The New White Stripes Album

Billboard says it will be called "Icky Thump," is due out this year, and was recorded in three weeks in Nashville. My favorite song title of the ones mentioned is either "Little Cream Soda" or "You Don't Know What Love Is (You Just Do What You're Told)," which sounds exactly like the sort of person I'd like to date.

Meanwhile, Wolfmother are set to prove they are the real thing, as opposed to the extended joke that was the Darkness. They've begun recording but constant touring will keep the CD away till 2008.

And Merle Haggard is in the midst of three projects. His collaboration with George Jones is already out; he's got a Trio sort of album with Willie Nelson and Ray Price due out March 20 and by the end of the year he'll have a bluegrass album out too. On top of it all, the Okie once dismissed as a reactionary has penned an ode to our first serious female Presidential candidate with lines like: "This country needs to be honest/This country needs to be large/Something like a big switch of gender/Let's put a woman in charge." If someone would explain to Haggard what a digital single is, that sucker might just make the radio.