Akron homer and Rock Hall inductee Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders will be releasing a new album called Break Up The Concrete to be released on Tuesday, September 23 through Shangri-La Music

But just as other veteran acts such as the Eagles, Madonna and Earth Wind & Fire, are embracing the future of the music business so are The Pretenders and Shangri-La.

How?

Free music.

From now until the release date, the Pretenders and Shangri-la will be giving away a one song/mp3 download a week through varioius media partners. This week the song is Boots of Chinese Plastic an uptempo rock-a-billy rave up that recalls the sneering attitude of Tattooed Love Boys and is available through AOL's Spinner.com.

There are a bunch of other media partners but since you likely don't care with whom they've partnered it's easiest to just go to www.thepretenders.com each week and check out the songs one week at a time.

The album will be the band's first since Loose Screw in 2002. The album was recorded in 10 Days and reportedly a stripped down affair that will remind fans of also finds Hynde working with a brand new group that includes UK guitarist James Walbourne, pedal steel guitarist Eric Heywood, and the rhythm section of bassist Nick Wilkinson and legendary drummer Jim Keltner.

Original drummer Martin Chambers will perform at the next Pretenders show on July 30 in London, according to a spokesperson.¶

When singer/songwriter/guitarist John Mayer played Blossom in 2004, he seemed to be a conflicted artist. Between songs he kept ripping of searing guitar licks, stopping himself and then returning to his groovy, adult alternative pop tunes as if he was afraid to unleash his inner guitar hero for fear of alienating the folks who just wanted to be told their body was a wonderland. Eventually, his inner guitar hero escaped and he played a seemingly off the cuff and credible take on Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Child (Slight Return).

Since then Mayer has given that inner guitar hero plenty of room to breathe, particularly on Try! his 2005 live trio album with drummer Steve Jordan and bassist Pino Palladino and his recent multi-format Live album Where The Light Is.
In 2008 the pop star and the guitar hero have merged and Thursday night at Blossom in front of a large, multi-generational, multi-cultural crowd he successfully channeled both sides of his artistic nature, and with his natural stage charisma and enthusiasm Mayer held fans in the palm of his fretboard fondling hands for nearly two hours.

Mayer's setlists are usually similar in content with a few surprises thrown in and wildly variant in sequence. At Blossom, sporting tank top that showed off off his tattooed arms, he opened the set upbeat and funky with the bluesy riff of Good Love Is On The Way quickly followed by Bigger Than My Body.
Fronting a septet that featured two horn players, former Pretenders guitarist Robbie McIntosh and singer/songwriter/ex-Follow For Now frontman David Ryan Harris, Mayer was a constantly moving ball of energy playing many guitar solos invoking the styles of Stevie Ray Vaughan and Robert Cray and some Eddie Van Halen style pyrotechnics and the crowd gave their energy right back to him by singing along and shimmying in their seats.

For listeners who find the grooves on Mayer's studio albums to be a bit to mannered, in concert everything his cranked up to 11 (well, maybe more like 9 and 1/2). The laid back Jack Johnson like beat of Belief became actually funky and he and the band turned Vultures into an extended funk jam with Mayer whistling harmony to his own guitar solo and dropping in a couple verses of Marvin Gaye's Inner City Blues (Makes Me Wanna Holler). He also took his R&B flavored ballad Gravity and extended it with a tasteful and lengthy slow building solo and a monologue on the power of love.
While Mayer is no longer shy about his love of leaning way back, scrunching up his face and wailing on his Stratocaster, he still appeared a bit surprised that his audience will pretty much allow him any and all musical indulgences.
"Let me tell you why you're so great," he said to the audience after a slow, 12-bar blues take of the classic Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do featuring a flashy solo, filled with tremolo bar theatrics.
"People talk about the death of pop culture, but I just played you guys one of the oldest R&B songs there is, thanks for letting me do that."
He peppered the set with other covers including an acoustic Free Fallin (yep, it was a sing-a-long) and bits of Daryl Hall's Every Time You Go Away and Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer.

