Morning Music Notes – Shakespearean Idiot

Foo Fighters to Make Unconventional Record

Foo Fighters ended their “long break” after only a few months, and are starting on a new album. How will that album sound? Apparently quite different than what we’re used to. Talking to Billboard, singer Dave Grohl said “[I have] a crazy idea of what I want to do with the next record and how we record it. It’s not conventional. It won’t be a conventional record” (via NME).

Goodbye radio-friendly unit shifters, hello Radiohead? More on Dave Grohl at the bottom end of today’s Morning Music Notes.

Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong to Dabble in Some Shakespeare, As One Does

Fresh out of rehab, Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong made the surprising sober decision to write music for a new adaptation of Shakespeare. When can we finish adapting centuries-old plays to resemble something that we’d see in the movies in present day?

Billie Joe will provide the music for These Paper Bullets, which is an update on Much Ado About Nothing (via NME). The play is put on by Yale Repertory Theater. Yale and Green Day, together at last.

Search Engine Company Yahoo to Get into Live Music Business

If search engine company Google can dabble into mapping and self-driving cars, then surely search engine company Yahoo! can get into the live music scene. Yahoo chose SXSW to make the announcement of their Yahoo! on the Road tour, which will last 21 days (via Hollywood Reporter). The tour will feature Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, and special guests Justin Timberlake, Frank Ocean, Chris Brown and Trey Songz, which I don’t actually know, but I think that is a terrible name.

The tour starts May 3 in New York City and will end May 31 in San Francisco. There’s also seven dates in Europe on the docket, with everything ending in the lovely city of London. The lineups have yet to be finalized.

Samsung’s S4 Smartphone Announced Yesterday

The big announcement came and went yesterday – Samsung has launched the Galaxy S4 smartphone. It builds on their well-reviewed SIII, and will have the potentially cool predictive scroll, by moving up and down a page based on where your eyes are looking. The phone will also pause a video if you’re not looking at the screen, which could be extremely annoying, since I love checking myself out in the mirror to see how much I look like Ryan Gosling. Unfortunately, it’s hard for me to tell with a paper bag over my head. Read all about it on their website.

Watch Dave Grohl’s SXSW Keynote Speech

Glasses are so rock and roll

Dave Grohl had the difficult job of filling Bruce Springsteen’s shoes as the keynote speaker at this year’s SXSW festival. I listened to half of it last night, and it was pretty interesting. It was an autobiographical story of him and his involvement in the music industry, told in a typically awesome Dave Grohl manner. Check out a video of it below, as he touches on Nirvana, Foo Fighters, and even chats Gangnam Style.

Dave Grohl Keynote Speech SXSW 2013