Friday, May 29, 2015

Kelly Clarkson - Invincible

This is the new video by Kelly Clarkson.
Second song out from the new album "Piece by Piece".

Kelly Clarkson - Invincible



Hope you will love this awesome lyric.

Kelly Clarkson - Invincible

You know I was broke down, I had hit the ground
I was crying out, I couldn't make no sound
No one hears the silent tears collecting
You know I had lost hope, I was all alone
Never been so long till you came along
Teacher, I feel the dots connecting

Beat down on me, beat down like a waterfall
Cause I can take on so much more than I had ever dreamed
So beat down on me, beat down like a waterfall
Cause baby, I am ready to be free

Now I am invincible
No, I ain't a scared little girl no more
Yeah, I am invincible
What was I running for
I was hiding from the world
I was so afraid, I felt so unsure
Now I am invincible
Another perfect storm

Now I am a warrior, a shooting star
Know I got this far, had a broken heart
No one hears the silent tears collecting
Cause it's being weak, but strong in the truth I found
I have courage now, gonna shout it out
Teacher, I feel the dots connecting

Beat down on me, beat down like a waterfall
Cause I can take on so much more than I had ever dreamed
So beat down on me, beat down like a waterfall
Cause baby, I am ready to be free

Now I am invincible
No, I ain't a scared little girl no more
Yeah, I am invincible
What was I running for
I was hiding from the world
I was so afraid, I felt so unsure
Now I am invincible
Another perfect storm

I was running from an empty threat
Of emptiness
I was running from an empty threat
That didn't exist
I was running from an empty threat
Of abandonment
I was running from an empty threat
That didn't exist

But now I am invincible
No, I ain't a scared little girl no more
Yeah, I am invincible
What was I running for
I was hiding from the world
I was so afraid, I felt so unsure
Now I am invincible
Another perfect storm

Now I am invincible
No, I ain't a scared little girl no more
Yeah, I am invincible
What was I running for
I was hiding from the world
I was so afraid, I felt so unsure
Now I am invincible
Another perfect storm

Friday, May 15, 2015

U2, 2015-05-17 - Entertainment, Review: Barry Egan at U2's opening night of Innocence + Experience in Vancouver

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/music/music-reviews/review-barry-egan-at-u2s-opening-night-of-innocence-experience-in-vancouver-31224378.html

Review: Barry Egan at U2's opening night of Innocence + Experience in Vancouver

Barry Egan in Vancouver at U2

Published 15/05/2015 | 06:41


Bono, of the band U2, throws water at the crowd while the Edge watches as they perform in the band's first concert of their new world tour in Vancouver, Thursday, May, 14, 2015. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT
Bono, of the band U2, throws water at the crowd while the Edge watches as they perform in the band's first concert of their new world tour in Vancouver, Thursday, May, 14, 2015. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT
A SLUMBERING giant awoke last night near the snow-capped Grouse Mountains in Canada.

Or to put it another way, U2 came back to the world stage last night in front of 20,000 fans at Rogers Arena in Vancouver.

It was not quite the return of four all-conquering superheroes but more like four men who have been through the wars before coming out the other side... with a brilliant new album that got denigrated.

The brilliance of the current Songs of Innocence album was obscured by the PR disaster that was the iTunes download debacle.


Bono, left, and Adam Clayton, of the band U2, perform in the band's first concert of their new world tour in Vancouver. Photo: Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via AP
Bono, left, and Adam Clayton, of the band U2, perform in the band's first concert of their new world tour in Vancouver. Photo: Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via AP
"Divisive" wouldn’t begin to describe it.

So U2 had a lot to prove last night.

Fail on this tour and U2 would be looking at a fatal loss of relevancy.

So no pressure, then.


The band U2 performs in their first concert of their new world tour in Vancouver, Thursday, May, 14, 2015. The concert opens a 19-city tour, playing indoor arenas after a decade of larger outdoor shows. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via AP) MANDATORY
The band U2 performs in their first concert of their new world tour in Vancouver, Thursday, May, 14, 2015. The concert opens a 19-city tour, playing indoor arenas after a decade of larger outdoor shows. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via AP) MANDATORY
Would Bono - after his dreadful accident in Central Park last November - be able to cut it as a performer?

No longer jumping Jack Flash -  more limping hack trash.  No longer the young Dub who jumped down off the stage at Live Aid during Bad … now a battered 55 year old man held together by surgical pins, like a rock-star Frankenstein.

