ENT

Carrie Underwood, who sang her latest single, Good Girl, on Dancing with the Stars Tuesday night, will perform next on the Billboard Music Awards on Sunday night.
She’s also planning on attending the American Idol finale and is intrigued by former judge Simon Cowell’s latest judge acquisitions in the form of pop stars Britney Spears and Demi Lovato for his post-Idol show The X-Factor.
“The whole point of all the stuff that they do is to get you talking and get you intrigued and I certainly am,” Underwood, 29, told QMI Agency while in Toronto on Wednesday. “I might actually watch.”
Underwood won the fourth season of American Idol.

It’s a busy morning on the concert scene, with news from Slash, Rush and k.d. lang. Here’s the lowdown:

Slash will share his Apocalyptic Love with Canadian fans very soon.

The top-hatted Guns N’ Roses guitarist and his band The Conspirators — fronted by singer Myles Kennedy and featuring an all-Canadian rhythm section — have booked 10 shows north of the border this summer. The tour begins July 14 in Vancouver and ends July 29 in Quebec City, with stops in Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Belleville, London and Montreal. See below for a full list of dates and locations.

Tickets for most shows go on sale Friday, May 11 at Ticketmaster, and will set you back between $30 and $45 before fees and taxes, depending on the city, venue and seating. Pre-sales and VIP packages are available May 9 via slashonline.com. Hamilton retro-rockers Monster Truck will open the shows.

Slash’s latest solo album Apocalyptic Love comes out May 22. It’s his first to feature his current touring band, which includes Winnipeg drummer Brent Fitz and Saskatchewan bassist Todd Kerns, formerly of Age of Electric.

Slash’s Apocalyptic Love Canadian tour dates:
July 14 | Vancouver | Queen Elizabeth Theatre
July 16 | Edmonton | Jubilee
July 17 | Calgary | Jubilee
July 20 | Saskatoon | TCU Place
July 21 | Winnipeg | Burton Cummings Theatre
July 23 | Thunder Bay | Community Auditorium
July 25 | Belleville | Empire Square Live
July 26 | London | Harris Park
July 27 | Montreal | Olympia Theater
July 29 | Quebec City | Salle Albert Rosseau

• • •

Even Clockwork Angels have their price.

Legendary power trio Rush have just revealed ticket prices and on-sale info for their previously announced Clockwork Angels tour dates.

If you want to see singer-bassist Geddy Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson and drummer Neil Peart when they touch down in a handful of Canadian arenas this fall, you’ll pay between $30 and $140 before fees and taxes, depending on the city, venus and seating. See below for a full list of dates and locations.

Tickets for most shows go on sale Saturday May 12 at Ticketmaster. The tour does not include an opening act, but Rush typically plays a lengthy show with an intermission.

Clockwork Angels, due online and in stores June 12, is Rush’s 19th studio record and the followup to 2007’s Snakes and Arrows.

Rush’s Clockwork Angels Canadian tour dates:
Sept. 26 | Winnipeg | MTS Centre
Sept. 28 | Saskatoon | Credit Union Centre
Sept. 30 | Edmonton | Rexall Place
Oct. 14 | Toronto | Air Canada Centre
Oct. 18 | Montreal | Bell Centre

• • •

k.d. lang will sing it loud in her homeland this fall.

The transplanted Alberta chanteuse is returning to Canada with her band Siss Boom Bang for a series of shows in September. Lang — who already has a few Western Canada gigs in July — begins her tour Sept. 9 in Victoria and then heads through the Prairies and Ontario, wrapping up with a Sept. 26 performance in Kitchener. See below for a full list of dates and locations.

Tickets for most shows go on sale Friday, May 11 at Ticketmaster or vipnation.com, and will cost between $60 and $120 before fees and taxes, depending on the city, venue and seating.

