Jerry Leiber
Jerry Leiber, one half of the songwriting team Leiber and Stoller, has died, the Los Angeles Times reports. He was 78.
Leiber, whose music with partner Mike Stoller was used as one of the themes on American Idol this past season, died Monday from...
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Haley Reinhart
Interest is growing in American Idol as crunch time approaches. Wednesday's 90-minute performance show, in which the Lady Gaga-mentored final four performed the songs of Leiber and Stoller, averaged 22.37 million viewers and notched a 6.9 rating among 18-to-49-year-olds.
That's up 5 percent from last week in the demo and 1 percent from the comparable year-earlier program (which jumped some 17 percent in viewership from 19.2 million).
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Lady Gaga
Lady Gaga will mentor the remaining four American Idol finalists next week, Fox announced Friday.
Gaga will join Jimmy Iovine in the studio to help Lauren Alaina, James Durbin, Scotty McCreery and Haley Reinhart prepare to sing songs by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Reinhart performed the singer's unreleased track "You and Me" on Wednesday.
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This is a week that I have a tough time relating to. Born in ’76, I never really got the full impact of '60s music and never heard enough that excited me to make me want to go back and visit it. I know this sounds strange coming from a guy that found enough stuff exciting to own 4,000+ pieces of audio from the '80s, which is arguably the worst decade for music. (At least I know El DeBarge and Taco would be on my side of the debate). So a song like "Some Other Guy" is almost like listening to an original for me. Fortunately though, Leiber and Stoller wrote a lot of great tunes that were covered by a mess of bands, so I’m sure I can say I’ve heard most. Side note: Many of the artists I will type as the performer of the songs really aren’t the original performers and I know that. But the artists I type are the versions that I remember as the hits. In a lot of cases, the original Leiber and Stoller song was performed by a soul group to little fanfare and then turned ...
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