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Well, that was quick.
When Caleb Sasser stopped by NBC’s The Voice to deliver a Blind Audition, the feedback was swift.

Sasser, who hails from Goldsboro, North Carolina, hadn’t even finished the first line in his cover of Toni Braxton’s “Another Sad Love Song” when he’d landed the one-two punch of Niall Horan and Gwen Stefani turns.

And when he unleashed a run of delicate high notes, Reba McEntire had heard enough. John Legend pushed the red button last to complete a four-chair turn.

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Sasser has his finger on R&B, jazz, soul. The good stuff. “That was magical,” remarked Legend. “I was hearing Toni and I was hearing a lot of Anita Baker in your voice, too.” Both are influences, the contestant told the coach, as are Jazmine Sullivan and Legend himself. At that point, a sigh came over the other three coaches, and a keen understanding of which team the singer would choose.

Regardless, Stefani entered her sales pitch. “I’m really good at stage presence, personality, getting out of your shell, trying to get people to know you as a person through your voice.”

Horan chimed in: “The ease at which you sing, is just so beautiful and the most humble, down-to-earth, smiley way that you could possibly do it.”

McEntire spoke last. “Calab,” she enthused, “your voice made me feel such peace inside. I did a duet album many years ago. And I promise you if I’d have heard your voice, I would have begged you to please come sing a duet with me.”

In the end, there could be only one. There were no more surprises; Sasser chose Team Legend.

Watch below.

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Billie Eilish’s dad is a handy guy to have around.
The California pop sensation and her collaborator/brother Finneas were guests on Jimmy Kimmel Live, where the pair pointed out their family’s considerable talents extend beyond music.

While on tour, O’Connell senior gets to work behind the scenes. At the start, he was driving the van. Now, “he does set carpentry on tour,” Eilish says, building anything from staircases to stages. “He won’t tell anyone on the crew his full name crew because he doesn’t want anybody on the tour to know that he’s related to me,” the “Bad Guy” singer reckons. Dad doesn’t want to hear the word “nepotism” uttered in his presence. “He doesn’t want any special treatment at all,” she explains. And does Mom get her hands dirty? Not really. She stays with Billie.

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The siblings also gave the late-night host a glimpse into their fights, over music or otherwise.“When we get into something” – a row, that is – “we can like blow up at each other, we can have arguments or whatever,” Eilish explains in the video, which dropped overnight. “We honestly don’t as much as we did when we were children.”

On a musical disagreement, they have their battles. One has to “die on the hill,” Finneas recounts, or someone typically comes around.

Also, Billie talked songwriting (it helps to get “a prompt, a story to write about”), their latest single, “What Was I Made For” from the Barbie movie, which went to No. 1 in the U.K. and Australia, and has clocked 600 million streams (“It’s pretty nuts. That’s a lot of listens”).

And she managed to poke fun at her biggest hit. “Objectively ‘Bad Guy’ is the stupidest song in the world,” she said, immediately clarifying “but it’s really good.” The song, a No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2019 is “supposed to be goofy.” It’s an act of “trolling,” she quips.

In her young, phenomenally successful career, Eilish has released two albums (2019’s When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? and 2021’s Happier Than Ever) for two No. 1s on the Billboard 200 chart (each logging three weeks at the summit). Sister and brother are making progress on the third. “We’ve been filming the whole creation of the next album we’re working on,” she says.

Last month, Eilish took a similar line in an interview with the The Cookout, declaring “there is lots of music coming.”

Watch the Kimmel interview below.