Longtime California resident Lang’s most recent album Sing it Loud was released in April of 2011. It’s the first record she’s made with a permanent band since her early days with The Reclines.

k.d. lang & Siss Boom Bang Fall tour dates:
Sept. 9 | Victoria | Royal Theatre
Sept. 12 | Edmonton | Jubilee
Sept. 13 | Saskatoon | Conexus Art Centre
Sept. 14 | Winnipeg | Playhouse Theatre
Sept. 17 | North Bay | Capitol Centre
Sept. 18 | Ottawa | National Arts Centre
Sept. 19 | Kingston | Grand Theatre
Sept. 22 & 23 | Toronto | Phoenix
Sept. 25 | Hamilton | Hamilton Place
Sept. 26 | Kitchener | Circle in the Square

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On the sad occasion of  Beastie Boys Adam Yauch’s death at the age of 47, I looked up my last Toronto Sun/Sun Media chat with him that ran June 13, 2004:

ALMOST TWO decades ago, Beastie Boys supported the “fight for your right to party!”
In fact, that single, Fight For Your Right, fuelled the New York City trio to the top of the charts as their 1986 debut album, Licensed To Ill, became the first rap album to ever hit No. 1.
Now, Adam Yauch (MCA), Mike Diamond (Mike D) and Adam Horovitz (Adrock), are fighting a much more adult battle on To The 5 Boroughs, their most political album to date, which hits stores Tuesday (June 15, 2004).
First and foremost, it’s a love letter to their beloved NYC, post 9/11 — despite plenty of anti-George W. Bush sentiments. (More on that later.)
But Yauch says the album — their first in six years since 1998′s Hello Nasty — didn’t start out that way.
“That isn’t exactly what we set out to do,” says Yauch, 39, down the line from L.A. recently. “We set out to make an album without much forethought on what it was going to be about. We just all started writing lyrics, and it was more sort of in retrospect, toward the end of it that we noticed that a lot of it was pretty nostalgic about New York.”
On the song, Open Letter To NYC, the B Boys rap: “Dear New York, I hope you’re doing well / I know a lot’s happened and you’ve been through hell / Since 9/11 we’re still livin’ and lovin’ life we’ve been given / Ain’t nothing going to take that away from us / We’re lookin’ pretty and gritty ’cause in the city we trust / Dear New York, I know a lot has changed / 2 Towers down and you’re still in the game.”
Yauch, who lives just a mile from Ground Zero, said being under attack like that was bound to have an effect.
“I think a big part of it is 9/11,” he says. “It’s almost like you get nostalgic for someone or something when it’s somewhere threatened or in jeopardy, in a sense.”
In addition to the songs themselves and the album title, there’s also striking artwork of the Manhattan skyline by artist Matteo Pericoli.
“We all live in downtown Manhattan, and we were all there,” Yauch says of that horrific day. “Each of us were home, it started pretty early in the morning. Basically, at first, I didn’t realize what was going on. I remember just hearing a loud explosion, and I just thought it was a truck backfiring. And then somebody was repairing my roof, doing work up there, and they came down and said, ‘Oh my God, it’s terrible, the World Trade Center is on fire.’ And I went up and looked and we didn’t really realize what was going on until my wife saw on the news that another plane had hit the Pentagon and then realized something pretty insane was happening. It was pretty intense. When the building started falling, there was like dust coming up toward my house. It stopped a few blocks away.”
In the end, Yauch and his family –his daughter is now 5 1/2 — made the decision to stay put in the city despite obvious fears.
“I think it’s slowly getting back to normal. That first period of time … from September through the New Year, was definitely very strange. But I remember sort feeling like it’s time to try to get back to a normal life after the New Year.”
As for To The 5 Boroughs attacking Bush, there are four songs which name-check the U.S. president and his war-mongering philosophy.
Here’s a sample of just a few of the lyrics.
“Maybe it’s time that we impeach Tex and the military muscle that he wants to flex,” goes It Takes Time To Build. “By the time Bush is done, what will be left? / Selling votes like E-pills at the discotheque / Environmental destruction and the national debt / But plenty of of dollars in the fat war chest.”
“I already thought he was jackass but that definitely took it to a whole other level, the things he’s done since then,” Yauch says of Bush’s response to 9/11.
As for the recent resignation of the CIA director George Tenet, Yauch says, “I was about to say I wish Bush would resign, but that would give us (U.S. vice-president Dick) Cheney.”
Yauch, now a John Kerry supporter, has no predictions about the coming U.S. election but he hopes Bush will be gone.
“I hope so. I think (Bush) is a pretty twisted man. I hope that Kerry will be good. That’s who’s most likely to beat Bush. I’m basically thinking about how to get this guy out of there.”
Another track, Right Right Now Now, addresses the issue of gun control, specifically in the wake of the Columbine high school shootings.
“Columbine Bowling, childhood stolen, we need a bit more gun controlling,” goes the rap.
“It’s definitely a topic that needs to be discussed,” Yauch says. “I think gun control in the United States is a pretty intense issue and it’s good to open it up and discuss it. There’s a lot of people who have a lot of very extreme feelings on both sides.”
Yauch, who was a fan of Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine, can’t wait to see the director’s anti-Bush followup Fahrenheit 9/11, which opens June 25.
In Bowling, Moore talks a lot about the White House- and media-generated climate of fear that feed off each other in the U.S, post-9/11.
“You really do see that in all the way the press deals with stuff here,” Yauch says. “I’ve noticed it even more since seeing that movie. They do just wind up the fear thing. It’s all feeding each other.
“The White House is doing it to cover their ass, I think, because every couple of weeks they come out and say there’s a terror alert. So, if anything happens, then they can say, ‘Oh, yeah, we knew about that.’ The papers print it because people buy it. People -buy it because they get scared. And it’s some kind of vicious cycle.”

