Today's Day in Rock Stories

Maynard James Keenan Addresses Tool Album Summer Release Rumor

"I write a lot of songs that people don't hear," Seger told the Detroit Free Press in 2003. "I just try to take the ones that sound the best - maybe have the best lyric, or the best melody. I really just enjoy the process. I fall in love with every single one of them. I finish 'em all, and I don't think there's a whole lot of difference between the bad ones and the good ones. But every now and then you hit something that you really like a lot. Every now and then you'll nail one that's really, really special. And that's what you live for.

"I've got a ballad on the new album called 'Finding Out,' where I really nailed the lyric," he said of the song. "So that's real good. The whole process is a lot of fun. When I have time to do it."

Seger postponed the remaining 19 dates on his Runaway Train tour last fall "upon receiving his doctor's orders to attend to an urgent medical issue concerning his vertebrae."

Winners included the late Leonard Cohen (Best Rock Performance), Mastodon (Best Metal Performance), Foo Fighters (Best Rock Song) and The War On Drugs (Best Rock Album). The National also won for Best Alternative Music Album.

Hard rock/metal act Avenged Sevenfold were also nominated this year, with their song 'The Stage' (from their album of the same name) getting a nod for Best Rock Song. However, the band decided not to attend the ceremony, owing to their category's exclusion from the main event. Lead singer M. Shadows texted radio DJ Eddie Trunk, telling him that the band's decision to not travel to New York was "not really a protest per se" but more of a financial consideration, given the costs involved.

It's now time for the New Jersey legends to return to their home turf and they've just announced an 'Original Misfits' show on May 19th in Newark, New Jersey. Billed as the "triumphant return to where it all began," it will the first Misfits East Coast show to feature their classic line-up since a 1983 gig at the Channel Club in Boston. In fact, the last time this line-up played New Jersey was 1982!

"This farewell tour will take a year or two to go all the places we've been and play them one more time, so it's not like we're going away," Rossington tells Billboard. "We're just winding it down a little bit. We'll be doing this a while longer."

The Southern rock icons will launch the farewell trek in West Palm Beach, FL on May 4, with the first leg scheduled to wrap up in Atlanta, GA on September 1; the run will include European dates, as well, at some point.

Lynyrd Skynryd will be joined by a variety of guests at various stops along the way, including Kid Rock, Hank Williams Jr., Charlie Daniels Band, Bad Company, Marshall Tucker Band, 38 Special, Blackberry Smoke and Blackfoot.

The sole remaining original member of the group, Rossington hints that 'farewell' may not necessarily mean 'the end' of Skynyrd's live performances.

Available via Primus' website, pre-sale tickets for the US tour will begin Tuesday, January 30 at 10:00 a.m. local time (password: Goblins), with general public seats available Friday, February 2.

Mastodon are touring behind their latest album, "Emperor Of Sand", which earned the Atlanta outfit their first Grammy on January 28 when the track, "Sultan's Curse", was named the Best Metal Performance of the year at the 60th annual Grammy Awards in New York.

Drummer Brann Dailor said that the award is "huge for us and for heavy metal. It's one of the greatest genres with some of the most talented and skilled musicians playing it."

The New Jersey quartet is set to travel to select cities in North America and Europe staring this fall and running until late summer and perform the album in its entirety.

The seven headline appearances include stops in Sweden, Italy, Austria, Hungary and Germany, with tickets on sale now. The Seattle outfit will open the four-week run in Stockholm, Sweden on June 20, and wrap things up with a July 14 gig at Lisbon, Portugal's NOS Alive festival.

The new album is set to hit stores on February 2nd and the new video can be streamed here. Frontman Biff Byford had this to say about the story behind the song, "The song tells the story of Saxon's very first tour in 1979 with Mot�rhead. I want people to get a flavor of what it was like in the UK in 79/80 for Saxon and Mot�rhead at the start of the 80s musical revolution."

In the Best Original Score category, Greenwood is up against Hans Zimmer for Dunkirk, Alexandre Desplat for The Shape of Water, John Williams for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, and Carter Burwell for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

And ahead of the album's February 2 release, Bruno is here to get you jazzed about the forthcoming album. Here Come The Runts was recorded at Bruno's home studio in the coastal California mountains--a landscape that heavily influenced the album's music.

Bruno explains, "The record definitely has a feel to it that seems parallel to the vibe of this mountain and the land. It's like a non-GMO record. There's no fake s*** on there. None of the vocals are tuned. It's all real playing."

So, just what kind of music comes with a mountain-vibe? We've already heard the hit "Passion," as well as "Seven Sticks of Dynamite" and "Handyman," so those tracks should give you an idea.

You'll also get a rock-n'-roll-meets-pop sound from the album. But don't be fooled by the "pop" label. In fact, Bruno explained, "I say 'pop' how I grew up listening to it--in the sense of Dire Straits or Born In The U.S.A or The Cars or Tom Petty." Right on.

He replied, "It's been 15 years but over the last two years, I've kind of reconnected with Paul [Stanley] and Gene [Simmons]. I reconnected with Paul on the [Free cover] track 'Fire and Water' [on Frehley's own album 2016's Origins Vol. I]. He actually shot a video with me. So that was a lot of fun and it was good to reconnect with an old buddy.

"And then more recently, I did two songs with Gene for this new studio record that will be coming out. And then I did a [Hurricane Harvey] charity event with Gene in Minneapolis. That was a big success.

In a recent interview to promote Five, his upcoming album of orchestral music, Genesis keyboard player Tony Banks was asked about the possibility of getting the old band back together. His answer: "I don't rule it out at all. Mike and I see each other all the time, we get on well, no problem. It's never an impossibility."

He went on to praise the recent return to live touring by Phil Collins, though with the reminder that Collins isn't able to drum anymore. He was also open to the idea of Collins' son Nick filling in on drums, as he is on his father's tour.

The band pre-recorded their performance of the tune from "Songs Of Experience" on a barge in the Hudson River on Friday evening, two days before the awards' live broadcast from Madison Square Garden.

The Palos Verdes estates house in California is where Bennington took his own life on July 20th of last year. His family has since moved out of the home.