Blog Posts by Andy Greene

Leonard Cohen has been working on a new album for years, but it's finally hitting shelves on January 31st.  Speaking to the press in Oviedo, Spain while in town to accept an award, Cohen said that the disc will be called Old Ideas. "I've played it for a few people and they seem to like it," Cohen said, adding that he still struggles with songwriting. "When
you're writing, you're always an absolute beginner. Each time you take
up your guitar or sit by a blank page, you start from scratch. It's a
struggle."

Cohen hasn't released an album of new material since 2004's Dear Heather,
but he went an epic world tour between 2008 and 2010 where previewed
new material onstage, including "Darkness," "Lullaby," "Born In Chains"
and "Feels So Good." According to a post
on his official online forum, only "Darkness" made the final cut for
the disc. (Watch a video of Cohen performing "Darkness" at a 2009
concert below.)

In June of 2010, Cohen spoke with Rolling Stone about his new album. "I'm

The Stone Roses may not be the only Britpop group gearing up for a reunion. Liam Gallager tells Rolling Stone that he would consider reconciling with his brother Noel to reunite Oasis for the 20th anniversary of the release of (What's The Story) Morning Glory.
"In 2015, if we can put our s--t aside, we can tour and play the album
in its entirety for the 20th anniversary," he says. "I'd be up for that,
if it's on our terms. There's got to be two-way respect."

In a radio interview this past August, Noel Gallagher said that breaking up Oasis was a rash decision. "We
could maybe have all gone off and done other things for a few years,"
he said. "In my own head the 2015, 20-year anniversary of Morning Glory
is looming and we could have maybe come back, made a new album and
played that album in its entirety and gone and been the greatest thing
ever, but there you go."

The two brothers no longer speak, but Liam tells Rolling Stone
that Noel's public comments got him thinking about the

Weird Al Yankovic
only sang about one minute of his 1988 classic "Lasagna" at the Count
Basie Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey last night, but he made it count.
Clutching an accordion, Yankovic delivered the song (to the tune of "La
Bamba") with the same look of crazed intensity in his eyes that Bruce
Springsteen has when he belts out the beginning of "Backstreets." Now,
it's pretty tough to be hysterically funny when singing a G-rated song
about lasagna. In fact, Weird Al might be the only man on the planet who
can pull it off.  The man is a national treasure. 

Weird Al fans are the kind of people who cheer for songs long before
the band plays a single note. They can tell what's coming next solely by
the costume the band is wearing when they walk onstage after video
interludes. If they have on long beards, it's time for "Amish Paradise."
Flannel shirts mean "Smells Like Nirvana" and pocket protectors mean
"White and Nerdy." 

The show is as rehearsed as much as any Broadway play. It

Earlier this year, the Monkees
put aside a decade of acrimony and toured in support of their 45th
anniversary. They did 43 dates in Europe and America before the tour was
called off with little explanation in August. "I'm not really at liberty to get into detail about what happened," Monkees bassist/guitarist Peter Tork tells Rolling Stone.
"But there were some business affairs that couldn't be coordinated
correctly. We hit a glitch and there was just this weird dislocation at
one point. I can't say anything more without getting into the stuff that
we have to keep down. We need to work on this stuff outside of the
public eye."

According to Tork, the group's internal problems
from the 2001 tour didn't resurface. "I find myself much less reactive
than I used to be," he says. "Between everybody's behavior changing
enough and restructuring the way that we related to one another . . . We
did it all right. We had a good time on stage, laughed and created
jokes. Jonsey [Davy Jones] and

We recently posted a long series of interviews with the members of Blink-182 -
but that was only the beginning. Here's part two of our series of
Q&As with Mark Hoppus, Tom Delonge and Travis Barker, conducted
backstage at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center in upstate New York. We
spoke about the difficult birth of their new album Neighborhoods,
how they finally learned to communicate and compromise after years of
strife, and Delonge's belief that that the band has embraced a "much
more modern and relevant form of rock & roll."

Mark Hoppus

Everybody in the group spent the last few years working on
different projects. Do you think that  helped the creative process after
you guys convened to cut the new album?
Yeah, absolutely. I
think that doing things outside of Blink allows us to find out what our
skill sets are, what we're good at, what we lack, what each person
brings to the table. I think probably the most important lesson we
learned from taking five years off from Blink was

Our recent interview with Peter Gabriel was more than just
the Genesis
Inquisition. During the course of a 40-minute chat, we touched upon
everything from Bruce Springsteen to the overuse of "Solsbury Hill" in movie
trailers. We also talked about his long-awaited studio album I/O, which
is fast becoming the Chinese Democracy of Peter Gabriel albums. But we
started off with New Blood, his new CD where he re-recorded
songs from his back catalog with an orchestra. 

Can you explain how New Blood came out of your Scratch My Back
covers project?
When we brought Scratch My Back on the
road we wanted to have two hours of music and I only had one hour with
Scratch, so we started working up my own stuff. It was opening up
something and I wanted to explore it a bit more. I was really pleased with the
Scratch My Back portion of the show, but people seemed to really like
the second half better. I was really enjoying it too. I felt that we were
discovering something special. It wasn't just an orchestral