The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has officially announced next year's inductees: Rush, Public Enemy, Heart, Randy Newman, Donna Summer and Albert King will all join the class of 2013, with Summer, who passed away this May, and King, who died in 1992, earning the honor posthumously. Lou Adler and Quincy Jones will both receive the Ahmet Ertegun Award for non-performers.

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Heart, Rush, Randy Newman and Public Enemy are among the new inductees.

"It's a terrific honor and we'll show up smiling," Rush's singer and bassist, Geddy Lee, tells Rolling Stone. "It made my mom happy, so that's worth it." Lee is especially happy for Rush's army of hardcore fans. "It was a cause they championed," he says. "I'm very relieved for them and we share this honor with them, for sure."

Q&A: Geddy Lee on Rush's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction

Public Enemy are only the fourth hip-hop act to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five were inducted in 2007, Run-D.M.C. made it in in 2009 and the Beastie Boys received the honor last year.

Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart were also overjoyed to learn the news. "Some people have an idea of what the shape of rock & roll is supposed to look like," says Ann Wilson. "We're not really it. Personally, that's why I think it's taken quite a while . . . We're always traveling and out there doing it. It can start to feel like you're a tree falling in the forest, but nobody notices. So this kind of acknowledgement is really sweet."

Heart: We weren't sure induction was real

For Randy Newman, the news came as a shock. "I thought maybe I'd have to die before they let me in," he says. "I'm really glad it happened when I was still around to see it . . . They're always a little doctrinaire about what's rock & roll and what isn't rock & roll. It's nice they opened up a little to let me in."

Randy Newman: 'I thought maybe I'd have to die'

The public was allowed to vote for the first time in the history of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year. Votes were taken online, and the result was a "fan's ballot" that was counted along with roughly 600 other ballots.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony will be held on April 18, 2013 at the Nokia Theater and broadcast on HBO May 18. Tickets will go on sale to the public on Jan. 25.

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Randy Newman has released a swooning, lyrically wicked new cut, "I'm Dreaming," that finds the songwriter stepping into the shoes of a narrator who's "dreaming of a white President/ Someone whom we can understand/ Someone who knows where we're coming from."

The track is available now as a free download, and Newman is encouraging listeners to donate to the United Negro College Fund.

A startling satire reminiscent of some of his earlier cuts like "Rednecks" and "Political Science" –- which took on racism and American jingoism, respectively, through the lenses of less-than-reliable narrators –- Newman told Slate in a recent interview that his new song's speaker "has no case at all, just some vague pseudo-scientific theories that no doubt sound good to him but are nonsense.

"[F]or me it's a reaction to the Republican Party, which seems to have drifted farther to the right than a major party has drifted in my lifetime in any direction," added Newman. "It seems to have become almost a radical party. The hate and . . . I don't think it'll last. That kind of thing doesn't seem to last."

Musically, the chorus of the track purposefully recalls Irving Berlin's famous carol "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas." Though Newman says he didn't necessarily have Berlin or the song's original performer, Bing Crosby, in mind when he wrote it, he noted he was possibly thinking of "the America they represent."

Newman noted how the song was partially inspired by the racial undercurrents he saw in the intense vitriol directed at Barack Obama during his presidency.

"Still, it's clear that there are lots of people out there who are uncomfortable [with a black president]," he said. "The Civil War was a long time ago, but there are aspects of it that remain unsettled, I think. Early on in Obama's term, there was heat generated by issues that you wouldn't think would cause such passion. Even the term 'Obamacare,' the way it's spit out, like he was some kind of witch doctor. Maybe I'm overly sensitive to the issue, but I don't think so. There's an edge to things that normally wouldn't have an edge. I thought it was a little extra."

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