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Sara Bareilles is back at the Grammys with the eighth nomination of her career, but it’s the first in the Americana field, where she’s up for Best American Roots Performance for “Saint Honesty,” a song she co-wrote with Grammy-winning country songwriter Lori McKenna. Will the change of scenery finally win her her first Grammy 11 years after she broke through at these awards?

Bareilles first made the cut in 2009 when she was a newcomer nominated for Song of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for her breakthrough hit “Love Song.” Then came two more pop performance nominations for “King of Anything” (2011) and “Brave” (2014), plus a surprise Album of the Year nom for “The Blessed Unrest” (2014).

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After that she took a detour to Broadway by writing the score for “Waitress,” which earned her a Best Musical Theater album...

Bong Joon-ho’s ‘Parasite’.

Australia and Korea have had an official co-production treaty in place for five years now, though a project has yet to eventuate from it.

Of course, co-productions – particularly official ones under government treaties or MOUs – aren’t easy and can take a long time to come to fruition. The challenges are often numerable: finding the right partner, nuances involved in cross-cultural creative and financial collaboration, language barriers, managing talent and shoots across countries, and a lot of paperwork.

But co-productions also offer many creative and financial benefits, particularly as the marketplace for content grows increasingly global.

Collaboration between Australia and Korea’s screen industries will form a focus at tomorrow’s Asia Pacific Screen Forum in Brisbane – a new adjunct to the Asia Pacific Screen Awards (Apsa) – in a session supported by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (Dfat)’s Australia-Korean Foundation.

Speaking on the...

Guitar game recognizes guitar game on the new album by Marcus King, which finds the South Carolina musician teaming up with producer and Black Keys guitarist Dan Auerbach to release King’s first solo LP, El Dorado.

Due January 17th, the album is a collection of 12 tracks, all written by King and Auerbach with songwriters like Pat McLaughlin, Paul Overstreet, and Ronnie Bowman. El Dorado also finds King backed up not by his eponymous Marcus King Band (as he was on his last effort, 2018’s Carolina Confessions), but by Auerbach’s roster of studio heavyweights,...

Lewis Capaldi has steadily been climbing up the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart with his breakthrough hit “Someone You Loved” (watch the video above), and on the chart dated September 28 it reached the top five for the first time, climbing from number-nine to number-four. Can the sensitive 22-year-old Scotsman — and second cousin of “Doctor Who” actor Peter Capaldi — next follow in the Grammy footsteps of Ed Sheeran?

Sheeran was also a modest British balladeer before rising to international superstardom. His debut single “The A Team,” about a young woman struggling with drug addiction, earned him one Grammy nomination in 2013, but it was a big one: a surprise bid for Song of the Year. Since then he has won that category (for “Thinking Out Loud” in 2016), one of four Grammys he has won to date, and he has become a reliable hit-maker.

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Today, City of Hope, a world-renowned independent research and treatment center for cancer, diabetes and other life-threatening diseases, announced the spectacular line-up of talent confirmed to take the stage at its Music, Film and Entertainment Industry Group’s 2019 Spirit of Life Gala, which will honor Epic Records chairman and CEO, Sylvia Rhone.

Award-winning recording artists Alicia Keys and Sara Bareilles will join together for a one-of-a-kind duet performance in honor of Rhone. Yolanda Adams will also perform at the event, while Eric H. Holder Jr., 82nd attorney general of the United States will present Rhone with the prestigious award. The event will feature a very special surprise performance from one of Rhone’s most iconic groups. The gala will take place on Thursday, Oct. 10 at Barker Hangar in Santa Monica.

“We are deeply grateful to these talented artists for lending their voices to support City of Hope’s delivery of...

They call Billy Joel the “Piano Man” (based off his song of the same name) but truth be told, there are a number of musicians these days who could lay claim to the moniker. From Chris Martin to John Legend, Tori Amos to Alicia Keys, piano-playing artists ran the spectrum from rockers to crooners and everything in between.

