John Fogerty's new album revisits Creedence classics with guests

For John Fogerty’s next album, due this fall, the former Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman will revisit his old band’s deep catalog of hits in new collaborations with rock, pop and country duet partners including the Foo Fighters, Miranda Lambert, My Morning Jacket, Bob Seger, Keith Urban and Brad Paisley.

“Wrote a Song For Everyone” also is slated to include new Fogerty songs, set alongside Creedence touchstones such as “Fortunate Son” and “Who’ll Stop the Rain” from the band's most successful period in the late '60s and early '70s.

The new project shows Fogerty fully embracing his artistic legacy; for many years after Creedence disbanded in 1972, he refused to perform the group’s songs because of legal issues with his former record company. He famously refused to play with former band mates Doug Clifford and Stu Cook when Creedence was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993. The fourth original band member, guitarist Tom Fogerty, John's older brother, died in 1990.

Fogerty eventually began performing Creedence material again during his live shows, and last September in New York played Creedence’s albums “Green River” and “Cosmo’s Factory” in their entirety over the course of a two-night stand.

The new album, which also will include duets with Alan Jackson, Dawes and other artists still to be confirmed, draws its title from Fogerty’s song that originally appeared on “Green River” in 1969.

Most recently Fogerty made his acting debut portraying himself in an episode of the Fox TV series "The Finder," for which he wrote and sang the theme song "Swamp Water," at the invitation of the show's creator, Hart Hanson, a longtime Fogerty/Creedence fan.

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--Randy Lewis

Photo of Keith Urban, left, performing with John Fogerty during the Recording Academy's 2010 MusiCares Person of the Year benefit concert salute to Neil Young in Los Angeles. Credit: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times.

CMA Awards: Taylor Swift, Jason Aldean, Band Perry win top honors

Nashville’s Country Music Assn. has a well-deserved reputation for déjà vu, having doled out the same awards to the same performers year after year across much of its nearly half-century history. But this year the CMA apparently decided that it’s time to bring some new blood into its ranks, heaping multiple awards on relative newcomers Jason Aldean and the Band Perry, yet saving its top award for Taylor Swift, naming the 21-year-old singer and songwriter entertainer of the year.

Aldean, country music’s unrequited best man for several years -- he's had just one previous CMA nomination -- finally made it to the altar himself as his “My Kinda Party” was named album of the year Wednesday at the 45th CMA Awards. It was a decisive vote of confidence for the Macon, Ga., singer, who got the nod over Swift and her blockbuster “Speak Now” album, which last fall became the first collection in 5½ years in any genre to sell more than 1 million copies during its first week of release. 

“My Kinda Party,” however, is the top-selling country album of 2011 with sales of more than 2 million copies to date; Swift’s album, which has logged nearly double that figure at 3.8 million, was released at the end of 2010.  Aldean, whose four studio albums have sold more than 5 million copies collectively, also received the trophy for musical event for his duet “Don’t You Wanna Stay” with the first “American Idol” winner, Kelly Clarkson.

PHOTOS: CMA Awards 2011 | Red carpet arrivals

The Band Perry won for new artist, and its hit single “If I Die Young” picked up single and song of the year honors for its heart-tugging exploration of youths who feel overlooked or taken for granted, something the young sibling trio doesn’t have to worry about now.

Taylor Swift, Brad Paisley are among top CMA Award nominees

Brad Paisley, Taylor Swift, Blake Shelton and Jason Aldean top the roster of nominees for the 45th Country Music Assn. Awards with five apiece. Right behind them with four nominations each are Kimberly Perry of the Band Perry and Zac Brown Band members Brown and Coy Bowles.

The CMA’s top award -- for entertainer of the year -- will have Swift, Shelton, Paisley and Aldean vying with Keith Urban. Album of the year nominees are Swift’s “Speak Now,” Shelton’s  “All About Tonight,” Paisley’s “This Is Country Music,” Zac Brown Band’s “You Get What You Give” and Aldean’s “My Kinda Party.”

The awards will be handed out Nov. 9 in a ceremony that ABC-TV will broadcast from Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena. The show will be hosted for the fourth time by Paisley and Carrie Underwood.

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-- Randy Lewis

Photo: Brad Paisley, who will co-host the 45th Country Music Assn. Awards in Nashville in October and is up for five awards, is shown during a 2010 concert at Staples Center in Los Angeles. Credit: Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times.

John Lennon, Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Josh Groban hits together on 'Songs for Japan' benefit album

Contemporary and classic hits from John Lennon, Justin Bieber, Bob Dylan, U2, Lady Gaga, Bruce Springsteen, Katy Perry, Josh Groban and nearly three dozen other acts have been gathered on “Songs for Japan,” a new compilation that will generate funds for the Japanese Red Cross Society’s disaster relief efforts.

The album’s 38 tracks include Lennon’s “Imagine,”  Bieber’s “Pray,” Dylan’s “Shelter From the Storm,” U2’s “Walk On,” Gaga’s “Born This Way,” Springsteen’s “Human Touch,” Perry’s “Firework,” Groban’s “Awake,” Pink’s “Sober” and Nicki Minaj’s “Save Me.”

