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This week’s album charts are topped by Canadian crooner Michael Bublé, who rode Friday appearance on Oprah that was keenly titled to the release of his new album, Crazy Love, to the No. 1 spot. Bublé’s album sold 132,000 copies despite only being available for three days of the sales week, which we can probably attribute to the power of Harpo Productions’ founder. But further down the chart, another act showed that Oprah’s audience is fairly, shall we say, faithful to the music recommendations she gives! More »
Posts Tagged ‘Journey’
Boyz II Men Begin Collective Campaign To Take Over Arnel Pineda’s Spot In Journey
Mon Sep 28 2009 by Maura
The harmonizers in Boyz II Men have a new all-covers album, Love, due out just in time for the holiday season, and the first single from it leaked over the weekend: It’s a super-syrupy take on “Open Arms,” the lighter-worthy ballad from arena-rockers Journey. You may notice that it sounds kind of like an American Idol audition, what with its melismas and straining and all, and there’s a good reason why: It was produced by former Journey member Randy “Dawg” Jackson, who somehow managed to modernize the circa-1982 sound of the original track, yet still make this new take on it sound as dated as a February 1998 Reader’s Digest in a dentist’s waiting room. Ah, the Idol magic is always working! Clip after the jump. More »
The “American Idol” Top 10 Jump On The Midnight Train Going Anywhere
Fri Jun 26 2009 by Maura
Matt Giraud’s background as a dueling pianist will apparently be put to use on this summer’s American Idol tour, where a version of “Don’t Stop Believin’” featuring the chapeau-sporting singer and Scott MacIntyre on piano will serve as the show’s finale. A clip of the version played at yesterday’s American Idol press preview is above. Was Michael Sarver that tic-y during the season? Why do I not remember that? Wouldn’t it have at least resulted in him sticking around an extra week or two? [YouTube via MJ] More »
Somehow, I Don’t Really Mind The Ubiquity Of “Don’t Stop Believing” All That Much
Wed May 20 2009 by Maura
After American Idol last night, Fox debuted its glee-club dramedy Glee, which had a lot of fantastic, if wince-inducing, “high school as metaphor for how depressing adult life can be” moments and the incredible comic timing of Jane Lynch. And as its big finish–which was designed to make us audience-members feel that the ragtag group of nerds, geeks, and that one jockish dude would all make it out of high school thanks to the power of song–it had a big old performance of Journey’s 28-year-old lighter-raiser “Don’t Stop Believing.” Our pal Mark Graham at New York’s Vulture apparently had the last Steve Perry-shaped straw at that point, and he was driven to call for a moratorium on the song in his recap of the show: More »
New Jersey Gets Bamboozled By Nostalgia
Mon May 4 2009 by Maura
Saturday’s “surprise guest” at the two-day parking-lot festival known as the Bamboozle was introduced with the three words “Don’t,” “Stop,” and “Believin’,” and from my vantage point in the crowd–which rendered the men muscling through four of Journey’s hits onstage into something resembling very animated Berzerk robots–I thought that I was actually watching the San Francisco band collect a big, yet sorta-strange, paycheck. As it turned out, the band that I was singing along with was actually a really, really convincing tribute band. (Of course, some smart-asses out there will assert that having Arnel Pineda on vocals makes the currently touring incarnation of Journey a cover band of sorts, but we’ll leave that alone for now.) But the surprise and its “gotcha!” aftershock were both appropriate for a festival that, despite being clad in “FUCK SWINE FLU” t-shirts as far as the eye could see, spent a fair chunk of time looking back. More »
Amazon’s MP3 Pricing Plan: Looks Like They Went The “Pick Songs Out Of A Hat” Route
Wed Apr 8 2009 by Dan Gibson
Amazon has entered the world of charging $1.29 for certain songs, following the lead taken by iTunes yesterday and rendering somewhat irrelevant the snarky remarks of Diggsters. By and large, iTunes’ pricing scheme has resulted in popular songs having their prices jacked up; in contrast, if there’s some logic to which songs saw a hike on Amazon, I’m certainly not seeing it.
No. 75: Journey Welcomes The Web 2.0 Era (And A New Singer) With Open Arms
Tue Dec 9 2008 by Maura
In the wake of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” being resurrected by a pop-culture phenomenon for the 58th time last year, the band went hunting for a new lead singer—and they found one on YouTube, of all places. Arnel Pineda’s rise to becoming a sort of Ripper Owens for the user-generated content era began when some friends uploaded his performances to the video-sharing site; as lore has it, the Manila-based singer received an e-mail from Journey guitarist Neal Schon inviting him to audition, but dismissed it as a probable hoax. Eventually, Schon convinced Pineda that he—and his request—were the real deal, and the online matchmaking bore full fruit in February, when the new Journey made its live debut in Chile.
Time-Life Music Rocks Your Heart
Wed Nov 12 2008 by Michaelangelo Matos
Even though I can’t recall a world without them, I’ve never liked Journey. As a kid, I found them vaguely annoying, and as I grew into a rock fan, I was more than happy to go along with the critical line that fingered them as all that sucked in rock. That’s eroded over time–Journey simply isn’t worth getting worked up over, and besides, when Chuck Eddy said back in the early ’90s that Journey were far more effective than any critic of the time wanted to admit, I knew exactly what he meant. I look back at the music of my childhood with more fondness than it sometimes warrants, but the recent “revival” of “Don’t Stop Believin’”–from The Sopranos to its inclusion in The Pitchfork 500–still puzzles me some, if a little bit less now that I’ve seen the infomercial for Time Life’s The Ultimate Rock Ballads Collection.