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As the 2023 BET Hip Hop Awards honored producers on the 50th anniversary of the genre, they made sure to pay homage to arguably the backbone of Atlanta’s musical production with Jermaine Dupri. The So So Def general took centerstage and ignited his fiery efforts with a performance of Kris Kross’ 1992 Hot 100-topping single […]

As the Palestinian group Hamas continues to attack Israel and the country retaliates by bombing Gaza, survivors of the terrorist attack at the Paralello Universo Supernova Sukkot Gathering electronic music festival near the Gaza border are continuing what has become a grim search for hundreds of people who are still missing.  
So far, the Israeli search and rescue organization Zaka has reported that it found 260 dead bodies at the festival site in Re’im, Israel. An unknown number of attendees have been abducted by Hamas terrorists. At least 150 Israelis were abducted on Saturday (Oct. 7), according to the New York Times, and some of them were taken from the rave.  

On Tuesday morning (Oct. 10), President Biden referenced the massacre during remarks on the Israel-Hamas conflict, naming “young people massacred while attending a music festival to celebrate peace” among the violent incidents of the last few days.

As of Sunday evening, 600-700 festival goers were believed to be missing in the immediate aftermath of the attack, according to artist manager Raz Gaster, who was at the event and represents several acts on the lineup. The exact number of the remaining still missing has not been verified, although two sources in Israel put this number at approximately 150, accounting for bodies that have since been recovered and identified as well as survivors who have been identified; though another source on the ground there says it’s still hard to tell how many remain missing.

Gaster, an artist manager who was at the event and represents several acts on the lineup, told Billboard Tuesday (Oct. 10) that he and members of the festival production team are working to locate survivors and gather information about festival attendees who remain missing.

“At the end of the day, it’s our responsibility as human beings to [provide] the families of these missing people whatever information we can get,” Gaster says. “We will keep working until we get information about each and every one of them.”  

The Israeli offshoot of the longstanding Brazilian festival brand Paralelllo Universo, Supernova Sukkot Gathering was named in honor of the Jewish Sukkot holiday, and hosted approximately 3,000 attendees on a rural site with two stages.

Those who escaped the festival describe the terror on the ground when at about 6:30 a.m. Saturday rockets began flying from Gaza, with some landing near Re’im. Within 20 minutes, terrorists armed with guns and RPGs arrived in ATVs, pickup trucks and motorcycles, as well as by paraglider, and immediately began shooting attendees.  

Shelly Barel, who sells jewelry and clothing at music festivals throughout Israel, had been on the site since Thursday, Oct. 5. At that time, the outdoor space was hosting another psytrance festival, Unity, with Supernova Sukkot Gathering starting on Friday. Supernova Sukkot was only moved to the Re’im site two days prior, after another site in southern Israel fell through.  

“The festival was so much fun,” Barel says of Supernova Sukkot through a translator. “Amazing people, it was really full of joy.”

Everything changed when rockets started falling early Saturday morning. Barel and her husband hit the ground and lay there for at least five minutes, until festival security made an announcement telling attendees to run to their cars and leave the site. Barel and her husband spent 10 minutes packing their belongings, then loaded them into their vehicle and drove away, with Barel’s husband behind the wheel. At the time, they assumed they were being asked to evacuate because of a rocket attack, a relatively regular occurrence in Israel.  

They soon hit a bottleneck of cars trying to exit the festival. Without realizing that armed attackers had arrived, they took a hard right turn and drove across the dirt field adjacent to the site instead of waiting in the exit line. That decision, made as much out of impatience and an instinct to escape as anything else, might have saved their lives.  

“In hindsight,” Barel says, “I understood that the terrorists shot the [people in the] first cars, so those cars couldn’t move, and the rest got stuck behind them. They formed a traffic jam for everyone coming after that. It was a death trap.”  

When Barel and her husband drove off the field and back onto the road, they came upon two stopped vehicles, both of which had all their doors open. Then they saw the occupants of those vehicles lying dead on the ground.  

Barel’s husband made a U-turn and minutes later received a text from someone in his army reserve group saying there were attackers in the area. “When we realized we had to fear the terrorists,” Barel says, “the missiles seemed like the smallest problem.”

