Category: News

You’ll probably never hear the Hermanos Gutiérrez sing. But if you ever have the opportunity to hear the instrumentalist duo speak as they share stories of each of their songs during tour sets, you’ll find that the vividness in their words aligns with the transcendence of their music. Their upcoming album, El Bueno Y El Malo, contains sounds inspired by their Swiss and Ecuadorian upbringing, channeling the rhythms and melodies found in the ‘50s and ‘60s Latin tunes they grew up on.

Upon hearing Hermanos Gutiérrez’s music, particularly their latest effort El Bueno Y El Malo, the listener can paint a picture of Sergio Leone films, scored with dreamy, heady guitars, matching each other’s familial energy throughout. It’s an album that finds the brother duo, Estevan and Alejandro Gutiérrez, taking risks, most notably working with a new producer after years of solely working with each other.

The record was co-produced with Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys, with much of the recordings taking place at Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound Studio in Nashville. With this particular album, the hermanos wanted to create a musical landscape in the desert and pay homage to Spaghetti Western films.

“[My brother and I] came prepared with 10 songs that we wrote together,” Estevan says. “We arrived in Nashville, we got to know Dan and the whole crew for about 20 minutes. And then we were already recording. It was amazing, because we felt like we knew each maybe in another life. It felt just so natural to be there to record. And we recorded 10 songs in two and a half days.”

They particularly enjoyed working with Auerbach as he didn’t impose ideas upon them, but rather, helped them expand upon their musical universe.

As one can imagine, the songwriting process is a bit different when their music doesn’t utilize any sung or spoken lyrics. Even during the early phases of the pandemic, working separately wasn’t an option for the hermanos. The two are bound by music and work together in a synergetic fashion.

“Once we have a clearer idea of something that we want to share with each other, then we show it to each other, and then it’s always like one part is missing,” Alejandro says. “And then we try to add stuff, and let it grow and be rich. But before we even go to the studio, I think we really want to have a clear structure of each song in the album. We want to want to be sure of the story we want to tell in the studio. And the more you’re prepared and have the structure you’re even more free to improvise stuff.”

As its title suggests, one of the main themes of El Bueno Y El Malo is duality. On a particular track called “Los Chicos Tristes,” the hermanos take inspiration from their grandfather, who they say taught them to embrace the beauty and power in feeling sad and vulnerable.

“Being sad doesn’t mean like,” Estevan says, before briefly pausing, “Yeah, does it mean having weight on your shoulder? Sometimes it does, but it’s an honest perspective. And how we try to transmit it to the music, it’s a powerful skill that we can all use to make something beautiful.”

The hermanos very briefly appear in the song’s music video, which is directed by Alejandro Sugich, as the music scores the story of a street vendor in Mexico City doing strenuous labor throughout the day, to come home and enjoy a calm, simple dinner with his family.

“We didn’t want it to make it about us,” Alejandro says. “We wanted to show someone and put a light on them. We were so overwhelmed by this idea of going there and portraying millions of stories that are happening every day.”

The hermanos were raised by a Swiss father and an Ecuadorian mother. Growing up between the cultures of Ecuador and Switzerland, the two learned how to be present in the moment, and to cherish things as they are, especially during the times when they’d be traveling between both countries.

The two often say that Ecuadorian culture takes place in the streets, as the children play and gather with their neighbors and friends; while Swiss culture takes place within the four walls of one’s home, focused on the safety and comfort of the family. As they are currently on tour, the sentiment continues to ring true, with the brothers continuing to recall and tell stories inspired by their upbringing through pure instrumentation.

“I remember we went to visit our relatives or grandparents in Ecuador, it was always kind of more loose, more free,” says Alejandro. “I remember our relatives would pick us up at the airport, and we were in the back of a pick-up, no safety stuff. You don’t have those kinds of things in Switzerland, but then going back makes you appreciate your other values. Not having something in a different culture makes you appreciate it even more in another culture.”

El Bueno Y El Malo is out 10/28 via Easy Eye Sound. Pre-order it here.

Russell Westbrook’s future with the Los Angeles Lakers is unclear. There is the possibility he is traded before his contract expires at the end of this season — there seems to be a new rumor every few weeks suggesting the Lakers have discussed a move with another team, with the Indiana Pacers a popular destination for the former league MVP.

And then, there’s the potential he just stays with the team this year, plays out his deal, and walks next summer. Should that happen, the question becomes whether he’ll remain in the starting lineup or come off the bench. While that’s been floated as a solution from early on in his Laker tenure, it’s never come to fruition, as Westbrook started all 78 games in which he appeared last season.

