This Week's Top Story: Chris Cornell's widow is suing the remaining members of Soundgarden over unpaid royalties, and the rights to unreleased songs he wrote. Even in death, the music business can't seem to work its way out of the ethical black hole it usually resides in, which isn't to be unexpected. When bands continue on as brands and earning entities long after they have finished their work, it seems inevitable that there will continue to be fights about how the money should be divided up. That doesn't stop the situation from feeling rather unseemly.
It's one thing for members of a band to be fighting, or to try hiding money from one another in the pursuit of a larger share of the pie. It's another thing to pull those kinds of stunts on a widow who likely never had the same inside knowledge of the financial workings of the band. If it's true that Chris Cornell's share of the profits hasn't been paid out to his widow, it paints one of the more damning pictures in all of the fights we have seen with bands and their money.
What's worse is that she claims the remaining members are holding the money hostage in essence to get her to hand over control of recordings Cornell made before his death of new songs. She claims they were written by Cornell with no promise of them being intended for Soundgarden, while the other members of the band are already at work turning them into what will soon be an ugly, posthumous release that will see Cornell's widow telling fans the new Soundgarden record is not what Chris Cornell wanted it to be. The band might feel they are trying to do their fans a service by bringing them Cornell's final songs, but they are first and foremost screwing over their leader and his family, putting their own interests and desires ahead of what is being expressed by the person who would have best known his intentions. It's only going to get worse.
In Other News: Mercurial guitarist John Frusciante has once again rejoined the Red Hot Chili Peppers. This will mark his third stint with the band, and the move has been met with an oddly positive reception. Fans have been expressing their joy at his return, which is a move I find odd, considering that Frusciante has twice already left the band, causing their career to take unexpected detours. Frusciante is anything but reliable, and whether the band intends to continue making new records, or wants to slip into nostalgia mode, having someone they can count on seems to be more important than the slight bump in ticket sales Frusciante will bring.
Furthermore, this likely signals the erasure of Josh Klinghoffer's era of the band. If Frusciante is anything like most original members of a band who later return, he will not want to play many, if any, songs that he was not part of writing. Bruce Dickinson might be the biggest exception to this rule, regularly playing a few cuts that Blaze Bayley originally sang. But when Ozzy reunited with Black Sabbath, or David Lee Roth with Van Halen, the important and vital songs their replacements sang were never to be heard from again. They put their own egos ahead of the fans, who might very well have wanted to still hear some of the biggest songs those bands ever had. Of course, Ozzy and Roth couldn't sing those songs, but that's another story.
And Also: Russell Allen and Anette Olzon are set to team up for a duet album in the Spring. The Symphony X frontman is reportedly teaming up with the former Nightwish singer for an album written by melodic metal mainstay Magnus Karlsson. I like Russel, and I love Anette in The Dark Element, so this project is something worth getting a bit excited for. Especially so, considering that it abides by my rules for multiple singers. So often, we hear duet songs and albums that miss the two key elements to such projects; 1)Have a song written from two perspectives, or 2)At least have two voices that bring something different to the table.
The worst thing any song with multiple singers can do is not justify its own existence. If the lyrics can be sung entirely by one person, as one character, what's the point in having more than one person doing it? It's redundant. But, I often let it slide if the two voices are different enough that the tones and feelings they bring are impossible for the other to achieve. That will be the case here, as Russell and Anette will not occupy the same space, and can easily play off one another, even if the songs aren't written as such. But we've heard albums such as Lione/Conti, where the two singers were nearly identical, and it was clear there were only two of them to try to sell more records by expanding the fan-base who even knew it existed. Even the original Allen/Lande albums are guilty of this. Those two singers were both capable of singing all that material on their own, and there wasn't enough difference between them to say the combination was better than if either had done it on their own.
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