Mayer is apparently comfortable enough with the pop star/guitar hero to delete a few of his breakthrough hits Daughters, and You're Body Is A Wonderland from his set entirely and only sometimes bothers with No Such Thing which he didn't play at Blossom but the crowd didn't seem to mind.
If Mayer ever decides to bring that energy and spontaneity to his studio albums he might work his way out of the (multiplatinum) mellow ghetto his detractors place him in alongside Jack Johnson and Dave Matthews.

But though Mayer is very much a 21st century, hyper self-aware pop star (like his Fallout Boy buddy Pete Wentz) and has referred to himself as "insufferable" and "kind of a "douchebag" (and later blogged about the word and its meaning, naturally), the 30 year-old seems to have a pretty good handle on his music and career.

Where The Light Is, is a live recording of a December 2007 concert for various Los Angeles charities and covers all of his current artistic bases. It features an acoustic set, another with the John Mayer Trio and a third set with his tour band debuted at number 5 on the Billboard 200 and was released on 2CD, DVD, 2LP, Blu-Ray and download, so he appears to also have his financial bases covered as well.

Hopefully, opener Colbie Caillat is spending her summer on the side of the stage watching Mayer nightly work an audience, because while the young singer/songwriter's tunes from her debut album Coco are pleasant enough and she sang them well, her stage presence is lacking, a fact to which she made reference.
Singer/songwriter/Brett Dennan also performed.

John Mayer's Blossom Setlist

* Good Love is On the Way
* Bigger Than My Body
* I Don't Trust Myself (With Loving You)
* Belief
* Stop This Train
* Slow Dancing in a Burning Room
* Free Falling
* Waiting on the World to Change
* Ain't Nobody's Bizness If I Do
* Why Georgia
* Vultures/Makes Me Want To Holler
* Gravity

* Encore
* Something Missing/Every Time You Go Away
* Get Out My/Sledgehammer
* Say

For the first time in more than a decade Cleveland rap crew Bone Thugs-N-Harmony are a quintet.
Stanley "Flesh N Bone" Howse, 34 who has spent the last 10 years in prison for brandishing an AK-47 at a friend was released Monday, July 13 from a California penitentiary.
All hiphop.com reports that Howse was greeted by friends and family including crew members Krayzie, Layzie (a.ka. his brother Steven Howse), Bizzy and Wish Bone.

“It feels amazing, refreshing, exciting [and] I'm so happy for him to finally come home to his family and friends and fans,” Bone Thug’s longtime manager Steve Lobel told AllHipHop.com. “Flesh is a very great, loving, talented, creative individual. We have a lot of memories together. Hopefully we can have more.”

The group which recently reunited with troubled member Bizzy Bone is now back to full strength and is already in the studio working on their follow-up to the gold selling Strength & Loyalty from 2007 which featured only Krayzie, Layzie, and Wish Bone.

The album is expected to be released on Interscope through hip hop producer Swizz Beatz's Full Surface label.

After being ousted from rehab/rock supergroup Velvet Revolver, troubled singer Scott Weiland fell back into the waiting arms of his former bandmates in 90's Grunge kings Stone Temple Pilots and the band hit the road.

As expected the reunion tour has been quite successful but also met with its share of bumps without including Weiland's November DUI arrest.

So far the tour has been met mostly with good reviews for the rest of the band, Robert and Dean DeLeo on bass, vocals and guitar respectively and drummer Eric Kretz. As usual Weiland has been the wildcard with both critics and fans noting nights when he mumbled incoherently and seemed disinterested and/or impaired and other nights when prowls the stage as the golden grunge god of yore.

Monday night at U of A's stately E.J. Thomas Hall, both the band and Weiland were in a happy place as they played a two hour set filled with the band's many 20th century hits.

The band played Cleveland a scant two months ago, so their quick return to Northeast Ohio is a bit of a surprise and surely had the folks at Live Nation quietly gnawing their collective fingernails wondering if they had saturated the local STP market. While their worst fears were allayed as the crowd was healthy, there were chunks of empty seats on all three levels of the venerable concert hall but the folks that showed up were definitely not feeling saturated.
Weiland sporting a burgundy fedora, jeans, two scarves, sport jacket, sunglasses and Rolling Stones T-shirt (most of which would eventually come off to reveal his still very thin, wiry frame) started the show of a bit slowly with a low energy take on the power ballad Big Empty which like much of the set became a group sing along.

