Latest news with #SayAnything
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'It's the Kinks meets AC/DC': Jim Babjak revisits 5 classic Smithereens riffs
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The Smithereens are, without a doubt, one of the greatest guitar bands to come out of New Jersey, which – scientifically speaking! – means Smithereens guitarist Jim Babjak has recorded some of the greatest riffs to come out of New Jersey. Below, Babjak goes to town on the roots and gear behind five of those riffs. And if you're gonna try to play them yourself, remember to tune down half a step, à la Jimi Hendrix or Stevie Ray Vaughan. 'Pat came up with the opening riff, but I helped him out on some of the chords. There's an F chord in there, but I don't know what it's called, and I do a sort of unorthodox thing with the E minor. The solo is all mine. I played it on the demo because the song was originally planned for Cameron Crowe's Say Anything. In fact, that's why Pat sings, 'I'll say anything' at the end. 'We were definitely going for a heavier sound, and I needed something even tougher than my SG. I said, 'I gotta get a Les Paul.' I've never been one of those guys who will go into a guitar store and start playing Stairway to Heaven. I was always kind of embarrassed by that sort of thing. 'We were recording in California, so I went with one of our assistant engineers to a used-guitar shop by the studio. I pointed to Les Paul and said, 'Can you plug that in to see what it sounds like?' He did, and I said, 'Okay, I'll take that one.' It was 1975 Les Paul. I put it through my Marshall, and it sounded great. I still have it – I don't want to give it up.' 'There's a chord with the pinky on the E and the B of the fourth fret – I don't know what you call it. I was watching Del Shannon doing Runaway, and he was playing that chord. I was like, 'Wow, that's really cool. I'm going to start doing that.' For the riff I play in the beginning of this song, I'm keeping my pinky on the E and the B while I move around with the other fingers. 'Around this time, I bought a new SG to get a heavier sound. It was a 1987 SG with regular humbuckers. Later on I put P90s in it. It was a good guitar and worked out fine, but I think an SG from 1967 or '68 would have been better.' 'I used the same SG that I played on Drown in My Own Tears. Same Marshall, too. I never veered too much from a winning combination. It's kind of funny, though; in the video, I play a Rickenbacker because we had an endorsement with them. 'The riff is pretty Kinks-ish, but heavier. It's the Kinks meets AC/DC. I had to play around with the riff because I didn't want it to sound like You Really Got Me – you don't wanna get sued or anything. We worked everything out in rehearsals during pre-production. Mike came in with his basslines, so it all came together.' 'I came up with that riff during a soundcheck in Madrid on our first tour. There's always a lot of waiting and goofing around at soundcheck – people aren't always ready at the same time. So it's a good chance to play around with new ideas to see if anybody reacts. Back then, if you played something good, you had to play it over and over so you could remember it. 'The minute I played this riff, I was like, 'I think there's a song here.' The other guys looked at me – 'What was that?' When we got back to the States, Pat put some chords to it and wrote the lyrics, which were different at the time. 'We went to a rehearsal studio before recording the album and worked out the parts. When we recorded the song, I used the SG for the rhythm, but I played the riff with a Strat. The Strat just sounded better with the part. Don Dixon put some sort of effect on it, and it sounded weird but good.' 'Capitol wanted another A Girl Like You. It was like the Kinks following up You Really Got Me with All Day and All of the Night. We were like, 'All right, we gotta give the record company that type of song again.' They told us that's what they wanted; they even said we had to use a click track. I was like, 'Are you fucking kidding me? That would stifle the drums.' Dennis actually got really good at playing with a click, though I wasn't a fan of it. 'We did the demo of it, but I don't think Pat had all the lyrics yet. The song is in the key of A, just like A Girl Like You, and I thought, 'How am I going to make it sound different?' I don't like to play solos on demos because I want them to be fresh in the studio. I just wait till we're recording and then I do a few passes. Eventually, the producer will say, 'Okay, we got it.' 'Sonically, I tried to make the song different from A Girl Like You in that I added an acoustic guitar under the electric on the opening riff. It added a little bit of texture and made it sound different. The electric was the '75 Les Paul I bought in L.A. The acoustic was a big-body Guild D-50.' This article first appeared in Guitar World. Subscribe and save.
