This Week In Music: Ken Burns, Ed Sheeran, Lindsay Lohan, Dolores O’Riordan

Bruce Haring

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The page is turning this weekend from summer into what promises to be a busy fall season, filled with music, football and Lindsay Lohan. There will be no Ed Sheeran, though, at least on the concert stage.

This week in music:

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NASHVILLE BRACES FOR BURNS: The Ken Burns documentary Country Music premieres on PBS September 15. Given the controversial background of the filmmaker, many are looking at the 16-hour series as a potential time bomb that may revive some things that the town would rather forget. This is Burns’s second music documentary, following 2001’s Jazz. It will be delivered in 16 episodes across eight hours, and has an accompanying all-star concert filmed at the Ryman Auditorium that will air on PBS in conjunction with the documentary’s release.

LILO NEW MUSIC: Actress and occasional singer Lindsay Lohan, whose MTV series was unexpectedly cancelled earlier this year, is heading back to music with the release of Xanax, a club track that is her first new music since 2008. It references someone who gets her high, the “only person in this town that I like.”

JAY-Z SCORES WITH NFL: The first fruits of the new deal between the National Football League and rapper/mogul Jay-Z’s Roc Nation will be new apparel that will benefit the NFL’s Inspire Change nonprofit, committed to education and economic empowerment, police and community relations, and criminal justice reform. The new gear will be out this fall. The second initiatve is Songs of the Season, a program that will highlight musicians, debut their new songs during NFL broadcasts, and put all proceeds towards Inspire Change. Meek Mill, Meghan Trainor and Rapsody are the first artists to be announced.

GOODBYE, MR. ED: A record-setting concert tour will lead to a long break for Ed Sheeran. He announced that he will take 18 months off at his last date in Ipswich, UK. “There is something very bittersweet about it. I love that you guys are here and we are ending it in Ipswich. This is my last gig for probably 18 months,” said Sheeran. But the time off won’t be relaxing. Sheeran is headed to court to face charges he borrowed too much from Marvin Gaye’s hit Let’s Get It On for his 2014 track, Thinking Out Loud. A mere $100 million is being asked in the lawsuit. He faces another lawsuit from lesser-known musician Sam Chokri, who claims that his song “Oh Why” was lifted by Sheeran.

THE GUESSING GAME: The Santa Monica Observer is crowing that it was the first to reveal LA Angels pitcher Tyler Skaggs’s cause of death from opioids addiction. But as entertainment veteran Bob Bell points out, the same newspaper claimed Cranberries singer Dolores O’Riordan died from a Fentanyl drug overdose, when it was later ruled that she died from drowning due to excessive drinking. The newspaper has some interesting stories in its archives by the same reporter who got the Skaggs story, including allegations that Hillary Clinton died on 9/11 and was replaced by a body double, or that Bill Clinton paid $12.5 million to mix and mingle with aliens at Nevada’s Area 51.

 

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