Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
After her 20-year relationship ended, the US songwriter refused to believe that she would emerge stronger. Yet against the odds, she experienced a creative and feminist rebirth
In 2018, as her marriage fell apart, Laura Veirs cried and biked all over Portland. “I called myself the crying cyclist,” she says. It was a new, impetuous hobby taken up after years of putting her desires on hold. When some friends asked her to join them on a 100-mile ride, she immediately kitted up and began training: 50 miles, 60 miles, weeping down her Spandex. “That got me through the divorce, honestly,” she says. Another friend wondered whether the optical act of navigation mimicked eye-movement therapy, which is thought to weaken the effect of trauma. “I was surprised by how much it helped get the grieving out.”
The theory – balancing intellect and intuition – hit Veirs in her sweet spot. She is the daughter of academics; a former geology student and a career songwriter beloved for her moving, naturalistic vocabulary. Her voice has a sturdy, earnest clarity: on the superb 2016 collaborative album case/lang/veirs, her freshness contrasted the fiery Neko Case and earthy kd lang.
John Prine, the US folk and country singer beloved of Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson and more, has died aged 73 due to complications from Covid-19.
Prine was hospitalised on 26 March, and was in intensive care for 13 days before dying on Tuesday, at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee. Prine’s family confirmed his death to several US media outlets including The New York Times, Rolling Stone and Variety.
It was a blueprint for Live Aid and every mega-festival since. We survey a new archive box set – in full – to uncover the real story of these ‘three days of peace and music’
A few weeks back, my Twitter feed was suddenly clogged with misty-eyed reminiscences of Live Aid. It is now generally regarded as a white saviour festival of mostly dreadful music. Still, there’s much nostalgic love for Tony Hadley’s leather trench coat, and Queen’s alarming “no time for losers” philosophy. I lived through it; I remembered how a bunch of craven, ageing rock stars fell over themselves to reboot their careers. OK, I was 21, and cynical, but I was there for it, watching it all unfold on TV. I understand it.Woodstock – which celebrates its 50th anniversary this weekend – was a primitive blueprint for Live Aid, and every mega-festival since. Its cultural weight has risen and fallen over the decades – depending on who you talk to, it was either the pinnacle of 1960s counterculture or the rain-sodden end of a dream. I was four years old. The soundtrack album would be in friends’ houses in the 70s, and the movie seemed to be on TV every year, so I’m part of a generation that thinks it knows Woodstock without having been there. But the movie is incomplete and out of sequence – some of the story is as fictionalised as Bohemian Rhapsody.
Out this month is a 50th anniversary archive box set – all 38 CDs of it – which presents the festival in something approximating real time. Folk-blues singer Richie Havens, who opened the event while almost every other act was stuck in traffic, would later claim he “played for nearly three hours … I sang every song I knew!” We now know he only played for 45 minutes. This is an audio vérité documentary, right down to the on-stage announcements: “Eric Klinnenberg, please call home … Dennis Dache, please call your wife … Karen from Poughkeepsie, please meet Harold at the stand with the blood pills …” I listened to all 38 discs in sequence, over three days.
Donald Trump fired back Monday at Taylor Swift for weighing in on Tennessee's hotly contested U.S. Senate race, saying the country-pop crossover star 'doesn't know anything' about the Republican she attacked on Sunday. The suddenly sassy president didn't know about Swift's unprecedented dip into politics, but he told DailyMail.com outside the White House that he found her music a bit less listenable because she's opposing Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican who he's endorsed.
But until now, the star hasn't said much about politics. That changed Sunday night, when Swift posted a lengthy Instagram message about her hometown Tennessee Senate race, denouncing Republican incumbent Marsha Blackburn.
But until now, the star hasn't said much about politics. That changed Sunday night, when Swift posted a lengthy Instagram message about her hometown Tennessee Senate race, denouncing Republican incumbent Marsha Blackburn.