New York Times
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
When Real Life Calls for a Cheesy Rom-Com Gesture
The second time I fell in love, before it began to go well, it went very badly. After only a couple of conversations over coffee, I showed up at my beloved's apartment and confessed the depth of my feelings — to which she responded, with heartbreaking nonchalance, 'Um … what do you expect me to say?' I was so devastated that, in trying to flee, I inadvertently stormed right past her front door and straight into her hallway closet. On my way home, I almost walked into the path of a moving train, then verbally abused the subway conductor for daring to warn me about it. That night I drank an entire bottle of wine, watched the 2005 film adaptation of 'Pride and Prejudice' for the umpteenth time and cursed my sorry fate. Yes, I know. You don't have to tell me what I looked like. What did I think I would accomplish, pulling some cheesy rom-com move, as if my life were 'Say Anything' or 'When Harry Met Sally'? Had Hollywood turned me into a tacky derivative? Relationship advice is awash with warnings to not be duped by films. We poor schlubs out in the world don't have teams of writers scripting our happy endings, experts caution — and so taking inspiration from rom-coms' corny gestures just sets ourselves up for disappointment. And it's true that real life does not tolerate clichés. Falling for someone is a highly individual experience. An unassuming widow's peak, the sound of their vowels when they're running late — it's small, specific details that stoke and justify desire (and that sent me marching to my beloved's doorstep that night). When we are fervently in love, wrote the novelist Stendhal, 'everything is a symbol.' If you have ever disapproved of a friend's partner, then you were not seeing the same symbols your friend was. But so then, if nothing is more unique than a love affair, how come so many of us watch Nicholas Sparks's films with the same generic scenes of rain-kissing and love-declaring? It's because underneath a rom-com's boilerplate narrative structures, there is extreme passion and ardor and desperation — and all of that is very true to what the actual nonmovie experience of falling in love feels like. Rom-coms resonate with us because we do see ourselves in them: They function as mirrors through which we can pinpoint and understand our own amorphous feelings. And their sweeping gestures also provide encouragement for us to turn our passions into concrete action. I have never seen anyone kiss a lover in the pouring rain — in real life, cold rainstorms are no aphrodisiac — but I have witnessed a grown man get down on bended knee and belt out the worst Nickelback cover. His girlfriend, who hates Nickelback, adored it. I was raised by a man who, after a decade of friendship with a woman, got drunk and flew across the country so he could tell her that he couldn't wait a moment longer to be together. Years later, my mother's brother was almost arrested for loudly declaiming his regret outside his wife's window in the middle of the night. (At least he didn't use a boombox.) As the sociologist Niklas Luhmann put it, 'Showing that one could control one's passion would be a poor way of showing passion.' I may have made a clown of myself when I showed up out of the blue to declare my love, but nothing else I could have done would have demonstrated the bigness of my feelings more clearly. And I don't think I would have had the courage to try had I not been bred on a steady diet of finely calibrated melodrama. Those Hail Mary moments in rom-coms, the porn of courtship, remind us that maudlin embarrassments are often what bring a couple together in the first place. Can these big declarations be stereotypical? Of course — but in the same way all rituals and ceremonies are stereotypical. They provide us with something recognizable. That structure connects us to the many attempts at love fumbled by the millions over the years. Things turned out OK for me. My corny gesture didn't go over as badly as I had assumed. In the end, I got the girl — she re-evaluated her reaction, after that initial disastrous moment, because she liked that I was a person capable of such earnest affection. We married. We have gorgeous children. These days, though, our happy ending doesn't seem as assured as it once did. But it's not because romantic movies have given us impossible expectations — it's because a long-term, real-world marriage is hard work, and ongoing, and often we're too tired to try. In the challenging moments, however, we have rom-coms. Watching and rewatching on-screen couples' phony theatrics reminds us of the ways in which our own relationship began. Remembering our origin story — intense, bumbling and yet very real — imbues our middle age with the optimism of our youth. By kicking off our relationship with a rom-com gesture, we ended up giving it a certain durability, taking our romance into an illustrious tradition of other lovers, real and fictional. Sometimes, who you want to be is who others have imagined they were. Nowadays, my wife and I come together through rom-coms. Watching their overwrought scenes, we laugh and reminisce about the time, all those years ago, when a stupid kid marched into the closet of a beautiful, sophisticated woman, who, later that night, while he was drunk on pride and prejudiced by films, sent him an email. In that email, she quoted characters from other love stories, whose words were much clearer about her own feelings than she could be.
