Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan have been honoured with the prestigious PEN Song Lyrics Award. The award is bestowed biennially by the writers' group PEN New England – with the aim of recognising excellence in the use of language in songwriting. This year's honorees were chosen by a committee that included U2's Bono, Elvis Costello and Salman Rushdie.
Bastille release their hugely anticipated second album ‘Wild World’ today through Virgin EMI. The album follows the band’s global 4 million selling, multi-platinum debut ‘Bad Blood’. ‘Wild World’ retains the vivid, rich, filmic song-writing of its predecessor but pushes the band’s distinctive sound in exciting new directions.
The super-successful Chinnichap team - Nicky Chinn and Mike Chapman - wrote some of the biggest pop and glam rock hits of the 70’s. These credentials made Nicky the perfect choice for Spotify’s new Secret Genius series, interviewing the songwriting talent behind some of the biggest musical success stories. Listen to Spotify’s Rob Fitzpatrick sit down with Nicky to talk songwriting, hit singles and ask – one hundred million sales later – how did he they do it?
Laura Mvula releases her new album, ‘The Dreaming Room’ today through RCA Victor (Sony). ‘The Dreaming Room’ is an expansion on what was already a captivating sound. The heavenly layers of voices, the unexpected complex diversions and the celestial grandeur are still all there but with the addition of buzzy analogue synths and electric guitar lines.
Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) announced today that Mike McCormack has been named Managing Director of the UK. McCormack first joined UMPG’s U.K. business in 1999 as Deputy Managing Director and during that time he signed and worked with artists and songwriters including Adele, Alabama Shakes, Lily Allen, Dangermouse, The Darkness, The Killers, MGMT and Sigur Rós.
Paul Simon has released ‘Stranger to Stranger’, his 13th solo album, on June 3rd via Concord Records. Full of thrilling, imaginative textures, ‘Stranger to Stranger’ conjures a vivid and vital new context to Simon’s well-established virtuosity as a singer and songwriter. The record - his first since 2011’s acclaimed ‘So Beautiful or So What’ - ushers the listener into a brave new musical world where expectations are defied and exceeded, as they were thirty years ago with another masterwork ‘Graceland’.
An artist whose music is at once timeless yet utterly of its time, Gregory Porter solidifies his standing as his generation’s most soulful jazz singer-songwriter with ‘Take Me to the Alley’, the much-anticipated follow-up to his sensational 2013 Blue Note debut ‘Liquid Spirit’.
Universal Music Publishing are well represented in the 2016 Ivor Novello nominations announced today, with seven out of 18 nominations and all three nominations in the Best Original Film Score category.
Always more than a musical genre, punk allowed a generation to express themselves without deference, to invent without fear, and to create without boundaries. 40 years on, Punk London is a year long programme of events to celebrate the most rebellious of music movements. One of the highlights of the program - ‘ANARCHY IN THE UK: #PUNKLONDON’ - opens at the Richard Young gallery this week, showcasing an incredible selection of both classic and never-seen-before images from Richard Young’s archive.
Eliza and the Bear release their self-titled debut album today on Capitol Records. It includes the current single 'Friends’, an uplifting song about the importance of friends and family, which went on to soundtrack a Bulmers cider advert. 'Friends' follows previous singles ‘Lion’s Heart’, which “led to roaring singalongs at festivals” (The Telegraph) and ‘It Gets Cold’ ( “hard to get away from its magnetic groove” - The Independent) – all of which made the Radio 1 playlist. Other standout tracks include the beautifully broody, strings accompanied ‘I’m On Your Side’, fan favourite