Credit: Blue Note Records

As fans of Norah Jones’ “Little Broken Hearts” album already know, the song “Miriam,” is the most chilling she has ever recorded. The sweet melody and seemingly benign, casual delivery belie the lyrics about a murder.

The crime of passion, by a jealous lover, is deliberately laid out, though we never know for sure the method. However, the video solves that mystery. In a clip that is as simple and plain and spine-tingling as the song, the camera focuses on Jones, calm and dressed pretty as can be, sitting in a row boat singing the song. She’s left the evidence where it won’t be found for a long time. We'll embed when we can, but for now, you can watch the Spin exclusive here.

The Phil Andelman-directed clip is the perfect visual marriage to the song. The camera moves slowly and snake-like, producing a video that provides the same cold-blooded, dead-eyed feel that song produces. There have been some other great rowboat murders, the one in the brilliant "A Place In the Sun" comes to mind, but none executed with such sang-froid.

As we previously wrote, "Little Broken Hearts" is on our short list for potential Grammy contenders for  album of the year.


 

Green Day

So three new albums from Green Day aren’t quite enough for you? Before the staggered releases of “Uno,” “Dos,” and “Tre” start Sept. 25,  Green Day will re-release its entire studio catalog with “The Studio Albums 1990-2009,” a box set available exclusively through Best Buy on Sept. 4.

The collection is housed in a clamshell box with each album in an individual paper sleeve with the original artwork. The set does not include any previously unreleased material. The price was not released.

Covering the group’s indie beginning on  Lookout! through their most recent studio album on Reprise/Warner Bros., the set includes “1,039/Smoothed Out Slappy Hours” (1990), “Kerplunk” (1992), “Dookie” (1994), “Insomniac” (1995), “Nimrod” (1997), “Warning” (2000), “American Idiot” (2004) and “21st Century Breakdown” (2009).

 

Credit: Arista Nashville

There’s a storm brewing and it’s making a bee-line right for Carrie Underwood’s house in the video for “Blown Away,” the dramatic title cut from her current album.

In the atmospheric clip, the pressure between Underwood and her alcoholic daddy builds as the barometric pressure outside drops. There’s a twister coming and pops is too snockered to get himself down into the storm cellar, where there’s a nice mattress and Underwood is just fine until it all blows over.  Also, note that her hair blows beautifully in the wind, never obscuring her beauty or getting caught on her lip gloss, like what happens to mere mortals.

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This is one hangover that her father won’t be able to sleep off as the storm blows away all the of the bad memories and past that have seeped into those Oklahoma walls.

When Underwood emerges, she’s greeted by nothing less than a rainbow and a yellow brick road as she, hopefully, goes on to find her pot of gold....and if not that, her Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow.

 Perry Farrell

Credit: AP Photo/Chris Pizzello

Perry Farrell is nothing if not ambitious. The Jane’s Addiction frontman’s mission for Lollapalooza, which he co-created in 1991, is nothing less than “trying to get the greatest musicians on the earth into Chicago” for the three-day music festival, which kicks off this Friday, Aug. 3 at Grant Park.

This year’s lineup is certainly a colorful attempt at that feat with headliners including Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Black Keys, Black Sabbath, and Jack White.

They are joined by nearly 130 other acts who span the musical spectrum. Farrell started the event as a traveling festival 21 years ago. After two brief hiatuses, it returned as a stationary festival in Chicago in 2005 and has grown into one of the premier summer music events.  Over the years, as the headliners have fallen into place, he says, “my ambition is a little different these days...What I’m trying to do is break the greatest young artists in the world. I cast that net pretty far out there.”

As Lollapalooza has  expanded to after-parties throughout Chicago, that has given Farrell greater leeway “to let people in who may have promise that aren’t great [yet] to people who have really developed their craft.”

He and his partners, booking agency William Morris Endeavor and concert presenter C3, have weekly conference calls to discuss potential performers. “I get to open up [WME’s]  portfolio and look them over, but we are absolutely not limited to them,” Farrell says, adding that the debates over whom to book for Lollapalooza “can get very heated at times and it can really spin your brain.”

As a musician, the rise in the number of multi-act festivals has been great for artists who can “can get paid good money to get in front of a good audience 10-20 times bigger than you’d normally play to,” Farrell says, but when he puts on his festival organizer hat, it’s a different story. “The other festivals are looking to outbid you, so it drives up the cost of the artist, so you have to be really careful because now you’re talking about a dozen or more groups that are operating on inflated fees,” he says. “It’s becoming a lot like pro sports.”

Finding the right talent is just one part of the equation to pulling off a successful event. Farrell worries as much about what happens off stage as on: “You want to make the accommodations for the patrons great and have their experience be great,” he says. In fact, he sees attending a festival las a vital part of growing up for kids now, a rite of passage just like getting their driver’s license. And he wants Lollapalooza to be the festival that every kid remembers as his or her first.

For the full Lollapalooza line up, go here.

