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Give Joni Mitchell an assist on Hillary Clinton’s new book.
Appearing at the Detroit Opera House on Monday (Oct. 28) to promote Something Lost, Something Gained: Reflections on Life, Love, and Liberty, the former First Lady, U.S. Senator and Secretary of State told her interviewer, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, that her eighth book (fifth as the sole author) was inspired by watching Mitchell sing “Both Sides Now” — the hit song that gave Clinton’s book its title — at the 66th Annual Grammy Awards in February.
“I saw her and she sang ‘Both Sides Now,’ which is one of my all-time favorite songs,” said Clinton, who suggested the “young people” in the crowd Google it. “It’s about life and love and I listened to her sing it. She’d had a cerebral aneurysm [in 2015] and there she was back on stage singing that incredible anthem about what you think of life, what you think of love at different points of your own journey. I heard that song in my twenties. Obviously I’ve heard it in every decade of my life, and I wanted to take a moment to write some essays about where I see my life now, and particularly about my family, about my friends, about some of these experiences I’ve had, like being First Lady of our country, but also politics, which I care deeply about.”
Clinton added that while some early interviews about the book — whose title was taken from a “Both Sides Now” lyric — were about politics and elections, “I was really thinking more about the people who have been important in my life, the relationships…. It was more a reflection of, ‘OK, I’m this age. At this point in my life, what’s really important?’”
While the nearly 90-minute conversation hit on expected political topics — Clinton’s support of Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her disdain for former President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement — she also spoke about her recent work in the arts, including co-producing the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical Suffs (which is about the women’s suffrage movement in the U.S. that led to the 19th Amendment, which provided women with the right to vote), and her HiddenLight Productions company with daughter Chelsea, whose releases include the Emmy Award-winning documentary In Her Hands and the new doc Zurawski V. Texas about abortion bans in that state. She said Suffs, which is slated to close Jan. 5 on Broadway, has been “absolutely thrilling” and will be heading out on a national tour in the near future.
Clinton also has a Grammy Award in the best spoken word album category, which led Benson to point out that she’s only an Oscar away from being an EGOT. “I don’t know when or if there’s an Academy Award in the future,” Clinton responded, “but I just am so committed to storytelling…. We want to tell stories, we want to be part of the truth-telling part of America… and tell stories about what’s going on in America, in our lives, and particularly women’s lives.”
Clinton did say we should not hold our collective breath for a future Grammy in a musical category.
“I love to sing, but nobody loves to listen,” she confessed, noting that she would sing to Chelsea when she was a baby, with “Moon River” a particular favorite. “This went on for 14, 15, 16 months, something like that. I’d sing to her. Then when she learned to talk…Y’know, people think the trauma of my life is the 2016 election [Clinton won the popular vote but lost to Trump in the Electoral College]. There is that. But (Chelsea) took her little finger and put it on my mouth and said, ‘No sing, mommy.’”
She has, however, continued to sing to her three grandchildren – “When my daughter’s not around.”
Beyoncé said on Tuesday (Oct. 29) that she is bursting with pride after her mom, Tina Knowles, announced that she is prepping a memoir for spring 2025. “Mama, I couldn’t be prouder. My love for you goes beyond what I can say,” the singer wrote on Instagram in a post featuring the colorful, gilded cover the the book entitled Matriarch: A Memoir, which is due out in stores on April 22.
“You put your heart into this book. I’m happy for you to share some of the stories that shaped you into who you are. To know you is to love you. But please don’t spill too much Mama Tea,” Bey wrote.
The post came after Tina Knowles announced the book on her Insta feed, revealing the cover that features the family matriarch seated in a flower-filled background in a yellow skirt and black top inside a gold picture frame.
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“I have always been a storyteller, and it’s something I learned from my mother. When I had a family of my own, I believed that my daughters needed to know where they came from in order to know where they were going,” Knowles wrote. “I’m now ready to share my story with all of you, so that we can all celebrate these themes of strength, motherhood, Black pride, and identity.”