Democratic Texas Senate candidate Beto O'Rouke rallied thousands with Willie Nelson on Saturday night, offering an openly liberal vision for the country's largest conservative state and vowing that his campaign that has shunned outside political support can topple Republican Ted Cruz in November. Taking an open-air stage in Texas' progressive-minded capital city, O'Rourke said he wanted to appeal to voters from both parties and independents but called for universal health care and gay rights, warned of the ills of climate change and switched to his fluent Spanish to denounce President Donald Trump's calls to wall off the U.S.-Mexico border.
AUSTIN, Texas - The Latest on Texas Democratic Senate candidate Beto O'Rourke's concert with Willie Nelson : Texas Democratic Senate candidate Beto O'Rouke is rallying with Willie Nelson, telling thousands of supporters, "The people of the future, our kids and our grandkids, are depending on what we do at this moment." O'Rouke, a onetime punk rocker facing Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in November, took the stage Saturday night in Austin to cheers from many wearing T-shirts or waving signs bearing his name.
In this Sept. 21, 2018, file photo, Democratic U.S. Representative Beto O'Rourke takes part in in a debate for the Texas U.S. Senate with Republican U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, in Dallas.
Country musician and longtime progressive activist Willie Nelson has announced plans to perform at a rally for Rep. Beto O'Rourke , who is running to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz . Country music icon Willie Nelson's decades of progressive political activism appeared to have gone unnoticed by many of his right-wing fans, with outrage erupting this week over the musician's plans to perform at a rally for Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate Beto O'Rourke.
Taylor Swift has been praised as a "class act" after helping TV co-host Meghan McCain arrange a concert meet-and-greet for a young woman battling cancer. Meghan, the daughter of ailing U.S. Senator John McCain, reached out to the pop superstar via Twitter earlier this month and highlighted a social media campaign launched for Lexi Caviston, who has been diagnosed with the same kind of brain cancer the 33-year-old's politician dad is battling, to help the 21-year-old meet her pop idol during the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania stop on her Reputation World Tour on Saturday.
Alexis Flores-Betancourt was 5 when her family loaded everything they owned onto a truck and trundled across country from California, where she was born, to Texas, one of several movesa Alexis Flores-Betancourt was 5 when her family loaded everything they owned onto a truck and trundled across country from California, where she was born, to Texas, one of several moves her parents made in search of a brighter future. That was in 2002, and in the years that followed, she recalls, life in the Lone Star State wasn't the easiest.
Hundreds of people holding purple placards with messages including "This is what 'Never Again' looks like," gathered outside the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in lower Manhattan Thursday evening to protest President Donald Trump's "zero-tolerance" immigration policy. The protest - organized by T'ruah and co-sponsored by groups including J Street NYC and Bend the Arc Jewish Action - comes one day after Trump buckled to pressure and signed an executive order reversing his administration's actions to separate immigrant families.
Last December, Democrat Doug Jones won a Senate race in Alabama by defeating a horribly flawed Republican candidate Roy Moore. For the first time, it appeared that the Democrats had a plausible path to winning control of the U.S. Senate in 2018.
Most states are blue states or purple states, and the only way to turn a purple state red is the old-fashioned way: by driving America First Republicans and independents to the polls, and outnumbering the tens of millions of anti-American voters throughout the country. President Trump has kept most of his promises , and our nation needs lawmakers who will fulfill the promises they make as candidates.
'If this was 148 years ago I'd have been more like Harriet or Nat': Kanye West sparks fury by comparing himself to Underground Railroad hero Harriet Tubman, hours after calling slavery 'a choice' during explosive interview 'I made it all up as I went along': Trump's former doctor claims the president DICTATED the glowing letter, released in 2015, that said he would be the 'healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency' 'Lawyers don't write this way': Mueller's former assistant says grammatical errors prove the leaked 44 questions Special Counsel wants to ask actually came from TRUMP 'The Department of Justice is not going to be extorted,' says Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, as Republicans prepare impeachment move Netflix producer claims Harvey Weinstein raped her at least NINE times in abuse lasting years - and says the disgraced mogul threatened her to stay silent as ... (more)