News Ticker: Beck, Shyne, Green Day, Robyn

Beck's Record Club has been slowly unveiling its covers of INXS' 1987 album Kick. To find out how Liars, St. Vincent and Os Mutantes' Sergio Dias helped him reinterpret the hit "New Sensation," watch the clip on his official site.

Shyne is scheduled to drop his first post-prison track today. MTV News reports "Messiah" is a EZ Elpee-produced song where Def Jam's newest artist rhymes, "Snitches take a nap with the fishes and the rats/ Buried in the dirt where the witnesses is at."

Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong stopped by HBO's Real Time With Bill Maher to talk the band's evolving sound, American Idiot on Broadway and eyeliner. Watch his segment on YouTube.

Robyn is scheduled to release three news tracks — "Dance Hall Queen," "Fembot" and "None of Dem" via Amazon on April 13th.

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  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.”

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