Marty Friedman's new single "Dead of Winter" from his upcoming album Drama features vocals by Chris Brooks.
Marty Friedman shares "Dead of Winter" the second single from his upcoming new solo album 'Drama', due out May 17th via Frontiers Music Srl. The track features vocals by Chris Brooks from Like A Storm and while normally an instrumentalist, this is Marty's first solo release featuring a vocalist.
"Dead of Winter" is accompanied by a new music video starring Skylar Erna and is available below.
About the track, Marty had this to say:
"The lyrics of 'Dead of Winter' as well as the story in the video, both sum up the way I would like people to feel about my music in general-- something that will be there to uplift you when the times are hardest and give you a tangible jolt of positivity to last until life inevitably smooths out."
Marty Friedman - "Dead of Winter" (featuring Chris Brooks of Like A Storm) - Official Music Video
May 17th will see the release of Marty's latest solo album, Drama where he only slightly revisits the atmospheric elements of his acclaimed 1992 release Scenes, elevating them to a modern and exotic collection of epic, extravagant, and unapologetically emotional mini-symphonies.
Tracks like "Illumination" and "Mirage" transport listeners to captivating realms, evoking sudden tears and chills. The entire album spotlights Marty's mesmerizing melodies, game-changing arrangements, and heart-tugging motifs, even more than any of his previous work.
Recorded in Italy, where Marty had access to a treasure trove of vintage guitars along with his modern signature models, 'Drama' is a pure, uplifting musical experience.
The new music video for "Dead of Winter" stars Skylar Erna, internet personality and daughter of Sully Erna from Godsmack. Skylar and Sully represent The Scars Foundation - a charity devoted to starting conversations about mental health to raise awareness about the issues facing so many people in our communities today.
With the rise of suicides, bullying, addiction, abuse, and so many other challenges, The Scars Foundation is dedicated to providing resources and tools to educate and empower people on a global level who struggle with these burdens.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. If somebody you know is going through a hard time and needs help, please visit HERE for resources.
For more information, please visit martyfriedman.com.
Forty-one years into their career, King Buzzo and his relentlessly creative heavy-music outsiders are more sure than ever that there are no rules for success.
On the Melvins’ new record, Tarantula Heart, the first track alone is longer than most hardcore punk records. “Pain Equals Funny” builds, collapses, and rebuilds over nearly 20 minutes. It’s grungy and bizarre and confrontational, swerving across prog-metal, industrial, noise, and grease-smeared stoner rock. Buzz Osborne’s trademark foghorn voice, sounding out from between his mad-scientist hair and high-priest robes, blasts in and out of the track with contextless proclamations and anecdotes, his behemoth guitar thrashing across an ocean of distortion. Steven Shane McDonald’s bass drones, flooding the room; Dale Crover’s drums, often doubled and bolstered by Ministry drummer Roy Mayorga’s, are punishing, bare-knuckled and relentless. Feedback interrupts in squeals, then in squalls, until it’s all you can hear—then, it’s instruments that disrupt the feedback, rather than the other way around. The track stews and clangs and hulks along without any indication of where it’s heading next. It’s the sound of chaos distilled and reined in, just barely. It sounds a bit like life.
Melvins "Working The Ditch"
Tarantula Heart is the veteran avant sludge-metal band’s 27th full-length record since their debut LP in 1987, and their 18th with label Ipecac Recordings. They obviously practice a sort of creation that is at odds with the traditional contemporary studio and band business model. Some people might just call it flat-out weird. It’s not uncommon for bands to go three to five years without new material and milk each album cycle for a couple more. So, why produce and release so much music if you don’t have to? Maybe the more interesting question to answer is: If you care about making music, why wouldn’t you?
“It’s a really weird record,” says Osborne. “I wasn’t sure what Ipecac would think. We turned it in, and they were like, ‘This might be our favorite one you’ve ever done.’
“We’ve done almost 30 albums, depending on what you count as an album, and at this point, the idea of doing things like I’ve always done, it doesn’t really excite me too much. I’m always looking for something new, some new idea: see if we can do this, see if we can pull that off. There’s enough bands out there doing traditional music. People shouldn’t expect us to.”
McDonald—who’s been with the band since 2015 and is also a member of punk icons Redd Kross—puts it simply: “It was the Melvins yet again finding a different way to skin a cat.”
“We’ve done almost 30 albums, depending on what you count as an album, and at this point, the idea of doing things like I’ve always done, it doesn’t really excite me too much.” —Buzz Osborne
By the band’s count, Tarantula Heart is their 27th LP of original material in their long and storied career.