He kept driving, following signs to the nearest city. “We decided to go as fast as we could, full gas, only slowing during turns,” she says. “The rockets were falling around us and at this point I thought it was the moment to say ‘I love you’ to each other and say goodbye.”

They didn’t get hit. Eventually, they made their way back to their home in central Israel. There, they found out that some of their friends from the festival had been killed, while others had been abducted. Many remain missing.  

Nitay, a 26-year-old security professional from Tel Aviv who also attended Supernova Sukkot said that he was helping an artist pack up some gear when gunmen appeared and started shooting at the festivalgoers. As shots rang out, “my friend called me when I was running away from the attack and asked me to try and find his sister,” says Nitay, who did not wish to give his last name. “I really wanted to help him, but I had to flee and hide. I felt like I was constantly surrounded by gunfire.”  

Nitay ran for several miles and eventually hid for 10 hours in an olive grove. At one point he thought the group he had taken shelter with had been discovered by armed men speaking in Arabic — they were about 20 yards away, close enough that he could see the men’s legs through the olive tree branches.  

“I prayed to my father, who passed away several years ago and begged him to help me,” Nitay recalls. As he hid, the men began shouting and Nitay says he braced himself for an attack. The shouting went on for about a half-hour, then the armed men began backing away from the area in which he was hiding with several others, including two tourists from Argentina. They stayed there for several more hours until Israeli finally arrived and led them to a nearby police station. Nitay says he never found his friend’s sister.

In the days since Barel and her husband escaped, they, too, have been searching for information on their missing friends, but they haven’t found much, even as obituaries have started to appear. The trauma is so fresh in her mind that she says she became “hysterical” when the elevator door in her apartment building opened and a man she didn’t know was inside.  

For decades, Israel’s dance music scene has been thriving. Psytrance, the electronic subgenre featured on the Supernova Sukkot lineup, became big in Israel in the late ’80s and ’90s, and it has been the country’s biggest electronic sound since, although house and techno have also grown in popularity in recent years.

On any given weekend, especially between March and October, there are several big parties like Supernova Sukkot throughout Israel, with crowd sizes ranging between 50 and 10,000, according to Amotz Tokatly, who’s been involved in the country’s electronic scene for more than 20 years as a promoter, manager, consultant and writer. “If you go to a psytrance party or a house or techno club, you see people from the age of 18 to 60 or even 70,” says Tokatly. “It’s a basic activity in Israel. We love to dance. We love to go out.”

It’s hard to tell what will happen to this scene in the aftermath of the attack, not to mention the war that is expected to follow.  

“What happened here is a disaster. It’s unbearable,” says Tokatly. “The most important thing for us is to [show] the world that this is a crime against innocent people. They don’t belong to any political side. These were just kids going to a party.”

Additional reporting by Tal Rimon.

Paul Russell ascends to No. 1 on Billboard’s Emerging Artists chart (dated Oct. 14), becoming the top up-and-coming act in the U.S. for the first time, thanks to the continued success of his viral breakthrough song, “Lil Boo Thang.”

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The single, released Aug. 18 on Arista Records, jumps 74-51 in its third week on the Billboard Hot 100 with 17.9 million radio airplay audience impressions (up 31%), 5.1 million official streams (up 16%) and 5,000 downloads sold (up 12%) in the United States in the Sept. 29-Oct. 5 tracking week, according to Luminate.

The track holds at its No. 5 high on Digital Song Sales and climbs 48-39 on the all-format Radio Songs chart. The feel-good song continues rising at multiple radio formats: It’s up 22-18 on Pop Airplay and 25-22 on Adult Pop Airplay, debuts at No. 25 on Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay and holds at its No. 27 high on Rhythmic Airplay.

Emerging Artists is the second chart that Russell has topped, after “Lil Boo Thang” led the Rap Digital Song Sales chart dated Sept. 2.

