West unleashed a torrent of emotions on his official Twitter account Saturday, acknowledging once again that he was wrong for jumping on stage, taking the trophy that Swift won at the MTV Video Music Awards and saying that it should have gone to Beyonce.

But the rapper-producer said that he has experienced enormous pain, been the subject of death wishes and suffered tremendous setback to his career.

“How deep is the scar … I bled hard … cancelled tour with the number one pop star in the world … closed the doors of my clothing office,” he tweeted.

The multiplatinum, Grammy-winning superstar had been one of the decade’s most successful and critically acclaimed stars, despite sometimes boorish behavior and meltdowns at other awards shows when things did not go his way.

However, when he upstaged Swift — the then-teenage darling of pop and country music worlds _the public had had enough. There was tremendous backlash against West — even President Barack Obama was caught calling him a “jackass.”

At the time, he went on Jay Leno’s prime-time show to apologize and said he still had not recovered from his mother’s death two years prior. He said he would be taking time off from the public eye.

That time off came sooner than expected. He canceled a joint tour with Lady Gaga that fall, apparently due to low ticket sales. On Twitter, West talked about the backlash.

“I’m the guy who at one point could perform the Justin Timberlake on stage and everyone would be sooo happy that I was there,” he wrote.

After the incident, he said, “People tweeted that they wish I was dead … No listen. They wanted me to die people. I carry that. I smile and take pictures through that.”

West said he’s now “ready to get out of my own way. The ego is overdone.”

He also apologized to Swift again, and said he has written a song for her that he hopes she will perform.

“If she won’t take it then I will perform it for her,” he said.

West is working on a new album that is supposed to come out sometime this fall. A recent member of Twitter, West has been an active user, posting not only his feelings, but new songs and other updates. He has over 900,000 followers since he joined earlier this summer.

“Man I love Twitter … I’ve always been at the mercy of the press but no more … The media tried to demonize me,” he tweeted Saturday.

Kanye West: ‘I bled hard’ over Swift debacle is a post from: Asikomusic.com - Your Music Reviews, News, and Discussion

Lambert will compete against her fiance Blake Shelton when the awards are handed out November 10 in Nashville, Tennessee and will be joined by Lady Antebellum, who scored a total of five nominations including for song of the year for their hit “Need You Now.”

The remaining five categories for the awards were announced Wednesday on ABC’S “Good Morning America,” including the top CMA award of Entertainer of the Year. The 27-year-old Lambert will compete against Lady A, Keith Urban, Brad Paisley and the Zac Brown Band for the esteemed prize that was won by Taylor Swift in 2009.

Finalists for the other seven categories were announced Tuesday for country music’s biggest night of the year that will again be hosted by Carrie Underwood and Paisley.

Lambert has been nominated in categories including female vocalist of the year, album of the year and single of the year for her songs “White Liar” and “The House That Built Me,” capping off a successful year after the release of her third album, “Revolution,” at the end of 2009.

Lambert’s Oklahoma-born fiance Blake Shelton, 34, earned four nominations, including for male vocalist of the year and song of the year for “Hillbilly Bone.” The Zac Brown Band is up for vocal group of the year among their four nominations.

Paisley, 37, will compete for three awards, including a category he has previously won, male vocalist of the year.

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“So y’all need to hide your kids, hide your wife and hide your husband, ’cause they raping everybody out here,” the song’s catchy refrain goes.

Dodson plans to use the money from the “Bed Intruder Song” selling for $1.29 a download and T-shirt sales to move his family out of the Lincoln Park housing project where they say the attack happened. But in an era when a viral video clip can rocket anyone to stardom, some suggest that Dodson and his family are being used and that his online rant plays to racial stereotypes.

To think so is to sell Dodson short. He said he is determined to be empowered, not exploited.

“Blessings come in disguise,” Dodson said. “This is a golden opportunity for us. I’m gonna take it and run with it.”

A typical day for Dodson now includes checking in on his thousands of Facebook fans, photo shoots, pondering a small movie role and juggling media interviews. And while he enjoys the limelight, he is still seeking justice for his sister and a better life for his family.

“We’re still struggling,” Dodson said. “We have a hit on iTunes, but we’re still in the projects.”

Two months ago, Dodson was a student at Virginia College in Huntsville, majoring in business management and hoping to one day own a hotel or a hair salon. He’d worked since he was 16 as a housekeeper and janitor.

He was thinking of moving back to Chicago, his hometown, to start a new life with his 22-year-old sister Kelly and her 2-year-old daughter.

