Chris Willman-Senior: Last News

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Glen Lockett, better known professionally as Spot, a producer and engineer of some of the most crucial crucial punk and post-punk records of the early 1980s, has died at 72, friends have confirmed. Spot was behind the boards for most of the essential SST Records releases that put that L.A.-based independent label on the map between 1980-85, including such scene-changing recordings as Husker Du’s “Zen Arcade” and “New Day Rising,” Black Flag’s “Damaged” and “Jealous Again,” and albums by the Minutemen, the Meat Puppets, the Descendents, Saccharine Trust and the Misfits. Joe Carducci, a co-owner of the SST label during the period when Spot was the imprint’s unofficial house producer, announced the death in a Facebook post, saying Spot had been found dead shortly after 10 a.m. Saturday at a health care facility in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. According to Carducci, Spot had suffered from fibrosis and was on oxygen for impaired lung function, and “was hoping for a lung transplant” prior to his condition worsening when he was hospitalized after a stroke three months ago.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic David Lindley, a virtuoso guitarist and multi-instrumentalist best known to many for his work with Jackson Browne, as well as a recording and touring artist in his own right, died Friday at age 78. No cause of death was immediately given. The musician had been known to have been ailing for some time. A family member posted late last year that Lindley had been repeatedly hospitalized for kidney issues, pneumonia and influenza; a fundraiser that had been recently set up for Lindley and his family said his medical issues “seem to have begun with a terrible bout of Long Covid.” “The loss of David Lindley is a huge one,” tweeted Jason Isbell. “Without his influence my music would sound completely different. I was genuinely obsessed with his playing from the first time I heard it. The man was a giant.”

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic What the world needs now is Burt, sweet Burt, and there’s a bereft feeling to be had in knowing we won’t be getting any more of the haunting, mind-twisting melodies that characterized the composer’s work over a period of more than six decades of sumptuous pop. But Burt Bacharach left a gift behind — something he actually held the finished product of in his hands, before he died Feb. 8 at age 94: “The Songs of Bacharach & Costello,” a deluxe boxed set of the material he worked on with Elvis Costello from the mid-’90s on up till nearly the present day. As anthologized by Costello with Steve Berkowitz (who also helps assemble Bob Dylan’s “Bootleg Series” sets), the new collection is a worthy testament to a true maestro who was doing some of the best work of his life in his final decades.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Singer-songwriter John Mellencamp, the proudest Hoosier in rock, plans to donate his archives to Indiana University, the institution announced Friday during a Mellencamp Symposium being held on campus. Mellencamp’s association with the university continues to grow. The future archive was just one of several developments discussed in the Friday symposium, which included a live interview with the musician as well as talks and panels “that brought academic scholars, music industry leaders, journalists and more to campus for a deep dive into the cultural and social impact of Mellencamp’s vast oeuvre,” according to IU. A sculpture is being commissioned for the Bloomington campus, which will be placed near the Fine Arts Plaza “and will symbolize the strong connection Mellencamp has to his southern Indiana roots.”