“Lil Boo Thang” interpolates the Emotions’ classic “Best of My Love,” which was written by Maurice White and Al McKay of Earth, Wind & Fire. The song spent five weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100 in 1977 and finished as Billboard’s No. 3 year-end Hot 100 song that year. White and McKay are both credited as writers on Russell’s single.

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Russell, from Texas and now based in Los Angeles, first teased a snippet of “Lil Boo Thang” in a June 28 TikTok that has since garnered over 10 million views and launched over 300,000 creations from fans who’ve paired it with other clips. (Activity on TikTok is not included in Billboard charts except for the newly-launched TikTok Billboard Top 50.) He later repurposed the post on Instagram Reels, where it has generated another 10 million views and sparked over a million creations. That virality helped Russell land a deal with Arista.

“First and foremost, ‘Lil Boo Thang’ is meant to be a good time,” Russell told Billboard ahead of the full track’s release. “When I wrote it, I was stressed out on a Thursday afternoon, so I just turned on some of the music that makes me happy and imagined that I was celebrating something. I think what makes the song special is the fact that so many of us are ready to just forget about whatever is happening around us and enjoy the good things in life – not just thinking back to good times in the past but creating new ones in the present day.”

The Emerging Artists chart ranks the most popular developing artists of the week, using the same formula as the all-encompassing Billboard Artist 100, which measures artist activity across multiple Billboard charts, including the Hot 100 and Billboard 200. (The Artist 100 lists the most popular acts, overall, each week.) However, the Emerging Artists chart excludes acts that have notched a top 25 entry on either the Hot 100 or Billboard 200, as well as artists that have achieved two or more top 10s on Billboard’s “Hot” song genre charts and/or consumption-based “Top” album genre rankings.

Tyla scores her first appearance on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (dated Oct. 14), as “Water,” the breakthrough single for the South African singer-songwriter, debuts at No. 67. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news The song, released July 28 on FAX Records/Epic Records, arrives on the chart […]

Sometimes, even a young artist can carry the weight of time, of life lived, in their vocals. Lila Forde showed the world those talents when she stopped by NBC‘s The Voice on Monday night (Oct. 9) for her Blind Audition. Performing at the keys, Forde has a vintage voice. It’s fused at the hip with soul and soil and a touch of country, the type we’ve all heard speaking to us from the radio over the years, wondering where on earth that came from. For the younger generation, think Florence Welch and Freya Ridings. And some of us older fogies, Joni Mitchell and Carole King.Like a hawk, Gwen Stefani swooped fast on that buzzer. John Legend turned next, then Reba McEntire and Niall Horan finished fourth, smacking that thing with his fist.Following her performance of Blind Faith’s “Can’t Find My Way Home,” and her four-chair turn, Forde gave a wide smile. For a moment, it looked as though emotion had sucked the wind from her sails.“That song could not have been more perfect if you tried,” Niall Horan remarked. “You looked so comfortable up there at the piano. Your tone has so many parts to it.”It was a performance “that reminded me of everything I love about music.” And then, yes, the first sales pitch. Stefani stepped up her game by taking off her shoes, walking towards the contestant, and delivering her own pitch. “What the world needs, we want a singer-songwriter with a true point of view, that’s original, unique, that’s not trying to be anyone else,” she enthused. “And the way you performed it, the confidence, it’s everything I love. It was so good, so beautiful.”The cover “was magical,” reckoned Legend, “what I heard was wisdom, you understood everything you were saying, every nuance…everything felt completely under your control.”Speaking last, McEntire remarked, “you are an old soul. You’re mature beyond your years.”Hailing from Seattle, the daughter of a musical mom, Forde plies her trade on the Los Angeles gig circuit. With four Voice judges beckoning her, begging for her, the choice was all Forde’s to make. And she selected Team Legend. Watch below.

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After being denied by Doja Cat on several occasions, Kenya Grace appears ready for her coronation on the U.K. singles chart.
The South Africa-born, U.K.-raised artist leads the midweek chart with “Strangers” (FFRR), her major label debut and first trans-Atlantic hit.