Knowles — mother of Bey and her younger sister, singer Solange — said she called the book Matriarch because among things that inspire her are the “wisdom that women pass on to each other, generation to generation — and the inner wisdom we long to uncover in ourselves. Even at 70 I am still learning valuable lessons — revelations that I wish that I would have had at 40 or even 20,” she wrote. “I want to share this knowledge now, one to one with the reader, as we laugh and sometimes cry together through all the stages of our lives.”
A description of the book from Penguin Random House describes a memoir that will take the reader on a journey to meet Knowles from when she was a “precocious, if unruly, little girl growing up in 1950s Galveston, the youngest of seven. She is in love with her world, with extended family on every other porch and the sounds of Motown and the lapping beach always within earshot. But as the realities of race and the limitations of girlhood set in, she begins to dream of the world beyond. Her instincts and impulsive nature drive her far beyond the shores of Texas to discover the life awaiting her on the other side of childhood.”
It continues, “that life’s journey — through grief and tragedy, creative and romantic risks and turmoil, the nurturing of superstar offspring and of her own special gifts — is the remarkable story she shares with readers here. This is a page-turning chronicle of family love and heartbreak, of loss and perseverance, and of the kind of creativity, audacity, and will it takes for a girl from Galveston to change the world. It’s one brilliant woman’s intimate and revealing story, and a multigenerational family saga that carries within it the story of America — and the wisdom that women pass on to each other, mothers to daughters, across generations.”
Knowles and Beyoncé co-founded the clothing line House of Deréon and the spin-off brand Miss Tina and earlier this year the former hair salon owner helped create Cécred, Bey’s haircare line.
Alex Van Halen hopes that those coming to his new memoir, Brothers, for a tell-all will be disappointed.
“It’s not about the dirt,” Van Halen, older brother and bandmate of the late Eddie Van Halen, tells Billboard. “If I start throwing dirt, it’ll never end. I think some people would like that; that’s how projects are sold nowadays. I think it divides the audience, and we’re not here to divide. I think the tone of the book and how I want the book to be perceived is more on a spiritual and creative level. That’s why there’s very little, or any, dirt in there.
“The majority of things that were written about Ed were third party,” he continues. “They weren’t really there. I’m not degrading any of it, but it’s not accurate. I really felt like a lot of the stuff that was out there was incorrect, and it didn’t do justice to the more sensitive side of Ed. So before I die I would like to at least partially set the record straight.”
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Brothers, publishing Oct. 22 and written with New Yorker staff writer Ariel Levy, acknowledges the sex and drugs and rock n’ roll. But as the title indicates it’s primarily a chronicle of the drummer’s relationship with his guitar hero brother, who passed way during Oct. 2020 at the age of 65 after a long battle with cancer. The tome is undeniably emotional, with some passages written directly to his late brother. Van Halen acknowledges that the process “really took its toll on me.”
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“You have to remember we were together for 65 years; that’s a lifetime, if not more,” explains Van Halen, who was born in Amsterdam and came to the United States with his family in 1962, eventually settling in Pasadena, Calif., where the Van Halen band was formed in 1974. “(Brothers) not only forced me to look at everything Ed and I had done in our lifetime, but also — and I should thank Ed for this — it forced me to look at me. What are my motivations? Why am I really doing this? Who does anybody do this? It took me a lot of places…very heavy.”
Throughout Brothers’ 231 pages, Van Halen discloses the tight bond between him and Eddie, personally and musically — and presents the connection between those two as one and the same thing. Van Halen offers a detailed account of the entire family dynamics, too, from the influence of their father, Jan, a jazz musician, and their more strict Dutch East Indies-born mother Eugenia, and the impact of immigrating to America and being treated as outsiders. The passion for music came early and was a constant, of course, and one can read in Brothers a kind of mission on Van Halen’s part to offer a more expansive and sophisticated view of his brother’s talents.