When Sara Bareilles released her debut single, “Love Song,” in 2007, searches for “Sara Bareilles sheet music” spiked online, with fans looking for ways to cover the singer-songwriter’s unorthodox ode to romance,...

Lana Del Rey has always been a pop classicist at heart — but she’s finally made her pop classic. The long-awaited Norman Fucking Rockwell is even more massive and majestic than everyone hoped it would be. Lana turns her fifth and finest album into a tour of sordid American dreams, going deep cover in all our nation’s most twisted fantasies of glamour and danger. No other songwriter around does such an expert job of building up elaborate romantic fantasies, and then burning them to the ground. She purrs lines like,...

Lana Del Rey has finally announced the official release date and track list for her sixth studio album, Norman Fucking Rockwell. Del Rey began releasing singles in 2018 and revealed the official name in September.

Norman Fucking Rockwell will be out on August 30th. The cover features a collage-like image starring the singer with actor Duke Nicholson, the grandson of Jack Nicholson. Her sister Chuck Grant took the photo. All of the previously released songs that Del Rey has either previewed or officially released, including “Mariners Apartment Complex” and her cover of Sublime’s “Doin’ Time,...

Always an awards bridesmaid but never a bride, Sara Bareilles has been nominated at the Grammys, Tonys and Emmys, but hasn’t won any of them yet. She might have another chance at Grammy in 2020, though, if she’s nominated for her latest album “Amidst the Chaos,” which was released in April. It’s her sixth studio album, following “What’s Inside: Songs from ‘Waitress'” (2015), and it’s her first of non-Broadway material since “The Blessed Unrest” (2013), for which she was nominated for Album of the Year.

The songs from “Chaos” have more of a political bent than Bareilles’s usual work. “No Such Thing” is a torch song that was actually inspired by how much she misses the Obamas in the White House. “What can I say? I’m a fan, I miss them, I miss them deeply every day, so gonna write a song about it,” she told Forbes.

David Bowie’s 1969 demo tape, recorded in an effort to secure a record contract with Mercury Records, will be released as The Mercury Demos on June 28th.

The 10-song vinyl release, featuring nine unreleased tracks, feature early versions of Space Oddity tracks like “Janine,” “An Occasional Dream,” “Letter to Hermione” and “Space Oddity”; the version of “Space Oddity” here previously featured on the Sound & Vision box set, the lone recording from The Mercury Demos that has been released.

The Mercury Demos, which Bowie recorded alongside guitarist John Hutchison, also features...

Chris Longo Tony Sokol Dec 13, 2018

Radiohead, Janet Jackson, and Stevie Nicks are among the new class of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame made it official: Radiohead, Janet Jackson, Stevie Nicks, Def Leppard, The Cure, Roxy Music, and the Zombies are part of the 2019 inductee class.

The Cleveland-based Hall of Fame will host its induction ceremony at Barclays Center in Brooklyn on March 29th. HBO and SiriusXM will air edited versions of the ceremony at a later date.

Stevie Nicks becomes the first woman to be twice inducted into the Rock Hall. She was previously honored in 1998 as a member of Fleetwood Mac. Nicks’ 1981 solo debut, “Bella Donna,” yielded four hit singles, including “Edge of Seventeen.” Nicks released eight solo albums in her career, earning eight Grammy nominations.

If South Park has taught us nothing, at least we know Disintegration rules. Kyle...

Sara Bareilles, Broadway’s Waitress composer and lyricist, will return to the starring role for a limited engagement in January, launching the hit musical production’s third year.

Though the Tony- and Grammy-nominated Bareilles wrote the show’s music, she did not originate the role of the pie-baking Jenna (that was Jessie Mueller), but Bareilles has taken the Waitress center stage at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre for two previous and very popular stints. The first was in 2017, the second in January 2018.

For the third time around, Bareilles will be joined by Gavin Creel as Dr. Pomatter.

Bareilles and Creel will play the Diane Paulus-directed Waitress engagement from January 7 to February 3, 2019.