If Tarantula Heart sounds at times like listening to a group of musicians simply bashing out ginormous riffs and exploring how far they can push things in a jam space, well, that’s pretty spot-on. The record was created primarily over two days of jamming with both Crover and Mayorga on their own kits at Melvins’ rehearsal space in an industrial area in the San Fernando Valley, which they share with long-time producer Toshi Kasai. Melvins have a history of playing with two drummers at the same time. For nearly a decade starting in 2006, Crover and Coady Willis both thundered along behind the band. “It’s like you’re riding this gigantic beast,” says McDonald of playing with two drummers. “It’s like an earthquake.”
The jams were unstructured and random, but afterward, Osborne took the audio files home and combed them for ideas. He’d find five- to seven-minute sections that stuck out, then isolate the drums and write new riffs, solos, and melodies overtop of them. Good friend and WE Are the Asteroid guitarist Gary Chester swung by to help fill out the chaos, and Osborne and Kasai traded off roles as either string-strummer or pedal and amp knob-turner to create “white noise insanity.” “I know I’m onto something in the studio when you’re not playing the guitar but there’s so much amp noise that it sounds like a vacuum cleaner,” says Osborne. Later, he stitched the ideas together to create the Frankenstein monsters on Tarantula Heart. By the time Mayorga and Crover heard them, they were entirely different songs.
“It’s like you’re riding this gigantic beast. It’s like an earthquake.” —Steven Shane McDonald
That process would be off-putting for many musicians, but Melvins aren’t terribly serious in the studio, says Osborne. He dislikes the self-importance that the environment can promote in musicians. “I feel privileged to be in a situation where I can do this for my living,” he says. “I don’t lose that perspective on it but like, I want to have fun, and I’m really happy I’m here.”
Part of the method behind Osborne’s madness is that he believes musicians will perform more purely, more excitingly, if they don’t have to adhere to any framework. “If you let people own the songs in some way, you’ll get a better performance out of them,” says Osborne. That’s a philosophy he picked up from David Bowie. Osborne claims that when Bowie handed guitarist Adrian Belew a tape of songs to learn, he told him, “Play them like this or better.”
Most of the material on Tarantula Heart came from open-ended jams at the Melvins’ rehearsal studio, with Ministry drummer Roy Mayorga doubling Dale Crover’s thunder.
Photo by Tim Bugbee
And for Melvins, that ethos doesn’t end when the song is finished. Osborne believes that songs aren’t just allowed to change after they’re recorded, but that it’s necessary for them to do so. When Osborne was a kid, his favorite band was the Who, and when he heard their 1970 live record, Live at Leeds, he was thrilled by how different the songs sounded. Bowie’s adventurous live recordings, too, were instructive. “I learned that lesson really early on, even before I played guitar,” he says. “The live experience is something different. If you go by the record, we’re playing [our songs] all wrong. Things grow. I’m not married to any kind of conventional thing when it comes to how we play live or anything like that.
“The idea that we would want to translate perfectly and exactly how we do it on a record is completely absurd to me. I’ve heard bands say, ‘Well, how are we going to pull that off live?’ Don’t worry about it. Change it. Who cares?”
“I know I’m onto something in the studio when you’re not playing the guitar but there’s so much amp noise that it sounds like a vacuum cleaner.” —Buzz Osborne
Osborne’s unshakeable approach feels like a threat to a modern music industry that, under the boot of a ruthless market, balks at risk and favors a sure thing. And while the Melvins have built a successful, long-lasting career doing their thing, they’ve also watched their peers rocket past them into the mainstream. Crover played drums with Nirvana while they were recording the songs that turned into their debut LP, Bleach, and Osborne was friends with Kurt Cobain, introducing him and bassist Krist Novoselic to Dave Grohl. Like Nirvana, Melvins signed to a major—Atlantic Records—and seemed poised to join their grunge and punk pals atop the charts. But after four years and three records (plus one farther afield release, Prick, which the band released under the name ƧИIV⅃ƎM, allegedly to avoid breaking their contract with Atlantic) the label dropped the band.
The fact of their trajectory versus Soundgarden’s or Nirvana’s is more a curiosity to Osborne than anything else. “We were much weirder than those bands that commercialized it in a way that we never did or never could have,” he says. “You just carve out a spot with all that in mind. The funny thing about all that was that I was making a living playing music before those bands ever got big. It was already working on a smaller scale.”
Buzz Osborne's Gear
The Melvins came up in the same scene as grunge legends Nirvana and Soundgarden, bands that Osborne says were “smarter” in figuring out how to commercialize gnarly sounds.
