Blog: Spinner.com

Filed under: News Anton Corbijn While Montreal's Arcade Fire have been known to think worldly in throwing their weight behind relief efforts in Haiti, they're also thinking locally and helping out a florist in their hometown. Yesterday the group tweeted the following after the Dragon Flowers on Bernard Street in Montreal was destroyed by fire on Monday evening and left florist Tamey Lau without her home. "Tamey [...]

Filed under: News AP Photo, Michael Dwyer NEW YORK (AP) - Neil Diamond is donating this week's sales from "Sweet Caroline" after the tune became a source of comfort following the explosions at the Boston Marathon. Sales from Diamond's song are up by 597 percent, Nielsen SoundScan said Wednesday. Diamond's representative said the singer will donate the recent sales to marathon bombing victims.

Filed under: Concerts and Tours , News , RPM , News Today, Oh Boy! , New Music , New Releases Ethan Miller, Getty Watch Animal Collective 's Panda Bear discuss contributing vocals to Daft Punk 's Random Acces Memories , in the fifth installment of the video series "The Collaborators," which documents the recording of the album. "It's a huge honor for me, but to talk about it [...]

• Classixx - All You're Waiting For
• Tropics - Don't You Know

Filed under: News , Exclusive , Q + A Tribeca Film The National 's lead singer Matt Berninger has always been somewhat of an outsider in his own band. Guitarists Bryce and Aaron Dessner are twins, while bassist Scott Devendorf and drummer Bryan Devendorf are brothers. Part of that isolation is why Matt invited his sibling Tom, who's nine years younger and pictured above on the right, to join the band's tour following their 2010 [...]

Filed under: News , Holy Hell Getty Images Ulf Ekberg , a founding member of Ace of Base , began his career as a neo-Nazi, according to an article by Noisey's Benjamin Shapiro . Apparently, this information has been "hiding in plain sight" for years, beginning with Ekberg's work in Nazi punk group Commit Suiside. Their lyrics, as translated by Noisey, go something like this: "Men in white hoods march down the [...]

Filed under: News , Exclusive , New Music , New Releases Pack AD Facebook Vancouver's hard-touring garage rock duo the Pack A.D. -- comprised of drummer Maya Miller and Becky Black -- has been tearing the roofs off venues and grinding it out on the road for the better part of seven years. Although the Pack has already been showered with a ton of critical praise and has a strong legion [...]

Filed under: News , Exclusive Brassneck PR Andy Partridge's career has to be one of the more circuitous and often ill fated in the history of pop music. At the height of his former band XTC 's commercial powers in the early '80s, the singer-songwriter suffered debilitating stage fright, forcing the band to stop touring altogether. The British trio almost missed its chance at a huge step forward in the college radio/alternative markets here [...]

Filed under: News , New Music , Exclusive Shore Fire Sarah Brightman is about to go where no professional musician has ever gone before. The iconic English soprano has, like so many other artists, been dreaming of blasting off into orgbit for most of her career, and in 2015, she'll take a journey to the International Space Station. And while she's prepping for the trip, which Brightman and private space tourism company Space Adventures officially [...]

Filed under: News , Exclusive Jory Cordy Alt-J are a rare case of a band appearing on the scene fully formed. Their debut album An Awesome Wave showcased a confident quartet marching to the beat of its own drum and landed the English group a coveted Mercury Music Prize win. Yet the band's guitar and bass player Gwil Sainsbury says the group are just now starting to find their [...]

Filed under: News , News Today, Oh Boy! Karl Walter, Getty After recently completing her touring commitments behind Visions, which also won best electronic album at the Junos last weekend, Montreal musician Claire Boucher, better known as Grimes , posted a lengthy message on her Tumblr site Tuesday evening. Titled "I don't want to have to compromise my morals in order to make a living," she stated she was "done [...]

Filed under: News , Exclusive Noam Galai, AOL On Sunday April 21, Amanda Palmer posted a poem to her Tumblr account related to the Boston Marathon bombings last week, riling up critics and fans alike. "A Poem for Dzhokhar" has experienced a tremendous amount of backlash, with many people labeling its content as sympathy for the devil (or in this case, a terrorist). Though Palmer's poem is an attempt to make [...]

Filed under: Concerts and Tours , Exclusive Lindsey Best for AOL I said I might never go back to Coachella . I'd done it already. It felt like someone else's high school reunion. Back in Los Angeles, there was a lot going on. I saw James Blake play for 1 00 people in a recording studio . It wasn't as good as his festival set. An intimate James Blake show is perhaps [...]

Filed under: News , Exclusive , Awards , Music Appreciation Canvas Media For Bahamas "it's nice to be nominated" isn't just a press platitude. It actually really was nice to be nominated -- particularly where the prestigious Songwriter of the Year category at the Juno Awards was concerned. "I think that's kind of the big one," Bahamas, known on his ID as Afie Jurvanen, told Spinner during a one-on-one [...]

Filed under: Exclusive Spinner Have you ever been in a record store and seen an album cover that made you think, "Who the hell thought that was a good idea?" If you haven't, you haven't dug through enough crates. Because we here at Spinner have a weird sense of humor, we enlisted our Instagramming fans to find more of these bizarre LP covers, and here are 14 great examples of why musicians should really [...]

Filed under: Concerts and Tours , News , Exclusive Kevin Winter, Getty Images On Saturday, April 13, Crosby, Stills and Nash performed a rare small-theater show (their only Los Angeles-area concert this year) at Club Nokia. The performance was part of Light Up The Blues, a benefit for Autism Speaks, one of the world's leading autism science and advocacy organizations. The evening featured many other artists as well and raised over $250,000 for the organization. [...]

Filed under: News , Holy Hell , News Today, Oh Boy! , I Fought the Law AFP Picture this: A woman in Mill Valley, California is walking on a thin line after pleading guilty to stealing Huey Lewis ' rental car and laptop computer. The Marin Independent Journal reports Katherine Bowyer Gallagher is charged with possession of stolen property, which is a felony. The rental car was later recovered but [...]

Filed under: News , R.I.P. Neilson Barnard, Getty Images NEW YORK (AP) - Richie Havens , who sang and strummed for a sea of people at Woodstock, has died at 72. His family says in a statement that Havens died Monday of a heart attack. Havens, a folk singer and guitarist, performed at the 1969 Woodstock Festival. He returned to the site during the 40th anniversary in 2009. The performer [...]

Filed under: Concerts and Tours , News , Exclusive Neil Preston If you're a fan of Led Zeppelin , you're familiar with photographer Neal Preston 's work. From 1973 onwards, Preston served as tour photographer for the notoriously press-adverse band. With unprecedented access to the band, he snapped now-iconic shots of Robert Plant , Jimmy Page , John Paul Jones and John Bonham and more than [...]

Filed under: News , Video , Exclusive Gino DePinto, AOL At last, our saga with Andrew W.K. and Marky Ramone comes to an end. After they talked drumming, G.G. Allin , pasta and Playtex wipes , we're wrapping up our interview series with an important topic, especially for New Yorkers: Pizza. Marky starts off the conversation by revealing why he couldn't stand living in Manhattan and [...]

Filed under: Concerts and Tours , News , Exclusive , Awards CARAS One of Canada's biggest bands won three Junos at this year's awards on the weekend -- and no one saw it happen. Toronto synth pop titans Metric picked up trophies for Best Alternative Album of the Year, Recording Package of the Year and guitarist James Shaw won Producer of the Year at Saturday night's untelevised Juno Gala [...]