The answer to most of the above questions is, mercifully, that U2 – on the basis of what they did on stage last night in Canada – have no worries about the future.

They opened at 9pm with a blitzkrieg bop version of The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone), which was quickly followed by Out Of Control.


Bono, of the band U2, performs in the band's first concert of their new world tour in Vancouver, Thursday, May, 14, 2015. The concert opens a 19-city tour, playing indoor arenas after a decade of larger outdoor shows. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via AP) MANDATORY
Bono, of the band U2, performs in the band's first concert of their new world tour in Vancouver, Thursday, May, 14, 2015. The concert opens a 19-city tour, playing indoor arenas after a decade of larger outdoor shows. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via AP) MANDATORY
“We’re a band from the Northside of Dublin,” Bono told Canada, introducing the song “This is one of our first singles [released in 1980]."

I’m glad to say that Ballymum boyo Bono still rocks like a beautiful bastard. After Out Of Control, they segued into Vertigo then an unsurprisingly emotive, even empowering, I Will Follow.

“A boy tries hard to be a man

His mother takes him by his hand

If he stops to think he starts to cry

Oh why,” he sang of his late mother.

And U2, with one of the greatest back-catalogues of songs from any band in the world, still have the power to move the listener to tears – both of joy and sadness.


Bono, of the band U2, spits water while performing in the band's first concert of their new world tour in Vancouver,  Thursday, May, 14, 2015. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via AP) MANDATORY
Bono, of the band U2, spits water while performing in the band's first concert of their new world tour in Vancouver, Thursday, May, 14, 2015. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via AP) MANDATORY



When Bono et al are at full throttle, as they are on Until The End Of The World and Bullet The Blue Sky, the very walls of  Rogers Arena seem to shake with the excitement of it all. It is at times like these when you realise just how magical these four fellas from the Northside of Dublin actually are. And why they are such a big part of our lives – and the zeitgeist.

So it would be a grave mistake to write off U2 as a music entity just because you don’t like a) U2 moving their tax affairs to Holland,  b) Bono once shaking George Bush’s hand or c) that Bono has more money than you or I.

U2's Innocence + Experience is certainly not a normal rock show.  Take That it certainly isn’t.

Advance reports indicated that it would be an autobiographical piece of rock theatre that owed more to Beckett than Bowie.

And yes, the opening image of the show is a single light bulb swinging forlornly inside Bono’s bedroom as a teenager at 10 Cedarwood Road in Dublin's Finglas/Ballymum, but it is all rather compelling.

Bono sings on Cedarwood Road, the sixth song into the set last night: "You can’t return to where you never left. I’m still standing on that street."

Unless you have a heart of stone, this is all quite moving. 

It is here inside Bono’s bedroom that we will hear young Paul Hewson listen to the records -  courtesy of Joey Ramone and The Clash among many others -   that made him want to be a singer called Bono. There is plenty of dark psychoanalysis of Bono’s youth, not least on the emotionally lacerating Iris (Hold Me Close), where the U2 singer sings about the moment his life crumbled to dust when he was 14:  his mother Iris died.


Bono, of the band U2, throws water at the crowd during the band's first concert of their new world tour in Vancouver, Thursday, May, 14, 2015. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT
Bono, of the band U2, throws water at the crowd during the band's first concert of their new world tour in Vancouver, Thursday, May, 14, 2015. (Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press via AP) MANDATORY CREDIT
So far, so bleak.

So far, so Beckett.

As Bono half-joked in an interview with The New York Times last week,  “People will walk out into the aisles not buying T-shirts but having counselling, and wondering, ‘Where did the fun go?’”

In reality, there was plenty of fun last night in Vancouver. Mysterious Ways, followed by Desire and The Sweetest Thing had everyone in the audience showing their allegiances.

Bullet The Blue Sky was magnificent, as was – as ever – Sunday Bloody Sunday followed by the overwhelming raw power of Raised By Wolves. Pride of course, was a defining moment of the night. There was no songs, perhaps understandably, from the last album No Lines On The Horizon.

It was an incredible night in Canada. (And I say this having seen U2 in concert in Miami, New York, Boston, LA, Paris, Rotterdam, Glasgow, Prague, San Francisco , Rome, London, to name a few of their gigs,  over the years.)

Any fears that U2 were putting on an over-reaching and pretentious rock opera heavy on concept and low on emotion are  dismissed as soon as Bono bursts into  the singular beauty of tonight's opener The Miracle (of Joey Ramone).