“There was more going on than most people recognize or realize, and it’s not our job to ‘teach’ people,” explains Van Halen, who also makes use in the book of a variety of other sources, including published interviews with his brother, books by original frontman David Lee Roth and producer Ted Templeman, and philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche. The brothers, who first learned to play piano, actually started out on each other’s instruments before switching as teenagers. “When Ed picked (the guitar) up he could make it sing. It was amazing. That sound, that intonation was phenomenal. You couldn’t express it in words. Everybody gets blinded by the fact Ed was such a phenomenal player (that) you’re not even understanding who the human being was. Maybe people don’t care, but I care. He’s my brother.”
Brothers of a Band
Writing about Van Halen the rock band in Brothers, Van Halen says that “me, Ed and Dave were very subversive in the way we looked at music and the political system and the way we looked at people in general…The band was dysfunctional. It was completely running on three wheels, if you will. I think Ed was quoted as saying ‘but we always played well,’ and that was ultimately what kept it together until it was no longer together. It was a very sad moment when that whole thing fell apart.” Van Halen, in fact, writes in Brothers that Van Halen’s 1985 split with Roth “was the most disappointing thing I’d experienced in my life, the thing that seemed the most wasteful and unjust. Until I lost my brother.”
Despite the acknowledged rancor with Roth over the years – and blaming Roth for the failure of a planned Eddie Van Halen tribute tour — Van Halen maintains that “I’m not angry at all with Dave. He was one of the three main components of the band. At the time we didn’t recognize it because we were constantly battling things out. That’s why I mentioned (in the book) that the first person I called when Ed died was Dave because I felt like I owed him that, to the work we had done together and the fact that our families knew each other and the fact that everybody was sort of on the same level, if you will, when we first started. I don’t know where things went wrong…I have nothing but the utmost respect for Dave and his work ethic. I just think some of his choices were really strange to me, but that’s not my job to figure it out.”
Other than his brother’s death, Van Halen chose to stop the story with the Roth split, leaving out subsequent runs with Sammy Hagar and Gary Cherone and even the reunion with Roth that started in 2007. (Roth and Hagar both wrote memoirs after their respective tenures with the band.) Van Halen cites “limitations to how big the book could be” but also says it the scope of the narrative made sense to him.
“What happened after Dave left is not the same band,” Van Halen explains. “I’m not saying it was better or worse or any of that. The fact is Ed and I did our best work whenever we played. We always gave it our best shot. But the magic was in the first years, when we didn’t know what we were doing, when we were willing to try anything.” Not surprisingly, Van Halen was not responsive, either, when Hagar and bassist Michael Anthony reached out about him taking part in some way in their Best of All Worlds tour celebrating Van Halen.
“I’m not interested,” he says. “They’re not doing the band justice. They can do what they want to do. That’s not my business.”
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Van Halen does add, however, that his auction of drum equipment and other items in June “was misinterpreted” and simply clearing out a warehouse of gear that wasn’t being used.
“I’m not quitting. I don’t know where that came from,” Van Halen says. “I’ll die with sticks in my hand.” Spinal issues he’s been battling for decades are still present, he adds, including a recent injury during a trip to a shooting range in 2022. “But with modern technology we have now I should be OK in about five years,” he says.
Despite rumors of what the Van Halens were up to between the last tour with Roth (in 2015) and Eddie’s death, Alex maintains there was little to report. “We never really talked about it,” he says. “We prefer that things just happen by some kind of magic. The issue was Ed had been dealing with cancer for quite a number of years, and some of the stuff that he was doing out of the normal procedures, if you will, had side effects. Some of the stuff that was being said about Ed was completely wrong, and it was painful…. He was fighting cancer. It’s as simple as that.”
Fans are certainly excited about the presence of a new instrumental track, “Unfinished,” that’s part of the audio version of Brothers. It hails from a trove of ideas the brothers recorded at Eddie’s 5150 studio and stashed away, and Alex anticipates releasing more of that material “when it feels right.”
“I’m not in a hurry,” he says. “I do have a certain obligation to keep it to Ed’s standards. He was meticulous and he was a pain in the ass…and I need to have access to the right takes, ’cause not every day did we play at our best. But we always had the tape recorders running. We didn’t go in the studio like, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna make a record from beginning to end.’ We had little pieces here, little pieces there, you put ’em away until the time comes and you go, ‘Hey, I think I like that piece…’ and then go back to it and build something from there.” He told Rolling Stone that he’s approached OpenAI about using its technology to help turn some of the material into songs.