Photo by Joshua Jennings
Guitars
- Electrical Guitar Company King Buzzo Standard
- Electrical Guitar Company King Buzzo Signature
- Electrical Guitar Company Wedge
- Gibson Firebird
- Gibson Flying V
- Gibson 50th Anniversary Pete Townshend SG
Amps
- Hilbish Design Preamplifier
- Tyrant Tone 2x15
- Tyrant Tone 2x12
Effects
- Hilbish Design Pessimiser
- Hilbish Design Compressimiser
- Hilbish Design Deathimizer
- Dunlop Cry Baby
- MXR Blue Box
Strings and Picks
- Ernie Ball Skinny Top Heavy Bottom
- Tortex Triangle Pick .50mm
Over their years on the road, Osborne has converted McDonald to his strategy of only carrying gear that can be replaced at a moment’s notice from any generic music store. It’s largely the result of brutal mishaps—McDonald guesses that around four of Osborne’s vintage Les Pauls have had their headstocks broken by various airport authorities and baggage handlers. Any TSA agent can open your guitar case upside down, McDonald notes, but he also appreciates the reality check of the approach. “If you get hooked on something that seems like it has that invisible secret mojo, then it’s hard when that object lets you down and you feel like you can’t replace it easily,” he says. Now, McDonald tours with an Epiphone Thunderbird 60s bass that he bought off of Amazon. “If worse came to worst and I needed another one of those on the road, I could have one shipped to the next Holiday Inn Express,” he says.
“I’ve heard bands say, ‘Well, how are we going to pull that off live?’ Don’t worry about it. Change it. Who cares?” —Buzz Osborne
Osborne will still bring new Electrical Guitar Company instruments on the road, probably because they’re virtually indestructible. Built in Irondale, Alabama, they borrow from (and in some cases replicate) the Travis Bean-style aluminum builds which have long been favored by offbeat noise-makers. Osborne counts a couple signature models with EGC—a fitting collaboration for one of guitar music’s freest spirits.
Osborne says people still approach him to praise what they believe to be a tone summoned by a Les Paul ripping through a Marshall, a combination that these days prompts Osborne to recoil: “God, wake me up later,” he groans. These days, he’s pretty sure of what he doesn’t want in his sound. But what he does want can be trickier. That can change from night to night, hour to hour.
“I’m one of the weirdos that likes brand new stuff,” says Osborne. “I don’t know. It’s fun to keep moving forward.”
Steven Shane McDonald's Gear
On the road, Osborne and McDonald stick to either new, easy-to-replace gear, or bomb-proof kit like the aluminum and plexiglass guitars from Electrical Guitar Company.
Photo by Chris Casella
Guitars
- Epiphone Thunderbird 60s bass
Amps
- Darkglass Electronics Microtubes X 900
- 8x10 cabinet
Effects
- Boss PH-3 Phase Shifter
- Electro-Harmonix Pitch Fork
- EarthQuaker Devices Hizumitas
Strings and Picks
- Ernie Ball Regular Slinky Bass (.050-.105)
- Tortex Sharp Pick .88mm
YouTube It
Melvins are just as weird and heavy as they were 40 years ago, as this 2023 live set at Germany’s Freak Valley Festival demonstrates.
From the tough economics of touring to building a personal style without theory, the Welsh guitarist talks about his journey from social media to sold-out shows.
On this episode of Dipped in Tone, Rhett and Zack are joined by Wales-born guitarist Chris Buck. Buck is gearing up for a string of US tour dates with his fast-rising rock band Cardinal Black, including a date at Nashville’s Basement East after the original venue sold-out within a few hours.
Luke Ottenhof HED: How Chris Buck Went From YouTube to the Royal Albert HallTEASER: From the tough economics of touring to building a personal style without theory, the Welsh guitarist talks about his journey from social media to sold-out shows.On this episode of Dipped in Tone, Rhett and Zack are joined by Wales-born guitarist Chris Buck. Buck is gearing up for a string of US tour dates with his fast-rising rock band Cardinal Black, including a date at Nashville’s Basement East after the original venue sold-out within a few hours.Buck starts off digging into the details of his custom Yamaha Revstar and why he chose the versatile guitar over better-known offerings from legacy brands. Buck’s rise has been nearly meteoric: He started off posting videos on Facebook and Instagram before his wife suggested he give YouTube a try. His channel now counts 226,000 subscribers, thanks to his popular Friday Fretworks videos. But as Buck explains, his content is a tool to help fund his original music—a very successful tool.
Still, it’s not all sunshine. Buck details how he and his band navigate the brutal economics of touring, including some horror stories of how they ended up losing money on merch sales. Later, we learn how Buck built his signature playing style—mostly by ear and by accident. “I don’t think anyone has ever ended up sounding like themselves through sitting down and going ‘Right, im gonna try to sound unique,’” he says. “It just happens over time.”
