Country
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CMT is set to pay tribute to the southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd with a power-packed performance during Sunday’s (April 2) CMT Music Awards. Guns N’ Roses lead guitarist Slash will join Wynonna Judd, Billy Gibbons, Chuck Leavell, Cody Johnson, Paul Rodgers, Warren Haynes and LeAnn Rimes as part of the performance, which comes half a century after the 1973 launch of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s self-titled debut album.
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The Lynyrd Skynyrd album included many of the group’s signature hits, including “Simple Man,” “Gimme Three Steps” and “Free Bird.” The tribute performance also follows the death of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s final original founding member, guitarist Gary Rossington, who passed away on March 5 at age 71.
Johnson and Rodgers will lead vocals with Gibbons, with Slash and Haynes on electric guitar for a one-time-only performance of a pair of timeless Lynyrd Skynyrd hits. Nashville studio musicians Ethan Pilzer and Rich Redmond will round out the lineup on bass and drums. Rimes and Judd will fill the role of The Honkettes.
Rossington’s wife and band member Dale Krantz Rossington is set to attend the event, along with fellow Lynyrd Skynyrd members Johnny Van Zant and Rickey Medlock.
In 2016, Lynyrd Skynyrd appeared on CMT Crossroads with Brantley Gilbert. The CMT Music Awards will air live on CBS, from the Moody Center in Austin, Texas, and will stream live and on-demand on Paramount+.
The tribute performance joins previously announced performances from Darius Rucker with The Black Crowes, as well as sets from Carrie Underwood, Jelly Roll, Tyler Hubbard, Ashley McBryde, Carly Pearce and CMT Music Awards co-hosts Kelsea Ballerini and Kane Brown.
Miley Cyrus peacefully turned the other cheek after her “Rainbowland” duet with godmother Dolly Parton was pulled from the lineup of a spring concert at Heyer Elementary School in Waukesha, Wisconsin. In a series of posts on Wednesday night (March 29) from the singer’s Happy Hippie Foundation — a non-profit that supports the LGBTQ community and homeless youth — the group announced that they are making a donation to a worthy cause in honor of the Heyer students.
“To the inspiring first grade students at Heyer Elementary, keep being YOU. We believe in our Happy Hippie heart that you’ll be the ones to brush the judgment and fear aside and make all of us more understanding and accepting,” read a tweet from the organization. A follow-up revealed that in honor of the students’ “BRIGHT future,” HH has made a donation to the organization Pride and Less Prejudice, which provides LGBTQ-inclusive books to pre-K through 3rd grade classrooms to help students and teachers “read out loud, read out proud!”
Earlier this week, a language teacher at Heyer called out the school’s administration after “Rainbowland” was reportedly nixed from the spring concert after the school’s leaders determined it was “could be deemed controversial.” Spokespeople for the school and district did not return Billboard‘s request for comment at press time, but Waukesha Superintendent James Sebert emailed a statement to Wisconsin Public Radio in which he said, “the question was around whether the song was appropriate for the age and maturity level of the first-grade students.”
The Cyrus/Parton duet about acceptance appeared on Miley’s 2017 album Younger Now. “Living in Rainbowland/ Where you and I go hand in hand/ Oh, I’d be lying if I said this was fine/ All the hurt and the hate going on here/ We are rainbows, me and you/ Every color, every hue/ Let’s shine on through/ Together, we can start living in a Rainbowland,” they sing on the song.
After “Rainbowland” was axed, the school’s music teacher replaced it with the Muppets’ “Rainbow Connection,” which was also initially banned, but later accepted after pushback from parents and Waukesha’s Alliance for Education. The language teacher who spoke out about the song flap, Melissa Tempel, told WPR that the district did not offer any specific reason for the ban, suggesting that the only common thread between “those two songs was the world ‘rainbow.’”
In a third post, HH posted some of the lyrics along with the message, “When our founder @mileycyrus and her fairy godmother @dollyparton wrote these words together, they meant it.”
See the Happy Hippie tweets below.
