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Fifty-five is hardly old age, but it would appear old enough to get Robyn Hitchcock thinking about a few things.

Goodnight Oslo, the beloved British acid-folkie’s second album with the Venus 3 – guitarist Peter Buck, bassist Scott McCaughey and drummer Bill Rieflin, all poached from the extended R.E.M. family – is rife with allusions to death, time passing and the wilder nights of Hitchcock’s youth. He’s said the creepy title track was inspired by a speed-fuelled romp in Norway many years ago with his old Soft Boys bandmate Morris Windsor (who guests here, along with the Decemberists’ Colin Meloy and Harvey Danger’s Sean Nelson).

"Saturday Groovers" relishes in smelling "the smoke from the lungs of the Saturday groovers" with jubilant, T. Rex-like swagger, then situates the reminiscence in a present fraught with "heart disease and gout." "16 Years" turns a cold eye upon "16 years when all I got was high." The lingering "Your Head Here," meanwhile, could be staring down into a friend’s casket and confronting the inevitable: "Life is all I own / You walk a thousand miles and you’re alone."

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If you’ve only seen videos of Katy Perry singing "I Kissed a Girl" and "Hot N Cold," looking like the love child of Zooey Deschanel and an anime character, you might take her for a lightweight. She giggles, does exaggerated pantomimes of femininity, and jumps into cakes at award shows. Nothing about her screams gravitas
But Perry doesn’t mind underplaying her hand. While she was "failing"—being dropped by three record labels before the age of 24—she was taking notes the entire time. And when she arrived at Capitol, she made sure to land on her feet.
"I Kissed a Girl," the first single from her album "One of the Boys," spent seven weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 during the summer of 2008 and has sold 3.1 million downloads, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The follow-up single, "Hot N Cold," reached No. 3 on the Hot 100 and has sold 2.9 million downloads. Her third single, "Thinking of You," shipped to radio Jan. 12; it has sold 97,000 copies.
Her album has sold 806,000 copies since its release in June, but if she was hitting 15 years ago, she’d probably be reaching Alanis Morissette levels of album sales.
That change in the music business is not lost on Perry. "People got burned by too many uneven records," she says. "I personally can’t live without iTunes."

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Nine Inch Nails will tour later this year with the reunited Jane’s Addiction, NIN frontman Trent Reznor wrote in a post on the band’s Web site.
Although he stopped short of saying the band was going on something more than a hiatus, Reznor confirmed these will be the last NIN shows for some time, and that they will be "much more raw, spontaneous and less scripted" compared to last year’s "Lights in the Sky" tour. "It’s time to make NIN disappear for a while," he said.
Dates have not yet been announced, but Reznor says the tour will take the bands "across the globe."
The pairing with Jane’s Addiction was inspired by NIN’s stint on the maiden Lollapalooza tour in 1991, which was headlined by Jane’s. The band broke up for the first time shortly thereafter, only to reunite minus original bassist Eric Avery in 1997 and again in 2001.
"These performances essentially created and defined the term ‘alternative’ rock in the U.S., created an ongoing festival franchise that is still thriving (Lollapalooza), set the stage for Nirvana to shift popular taste a few months later, and were really f*cking FUN to play and attend — truly the best times I’ve had," Reznor wrote.

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