That plan was interrupted one night in late July when Dodson heard a muffled scream from his sister’s bedroom. He said he burst in to find a man on top of Kelly Dodson, choking her.

He said he fought off the intruder, who escaped through the kitchen window. The next day, the family called the authorities and the media.

A local TV reporter asked a furious Dodson, “Is there anything you’d like to say to the camera?”

Emotions raw, Dodson let his words fly. The interview was immediately posted to YouTube.

“Well, obviously, we have a rapist in Lincoln Park. He’s climbing in your windows, he’s snatching your people up.”

Later to the attacker: “We’re lookin’ for you. We gonna find you. I’m lettin’ you know now.”

By the next day, the clip had a million hits.

Reactions were mixed. To many, it was a punchline forwarded to e-mail inboxes across the globe. Some were outraged that its popularity seemed to reinforce demeaning stereotypes of African-Americans. Still others saw someone standing up for himself and his community.

Blogger Danielle Belton, owner of the website The Black Snob, said she was initially put off because the attention on Dodson’s interview seemed to overshadow the crime at the root of the story.

“What I saw were two people who were very angry and frustrated because crime is so commonplace in poor communities,” Belton said. “People got stuck on the humorous aspect of it. What happened to Kelly got pushed to the background.”

Later, when she discovered the Dodsons were using the attention to help their family, Belton said she was impressed.

“So many people who have become Internet memes didn’t get anything out of it other than grief,” she said. “They’re spreading awareness, raising money … taking advantage of this moment.”

After the fans came phone calls and offers.

About 1,000 miles away in Brooklyn, N.Y., musicians Evan and Michael Gregory saw the clip and were sold. The brothers made Dodson the next project in their “Auto-Tune the News” series, which digitally converts the voices of newsmakers into music.

“You could already hear the music in what he was saying,” Michael Gregory said.

The brothers pondered the rare next step of putting the song on iTunes. But they said they wouldn’t have sold the song without Dodson’s buy-in.

“To me, it just seemed like the right thing to do,” Michael Gregory said.

In the first 2 1/2 weeks of sales, the song had 60,000 downloads and at least 25 million views on YouTube.

The musicians are splitting the proceeds with Dodson. While the money has begun to trickle in, it can’t come fast enough for Dodson, who, along with his sister, has had sleepless nights since what happened.

“I want them to be in a house that’s comfortable. I feel like they need to be in a different area,” he said of his family, adding that they have begun househunting.

Kelly Dodson declined to be interviewed for this story. On a recent appearance on The Today Show, she said the situation had “a sad beginning, but it was a good ending.”

Huntsville police spokesman Sgt. Mark Roberts said the case is being investigated and that the publicity has neither helped nor hurt.

On a recent Friday, the “Bed Intruder Song” was No. 38 on iTunes in the Pop category, surpassing performances by Usher, Lady Gaga, John Mayer, Drake and Katy Perry.

Dodson has done radio shows for audiences in Australia, has fans in London and is constantly stopped by people around town.

Evan Gregory said the phenomenon has been an empowering moment for Dodson’s family.

“It showed Antoine in a position of strength and courage,” he said. “The message he had … was one of righteous anger. That’s what really ended up coming through in the song. People kind of connected to that.”

Another big part of Dodson’s life these days is getting control of his image, especially with all the opportunities coming his way — both good and bad. When he wanted to start a website, he found that his name had already been bought. “Bed Intruder” is being played at nightclubs — and Dodson wants his cut.

“This is so crazy,” Dodson said. “I can’t believe this is happening. But I like it. I like the attention. Before all this, people didn’t really care about us.”

Just then, Dodson’s cell phone rings.

The ringtone? His song, of course.

‘Bed Intruder’ songster turning fame into a future is a post from: Asikomusic.com - Your Music Reviews, News, and Discussion

Disturbed is back with their fifth studio album, “Asylum,” and the band shows it is a metal band with a conscience.

The first single off Asylum is “Another Way to Die,” featuring front man David Drainman’s signature mix of hard, scratchy vocals and smooth melodic crooning reminiscent of Ed Kowalczyk of Live. But what makes the group sound distinct is its subject material.

“Another Way to Die” is about global warming with lyrics such as: “Glaciers melt as we pollute the sky/ a sign of devastation coming.”

On a second track, “Never Again,” Drainman goes to his Jewish roots and sings of the Holocaust: “Exterminated by the Nazi war machine/ we will remember/ let the story be told.”

But avid fans shouldn’t worry about their beloved nu-metal band getting too preachy on them. “Asylum” is still packed with songs like “Animal,” which brings to mind the current werewolf craze, and the album’s title track “Asylum,” which is about the mental torture of a breakup.