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Cate Blanchett recently had her way with Mahler’s fifth on screen, but she really digs her dancing heels into Sparks’ 26th — a song from the duo’s 26th album, that is — with the brand new music video for the record’s title track, “The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte.” Blanchett seems to be caught up in her own dance symphony as, rocking a yellow suit and bright red headphones, she alternately hoofs and sulks her way through the spirited track, in which tears and overcaffeination make for a natural brew. Ron and Russell Mael told Variety how a chance meeting with Blanchett at a film festival led to shooting the video in Los Angeles just two weeks ago. (The currently Oscar-nominated “Tar” star corroborated details of their surprise collaboration in a separate interview.) The brothers also talked about the pleasures of bringing the “Latte” album to the public after drawing in new fans with the recent “Sparks Brothers” and “Annette” films, and what it means to finally be playing both the Hollywood Bowl and Royal Albert Hall this summer, 52 years after the start of their recording career.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Annie Clark, better known to most as recording artist St. Vincent, first took a step out of rock ‘n’ roll and into “voice work,” as it were, when she wrote and recorded a compelling original audiobook, “Words + Music,” for Audible in 2020. Now she’s taking a step further into the realm of pure narration as the host of a new six-episode podcast series, “History Listen: Rock,” which premiered on the Audible service in January. She didn’t write the series, which produced by Double Elvis, creators of the lauded “Disgraceland” podcast, among others. But f you’re a fan of St. Vincent’s through material like “Daddy’s Home,” there’s a good chance you’ll take to her intonations as she speaks into life some well-crafted mini-histories of rock, from the R&B of the ’40s and ’50s through folk, psychedelia, punk, metal and (the arena where she’s picked up her three Grammys) alternative rock.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic For more than half a century, John Fogerty stood as the poster boy for all musicians who’d ever signed away rights to their publishing or master recordings and been unable to buy them back. Over time, Paul McCartney and then Taylor Swift came to be symbols, as well, of artists who tried and failed to win full ownership of their own music. But even Swift’s radical decision to re-record all her old albums, to do an end run around her former label selling her masters, may not count as quite as bold as the stance Fogerty took for several decades, during which he refused to perform any of his classic late ’60s and early ’70s Creedence Clearwater Revival songs in protest of his inability to purchase publishing rights for that material.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic It used to be that it was considered a Herculean feat if artists dug into their back catalogs to recreate two, three or even four classic albums in their entirety for a run of back-to-back concerts. Now, Elvis Costello has pulled off something to make even a stunt like that seem like the stuff of slackers. His 10-night stand at New York’s Gramercy Theatre was billed as “100 Songs and More,” with the artist laying out 10 unique songs he would be playing each night, just as a starting point. By the time the run wrapped up with one final three-hour show Wednesday night, the emphasis was on the …and more, with Costello actually having played exactly 250 songs over the course of the Feb. 9-22 residency (not counting interpolations), with only a handful of those breaking his vow to have no repeats between shows.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Watching “Kiss the Future,” a documentary about the band U2’s relationship with wartorn Sarajevo in the 1990s, it’s hard not to think: “We’ve seen this movie before.” That’s not to do with the doc itself so much as how aspects of the 30-year-old footage from Bosnia’s brutal civil war parallel what we’ve seen in the news coverage coming out of Ukraine for the past year. Both involve stranger-than-fiction (or stranger-than-fascism) scenarios of cosmopolitan cities suddenly subject to state terrorism, which makes the Matt Damon and Ben Affleck-produced film coincidentally timely, for all its belatedness. In a sense, “Kiss the Future” is the story of a long-distance romance, between a superstar rock quartet reaching its peak and a once-grand metropolis that’s bottoming out. In the early ’90s, genocidally minded Serbian president Slobodan Milošević tried to subject the happily mixed population of Sarajevo to ethnic cleansing by any means necessary. The area’s young people fought back in whatever spirit-lifting way they could — including founding underground discos, forming punk bands and otherwise keeping the arts alive as they dodged shelling and snipers. An American activist, Bill Carter, had the idea to enlist the stadium-filling U2 in publicizing their plight, which led to nightly satellite appearances by Sarajevo locals on the giant screens of the “Zoo TV” tour’s European leg.