The casting was announced today by producers Barry and Fran Weissler and Norton and Elayne Herrick.

“We have three productions of Waitress running,” said Bareilles about the Broadway, London and touring shows,...

The hit musical Waitress opened on November 9, 2018, at the Carlos P. Romulo Auditorium, Rcbc Plaza, Makati City, Manila, Philippines. Based on the beloved film by Adrienne Shelly, Waitress features music and lyrics from six-time Grammy nominee Sara Bareilles 'Love Song,' 'Brave' and book by Jessie Nelson. Waitress tells the story of a pie maker named Jenna who, despite the mundanity of her life, finds comfort and reckoning in the simple magic of baking. With the help of her two friends, Dawn and Becky, she dreams of a way out of her loveless marriage and musters the courage to change her life for the better.

Dickson Leach’s UK-China project is being produced by Christopher Granier-Deferre.

The Iffam Project Market (Ipm) has unveiled 14 films that will be presented during its event December 9-11.

They include the latest feature from UK director Hope Dickson Leach (The Levelling), who will introduce her family drama Klepto, which is being produced by Christopher Granier-Deferre at Poisson Rouge Pictures and is a UK-China co-production.

Also on the list are South Korean director Song II-Kong’s romantic drama Love Song and the first fiction feature from documentary director Yan Ting Yuen, arthouse project Hong Kong Sister.

The event will run during...

The most unexpected hit of the year, hands down, is Weezer‘s cover of Toto’s “Africa.” It’s the tweet-turned-song heard ’round the country, setting a weekly record for spins as a Number One hit at Alternative radio and reaching Number 54 on the Hot 100.

Though it seems like a jokey fluke, covers like this one are an increasingly important way for rock bands to gain exposure at a time when the genre has lost most of its traction in the mainstream. Billboard has noted at least 15 other rock covers...

This summer has been good to singer-songwriter-actress Sara Bareilles, who hosted the Tony Awards with Josh Groban in June and then earned an Emmy nomination for “Jesus Christ Superstar” in July. But as she sang at the Tonys with Groban, she has never actually won a major industry award. It’s been a while since her last new album, but on August 22 she revealed on Twitter that she’s working on a new album (see the tweet at the bottom of this post), so maybe her absence will have made Grammy hearts grow fonder.

Bareilles’s breakthrough was as a recording artist. Her single “Love Song” earned her a pair of Grammy noms in 2009: Song of the Year and Best Female Pop Vocal. Then in 2011 she returned to the Female Pop Vocal race with her song “King of Anything.” In 2014 she earned yet another bid for Best Pop Solo Performance for “Brave,...

“I didn’t think this would happen again,” Liz Phair sang in her signature song, “F— and Run,” a line written to describe a one-night stand, or something close to it. In a far less rueful sense, the lyric also applies to what’s happening again on Phair’s current seven-city tour, in which she’s performing nothing but 1993-and-prior material, in honor of a recent boxed set commemorating the 25th anniversary of “Exile to Guyville.” With that razor-sharp landmark album, she cut, but she definitely hasn’t run.

Phair opened her brief cross-country outing Thursday night at the Masonic Hall at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, a 150-seat venue she could have easily sold out several times over (as scalper prices clearly indicated). Quick-on-the-draw ticketholders weren’t entirely sure what nature of gig they were in for, especially since Phair has already announced an entirely separate tour of bigger venues for the fall,...

Paris Hilton has become a muse to her boyfriend of two months, Benji Madden. "He actually wrote me a beautiful song, and actually recorded it in the studio," Hilton, 27, said Monday night at the Lg launch of the TV series Scarlet. "He surprised me with it. It's called, 'Shine Your Light.' It's this really beautiful love song about me. It was the sweetest thing that anyone has ever done for me."As Madden spent the night sharing Dj duties with pal Steve Aoki, Hilton couldn't stop gushing about the 29-year-old Good Charlotte guitarist "He's my best friend," she said.