We heard Damien Rice perform “What If I’m Wrong?,” the theme tune to When the Dragon Swallowed the Sun, not to mention his first new songs in years, back in February, but now we have a new official release and studio debut from his post-Lisa Hannigan singing partner, Julia Dubsky, as well. One look at the album’s cover art, and it’s no wonder this somewhat obscure soundtrack has remained under the radar since dropping in early March…

Rice, the Swell Season’s Glen Hansard, Shane MacGowan, Sinead O’Connor, the late Liam Clancy, and others have contributed to Welcome Home: Music of Ireland, the soundtrack to a PBS special about contemporary Irish music, which featured interviews with director Jim Sheridan, U2’s Bono and Adam Clayton, Pete Seeger, a few of the aforementioned artists, and Liam Clancy’s final U.S. television appearance.

Though Julia Dubsky has some pretty big shoes to fill in the Rice duet department, I can’t deny that she pulled through brilliantly in this mix. Stream Rice’s new song, “Under The Tongue” (a response to “Teeth”?), below:

U2 announced support acts for this summer’s North American 360° stadium tour on their official site moments ago, and though a few of their future openers are somewhat obvious picks (Lenny Kravitz, The Fray), one name jumped out at me: Interpol.

We knew that Paul Banks, Carlos D, and company have been prepping that 4th Interpol album for release early this year, but this is a somewhat surprising choice by U2 nonetheless. (Perhaps both bands will go orchestral for the gigs.)

Interpol will open for U2 at 6 dates on the 360° tour in Minneapolis, East Lansing, Toronto, Chicago, Miami and Philadelphia, while The Fray and Kravitz will open at 3 shows each. Check out the full tour schedule at Slicing Up Eyeballs.

There were many interesting musical moments during tonight’s “Hope for Haiti Now” telethon—which would be pretty hard to miss if you flipped through the channels during primetime television in the past couple hours. Though the program has only just begun here on the West Coast, we watched the stream on YouTube and want to encourage all those in our timezone to tune in asap to watch some great artists for a great a cause.

Sure, the most anticipated performance of the night was perhaps U2, Jay-Z, and Rihanna’s unveiling of their new song “Stranded (Haiti Mon Amour),” but we were more into Bruce Springsteen’s take on “We Shall Overcome,” as well as Neil Young (who just played “Long May You Run” for Conan O’Brien’s final Tonight Show) and Dave Matthews’ cover of Hank Williams classic “Alone and Forsaken.”

iTunes will offer all of tonight’s performances on Monday for the Hope for Haiti Now charity compilation at itunes.com/haiti, but until then, you can watch the Young/Matthews performance here or below, The Boss below or thataway, or check out the new Jay-Z/U2/Rihanna song here.

Most importantly, though, please donate here for the Haiti relief effort if you are able.

I’ll admit to being a Bono apologist from time to time, but the one-year anniversary of his column in the NY Times’ Op-Ed section is approaching and I can’t help but point out the U2 singer’s somewhat lackluster offering. This time around, he opens by decrying the glut of year-end lists of late.

“Even in these self-restrained pages,” writes Bono Vox, “it has been impossible to avoid the end-of-the-decade accountings of the 10 best such-and-suches and the 10 worst fill-in-the-blanks.”

What follows is his own list of “10 ideas that might make the next 10 years more interesting,” including a forewarning to music pirates, the automobile “bling bling” culture, and some good ole Middle East meddling.

There might be more there, but I honestly didn’t make it all the way through.

Poor Adam Clayton. Not poor in the financial sense, of course, but the one time he makes headlines over Bono and the Edge and it’s over legal/financial hassles. Irish Times reports that the U2 bassist is accusing his former assistant and housekeeper, Carol Hawkins, of spending €1.8 million of his money on a New York City apartment and other assorted items (“a syndicate which maintained horses,” etc.).

The unauthorized purchases in question were made using the Irish rock star’s debit and credit cards, Clayton alleges, and while Hawkins admits to having secretly charged the cards for personal use, she is contesting the total amount stolen.

Fortunately, at this point U2 probably have their own in-house legal department for this sort of stuff.

M.I.A. may have ruled last year’s award show season, but it’s looking like Karen O will be our favorite artist to rock the red carpet this year. The Hollywood Foreign Press announced this year’s Golden Globe nominees this morning and the list not only confirms that Karen O is having a great week, but that the Oscar buzz we placed on U2 and T Bone Burnett was not unfounded.

Karen O and Carter Burwell are by far the most interesting nominees for Best Original Score (Where the Wild Things Are). Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett’s theme song to Crazy Heart, “The Weary Kind,” earned a nomination for Best Original Song, alongside U2’s “Winter” (from Brothers), Paul McCartney’s “I Want to Come Home” (Everybody’s Fine), as well as inevitable Avatar/Nine nominations.

Can’t wait until the fashion watchers see what Christian Joy cooks up for Karen O’s red carpet garb. Check out the full list of Golden Globe nominations here.

The “Best Original Song” portion at the Academy Awards is one of the annual Hollywood award show’s weirder categories. Most years I have no idea who is even nominated until the live broadcast when the host introduces Sting, Randy Newman, or whoever’s pretending to have written a song inspired by a film they likely haven’t seen in full that year. But then Three Six Mafia wins a gold statue, indie singer/songwriters Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová upset three nods for Enchanted, or Elliott Smith shows up to play “Miss Misery” dressed all in white, and they’ve grabbed my attention again.

In order to stir up some hope that next year’s broadcast will include a similar event, we’ll be posting from time to time on a few interesting possible nominees that come across the radar, starting with U2:

This isn’t too surprising, but it is a disappointment for those of us hoping to watch Steve “Lips” Kudlow crash the Oscars red carpet. Anvil! The Story of Anvil and It Might Get Loud, Jack White, the Edge, and Jimmy Page’s jam session-turned-film, have both been left off the Oscar short list for Best Documentary, /Film reports.

Even though director Davis Guggenheim won an Academy Award for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and It Might Get Loud will likely be joining the canon of great music documentaries, it never really screamed “Oscar” to me. I did honestly think Anvil had a shot for a nomination at least, but, as /Film’s Peter Sciretta notes, “the Academy obviously doesn’t like Rock music.”

Either U2 have the biggest stack of bills piling up or they’re the only band getting press about this sort of thing, but another financial woe has hit the arena-packing foursome: Ireland’s Herald reports that Bono, Edge, Larry, and Adam are responsible for a €36,000 fine after allegedly breaking noise limit restrictions at their recent 3-night stand at Dublin’s Croke Park Stadium.