News

It's all happening people, Fiona is hitting the road. After a handful of sold out shows with her pals over at Largo towards the end of last year, the great Fiona Apple is now hitting the road for a short tour, her first since backing 2005's fantastic Extraordinary Machine. The best part is these gigs will presumably be showing off some of her new material, at least if that guy from that tv show that makes records is to be believed.

Tickets for the newly announced shows aside from the SXSW appearance go on sale this Friday, February 24th. Get them while you can as these shows certainly will sell out. Hooray Fiona, welcome back.

For links and such head over to her official site.

• 03/15 – Austin, TX @ Central Presbyterian Church (SXSW) 
• 03/19 – Chicago, IL @ Lincoln Hall 
• 03/21 – Washington, DC @ Sixth and I 
• 03/23 – Brooklyn, NY @ Music Hall of Williamsburg 
• 03/24 – Atlantic City, NJ @ Music Box 
• 03/26 – New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom 
• 03/27 – Boston, MA @ Royale

We've known for a long time that Pearl Jam was going to host a festival-like event this summer to celebrate the band's twentieth anniversary. Unfortunately we didn't know when or where, although "somewhere in the middle of the country" was thrown out to help us narrow it down. Today the band has finally answered this question officially, confirming the long rumored shenanigans will take place at Alpine Valley in East Troy, Wisconsin over Labor Day weekend. The latest anniversary celebrating is of course in addition to the numerous reissues the band has put together this year, as well as the upcoming Cameron Crowe directed documentary of the band rumored to be out in the early fall. Woo hoo, Pearl Jam fun.

As for the actual concert the term festival should probably be thrown out and replaced with "guest heavy shows" or something along those lines as each day will be ticketed separately and seemingly nothing will be all that different from a normal show than the amount of openers. Don't get me wrong the openers have some firepower in The Strokes, Mudhoney and Queens of the Stone Age, but they're also going the songwriter route with Liam Finn, Joseph Arthur and Glen Hasnard. For safety's sake we'll leave punk legend John Doe in his own classificiation. It certainly sounds like a grand old time but let's be honest, this is only slightly more appealing than your standard Pearl Jam show, which isn't exactly a bad thing.

What is a bad thing is how the band's biggest fans, those who are paid members of the Ten Club, are somewhat getting the shaft from their favorite musicians. To obtain fan club tickets you must buy tickets to both shows but you only have two options: The "Reserved/GA Weekend Package" or a "General Admission Weekend Package". "Well those don't seem all that bad!" you shout in your corduroy and flannel. Fine, maybe not to you, but what if they replace the words "general admission" with "lawn". How does that sound? Essentially all that's happening here is that if you are a member of the Ten Club and you want to go to see Pearl Jam's special anniversary show in Wisconsin you have to buy at least one lawn ticket to the show. The same lawn tickets people will be trying to give away outside because nobody ever wants to sit in the lawn unless they are under the legal drinking age. Paying for the privelage to not be able to get reserved seats to both nights is insulting, and I'm not even a Ten Club member.

At midnight last night the lineup for this year's twentieth anniversary of Lollapalooza was announced. Heading up the shenanigans in Chicago's Grant Park August 5th-7th will be SHA favorites My Morning Jacket and the Foo Fighters along with Muse, Coldplay and Eminem. Add to that some Deadmau5, A Perfect Circle and Cee-Lo Green and you've got the first two lines covered. Digging further in to the well of bands we enjoy you'll find Ween, Bright Eyes, The Cars, Arctic Monkeys , Local Natives, Delta Spirit, Grace Potter & The Nocturnals and more. As always Perry Ferrell and company even have the breaking indie bands slots for Foster The People, Dale Earnhart Jr. Jr., The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, Smith Westerns, Tennis, and quite a few other bands I know little or nothing about.

Of course what fun would Lollapalooza be without the mania that is Perry's. Holding down the dance front will be Girl Talk, Pretty Lights and Kid Cudi among others. Early bird tickets have already sold out but three day passes are still currently available for $215 plus the fun tax. The full lineup in alphabetical order is listed after the jump courtesy of those handsome gentleman holding down the fort over at Hidden Track.

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's the cover art for Eddie Vedder's upcoming solo album Ukulele Songs and it doesn't have a ukulele on it! Take that literalists! What? Too much? But look at all of those sentences that don't end with periods! That has to account for something right? No? Fine, I wasn't going to invite you anyway.

The sixteen song set that will undoubtedly feature some ukulele, unlike the Jason deCaires Taylor designed cover above, doesn't hit shelves until May 31st so all you out there in Eddie nation will have plenty of time to contemplate the meaning of a man underwater at a desk with a typewriter. The artist figures it as such:

The Lost Correspondent depicts a man sitting at a desk with a typewriter. The desk is covered with a collection of newspaper articles and cuttings that date back to the 1970s. Many of these have political significance, a number detail Grenada’s alignment with Cuba in the period immediately prior to the revolution. The work informs the rapid changes in communication between generations. Taking the form of a traditional correspondent, the lone figure becomes little more than a relic, a fossil in a lost world.

Weird, I was pretty certain it was just a deleted scene from Titanic.  [via antiquiet]