Other artists represented include Black Eyed Peas, Madonna, Keith Urban, Rihanna, Lady Antebellum, Eminem, Elton John and Shakira.

All artists, publishers and record companies have waived their royalties and other proceeds so that 100% of money generated from sales of “Songs for Japan” will go to the Japanese Red Cross Society. The collection is available for digital download now on iTunes and will surface as a double CD set in early April.

Meanwhile, Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, is playing two benefit shows in New York in the days ahead from which proceeds will go to relief efforts. She’ll be joined by Sonic Youth; her son, Sean Ono Lennon; Cibo Matto; and others on Sunday at the Miller Theatre in a performance that has already sold out. Then on Tuesday, she’ll have Patti Smith, Tony Shanahan, Matto and others with her at Le Poisson Rouge. Tickets are $100.

-- Randy Lewis

Keith Urban on weathering Nashville's flood of 2010

Keith Urban was scheduled to start recording his new album, “Get Closer,” in Nashville on May 5. So,  three days before that, he had all his most prized guitars, which he kept at home, moved to the same storage facility where he kept his backup instruments, amplifiers and other gear.

He, his wife, actress Nicole Kidman, and their daughter, Sunday Rose, were in Hawaii, where Kidman was shooting a film, when the torrential storms hit Nashville on May 3 and left the Soundcheck Nashville storage warehouse used by Urban and hundreds of other musicians under several feet of water for nearly a week.

One of the guitars severely damaged was his “Shattered Mirror” Telecaster, custom-made for him at the Fender Custom Shop in Corona by senior master guitar builder Yuriy Shishkov -- a guitar I’d seen in its embryonic stage on Shishkov’s work bench when I visited him at the shop a few years ago. 

“I felt like I’d drowned the 'Mona Lisa' -- for Yuriy, at least,” Urban said. “He put so much time into that guitar. But it just swelled up, all the mirrors broke, the neck got all warped.  It’s the unfortunate reality of new wood. It’s still very porous, absorbent, it sucked in lots and lots of water. But the 50-year-old Fenders and Gibsons fared fantastic."

Urban took the losses philosophically, but that didn't mean it was an easy experience.

“It was a very weird grieving process,” he said, “because I didn’t know if everything was gone, or if some of it was gone; if the water was up two inches, or five feet. I had weird dreams on the Monday and Tuesday night, imagining that none of it was underwater and that we were going to be fine.”

The equipment, however, wasn't.

But rather than delay starting on the new album, Urban went to work using borrowed, rented or newly acquired instruments, a decision that required a new perspective that he decided to embrace rather than fight.

“I bought a few guitars off EBay, and occasionally we’d have the UPS guys arrive at the studio with a package,” he said. “We’d get the guitar out, string it up, tune it up, plug it in, and off we’d go. I just took to the whole reality of the situation and thought, ‘All right, well, let’s make a record.’ ”

-- Randy Lewis

Photo of Keith Urban with the "Shattered Mirror" Fender Telecaster. Credit: Fender.com

Lost in the Nashville flood: Musical instruments galore

Anyone who knows the feeling of becoming intimately familiar with a particular musical instrument can’t help but sympathize with all those musicians who lost prized pieces of equipment during the recent floods in Nashville.

I reached out to several to ask whether they’d been affected by the wall of water that submerged Soundcheck Nashville, one of the key musical equipment storage facilities there. A lot of people think of instruments as little more than furniture that's easily replaceable, but that notion quickly fades when you hear a musician talk about a favorite piece of musical equipment. And even for those instruments that might be in good enough shape to repair, the chorus from those dealing with them was remarkably consistent: "They'll never be the same."

Brad Paisley had all his guitars and other equipment he uses on tour at Soundcheck because he and his crew were rehearsing for a tour that opens May 21 in Virginia Beach, Va. Ironically, it’s “The H20 Tour” from the track “Water” on his latest album, recorded long before the flood.

Stagecoach 2010: Room for lots of tastes

At the desert gathering, pop-driven acts, traditional sounds and fringe performers all have a chance to please an expanded crowd.

 The old gag about people who brag about loving both kinds of music — country and western — gets a twist at Stagecoach. Out in the desert, the annual festival serves up both kinds of country music: that which sells, and everything else.

Fest-goers generally fall into one camp or the other, and even though it often feels that the gap between is a great divide, there's not a hint of rivalry among these groups that otherwise rarely intersect.

The majority, predictably, plop down their blankets and lawn chairs — the kind with the built-in, beer-friendly cup holders — in front of the Mane Stage, where on Saturday the lineup was topped by a couple of contemporary country's more pop-driven acts, Keith Urban and Sugarland, and Sunday by the hard-charging likes of Toby Keith and Brooks & Dunn.