“I know people want to hear it,” Van Halen adds, before cautioning that, “the other side of the coin is this doesn’t sound like Van Halen. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” He says that for future releases he’s also “looking forward to getting some people involved…other musicians and producers. You have to have the right team, because not everybody can do everything. So we’ll see.”
For the time being Van Halen is focused on promoting Brothers, which he’d also like to turn into a movie — though he notes that, “I learned a long time ago not to put your hope in things that don’t exist yet. I know people who would be willing to participate, but it’s a very complex fabric of things that need to happen.” Meanwhile Van Halen has three book events lined up — signings at Barnes & Noble in New York on Oct. 21 and at Books & Greetings in Northvale, N.J., the following day, and a live conversation on Oct. 24 at the Frost Auditorium in Culver City, Calif.
“People can ask whatever they like — that’s their prerogative,” Van Halen says. “It’s my prerogative to answer. Or not answer.”
One thing Van Halen will make clear, however, is that his brother is still a strong presence in his life.
“He’s not gone for me,” Van Halen says, citing the “island voodoo” of their mother’s upbringing and the Spooky Action at a Distance concept of quantum physics. “He’s still there. His spirit’s here, and it’s not something you can grab or touch. There’s something between us that’s just connected on a level that is beyond explanation. Scientists will tell you that you cannot destroy energy, it just takes different shapes, and that’s kind of how it is for me with Ed.
“I really had a tough time when Ed passed — full of rage, for a number of reasons. I heard this thing by Billy Bob Thornton; he just said basically when his brother died he didn’t know how to deal with it, and he basically said that you’re not running away from the fact that you’re not together anymore. You accept it for what it is and then the pain will slowly diminish, but it’ll never go away. That’s why i said (in the book), ‘When I see you again, I’m gonna kick yo’ ass…’”
Brothers by Alex Van Halen
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Sum 41‘s frontman is holding nothing back in a new memoir detailing the highs and lows of Deryck Whibley’s career.
Released on Tuesday (Oct. 8), Walking Disaster: My Life Through Heaven and Hell is the lead singer’s first-ever autobiography detailing his rise to fame, the success of Sum 41 as well as the struggles he endured — including alleged sexual abuse by the band’s former manager.
Whibley’s memoir starts from the beginning detailing his life before fame, being raised by a single mom in Canada and forming a friend group that would eventually evolve into an internationally famous punk rock band. While the band has since announced their split, fans can relive the group’s most memorable moments straight from the 44-year-old’s perspective.
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Since its release, the book has skyrocketed to the top of Amazon’s bestselling chart, earning the No. 1 spot for punk musician biographies. And, for a limited time, you can buy Walking Disaster: My Life Through Heaven and Hell online for 21% off.
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Keep reading to learn more and shop Whibley’s memoir.
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Readers can expect to delve into more than just the singer’s upbringings in Walking Disaster, as he details Sum 41’s rise to fame. Throughout the start of Whibley music career, he kept hidden alleged sexual misconduct from the band’s first manager, Greig Nori, who groomed him as well as sexually and verbally abused him, according to reporting from Rolling Stone.
Reviewers can’t get enough of the memoir with one Amazon shopper saying it “tells some incredible stories, but it also includes some great life lessons about resilience, redemptions, and suffering.
In addition to the lows, the punk rockstar experienced unforgettable moments like “winning at the MTV Video Music Awards and being nominated for a Grammy,” the official description states. Plus, he’ll revisit some of his high-profile relationships including with Paris Hilton and Avril Lavigne.
Audiobook fans can even listen to the memoir narrated by Whibley himself through Audible. Bonus savings: new Audible users can get three months for $3 when you sign up here.
For more product recommendations, check out ShopBillboard‘s roundups of the best country music books, books about jazz and female musician memoirs.
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes. Katie Ledecky has been a standout athlete during the 2024 Paris Olympics, only solidifying her legacy as one of the best […]
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Lil Wayne’s penmanship is worth more than he probably ever imagined. His old rhyme book is going to be auctioned for $5 million dollars after a long legal battle.