Every one of the 20,000 in the audience are bopping along to the sonic splendor of U2’s punk homage with Bono singing – and the audience singing the words back to him – “I woke up at the moment when the miracle occurred: heard a song that made sense out of the world.”

The crowd are held in thrall to every “wooah” from Bono, every soaring guitar riff from The Edge, every beat from Larry begin the kit and every whoosh from Adam’s bass-lines.

The crowd also hang on Bono’s every word like he is their personal Jesus.



The songs set forth Bono’s personal criteria of spiritual longing - restless search even.

The images (of Guggi on a horse, of the Dublin bombings of 1974 ) are even more powerful when it is set against the songs. Raised by Wolves shone with a beautiful sadness. But nothing compared to the terrible beauty of Iris (Hold Me Close.)

He introduced the song by saying if you are can’t discuss the past then you are stuck in the past. “This is for you, Iris,” the boy inside the man Bono said.

In the darkness of the vast arena last night, Bono then sang:

The star

That gives us light

Has been gone a while

But it’s not an illusion

The ache

In my heart

Is so much a part of who I am

Something in your eyes

Took a thousand years to get here

It was like Bono was singing to his late mum, as much to God, for deliverance.

Everyone in Rogers Arena last night was transported to a different world as Bono sang these words. I’m sure Larry Mullen was at that exact moment thinking of his late father, who died last weekend in Dublin.

Last night in Vancouver it was a night for reflection – and dancing, as U2, lest we forget, have some cracking tunes.

As the title of the show Innocence + Experience suggests, this is not Cats. This is a show that comes with a narrative about the human condition. It is far from French existentialism that Bono was reared but if this show is about anything, it is as much about the meaning of death (of mothers, of victims of bombings, of dreams) as it is about life.

(Before the show I listened at the hotel to California (There is No End to Love), where Bono sings "I’ve seen for myself/There’s no end to grief", is a kick to the heart. It said it all. They didn't play it at the show.)

The first half of show is called Innocence.

There was be an interval, something of a first for a U2 show. Then the second half saw U2 walk down a giant walkway to the opposite end of the arena to play the second part of the show, which was called Experience. (I hope you're all paying attention at the back. Because I'll be asking questions at the end.)

360, U2’s last concert tour from 2009 through 2011, earned the band an eye-watering €653 million in ticket sales from playing stadiums globally to crowds of upwards of 80,000.

Innocence + Experience is a much more stripped-back affair, with U2 playing indoor venues to dramatically smaller crowds.

Be that as it may, for the last few days on the eve of their Innocence and Experience world tour U2 have owned Vancouver. Irish bars downtown are full of U2 fans celebrating Bono, Larry, The Edge and Adam in their midst.

On Thursday morning, the group from Ireland was on the front page of Canada's Globe & Mail newspaper under the headline, How Long Must They Sing This Song?

The truth is, thousands of people have travelled from all over the world (some even sleeping on the pavement outside Rogers Arena here in Vancouver to get the best view of the stage) to hear U2 sing their songs during a two hour show last night - and again tomorrow. They’ll get to see an incredible performance from a band that unapologetically refuse to fade from view.

The crowd gave them a standing ovation as the came off to With Or Without You.

Five minutes later, the band from the Northside of Dublin encored in Vancouver with City Of Blinding Lights, Beautiful Day, Where The Streets Have No Name and Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.

In short, the best U2 gig I’ve ever been to. See you in Dublin at Christmas, Bono.

BB King, 2015-05-15 - The New York Times, B. B. King, Defining Bluesman for Generations, Dies at 89

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/16/arts/music/b-b-king-blues-singer-dies-at-89.html?smid=tw-bna

B. B. King, Defining Bluesman for Generations, Dies at 89



Associated Press

B. B. King, whose world-weary voice and wailing guitar lifted him from the cotton fields of Mississippi to a global stage and the apex of American blues, died Thursday in Las Vegas, The Associated Press reported. He was 89.

His death was reported to The A.P. by his attorney, Brent Bryson.

Mr. King married country blues to big-city rhythms and created a sound instantly recognizable to millions: a stinging guitar with a shimmering vibrato, notes that coiled and leapt like an animal, and a voice that groaned and bent with the weight of lust, longing and lost love.

“I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions,” Mr. King said in his autobiography, “Blues All Around Me” (1996), written with David Ritz.

