Video Of The Week: Queens Of The Stone Age

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Just days after leader Josh Homme confirmed having recorded a song with Shania Twain, Queens Of The Stone Age themselves released a video for a country-ish duet with none other than Nikki Lane, this generation's ultimate outlaw country singer: Directed by the duo of Christopher Gruse and Tony Wolski from Hungry Man Productions, with cameos from veteran actors Diedrich Bader (Drew Carey Show, Veep) and wife Dulcy Rogers (Father of the Bride Part II), the video for Easy Street follows a battered and bruised Homme seemingly running from a motley crew of disguised degenerate characters and then hosting a party for them at a huge cottage.

It's definitely a slower jam than most QOTSA songs, but not completely out of place considering past tracks like Make It Wit Chu and the sublimely subdued cover of Billy Idol's White Wedding.

I'll probably require time for it to grow on me a bit more - and will likely hope I don't see it too often live - but it will probably make its way onto my Eternal Playlist eventually.

Video Of The Week: Johnny Cash

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After the extremely successful run of covers albums, Johnny Cash's estate now takes us to his back catalogue with a full album of unreleased 1993 tracks called Songwriter, Cash's new video for Hello Out There, a song that takes the side of presenting planet Earth to alien civilizations in bit of a cry for help, and mixes it in with the singer's usual religious inclinations: As per with the award-winning video for Hurt, this black-and-white video's story owes a lot to the Johnny Cash Museum in Nashville, this time concentrating on a child finding out about the songwriter's craft or, as per the video's YouTube page:

“Hello Out There” was directed by Matt Paskert and starring Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash’s youngest granddaughter, six-year-old Grace June Cash, the daughter of John Carter and his wife Ana Cristina Cash. In the black and white video, Grace sets off alone on an adventure and comes upon the Cash Cabin, Johnny’s hallowed sanctuary in Hendersonville, Tennessee where he wrote and recorded some of his final songs, and where ‘Songwriter’ was produced.

The cynic in me took a hard listen and my conclusion was that this was worthy of release and of inclusion in my Country, Johnny Cash, and Current playlists - and maybe in time my Eternal Playlist as well.

Video Of The Week: Tom Petty

Tom Petty died last night, but because we live in a 24-hour news cycle where tweets count as "breaking news", the story was ahead of itself, reports of his demise making the rounds on social media while he was still technically alive, angering his family, friends and bandmates:

from Instagram

How sad a world are we living in? TMZ were once again the only ones to get the news right, but instead of leaving it at that, they actually released the audio of the 911 call his wife made when she found his body. For fuck's sake.

This does, as AnnaKim Violette Petty mentioned, overshadow and disrespect the man and the artist's oeuvre. We're talking about a Rock And Roll Hall of Famer (class of 2002), yet another lost member of The Traveling Wilburys (Roy Orbison and George Harrison had passed away before him, Bob Dylan and Jeff Lyne of Electric Light Orchestra fame remain), and a very successful songwriter whose career spanned five decades.

Some of the songs you may know him from include Refugee, Learning To Fly, Free Fallin', It's Good To Be King, Into The Great Wide Open, Don't Do Me Like That, Runnin' Down A Dream, All Of Nothin', Mary Jane's Last Dance, You Wreck Me, and a terrific and perfect cover of Patti Smith's So You Wanna Be A Rock'N'Roll Star.

Oh, and this tremendous piece of 1980s music called I Won't Back Down that I've sung in concert over a dozen times:

Yes, there are a few cameos in the video directed by David Leland, including Lynne (co-songwriter on most of 1989's Full Moon Fever, Petty's first official solo album), Harrison (who played guitar on it), Mike Campbell (lead guitarist of both Petty's band The Heartbreakers and on this record) and former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr, who does not play on the actual recording (those are actually Phil Jones' beats). Also missing in the video is Heartbreakers bassist Howie Epstein doing backing vocals.

Notable covers of this song include Pearl Jam's rendition from the Live At The Gorge set, but young'uns will know it best by Sam Smith stealing it for his Grammy-winning Stay With Me...

Video Of The Week: Cake

Cake.

With Soul Coughing, they're my favourite band that I always forget exists.

I wanted to add a few of their songs to my phone playlist this week - namely Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps, Never There, Sheep Go To Heaven, Cool Blue Reason, their cover of Black Sabbath's War Pigs, Satan Is My Motor, She'll Come Back To Me, Open Book and, of course, The Distance:

The 1990s were great about introducing us to acts that didn't all resemble each other, what with the boom in indie labels and the traveling festivals. All bands didn't have to be big at the same level, either; Cake had one extremely successful album - 1996's Fashion Nugget, with their cover of I Will Survive - but also enjoyed moderate success with 1994's Motorcade Of Generosity and 1998's Prolonging The Magic, building a fanbase that would remain loyal to them to this day. Like Pearl Jam, but on a much smaller scale.

