Latest news with #I'llSleepWhenI'mDead
New York Post
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Rachael Ray sparks new health concerns in viral cooking video: ‘She looks sick'
Rachael Ray fans are worried about her health once again. The celebrity chef, 56, slurred her words in another cooking video that she shared to Instagram on Mother's Day. In the clip from Sunday, Ray stood over a stovetop and recalled how she was 'very, very poor' while living in New York as a young woman. Advertisement 9 Rachael Ray in her May 11 Instagram video. Rachael Ray/Instagram 9 Old footage of Rachael Ray and her mom. Rachael Ray/Instagram 'I didn't want to bother my mother. I didn't want her to feel scared for me. So I would never ask for money,' she said. 'And I didn't have any.' Advertisement Ray continued, 'Eventually, I did a show called '$40 a Day.' And that was my budget for a whole week. I would buy a week's food, and I only had $40. I always felt so grateful that I came from people that taught me how to buy dry beans, a few vegetables, very little protein, and to live on that for a long time. And I'm deeply grateful for it.' 9 Rachael Ray appears to slur her words in a cooking video. Rachael Ray/Instagram 'It has changed the course of my life. It has made my life what it is,' Ray added. 'And that's what I try to share in these shows as often as I can.' In the comments, fans expressed concern for Ray's wellbeing. Advertisement 'Rachael worried about you! ❤️🙏🙏🙏,' one fan wrote. 9 Fans are worried about Rachael Ray's health. Rachael Ray/Instagram 9 Rachael Ray and her mom. Rachael Ray/Instagram 'Rachael are you okay? You don't look well,' another fan said. Advertisement A third person added, 'OMG WHAT HAPPENED TO RACHAEL.' 'Girl are you okay? We don't recognize you,' a different comment read. Someone else wrote, 'she looks sick.' But other fans defended the famous homemaker. 'Let's be kind or silent. We never know what people are going through,' someone wrote. 9 Rachael Ray on her show in 2015. Rachael Ray Show Another fan said, 'Please be kind, we never know what types of health or personal struggles people have.' 'People who have nothing nice to say should shut up,' a different person wrote. Advertisement Another fan commented, 'She's having some health issues. Hopefully, people will understand and show her grace as she goes through it.' The Post has reached out to Ray's rep for comment. 9 Rachael Ray at SOBEWFF 2025 at the Grand Tasting Village in Miami Beach, Florida. WireImage Ray previously sparked concern for her slurred speech in a different cooking video last year. Advertisement In the clip from her 'Rachael Ray in Tuscany' series, she made Tony Bennett's favorite dish while recalling the time the late singer came over for dinner and slipped on her polished kitchen floor. However, fans were distracted by the way Ray was speaking. 9 Rachael Ray cooking on her talk show in 2017. 9 Rachael Ray at the 'We Feed People' New York premiere in May 2022. Getty Images for National Geographic One month later, Ray revealed on her 'I'll Sleep When I'm Dead' podcast that she recently suffered 'a couple of bad falls,' though she didn't offer more context. Advertisement During another episode of her podcast in December, Ray told guest Anne Burrell that she's 'afraid' to go on the internet and see what people are saying about her. 'Do you ever think about the way people think about you? I don't,' said Ray. 'I'm, like, afraid to, quite frankly.'