In honor & celebration of your BRIGHT future Happy Hippie is making a donation to @lessprejudice to help make classrooms more inclusive! 💛💛💛— Happy Hippie Foundation (@happyhippiefdn) March 29, 2023
“We are rainbows, me and youEvery color, every hueLet’s shine on through… TOGETHER WE CAN START LIVING IN A RAINBOWLAND.”When our founder @mileycyrus and her fairy godmother @dollyparton wrote these words together, they meant it. pic.twitter.com/zRjTkcWttm— Happy Hippie Foundation (@happyhippiefdn) March 29, 2023
Sheryl Crow, Margo Price and Old Crow Medicine Show singer Ketch Secor performed at the “Nashville Remembers” vigil in the town’s Public Square Park on Wednesday night (March 29) honoring the lives of the three 9-year-old children and three adult staff members who were killed at the city’s Covenent School on Monday.
In the wake of Monday’s mass shooting, Crow responded to a tweet from Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s comment that her office was “ready to assist” by suggesting, “If you are ready to assist, please pass sensible gun laws so that the children of Tennessee and America at large might attend school without risk of being gunned down.”
Crow performed first, playing a solemn “I Shall Believe” while seated at a keyboard to a hushed crowd, ending with a bit of Dionne Warwick’s “What the World Needs Now is Love,” according to the AP, while Price thundered an emotional a cappella cover of The Band’s “Tears of Rage,” according to Rolling Stone. Secor played the banjo — with harmonica accompaniment from his son — as the audience joined him in a sing-along to the anthem of the Grand Ole Opry, the Carter Family’s “Can the Circle Be Unbroken (By and By).”
The performances ended with Secor and Price joining for “Amazing Grace” and “I’ll Fly Away.” The 30-minute event included the repeated recitation of the victims’ names: 9-year-old students Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs, as well as custodian Mike Hill, 61; the school’s headmaster, Katherine Koonce, 60; and substitute teacher Cynthia Peak, 61; the latter were reportedly close friends of Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s wife, Maria, and Peak was scheduled to have dinner with the Lee’s on Monday night. Hill’s seven children were also on hand at the event.
Price is raising funds for Everytown for Gun Safety, writing in an emotional Instagram post that, “It doesn’t have to be this way, yet, guns are the leading cause of death for children in the US. In Tennessee, @govbilllee has made it easier than ever to procure weapons when he passed permit less carry in 2021. @marshablackburn has accepted over 1 million dollars from the NRA. Please vote them out and also donate to @everytown and let’s help end this nightmare. Children shouldn’t go to school and fear for their lives.”
The day after the shooting, Secor posted an emotional video in which he said the community was struggling to understand a reality that includes “murder in our school systems with assault rifles and kids dying in classes,” and imaging how heart-wrenching it must have been for the parents of the fourth graders who had to identify the bodies of their children.
“We’re not gonna be pushed around anymore by people that think that the right to have an assault rifle okay,” he added through tears. “F–k your assault rifle. If you need to defend your house with an assault rifle you must be crazy… You need a storm the beaches on D-day weapon to protect your family? F–k you!… Never again, this has to stop.”
First Lady Jill Biden was also on hand — but did not speak — at the event, where Mayor John Cooper called the shooting the “city’s worst day.” A number of Nashville musicians spoke out in grief and anger after the nation’s 132nd mass shooting so far this year, carried out by a 28-year-old former student at the private religious charter school while armed with one military-grade semi-automatic rifle and two handguns.
As conservative politicians mostly offered up thoughts and prayers and made comments including “emotion doesn’t solve problems,” Pres. Biden once again urged Congress to take any action to curb the easy access to military-style weapons. “We have to do more to stop gun violence. It’s ripping our communities apart, ripping the soul of this nation — ripping at the very soul of the nation. And we — we have to do more to protect our schools so they aren’t turned into prisons,” Biden said in remarks following the 17th school shooting so far this year.
Biden once again urged Congress to pass his assault weapons ban, an action that GOP lawmakers have steadfastly refused to take on.
People don’t come with an owner’s manual, but if they did, the checklist might look something like the words in Ashley McBryde’s new single, “Light On in the Kitchen.”