Weiland whose early set banter suggested that he thought he was in Cleveland made several references to his childhood days spent in Chagrin Falls and even briefly wore a jersey from the Kentston school district he attended as a teen. Weiland whose banter, like his singing got better as the evening progressed also admitted he was a Notre Dame fan (drawing many boos from the crowd) and praised former Fighting Irish/Browns quarterback Brady Quinn(drawing a mixed reaction).
Local references always help warm up a room. But the crowd, a mixture of folks who were probably flying the flannel during the band's hey-day and younger fans who were likely dipping into their older siblings CD collections, didn't need much encouragement to sing/shout along to the string of hits that included Wicked Garden, the churning Big Bang Baby and the still taut single Vaseline.

During their commercial heights S.T.P. got a bad critical rap and was lumped in with the wave of grunge also-rans such as Candlebox (also reunited), Bush, Seven Mary Three and others that would pollute the airwaves for the next few years and make piles of money for their record companies. Truthfully, STP's massive selling debut Core still sounds too much like a Mainstream Grunge Blueprint when compared to the Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains records by which it was preceded (not to mention the Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Melvins, Tad and others that proceeded the Seattle stars).

That album also contains many of the band's most enduring hits and almost half of its contents made the set list.

But the band also dipped into personal favorites such as Lounge Fly and Lady Picture Show and Too Cool Queenie from the band's last and least popular album of new material Shangri-La Dee Da . There were also few apparently spontaneous and seemingly out-of-place funk jams between tunes, perhaps a preview of the band's possible recording future.
Playing in front of a huge video screen showing mostly abstract images save a car chase from Bullitt, the 40 year old Weiland's patented stiff, herky-jerky stage movements have gained a bit of extra stiffness but he was pretty energetic, using the entire space and even walking into the crowd during the metal-flavored Down. A few times his vocal fastball seemed to have lost a bit off its top end, but mostly his Vedder/Morrison-esque growls and wails were intact as was his trusty bullhorn and he seemed to empty his lungs on Plush despite having most of the audience singing the song just as loud as he.

Tim McGraw has been a country music superstar for more than 15 years and mainstream pop star for a decade taking the mantle of crossover king from the semi-retired Garth Brooks and racking up a string of country and pop chart topping albums and sell out tours alone and with his crossover superstar wife Faith Hill.
One of the ways McGraw has topped both charts is he’s not afraid to cross-pollinate his music mixing in crunchy rock, slick soul and big pop ballads with his neo-traditional country and contemporary honky-tonk.

Wednesday night at Blossom McGraw and his longtime band the Dancehall Doctors wowed and wooed a near sellout crowd of screaming women who wish they could touch his chiseled body and urban cowboys who would love to drink a beer with him.
McGraw’s superstar status doesn’t stop him from bucking the fairly codified country music system by using his touring band in the studio and recording tunes with rappers and rockers. While many artists have stopped playing soon to be released songs in concert because of camera phones and Youtube, McGraw opened the Blossom show with a solid new song, Still from his next album due in the fall and played three more new songs.

McGraw isn’t a particularly animated performer preferring to let his (usually) tight pants and tighter shirt carry much of the visual load. But the singer, wearing loose cargo pants and a tank top, and oozes charisma and gives his nine band mates-some who have been with him for 20 years- plenty of room to elicit their own screams from the audience.

McGraw whipped out hit after hit, spanning his career from 1993’s still politically incorrect Indian Outlaw through to his recent hit If You're Reading This, about fallen soldiers.

In between he hit showed his soulful side with a cover of Eddie Rabbit’s Suspicion, revisited his daddy issues on the new ballad You Had To Be There and on the new rootsy rocker Southern Voices he named checked a slew of southern icons including Dale Earnhardt, Hank Williams Sr., Rosa Parks and Billy Graham.

Blossom is one of the final stops on McGraw’s Live Your Voice tour, but given their energetic performance it seems neither he nor his band seem ready to leave the road.