Blog Posts by Chris Willman

Yoko Ono didn't break up the Beatles? What?

Next, will they be trying to convince us that David St. Hubbins' girlfriend, Janine, didn't break up Spinal Tap?

Yet here is Paul McCartney, in conversation with David Frost, telling fans they need to leave Yoko alone. "She certainly didn't break the group up; the group was breaking up," he told Frost in a conversation set to air Nov. 9 on Al Jazeera's English channel. ""I don't think you can blame her for anything... When Yoko came along, part of her attraction was her avant-garde side, her view of things, so she showed him another way to be, which was very attractive to him. So it was time for John to leave; he was definitely going to leave..."

For a second there, it kind of sounded like McCartney was saying Ono broke up the band—but just by attracting Lennon to a different aesthetic model, not by sitting around on the floor during the Let It Be sessions.

Yoko, John, and PaulEither way, few Beatlemaniacs would dispute the general truth of what McCartney is

When Harry Shearer—of Spinal Tap and Simpsons fame—decided to bring in some vocal support for an album of satirical songs, he picked guest singers ranging from Dr. John to Jane Lynch. But for the leadoff track, "Celebrity Booze Endorser," he had no choice but to call the Fountains of Wayne hotline.

As some will recall, some years back the singer Robbie Fulks actually had a song titled "Fountains of Wayne Hotline," dedicated to the idea that there might be a number a songwriter could call when in doubt about what kind of key change to employ in a well-crafted rock tune. Shearer had already composed "Celebrity Booze Endorser" by the time he got around to dialing up FOW, but their power-pop presence still loomed over the song's creation as well as recording.

"The bands that I listen to for just pleasure and rock & roll excitement at this point in time tend to be them and XTC," says Shearer. "I wrote it with them in mind. I had been driving around in my car listening to Welcome Interstate

Never mind middle age, here's the Sex Pistols!

The seminal punk band's first and only studio album was released October 27, 1977… which means that, even if it doesn't sound a day over 18, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols is turning 35 years old this weekend. No allusions to Johnny Rotten's famously ragged British dentistry are necessary when we point out that the album is now officially a little long in the tooth. Yet it remains among the most vigorously and sneeringly youthful of rock & roll classics.

Also undiminished with age: Johnny Rotten's penchant for the outrageous. He may have changed his name back to John Lydon after the Pistols broke up almost as soon as they'd started, but his attitude will always be rotten to us. (Charmingly rotten, we'd hasten to add, though your mileage may vary.) In honor of Bollocks' 35^th birthday, here's a rundown of a dozen of Rotten/Lydon's most outrageous moments over the years, from the Pistols' first fateful appearance on live

Taylor talks with Yahoo!In the conclusion of Yahoo! Music's interview with Taylor Swift, we query the singer about her beguiling new single "Begin Again"—and how that contrasts with some earlier songs that were more about rough landings than sweet beginnings. Has she really gotten over her attraction to the "Treacherous" type? We'll let her explain.

YAHOO! MUSIC: "Begin Again" strikes me as being kind of the opposite of "The Way I Loved You," from the Fearless album.Then, you were contrasting the good guy you were with in the song with a less polite guy you were with before—and thinking about how you liked the bad guy better. "Begin Again" is looking back at the bad boy and thinking how you like the new, nice guy better.

SWIFT: That's an awesome, awesome observation. That's a really cool observation. I think that might be kind of growing up. When you think about the song on Fearless, "The Way I Loved You," you're reminiscing about the passion and the heated arguments and the dysfunction of a dysfunctional

Taylor Swift nearly kept the cancer-themed ballad "Ronan" in her drawer forever, thinking it was "too sad to ever sing again" after she first wrote it, she tells Yahoo! Music.

"Ronan" isn't included on her new album, Red, but it's still part of the national conversation after she debuted it in September on the Stand Up to Cancer telecast. While we were asking her about Red, we also had to inquire about what led her to unexpectedly debut this non-album cut on national television less than two months before her album was coming out.

"Writing 'Ronan' was something that I did very quietly," Swift told us. "And I only played it for a few people when I wrote it almost a year and a half ago, because it was really hard for me to get through. It was hard for me to record. It was hard emotionally to present that song. When it came time to play Stand Up to Cancer, Gwyneth (Paltrow, the show's executive producer) reached out to me and said 'I really want you to be a part of this'— and immediately

Taylor talks to Yahoo!If you're inclined to skip the deluxe edition of Taylor Swift's Red because you figure the bonus tracks must have landed on the cutting-room floor for a good reason, you may want to reconsider that assumption. The three extra studio tracks on the Target version's second disc are as red-hot-and-rouge as anything on the principal recording.

"The bonus tracks on that Target edition are songs that I'm really excited about," Swift told Yahoo! Music when we sat down with her in Nashville shortly before the album's release. Here's what she shared with us about the extras:

* "The Moment I Knew" "was a song about my 21^st birthday party, which was the worst experience ever," she tells Yahoo! Music. It's certainly the flip side of "22," a celebratory birthday song that appears on the main disc. In this dourest of coming-of-legal-age anthems, she sings of waiting for a significant other to show up at her shindig—and when it's clear he won't be joining the celebrants, that's "the moment (she) knew"

Reading through the lyric booklet of Taylor Swift's Red, you may be surprised to come across the secret message that reads:

P-A-U-L-I-S D-E-A-D.

Just kidding. But not since the late '60s, when worried Beatlemaniacs scanned every microscopic bit of every album looking for confirmation that Paul McCartney had died, have so many fans spent as much time analyzing cryptic C-L-U-E-S as they are this week, now that Red is out and peppered with hints about the subjects of Swift's songs.

"Red" album coverAs you may know, on every album, Swift indulges in inappropriate capitalizations in the printed lyrics of her songs, and it's not because she spilled a Coke on the shift key of her old IBM Selectric. When you put together those capitalized letters, they spell out messages about the meanings or origins of the tune in question. Which made for decoder-ring-style fun from the get-go, but which is particularly provocative now that there's a national guessing game about which well-known boyfriend each number might be

It's a Red-letter day for Taylor Swift fans, as her fourth studio album finally hits stores after two years of breathless waiting that made die-hard fans blue in the face. Yahoo! Music sat with Swift in Nashville to talk about the making of the album and the stories behind the massive singles "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" and "Begin Again." Dig into the full text of our Q&A or watch the video footage to get the breakdown straight from the deeply red lips of the superstar herself...

YAHOO! MUSIC:When you played the iHeartRadio Music Festival recently, you were doing mostly older songs but ended the set with "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together." And it seems like that song is such a phenomenon that it's this very rare thing: a brand new song so powerful that it could immediately become your new show-closer every night on tour, instead of "Love Story" or another familiar stand-by.

SWIFT: I think when I played "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together" live, whether it