As reported on Digital Music News, the New Orleans, Louisiana, native will see some of his earliest work go to the highest bidder. This week, memorabilia site Moments In Time announced that they will be moving forward with the selling of a notebook he used during the 1990s as a member of the Hot Boys. In it are lyrics he penned for several of the group’s classic songs including, “Grown Man” and “We On Fire.” Additionally, the company states that it also includes drawings of what appears to be Mannie Fresh, but this has yet to confirmed.
According to TMZ, the notebook was in a car owned by someone associated with Cash Money Records. Legend has it when the dealership took back the car an employee emptied the vehicle out and held onto the book. The man stored the collectible in his garage, but then Hurricane Katrina hit the city in 2005 causing severe water damage to the item. This is not the first time the memorabilia site has tried to sell off the notebook. Back in 2019, the personal item went on the block for $250,000, but Lil Wayne filed a cease and desist stopping Moments In Time from selling it. Almost five years later, a judge has granted the company the right to proceed with the sale.
You can read more about the Lil Wayne book of rhymes auction here.
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes. Colleen Hoover erupted on BookTok for her duology It Ends With Us and the popularity has led the books to not […]
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes. Taylor Swift’s record-breaking Eras tour is about to complete its European leg and head back to North America for the final […]
All products and services featured are independently chosen by editors. However, Billboard may receive a commission on orders placed through its retail links, and the retailer may receive certain auditable data for accounting purposes. Taylor Swift has been dazzling audiences with bejeweled outfit changes throughout her record-breaking Eras tour. With the addition of The Tortured […]
The following is an excerpt from the newly published book Rockin’ the Kremlin: My Incredible True Story of Gangsters, Oligarch, and Pop Stars in Putin’s Russia written by David Junk with Fred Bronson, out now on Rowman & Littlefield. David Junk was the first CEO of Universal Music in Moscow, helping promote artists from Elton John to Mariah Carey in Russia and signing t.A.T.u. and Alsou to Universal. Junk also opened the first Universal Music office in Kyiv, Ukraine, and developed music reality shows for TV in Ukraine. Fred Bronson is a journalist, author and regular contributor to Billboard. He has written three books about the Billboard charts and covered American Idol and Eurovision for Billboard extensively.
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Adapted from the book Rockin’ the Kremlin: My Incredible True Story of Gangsters, Oligarch, and Pop Stars in Putin’s Russia by David Junk with Fred Bronson. Used by permission of the publisher Rowman & Littlefield. All rights reserved.
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The Kiss Heard ‘Round the World
I knew the Moscow-based duo t.A.T.u. was going to be my international breakthrough from the first moment I saw their controversial video.
I loved their music. The dynamic vocals were haunting and the music had an infectious dance beat. The lyrics were provocative. There was no act like them anywhere in the world. But I had to convince my Russian marketing and sales team to support me. An act like t.A.T.u. was going to be a risk for everyone. Russia was still a very intolerant society, despite the Soviet Union being long gone. This band would be pushing boundaries.
I gathered the team in my office, plugged t.A.T.u.’s VHS tape into my TV hanging on the wall, and we watched it together. Everyone’s mouth dropped watching the infamous scene when Julia and Lena kiss. “No! You cannot sign them. Are you crazy, David?” Asya, my very wise marketing director stood up and shouted. “We are going to catch so much hell for this, from everybody!” I argued, “Don’t you love how they’re rebelling against authority? That’s all that kiss is. They’re teenage symbols of a new Russia, leaving the past behind.” That’s when my excellent radio promoter Sasha Rodmanich spoke up. “The song is a hit.” At a record label, that’s all that matters. So with Sasha’s promise the song would be a hit at radio, I was able to rally the team, including Asya, who would have to carry most of the burden. We were going to pursue signing t.A.T.u. But she was right to be cautious, since I was taking Universal into uncharted territory.