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Much like Tim McGraw’s “Humble and Kind,” written by Lori McKenna, “Kitchen” is a compendium of wisdom handed down from a mother to her kids. But where “Humble” was relayed from Mom’s point of view, the advice in “Kitchen” is seen through the recipient’s eyes. And those eyes may well be teary.
“Mom and her sister and I are really close, and we say it to each other, just to remind one another that we’re on each other’s minds,” McBryde says. “Instead of just saying, ‘All right, I love you. I’ll talk to you later. Bye,’ we’ll say, ‘Hey, I’m going to leave the kitchen light on for you tonight.’ I don’t know why it’s so stirring. It tugs on something.”
That something is the stuff that successful families are made of: the generational mentoring, the caring for relatives, the sense that there’s someone offering protection. Those are the nuts and bolts of love and connection.
“Light On in the Kitchen” arrived in the world at a time when connection was being tested. McBryde wrote it with Connie Harrington (“I Drive Your Truck,” “Mine Would Be You”) and Jessi Alexander (“Don’t Think Jesus,” “Never Say Never”) on June 9, 2020. It was three months into the pandemic, 15 days after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and eight days after the Trump administration used chemicals to disperse a crowd of protesters for a controversial photo op in front of a Washington, D.C., church.
“I just remember that being such a dark time,” says Alexander. “It was dark for me, just being stuck at home and feeling like I’m lost. I mean, songwriting is such a part of who I am. It was a weird time, but what a beautiful light’s come out of it.”
They masked up and met in person to write two songs in Midtown Nashville — “It was tumbleweeds down Music Row,” Alexander recalls. Harrington got one of the day’s titles from a story in The Magnolia Journal, a quarterly magazine published by Chip and Joanna Gaines, co-hosts of HGTV’s Fixer Upper. The “light on in the kitchen” line resonated with her own experiences.
“If I have guests that get up in the night, I want them to be able to go to the kitchen because that’s where everything you need is,” she says. “No matter how little your kitchen is, or how many people are there, and how much room might be elsewhere in the home, everybody ends up in the kitchen.”
Alexander threaded a simple chord progression as they began to fashion a series of homey thoughts from the top “left-hand corner of the page,” says McBryde. “I love it when songs happen this way.”
The verses provide details on smart self-care, the first two choruses feature hints at building relationships, and the final chorus changes a few lines to focus on living independently if that right relationship never quite appears. Significant time spent alone, oddly enough, improves the chances of living successfully with someone else.
“Until you really get along with yourself, and reconcile your demons, and learn who you are apart from anybody else, you won’t be at your best and optimal,” Harrington reasons. “Everyone needs to do that, in my opinion.”
After a parade of images and hurdles — pancakes after midnight, runny noses and weight issues, among them — that last chorus encourages listeners to stand up for themselves: “If somethin’ tries to hold you back/Get up and give it hell.” It’s an example of a mentor plotting their own obsolescence.
“As a mom, if you’ve done a good job, they don’t need you anymore,” says Alexander. “That’s the ‘light on in the kitchen’ for me — my daughter and I and my sons actually had this conversation the other night: ‘Always, you can call me. There’s nothing you can say that would keep me from helping you if you needed it.’”
When producer Jay Joyce (Eric Church, Miranda Lambert) heard “Kitchen,” McBryde’s team already had it scoped out as a likely single. Joyce felt pressured to make it radio-friendly, though he fought that tendency. “It’s hard not to think that way,” he says, “particularly if they put that on you.”
They cut “Kitchen” at Joyce’s Neon Cross Studios during February 2022 in East Nashville using McBryde’s band: electric guitarist Matt Helmkamp, mandolinist Chris Harris, bassist Chris Sancho and drummer Quinn Hill. The challenge was to make the supporting arrangement interesting without distracting from the lyrics. McBryde had already finished recording her Lindeville album, and knowing it would be released first, they had freedom to take their time in getting “Kitchen” right.
The mandolin brought a bluegrass element to its folk foundation, while Helmkamp applied a contrasting blues guitar to the proceedings. Those instruments deftly bracketed the song, though McBryde eventually recognized an unintended symbolism. “It’s a big guitar and a little mandolin,” she says. “And it’s a big woman and a smaller girl having a conversation.”