Telegraph
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The brothers who bet the family farm on a rock career
In what would soon become a pivotal conversation, in 1978, Don Emerson Sr. asked his sons if they were serious about making music. He'd noticed that as well as attending school and working on the family's 1,600-acre farm in Fruitland, in Washington state, Joe and Donnie, age 17 and 15 respectively, were spending every scarce and valued free hour writing and playing songs. Goodness knows where they found the time, or the energy, to do so. Never mind that I'll Sleep When I'm Dead is a Bon Jovi song – it could easily have been one of theirs. As recreated in the feature film Dreamin' Wild, released in the UK this week, the conversation went as follows. In order to further their cause, the pair learnt that Don Sr. would (at the cost of a hundred thousand dollars) oversee the construction of a one-room studio in which his sons could make music. Donnie, the guitarist and singer who wrote the songs, and Joe, who played drums, were also told their efforts would be better rewarded by concentrating on their own material rather than playing cover tunes in local bars in the Pacific Northwest. With this, they recorded and self-released their own album, from which the film takes its name. 'My brother and I worked on that farm and that was the deal our father made with us,' Donnie Emerson tells me. 'We worked hard and he supplied the stuff for us. It wasn't like we were getting paid as hired hands. It was never like that. We never got paid to work on the farm. We were never spoiled. Hollywood doesn't understand, and can't portray, the work ethic [we had] because they don't have time to figure it out. They don't understand waking up at 5:30, six o' clock in the morning for an hour and a half before school and doing these kind of chores. And then doing them after school as well. And that happened every day.' Directed by Bill Pohlad, the man responsible for the acclaimed Beach Boys biopic Love & Mercy, and starring Casey Affleck as the adult Donnie Emerson, Zooey Deschanel as his wife Nancy, Noah Jupe as the young Donny, and the great Beau Bridges as his father, Dreamin' Wild's impressive cast portrays a family united by a rugged kind of taciturn love. Hearing the news that they're getting their own recording studio, the sons spontaneously hug their father in an embrace that lasts only for a moment. Duly, the kids are told, 'That's enough of that'. Speaking on Zoom from a room in Spokane adorned with guitars and soundproof padding, almost half a century later, it's now sixty-something Donnie Emerson who gives the impression of a man who keeps his emotions on a tight leash. Answering my questions, he pauses often, while asking frequently if I understand what he's saying. Watching him search for the right words, at times, I wonder if he's actually about to burst into tears. Notwithstanding the briefest of laughs at being told that he's better looking than Casey Affleck, evidently, any sense of humour he might have has been given the afternoon off. Given the startling proximity of Affleck's performance, speaking to real person portrayed on-screen is a vaguely unsettling experience. It makes me wonder, too, if the portrayal of Joe Emerson, by the White Lotus actor Walton Goggins, is similarly close to home. Either way, Goggins's nuanced balance of enthusiasm and insecurity is a highlight of the film. For his part, Donnie Emerson tells me that he doesn't think about the movie as much as he once did. 'I used to analyse it when it first came out, when I first watched it, but now I just kind of try accept it as for how a Hollywood film is made. I can't really dive into it and dissect it so much that some of it is kind of, I don't want to say embellished or anything cos it's not like that, but if you had to do everything true to form, probably it would be different.' The bones of the story, though, are indisputable. With Donnie Emerson taking inspiration from the radio on the farm tractor – the one regular source of music available to him, he says – he and Joe made an album. They beavered away on pretty basic instruments bought with bank loans in a studio equipped with an eight-track recorder, a mixing desk and a reverb unit (on which they might have gone a little easier). Photographed wearing clothes that looked to have been borrowed from Evel Knievel, the family handled the art work as well as the costs of pressing up 2,000 vinyl copies. Decades before technology allowed similarly ambitious young artists to cook up albums in their bedrooms, with this, they anticipated the future from the overlooked boondocks of America. The result was a strange kind of innocence – of purity, even. Writing in the Los Angeles Times, in 2012, the journalist Randall Roberts correctly noted that Dreamin' Wild is 'an album whose eight songs feel like a time capsule found buried on a distant island. The album has no sense of the rock world outside of the farm: there's not a hint of punk rock on it, even though the Sex Pistols and Ramones had shifted the conversation a few years before it was made. Any notion that disco is in the cultural conversation on the coasts is absent. Rather, the raw honesty of soft rock, funk and the singer-songwriter sounds of the decade reign supreme.' To the surprise, perhaps, of only the brothers and their father, for almost three decades, the album went almost entirely unnoticed. Almost. But over in Spokane, 70 miles away, the purchase of a thrift store copy by a collector named Jack Fleischer became the catalyst for a conversational and online buzz that brought the brothers to the attention of Light In The Attic Records. With artists such as Kris Kristofferson, Serge Gainsbourg and Mercury Rev on its roster, initially, the news that a label that specialises in overlooked music wanted to properly release Dreamin' Wild was met with suspicion from Donnie Emerson. In the film, he asks, 'How much is this gonna cost us?' (To which the answer comes, 'nothing'.) His caution is easily explained. After Dreamin' Wild's inevitably