In many ways, Cake was similar to Soul Coughing, both containing elements of deadpan-delivery spoken word, rock, humour, poetry, irony, sarcasm; the main difference was the flavouring: Cake was based on country (particularly clearer after the departure of guitarist Greg Brown and his distinctive tone) whereas Soul Coughing's love of jazz was the underlying essence behind the composition.

Video Of The Week: Hadley Kennary

Hadley Kennary straddles the line between heartfelt ballads, folk and "new country", that quasi-orchestral-pop music sung with an accent that wins awards that we wouldn't want Toby Keith to get anyway.

Personally, I'd do away with a lot of the instrumentation on her Momentum EP, particularly the bass, which does nothing for me and is just too conventional and too present. The last song on it, 24 Hours, is more along the lines of what I'd like to hear her do more in the future. I'd be up for a solo/acoustic tour with her.

That being said, today I wanted to show her video for Painkiller, a black-and-white clip directed by Joe Barnard:

It's standard, 80s-tinged fare (complete with one-shot-stop up-motion strumming to add punch to a chord switch as if it were light ska), with the darkness-infused lyrics more prevalent in pop since the grunge era. But it ain't half bad.

Video Of The Week: Miranda Lambert

I used to think of Miranda Lambert as a boring, new-country singer who may have been a puppet not just from her managers but also the industry; she was married to a rather beige performer (Blake Shelton) who is so into prefabricated crap that he is a judge on The Voice, and I thought it reverberated on her as well.

That was until I heard this week's featured song, Mama's Broken Heart. The 2013 single from her 2011 album Four The Record didn't sound as generic to me as many of her other stuff; in fact, it reminded me of what Nikki Lane does, it had a real sense of danger that was fueled by pain and anger, but also a lust for life.

The song would also work as a ballad, but with its upbeat tempo really is reminiscent of Nikki Lane, especially with the overblown pseudo-rock chorus. It also works really well in light of Lambert's alleged extra-conjugal affairs... (beige never keeps the girl).

The beautiful, light-coloured video was directed by Trey Fanjoy, a regular nominee at country music award shows who has also directed videos for Tim McGraw, Taylor Swift, Alan Jackson, Lee Ann Womack, Keith Urban, George Strait, Lonestar, and Reba McEntire, as well as pop act Atomic Kitten, singer-songwriters Jewel and Sheryl Crow, renegade Steve Earle and whatever Aerosmith's Steven Tyler does now that he's a solo artist.

Video Of The Week: Katie Armiger

Yep, for the second straight week, I'm featuring a young, strong country singer - though this time her style fits completely with what you might have in mind when it comes to modern country music.

But like last week's bad-girl Nikki Lane, good-girl Katie Armiger has the confidence and swagger to party around flames, though in Armiger's case, it wasn't from burning a bad boyfriend's Harley, just ''regular'' pyrotechnics:



I mean, sure, she's pretty, but what hits me first and foremost is exactly the opposite: with 4 professional records in 4 years, hundreds of live shows and tons of people met who were as impressed with her talent as they were her looks - and all that at just 22 years of age - Katie Armiger has lived, in such a short time, what most people don't experience in a whole lifetime. And when a stunning woman has to deal with saying ''no'' more often than she does ''hello'', that builds character the likes of which men twice her age will never even come close to.

In the Playin' With Fire video shown above, she has that Leelee Sobieski / Jennifer Lawrence look going for her, but mixed with a dirty, working-girl attire, saying lines like ''I'm already crazy and I feel fine / as I cross this line between wrong and right'', ''I'm already lit and this ain't done yet'' and ''I like the burn''. And there's the look in her eyes in every close-up. And the totally sexual way she cranks up and uses that flame-thrower (in high heels, no less).

She's in control, and not much can stop her. I'd say the sky's the limit, but she can even shatter that if she wants to.

I first came to realize she existed when recording songs at Studio Loco in Montréal, where her Confessions Of A Nice Girl CD laid on a table. I put it on out of sheer curiosity and had expected ballads and cutesy, wholesome songs from the cover, but instead found well-written, beat-driven songs that I instantly connected with. I've been a fan ever since. Here's the cover art in question:

Video Of The Week: Nikki Lane

I can totally relate to Nikki Lane, who moved to NYC only to be forced out by its high cost of living that is not artist-friendly; I came back home to Montréal, she moved to Nashville - big enough to qualify as a ''city'', but not so much down in the Red States as her native South Carolina.

