Ed Sheeran Tickets On Sale Now!

 

 

Synopsis

Ed Sheeran was born in February 1991 in Halifax, England. He began playing guitar at a young age and soon after started writing his own songs. When he was just a teenager, he moved to London to pursue his music, and his outpouring of creativity added up to several early EPs and hundreds of live shows. Getting a lot of attention with his online performances, Sheeran hit No. 1 on the iTunes chart before he ever signed with a record label. Since signing with Atlantic, Sheeran has sold millions of records and has had a song appear in the second installment of The Hobbit trilogy.

Early Years

Ed Sheeran was born on February 17, 1991, in Halifax, West Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom. When he was young, he began playing guitar, showing early promise as a musical talent. When he was 11, Sheeran met singer-songwriter Damien Rice backstage at one of Rice’s shows, and the young musician found added inspiration. As the story goes, Rice told Sheeran to write his own music, and Sheeran set out the next day to do just that.

It wasn’t long before Sheeran was recording CDs and selling them, and he soon put together his first official EP, The Orange Room. With that accomplishment and his abiding ambition driving him, at only 14 years of age, Sheeran headed to London for the summer. Thinking he could find gigs on the big city, Sheeran left home with his guitar and a backpack full of clothes, and his musical career took flight.

London

Once in London, Sheeran got busy recording and playing the local singer-songwriter circuit and quickly released two albums: a self-titled record in 2006 and Want Some? in 2007. He also began opening for more established acts, such as Nizlopi, the Noisettes and Jay Sean, and released another EP, You Need Me, in 2009, a year that found Sheeran playing more than 300 live shows.

It wasn’t until 2010 that Sheeran made the leap to the next level in his career, and it came via online media, a route Sheeran had learned to use with great effectiveness. When a video he posted online got the attention of Example, a rapper, Sheeran was asked to go on the road with him as his opening act. This led to an even larger online fan base and inspiration for many more songs, which ended up filling three new EPs, all in 2010.

The Next Level

When Sheeran headed to the U.S. that year, he found a new fan in Jamie Foxx, who asked Sheeran to appear on his Sirius radio show. Soon after, in January 2011, Sheeran released yet another EP, his last as an independent artist. Without any promotion, the record reached No. 2 on the iTunes chart, and he signed on with Atlantic Records that same month.

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Yanni

Of the artists who rose to popularity as part of the new age music boom of the 1980s and ’90s, few (if any) enjoyed greater or more lasting success than Yanni. Composing and performing instrumental music with a pronounced sense of drama, dynamics, and romanticism, Yanni broke through to a significantly larger audience than his peers, thanks to adult alternative radio airplay and a commanding performance style that attracted fans through frequent appearances on public television as well as world-wide concert tours.

Yanni was born Yiannis Chryssomalis on November 14, 1954 on the Greek island of Kalamata. He displayed a talent for a music at a young age, playing piano at the age of six, but rather than enroll him in music school, his parents encouraged their son to follow his own muse and learn the instrument at his own pace and in his own way. In 1972, Yanni traveled to Minnesota to attend college, and while he majored in psychology, he didn’t walk away from music, playing in a local rock band and continuing his personal study of piano and other keyboard instruments. In 1977, after receiving his degree, Yanni joined a Minneapolis-based rock group called Chameleon, who toured regionally and cut several self-released albums, but in 1980, he began striking out on his own, recording and releasing an album of his own material, Optimystique. In 1984, Yanni signed a deal with Atlantic Records, who re-released the privately issued Optimystique; his deal with Atlantic proved short-lived, but the album attracted the attention of the noted independent label Private Music, who released Yanni’s second album, Keys to Imagination, in 1986. (They would also reissue Optimystique a few years later.) Yanni relocated to Los Angeles, where he began composing film scores as well as recording as a solo artist, and in 1987, after releasing his third album, Out of Silence, he set out on his first major concert tour; the band included John Tesh on keyboards and former Chameleon drummer Charlie Adams. In 1990, after the release of Reflections of Passion, Yanni performed a special concert with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, a preview of the large-scale events he would stage in the future.