Far across the Empire Polo Field grounds in Indio, tradition-loving fans ensconced themselves in front of the Palomino Stage, where standard bearers such as Merle Haggard, Ray Price and Bobby Bare held forth on Saturday, while Sunday's offerings extended from the searingly dark folk country of Mary Gauthier to the Band-influenced Avett Brothers to those country-gospel hit makers of yore, the Oak Ridge Boys.

And in between, at the Mustang Stage, fans of the fringe were served by boundary-blind Americana musicians including Victoria Williams, Trampled by Turtles, Truth & Salvage and Black Prairie; Grand Ole Opry stalwarts Bill Anderson and Little Jimmy Dickens; and cowboy poets Waddie Mitchell and Baxter Black.

It's a catholic mix that draws no distinction between acts that just want to party and those more concerned with the inner workings of the human heart. But the difference is there for anyone attuned to it, and for many, the gift of Stagecoach is the ability to experience both schools in the same place. 

Plenty turned out to savor that gift: Preliminary estimates put the average attendance at 50,000 each day, a significant uptick from last year's record of 40,000 per day, Goldenvoice chief Paul Tollett said Sunday.

Bobby Bare got Saturday off to a rousing start with several of the Shel Silverstein narrative tales he's recorded over the years — sterling examples of detail-rich songwriting that avoids cliché at every turn. Silverstein excelled in the tradition of tall tales from the American frontier going back to poet Robert W. Service and beyond, such as one concerning a chump who's had one too many and decides to pick a fight with the toughest guy in the bar, only to get a lecture on what it really means to be “The Winner”: “He said, ‘You see these bright white smilin' teeth, you know they ain't my own / Mine rolled away like Chiclets down a street in San Antone.'”

Stagecoach 2010: Keith Urban and the art of discretion

 

Four songs into Keith Urban's headlining set Saturday night at the Mane Stage, the New Zealand-born country star offered up "Stupid Boy," a track from his 2006 album "Love, Pain & the whole crazy thing" that took on new meaning after he checked himself into a rehab facility for backsliding on substance-abuse problems.

It was, and remains, a clever choice. The song was written by Sarah Buxton as a slice of empathy from one girlfriend to another. But tackling it from the male perspective, Urban turned it into a self-dialogue about a guy who ignores the great blessing of his relationship with a good woman, ultimately losing her by ignoring the unique gifts she brings to the table. (The song stirred thoughts of “Tiger Woods” but Urban, ever tactful, made no mention.)

-- Randy Lewis

Photo: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times

Lady Antebellum, Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert lead ACM nominations

Lady Antebellum continues its ascent in country music circles, nabbing a field-leading seven nominations for the 45th Academy of Country Music Awards, among them album, single, song and top vocal group.

The Georgia trio is the hottest act in all of pop music at the moment, having sold more than 1 million copies of its sophomore album “Need You Now” in the four weeks since it was released in January. Lady Antebellum just edged out Carrie Underwood and Miranda Lambert, who scored six nominations each, and Taylor Swift with five nods. It creates a roster of top award contenders heavy on new blood.

Swift, who upset a slate of country veterans at last fall’s Country Music Assn. Awards in being named that organization’s youngest entertainer of the year winner ever, is in the running for the same trophy at this year’s ACMs. The organization expanded the entertainer category to include eight names this year, up from the usual five: the other nominees are Underwood, Kenny Chesney, Toby Keith, Brad Paisley, George Strait, Keith Urban and the Zac Brown Band.

Voting for entertainer of the year will be open once again to fans, and audience input also will be factored into the award for best new artist. Awards will be handed out April 18 at a ceremony from the MGM Grand Arena in Las Vegas, to be telecast on CBS.

--Randy Lewis

Photo of Lady Antebellum (left to right): Charles Kelley, Hillary Scott and Dave Haywood. Credit: Miranda Penn Turin

Stagecoach 2010: Keith Urban, Toby Keith, Sugarland and more

Stagecoach 2010 presents something of a battle of the Keiths and country duos, with headliners Keith Urban and Toby Keith making their first appearances next April at the two-day country festival in Indio, while Brooks & Dunn return for a stop on their farewell tour on a lineup that also includes Sugarland, the twosome that’s taken over as country's reigning pair.

The fourth edition of Stagecoach will take place April 24-25 at the Empire Polo Club in Indio and also will feature country standard-bearers Merle Haggard and Ray Price as well as more recent vintage acts including Billy Currington, Gary Allan, Phil Vassar, Jamey Johnson, Joey + Rory and the Avett Brothers.

Also  on the bill will be the Oak Ridge Boys, Carlene Carter, B.J. Thomas, Mary Gauthier, Bill Anderson and the Steel Drivers, among the usual complement of classic and contemporary country, bluegrass, folk and western acts. Tickets go on sale Friday at Ticketmaster and at the festival’s website.

Last year’s event drew more than 100,000 attendees for the two days of music headlined by Kenny Chesney and Brad Paisley.

--Randy Lewis

Top photo: Sugarland. Credit: Robert Lachman / Los Angeles Times
Middle photo: Brooks & Dunne at Stagecoach in 2007. Credit: Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times