Three years ago New Zealand singer Hollie Smith released her debut album, Long Player, in New Zealand. The story goes, says the The New Zealand Herald, that the New York record company Blue Note’s honcho Bruce Lundvall was so overwhelmed listening to it in his car en route to see his wife in hospital that he narrowly avoided an accident before getting off the road to find out immediately about this girl with the major voice.
Smith, who has been singing since she was 4, had a couple of other international deals come through from other record labels in the U.S. But Blue Note was something special. “I was really, really excited but in my view there was a long way to go before establishing that this was going to be okay contractually,” she told the Herald. “I wasn’t counting my chickens before they were hatched.” She went to New York, hired what she called an expensive Manhattan lawyer to take care of her interests, and the done deal looked good. Then it all went wrong. EMI, who had owned the Blue Note label since 1979, had a bad year; one of their biggest acts quit, then their marketing budget was cut, 2000 jobs were lost, and artists were warned they would be dropped if they did not work hard enough for the company. Smith, who had sent in a couple of her songs for them to okay and not heard back yet, called them around then and was told that they had decided not to release her internationally at all. She said she didn’t panic. She told the Herald she believed she could simply tear up the contract. “It was like, ‘cool, let’s just dissolve the contract and get my masters back and let’s just leave it at that’.” But Blue Note told her they owned the masters and that Smith would have to buy them back. “A couple of hundred thousand to buy back my life. I basically said, ‘I’d rather sue you for that’, and they said, ‘Okay, go ahead.’ That’s kind of where you go ‘oh f**k’.”
“I was completely, completely f**ked.” Smith said she had already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars putting together the defunct record deal and on a Blue Note tour to Europe and travel to the U.S. “At the start, I was angry angry angry. But then, realising how hopeless the situation I was in was, I kind of stopped doing anything.” Six years of work had been lost. “I was questioning my entire existence after that, which sounds really dramatic, but that was just the state I was in. It was really difficult to see past that and difficult to understand what it was that I was trying to achieve with music if this was going to be the pay-back.”
Surviving on the revenue from her on-going New Zealand gigs, Smith eventually reached an out-of-court settlement with EMI-Blue Note and got back her masters. But she still wasn’t writing. Then her two-year relationship ended and she fell into what she said was a significant depression. Counselling, clinical help and a spell on some ‘pretty serious’ anti-depressants later, and Smith was ready to get better. “A lot of things changed when I came off the pills ... Regardless of whether they helped me or not, I hit a point where I had to do this on my own. I started writing again and started getting more inspired.” The result was her new album, Humour and the Misfortune of Others, of which she is very proud and which was ‘incredibly cathartic’ to make. The lyrics are very much about the troubles of the last few years. “Music is my way of expressing so much that I’m not good at doing in person ... but the main thing I realised through this whole thing ... was just realising that without music, it is so hard for me ... I just want to do music and without it, I kind of shut down ... ” Her album will be released on March 15 and she is planning to tour the country in April-May.
Goodbye
: Winston Churchill, British Conservative MP for 27 years, former writer and journalist, grandson of Sir Winston; aged 69.
: Rose Gray, a founder and chef of the River Café in London, a restaurant that transformed the image of Italian cooking in Britain by emphasising fresh ingredients and authentic country dishes; aged 71.
: John Babcock, last Canadian World War I veteran; aged 109.
: Jeanne Holm, first woman general in the United States Air Force; aged 88. : Andrew Koenig, US actor best known for his role as Boner in the 1980's sitcom, Growing Pains; aged 41.
Khan's 'innocent' tale
Shah Rukh Khan, the reigning ‘king of Bollywood’ believes his job is to make sure people smile. “I have no self-centredness or ego about being a movie star,” he said. In his latest movie MyName is Khan, Khan plays a Muslim with Asperger syndrome who is detained by United States authorities. A hero with a Forrest Gump-like simplicity, he sets out on a journey across the United States after the love of his life tells him to find the president and tell him that he is not a terrorist. The real Khan, who is a Muslim but is married to a Hindu, said he hoped his movie would help change practices such as racial profiling – a procedure he is familiar with. In August Khan was detained for nearly two hours at New Jersey’s Newark International Airport because of his last name. “This is the world we have created,” he said. “We are all paranoid of each other.” He wanted to challenge those notions with his film. “I know it’s very idealistic and Utopian, but I believe we need to just let everyone not be judged in terms of religion, groups or nations or region.” My Name is Khan might be naive, the father of two said, but “that’s what’s the most beautiful part of the film. It’s like your children, it’s simple and it’s innocent.” - CNN
The actor was, however, recently engulfed by controversy for showing sympathy to Pakistani players, reported indiaserver.com. A strong reaction from a far-right Hindu nationalistic political party, Shiv Sena, surfaced when cricket lover Khan expressed his desire to include Pakistani players in IPL series. Sena threatened to disrupt the screening of his movie if Khan refused to apologise. Khan told reporters he didn't want to cause any problems or stress with his comments and and said he gets very "disturbed and scared and emotionally hurt when things like this happen." Still, My Name is Khan has been a runaway success. In less that two weeks, it's taken in $6.3 million worldwide, with nearly half of that coming from ticket sales outside the US. -CNN
Marie Osmond's son commits suicide
Tragedy hit singer Marie Osmond this week with the death of her son, Michael, 18, who took his life on Friday night by throwing himself from a 15-storey building (People.com). Michael was one of Marie’s five adopted children. She also has three other children from two marriages. Her 20-year marriage to Michael’s father, Brian Blosin, ended in 2007 (AP). A friend told People magazine that although Marie knew her son had problems she had visited him often in Los Angeles, where he attended school at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, and thought he was doing better. After a spell in rehab in 2009 Michael had seemed to be turning his life around. “I couldn’t be more proud of him,” Marie said at the time. “He’s got a 3.9 GPA in high school. He’s looking at scholarships to some wonderful colleges.” An article in Entertainment Tonightsaid that Michael had left a note explaining that he intended to end his life after a long battle with severe depression that left him feeling as if he had no friends and could never fit in. The entertainment-oriented web site TMZ reported that Michael had described the woman to whom he addressed his suicide note – a fellow resident of the Met apartment building he lived in – as his “only good friend in LA”. Marie Osmond said in a statement: “My family and I are devastated and in deep shock by the tragic loss of our dear Michael and ask that everyone respect our privacy during this difficult time.”
Tragedy hit singer Marie Osmond this week with the death of her son, Michael, 18, who took his life on Friday night by throwing himself from a 15-storey building (