He’s gone from YouTube to the Royal Albert Hall, but Buck reveals a quiet concern that he’s peaked too early. What do Rhett and Zach make of that fear? Tune in.
Pearl Jam present their latest single, “Wreckage," from their twelfth studio album, 'Dark Matter,' available today.
Wreckage
Stone Gossard on “Wreckage”:
“That one probably has the biggest build for me personally, in terms of hearing it at first and thinking, it’s kind of an Ed song. I wasn’t quite aware of its potency until later. Andrew [Watt] encouraged me to play this little harmonic, acoustic part almost like a Cure melody. I’ve been playing along with the song to relearn it and I’m really looking forward to playing it live. It’s a really powerful lyric and I think we did a really great job of taking something and really pushing it to its limit.”
Andrew Watt adds:
“[“Wreckage”] started with the riff and everyone kind of formulating sections together. That song just came to Ed right away. Within the first couple takes before the music was even right, his vocals were right. His melodies and words are so strong in that song. Once the initial spark was there and there were a few sections, it was just really about following him.”
The composer and co-creator of the Allman Brothers’ guitar legacy dies at 80, leaving behind 55 years of recording, performing, and legendary tales.
Magic happened when Dickey Betts and Duane Allman played together. Their sinuous, twined, harmonized guitar lines—inspired in part by Western swing and Miles Davis—were like nothing else in rock when the Allman Brothers Band’s debut album was released in 1969. And their Les Paul and SG partnership led the way in creating the Band’s reputation as the finest rock ensemble players of their day. Although that partnership was short-lived, due to Duane’s fatal motorcycle accident in 1971, that transcendent dual-guitar sound, best captured in the heroic performances on the live At Fillmore East double-album, continued throughout the band’s career and became a hallmark of Southern rock, largely thanks to Betts. And it will endure as one of the most recognizable dialects of electrified guitar-based music.
Betts soldiered on with the Allman Brothers Band until 2000, living in the shadow of Duane, whose early death cemented his legendary status. But Betts’ playing was equally commanding—the yin to Duane’s fat-toned, slide-driven yang. As a composer, he minted melodies and riffs that endure. “Jessica,” “Blue Sky,” “Ramblin’ Man,” and “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed” are Betts’ work. As a player, he was unerringly melodic, with a Gibson and Marshall tone that blended clarity and heft with the tang of distortion. He played loud. Really loud. But that volume fueled his expressive dynamic touch and his supremely articulate 6-string language was always worth hearing.
“The band was so good we thought we’d never make it. It was so amazing I don’t even know how to put it into words—even now.”
Dickey Betts died on April 18, reportedly from cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He’d been sidelined since 2018, when he had a mild stroke which was followed by an accident at his home, which necessitated surgery to relieve swelling of the brain. He was 80 years old.
Like the Allman Brothers over the decades, Betts’ own career had its hills and valleys, but his musical character and abilities remained intact until recent years. When I spoke with him a decade ago at Nashville’s Hutton Hotel, the then-70-year-old observed, “I’m amazed that at my age I’m still effective. I have a formidable band together and I write new songs, although mainly we just do renditions of things like ‘Jessica’ and other hits.
Those are fun to play and people enjoy those songs. I’ve got a full catalog of instrumentals that I could play all night if I wanted to. A rock ’n’ roll career is supposed to last about as long as a professional football player’s—five years and you’re done. But I’m still out there swinging, filling theaters, and playing festivals.”
Passing the torch: Betts onstage with his son, Duane Betts, who leads his own band today. Here, they recreate the dual-guitar sound first cast in bronze by Betts and Duane Allman in 1969.
Photo by Jordi Vidal
Betts was in Music City on that occasion to celebrate the launch of the Gibson Custom Shop’s Southern Rock Tribute 1959 Les Paul, based on an instrument he owned, and was about to embark on one of his annual summer tours with his band Great Southern, which he’d been leading in various configurations since 1977. He also had his Dickey Betts Band, which he started in 1988 and included Warren Haynes, whom Betts drafted into the Allmans when the Brothers reformed in 1990 after a near-decade hiatus. I’d been warned by Betts’ handlers that he could be difficult, and Allman Brothers Band lore contains enough stories of his wicked temper and edge-of-violence outbursts to serve as warning. He was arrested for assaulting a police officer in 1993, and reportedly held a knife behind his back during a band argument shortly before he was dismissed from the Allmans. But, sipping a glass of wine while wearing a sleeveless white tee shirt, a straw cowboy hat, and a necklace of alligator’s teeth, he was cordial, funny, and thoughtful.
