Sound Rug

In the 80’s, Whitney Houston may have been the best singer around until crack that all changed. Now, even talking seems a bit of a struggle for her, but perhaps her daughter has inherited her mother’s gift.

Here’s 17-year-old, Bobbi Kristina Brown (daughter of Whitney and Bobby Brown) doing an a cappella version of Adele’s “Someone Like You”.

See for yourself: http://twitvid.com/RVSKI

Granitz

Adele has already sold 350,000 copies of her latest album, ’21,’ in just her first week in stores. The 22-yr-old singer’s album, ‘21′, which debuted at No. 1 on Billboard, has become the biggest-selling album of 2011.

No doubt Adele has an amazing voice with soul and power behind it, but there’s something so right about John Legend’s stripped down version. See if you agree.

Listen to John Legend, ‘Rolling in the Deep’ (Adele Cover)

image source: Granitz

John Legend - Rolling in the Deep (Adele Cover) by johnlegend

The Gorillaz leader, Damon Albarn made an entire album, The Fall, in a 32 day span while on their North American tour using the iPad and has made it available to you here. You can hear their dedicated songs as they made their way through the cities on the tour. Houston’s ode is aptly titled “The Parish of Space Dust” complete with samples from one of our country radio stations 97.1 FM. There are also songs about other Texas towns, Dallas and Amarillo.

All tracks written and performed by Gorillaz using the iPad and additional instruments: Korg Vocoder, Ukelele, Microkorg, Omnichord, Moog Voyager, Melodica, Guitar, Piano, Korg Monotron. Except track 13 written and performed by Gorillaz and Bobby Womack. Recorded between Montreal and Vancouver over 32 days on the Gorillaz North American Tour 2010.

Just in case you want to make your own album in 32 days on an iPad, here are the apps they used: Speak It! / SoundyThingie / Mugician / Solo Synth / Synth / Funk Box / Gliss / AmpliTube / Xenon / iElectribe / BS-16i / M3000 HD / Cleartune / iOrgel HD / Olsynth / StudioMiniXI / BassLine / Harmonizer / Dub Siren Pro / Moog Filatro.

The self-proclaimed “Ivory Queen of Soul” was found dead, by her daughter, this past Sunday. Her manager, Mike Gardner, told CNN that she was found dead at her Pasadena home on Sunday afternoon, and apparently died in her sleep. The singer suffered a grand mal seizure a month ago. Family friends disclosed to TMZ that Tina has suffered other seizures, but the grand mal shook her up badly. We’re told she had broken two ribs after falling during that seizure. Also that Teena was so scared of having another grand mal seizure she would have someone sleep next to her at night. Teena had returned to bed early afternoon, after getting up at 11:30am. When her daughter checked on her at 1 pm, she was fine, but at 3 pm her daughter found her unresponsive. The Coroner has said signs point to death from natural causes. But “natural causes” could be death from a seizure.

Born Mary Christine Brockert, Teena Marie grew up in a predominately black area of Los Angeles. Teena began singing at the age of eight and was signed by Motown just after graduating from high school in 1976. Her music was unreleased until she met up with her mentor and musical collaborator, Rick James. Motown then released “Lovergirl”, “Fire and Desire” and “Lover”. Rick James went on to produce her 1979 debut album, Wild and Peaceful. Her first hit was a duet with Rick James called “I’m a Sucker for Your Love”.

Motown apparently thought black audiences might not accept that the R&B singer was white, so the album cover was publish without a photo of Teena Maria. After much success from her first album, Teena was won a huge following in the black community and was dubbed the “Ivory Queen of Soul”.

Divorce, it’s a sad theme, because the kids are the ones that get hurt and grow up a little bit broken. We all are who we are; we all have our stories, but no one escapes the pain of a divorce and I find that severed relationships are the saddest stories. Remember Tracey Thorn from Everything But The Girl? Well, on her new album Love And Its Opposite she asks “who’s next?, who’s fled, who’s been caught out in somebodies bed?” - in “Oh, The Divorces!”. Download the album here; a bittersweet little holiday gift for you, from Tracey. Also included is a new cover version of Sufjan Steven’s seasons classic, ‘Sister Winter’.

Enjoy.

img via AMS 

Already, I sing this song, at least once a day, and have been doing so, precisely, for the past 15 years - apparently Weezer recorded this song five years ago, but it showed up today on the Weezer message boards.

Rivers tells American Songwriter, that recording this song was no joke:

“No. I loved that song. It was actually Rick Rubin’s suggestion. We both loved that song and we both thought it would be great for Weezer, and for my voice, and it’d be great to do like a rock version of it with more of an alternative aesthetic. And you know, just the way I would sing it versus in the way Toni Braxton would sing it. And I love the way it came out, and I think probably the rest of the band really does not like it, and that’s probably why it didn’t make our fifth record, in 2005 when we were recording it.”

Unbreak My Heart (Tony Braxton)

The official “Barbra Streisand” single is out 10/12.

Finally a music video that encompasses everything a music video should; sparkles, water, a fat man, a crow, girls, girls, girls, 70’s filter, a bit of science and a really good song. The video is actually a trailer for a film, called Bombay, directed by Nicolás Méndez. This is El Guincho’s, aka Pablo Díaz-Reixa, second album, “Pop Negro” which he mixed with Jon Gass (Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston), released by Young Turks / XL Recordings (The xx).  El Gincho grew up on the Canary Isles, the Spanish-owned archipelago off the coast of Northwestern Africa; starved for 80’s pop culture and later found a talent for music while in Paris and Barcelona. He describes his music as a kind of “space-age exotica”.

Fiona Apple’s drummer and co-producer Charley Drayton, has a spring 2011 release date on a new album by Fiona, according to an article on Charley Drayton in Modern Drummer magazine. Drayton has toured with Fiona since 2006, is co-producer on album, for which he also played on and mixed.

Here’s a look at the future… using touchscreen technology. What I do like is thinness of the products; what I don’t like is that we’ll still be plagued with “chill” music in the future. How shall we advance?

You’ve got to dig MTV’s power flexing abilities. Kanye was forever banned from the VMAs last year for hijacking Taylor Swift’s mic during her acceptance speech for best female video. This year Kanye landed the topspot in the closing of the show for his apology song, where he seemingly calls himself a douchebag for “always finding something wrong, you’ve been putting up with my sh*t way too long” and suggests that the cure to his mic hijacking problem is to “Runaway” from him as fast as you can. It really is a great song. The dude is a hitmaker.