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic For the last 60 years, it’s been hard to see Joan Baez as anything other than a saintly figure, or certainly, at the least, a beatifically placid one. Early on in the new documentary “Joan Baez I Am a Noise,” over shots of its subject being swarmed by fans at the height of her early-‘60s success, the present-day Baez quips that much of the public came to view her like the Virgin Mary — and confesses that, with her head swelled by fame at the time, she was not much inclined to disagree. But occasional flashes of ego seem like the least of the psychological problems dogging the singer, as portrayed in a music doc that starts out as a fly-on-the-wall view of Baez’s farewell tour and ends as an extended look at family trauma and recovery from mental illness.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The good news for Taylor Swift fans: She is participating in Record Store Day again with a vinyl exclusive, for the second straight year. The bad news is that it’s in quantities of … Wait, that’s good news, too — there will be 115,000 copies available of “Folklore: The Long Pond Studio Sessions,” worldwide, about 10 times the amount that were pressed for her RSD 2022 single. Is that enough to meet demand, or keep legions of Swifties from queuing up before dawn along with the Record Store Day regulars on April 22? Not likely, but the volume of the pressing —more than four times as many as any RSD exclusive to date — should keep panic over procuring a copy to a lower level.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic When Kelsea Ballerini did interviews last year for her largely upbeat “Subject to Change” album, she was in a tough spot, being in the public spotlight for her less cheerful personal state of affairs but having to affirm (as she did to Variety at the time), “It’s been pretty difficult, to show up and want to talk about a record that I love, and end up doing divorce press, you know?… This is not a divorce record.” And yet, six months later, Ballerini is back with the surprise drop of an EP that is so single-mindedly about that split, it’s nothing but a divorce record. The only thing she’s got dibs on in “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat” is filing court papers. And it’s fairly shocking — in a good way — to hear her baring her post-marital soul on record so soon after seemingly placing limits on how far what she was going through at the time needed to make its way into her music. Ballerini faced the quandary many country artists do: how to proceed in a genre where fans want to believe artists are keeping it real, when the realness has become a major mess. Her solution to that, now, is an unexpectedly savvy one: parcel all that pain into a dam-burster of a side project with no commercial expectations, no press (“divorce press” or otherwise) and no holds barred, before presumably getting back to the sunny side of the street.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic At last, Bruce Springsteen fans can let go over their angst over whether the performer will reach Los Angeles and many other areas left off the first leg of his U.S. tour this year… and move on to the angst of the difficulty of getting tickets. The fact that some of the added gigs are in stadiums instead of arenas may ameliorate at least some of those concerns, though. The second leg of the North American tour begins August 9 with a show at Chicago’s Wrigley Field and ends at the close of fall back indoors with shows at L.A.’s Forum on Dec. 4 and 6 and San Francisco’s Chase Center on Dec. 8. Altogether, these additions add up to 22 gigs in 18 cities, with Philadelphia, East Rutherford, NJ, Toronto and L.A. being the four cities that are getting two-night stands — although wide-open holes in the calendar surely allow for additions as these dates sell out.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic London-based rapper Little Simz has been awarded the 2022 Mercury Prize, topping a list of candidates that included Harry Styles, Wet Leg and Sam Fender. The 28-year-old performer won for “Sometimes I Feel Introvert,” her fourth album, and her second to be nominated for the prestigious honor, after “Grey Area” landed on the shortlist for the same award in 2019. Little Simz has been considered a major artist in the U.K. for years, although this album represented more of a breakthrough for her in the U.S. That may hold somewhat true in her native country, too — she recently won the best new artist award at the Brits, despite having released albums over the last seven years.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Guess how many submissions Taylor Swift has on the preliminary Grammy ballot? If you know her all too well, you can probably intuit the answer to that one even before we tell you? It’s 13… of course. But there are many other burning questions about the ballot that has gone out to Recording Academy members where the answers are not so easily guessed, and we’re here to clear up some of those mysteries. The annual intrigue often centers on which categories certain genre-straddling artists ended up submitting their material in… or where that material got shifted sometimes against the artists’ wishes, as we’ve seen already this year with Nicki Minaj very vocally objecting to having “Super Freaky Girl” moved from a rap category to pop.