Homosexuality was a crime in the old Soviet Union and under Russian law, promotion of LGBTQ issues was considered propaganda, punishable with time in prison. Gay Russians have always been treated as outcasts and subversives by the authorities. So when Julia and Lena openly embraced gay rights and kissed in their first music video, I knew I had to make a quick decision that could change my music career forever: should I sign the most exciting new music act in Russia (and maybe the world) to Universal, even if it meant risking my visa status as an American working in the country or even possible jail time because I angered the two most powerful institutions in the country – the government and the Russian Orthodox Church?
Both frowned on all things LGBTQ. Or should I shy away from the controversy and miss the best opportunity I would ever have to promote a Russian act around the world, perhaps achieving my wildest dream, being the first record executive to promote a Russian band in America? There was no way I was going to pass on this. I kept my fingers crossed that I wouldn’t end up in a Russian prison.
To sign t.A.T.u., I had to deal with Ivan Shapovalov, a high IQ provocateur in the mold of Sex Pistols manager Malcom McLaren. He was a manipulative, edgy person, whose eyes would pierce you while you were in conversation. The band was his idea, and he brought in songwriters to craft the anarchistic message. He auditioned many girls and ultimately chose two Moscow teenagers: Lena Katina, a firey redhead with a head of wild curls, considered the reasonable one; and Julia Volkova, the sassy brunette manga comic-looking foul mouthed and funny one. Both had worked in television and music projects as child actors.
I didn’t know what to expect from Ivan because negotiations in Russian show business were never predictable. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia was chaotic, corrupt, and dangerous, like Chicago was in the 1930s when Al Capone was declared the FBI’s public enemy No. 1. Russia was the wild, wild east, and their music industry had no rules or standards.
Common Western business practices like royalty payments and songwriter copyrights were foreign concepts. Payola was rampant. The government didn’t support the music industry or musicians’ rights.
The biggest obstacle was that 90 percent of all music sold in Russia was printed on counterfeit compact discs, while music legally released by record companies accounted for the other 10 percent. Musicians only made money from sales of the official releases, so this situation made it nearly impossible for artists to survive financially. The pirates who made the bootleg CDs sold them in illegal outdoor markets and kiosks throughout the country while local authorities turned a blind eye to all of it. Worse yet, the pirates were controlled by organized crime groups that used the proceeds from counterfeit sales to fund a host of illegal activities, including selling weapons to terrorists and sex trafficking.
Ivan was a tough negotiator, and he knew how badly I wanted to sign the band. My rival Sony Music had caught wind of my efforts and started courting him while I was trying to close the deal. I knew I had to play to his ego, so when he arrived at our Universal office to discuss a record contract I made sure Asya gave him a tour of our marketing and sales department where large cut-out posters of Elton John, U2, and Bon Jovi’s new album releases were hanging on the wall along with dozens of other posters of Universal’s vast roster of superstars, demonstrating that we were an international label, not a small Russian one. That was my best leverage for negotiations. “Why should I give you the rights to t.A.T.u.?” Ivan asked, staring at me with his wild eyes. “I don’t need a record label; the pirates will steal the music from you anyway.” He was right about that. Piracy would limit our sales. I told Ivan, “If you sign with me I guarantee that t.A.T.u’s album would will be promoted by Universal not just in Russia but also internationally.” That persuaded him. Universal was one of the most prestigious American brands in the world and the largest record company, and he wanted t.A.T.u. to be associated with the best Western artists.
Ivan demanded $100,000 for the rights to t.A.T.u., which would have made it the biggest record deal in Russian show business history. He was adamant that he couldn’t accept anything less. I didn’t believe him until I discovered that he had already sold the rights to the first single to a record label controlled by Russian gangsters and they had already manufactured it.
I got angry with Ivan, and he told me that he had made a mistake, that he was new to show business and didn’t know anything about song rights. The gangsters had initially paid him $5,000, but now that he was in talks with Universal, they wanted significantly more to give the rights back. I didn’t have much choice because this wasn’t just any song. This was the hit single with the notorious music video that would launch t.A.T.u. internationally and top music charts worldwide. If I didn’t get the single rights back from the gangsters at that exorbitant price, there would be no t.A.T.u.
