Steve Hackett Gets a Fresh Start — in the Living Room

The new album Out of the Tunnel’s Mouth came about after rock guitarist Steve Hackett was forced to make a fresh start. Pushed out of his previous business and moving to a new home, he set up to record in the new living room with the help of technology that is, he says, much smaller than the equipment of the past. The Sansamp, for example, produces a guitar tone in a much smaller space than the guitar rigs he used on past albums.

The small space didn’t limit the involvement of other musicians on an album that Steve described as “a solo record in name only.” The choir and orchestral passages were constructed largely in the living room by painstaking overdubs by the likes of Christine Townsend, who played violin and viola. Roger King was in the middle of the project, not only with keyboards, but also operating the computer on which the album was recorded.

Nick Beggs played bass parts, along with Chris Squire, who was returning a favor after Steve appeared on Chris’s Christmas album two years ago. There were at least 10 more singers and musicians involved. Out of the Tunnel’s Mouth is initially available on Hackett’s web site and at his tour stops across western Europe.

♫ “Highway” ♫

“Highway” – Paul McCartney

One blues song from Paul McCartney’s Citi Field concert, and the new album Good Evening New York City.

Notes

The movie Mamma Mia was such a huge success (for example, the highest-grossing U.K. film ever) that the producers are trying to figure out how to do a sequel. Star Amanda Seyfried has been signed up, and the shape of the script will likely depend on which other cast members are returning. As for the music, since the original movie used up a quarter of Abba’s dance songs, there has been some talk of using songs from a source other than Abba in the sequel — but surely that’s just a ploy to try to persuade Abba songwriters Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus to write a couple of new hits for the new movie.

Production on the movie adaptation of The Hobbit is proceeding despite the cash problems at MGM, with Warner Bros. and some of the suppliers keeping things going. MGM is still hoping to avoid bankruptcy.

Yoso, the band formed by Toto’s former lead singer and former members of Yes, tested its stage show in a one-week tour of Mexico. The Yoso live show includes a few Yes and Toto songs and an already legendary version of “Stairway to Heaven.” The band’s debut album is essentially complete and will probably be released in advance of a much larger tour next year. After returning home from the tour, bassist Billy Sherwood took only half of the weekend off before going back into the studio to start work on his fourth solo album.

Pressing personal matters compelled Def Leppard to cancel the final month of its tour with Cheap Trick. The tour, which ran much of the summer, was to have continued across the United States and Canada from the end of October to the end of November. Cheap Trick has begun to schedule new shows, starting with one in Nashville, December 3.

The first Howard Jones album of new songs since the early 1990s is set for release November 6, with a week of U.K. album launch events scheduled.

Microsoft is trying to restore the T-Mobile Sidekick database it lost on October 2 after a routine hardware failure when, for reasons that have not been explained, backup files turned out to be inaccessible. After reporting at one point that the data was irretrievably lost, Microsoft then expressed confidence that it will eventually be able to restore most of the e-mail messages, photos, and other missing data. But it took Microsoft two weeks to partially reconstruct users’ address book data, and it has made no further announcements since. T-Mobile, meanwhile, appears to be preparing to abandon the current Sidekick platform and is trying to persuade Sidekick users to “upgrade” to another handset family.

The new Michael Jackson movie This Is It, made from rehearsal and backstage video from the final weeks of the singer’s life, delivers the vibe of a concert, according to fans who have seen it. The opening-weekend box office total in 97 countries, excluding the United States, is expected to reach $40 million. The movie was made by concert promoter AEG, and its theatrical release is expected to raise enough in revenue to cover the costs of the concerts that were canceled when Jackson died.

According to Billboard, U2 set a new record for largest attendance at a single U.S. concert by a single headliner with its Rose Bowl performance on October 25. There were 97,014 in attendance. U2’s 360° touring stage was specifically designed to allow better sight lines from more seats in a stadium. U2 also owns the second and third largest concerts on the all-time U.S. list, with its September 25, 1987, concert at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia and its September 29, 2009, concert at FedEx Field.

♫ “Did It Again” ♫

“Did It Again” – Shakira

Smooth, sassy dance pop – it’s the new single from Shakira in most of the world.

