Swift drops 4 songs before tour start
Taylor Swift debuted “four previously unreleased songs” ahead of the Friday launch of her highly anticipated stadium tour.
The hitmaker dropped the quartet of singles at midnight Friday “in celebration of the Eras Tour,” which follows the October release of her “Midnights” album. Swift announced her latest auditory offering Thursday via Instagram stories, and the singles manifested on Spotify hours later.
Three of the tunes are “Taylor’s Version” tracks, which refers to rerecordings of her music that got stuck in ownership limbo when her former label,
Big Machine Records, was sold to Scooter Braun in 2019. Swift lost the master recordings to her first six albums but later “devised a plan to rerecord her early work as a way to devalue those masters,” Los Angeles Times music critic Mikael Wood explained.
The new recordings include the guitar-heavy rock ballad “Eyes Open (Taylor’s Version)” and “Safe & Sound (Taylor’s Version)” featuring the Civil Wars’ Joy Williams and John Paul White. Both songs were featured on the soundtrack to the 2012 film “The Hunger Games.”
Swift also debuted “If This Was a Movie (Taylor’s Version),” whose previous iteration hailed from the Target deluxe edition of her 2010 album, “Speak Now.”
The fourth track is the love song “All of the Girls You Loved Before,” a vault track from her seventh studio album, “Lover,” in 2019.
Swift’s Eras Tour kicked off Friday in Arizona.
Barrymore to host MTV awards:
Drew Barrymore is taking her daytime talk show hosting skills to the 2023 MTV Movie and TV
Awards.
The Golden Globe winner announced Wednesday that she has been tapped to serve as master of ceremonies for the channel’s celebration of the best of the year’s movies and television.
Barrymore said on her talk show she was looking forward to the awards show, which is all about the fans. “It’s going to an epic night, big moments, huuuuuuge movie stars,” she said. “Cocaine Bear, are you free on May 7?” she said referencing the recent box-office hit film.
The MTV Movie and TV Awards will broadcast live May 7 from Los Angeles.
Posthumous album set from Coolio:
The estate of rapper Coolio plans to release a studio album later this year that the Grammywinning hitmaker had been working on in the days before he died.
“Long Live Coolio” will
be the first posthumous album release from the rapper, and the first single, “TAG ‘You It,’ ” featuring Too $hort and DJ Wino, dropped Friday.
The single’s video marks the last piece of visual content Coolio appeared in before his death from cardiac arrest on Sept. 28 at age 59.
Coolio won a Grammy for best solo rap performance for “Gangsta’s Paradise,” the 1995 hit from the soundtrack of the film “Dangerous Minds.”
March 18 birthdays:
Composer John Kander is
96. Guitarist Bill Frisell is
72. Actor Geoffrey Owens is 62. Actor Thomas Ian Griffith is 61. TV host Mike Rowe is 61. Singer Vanessa Williams is 60. Guitarist Jerry Cantrell is 57. Rapper Queen Latifah is 53. Actor Sutton Foster is 48. Singer Adam Levine is 44. Actor Lily Collins is 34. Actor Ciara Bravo is 26.