Hill’s percussion part relied mostly — if not entirely — on the snare and kick drum, dialed intentionally into a thinner sound. “I think I’m filtering the top end of the drums,” says Joyce. “They’re very dark and sort of muffled, so they’re not getting in the way of the vocals.”
McBryde recorded the bulk of her vocals live with the band, getting a more cohesive performance out of the entire ensemble. “When somebody’s really singing, then the players play better,” Joyce reasons. “There’s a million questions that are answered naturally in your own mind — how hard to play, when to play, when not to. When somebody like her is really performing, it just makes it easy.”
It was not necessarily easy for McBryde, who wrote “Kitchen” with the longest notes — on the phrases “trust yourself” and “love yourself” — in an uncomfortable section of her voice. “I don’t know where other women’s vocal break is, but the difference between chest voice and head voice is just right there on that damn line,” she says. “It’s so on-brand for me to be like, ‘Here’s the line, I’ll put my toes on it.’”
McBryde topped off the recording with finger-picking on acoustic guitar. She performed it live for the first time on Feb. 24 at TempleLive in Fort Smith, Ark. During the day, she sang it for her mom, though it took three tries before she could get through it. McBryde held it together onstage that night, introducing it to fans a day after Warner Music Nashville released it to country radio via PlayMPE. “Light On in the Kitchen” occupies the No. 41 spot on the Country Airplay chart dated April 1.
As a contemplative ballad, it’s a bit unusual as a first single from a forthcoming album — but it speaks volumes for its long-term possibilities.
“I didn’t see that coming,” McBryde says. “I’m so happy for that to be the life that this song lives — to not only be on the album, but also to be the song [about which] we say, ‘This is the foot that we’re going to stick forward.’”
Garth Brooks will join returning host Dolly Parton as co-host of the 58th annual Academy of Country Music Awards, Billboard has exclusively learned. The May 11 show will stream live on Amazon’s Prime Video from Ford Center at the Star in Frisco, Texas, outside of Dallas.
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Parton hosted the ACM Awards solo in 2000 and with Jimmie Allen and Gabby Barrett last year — its first year on Prime Video — while this will mark Brooks’ first time hosting the show. Billboard sat down with the two icons as they filmed promotional video footage for the awards show at a Nashville production studio and displayed an easy-going banter that should serve them well on awards night.
“All I hope that we do as a pair is represent [country music] well,” Brooks tells Billboard of co-hosting the ACM Awards. “I mean, you’ve got your foundation and what you’re looking for here,” he says, gesturing to Parton seated beside him. “You’ve got talent and class. Let’s represent country music the best that we can.”
“I told him to say all that, and that I’d say something good about him if he would say something good about me,” Parton says with a laugh.
“We are excited about this because we’ve always wanted to do something together,” Parton continues. “We’ve always admired each other musically and as people and how we handle our business. So this is a great thrill for me. I think the fans are going to enjoy seeing us together, ‘cause Lord knows he’s got fans and I got a few.”
Both Brooks and Parton have ample experience in the ACM Awards’ winners circle, with Parton earning 13 ACM Awards wins, including entertainer of the year in 1977. Brooks has earned 22 ACM Awards, including a record-setting six entertainer of the year trophies (with a consecutive four-year run from 1990-93), in addition to being named ACM artist of the decade for the ‘90s.
Though Brooks released his debut album in 1989 and went on to become the best-selling solo artist in U.S. history, with nine RIAA Diamond Awards to his credit and 19 Billboard Country Airplay chart-toppers, the ACM Awards will mark his first time hosting any major awards show. Brooks, who inked an exclusive streaming deal with Amazon Music in 2016, says several factors were at play in his decision to co-host this year’s ACM Awards in addition to that partnership.
Primary among his reasons is “just getting to work with Dolly,” says Brooks, briefly reaching over to hold Parton’s hand. “When you think about my career, I don’t want to pick favorites, but some of our biggest nights have been at the ACMs. The fact that they would even ask is flattering and the fact that I get to host with Ms. Parton is unbelievable. The surprise of the night is you’re gonna see this beautiful woman carry this 260-pound ass all night.”
