BONUS TRACKS: FreshGrass | Bentonville Lineup, A ‘New’ Beatles Song, and More

As festival season starts to snooze for the winter, music fans can start dreaming of spring lineups, and we’ve got a good one for you: FreshGrass | Bentonville, presented by No Depression publisher the FreshGrass Foundation, announced its lineup this week, headlined by Jason Isbell and The 400 Unit and Trampled by Turtles. Joining those bands on the grounds of the very cool Momentary museum in Arkansas on May 17 and 18 will be Aoife O’Donovan, Alison Brown, Ruthie Foster, S.G. Goodman, Peter One, and more. Get more info and snag tickets here.

There’s one last “new” Beatles song coming our way — which isn’t a sentence anyone expected to hear in this, the year 2023, with two of the band’s members long dead. “Now and Then,” coming next Thursday, was made possible by artificial intelligence, which was able to take a poor-quality tape of a demo from John Lennon and isolate his vocals. At the helm of that work was film director Peter Jackson, who brought us the Lord of the Rings trilogy of movies in the early 2000s as well as the eight-hour 2021 documentary The Beatles: Get Back. The song is built from pieces that span decades: Lennon’s recovered vocals; a guitar track recorded by George Harrison in the 1990s; a new drum part from Ringo Starr and new bass, piano, and guitar work from Paul McCartney; and backing vocals from recordings of existing Beatles songs. On Wednesday, the day before “Now and Then” is released, a 12-minute film telling the story of the new recording will be available — watch the trailer here. Learn more about the making of the new song in this story from The Associated Press, and check out this exclusive story from People for the backstory behind the writing of the song itself.

Music Business Worldwide, without naming its sources, is reporting that Spotify is considering changes to its royalty payment model early next year. The changes include a minimum time length for “noise” tracks before they generate royalties, financial penalties for distributors that have uploaded tracks with fraudulent activity, and — raising the most eyebrows — introducing a minimum number of annual streams before a track can start generating royalties. Spotify has not commented on the accuracy of this report, so take it with a large grain of salt, but it seems worth keeping an eye on. Read Music Business Worldwide’s story here.

WHAT WE’RE LISTENING TO

Here’s a sampling of the songs, albums, bands, and sounds No Depression staffers have been into this week:

Mark Erelli – “By Degrees”
Andrea von Kampen – ‘Sister Moon,” the title track from her new album, coming in March
American Patchwork Quartet – “Beneath the Willow,” from the project’s debut album, coming next year

Barbaro – About the Winter
Patty Loveless – “Blame It On Your Heart”
Lorrie Morgan – “Out of Your Shoes”
Charley Crockett – “Killers of the Flower Moon”
Kurt Vile – “Another good year for the roses,” from his upcoming EP, Back to Moon Beach, coming in November