Concert Dates, Concert Tour News, Artist Information

Billy Joel’s My Lives Concert

Billy Joel is going on tour to promote his My Lives Album, a compendium of unheard tracks and favorite hits that chronicle his life as a performer. The Album My Lives provides a look at, in Billy Joel’s website’s words, “the complete career of Billy Joel through this behind-the-scenes journey, from the 60’s through to his Classical work, as he reveals some of his most intimate musical moments in [the] unprecedented box set.” The set includes 68 tracks, several of these on its DVD, like his video of Piano Man. For the full list of songs and a music player, check out ArtistDirect.com.
(Check out Sony Music’s Billy Joel homepage for more information on his concerts, his musical endeavors, and his social welfare programs like his music education initiative.)

Billy Joel’s tour began in Perth, Australia, in early November, and he’s currently moving around the Pacific and stopping in Japan before making the jump to the US and Hawaii. Billy Joel’s US tour starts in Honolulu on December 16, and tickets are going for $250 on StubHub.com’s Billy Joel tickets forum, where you can find sold out Billy Joel tickets.

Rod Stewart Concert Tickets on Sale!

Though Rod Stewart never really left in my heart, he’s back, touring to promote his new top-hits review album, Still the Same… Great Rock Classics of Our Time.

The album song list reads like a classical rock and roller junkie’s dream, with everything from CCR’s poigniantly anthemic “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” to the blistering melancholy of “Love Hurts” included. The list of titles includes “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” “Still the Same,” “It’s a Heartache,” “The Best of My Love,” and “Crazy Love.”

You can sample these songs at amazon.com’s Rod Stewart Still the Same page, just scroll down to the “Listen to Samples” section.

Top40’s review is saying of the album that it “fits like an old comfortable pair of jeans,” that “Every tune is an undisputed classic. The arrangements are close to the originals, [and] Rod Stewart is in fine voice.”

This show is a great choice for any fan of their local classic rock station: it hits all the bases, it doesn’t tweak with the songs too much, and it delivers it all with the style only a professional like Rod Stewart can bring to the table. Find sold-out tickets from other fans for Rod Stewart’s Still the Same tour at StubHub’s Rod Stewart Tickets forum, where spiky-haired rocker fans buy and sell tickets.

Red Hot Chili Peppers Tickets on Sale

The Red Hot Chili Peppers are warming up the busses for their North American tour scheduled to begin early January of next year.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers have timed this tour to promote their new double-cd album Stadium Arcadium, and will be teaming up for three months of the tour with hip-hop virtuouso Gnarles Barkley, reports Pedigree music.com.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers have been wowing audiences with their uniquely freaky music and performances for over twenty years now, and they still haven’t lost their original flare: this year, they’ve been shortlisted for the “Best Live Performance” award from Ireland’s Meteor Music Awards, following on their brilliant show at the Oxygen festival.  The band’s blurb on the event is online at The Red Hot Chili Peppers website.

They’ve recently added the following shows to their North American tour: Oklahoma City, Dallas, St. Louis, Raleigh, Charlotte, Washington DC, Tampa, Orlando, Ft. Lauderdale, Chicago, and Houston, so you’ve got more opportunities to see the band. However, these new shows have restrictions on the tickets: they’re available to fan club members first without any General Admittance, so your best bet to get a hold of these if you’re not on the list is to check out StubHub’s Red Hot Chili Peppers tickets, where fans can buy and sell tickets to their favorite shows.

Christina Aguilera Hits US in February

Christina Aguilera is currently on tour in Europe and is scheduled to begin her North American tour in February of next year. This past Wednesday night she appeared in Manchester, England, with a blowout set and effects. WeLoveCelebs.com has posted a brief photodocumentation of the concert (one of which is pictured above), and the presentation was fabulous. Shocking white costumes designed by Roberto Cavelli reminiscent of 1920’s high-end variety theater, enhanced with a hyper-lit set and the latest stage technology… yeesh.

For more information on her “Back to Basics” tour and album, go to my previous Christina Aguilera post, and if you want a bootleg (legitimacy not certified, by the way) set list from a while back that someone claims to have nicked, it’s scanned online at the Christina Aguilera Forum, a great resource site for fans.

Christina Aguilera’s American leg will begin February 20, 2007, at the Toyota Center in Houston, TX, and tickets are going for a wide range of prices, still as low as $93 this far out for you buyers, and around $800 for you sellers of top seats. Check out StubHub’s Christina Aguilera Tickets forum for the latest deals on Christina Aguilera’s North American tour tickets, from StubHub, the website where fans buy and sell tickets.

Justin Timberlake Tours with Pink

Justin Timberlake, the artist who is probably singlehandedly saving pop music, will be touring with Pink beginning in January 2007.