In 1992, the album Dare to Dream earned Yanni his first Grammy nomination, and his music began popping up in television commercials and during coverage of sporting events, bringing his compositions to a new audience. His concert tours became larger and more spectacular as his fan base grew, and in the fall of 1993, in support of the album In My Time, he performed a special show at the Herod Atticus Theater in Athens, Greece, a venue that was over 2,000 years old. The concert was recorded and videotaped, and the subsequent Yanni Live at the Acropolis album and home video became major successes, selling over seven million copies worldwide and becoming a fixture on public television broadcasts in the United States. The success of Live at the Acropolis led to Yanni staging prestigious events at London’s Royal Albert Hall and major venues around the globe, as well as special concerts at the Taj Mahal in India and the Forbidden City in China, both in 1997 (material from the two shows appeared on the album Tribute). In both cases, Yanni was the first Western artist permitted to perform at these historic landmarks. After concluding a world tour in 1998, Yanni took a well-deserved vacation for two years and relocated to the East Coast; his 2000 studio album If I Could Tell You offered a more personal and intimate sound from the composer (it was also his first album for Virgin Records), and he explored world music sounds on 2003’s Ethnicity. In 2009, he launched his own label, Yanni-Wake Entertainment, in association with Disney, and released Yanni Voices, in which he collaborated with vocalists for the first time in his solo career, teaming with a handful of gifted newcomers. Yanni took his vocalists on the road for a Yanni Voices concert tour, and in 2010, he explored his interest in Latin music on the album Mexicanisimo. A new studio effort, Truth of Touch, followed in 2011 and proved Yanni’s popularity had not waned, topping the Billboard new age chart and going on to become the biggest-selling new age album of that year. After extensive touring for the release, Yanni added another string to his bow by collaborating with some of the biggest names in vocal classical music on his next album, Inspirato. On the album, released in 2014, the likes of Plácido Domingo, Renée Fleming, Russell Watson, Vittorio Grigolo, Rolando Villazón, and Katherine Jenkins added operatic vocals to a selection of re-recordings of classic inspirational tracks from Yanni’s back catalog. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi.

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Madonna Rebel Heart Tour

Madonna ‘Rebel Heart’ Tour Explores Religion And Sexuality, Familiar Topics For The Pop Queen

Even before any music plays on Madonna’s thundering 1989 hit, “Like A Prayer,” which sat atop the pop charts for 16 weeks, we hear the Material Girl’s plaintive voice asking a simple question:

“God?”

It’s one the pop star has been raising, in some form or another, for years. Religion has been a favored subject for Madonna since she got her start in the music business more than three decades ago, whether she’s appropriating Roman Catholic iconography in a music video or dabbling in Jewish spiritual traditions.

And her upcoming tour, kicking off Sept. 9 in Montreal to promote her new album, “Rebel Heart,” will be no exception.

“I’m very immersed in deconstructing the concept of sexuality and religion and how it’s not supposed to go together, but in my world it goes together,” the superstar told guest editor Andy Cohen in an upcoming event of Entertainment Weekly.

The idea promises to be big business. Madonna’s last two world tours ranked among the top 12 highest-grossing tours of all time. Her 2008 “Sticky & Sweet” tour grossed $408 million, while the 2012 “MDNA” tour earned $305 million. For that, she can thank longevity, a keen knack for being able to reinvent herself, and a cross-generational fan base that stretches throughout much of the world. In 2012, the pop queen famously outsold Lady Gaga during a number of tour stops in South America while the two stars were feuding.

Devilish Divinity

In speaking about the religious concepts in her latest tour, the 56-year-old Madonna was referring specifically to the nuns dancing provocatively on poles in a teaser video posted to YouTube, but she might as well have been alluding to entire swathes of her pop canon. Madonna’s flirtation with religion in her pop culture persona began when she popularized donning large crosses and rosaries — the latter of which is frowned upon by the Roman Catholic Church — as a fashion statement in the 1980s.

