Pink has a made a career of confounding expectations.
After her successful R&B-oriented debut, “Can’t Take Me Home,” in 2000, she quickly ditched the style for a more rock-oriented sound in 2001 and even sang about the resistance from her record company in her hit “Don’t Let Me Get Me.”
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She hasn’t looked back since. And with last year’s “The Truth About Love,” her first No. 1 album, and the accompanying tour, Pink has been forcefully forging her own brand of pop with her mixed-signals pop hit “Blow Me (One Last Kiss)” and the lush, inspirational ballad “Try,” as well as her acrobatic performance.
“I like myself a lot more than I did when I started,” she recently told The Sunday Mirror of London. “I’ve exorcised a lot of demons. I don’t think I’ll ever give up performing. But I don’t know if I would do it as full-on with more kids. I only have ‘off’ or ‘on,’ so I’d have to seriously figure out different speeds.”
Few of her fellow superstars can match her pop power even as she raises her daughter, Willow. In a time when most artists release only one or two songs from an album, her third single from “The Truth About Love,” the lovely “Just Give Me a Reason” duet with fun. singer Nate Ruess, caught fire last week, moving into the Top 10 on the sales charts, as sales of the single nearly doubled. If “Just Give Me a Reason” follows “Try” to No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult Top 40 charts, Pink will have the most No. 1’s ever on the chart, breaking the tie she has with Katy Perry at seven.
“This is the life I wanted,” Pink recently told the Tampa Tribune. “I’ve been crazy about music since I can remember. It all had an impact on me, listening to the radio, first concert, all of that.
Journey guitarist sues former mother-in-law
The lead guitarist for the rock band Journey has filed a federal lawsuit in Minneapolis that accuses his former mother-in-law of libeling him in her blog posts.
Neal Schon’s lawsuit says Judy Kozan suggested that he has failed to support his ex-wife, Amber Schon, and their two daughters.
The Star Tribune says the lawsuit references a family court judge who determined that Schon has exceeded his required payments to his ex-wife and their children.
Kozan denies ever mentioning Schon in her blog postings. She blames a British tabloid for incorrectly concluding that she considered Schon a deadbeat dad.
An awakening for Shocked fans
Once upon a time, Michelle Shocked was universally regarded as one of the most politically progressive and active of rock artists, an outspoken supporter of an array of liberal causes.
She also embraced an ambiguous sexual identity, and made clear that she viewed sexual typecasting as oppressive.
Then Shocked became a born-again Christian, and her pluralistic perspective appeared to change. That shift allegedly culminated on March 17 when, according to a number of news reports, Shocked stunned her audience at the San Francisco nightclub Yoshi’s when she blurted out, “You are going to leave here and tell people, ‘Michelle Shocked said God hates (gays),’ ” using a pejorative term.
According to other reports, Shocked also said, in effect, “I live in fear that the world will be destroyed if gays are allowed to marry.”
Shocked’s outburst, and subsequent fan outrage, has caused several venues to cancel the singer-songwriter’s upcoming shows.
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