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Rosalía offers an exasperated laugh as she sits down, having tried on a variety of equally stunning outfits only to end up in the casual clothes she arrived in: black pants and a camo jacket lined with fur. It’s the same jacket she was spotted wearing at a Parisian cafe in early October, seated alone with a cup of tea while poring over the sheet music of a song from the 1900 Puccini opera Tosca.
The Barcelona-born singer’s candid moment with the canonical tragedy was significant — one of many subtle nods that she was pursuing something outside the typical parameters of modern mainstream music. Rosalía studied musicology in college, and over the last eight years has often meshed a wide variety of genres and influences in her songs. But for someone who rose to global fame on the cutting edge of culture, studying the musical notation of a century-old opera communicated a pointed message.
Weeks later, fans began to understand why. On the evening of Oct. 20, she took to Madrid’s Callao Square with giant projector screens, where a countdown unveiled the release date for her fourth album, Lux (Nov. 7 on Columbia Records), as well as its cover art, which features Rosalía dressed in all white, wearing a nun’s habit and hugging herself under her clothing.
Every move Rosalía has made over the past three years while crafting Lux has been considered, intentional and entirely in her own world. Having risen to fame with the flamenco-inspired pop of her Columbia debut, 2018’s El Mal Querer, she flipped the script with her eclectic, energetic 2022 album, Motomami, which spanned pop, reggaetón, hip-hop, electronic and more and became her first album to chart on the Billboard 200, peaking at No. 33. But Lux is something different: an orchestral, operatic opus recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra that blends history and spirituality and experiments with form, language (she sings in 13 different ones throughout the album’s 18 tracks) and the very idea of what is possible for a major recording artist in 2025, for a project that’s more Puccini than pop — not that it doesn’t have its moments of catchy relatability.
“It’s like an album she wrote to God — whatever each person feels God is to them,” says Afo Verde, chairman/CEO of Sony Latin Iberia, which works with Rosalía alongside Columbia. “This is an artist who said, ‘I want to walk down a path where few walk.’ And when you navigate inside the album, you completely understand the genius behind it.”
Araks bra, Claire Sullivan skirt, Louis Verdad hat.
Alex G. Harper
Rosalía spent the better part of three years crafting Lux’s lyrics and instrumentation, drawing from classical music, native speakers and instrumentation, and the giants of the past — women including Saint Rosalia of Palermo; the Chinese Taoist master/poet Sun Bu’er; the biblical figure of Miriam, sister of Moses; and even Patti Smith all figure into its cosmology — to create something that feels both worldly and otherworldly, a distinct take on navigating life’s chaos. It was also a period where she experienced personal and professional changes: She broke off her engagement to Puerto Rican reggaetón star Rauw Alejandro, switched management and landed her first big acting role in the forthcoming third season of hit HBO series Euphoria, all while immersed in making the album.
“In general, just to be in this world is a lot; sometimes it’s overwhelming,” she says on a fall day in Los Angeles. “In the best-case scenario, the idea would be that whoever hears it feels light and feels hope. Because that was how it was made and where it was made from.”
“This record takes you on a complete journey; the singing on it is just astounding,” says Jonathan Dickins, who runs September Management, home to Adele, and who began representing Rosalía in June. “I think she’s a generational artist. I’m lucky enough to have worked with one, and now I’m lucky enough to work with another. She is an original.”
To make Lux, Rosalía relied on several of her longtime collaborators — producers Noah Goldstein and Dylan Wiggins and engineer David Rodriguez among them — and tasked them with taking a new approach. “The whole process helped me grow as a musician, as a producer, as a sound engineer,” says Goldstein, who has also worked with Frank Ocean, Jay-Z and FKA twigs. “That’s one of my favorite things about working with Rosalía: I’m always learning things from her.”