I had to keep my bosses at Universal’s headquarters in the dark about some of the unsavory aspects of the deal. Luckily, they thought I had done a good job selling American rap and hip-hop music in Russia, with Eminem being my biggest success.
Still, $100,000 was outrageous for an artist from that part of the world and would be the biggest payout in Russian and Eastern European history. None of my colleagues who ran Universal subsidiaries in Eastern Europe had ever requested that much. Ultimately, my London bosses agreed to the amount, and I used the money to pay Ivan, who paid off the gangsters.
With Universal Russia behind the duo, t.A.T.u.’s debut album, 200 Po Vstrechnoy, got wider distribution and became a phenomenal success in every Russian city and former Soviet republic, including Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ukraine. Julia and Lena topped the charts everywhere in the region, and t.A.T.u.’s first song and video hit No. 1 simultaneously on pop radio and MTV in 2000.
Their music first appealed to gay and lesbian youth, then spread to a much larger audience of disaffected teens. They took off like a wildfire throughout the former U.S.S.R. Stadiums were sold out and crowds of fans were worked up into a frenzy with Julia and Lena’s provocative performances. It was Russia’s version of Beatlemania. My Eastern European colleagues took notice of that because they all had sizable teenage Russian-speaking populations in their countries and sensed a hit for their markets. On that score, t.A.T.u.’s album delivered, topping the charts in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Poland.
We were getting ready to release 200 Po Vstrechnoy in Germany, but I knew that t.A.T.u. would never go beyond Russian-speaking audiences in Eastern Europe unless they recorded in English for Western markets.
We needed a partner to help make a t.A.T.u. album in English. We needed to rewrite and re-record the songs, and we needed a bigger, more powerful partner ally inside of our parent company Universal Music Group to shepherd us through the process. I wanted Universal’s full weight behind the release.
I went on a road tour of all of all the company’s offices in search of help. We told everyone that t.A.T.u. was on the way up, selling out concerts everywhere and climbing the charts in Bulgaria, Poland, and Hungary. If they had an English-language release, I said, they could become a global act. Unfortunately, nobody was interested in partnering with us.
Wherever we went – Los Angeles, Nashville, New York, London, anywhere Universal had an office – the answer was always no. When people from the label saw footage of them kissing on stage, it made them uncomfortable, and when Lena and Julia invited boys onstage to do the same, my colleagues were too nervous to support us.
Another issue for the executives was my goal of breaking t.A.T.u. into the American market. They would have to compete with American pop stars like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, boy bands like the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC and big pop acts from the U.K. My colleagues arrogantly dismissed the potential for a band not from America or the U.K. to have a hit in their markets.
My road tour was a bust, so I went back to Moscow and mailed packages with the Russian album and videos out to all the remaining labels in the Universal Music Group that we hadn’t visited. We kept getting turned down. It felt like we would never find a partner – until suddenly I received a phone call from Interscope Records in Los Angeles, a subsidiary label of Universal and the hottest record company in America.
I was surprised that Interscope was interested. Their roster included No Doubt, Marilyn Manson, the Black Eyed Peas, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, 50 Cent, Eminem, Mary J. Blige, Nelly, and Blink-182 – some of the most popular acts in the world. They really didn’t need us. Still, I had done well selling their artists in Russia, so there was already a symbiotic relationship in place.
I had sent our package to the label’s co-founder, Jimmy Iovine. He was the most powerful record executive in the world, and before forming the label, he had produced some of the most prominent artists of all time, including Tom Petty, U2, and Stevie Nicks. He sent t.A.T.u.’s Russian-language CD to British producer Trevor Horn, who had helmed very successful records for artists like Seal and Yes. He had also been in the Buggles, whose “Video Killed The Radio Star” was the first video ever shown on MTV.
He loved the t.A.T.u. CD and was very enthusiastic about working with Julia and Lena. He had been a ground-breaking pioneer in the U.K. music industry, producing the openly gay act Frankie Goes To Hollywood. I suspected that t.A.T.u. breaking through boundaries in Russia and Eastern Europe hit a nerve with him. He just had one question: “Can they sing in English?”
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