The album opens with the band’s first instrumental track, “Remnants” which sounds like the intro to a dark Quentin Tarantino film. The track gives guitarist Don Donegan a chance to shine, which he does explosively.

CHECK OUT THIS TRACK: Drainman and Donegan both showcase their talent on the dark and brooding “Serpentine.”

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Don’t be fooled by the video to “King of Anything,” the lead single off her sophomore album for Epic, “Kaleidoscope Heart,” due September 7. In the clip, which has already attracted upward of 1 million views on Vevo, Bareilles, 31, is wandering through a park in a gauzy tutu and singing with a generous smile. But much like the monster success of “Love Song,” a track off her first Epic album, “Little Voice,” “King of Anything” is an anthem to sassy assertiveness dressed in a lilting singer-songwriter sheen.

“It was the last song I wrote before we went into the studio, and I was at the point where I started sharing the music with my inner circle and started getting feedback,” she says. “I remember having a very vivid realization of, ‘Oh, I forgot that this was a part of it. Everybody gets to tell you what they think about what you do.’ I could tell I was getting defensive. That song was a little bit of a pep-talk song — and that’s exactly what ‘Love Song’ was.”

“Love Song,” released in 2007, sold 3.2 million digital downloads, earned two Grammy Award nominations — one for song of the year and another for best female pop vocal performance — and bolstered sales of “Little Voice” to 985,000, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Mainstream success came to Bareilles swiftly, and she’s the first to admit she was unprepared. “I was so precious about every choice,” she says. “I was so guarded, and I don’t know that I enjoyed it as much as I could have. There were times where I was so fearful and so anxious about the process: ‘Am I doing too much? Am I selling out? Do I look all right?’ All those things swirl around in your brain. What I’m here to do is play my music, and I want to be able to enjoy the process this time.”

THE LIVE EXPERIENCE

Bareilles was a fixture on the Los Angeles bar and club scene for years after she graduated from the University of California Los Angeles — the Fairfax area’s premier kosher Chinese restaurant, Genghis Cohen, was a frequent stop — and she’s still most invigorated by playing live. The Obamas are fans — Bareilles performed at both the G20 Summit and the White House Easter Egg Roll — and she was on the roster for six Lilith Fair shows this summer, an experience she treasures.

“That was so magical. I feel like I went to female songwriter school,” she says. “There was so much negative press about Lilith Fair, and it makes me a little angry. The essence was totally intact. The crowds were small in some of the markets, but we played huge shows of 10,000-15,000 people.”

On September 25, Bareilles will start a 30-city headlining tour in Portland, Ore., including stops at the Orpheum Theater in Los Angeles, Ryman Auditorium in Nashville and Webster Hall in New York. The size of the venues gives Bareilles a chance to have a full band backing her — her previous headlining tour was acoustic — and include theatrical stage design elements, she says.

Bareilles’ live show has spawned several releases: Her iTunes-exclusive “Live Sessions EP” has sold 30,000 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan, and she released the CD/DVD “Between the Lines: Sara Bareilles Live at the Fillmore” in 2008.

Besides gabbing on Twitter — a recent tweet from Bareilles reads, “At home, sick, watching Oprah talk about hoarding. Feeling sicker by the moment. Gotta go buy more stuff” — she’s been documenting the making of “Kaleidoscope Heart” in a video blog on her website.

IN TUNE

Coming off the success of “Love Song” was daunting for Bareilles, who says that she took procrastination to an art form while preparing to write “Kaleidoscope Heart.” (In her bio for the album, she admits that she spent a significant amount of time shopping for throw pillows at Target in lieu of putting notes on paper.)

“I am the tortoise of the ‘Tortoise and the Hare’ story,” she says. “It definitely takes me a little while to process things and make decisions about what I like and what I don’t like.”

But everything clicked once she sat down with producer Neal Avron, who has worked with Fall Out Boy, Linkin Park and Weezer. “I looked at his discography, and I was like, ‘Fall Out Boy? I don’t see how I fit into this at all,’” she says. “But Neal and I met and it felt like a good fit. He really listened. He has no ego, and I love that quality in someone.”

Avron encouraged Bareilles to stay true to her instincts and make “Kaleidoscope Heart” as personal as “Little Voice.” Bareilles says the centerpiece song on the album is the second track, “Uncharted.”

