The Killers' Brandon Flowers
Photo: Karl Walter/ Getty Images

The news happens all the time, even while you're catching up on beauty sleep. Check out this brief rundown to bring you up to speed this morning — a quick heads up from your friends at MTV News.

Here's what we've got:

Andre 3000 tells us that his guest verses on songs by everyone from UGK to Lloyd just happened. "It wasn't like a divine plan or anything." Now the next Outkast album, that's going to take some planning. "I gotta find out what I'm tryin' to say," he said. "It's almost like a picnic — you call your auntie and say, 'You bringin' some greens? Yeah? OK, I'm not gonna bring any greens.' I gotta find out what I gotta cook up."

Think Avril Lavigne is topless on the cover of Blender? Think again. "I was wearing a tube top, and they just kind of put a banner on top of it," Avril revealed to us Wednesday night. She also told us that she's ready to dig into some major acting roles. "I would want to go for a more serious drama, something darker that would take a lot of emotion." Avril said she will soon be starring in a movie, but wouldn't give up the title. ...

And if you notice a similarity between Chicago instrumental post-metal band Pelican and Weezer, you might want to keep that to yourself. "I couldn't believe it," guitarist Laurence Lebec said, telling us the story of a "You guys look like Weezer" shout during an opening set for Opeth. "These guys were coming to see Opeth, this really progressive band, yet they were still locked in such rudimentary middle-school kind of nonsense attitudes." ...

Quote of the Day: "I've seen the kid, and I love him." — "Original Human Beatbox" Doug E. Fresh on "Idol" beatboxer Blake Lewis.

Here's what everyone else is talking about:

The Killers pulled the plug on their Thursday night show at Red Rocks in Morrison, Colorado, after just two songs. Brandon Flowers walked off following "When You Were Young," and a doctor later stepped onstage to announce that the singer's throat had been injured and singing would harm his voice, local NBC affiliate KUSA reported. Drummer Ronnie Vannucci promised the crowd that the band would make it up to them. The concert has not yet been rescheduled. ...

Evanescence have rounded out their lineup by grabbing two members of Dark New Day, the band announced Thursday. Drummer Will Hunt and guitarist Troy McLawhorn replace Rocky Gray and John LeCompt in the lineup. "I am a big fan of Dark New Day and can't wait for the fans to see what the guys bring to our live show," Amy Lee said in a statement. The new Evanescence will debut Saturday at the Rock on the Range festival in Columbus, Ohio. Meanwhile, Rocky Gray is unloading the gold and platinum discs he was awarded with band on eBay. There are no bids yet on the six auctions, which open at $500. ...

Lindsay Lohan won't be following Paris Hilton to the slammer. The Los Angeles District Attorney has thrown out a claim that Lohan stole clothing from a woman's home, citing insufficient evidence, The Associated Press reports. ...

Samuel L. Jackson is in negotiations to star in Frank Miller's big-screen adaptation of "The Spirit." The ultimate badass would play ultimate bad guy the Octopus, a lab-rat-turned-tentacled-menace described by The Hollywood Reporter as "a psychotic nightmare that kills anyone unfortunate enough to see his face." Awesome.

Linkin Park are a lock for #1 on the next Billboard albums charts, according to one-day sales reports gathered by Hits Daily Double, which predicts Minutes to Midnight will sell more than 550,000 copies its first week in stores. ...

Elsewhere on the charts, T-Pain scores his first #1 on Billboard's Hot 100 with "Buy U a Drank (Shawty Snappin')." Maroon 5 drop to #2 after two weeks on top with "Makes Me Wonder," while Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend" climbs one spot to #3. ...

The Pentagon defended restricting Army access to MySpace, YouTube and MTV on Thursday, after Representative Ed Markey — chair of the House of Representatives subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet — asked that the policy be reversed. "We just simply cannot accommodate the growth in the bandwidth demands of this newer technology for both official reasons and recreational sites," Rear Admiral Elizabeth Hight, deputy head of the Defense Information Systems Agency, told Reuters. ...

Those Virgin Festival two-day passes are great, unless you love Smashing Pumpkins but can't stomach the Police — or Stewart Copeland makes your heart sing while Billy Corgan makes your skin crawl. Now you're in luck: organizers have announced that single-day tickets for the event go on sale Saturday. ...

Bo Diddley was up and walking around on Thursday after suffering a stroke Sunday, AP reports. Doctors are encouraged that the 78-year-old guitarist, whose speech has been impaired by the stroke, would be able to perform again. ...