Also contending for the crown is Casso, RAYE, D-Block Europe’s “Prada” (Ministry of Sound) up 4-2 on the Official Chart Update, and Tate McRae’s “Greedy” (Ministry of Sound), up 5-3.

It’s tightly bunched at the top. Fewer than 600 chart units separated the top three, based on sales and streaming data for the first 48 hours of the chart week, published by the Official Charts Company.

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Drake’s new release For All The Dogs (via OVO/Republic Records) is flying high on the midweek U.K. albums survey, and is likely to earn the Canadian hip-hop star his sixth No. 1. The impact of For All The Dogs can also be felt on the midweek U.K. singles survey, as album tracks “First Person Shooter” featuring J. Cole (at No. 4), “Virginia Beach” (No. 5) and “IDGAF” featuring Yeat (No. 6) are predicted to crash the top 10. If that trio of tracks hold firm, Drake will boast 44 U.K. top 10s when the weekly chart is published late Friday, Oct. 13.

Meanwhile, Doja Cat’s five-week reign is set to end, as “Paint the Town Red” (Ministry of Sound) tumbles 1-12 on the chart blast.

Brighton, England formed alt-pop band Lovejoy should snag a second U.K. top 40 single with “Normal People Things” (Anvil Cat/AWAL), new at No. 22 on the chart blast. It’s the followup to “Call Me What You Like” which peaked at No. 32 in February of this year.

Finally, BlackPink’s Jennie is eyeing a maiden solo top 40 appearance with “You & Me” (Interscope). It’s new at No. 27 on the U.K. chart blast. Jennie does have an earlier appearance on the Official Singles Chart, with 2018’s “Solo,” which topped out at No. 73.

Drake is off to the races in the U.K. with For All The Dogs (via OVO/Republic Records).
The Canadian hip-hop giant leads the midweek chart, and appears set to score his sixth U.K. No. 1 — and second in less than a year, following 2022’s collaborative effort Her Loss with 21 Savage.

Drizzy’s delayed eighth solo studio dropped at 6am ET last Friday, Oct. 6, the culmination of nearly 10 months of teasing and delays.

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Spread across 23 songs, the LP features assists from SZA, J. Cole, Chief Keef, Sexyy Red, Snoop Dogg, Sade, Teezo Touchdown, Bad Bunny, Yeat, 21 Savage, Lil Yachty and PARTYNEXTDOOR. His U.K. albums chart leaders to date include Views (2016), Scorpion (2018), Dark Lane Demo Tapes (2020) and Certified Lover Boy (2021); his last solo full-length recording, Honestly, Nevermind, peaked at No. 2 on the Official U.K. Albums Chart in June 2022.

Eyeing a No. 2 debut on the national survey is Nines with Crop Circle 3 (Zino). If it holds its course, Crop Circle 3 would become the British rapper’s second top 10 album in less than six months, after Crop Circle 2 hit No. 2 in May.

Roger Waters’ Dark Side of the Moon Redux (Cooking Vinyl) has come into view on the midweek chart, and is set to spin in at No. 3. The reissue celebrates the legacy of Pink Floyd’s masterpiece Dark Side Of The Moon from 1973, which has logged 560 weeks on national chart and is recognized as one of the most successful British albums of all time.

Pink Floyd has six U.K. No. 1 albums, though Dark Side isn’t one of them; it peaked at No. 2 in 1973.

Completing an all-new top four on the Official Chart Update is Sufjan Stevens’ Javelin (Asthmatic Kitty). If Javelin flies in at No. 4, it would give the veteran U.S. indie singer and songwriter his career best chart position in the U.K., bettering the No. 6 for 2015’s Carrie & Lowell.