Yahoo
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
More enjoyable sex, less enjoyable sleep. Ione Skye, 54, gets candid about intimacy, insecurities and menopause.
Gen-X it girl Ione Skye starred in River's Edge with Keanu Reeves, Say Anything with John Cusack and Wayne's World with Mike Myers and Dana Carvey. At just 16, she dated Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers and married, cheated on and divorced the Beastie Boys' Adam Horowitz. For so much of her life, much of which has been covered by tabloids and chronicled in pop culture history has been notable for the men — and women — she's dated. But at 54, with the release of her memoir Say Everything, she's writing the story and taking center stage. So why tell all (and tell all she does) now? 'It's just that getting older, life doesn't get easier. But I feel I can handle getting through things a little better with the wisdom of age,' she tells Yahoo Life. With age comes wisdom, yes, but also new challenges and changes. Here she shares her refreshing thoughts on body image, exercise, menopause and more. Why was it the right time for you to write and release this book? I always love sharing myself with my close friends and family and just have that desire to be known, like all of us. But at this point, I felt I could trust myself to share and not overshare, believe it or not, even though it is unapologetically honest and disarming. It felt like there was a lot of interest in my life and I wanted to let people know who I am and share my experience. As I get older, I feel I can kind of take care of myself through things emotionally — ride the ups and downs and still stick with myself. When I was younger, I don't know if I would have had the same mind to edit parts. The older I get, the more I feel like life is just as hard in some ways, but this, too, shall pass. You touch on different sources of insecurity in your writing — your body being one of them. Has that changed as you've gotten older? The pressure I had put on myself to look like a friggin' model is insane. As I get older, I'm grateful when my body works. I'm always going to have that mind where I put pressure on myself thinking my stomach looks big in a picture or whatever it is. But I just appreciate superficially the parts of my body that I do like. In the book I write a list about the parts I like versus the parts I don't like, which is not a healthy thing. But also, it is, in the sense that I'm focusing on the good things. I'm just trying to remember all the healthy things that really matter. What does exercise look like for you in your 50s? I struggle with that and always have. As a little kid, I didn't like sports at first because I hated the feeling of competition. When it was light and just fun, it was great. I liked it when I could forget that I was exercising. It's about finding the thing that I feel good doing so I'm still doing something because I realize I have to and it makes me feel better, of course. But I'm inconsistent. Now I'm doing Pilates for just stretching. I'm not in a class — I found a place where you go on your own machine because I feel a lot of pressure in class sometimes. I'm 54 and most women in classes I've gone to were up to their 30s or 40s. So I'm a little older, they're seemingly having a much easier time and I get frustrated with myself that I don't have the same endurance. I was never highly athletic, but I'm giving myself a break. I don't want to push myself anymore as long as I'm doing something. Just being very gentle and taking it slow. How has your body evolved with aging? I'm getting older, my tummy is getting bigger and I'm gaining a little weight as I'm menopausal. Maybe that'll even out, but again, I'm giving myself grace for the changes of my body. As long as I'm being healthy and trying to be mobile and keep fit, that's more important than just worrying too much about what I look like in clothes. What has menopause been like for you otherwise? It's hard getting older. I guess you hear about that whole feeling of being invisible and all of that. I just didn't expect the anxiety and the mood changes. Obviously, your hormones are different, so all of a sudden I've got more anxiety. The part that's the hardest for me isn't even the hot flashes because I'm taking estrogen and that helps. It's the sleeplessness that's just the worst. I look at my 23-year-old and my teenager and I'm like, 'Oh, I loved when I was younger and could just sleep.' It's really good that more people are talking about it. I can't believe my mom didn't. I asked my mom about her experience and she's like, 'Oh, I don't remember. I just remember feeling sort of sad that I wouldn't be able to have a baby anymore.' And I'm like, 'That's it?' It's getting better. But I still feel sexy and beautiful. Intimacy and sexuality were a big part of the book. What does that look like for you today? It's been this whole process of … having sex for myself. I thankfully never had any nightmarish experiences, but I was still doing it a lot without really being in my body or knowing what I wanted. It felt almost like an extension of being creative with somebody I was attracted to and I admired. But I was very unable to enjoy it or I felt insecure about my body. Now that I'm in this marriage, I feel so safe. I can really check in with myself and do it for myself. I've turned it more into like, this is something good for me to do, which sounds completely unsexy, but it isn't. I remind myself that this is for you, this is for your sexual health and to connect with yourself and with your husband. It's such a long road and it's still going. Tell me about your beauty routine. I feel like I've finally learned how to do my makeup properly. It's taken me a long time. I was naturally pretty and I didn't have a mom who encouraged me to get gussied up or to put on a face. So I just kind of went with it and brushed my hair, put on some cool clothes. I've always had rosacea, so I used to lean toward a natural look and products just because I was trying to avoid perfumes and stuff that would make my skin turn bright red. I have dry skin too, so just whatever I'm doing, I use a lot of moisturizer. I've never stuck to a routine, but I'm more and more open to learning about it these days, especially having daughters. They have like 20-step skincare routines. I'm going to try to do more facials because I think they do brighten up your skin. So I want to try to do a facial every three months or something if I can. You wrote about always feeling older than you were when you were a teenager, as a result of being in Hollywood. What age do you feel now? I feel a lot of different ages for different parts of me. I mean, sometimes I feel like a kid when I'm feeling emotional in a certain way. But I would say maybe early 40s, if I was going to land on like a more mature adult age.