He reflected on his role in bringing jazz influences to the early Allman Brothers, which tapered well with Duane and Gregg Allman’s blues sensibilities. “I got that, initially, from Western swing,” he recalled. “My dad did play fiddle, but we didn’t call it bluegrass. It was called string music and he also played Irish reels and things. So, I think I got my sense of melody from Western swing and my dad.
“I also got my sense of tone from my dad. I saw how my dad would pay attention to his fiddle sound. He knew how to tune a fiddle by putting a tone post in, to push the top of the fiddle up. He would move that post around until he had just the right tone. So, I think that search for tone is just in my disposition. I always wanted my guitar to have a little edge on it, but with a clear sound. I experimented with different speaker combinations until I found it. Part of your tone is in your hand, too.”
After playing in a series of bands from his native Florida into the Midwest, including an outfit called the Jokers that Rick Derringer name-checked in his hit “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo,” Betts was recruited for the Allmans by Duane in 1969. “We didn’t do it consciously,” Betts said of their conflagrant dual-guitar sound. “We knew that when we started improvising, things fit, and we didn’t analyze it. Duane was more real militaristic into urban blues. And then I had a Western swing lilt to my rock playing, and it fit together beautifully. A lot of older folks said they thought we sounded like Benny Goodman, and it made sense to me later on when I listened to Goodman. He was pretty hip for his day, and would interweave his instruments together, too. We also listened to Miles Davis, who we thought was one of the greatest composers and bandleaders.
“Right from the beginning, we knew what we had,” Betts continued. “The band was so good we thought we’d never make it. It was so amazing I don’t even know how to put it into words—even now. With Duane, Berry Oakley, Greg and me as the songwriters, with everybody’s musicianship … it developed like a Polaroid picture. Nobody knew what it was going to be. They tried it at first as a trio, with Duane, Berry [Oakley, bass] and Jaimoe [Johnson, drums], and they cut some demos that were okay but they knew it wasn’t the Cream or Jimi Hendrix. And Berry told Duane the magic was happening when Betts was around, jamming, and from there we just grew into a six-piece naturally.
“We were elated with our sound, but every record company in the country turned us down. ‘All the songs sound the same.’ ‘They don’t have a frontman’… all this corny junk. So, we just started to travel around the country playing for free. In Boston, I remember we moved into a condemned building and ran an extension cord from the next building. We played in the park there. We’d get some hippies together and build a stage.”
While ’69’s The Allman Brothers Band sold poorly at first, it received critical acclaim, and the band’s grassroots mentality and love for playing—often relayed live via extended versions of their songs with plenty of improvisation—took hold in the potent American youth culture. The follow-up, Idlewild South, fared a bit better commercially, but At Fillmore East became their breakthrough. Sadly, Duane died just three months after its release.
“When we started getting killed off, well, there was nothing we could do about that,” Betts reflected. “It was tough times after we lost Duane and then we lost Berry. But then we had our biggest record [Eat a Peach, from 1972]. We figured. ‘Why quit when you’re losing?,’ and it worked out.
“And then, of course, the whole thing came apart,” Betts said of his 2000 ouster from the band. He was removed by the other charter members for the transgressions he was notorious for: drug and alcohol abuse, aggressive behavior. “But the Allman Brothers weren’t like the Rolling Stones, where we toured every five years. We were a working band. Thirty years is a long haul—especially when you’re doing something where your emotions are on your shirtsleeve all the time. The social dynamics just blew apart.”
Regarding the Southern rock mantle, Betts said, “We didn’t like it at first. It was kind of a reckless business label put on us by record companies. We thought of ourselves as progressive rock. We wanted to be more sophisticated than Southern rock sounds. We also didn’t think Southern bands sound that much alike, so why categorize them that way? As I get older I understand it was about record company marketing, but the difference between Marshall Tucker and the Allman Brothers Band is vast. They were more Western and we had a lot more jazz and blues, and improvising. My favorite was Molly Hatchet.”
Until his stroke and other illnesses waylaid him, Betts settled into his own music, seemingly content to be out of the heavy cycle of touring and recording required by a major band, settled into his life on Florida’s Gulf Coast. “I like fishing,” he said. “We live on the water and I’ve got a boat. I’m an archer. I can shoot stuff out of the air. We hunt wild hogs on the islands. It’s good to have something to do when you go home besides take dope [laughs]. I’d always get in trouble. On the road you’re busy; you go home and you don’t know what to do. Now I have some other good ways to apply myself.” Betts is survived by his wife, Donna, and four children: Kimberly, Christy, Jessica, and Duane, a skillful guitarist and bandleader in his own right.