When it comes to crafting the script that will navigate viewers through the evening, Parton says, “We’re both pretty good at ad-libbing. Garth’s more serious-minded than me. I just talk off the top of my head. But we’ll have a lot of fun together.”
“I like being a goofball too, but the truth is, comedy is the hardest way to make a living,” Brooks adds. “If you think you can just write comedy and it be funny, it usually isn’t. So my thing is, I feel more comfortable if we just stay on the class side and let her do her thing,” Brooks says, adding that he appreciates efficiency in hosts. “I watch awards shows and what do I want? Let me see the performances and don’t take a long time telling me who’s gonna win, because I want to hear what the winners will have to say.”
“That’s a good point,” Parton responds. “And there’s always things that just happen usually on live shows like that. Sometimes your best comedy are things that might even happen with someone in the audience or something is said and you just pick up on it. We’re country people, most of the artists are kind of like people we grew up with, so you play off of that, and it’s usually entertaining. Whether it’s funny or not, it’s usually entertaining.”
They note fans shouldn’t expect a musical collaboration during the ACM Awards, but Parton, who was officially inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last year, will premiere the lead single from her upcoming rock album on the show.
Meanwhile, Brooks’ excitement at finally working with Parton shines through.
“Just sitting here, I’m nervous as hell,” Brooks admits, “and I don’t know why that is because she’s never been anything but sweet to me, never been anything but treated me as an equal, though I’m not. It’s that thing when someone has done something that freaking cool, you just become a fan. If [George] Strait was here, I wouldn’t be holding his hand as much, but…” Brooks jokes, drawing a big laugh from Parton.
“Well, it’s because I’ve been around forever,” Parton interjects.
“What I’m looking forward to the most,” Brooks says, gesturing to Parton, “and forgive me for comparing you to somebody else, but when you get to work with Reba McEntire, you just wear out pencils on a notebook because you take notes, right? A woman in this industry — and I’m married to one of the greatest singers ever — they have to work a thousand times harder to get a tenth as much,” says Brooks, who wed Trisha Yearwood in 2005. “So you watch them go to work, and when it’s your turn, your time, you work like a girl. You outwork everybody you can.”
“Well, that’s very sweet,” Parton replied. “Now I see why you’ve been married to Trisha all these years. And Reba, I’ve co-hosted with her before [on the 2019 CMA Awards], and she is a worker too. I admire and respect all the great women in the business, but it’s nice to have these great guys like the Garths and people that really do appreciate the women as well as the men. We have a mutual respect for each other.”
She also recently announced an upcoming book, Behind the Seams: My Life in Rhinestones, out in October. Asked about their fashion for the ACMs, Parton said, “[Garth] said a funny thing earlier. When they asked what I was going to be wearing — in three words, how would I describe it? — I said, ‘Nothing but trash,’ and when they asked him about it, he said, ‘Nothing but Trish.’ … I thought that was so great that she gets him all together,” Parton said.
Regarding whether fans might see a return Parton-Brooks pairing as ACM Awards co-hosts in 2024, Parton quips, “We’ll see how we do this year, they may not even ask us [back].”
Brooks adds, “I tell you what, yes to everything, except [Parton] might be going, ‘I’m not sure I wanna work with that guy. He’s too much of a fan.’”
“I’m a fan of yours too,” Parton replies. “I think that’s going to be one of the things that hopefully shows up on camera that we like each other for real. I think sometimes you get people onstage and everybody’s a pro and can get up there and talk, but when you really feel the warmth between two people, I think that’s where the magic is, and I think we both have that in us.”
The CMT Music Awards have added a solid shot of female star power.
Gwen Stefani, Alanis Morissette and Shania Twain have been added to the performers lineup for the fan-voted awards show, which airs Sunday on CBS, live from the Moody Center in Austin, Texas, beginning at 8 p.m. ET. The show will also be available to stream live and on-demand via Paramount+. This marks the first time that the CMT Music Awards have been held in Austin, after being held in Nashville for decades.