In performances, his singing and his solos flowed into each other as he wrung notes from the neck of his guitar, vibrating his hand as if it were wounded, his face a mask of suffering. Many of the songs he sang — like his biggest hit, “The Thrill Is Gone” (“I’ll still live on/But so lonely I’ll be”) — were poems of pain and perseverance.

The music historian Peter Guralnick once noted that Mr. King helped expand the audience for the blues through “the urbanity of his playing, the absorption of a multiplicity of influences, not simply from the blues, along with a graciousness of manner and willingness to adapt to new audiences and give them something they were able to respond to.”

B. B. stood for Blues Boy, a name he took with his first taste of fame in the 1940s. His peers were bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, whose nicknames fit their hard-bitten lives. But he was born a King, albeit in a sharecropper’s shack surrounded by dirt-poor laborers and wealthy landowners.

Mr. King went out on the road and never came back after one of his first recordings reached the top of the rhythm-and-blues charts in 1951. He began in juke joints, country dance halls and ghetto nightclubs, playing 342 one-night stands in 1956 and 200 to 300 shows a year for a half-century thereafter, rising to concert halls, casino main stages and international acclaim.

He was embraced by rock ’n’ roll fans of the 1960s and ’70s, who remained loyal as they grew older together. His playing influenced many of the most successful rock guitarists of the era, including Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.

Mr. King considered a 1968 performance at the Fillmore West, the San Francisco rock palace, to have been the moment of his commercial breakthrough, he told a public-television interviewer in 2003. A few years earlier, he recalled, an M.C. in an elegant Chicago club had introduced him thus: “O.K., folks, time to pull out your chitlins and your collard greens, your pigs’ feet and your watermelons, because here is B. B. King.” It had infuriated him.

When he saw “long-haired white people” lining up outside the Fillmore, he said, he told his road manager, “I think they booked us in the wrong place.” Then the promoter Bill Graham introduced him to the sold-out crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the chairman of the board, B. B. King.”

“Everybody stood up, and I cried,” Mr. King said. “That was the beginning of it.”

By his 80th birthday he was a millionaire many times over. He owned a mansion in Las Vegas, a closet full of embroidered tuxedoes and smoking jackets, a chain of nightclubs bearing his name (including a popular room on West 42nd Street in Manhattan) and the personal and professional satisfaction of having endured.

Through it all he remained with the great love of his life, his guitar. He told the tale a thousand times: He was playing a dance hall in Twist, Ark., in the early 1950s when two men got into a fight and knocked over a kerosene stove. Mr. King fled the blaze — and then remembered his $30 guitar. He ran into the burning building to rescue it.

He learned thereafter that the fight had been about a woman named Lucille. For the rest of his life, Mr. King addressed his guitars — big Gibsons, curved like a woman’s hips — as Lucille.

He married twice, unsuccessfully, and was legally single from 1966 onward; by his own account he fathered 15 children with 15 women. But a Lucille was always at his side.

Riley B. King (the middle initial apparently did not stand for anything) was born on Sept. 16, 1925, to Albert and Nora Ella King, both sharecroppers, in Berclair, a Mississippi hamlet outside the small town of Itta Bena. His memories of the Depression included the sound of sanctified gospel music, the scratch of 78-r.p.m. blues records, the sweat of dawn-to-dusk work and the sight of a black man lynched by a white mob.

By early 1940 Mr. King’s mother was dead and his father was gone. He was 14 and on his own, “sharecropping an acre of cotton, living on a borrowed allowance of $2.50 a month,” wrote Dick Waterman, a blues scholar. “When the crop was harvested, Riley ended his first year of independence owing his landlord $7.54.”

In November 1941 came a revelation: “King Biscuit Time” went on the air, broadcasting on KFFA, a radio station in Helena, Ark. It was the first radio show to feature the Mississippi Delta blues, and young Riley King heard it on his lunch break at the plantation. A largely self-taught guitarist, he now knew what he wanted to be when he grew up: a musician on the air.

The King Biscuit show featured Rice Miller, a primeval bluesman and one of two performers who worked under the name Sonny Boy Williamson. After serving in the Army and marrying his first wife, Martha Denton, Mr. King, then 22, went to seek him out in Memphis, looking for work. Memphis and its musical hub, Beale Street, lay 130 miles north of his birthplace, and it looked like a world capital to him.

Mr. Miller had two performances booked that night, one in Memphis and one in Mississippi. He handed the lower-paying nightclub job to Mr. King. It paid $12.50.