She also tapped new collaborators such as OneRepublic singer and decorated songwriter Ryan Tedder (who spent three years DM’ing Rosalía, hoping to eventually work together) and urged them to push their boundaries. “For an artist to give me the freedom to just express myself in that way, God, that is the most fun I’ve ever had,” says Tedder, who has worked on mammoth albums by Adele, Beyoncé and more throughout his career. “I’ve been asked by everybody, ‘What does the new Rosalía stuff sound like?’ And I literally say to everybody, ‘Nothing that you possibly would imagine.’ ”
Alex G. Harper
Fans got their first taste of Lux when Rosalía dropped the single “Berghain,” which features Björk and Yves Tumor, in late October. The song kicks off with a string orchestra introduction followed by a Carmina Burana-like chorus and then Rosalía singing in an operatic soprano voice — in three languages.
For Rosalía, challenging preconceptions about the type of music she, or anyone, can make is part of the point — thinking outside the box, following her inspiration and constantly learning, finding and creating from a place of curiosity and openness to new experiences and ideas. “I think that in order to fully enjoy music, you have to have a tolerant, open way of understanding it,” she says. “Because music is the ‘4’33” ’ of John Cage, as much as the birds in the trees for the Kaluli of New Guinea, as much as the fugues of Bach, as much as the songs of Chencho Corleone. All of it is music. And if you understand that, then you can enjoy in a much fuller, profound way, what music is.”
When did you start working on this album?
I don’t think that it’s easy to measure when something like this happens or starts. The album is heavily inspired by the world of mysticism and spirituality. Since I was a kid, I’ve always had a very personal relationship with spirituality. That’s the seed of this project, and I don’t remember when that started.
How did you approach Lux differently?
This album has a completely different sound than any of the projects that I’ve done before. It was a challenge for me to do a more orchestral project and learn how to use an orchestra, understand all the instruments, all the possibilities, and learn and study from amazing composers in history and say, “OK, that’s what’s been done. What can I do that feels personal and honest for me?” And also the challenge of having that inspiration in classical music and trying to do something that I haven’t done before, trying to write songs from another place. Because the instrumentation is different from all the other projects I have done. But also the writing, the structures, it’s very different.
Chloé dress, shoes, and scarf.
Alex G. Harper
After Motomami, your success and fame hit a new level. How did that help you make this album?
All the albums I’ve done helped me be able to be the musician I am today and make this album now. Lux wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t taken the previous steps. Each album helped me release something, to free myself as much as possible. Every time I go to the studio, it’s from wanting to play around, try something different, to find different styles of making songs. I always try to stay open.
You’ve said Motomami was inspired by the energy of L.A., New York, Miami. What was your mission in making Lux?
It’s made from love and curiosity. I’ve always wanted to understand other languages, learn other music, learn from others about what I don’t know. It comes from curiosity, from wanting to understand others better, and through that I can understand who I am better. I love explaining stories. I like to be the narrator. I think as much as I love music itself, music is just a medium to explain stories, to put ideas on the table. So that’s what this project is for me. I’m just a channel to explain stories, and there’s inspiration in different saints from all across the world. So you could say it feels like a global thing, but at the same time, it’s so personal for me. Those stories are exceptional. They are remarkable stories about women who lived their lives in a very unconventional way, of women who were writers in very special ways. And so I’m like, “Let’s throw some light there.”
What I know is that I am ready, and this is what I needed to do. What I know is that this is what I was supposed to write about. This is my truth. This is where I am now.
What contributes to the fact that the album feels so global is you sing in 13 languages on it.
It took a lot of writing and scratching it and sending it to someone who would help me translate and be like, “This is how you would say this in Japanese. This is how it sounds.” There were so many things that I had to play with and take under consideration. Because it’s not just writing. It’s not just on paper. It has to sound good. There’s a big difference for me when I write, for example, a letter for somebody that I love than if I write a song. It has to have a certain sound, a certain intention of musicality.
It was a big challenge, but it was worth it. It made me grow so much. And I feel like every word on this album, I fought for it, I really wanted it, and then I waited for it, and then it came. It took me a year to write just the lyrics for this album, and then another year of arranging music and going back to the lyrics and retouching. It took a lot of effort searching for the right words: “How is this not just going to be heard, but also, if you read it, how does it feel?”
Rosalía photographed September 24, 2025 at Quixote Studios in Los Angeles. Colleen Allen top and skirt.