It appears that is on the verge of changing, at least for one night. According to Dave McMenamin and Adrian Wojnarowski of ESPN, Westbrook is going to come off the bench during the team’s preseason finale against the Sacramento Kings on Friday night.

As Woj went on to explain, the idea is that Westbrook can more or less be given free rein to play the way he wants with the team’s second unit.

Ham has mentioned he has “a clear plan” for how he wants to use Westbrook this season, although it was not clear if that meant bringing him off the bench.

In support of The 1975’s new album, Being Funny In A Foreign Language, lead singer Matty Healy appeared on Apple Music’s The Zane Lowe Show for an interview out this week (as Rolling Stone notes). While discussing the band’s trajectory for crafting this record (which is out today), Healy also opened up about his experience struggling with a heroin addiction — before the fellow members intervened.

Healy described his heroin use as a solo thing, saying it was “the first time where there had been anything that one of us was doing, or was into, that the others weren’t.” he continued, “It was the first time I had to tell them something. It was the first time that the idea of a secret existing even came out. It’s almost as if, well, is there anything else that we’ve not known? Because that’s a big thing.”

He went on to note that it was in 2018, tied to The 1975’s album A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, that the rest of the band (and his friends) stepped in. “No, you need to respect my drug addiction,” Healy claims was his response to the intervention.

“I’d not lost anything. I’d nearly lost the respect of everybody I loved, but I hadn’t,” he explained. “Hadn’t lost my career. Hadn’t lost my possessions. Hadn’t lost my money. I was just walking a very, very thin line. I think that I was lucky enough in my condition in the way that I am as a person to recognize that what needed to be done needed to be done.”

Being Funny In A Foreign Language is out now via Dirty Hit. Buy/stream it here.

Drake is used to attending big-time games and rocking the jersey du jour, but this weekend’s vaunted El Clásico clash between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid will feature Drake’s OVO owl on Barça’s kit.

“To celebrate being the first artist with 50 billion streams on @Spotify @FCBarcelona will wear the OVO owl at El Clasico on Sunday,” Drake captioned an Instagram photo of himself holding up the FCB jersey. “This doesn’t feel real but it is.”

The LaLiga giants debuted the jersey to a remix of Drake’s 2016 No. 1 hit “One Dance.”

Drake surpassed 50 billion cumulative Spotify streams in January 2021, with Variety noting that the Toronto icon had been named the most-streamed Spotify artist of the 2010s. “One Dance” and Drake’s 2018 No. 1 single “God’s Plan” have each racked up over 2 billion streams alone.

Spotify became the official kit sponsor of Barça in July as part of an overarching long-term partnership that included the rebranding of the club’s home from Camp Nou to Spotify Camp Nou. It’s especially fitting that Barcelona is honoring a first for Drake because this year’s El Clásico will give the winner sole possession of first place early in this LaLiga season.

The match will kick off at 10:15 a.m. EST on Sunday (October 16) from Santiago Bernabeu in Madrid, Spain.

To paraphrase Tyrion Lannister, it’s not easy watching Game of Thrones all the time, but Ben Schwartz found a way. Testing positive for COVID helped, but the Parks and Recreation and The Afterparty star is “getting better, testing negative, & shaking off symptoms,” he tweeted this week, which is obviously good news. The bad news: “I cant watch 8 hours of Game of Thrones a day anymore BUT I will finish this show, just slower,” he wrote, adding, “THE GOT THREAD WILL CONTINUE! FOR THE WATCH!”

Schwartz is a man of his word. He’s up to season six, having recently watched the episode where Missandei tells the worst joke that Grey Worm has ever heard and Arya kills the Waif (who Schwartz dubbed “The Terminator”). “No One” is a triumphant episode of Game of Thrones — like an episode earlier in the season, “The Door,” which is triumphantly devastating. If you don’t remember what happens in it based on the title alone, maybe Schwartz’s live-tweets will refresh your memory.

“People had to be floored when Hodor died, right?” Schwartz wondered (they were). “Had to be a fan favorite character. He was great. I will miss you, [Wylis]. You died doing what you said you were gonna do for a bunch of seasons.” Amen.

The thread is worth monitoring as Schwartz inches ever closer to the final season. Maybe it’s better in 2022 than it was in 2019, without the pressure? (Unlikely, but at least there’s House of the Dragon to look forward to.)

The Watcher miniseries has arrived on Netflix as another Ryan Murphy production. Granted, there are a lot of these Murphy projects, and some stand out much more than the rest. Dahmer may have stood out for some wrong reasons, but it’s still the streamer’s second most-watched series already, so Murphy knows a thing or two about making compelling shows out of horrific situations. And The Watcher does dramatize a truly upsetting real-life situation for one family who bought (what they believed was) their dream home, only for the situation to quickly devolve into a mystery person stalking the home (and the Broaddus family).