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Kelsea Ballerini walks into the penthouse suite of a West Hollywood hotel bearing a big smile, a full bottle of wine and two glasses, and this is immediately a good sign for an interview. She has a lot to toast, having just released a well-reviewed album, “Subject to Change,” and being about to play a venue she’s dreamed of headlining, L.A.’s Greek Theatre. Ballerini is coming off a previous album cycle in which she had a No. 2 country hit with “Hole in the Bottle” and a No. 1 with “Half of My Hometown,” which picked up a couple of CMA Awards. But the wine may not be for purely celebratory purposes. “Interviews make me nervous,” she admits, settling in and pouring.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The fact that Nicki Minaj’s “Super Freaky Girl” was shifted out of the Grammys’ rap categories and into the pop division on a preliminary ballot has nearly resulted in an international incident, given the ensuing publicity and controversy as voting began this week. It’s certainly resulted in the year’s most visible hip-hop feud, with a fiery war of words between Minaj and Latto, whose “Big Energy” stayed as a rap contender and was not bounced to pop. But lost amid all this — or unreported till now, anyway — is the fact that Minaj is, in fact, on the ballot in rap categories this year… just not for “Super Freaky Girl.” Grammy voters who’ve received their ballots tell Variety that Minaj is in contention in the best rap performance category for another song of hers, “Do We Have a Problem?,” which has a featured appearance from Lil Baby. The Grammys’ rap screening committee apparently considered this more of a true hip-song and “Super Freaky Girl” more pop in nature, splitting the difference.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Arcade Fire is having trouble keeping name acts in the opening slots for its arena tours. Beck has now dropped out of his position as the opener for the group’s U.S. tour, without any explanation so far. In an email sent to ticket buyers, Beck was described only as “unfortunately no longer able to join Arcade Fire on their upcoming North American tour. Taking his place will be Boukman Eksperyans,” described as a Grammy-nominated Haitian roots band. Contacted by Variety, Beck’s reps declined to comment on his bowing out. The move was not necessarily a surprise, as fans had already been speculating whether the singer-songwriter might exit the Arcade Fire outing, after Win Butler was accused of sexual misconduct in an August Pitchfork article. Feist dropped out of her opening slot on the European leg of the tour after playing just the first two dates.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic It’s only the first week of first-round voting for the Grammys, but the awards process has already stirred up a major controversy in the hip-hop world and beyond, bringing sparring between rappers Nicki Minaj and Latto out into the open after Minaj said she felt the Recording Academy was showing a bias toward Latto in the way their work was being categorized. As the Twitter war between the two went full-bore Thursday night and Friday morning, Minaj called the newcomer “an entitled Karen,” while Latto returned fire by saying that Minaj was “a 40-year-old bully” acting in a way unbecoming of her age and stature. The younger artist even referred to Minaj as “my idol-turned-rival” as the conversation went nuclear. “Super freaky grandma is married AND related to fucking rapists. You ain’t gone bully me BITCH! My idol turned rival now u hating!”

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Nicki Minaj is protesting the Recording Academy shifting her “Super Freaky Girl” from consideration in the Grammys’ rap division to a pop category, saying that she would be OK with the shift if it were applied consistently to other artists that straddle the crossover line, which she believes is not the case. “I have no prob being moved out the RAP category as long as we r ALL being treated FAIRLY,” Minaj tweeted late Thursday, in response to reports that her submission had been moved out of her chosen category. “If SFG (‘Super Freaky Girl’) has 2B moved out RAP then so does Big Energy!” she added, referring to the Latto hit of that name. “ANY1 who says diff is simply a Nicki hater or a troll.”

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic When it comes to the 2023 Grammys, it’s easy to jump ahead and look at what we expect will be the final showdown on Feb. 3 between the top two competitors — Adele and Beyoncé. Because, yes, in the top three general categories, it’s likely to be a narrow contest that runs the gamut from A to B, as it were … almost a direct sequel to the 2017 Grammy race, in which “25” was pitted against “Lemonade.” The big question may be, will this movie have the same ending, with Adele apologizing to Bey for besting her, again? But there’s a lot of road to travel before then and considerable suspense over which other eight artists will fill out the 10 available slots in the album, record and song of the year categories. (The Recording Academy upped the slots from eight at the last minute last year, only in those divisions.) The only other virtual certainties in all three of those categories are Harry Styles and Silk Sonic, neither of whom can be completely counted out as ultimate winners, should the voting members decide they don’t even want to have to decide between all that big diva energy again