Stefani will make her CMT Music Awards debut via a collaboration with Carly Pearce. Morissette will make her CMT Music Awards debut by helping to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the CMT Next Women of Country franchise, by performing her 1995 hit “You Oughta Know” alongside former CMT Next Women of Country honorees Morgan Wade (Class of 2022), Ingrid Andress (2019), Madeline Edwards (2022) and Lainey Wilson (2019).
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Twain will perform and will also be honored with the third CMT Equal Play Award, which recognizes an artist’s work as an advocate for diversity and a champion for underrepresented voices within country music. Previous recipients of the award are Jennifer Nettles and Linda Martell.
Twain, Stefani and Morissette join previously announced performers Darius Rucker with The Black Crowes, as well as Wynonna Judd with Ashley McBryde. Other previously announced performers include Carrie Underwood, Cody Johnson, Blake Shelton, Keith Urban and show co-hosts Kelsea Ballerini and Kane Brown.
Leading this year’s CMT Music Awards nominees is Wilson with four nominations, including video of the year (for “Wait in the Truck” with HARDY), female video of the year (“Heart Like a Truck”), collaborative video of the year (“Wait in the Truck” with HARDY) and CMT performance of the year (for “Never Say Never” with Cole Swindell, from the 2022 CMT Music Awards). Johnson, Brown and first-time nominee Jelly Roll follow with three nominations each.
Country music group Old Dominion was forced to postpone three shows on its No Bad Vibes Tour, after lead singer Matthew Ramsey was injured in an ATV riding accident, Ramsey revealed on social media. The group’s trio of shows slated for Coffee Butler Amphitheater in Key West, Fla., this weekend have been postponed to March 22-24, 2024.
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“Well friends – I’m afraid I have some disappointing news,” Ramsey said in a statement posted via Twitter. “I was in an ATV accident that has left my pelvis fractured in three places. The good news is it’s gonna heal just fine. The bad news is I’m gonna have to stay home and recover for a little while. I know we all had plans to sing and dance together in Key West. I was looking forward to that so much! We will make it up to you!”
He added, “I promise we’ll keep up updated on my recovery and any other shows that might be affected. This tour has been such a blast so far this year and before you know it, I’ll be back out there with No Bad Vibes! Love you all. – m”
Old Dominion’s “Memory Lane” is currently at No. 21 on Billboard‘s Country Airplay chart. According to the band’s official website, the group’s next tour dates begin with an East Coast run in April, starting with a show in Redding, Penn., on April 13, followed by shows Albany, N.Y. (April 14), and Bangor, Maine (April 15).
Attendees holding tickets for the three Key West dates will have their tickets honored for the new dates. For any fans unable to attend the new show dates in 2024, full refunds will be available at the point of purchase for the next 30 days.
See Ramsey’s full statement below:
Jana Kramer took to social media on Monday (March 27) to update fans on her kids amid the mass shooting at Nashville’s Covenant School.
The One Tree Hill alum, who lives in Music City, assured fans the tragedy didn’t take place at the school her kids — seven-year-old Jolie and four-year-old Jace — attend. “It wasn’t their school,” she wrote in an Instagram Story. “I know someone that works there though and we have friends that have kids there… It all just feels too close to home. I just don’t understand. We need prayers and then action.”
“We shouldn’t have to fear dropping our kids [off] at school and fearing them not coming home,” she continued. “Just want to squeeze them asap. first flight out tomorrow am now.”
Kramer reiterated her concern for her kids while attending the 2023 iHeartRadio Music Awards at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles. “People are like, ‘Who are you wearing?’ I’m like, ‘I don’t care. I want to go hug my kids right now,” she said on the red carpet. “Their dad picked them up at school, and they’re good.”
Tragically, three students and three staff members were killed by a shooter at the school — which is located on the grounds of Covenant Presbyterian Church in the Nashville neighborhood of Green Hills — armed with two AR-style guns and a pistol. Among the murdered were three nine-year-old third graders, a 61-year-old substitute teacher, the school’s janitor and the head administrator of the school.
Read Kramer’s Instagram Story here before it expires.
Morgan Wallen scores a 10th week at No. 1 on the Billboard Artist 100 chart (dated April 1), holding as the top musical act in the United States thanks to the continued success of his new LP, One Thing at a Time.