The situation later turned into a real-estate nightmare. Derek and Maria Broaddus are portrayed by Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts in this show, and they initially purchased their cursed home from a real estate agent portrayed by Jennifer Coolidge, but that’s not the real estate who’s talking about the house these days. Rather, that would be David Barbosa, who came to the gig after a 2018 article by The Cut, which detailed how a mystery party fired off a series of disturbingly threatening letters to the Broaddus family. This person claimed to have been tasked with watching over the house for decades, and he knew far too much about the parents and their children while referring to them as “young blood.”

That was only the beginning of the letters, and the article sent the house into viral infamy with people flocking to take photos and generally gawk. Entertainment Weekly spoke with Barbosa about how his clients took a big loss on the $1.4 million house (listed for $999,000 and selling for $40,000 less), but someone eventually did buy it after a deluge of prospective buyers nope-d out:

“The deal was that, if you were going to put an offer in on the house, you had to go down to the attorney’s office and look at [all of the evidence], so you knew what really happened before we went into a hard contract,” he explains. One man, whom Barbosa remembers confidently told him that he didn’t “give a s—” about the hostile letters the Broadduses received, backed out after delving deeper into the case.

“He went down to the attorney’s office and called me and said, ‘Yeah, I’m out.’ He just said, ‘Listen, after reading everything, there’s no way I’m going in that house,’” Barbosa says with a laugh.

From there, no one knows what happened with The Watcher because the new owner didn’t experience the same harassment. Did he suddenly pass away, and no one knew it? The abuse doesn’t appear to be targeted against the Broaddus family since a former owner received a disturbing letter, too. Well, Netflix viewers are now left to evaluate the situation, and that’s precisely what they’ll do while binging.

The Watcher is streaming on Netflix.

(Via Entertainment Weekly)

The controversial racketeering case against Gunna, Young Thug, and their label, YSL, has received national attention and criticism for its use of lyrics as evidence for months, and now, an unexpected new voice has entered the discussion. Kim Kardashian, who has become more involved in the fight for prison reform as she has pursued a law degree, issued a statement in support of Gunna on her social media. In it, she decries his treatment by authorities and a judge’s recent refusal to grant him bond — the third such request that has been denied. His trial is set for January.

“Imagine sitting in a jail cell for 155 days with no bond when the only evidence against you is a ticket for an unrelated window tint and someone saying you were in a gang,” she wrote. “That’s where my friend Sergio finds himself today after having his bond denied for the third time despite there being zero evidence that he committed a crime.”

Gunna’s bond request has been denied three times because prosecutors feel that he might intimidate or tamper with witnesses. However, Gunna’s legal team argues that there’s no evidence to support this fear. Meanwhile, the main evidence against him according to the original indictment is his own music; while Gunna shouts out YSL, prosecutors maintain this means “Young Slime Life,” a gang, not “Young Stoner Life,” Gunna’s label.

Kardashian’s statement refutes this, declaring, “Sergio [Kitchens, Gunna’s real name] deserves better and we all should demand better.” You can read the full statement below.

Imagine sitting in a jail cell for 155 days with no bond when the only evidence against you is a ticket for an unrelated window tint and someone saying you weren’t in a gang. That’s where my friend Sergio finds himself today after having his bond denied for the third time despite there being zero evidence that he committed a crime.

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of meeting Sergio aka Gunna. He appreciated my interest in criminal justice reform and asked me to take a look at his cousin’s case. Since his incarceration, I have worked with his legal team and the facts of his case are yet another example of why the “justice system” is anything but just.

Some of these facts include:
*prosecutors alleged witness intimidation yet not a single person has said he threatened them or had anyone else threaten them.
*prosecutors alleged he’d had a nurse sneak him drugs yet the nurse says this is untrue and there is zero evidence it happened
*prosecutors alleged he was in a gang based on a witnesses testimony but when you read that testimony it says specifically that he is not in a gang and the witness doesn’t really know him and the interview is 3 years old.

Even though there is no evidence tying him to a single crime, or showing that he is a risk to the community Sergio had his bond denied once again today.

His trial is set for January but will likely be continued meaning he will sit in jail even longer.
Sergio deserves better and we all should demand better. #FreeGunna

If you’ve ever secretly imagined that, behind closed doors, Nancy Pelosi swears like a truck driver, we’ve got some disappointing news. On Thursday, the January 6th Committee held its latest public hearing, in which they showed some truly remarkable and never-before-seen footage of what top Democratic leaders like Pelosi were doing while insurrectionists ravaged the Capitol. As Trevor Noah pointed out, they were talking an awful lot about fecal matter.