And Westboro Baptist Church, an anti-gay organization best known for picketing soldiers' funerals — and inspiring 34 states to enact laws restricting such demonstrations — is branching out into music ... and possible copyright infringement. They've remade "We Are the World" as "God Hates the World," only they didn't get permission to use the original song. Warner/Chappel Music Inc. has issued a letter to the church alleging copyright infringement, according to an AP report. The church claims the song and video are parodies protected under the First Amendment.

• MTV News RAW: Outkast

• The Killers
• Evanescence
• Dark new Day
• Lindsay Lohan

Dark New Day (file)
Photo: Warner Music Group

Technically, Dark New Day are a new dream team, but the band was actually more than 12 years in the making.

The story began when guitarist Clint Lowery and his brother, bassist Corey, were in their teens jamming in rural North Carolina with their neighborhood friend, guitarist Troy McLawhorn. With dreams of stardom, they formed the melodic hard-rock band Still Rain and toured through the Southeast playing to dismissive crowds in divey clubs.

On the road, they bumped into singer Brett Hestla and drummer Will Hunt, who were playing in other bands, and they struck up fast friendships. "We used to say to each other, 'Man, we'd have a ripping band if we all played together,' " Clint said. "But we were all doing other things. Over the years, we'd get back together and jam and write stuff from time to time, but we were all committed to other groups."

These weren't just any groups. Clint was in Sevendust for almost 10 years, Corey co-formed Stereomud, Hestla sang for Virgos Merlot and then became Creed's touring bassist, McLawhorn played in Doubledrive, and Hunt performed in Skrape and contributed to Tommy Lee's solo project. But even when powering ahead with their main gigs, they were always looking over their shoulders to see what their pals were up to. "We remained friends and huge fans of each other's bands over the years," Clint said. "So that window to get back together was always open."

It was Corey Lowery who dragged his pals through that window a little over a year ago. At the time, Stereomud were disillusioned by their lack of success and basically on life support, and Sevendust were coming off the sales disappointment of their most mainstream offering, Seasons (see "Sevendust Sober Up, Emphasize Hooks On Seasons"). When Creed broke up (see "Creed Break Up") and Skrape fell apart, the members of Dark New Day were finally the displaced heroes they needed to be. The only big problem was Clint didn't want to quit Sevendust.

"I wanted to do both, but that just wasn't possible," he explained. "I didn't want to leave Sevendust because of the brotherhood I had with those guys. I wanted to do another record with them and continue on, I just knew I couldn't tour with both bands at the same time. And, in the end, Sevendust saw how much I wanted to do this project, and they wanted someone that was gonna be there for them 110 percent. So we both decided to end it."

With the Sevendust cord finally severed, Dark New Day started writing songs for their just-released debut, Twelve Year Silence, the title being a reference to how long the band remained in limbo before being conceived. To say it was worth the wait would be apocryphal, but songs like "Taking Me Alive" and "Brother" should make the heavy-rotation playlist of anyone that likes moody, anthemic metal with surging riffs and strong melodies.

"We called the band Dark New Day because the music pulls out emotions and topics that are generally pretty dark," Clint said. "It has this aggressive, sad nature to it, so you don't put it on when you want to clean the house. But it's not woe-is-me kind of music and it's not self-loathing at all. It's more about taking these difficult situations and dealing with them."

Much of Twelve Year Silence addresses missed opportunities, personal trauma and the sometimes hefty price of circumstance. Clint wrote "Brother" about how a career in music has distanced him from his loved ones, and "Lean," which was penned by Hestla, is about Clint's struggle with alcoholism. "I read the lyrics, and I was like, 'Huh, some of this is really familiar,' " Clint said. "Then, when we were in the control room, he said, 'This is about you.' I thought that was really touching. He was writing about being my friend through that experience no matter what happened."

The lyrical turbulence of Twelve Year Silence parallels the storms Dark New Day weathered in the studio — not the metaphoric type, but the kind that blow roofs off houses and send trees crashing through cars. "We did the record in Orlando [Florida], and there were five massive hurricanes when we were there," Clint said. "Corey and Troy would be driving from Atlanta to Orlando and everyone else would be driving the other way to evacuate the city. It looked like a nuclear bomb was about to drop or something and it really created this somber feel to everything."

While Dark New Day were in a rush to finish the album, they weren't that pressed for time, and many of their friends and peers were dumbfounded that they refused to leave the area. Looking back, Clint laughs at the band's stubbornness, but he still considers the decision more of a test of faith than an act of stupidity.

"The whole time the winds were kicking all around us and stuff was getting demolished, we were like, 'Hey man, should we be doing this?' But we kept going because we felt like, 'Well, if we get through it, maybe it's a sign that it will be worth it.' "

• Dark new Day
• Creed
• Sevendust
• Stereomud
• Skrape