaters right now” kind of way. Universal issued a press release on Monday that claimed it was their biggest digital release of all time. There are no specific numbers attached, but I don’t doubt this is true since everyone seems to have Trolls World Tour madness right now – which is why I watched it in the first place so I could at least understand all the future Trolls World Tour pop culture references for the rest of my life.

Is this a game-changer? You know what, I doubt it. I think people are just bored. If I could have done anything other than watch Trolls World Tour that involved leaving my apartment, I certainly would have. If literally one bar were open in New York City and it were safe to go there, I’d be there right now instead of writing about Trolls World Tour. But, guess what? I’m currently writing about Trolls World Tour and, I have to admit, enjoying myself while doing it.

And the funny thing about Trolls World Tour is, in a normal headspace, there’s no way I’d enjoy this movie. I’m still self-aware enough to know this about myself. But, in my current headspace, I found myself loving it and having a million questions about it: Why are the rock music trolls so adamant that everyone must love rock music? Why is the smooth jazz bounty hunter treated so unfairly since smooth jazz is a calming agent we probably could all use more of right now. I demand justice for the smooth jazz bounty hunter! He got a raw deal. Then he swore he’d be back, but I sure didn’t see him again. If there were a $20 option for a Trolls World Tour: Smooth Jazz Bounty Hunter movie, I’d buy it right now. (Somewhat related: I listen way too much to the Yacht Rock Sirius station these days.) Then I’d happily write, oh, 705 words about it (so far). Look, I am in desperate need for entertainment and if Trolls World Tour is all you’re selling, well, right now, I’m buying. And here’s another thing: I like everything right now. There are no bad movies. If your piece of entertainment can knock off a couple hours of my day, that’s literally all I’m asking for right now.

Would I buy Trolls World Tour on demand under normal circumstances? No. Or, if other movies were also released and competing against it? Well, right now, I’d probably wind up eventually getting to it. But, that’s why I’m not so sure the current idea that “this is our future” is accurate.

Oh, sure, there will be, and should be, adjustments to theatrical windows and stuff like that. But I’m not sure this is the right time to judge the future of skipping theaters all together when a movie like Trolls World Tour has my undivided attention. Because, hopefully, a day will come again when Trolls World Tour is not the cultural event of our lifetime. But, for now, it is. And I suppose there’s also the chance, a few years from now, Christian Bale and Gerard Butler will be acting out the scene where Queen Poppy and Queen Barb have their climatic showdown to decide who rules music forever. (Also, I should note, I really miss leaving my apartment and “doing things.” But, in the meantime, long live Trolls World Tour.)

You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

After Parasite won Best Picture (which was, somehow, only nine weeks ago), it received a 230 percent “bump” at the domestic box office, eventually pushing its total to $53.48 million. The Bong Joon Ho-directed film is now the fourth highest-grossing foreign language movie of all-time, behind only Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Life is Beautiful, and Hero, but there’s still a lot of people who never caught it in theaters. And nearly as many who wanted to re-watch it, based on figures provided by Hulu.

IndieWire reports that since debuting on the streaming service on April 8, Parasite has “become the most streamed independent or foreign language film among all titles available on Hulu.” Not only that, but the dark comedy-thriller (along with about seven other genres) is “now the second most-watched movie overall on Hulu ever among titles currently available to stream.” That means in a single week, Parasite has already been streamed more times than Aquaman, A Quiet Place, and Bohemian Rhapsody, among other “blockbuster” titles, during the entire time they’ve been on Hulu. Not too shabby.

No wonder Hulu shut down those subtitles-averse trolls. Not the kind of trolls who go on world tours, either. That’s not on Hulu.

I mean, Parasite‘s no Gone with the Wind, but it’s still pretty good.

(Via IndieWire)

Kanye West knows what people think about My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy — a fan and critical favorite that many consider to be the best album in his discography — but as it turns out, he has a contrarian opinion about that too. In a new GQ profile of the mercurial, multihyphenate superstar — May’s cover story — Kanye reveals that he thinks “Power” was his worst lead single and questions why people thought Fantasy was so much better than its predecessor or what came next.

“All these people say Dark Fantasy was this album that was so good, and then people didn’t like 808s, they didn’t like Yeezus,” he explains. “Dark Fantasy, I just made it to that level because people were saying my career was going to be over. I always felt like “Power” was my weakest first single that I ever had, because I felt like it was bowing to the expectations.”

He also elaborated on what made “Power” so unremarkable in his mind. “Just like, ‘Here’s the ultimate Kanye West song!’” he says. “Versus ‘Love Lockdown?’ ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing?’ ‘Diamonds?’ ‘Follow God?’ I always do the songs that people never heard before. But you had actually heard ‘Power’ before. You heard ‘Crack Music.’ You heard ‘Amazing.’ You heard that song before! It’s just a mix of things.”

Read the full profile here.

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