Finally, Joel Corry‘s Another Friday Night (Atlantic) is set for a new peak position, up 45-6 on the chart blast, while new releases from Stornoway (Dig The Mountain! at No. 14 via Cooking Vinyl), MC Slim (Still Working 2 at No. 16 via Warner Records) and Joe Bonamassa (Blues Deluxe: Volume 2 at No. 19 via Provogue) should land U.K. top 40 debuts.

All will be revealed when the Official U.K. Albums Chart is published late Friday, Oct. 13.

Banjo player and guitarist Buck Trent, a two-time CMA instrumental group of the year winner and a prominent member of the cast of the variety show Hee Haw, died on Monday (Oct. 9) at age 85.

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Trent was born in Spartanburg, South Carolina on Feb. 17, 1938, and moved to Nashville in 1959. In 1962, he joined Porter Wagoner’s Wagonmasters, performing with the group for approximately a decade.

Trent’s star rose through his work as a member of the cast of the variety show Hee Haw from 1974 to 1982. Those performances were regularly punctuated by Trent shouting what became his signature phrase, “Oh yeah!” In 2018, Trent was part of a “Kornfield Friends” reunion tour which also featured his fellow Hee Haw alums Jana Jae, Lulu Roman and Misty Rowe.

During his career, Trent also made appearances on The Marty Stuart Show and The Porter Wagoner Show, among others.

In 1975, Trent and fellow country music entertainer and banjoist Roy Clark earned a Billboard Top Country Albums hit with their collaborative project A Pair of Fives (Banjos, That Is), peaking at No. 9. Three other Trent titles impacted the tally: 1968’s Give Me Five (No. 40), 1976’s Bionic Banjo (No. 43) 1978’s Banjo Bandits with Clark (No. 45).

In 1975 and 1976, Trent and Clark won consecutive CMA Awards for instrumental group of the year. Also in 1976, Trent joined Clark and The Oak Ridge Boys for a concert tour behind the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Union. Two years later, Trent and Clark released the project Banjo Bandits, which would earn a Grammy nomination for best country instrumental performance.

In addition to his own recordings, Trent contributed guitar and/or banjo on enduring recordings by Roy Acuff, Wagoner, Clark, Stuart and Dolly Parton, including Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” and “Jolene.” His contributions to music also proved innovative, as the creator of the electric banjo.

In the 1980s, after traveling to Branson, Trent began performing and would become a longtime performer in the town. In 2004, Trent also appeared as a Branson performer in the movie Gordy. Later, in 2012, Trent played on two songs for Marty Stuart’s album Nashville Volume 1: Tear the Woodpile Down.

Trent was previously named as one of this year’s American Banjo Museum Hall of Fame honorees; the celebration is slated for Oct. 12-14 in Oklahoma City.

Trent’s wife, Jean Trent, said in a statement, “It is with great sorrow and a broken heart to say my husband, my love, Buck Trent, went to be with Jesus this morning. I lost my best friend, and the world lost a Master Musician and Country Music Legend. Oh Yeah!”

Jim Halsey, longtime manager for Country Music Hall of Fame group The Oak Ridge Boys and the late Clark, described Trent as “one of my very favorite people in the world.” He added in a statement, “I worked with him for years as a partner with the Roy Clark Show. Buck Trent is one of the greatest banjo players ever. We will all miss him. Thank you, Buck Trent, for being in all our lives.”

Roman added in a statement, “Buck was like a brother to me after all of these years. We’ve shared tons of laughs and some tears along the way, but we never left each other’s side. We had a bond like no other. I’ll miss the man, but cherish the memories from our 50+ year friendship. My heart breaks for his precious wife, Jean, his family, friends, and fans. There will never be another like Buck Trent. Oh Yea!” 

The Oak Ridge Boys member Joe Bonsall added, “We lost a dear long-time friend today in Buck Trent. Buck toured the Soviet Union with us and Roy Clark in 1976 and we have been close ever since. Buck was one of the greatest banjo players of all time and a very funny man. We will miss Buck!”