Music News: Matthew McConaughey signs and Taylor Swift opens the Vault

Matthew McConaughey is an interesting guy, isn't he? He writes books and does audiobooks, acts in funny films and dramas, and now, well...he sings. In fact, he sings as part of an audiobook so that seems right. And he gets to sing about his beloved home state of Texas.

Rolling Stone magazine got an early listen to Lawrence Wright's audiobook, Mr. Texas. Turns out, Wright used to be a neighbor of Matthew McConaughey's in Texas and Wright asked the actor if he would duet on a track called "Texas My Home" with Wright's son, Gordon. McConaughey decided to do the neighborly thing and help. As Wayne from Letterkenny might say, "When a friend asks for help, you help them."

McConaughey doesn't sound bad on the song, but he talk-sings more than he actually sings. But the way he does the song fits with the music, so he can get away with it. McConaughey might not be replacing Thom Yorke with Radiohead any time soon, but he is better than one might expect.

Matthew McConaughey sings and Taylor Swift puzzles her fans

Mr. Texas went on sale this week. Lawrence Wright is no hack either. He won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. So Mr. Texas, about a dark-horse political candidate running for the Texas House of Representatives and trying to avoid all the pitfalls - lobbyists, ideals, etc. - that comes with that, is probably pretty good.

In Taylor Swift news, she gave her fans a puzzle to decode this week so that they could find out the names of most of the songs from her Vault that will have has extras on her release of 1989 (Taylor's Version) which comes out on October 27. Swifties decoded the puzzle in about 24 hours, so now we all know what the songs will be. Of course, all the songs are previously unreleased and were written around the time when Taylor Swift was making the original version of 1989 in 2014.

There will probably be a few other unreleased tracks from The Vault that will show up on the new release as well, but so far there are four that have been announced (once the puzzle was decoded). The songs are:

• "Is It Over Now?"
• "Now That We Don't Talk"
• "Say Don't Go"
• "Suburban Legends"

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