“I was worrying (to a friend) about how I was never going to be able to write another song, and I was starting a lot of songs but I couldn’t finish any of them,” she says. “I was really worried about stepping into the unknown and I didn’t know what to expect the second time around … and that afternoon, I sat down and wrote ‘Uncharted.’” The title of the album, in fact, comes from a lyric in that song.

For Bareilles, “Kaleidoscope Heart” is another album where the personal becomes public — but this time around, she’s prepared. “Nothing is brand-new to me anymore,” she says. “I don’t have to be so consumed with learning how to get through it. I’m just like, ‘Oh, I’ve been here before, so now let’s just see how today can be a great day.’”

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A furor over whether Cowell’s British talent show “The X Factor” electronically altered contestant voices has prompted “American Idol” to make a pre-emptive strike.

“We have never, nor would we ever, use Auto-Tuning during the `American Idol’ competition,” producers of the Fox show said in a statement Thursday, referring to pitch-correcting technology.

“American Idol” viewers can attest that contestants have been regularly scolded for “pitchiness.”

The producers’ statement, issued in response to a query, didn’t address a key “American Idol” issue: the replacements for Cowell and another departing judge, Ellen DeGeneres. Steven Tyler and Jennifer Lopez are the reported front-runners for the judge’s panel, which begins its work sometime after Labor Day.

Cowell left the top-rated series at the end of last season and is bringing “The X Factor,” which he created in Britain and is hugely popular there, to the Fox network in 2011.

Fans of “The X Factor” have alleged online that pitch-correction software was used to alter some performances. The show’s producers responded to the outcry by acknowledging that post-production was used to correct for the interplay of the various microphones used during filming.

The producers vowed to avoid the use of electronic pitch correction.

British media outlets have made hay of the issue, with Cowell a particular target. His photo was featured on the front of Britain’s Daily Mirror on Monday, under the caption: “X Faker.”

“American Idol” returns in January.

No autotuning here, say `American Idol’ producers is a post from: Asikomusic.com - Your Music Reviews, News, and Discussion

The Roman Catholic Church says the singer will perform hymns and sing with an 800-strong choir at an open-air papal Mass in Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park on Sept. 16. Benedict’s four-day trip will be the first papal visit to Britain since Pope John Paul II in 1982.

Boyle will also sing “I Dreamed A Dream,” the “Les Miserables” song that catapulted her to fame on the TV show “Britain’s Got Talent.” Her rendition of the song has been viewed millions of times on the Internet.

She told Scotland’s The Daily Record newspaper on Wednesday that the invitation to sing for the pope is “my greatest dream come true.”

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“I felt like if that would have happened, I would have been fine with that — I would have been OK with that,” she said in an interview with The Associated Press on Monday afternoon, nearly two weeks after she attempted suicide.

The former “American Idol” champ took a mixture of aspirin and sleeping pills after she was named in divorce papers as the cause of a couple’s breakup. The 26-year-old said she was so devastated and upset about lies being spread about her that she couldn’t function anymore.

“I had never experienced that — I was very numb,” she said.

As for the accusations that she knowingly dated Antwaun Cook even though he was married with kids, she said he was already separated when they started dating: “I don’t think I would stand for going in and breaking up somebody’s home.”

While she called Cook a good guy and a “great friend,” she said they are no longer together, and haven’t been for a while.

Fantasia shares some of her story on VH1’s “Behind the Music,” airing Tuesday, and a new season of her reality show “Fantasia for Real” debuts in September. She is hopeful the show will tell her side of the story: “The best way for me to clear my name is through my show,” she said.

Her focus now, however, is on her album, “Back to Me,” out on Tuesday. She is in therapy, and said she’s now better able to cope with her problems.

“I must say it was probably a blessing to be in the hospital,” she said, adding: “It ain’t time for me to go yet.”

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Officer Cleon Joseph of the LAPD says the 37-year-old Evans was arrested Saturday night near Marina del Rey on suspicion of misdemeanor drunken driving. He says Evans was held for a few hours and released on bail Sunday morning. Her car was impounded.

The R&B singer is the widow of rapper Christopher Wallace, also known as the Notorious B.I.G. She won a Grammy in 1998 for the song “I’ll Be Missing You.”

A reality series chronicling Evans’ life is reportedly in production, and a new album is scheduled for release in October.

A message left with Evans’ agent Sunday was not immediately returned.

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A Fort Eustis spokesman confirmed the probe Friday to The Associated Press.

Pvt. Anthony Smith told AP that he was among those who objected to attending the May concert by BarlowGirl. Smith says the soldiers were pressured into going to the show and when they didn’t, they were ordered to return to their barracks.

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation says several soldiers complained to the watchdog group.

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