Timberlake is using this tour to promote his new album “Futuresex/Love Sounds”, which is a flat-out amazing musical product. Heavily polished and brilliantly experimental within the pop genre, Futuresex/Love Sounds is being hailed as his “breakthrough album” by critics. Says blogcritics.org’s review: “Neither of these two songs sound like what non-Justin fans would expect from him, and that’s the point. Future Sex/Love Sounds is Justin Timberlake’s breakthrough album, an album that makes listeners take notice. It is a fun album to listen to and makes us eager to hear what he does next.” And I have to admit, I listened to the whole album on a long drive recently, and was completely floored by it, especially when I realized that it was Justin Timberlake I was listening to. Sample it on iTunes store or elsewhere, but if you are as unfamiliar with Timberlake as I was, you will be very pleasantly surprised.

Pink brings to the show a powerful sound of her own that at the same time fits well with Timberlake’s. Pink will be promoting her own April 2006 album “I’m Not Dead,” which one listener reviewed as a “Great album. So much more knowledge in the lyrics, and just more down to earth. Basically something all girls can relate to at one time or another. It seems to take a defferent look at things than her other previous albums have. There just seems to be a deeper meaning to everything.”

Justin Timberlake and Pink’s upcoming tour is currently planned to visit 34 cities beginning in January, where they wil be dazzling with a “360-degree multimedia” spectacle. I definitely recommend checking it out, and StubHub has Justin Timberlake Tickets onsale for sold-out concert dates. Rock on.

(And both Justin and Pink sing with very mature lyrics for a mature audience, so please don’t bring your underage children)

Trans-Siberian Orchestra steams towards holiday season

The Trans-Siberian Orchestra, an epic musical endeavor best-known for its powerful reinterpretations of classical Christmas songs,
is on tour this winter to promote its upcoming album The Night Castle.

The Trans-Siberian Orchestra exploded on the musical scene in the mid-nineties with the release of Christmas Eve and Other Stories, a cover-album of age-old Christmas carols from “O Come, All Ye Faithful” to “Oh, Holy Night”, and other songs (not all beginning with “Oh”). Bringing their own compositions into the mix and adding heavy electric guitar to their sixty-piece orchestra, the band created an absolutely spectacular sound.

Commented one listener of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra’s second album, The Lost Christmas Eve,

“I ... popped the CD into the player of my car and was amazed and fell in love with what I was listening too. They take parts of our Christmas standby classic songs and spice them up a little bit with heavier sound music, that of rock and such. When talking to my friends about it I said that’s it’s kind of like the Metallica of Christmas Music.”

And the Trans-Siberian Orchestra concerts dazzle. It’s a true rock show with a twenty-someodd-member band blasting away at the audience, dry ice, and a light show done to the nines. As one reviewer summed up the experience:

“With Boston’s continuing affinity for classic rock, it is no surprise that the TSO is a perennial favorite in the city. Like Santa, the group promised they would return the same time next year possibly with some new surprises. Fans can only lament that Christmas comes but once a year.”

So if you’re feeling a heavy-metal itch when you see the snow fall, it may not be the lead paint curling and chipping but the polished steel runners of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra pulling into your city. Check out their greuling schedule on StubHub’s Trans Siberian Orchestra Tickets Page, where they’re doing multiple shows in a day.

Ok go concert dates added to tour

StubHub has posted new concert tour dates to the Ok go tour 2006, and has Ok go concert tickets for sale.
Ok go’s indy-rock style combines a super-energetic pace with hooks any pop group would kill for—they don’t shy away in the least from addictive lines and riffs (try not catching yourself mumbling “get get get get get over it… hey!” after hearing the song once)—and have no patience for the self-indulgence inherent in the emo scene (again, “get over it”).

But what’s really made this band a smash hit—there are so many people out there who can play guitar and sing—is their willingness to experiment with their entire band image, to remain on all fronts an ’indy’ operation, as it were by constantly making fun of themselves and refusing to take their growing fame too seriously. Their guitarist writes the OK go blog “the will to rock,” (which is really something else: very well constructed, great content, and a polished sense of humor) and their music videos, produced in-house on mostly low-budget equipment, are some of the more entertaining and popular videos on the internet. If you haven’t seen the OK go “Here it Goes Again” treadmill movie yet, I strongly strongly recommend you do. It’s the one that really blew the band up on the national scene, and with good reason. Many, many takes were involved in the shooting.

Interesting fact: the band’s founding members originally hail from the small town of Gilmanton Ironworks, which is an incorporated sub-entity of Gilmanton, NH, which is the unbelievably low-population-density town I grew up in, a real Currier-and-Ives New England town. Then again, it might just be the lead singer’s sister who’s from Gilmanton Ironworks… there’s a connection, I swear, and I think that’s probably the biggest news from the town since Grace Metalious wrote Peyton Place about its inhabitants. See my town hall below:

Crazy, eh?

But enough about New Hampshire and its tenuous connections to Ok go. You, too, can have a brush with fame. OK go is touring over the country through December 12th. Extra dates have been added, and StubHub.com has the listings for Ok go concert tickets online, give a peek and see when they’ll be coming near you.

