Digest: Green Day Announce Live Album Details; Rihanna Reveals Her Favorite Things

Green Day Announce Live Album Details
Earlier this week, Green Day teased fans with a trailer for their new live CD/DVD set Awesome As Fuck. Now they have released details for the discs, due out March 22nd. The CD will include selections from every stage of the band's career, including the title track of Cigarettes and Valentines, an album the group abandoned before moving on to their blockbuster hit American Idiot. The DVD will feature some of the same songs along with hits such as "Blvd. of Broken Dreams" and "Jesus of Suburbia." [Press Release]

Rihanna Talks About Her Favorite Things
According to a questionnaire in the new issue of Vanity Fair, Rihanna says she is inspired by Navy SEALs, her collection of "naughty toys" and her vintage Bob Marley T-shirt. The singer also mentions that she is a huge fan of Jay-Z and Paramore, vodka and Red Bull, and Bajan seasoning, which she says can make "anything taste good." [Vanity Fair]

Tom Waits Contributes Poetry to Charity
Tom Waits has posted a few pages of a chapbook of poetry titled Seeds on Hard Ground. Proceeds from the chapbook will go to several charities supporting homeless people in California. The fragment Waits shared is notable for including a few surprising words, such as "blooper," "blotch" and "boner." [LA Weekly]

Broadcast Singer Seriously Ill
Trish Keenan, singer of the British electronic pop duo Broadcast, has been hospitalized for a severe case of pneumonia. Warp Records, the band's label, has not released more specific information regarding Keenan's illness, but a woman claiming to be her sister left a post on the Broadcast Facebook page saying that the singer contracted the H1N1 flu and is currently "fighting for her life." [Pitchfork]

MORE: Kelly Clarkson's Album 'May' Come Out in March; Wyclef Jean Considers Fugees Reunion

• 
  MUSIC Exclusive Live Chat With Linkin Park and Incubus
• 
  MOVIES & TV Peter Travers: 'The Avengers' Has it All
• 
  POLITICS Matt Taibbi: Jon Corzine Is the Original Zimmerman
• 
  VIDEOS Exclusive Premiere: Tenacious D's 'Tinnitus'

Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

More Song Stories entries »

Twitter