But the flirtation turned into a full-on affair with Madonna’s seminal “Like A Prayer” album in 1989. The video for the single by the same name told the story of a young white girl in a forbidden interracial relationship, but it also featured a heavy dosage of Catholic iconography.

The skimpily clad Madonna danced on screen in front of burning crosses and made love to a saint, all while bearing the scars of stigmata on her hands. The Vatican was not amused, calling the video heresy and demanding that it be banned. Pepsi, which had entered into a lucrative endorsement deal with the singer, backed out of the contract and canceled a commercial in which she debuted the song.

Devilish Divinity

In speaking about the religious concepts in her latest tour, the 56-year-old Madonna was referring specifically to the nuns dancing provocatively on poles in a teaser video posted to YouTube, but she might as well have been alluding to entire swathes of her pop canon. Madonna’s flirtation with religion in her pop culture persona began when she popularized donning large crosses and rosaries — the latter of which is frowned upon by the Roman Catholic Church — as a fashion statement in the 1980s.

But the flirtation turned into a full-on affair with Madonna’s seminal “Like A Prayer” album in 1989. The video for the single by the same name told the story of a young white girl in a forbidden interracial relationship, but it also featured a heavy dosage of Catholic iconography.

The skimpily clad Madonna danced on screen in front of burning crosses and made love to a saint, all while bearing the scars of stigmata on her hands. The Vatican was not amused, calling the video heresy and demanding that it be banned. Pepsi, which had entered into a lucrative endorsement deal with the singer, backed out of the contract and canceled a commercial in which she debuted the song.

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Taylor Swift 1989 World Tour!

 

 

 

She is, quite simply, a global superstar.

 

Taylor Swift is a seven-time GRAMMY winner, and the youngest recipient in history of the music industry’s highest honor, the GRAMMY Award for Album of the Year. She is the only artist in history to have an album hit the 1 million first-week sales figure three times (2010’s Speak Now, 2012’s RED and 2014’s 1989). She’s a household name whose insanely catchy yet deeply personal self-penned songs transcend music genres, and a savvy businesswoman who has built a childhood dream into an empire.

 

But the numbers don’t tell Taylor’s story half as well as she could. After all, it’s the intangibles that elevate Swift into the stratosphere of our pop culture planet, allowing the 25-year old singer-songwriter to orbit in a more rarified air. Her large-scale charitable contributions are one thing, but it’s in the small gestures – the notes of compassion she posts on the Instagram photos of lovelorn fans, the genuine hugs she distributes without discretion – where Swift proves time and time again that platinum-selling, record-setting success has not changed her inherent nature. She is awkwardly honest and powerfully empathetic; a brazen superfan, loyal friend, fierce protector of hearts; and one of the world’s greatest ambassadors for the power of just being yourself.

 

Granted, for Taylor, “being herself” tends towards shimmering, gossamer perfection – but that’s an image regularly blown whenever she dons fake braces and a tri-pony to clown around on late night TV. She’s the first artist since the Beatles (and the only female artist in history) to log six or more weeks at #1 with three consecutive studio albums, and while she’s been named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World and one of only eight candidates for their most prestigious honor, 2014 Person of the Year, she’s probably the only person on these lists who uses social media to post notes to her best friends and videos of her cats.

 

As Billboard Magazine’s Woman of the Year (only artist to receive this nod twice, and youngest-ever honoree) released her critically acclaimed fifth album, 1989, she astounded the world by selling almost 1.3 million albums in its debut week. A fete that had been called impossible in 2014, Taylor proved it was possible. She calls 1989 her most sonically cohesive collection, it is a touchstone; Taylor’s songwriting and sonic evolution surprises us more than ever before. Heavily keyboard and beat driven, the pop sensibilities that have always been the hallmark of Taylor’s music now move front and center. On 1989 she finds herself, as always, in the glare of a blinding spotlight – but if you think that scares her, you haven’t been paying attention. She’s ready to blaze into the next phase of her still-young career, where she’ll continue to dance like no one’s watching, write like she stole our collective diary, and inevitably soar to ever-greater heights. All that’s left to wonder is how many more lives she’ll lift in the process.

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