Panic! at the Disco tours

Ah, Las Vegas, home to casinos and sand and… incredible rock bands… see, that’s how it doesn’t make sense. Them and the Killers are making a name for the city, and fast. Panic! at the Disco’s emo-crossed-with-ben-folds-crossed-with-indy-rock sound creates a sensationally energetic music that’ something not to be missed in concert. A genre-bending band, they’re garnering praise even from people who don’t exactly like the sort of music that Panic! at the Disco sounds like. BlogCritic.org has a great review of the band from their 2005 breakout, and although MTV.com was a little uncertain about the explosively theatrical character of the show, they gave it to the band on ambition and talent. Here’s what they had to say:

“Make no mistake about it, Panic! did manage to pack a few minutes of chord-crunching excellence in their hour-long set (“I Write Sins not Tragedies” was all spiky fretwork and ripping choruses and “Build God, Then We’ll Talk” came unwound on a truly epic crescendo), but you’d be hard pressed to find an arena show in recent memory that featured more gloriously unrelated ephemera.”
(read the whole MTV review on the Panic! at the Disco tour 2006 here)

And The band itself is a bunch of charmers, too. America Online has an AIM interview with Panic! at the Disco posted on its website, and it’s pretty entertaining stuff. To be completely honest, I don’t know how old these guys are, but I don’t want to ruin the amusing illusion I have that they’re all between the ages of eight and ten. An excerpt from the interview:
ScottBinMusic: Where are you right now?
PaniqAtTheDiscko: my house in Las Vegas
PaniqAtTheDiscko: well my parents’ house in las vegas
With a corn-rowed mime and legions of spangled backup dancers (insane circus-gone-wrong mise-en-scene not guaranteed at every show…), this show is sequined to the nines and ready to take all comers… who can handle it, it would seem. If you’re one of the hardy few who can take the Panic! at the Disco tour 2006, Panic! at the Disco concert tickets are available at StubHub.com, where fans buy and sell tickets.

Bob Seger kicks off American tour 2007

Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band are hitting the road, kicking off their 2007 tour in Grand Rapids Michigan tonight. A country-rock legend—though ’country rock’ doesn’t capture what he does—Seger has been in the music scene for forty years now, a contemporary of Springstein and predecessor to Mellencamp.

Dishing out some Old Time Rock & Roll, Seger and his Silver Bullet Band will be making stops in West Virginia, Montana, Massachussetts, Colorado, and, of course, Michigan, to name a few. StubHub has pages for Bob Seger concert tickets, going as low as $25 (buyers’ delight) and as high as $1325 for those of you in the selling market.
During the month of November, Seger will be joined on the road by country singer/songwriter Steve Azar, who will be coming out with his new album “Indianola” this summer. Azar’s diverse musical talents and strong presence in the country music world are sure to bring a lot of fans and make his on-stage work with Seger a real treat. Great American Country’s website has a news spot on the collaboration as well as an in-depth bio on Azar himself.

His fans’ websites are going crazy over the new tour, scraping for all the news they can get and revising and reposting epic bios on Bob Seger. For a taste of a real Seger-fan internet mainstay, check out www.segerbob.com. The webmaster is a dyed-in-the-wool Silver Bullet junkie, and in fact, that’s his arm tattooed above.

Also, if you’ve got an XM radio box, XM’s Offstage station will be handing the mic and turntables over to Bob Seger for a one-hour session in their studios, where he’ll be putting on his DJ hat and playing his favorite music without any restrictions. The majesty of deterritorialized space.

Tickets to Bob Seger concerts available at Stubhub.com

Tenacious D concert tickets online

This is not the best blog in the world, no.

It’s just a tribute.

Jack Black and Kyle Gass are back on the Tenacious D tour,  and this time it feels like destiny. Timed to coincide with the release of their new movie “The Pick of Destiny”, they’ve returned to their hard-rocking, face-melting roots, and the cosmos will never be the same again.

Starting in the Las Vegas House of Blues on November eleventh, tenacious D will kick off their countrywide tour that will bring them from California to New York to Georgia, and as reports have it, to the UK as well. Nobody is safe.

Along with the concert dates and the movie release, Tenacious D has cut a full album with the songs from the movie. There’s great information online about the album release at IGN.com. The tracks on the album are

1. “Kickapoo”
2. “Classico”
3. “Baby”
4. “Destiny”
5. “History”
6. “The Government Totally Sucks”
7. “Master Exploder”
8. “The Divide”
9. “Papagenu (He’s My Sassafrass)
10. “Dude (I Totally Miss You)”
11. “Break In-City (Storm the Gate!)”
12. “Car Chase City”
13. “Beelzeboss (The Final Showdown)”
14. “POD”
15. “The Metal”

The movie itself looks like it’s going to be right in the vein of their television show—I saw the trailer last night at the movie theater, and it looks hysterical. It’s got the devil (of course), an apparently epic quest (thank god) and good old fashioned grungy-stage open mic night (booyah). They’ve gone way over the top with the whole slapstick element, but their television show was never anything if not melodramatic, with microphones yes lighting on fire and absurd montages of the Black brothers plumbing the depths of their collective creative genius. The Tenacious D Pick of Destiny trailer is online at YouTube now, give it a gander.
Again, Tenacious D concert tickets are available online at Stubhub.com, ranging from $42 at the Gibson Ampitheater in Hollywood to $401 at the Masonic Temple Theater in Chicago. Jack, Kyle, and the entire insane Tenacious D crew will be travelling all over the country, so check for a theater date near you.