Group Love – Tongue Tied

Weird Al Yankovich has sampled them.  Even John Michael Higgins has covered them in a capalla for Vince Vaughn.  Owner of a Lonely Heart was a number 1 hit in the 1980s that has since been the hallmark song of the band Yes.  The song was featured on the Break Up, as Higgins sings it to Vaughn at a family dinner and Yankovich sampled it in Hooked on Polkas.  And now the band that is famed as championing progressive music, writing epic tunes that require 16 musicians and may even last 16 minutes, has spawned an offspring.

The offspring is Ryan Rabin, son of former guitarist from Yes, Trevor Rabin.  Rabin joins Andrew Wessen, Sean Gadd, Hannah  Hopper and Christian Zucconi to form American Indie band Group Love.

 

The band has been touring with Florence and the Machine and released their debut album, Never Trust A Happy Song, in September last year. Tongue Tied is the most recent single to be taken off the album and is the follow up to debut single, Colours.

Their debut video featured the band dressed like Native Indians and bludgeoning a lincher for trying to hang their vocalist, Zucconi, under a tree.  And now, although less graphic and bloody, the video to Tongue Tied has just as much fearfulness packed into the wide eyes of a blond chap, running shirtless and ending up, face down in a inflatable baby pool in the park.  The man is running scared because he is being chased by suited men wearing WWF masks for apparently kissing the wrong girl at a party.

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We Are Young by Fun featuring Janelle Monae

‘My lover she’s waiting for me just across the bar; My seat’s been taken by some sunglasses asking bout a scar, and I know I gave it to you months ago.’  That’s how the song starts and those lyrics may sound like the tale of another boy and a girl…but then the song ends with ‘So if by the time the bar closes, and you feel like falling down I’ll carry you home.’

The song is not just about being in love…it’s about being young and love happening to be one of the many incidents of youth.  Other incidents include falling down after the bar closes, and friends who think they can reach the top of the Empire State building from a bathroom.

Nate Ruess, Andrew Dost and Jack Antonoff of the 2008 American Indie band Fun, paid tribute to the impulsive celebrations of youth on their new single, We Are Young.  The song features Janelle Monae, whom the band is supporting on her Campus Consciousness Campaign.

Monae caught the world’s attention with her Grammy-nominated single Tightrope and her performance of Cold War at the 2011 Grammy Awards, sharing a stage with Bruno Mars and B.O.B.  The young singer is due to release more music this year.

This is not the first time Fun have collaborated with an artist for release of a single, having released C’mon, earlier last year, together with Panic at the Disco.  The song We Are Young was covered on an episode of Glee in December last year.

The band has an eclectic range of instruments including, trumpets, flugelhorn, glockenspiel among the usual, and have opened for the likes Paramore.

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These Days by Foo Fighters

‘Easy for you to say, your heart has never been broken; your pride has never been stolen; not yet, not yet.’

Melodically so simple – A, D, C, Em, G – lyrically so philosophically rock!  Written by vocalist Dave Grohl and taken off the album, Wasting Light, this is the third single that proves that so long as the Foo Fighters are around, radio will have a reason to play rock even in the midst of mistletoe romance with Bieber, drug rehabilitation with Rihanna and time-travel in soul with Beyonce.

The song oscillates between verses of quiet vocals to guitar laden guttural choruses.  The song starts with the delicate plucking of a folk guitar as Grohl professes life wisdom that makes navel-gazing seem like the thought-process of musicians rather than Harvard lawyers.  Then a second’s pause before Grohl’s vocals rage through crashing guitars on the chorus.

The Foo Fighters have really mastered the perfect balance with subdued delivery of anthemic words and rich guitar-wear that makes all the emotions hang as heavily as classic Foo Fighters music did in Times Like These and Learn to Fly.

Country may tell you stories about innocent romance, and rap may tell you how to treat your woman but nothing puts meaning into the loves and losses of life better than the angst of rock and roll.

In an interview with Rolling Stone Magazine, Grohl made it clear that Wasting Light as an album was not going to be a soft contemplation from the armchair of maturity.  ‘When I was writing the riffs for this record, they were getting heavier and heavier," he said, ‘there’s something about getting older and taking a right on …… Discharge Avenue rather than turning left on Tom Petty Lane."

One listen to the song and you’ll realize why Grohl said this is his favorite song he’s ever written.  Thank you Foo Fighters for keeping anthemic rock on the charts and on the radio.

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Lonely Boy - Black Keys

Remember when Christopher Walken showed us how he can bust a move for Fat Boy Slim?  ON the video to Weapon of Choice, Walken glides and leaps in a suit across a hotel in a solo Broadway like performance with Elvis-like knee buckling, heel kicking, arms outstretched and hands on rabbit-paws and hands-in- pocket.  The videoclip was about the need to just break out into dance no matter where you are or who you are.

Derrick Tuggle will tell you, sometimes breaking out into dance can decide where you go and who you become!  Derrick Tuggle has been one of the biggest reasons for the viral addiction to the Black Keys video for their new single, Lonely Boy.  The entire videoclip sees Toggle dancing in a room, with a lot of twisting, Travolta-like room pointing, occassional kick t the side and also what possibly looks like either fist-pumping or cowboy-roping-a-horse  moves.

Forty-eight year old Tuggle may have been a part-time security guard and an actor who was formerly cast as extras for music videos, but Tuggle's moves got the videoclip 400,000 hits in 24 hours and won him a seat on the Ellen de Generes couch as he sweated profusely through an akward interview but then showed miss talk show dance queen herself how to bust a move Tuggle style.

Tuggle was supposed to be an extra for the Lonely Boy clip, his sole role being to hand the motel keys to the Black Keys.  "I was cast as an extra, and there were maybe six or seven other people who were supposedly going to be in the video. ... I was the first one to perform in the video. It was a motel shot where the guys from the Black Keys come and give me the keys to their motel room," he said. "The director just sort of noticed me dancing and asked me, 'Can you perform?' I said, 'I can dance, anybody can dance,' so I took some moves from everybody: John Travolta from 'Saturday Night Fever' and 'Pulp Fiction,' the Carlton Banks dance from 'The Fresh Prince' and a little bit of Michael Jackson, so it was a smorgasbord of everybody in there.

"It was just a spur-of-the-moment thing," Tuggle added. "My acting teacher Mark McPherson, he has us do this thing before we start class called 'Song and Dance,' where he'll have us sing one of our favorite songs, and then while we're singing it, he'll have us do a crazy dance, or a sexy dance, and I guess it spawned from that."

This isn't the first time, Tuggle starred in a music video, but this is the first time he got noticed.  Tuggle could also be seen in Lenny Kravitz's videoclip to Stand.  He's the guy playing the bass in the band.

Lonely Boy is the first single from the Black Keys' upcoming album, El Camino, due to be released in December.

Lonely Boy - Black Keys

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Tuggle in Lenny Kravitz video

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