The Cure's Robert Smith Slams Record Label, iTunes For EP Price

The Cure's Robert Smith has lashed out at both iTunes UK and his record label after the band's new remix EP Hypnagogic States hit the digital music service with an inflated price tag. "5 tracks for £7.99? For fucks sake!" rants Smith in an open letter to his label before complaining that the overpriced package is also missing a bonus remix of new song "The Only One." "Who the fuck is going to pay this and not feel ripped off?" Smith asks. The tracks on Hypnagogic States will appear in non-remixed form on the band's next album 4:13 Dream. Check out the album's track list and cover art, plus more from Smith's angry letter to his label, over at the Cure's site.

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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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