Director Andrew Hines captured the essence of her energy in this video, for the song Right Time, giving it country's requisite amount of white trash-ness (couples fighting, day-time beer drinking, a poor neighbourhood that could pass as a trailer park), but also the power, control, strength, coolness and hard-headedness Lane naturally exhudes. She is like Johnny Ramone (or Joan Jett) walking amongst a bunch of decrepit nobodies.

Also, this is a nice way to use Dan Auerbach's trademark Black Keys sound (he produced the record), without relying on it as the basis of your own art. Well played.

Video Of The Week: Callaghan

This week's entry comes from London, originally, but has since moved to the U.S. (Atlanta, to be exact), where she recorded her debut LP, produced by Shawn Mullins, whom you may recall from his 1998 smash-hit Lullaby.

So, yeah, Callaghan dabbles in Americana-inspired folk. Unfortunately - in my opinion - her talent is best served live, or at least Mullins hasn't been able to capture her raw essence in the studio the first time around. But the rules I set forth for this series is about ''official'' videos, therefore this ''life on tour'' clip makes the cut and her live audience-filmed YouTube clips don't.

But if one director were to combine her natural live charms (and keep the music from that version in the clip), with background scenes interspersed throughout, it'd be a sure-fire winner, and perhaps a better introduction to her talent.

She could easily have the kind of breakthrough Jewel had in the 1990s; I just think she just needs to take some of the polishing out her her tunes the next time she enters the studio.

R.I.P. Mindy McCready

She was a tortured soul who felt alone, needed to feel loved and accepted, and never quite got past the brink of happiness. As a teen - some reports (quoting him) say she was 15, others (quoting her) say 16 - she met baseball steroid über-user and star pitcher Roger Clemens and they promptly started a long-term relationship that was ''sexual in its nature''; as a young adult, she entered the country music business on the strength of karaoke tapes she brought to Nashville labels (and was signed by BNA Records); apart from Clemens, she dated pop culture side-dishes Dean Cain and Drake Berehowski; her substance-abuse problems became so rampant that she spent a season on Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew.

That was the public life of Mindy McCready.

In the end, she shot herself on the same porch, in the same exact manner as her boyfriend (and father of her second child) David Wilson, who had done it a month prior. It was at least her fifth suicide attempt.

Most of the conversation regarding her death should center around her talent, then substance abuse and mental health - and hopefully it will.

But we should also reserve a spot to talk about Reality TV, and more specifically Dr. Drew's exploitation show. She is the fifth ''cast member'' of the hack Dr. Drew Pinski - the third from Season 3 alone - to die in the last two years. While some of those were deemed ''accidental'', all of them involved drugs and alcohol directly: Rodney King drowned but was found to have alcohol, marijuana, cocaine and PCP in his blood, and Grease actor Jeff Conway may have died from pneumonia, but the autopsy showed his life-long addiction to painkillers was the cause of it. Alice In Chains bassist Mike Starr and Real World participant Joey Kovar both died of overdoses, Starr on cocaine and heroin, Kovar on heroin and other opiates.

Some cynics claim it'd be a scandal if no one from a series about addiction had died, and Pinski agrees with them, from a CNN interview last night:

One of my hopes was, in bringing ‘Celebrity Rehab’ out, was to teach people how dangerous addiction was. If I was doing a show on cancer, there would not be much surprise when my cancer patient died. In fact, we’d celebrate a few years of good quality life. People don’t understand that addiction has virtually the same prognosis. If you have other mental health issues on top of that, it’s so much worse. This was not an addiction death, interestingly. This was related to - had her boyfriend not died, I don’t think there’s any way we’d be in this position right now.

Really? He drops the fucking towel this easily? ''Meh, I gave it a half-assed shot, spewed out a few clichés here and there, made her (and others) look like a complete ass, and I did all that while also seeing my regular, non-celeb patients on the side, raking money in from all sides while forging myself a reputation as the go-to guy. Come see me, you have a 1-in-3 chance of dying.''

Jack Kevorkian went to jail for helping people who wanted to die get there. This hack's job is to try to save the fuckers and he fails consistently - how is that not also murder?

Shut Up And Sing

Oh, Hank Williams Jr.!

Drunk-dialing Fox News the morning of a drunken bender, hitting on Gretchen Carlson and calling Barack Obama ''Hitler''... signs of a good day coming. Or maybe not.

Better Know A Hottie: Karen Waldrup

She was born in Louisianna but practices her craft in Nashville, Tennessee. And she excels at writing country songs so well she was chosen as a finalist in the show Platinum Hit, where judges ranging from Kara DioGuardi to Jewel show young future stars the rudiments of songwriting.

Karen Waldrup is still merely 24 years old and could be country music's next bright, young star. Especially since she's much more pleasant to the eye than Taylor Swift and has that aura of both wisdom and fun.

Look at that spunk! I'd love to have her play on my next record! (before she gets too big...!)