South China Morning Post
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
She was turned down by Keanu Reeves. 80s teen actress Ione Skye recalls a steamy encounter
Professionally known as the cool-girl star of Say Anything and other 1980s teen films, Ione Skye was also famous for her tumultuous trysts and relationships with famous men, from Red Hot Chili Peppers front man Anthony Kiedis to actor John Cusack, and for getting swept up in the dark side of Hollywood. Advertisement Fortunately, it does not sound like there was anything too dark about Skye's friendship with Keanu Reeves , as she has revealed in her new, tell-all memoir, Say Everything. However, she admitted that the friendship began with her 'stalking' the famously easy-going A-list actor while they worked together on her first movie, River's Edge, a 1986 crime drama. During the film shoot, she also described how their friendship reached an important understanding after she unsuccessfully tried to seduce him. Keanu Reeves and Ione Skye in a still from River's Edge. 'Even the way he'd rejected me was charming,' Skye wrote, according to entertainment magazine Entertainment Weekly.
The Independent
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Ione Skye reveals Keanu Reeves turned her down her after steamy shower kiss
Ione Skye has opened up about a steamy interaction she had with Keanu Reeves in the 1980s. The 54-year-old revealed in her memoir Say Everything: A Memoir, which hit shelves on Tuesday, that she developed a 'huge crush' on Reeves while they were co-starring in the 1986 movie River's Edge. In her book, the Say Anything actor wrote that she first began acting on her crush by 'stalking' Reeves — who is six years her senior — while he was in his trailer between scenes. At one point, she visited his apartment and tried to kiss him, which he attempted to get out of by telling her that he was going to go take a shower. However, Skye followed him into the bathroom. 'Keanu turned on the water and stood with his back to me, hand in the stream, staring up at the showerhead. I maneuvered between him and the open shower curtain, water spraying my back,' her book read. 'His beautiful neck was right there, so close I could lick it, so I did. I zeroed in on his beautiful throat, sucking and making out with it. He made a low, growly noise and I felt my stomach turn nicely. 'Oh,' I heard myself say. The room was thick with steam, my wet T-shirt sticking to me, wanting to be peeled off.' Skye then tried to unfasten Reeves's belt buckle before he grabbed her wrist and told her he wasn't interested. 'I broke out with a quick, shocked laugh. 'Sorry!'' the memoir continued. ''No, don't be,' said Keanu, releasing my wrist. We were still stuck together, breathing hard. I pressed my face, red from the kiss and now embarrassment, into his chest.' ''Let me, ah, get you a dry shirt,'' he said to her. 'Damn,' Skye thought. 'Even the way he'd rejected me was charming.' The next day on set, Skye said being around Reeves was only 'a little awkward.' During another portion of the book, Skye wrote about years after they filmed the movie together. Recalling a dinner party with her fiancé, designer David Netto, and some friends who loved the movie, she wrote: 'We talked about the film and what John Cusack was like. I told them we'd had a sweet friendship and I'd always admired him and he'd never felt at home in LA so had recently moved back to Chicago.' 'I did not mention that I'd slept with Johnny after my divorce because I'd needed to get him out of my system and it had worked — now I knew we were meant to be in love only in the movies,' she added casually.