Noah was pretty impressed with how “while Trump’s mob was outside asking to have an intimate conversation with Mike Pence’s neck,” Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer “were keeping their cool and trying to get stuff done.” The new footage shows the two of them hitting their phones in an attempt to get more help and enlist the National Guard. “But one of the craziest moments,” according to the outgoing host of The Daily Show, “was when Nancy Pelosi pointed out one really smelly reason the lawmakers might not be able to stay in the Capitol.”

In the footage, Pelosi is seen on the phone with Pence, whom she tells that they’ve “gotten a really bad report about the condition of the House floor. There’s defecation and all that kind of thing as well.”

Pelosi took a more casual approach when relaying this story to her colleagues, noting that “it could take time to clean up all the poo-poo that they’re making, literally and figuratively, in the Capitol.” Noah’s reaction to this clip was one of equal parts amusement and annoyance.

Yep, you heard that right. It turns out right wing Jamiroquai [Jacob Chansley] was sh*tting — or, as Nancy Pelosi put it, ‘poo-pooing’ — all over the Capitol. And you know, when I was watching this happen, I thought to myself: It’s so interesting how people like Tucker Carlson were calling Black people ‘animals’ when the George Floyd protests were happening. But when these people were literally sh*tting in the Capitol, Fox was like, ‘These brave patriots are just expressing their frustration and standing up for American democracy.’

You can watch the full clip above, beginning at the 8:35 mark.

“Lunatic Country Music Person” Maren Morris is fully embracing her affinity for pickleball. The Grammy winner visited Jimmy Kimmel Live this week, the first time she’d been on the show since guest hosting it, and was introduced as the latest cover star of Pickleball Magazine.

“Vogue, eat your heart out,” Morris joked. “Pickleball is life.”

The country-pop hitmaker explained that she and her husband, Ryan Hurd, got into pickleball during her current North American headlining tour in support of Humble Quest, her third studio album from March.

“We would just set up courts outside the tour bus and play each other,” Morris told Kimmel. “It was kind of like a team-bonding thing, and then everyone got into it. And now, apparently, there’s a Pickleball Magazine. They’re all gonna be freaking out that we’re mentioning this on the show tonight. But yeah, I’m the cover girl.”

“We play doubles. We have scorecards,” she continued. “There’s a lot of trash-talking. We just do it before soundcheck and before shows. It was kind of a good way — we hadn’t toured in so many years, so there were a few new faces in the crew, and I felt like that first night we played after the show in the parking lot.”

“They say there’s no better way to get to know somebody than to play pickleball with them,” Kimmel interjected.

“That’s, I think, the Pickleball Magazine motto,” Morris quipped, noting that she would play pickleball before her Hollywood Bowl show in Los Angeles on Thursday night (October 13).

Morris didn’t leave Kimmel without performing a swoon-worthy rendition of “Good Friends” so check that out below.

While reminiscing about his lengthy comedy career stretching all the way back to the early days of Saturday Night Live, Chevy Chase opened up to Bill Maher about the stupidest thing he’s ever said in a long line of misguided wisecracks. Chase made the confession on the latest episode of Maher’s Club Random podcast where he also shared an anecdote about John Belushi stealing his cocaine.

According to Chase, the biggest blunder of his career was during a 1980 interview with NBC’s Tom Snyder when Chase categorized legendary screen actor Cary Grant as a “homo.” Chase, who has a reputation for having a caustic personality, was surprisingly repentant about the whole thing. It was an unusual confession for a guy who still doesn’t care that he was a pain in the butt on Community for making off-color jokes. Via The Hollywood Reporter:

“[Tom] said, ‘People say you’re going to be the next Cary Grant,’ and I said, ‘That’s crazy, there’s nobody like Cary Grant and there will never be another Cary Grant and I understand he was a homo,’” Chase tells Maher of the appearance, during which he also said “what a gal” about Grant. “It was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever said.”

Of course, there’s another dimension that explains Chase’s self-reflection. Grant sued the National Lampoon actor for defamation to the tune of $10 million, and Chase reportedly settled for $1 million.

However, he didn’t entirely learn his lesson. While making it a point to say that he doesn’t think Grant was gay, Chase asked Maher for his opinion on Grant’s sexuality, and it went downhill real quick.

“Cary Grant, I think was half of…. I’m going to say this, I think at one time in his life had a d*** in his a**,” Maher said. “That’s conjecture, but he’s just too good looking not to, that’s my theory.”

(Via The Hollywood Reporter)