The 36-track album tallies a third week at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, with 209,000 equivalent album units earned in the March 17-23 tracking week, according to Luminate, after opening with 501,000 units, the largest weekly sum for an album this year. The set became Wallen’s second No. 1, following 2021’s 30-track Dangerous: The Double Album. The latter places at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 (42,000 units).
Contributing to Wallen’s Artist 100 rule are 18 songs on the Billboard Hot 100. Two weeks earlier, he set a one-week record, with 36 songs on the chart, and then claimed the second-most weekly entries last week, with 28, with all from from One Thing at a Time. “Last Night” leads his 18 titles on the latest Hot 100 at No. 2, after becoming his first No. 1 two weeks ago.
Wallen is the 11th artist to reach the 10-week milestone on the Artist 100, dating to the chart’s 2014 inception. Taylor Swift leads with 64 weeks at No. 1, followed by Drake (37), The Weeknd (28), BTS (21), Adele (20), Ariana Grande (15), Justin Bieber, Post Malone and Ed Sheeran (14 each), Billie Eilish (12) and Wallen (10).
U2 re-enters the Artist 100 at No. 5, thanks to its new 40-track LP Songs of Surrender, which starts at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 (46,000 units). It’s the band’s 13th top 10 and makes the Rock & Roll Hall of Famers just the fourth group with new top 10s in the 1980s, ’90s, 2000s, ’10s and ’20s, after AC/DC, Def Leppard and Metallica. U2 topped the Artist 100 for a week in 2017.
Plus, BTS member Jimin debuts at No. 10 on the Artist 100 thanks to his new solo single “Set Me Free, Pt. 2.” The song debuts at No. 30 on the Hot 100 with 6.4 million official U.S. streams and 63,000 downloads sold, as he becomes the first BTS member to score an unaccompanied solo top 40 hit on the Hot 100. He’s the third member of BTS (which re-enters at No. 100) to reach the Artist 100’s top 10, joining RM (No. 6 peak in December) and Jin (No. 10, November).
The Artist 100 measures artist activity across key metrics of music consumption, blending album and track sales, radio airplay and streaming to provide a weekly multidimensional ranking of artist popularity.
Lauren Daigle postponed a planned concert to preview songs from her upcoming third studio album on Monday night (March 27) in order to host a prayer vigil for the victims of a mass shooting at Nashville’s The Covenant School.
“Today’s shooting is truly heartbreaking for our Nashville community and all of those impacted,” the Christian pop singer said in a statement. “I’m going to postpone my performance tonight, and in its place, host a community-wide Prayer Vigil. To everyone who was planning to come out, please continue to come join us as we share in a time of prayer and worship to honor the victims and everyone in need.”
Daigle was slated to preview her upcoming self-titled album (May 12) at the Marathon Music Works on Monday night; the show is now scheduled for April 5. Instead, the venue hosted a free-to-all community-wide prayer vigil to honor the three nine-year-old children and three school staff members who were killed during Monday’s mass shooting in which the shooter — armed with two semi-automatic long guns, a pistol and tactical gear — was killed by police 14 minutes after the rampage began at the private Christian school in Nashville.
A number of Nashville musicians spoke out in grief and anger after the nation’s 132nd mass shooting so far this year. Singer-songwriter-musician Charlie Worsham wrote via his Instagram Stories, “It seems impossible to find fitting words to say about the shooting in Nashville today. I’m heartbroken and enraged that we can’t seem to provide the simplest, most common-sense safeguards for our own children. If this was something other than a gun problem, it’d be happening all over the world. But it only seems to happen here.”
Kelsea Ballerini, who has previously spoken with Billboard about her own experience surviving a school shooting when she was a high school sophomore, shared via Instagram Stories, “i’m heartbroken i’m triggered i’m angry and i’m terrified for the loss we continue to have in this country due to guns. three f**king kids. what are we doing.”
In a stark post last Monday night, Justin Timberlake tweeted out a list of the victims, which included three fourth grade children and three adults in their 60s.
See Daigle’s statement and Timberlake’s post below.