—-

And my sidebar on namechecking Canada:

BEASTIE BOYS, whose new album, To The 5 Boroughs, hits stores on Tuesday (june 15, 2004), has three Canadian shout-outs.

“Gliding in the glades, like Lorne Greene you know I get paid,” on Ch-Check It Out.
Or on The Brouhaha: “I’m like tha freak from Cirque Du Soleil, with my leg behind my head and a rhyme to say.”
Or later on F–k You: “So don’t ask me to wine and dine ya, I’m from Brooklyn, you’re from Regina.”
On that last matter — since I’d venture to say both Greene and Cirque are both universally known and the Prairie town not so much — I had to ask Beastie Adam Yauch (aka MCA) for an explanation.
“It just sounded funny. It’s a funny name,” he told me. “My friend was directing a movie and had to keep going up there, and so they kept talking about it. It’s a good rhyming word.”

Queen drummer Roger Taylor arrived in Toronto over the weekend to begin two weeks of intensive rehearsals with musicians – half of whom are Canadian – from the upcoming tribute show, Queen Extravaganza, that will tour North America this summer.

Taylor and company will move to Montreal next for full-blown production rehearsals leading up to the May 26 North American tour launch in Quebec City.
“Toronto (was chosen because) they have great facilities here and it is a big city,” he told reporters during a teleconference interview.

“Without giving away too much we have a great view of the skyline and it’s very splendid. We’re doing the real nitty-gritty here. We’re on a great soundstage.”

Taylor, who confirmed he will attend the Queen Extravaganza tour launch on May 26, said so far, so good, on the rehearsal front in T.O.

“I was sitting down writing something facing away from the stage (Sunday) and (Montreal-born singer) Marc Martel was singing Bohemian Rhapsody and I had chills down my spine. I couldn’t see. And it was as if (late Queen singer) Freddie (Mercury) was in the room. It was uncanny, the absolute same vocal characteristic. And that was a fascinating moment for me.”

QUEEN EXTRAVAGANZA CANADIAN TOUR DATES:

May 26 Quebec, QC Grand Theatre du Quebec (tour launch)

May 27 Montreal, QC St. Denis

May 29 Toronto, ON QE Theatre

June 30 Vancouver, BC Orpheum
July 2 Calgary, AB Jack Singer
July 3 Edmonton, AB Jubilee