♫ “Stop This Game” ♫

“Stop This Game” – Cheap Trick

In case you missed the Cheap Trick performance at Chicagofest in 1981, this is how it started. (YouTube video)

Heart Guitarist’s New Album Was Composed for Babies

The new album by Heart guitarist Nancy Wilson was actually recorded a few years ago. Nancy, along with Heart’s other guitarist, Craig Bartock, wrote the guitar instrumentals as music to put babies to sleep. Nancy played the record for her own children as they were falling asleep and gave copies to family friends when they had new babies.

Now, the album, appropriately titled Baby Guitars, has been released to the public, initially an Amazon.com exclusive. The music might be more quiet and soothing than you would expect from Heart, and absent any singing, but Heart fans will nevertheless find the sound and musical style familiar.

T-Mobile Sidekick Data Vanishes

Around the beginning of the month, the Sidekick data service for T-Mobile phones went offline. What initially appeared to be a simple service disruption has turned into the most prominent public data loss ever, as it appears that most personal data that was on the Sidekick system has been permanently lost. According to T-Mobile, “we must now inform you that personal information stored on your device – such as contacts, calendar entries, to-do lists or photos – that is no longer on your Sidekick almost certainly has been lost as a result of a server failure at Microsoft/Danger. That said, our teams continue to work around-the-clock in hopes of discovering some way to recover this information.”

T-Mobile has hinted that it will credit customers for one month of access fees, and it may have to do much more than that to keep the Sidekick brand alive. The technology might have been cutting-edge in 2005 but is expensive and idiosyncratic when compared to other e-mail phones available in 2009. T-Mobile suspended sales and manufacturing of Sidekick devices over the weekend, apparently waiting to make sure the data service can be restored to a stable operating condition.

T-Mobile has cautioned users to keep the batteries in their Sidekick devices and keep them charged to reduce the risk of additional data loss.

The failure has called into question one of the promises of cloud computing, which stores working data on a “cloud,” an ever-changing array of computers at various physical locations. Before the Sidekick failure, cloud computing was thought to be better protected from data loss. But, as a user might ask, what happens if the whole cloud disappears? It is not a trivial question, as keeping a backup of the kind of distributed, encrypted database used in cloud computing is not a trivial matter. Individual users can save their own offline backups of their data, but this negates most of the convenience and energy savings that cloud computing was supposed to offer.

The confusion surrounding the cloud failure will almost certainly prompt Microsoft to postpone its new cloud-computing platform announcement that was to take place next month. The Sidekick data loss occurred, observers believe, because Microsoft pulled most of the engineers off of the Sidekick project as a cost-cutting measure. It would seem that the same failure could just as easily occur at any other Microsoft-managed cloud data center, all the more so as Microsoft’s traditional sources of revenue get squeezed.

In the meantime, Sidekick users are left to try to recollect their recent history from whatever clues they can pull together. Some users, for example, have been able to retrieve the subject lines of recent e-mail messages, but not the text of the messages. Others can only go by whatever notes they happened to write down on paper. It is somewhat as if a million e-mail phones were all thrown in the sea at once.

Notes

Roxette is marking its return by participating in Night of the Proms, an annual classical crossover tour in Belgium, Netherlands, and Germany, from late October to late December. Roxette had been slated to perform in the 2002 series, but pulled out for health reasons, so in a way, the band is picking up where it left off. Wanting to make sure up-to-date versions of the band’s albums were available, record label EMI remastered the Roxette catalog and reissued the albums two days ago. Some of the albums are available on U.S. download sites for the first time. The reissued albums have several bonus tracks, but aren’t meant as collector’s items, according to Roxette songwriter Per Gessle.

After salvaging what it could of its U.S. tour after Aerosmith had to pull out, ZZ Top is on its way to Europe for a month of shows there.

After finding success with albums on letters and numbers, They Might Be Giants has released a new children’s music album celebrating science and technology. Here Comes Science includes songs about planets, elements, photosynthesis, kinematics, and the electric car, and the sound is more reminiscent of the Beatles than the band has been in the past.

The Blu-ray movie format seems to be catching on. At this point, Blu-ray players are being purchased not just by early adopters, but also by movie fans. Hardware prices around $200 might keep the technology from going mainstream this year, but prices for entry-level Blu-ray players are expected to fall below $100 next year.

♫ “Who Cries Now” ♫

“Who Cries Now” – Unruly Child

This 1990s hard rock band, formed when World Trade broke up, has just signed a new one-album deal with Frontier Records. Here’s a song from way back when.