disappointing box office returns, Donnie went to Los Angeles to try his luck as a solo artist. As a farm boy with no real experience of the music industry, one can imagine how that worked out: the City of Angels chewed him up like a hot dog at a ballpark. At this point, Don Emerson Sr. was selling chunks of farmland to meet the costs of this suddenly and ruinously expensive experiment. By far the most heart-rending moment in the film comes in a phone conversation in which the son tells his father, 'Dad, we're gonna need just a little bit more money.' Asked if he and his family were ripped off down in California, Donnie Replies, 'Oh gosh yes'. He adds, 'We were kind of taken [financially] because we were kind of naïve during that time about how the business worked. If we probably had just got out and played and just hit the road as a band, and just kicked, it would have changed, probably.' For anyone familiar with the music industry, what followed the re-release of Dreamin' Wild was predictably complicated. Despite warm reviews – notably from the then influential website Pitchfork – and a feature in the New York Times, Donnie, who'd been busting his hump in the song-writing game for 30 years, felt no small measure of resentment at becoming known for music created in his teenage years. As a junior partner, his brother, meanwhile, revisited feelings of inadequacy with regard his general standing and his (it's fair to say, limited) abilities as a drummer. 'Obviously the fan base likes… that kind of' – long pause – 'that, what do you say, adolescent approach,' Donnie Emerson tells me. 'And I respect that, I really do, because there's something great in that, in its purity. But I grew as a musician, you know? I look at my heights differently now. I look at where I'm playing differently now… Does that make any sense? So it's really difficult for me to sit back, you know. And my brother had stopped playing drums for many years. And you don't just pick up drums and fall [back] in. I don't care what anybody says.' To reveal any more would spoil the film's ending, which wasn't at all what I expected. But perhaps it would be fair to say that the Emerson brothers' continued absence from the world of mainstream music proper can be attributed to things not going exactly to plan. In a narrative that is short on genuine conflict, matters come to a boil at a showcase concert at The Showbox, in Seattle, the nearest big city – five hours by car – from Fruitland. Backstage, before a startled band, Donnie throws a tantrum that seems to have more than a little bit of self-sabotage at its core. 'There's absolute realism [in the film] about how I get emotional about the music and stuff, but I never did during that show,' he says. But there were issues beforehand, he admits, not least with his brother keeping time like a pacemaker in an electrical storm. 'Going through rehearsals and stuff, yes, there was some tension there,' he tells me. 'Do you know what I'm saying? Absolutely there was.' In an irony that has not gone unnoticed by Donnie Emerson, though, in its own way, the fate of Dreamin' Wild has mirrored the early-day fortunes of the album from which it takes its name. Despite its stellar cast and noted director, in its opening week (almost two years ago) in the United States and Canada, the film earned just $136, 391 at the box office. Today, its worldwide gross is a pallid $296, 290. Despite being at last available in the United Kingdom, the movie hasn't been given a cinema release. 'You would think that by having the film come out and everything, people would recognise me as an artist,' Donnie Emerson says. 'And they would say, 'Okay, we're going to give this guy a shot and let's see what he actually does…' I'm in that dilemma even now. The film didn't get recognised to catapult me to people's attention… because I want to be on the stage. And there aren't a lot of people who can say they've had a film made about their life. So you would think, this would have catapulted me into a [higher] arena… although I don't mean actual arenas.' He goes on. 'It's just like Dreamin' Wild [the album]. We did a record back then hoping that people were going to like it and that things were going to happen for us, but that was basically a mirage because it didn't come to fruition.' All of which makes the film and its subjects a rather curious endeavour. Today, as well as working on the farm, Joe Emerson looks after his 94-year-old father and his mother. Donnie, meanwhile, continues to write songs that he records and perform with his wife and their band, with whom he has undertaken more than 1,700 concerts. The gang are about to head off to play a series of shows in Portland and Seattle, he tells me. In other words, things are much the same as they might have been had Light In The Attic Records not come calling. Which isn't the same as saying one should feel sorry for the people portrayed on-screen. With his immovable frankness – he can't help expressing disappointment at his wife's admittedly underwritten role in the film, for one thing – I'm not sure Donnie Emerson ever really wanted to be famous. If he did, I'm even less sure that he has the temperament for it. But as a writer and performer, and as a producer, music provides him with his living at a time when corners are being cut everywhere. He's still in the game. It's just that, now, he knows to take care in what he wishes for. 'I work with some up and coming artists and I just basically tell them, if you think that it's greener on the other side of this fence, you're very much mistaken,' he tells me. 'You've got a great life [already] right here… You've got a family and a child and this and that. So, buddy, let me tell you, this ain't glamorous. It's hard, hard work. You've got to enjoy the music from the stage so it's real… And I'm not trying to be negative or anything cos people tell me about the film [and] they'll say, 'Oh look he's got a film, he should be grateful'. Well of course I'm grateful, but that doesn't mean that it's all perfect. It's just life, you know? We all go through things.'