The Avett Brothers’ new album, “The Carpenter,” has song titles sure to intrigue fans. The North Carolina group released the track listing for the Sept. 11, Rick Rubin-produced album, as well as the cover artwork. 

With songs like “Paul Newman Vs. the Demons”  and “Down With The Shine, “ it sounds like they have some more interesting stories to tell. The band has already revealed a few songs from their sixth studio album, including first single, "Live And Die," embedded below.

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Nicki Minaj is certainly doing her part for tourism for her native Trinidad and Tobago.  In her video for “Pound the Alarm,” it’s carnival 24 hours a day  in Port of Spain as Minaj and a bevy of beauties in feathered headdress and bejeweled bikinis  fill the streets.

When the scenery isn’t of the local lovelies and their various body parts, it’s on Trinidad’s natural beauty, including the miles of beaches.

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John Mayer

John Mayer goes through his own westward expansion on the video for “Queen of California.” The  low-key video matches the laidback feel of the song, as Mayer strolls casually through various landscapes —New York City’s hustle and bustle, a movie set, the snow-crested Rockies—as he wends his way to a final beautiful scene (that still looks decidedly east coast, given the trees) and reunites with his band.

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It was in 2003 that teenage British lass Joss Stone released “The Soul Sessions,” a collection of primarily obscure ’60 and ‘70s R&B covers delivered with an almost preternatural maturity and vocal prowess.

Nine years later, Stone is all grown up and it shows on “The Soul Sessions Volume 2,” out July 31 on Stone’d/S Curve Recordings.

Often such sequels are bad ideas and feel like a calculated way to try to recapture the unplanned magic that made the first effort soar. However, this time Stone has done the near impossible: she has caught lightning in a bottle twice.

Her remarkably lush, throaty vocals seems even stronger, but more importantly, the 25-year-old Stone has sufficient living and heartache under her belt to bring the needed bite to songs like The Honey Cone’s “While You’re Out Looking For Sugar.” And there’s certainly no way a 16-year old should have been singing a cover of Sylvia’s breathy “Pillow Talk.”

Recorded primarily in Nashville and produced by S-Curve chief Steve Greenberg, who helmed “Soul Sessions” with Betty Wright,  “SS2” features such soul stalwarts as Ernie Isley, Delbert McClinton and Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section pianist/keyboardist Clayton Ivey. They ground Stone in a sense of time and place and authenticity in a way that more modern players likely could not (although a special nod has to go to Raymond Angry, best known for his work with Christina Aguilera and the Roots, whose B3 work here drenches the album in his own delectable brand of soul honey). It’s possible to feel transported back to another era as she sears through tunes like Eddie Floyd’s “I Don’t Wanna Be With Nobody But You.”

Just as she included The White Stripes’ “Fell In Love With A Boy”  on “Soul Sessions,” Stone expands the definition of soul here to include a striking cover of The Broken Bells’ “The High Road.” While she remains faithful to most of the soul originals, she upends “The High Road,” infusing it with a sultriness totally non-existent in the Broken Bells’ version, and discarding some of the song’s mournfulness. 

Stone proves adept on all numbers here, but she’s at her best when she’s belting with a purpose. A revamp of soul and country classic “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye,” with just acoustic guitar and strings, shows off her softer side, but it’s the sassy, take-no-prisoners Stone that will keep listeners interested, such as on the spritely, vengeful “First Taste Of Hurt” (one of four extra songs on the expanded deluxe version) or the funked out “Stoned Out Of My Mind.”

As much depth as she’s able to infuse these songs with now, it would be incredible to have Stone record a new edition of “The Soul Sessions” every decade. In about 20 years, when life has kicked her around a bit more as it does all of us, Stone should really be able to give them some heft.  In the meantime, “The Soul Sessions Vol. 2” will have to suffice and it does so masterfully.

Matchbox Twenty in "She's So Mean"

Warning: Several vinyl albums were harmed in the making of this video.

“She’s So Mean,” Matchbox Twenty’s video for the  first single from its first album of all-new material in 10 years, should be retitled "She's So Hot." As the lyrics state, “You want her, but she’s so mean,” as they detail a girl who wreaks havoc but you just can’t let her go. “Mean” = “Hot.” Trust me, no guy in the world would put up with this femme fatale’s antics if she weren’t a 10. Some guys like the cray-cray, but only when it comes wrapped in a very pretty package.

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Green Day continues to give fans peeks into “¡Uno!,” “¡Dos!,” and “¡Tre!”, the three albums coming out over a four-month period starting next month.

Today, we get a live video of “Let Yourself Go,” filmed Nov. 17 at a club in Austin, Texas.  The Alternative Press exclusive is a little slice of punk pop that is a straight-down-the-middle fastball from the trio: it’s propulsive, snarly, and energetic. Plus, Billie Joe Armstrong, Tre Cool and Mike Dirnt are appropriately scruffy, looking like they’re running on no sleep and caffeine for days on end in the black and white clip.  The live version stretches out a bit after a great, anthemic start. We’re hoping the album version is a tightly-wound, 2:30 version.

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