Mr. King was making about $5 a day on the plantation. He never returned to his tractor.

He was a hit, and quickly became a popular disc jockey playing the blues on a Memphis radio station, WDIA. “Before Memphis,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I never even owned a record player. Now I was sitting in a room with a thousand records and the ability to play them whenever I wanted. I was the kid in the candy store, able to eat it all. I gorged myself.”

Memphis had heard five decades of the blues: country sounds from the Delta, barrelhouse boogie-woogie, jumps and shuffles and gospel shouts. He made it all his own. From records he absorbed the big-band sounds of Count Basie, the rollicking jump blues of Louis Jordan, the electric-guitar styles of the jazzman Charlie Christian and the bluesman T-Bone Walker.

On the air in Memphis, Mr. King was nicknamed the Beale Street Blues Boy. That became Blues Boy, which became B. B. In December 1951, two years after arriving in Memphis, Mr. King released a single, “Three O’Clock Blues,” which reached No. 1 on the rhythm-and-blues charts and stayed there for 15 weeks.

He began a tour of the biggest stages a bluesman could play: the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the Howard Theater in Washington, the Royal Theater in Baltimore. By the time his wife divorced him after eight years, he was playing 275 one-night stands a year on the so-called chitlin’ circuit.

There were hard times when the blues fell out of fashion with young black audiences in the early 1960s. Mr. King never forgot being booed at the Royal by teenagers who cheered the sweeter sounds of Sam Cooke.

“They didn’t know about the blues,” he said 40 years after the fact. “They had been taught that the blues was the bottom of the totem pole, done by slaves, and they didn’t want to think along those lines.”

Mr. King’s second marriage, to Sue Hall, also lasted eight years, ending in divorce in 1966. He responded in 1969 with his best-known recording, “The Thrill Is Gone,” a minor-key blues about having loved and lost. It was co-written and originally recorded in 1951 by another blues singer, Roy Hawkins, but Mr. King made it his own.

The success of “The Thrill Is Gone” coincided with a surge in the popularity of the blues with a young white audience. Mr. King began playing folk festivals and college auditoriums, rock shows and resort clubs, and appearing on “The Tonight Show.”

Though he never had another hit that big, he had more than four decades of the road before him. He eventually played the world — Russia and China as well as Europe and Japan. His schedule around his 81st birthday, in September 2006, included nine cities over two weeks in Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Luxembourg. Despite health problems, he maintained a busy touring schedule until 2014.

In addition to winning more than a dozen Grammy Awards (including a lifetime achievement award), having a star on Hollywood Boulevard and being inducted in both the Rock and Roll and Blues Halls of Fame, Mr. King was among the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995 and was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006, awards rarely associated with the blues. In 1999, in a public conversation with William Ferris, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mr. King recounted how he came to sing the blues.

“Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon,” he said. “I’d go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I’d sing and play.

“I’d have me a hat or box or something in front of me. People that would request a gospel song would always be very polite to me, and they’d say: ‘Son, you’re mighty good. Keep it up. You’re going to be great one day.’ But they never put anything in the hat.

“But people that would ask me to sing a blues song would always tip me and maybe give me a beer. They always would do something of that kind. Sometimes I’d make 50 or 60 dollars one Saturday afternoon. Now you know why I’m a blues singer.”

Monday, May 11, 2015

U2, 2015-05-11 - COS, A good samaritan repaired U2’s Joshua Tree

http://consequenceofsound.net/2015/05/a-good-samaritan-repaired-u2s-joshua-tree/

A good samaritan repaired U2’s Joshua Tree

on May 11, 2015, 4:55pm

U2's Joshua Tree repaired fixed

Earlier this year, a U2 fan discovered that someone had vandalized a limb of the famed Joshua Tree. Though it’s still unclear who was behind the hack job, one kind samaritan took it upon himself to head out to the Mojave Desert and perform “surgery” on the tree’s injured “arm.”

The man — who goes by the name George G. — spent the better part of the evening of May 3rd in the dark, guided through his “operation” by just a dim flashlight. Using adhesive and a couple of well-hidden anchor screws, he was able to piece the limb back together again. By the end of his repairs, U2’s Joshua Tree looked good as new. As proof of his completed mission, George G. provided a video of the whole procedure, which you can watch below.



Before:

Joshua Tree - cut, vandalized

After:

Joshua-Tree-Repaired