Alex G. Harper
The lyrics read like a novel.
There’s a whole intentional structure throughout the album. I was clear that I wanted four movements. I wanted one where it would be more a departure from purity. The second movement, I wanted it to feel more like being in gravity, being friends with the world. The third would be more about grace and hopefully being friends with God. And at the end, the farewell, the return. All of that helped me be very strategic and concise and precise about what songs would go where, how I wanted it to start, how I wanted the journey to go, what lyrics would make sense.
Each story, each song is inspired by the story of a saint. I read a lot of hagiographies — the lives of the saints — and it helped me expand my understanding of sainthood. Because my background is Catholic from my family, so you understand it through this one [lens]. But then you realize that in other cultures and other religious contexts, it’s another thing. But what surprised me a lot was that there’s a main theme, which is not fearing, which you can find shared across many religions. And I think that’s so powerful because probably the fears that I have, somebody on the other side of the world has the same ones. And for me, there’s beauty in that, in understanding that we might think that we’re different, but we’re not.
All of these songs are very personal, but “Focu ’ranni” feels especially so. What was the experience of writing that one?
I found out that there’s this saying by Santa Rosalia de Palermo — she was supposed to get married and then she decided not to; she decided to dedicate her life to God. I thought that something in that was very powerful. I researched her story, and that’s why there’s some Sicilian thrown in that song. It was a challenge to sing in that language. That was a challenging song to do and to sing, but I feel grateful that it exists.
You create a world, and a sisterhood almost, on this album. How does a more playful song like “Novia Robot” fit in?
There was this woman who was very inspiring named Sun Bu’er; she dedicated her life to becoming a teacher of the Tao. And the way she lived her life was unconventional at that time. I thought there was something powerful about her story. Apparently, in order to make a journey, she destroyed her face to be able to travel safely. And she had a partner, she had a family, but she decided she wanted to dedicate her life to spirituality. It was so bold and courageous. And at the end of that song, you hear another voice, which is in [Hebrew], that’s inspired by Miriam, this figure who led an entire people and was a rebellious woman and considered close to the idea of sainthood in Judaism. So I thought that it was cool to have those two voices, the same way how in opera there are so many voices co-existing. So I thought in that song that could happen with that playfulness, yes, and playing with the sound of how Chinese Mandarin would sound.
The album is so operatic and orchestral. How did you begin to immerse yourself in those styles and find the people that you worked with to deliver that?
They’re the people I feel comfortable with, so I love sharing time with them in the studio. For example, I worked on [Lux song] “Mio Cristo” for months by myself in Miami and L.A., and I delayed the moment when I would share it. I wanted to make a song that was like my version of what an aria could be. So I remember just going to the studio after so much work, after so much back and forth with an Italian translator, and I [had been] improvising on the piano, trying to find melodies, to find the right chords and notes. I went to the studio and I shared it with Dylan [Wiggins], with Noah [Goldstein], with David [Rodriguez], and I remember they were like, “Yes. That’s the song. There it is.” So it’s been a lot of isolation on one side — a lot of writing — and then on the other side a lot of collective effort in the studio.
It’s such a vivid album. How are you plotting out how it will look visually?
My sister and I work together a lot. I’m very lucky that I get to just keep playing around and having fun like how we used to when we were kids. Her and I love recommending things to each other, we send books to each other. Having a project together is something I feel so grateful about, the fact that my family is involved — my mother, my sister, they’re very important people in my life, and I feel like I can share everything with them. And on the visual side, it was just playing around with references and imagination, just trying to think, “What can we do with this?” Just playfulness. That’s how I think the best things happen — out of joy.
Have you given any thought yet to what a live performance of this album would look like?
Thoughts are never lacking, but we’ll see. I don’t want to think too much how that would look until that really is happening, if that makes sense. But there’s definitely a lot of creativity with how this could be translated to the stage.
Alex G. Harper
At the same time you were working on this, you were filming the third season of Euphoria, your first major acting role. Was that difficult?
It was very challenging to do both. I was recording the album and producing and checking mixes, everything, while I was shooting Euphoria. I had to divide my mind between both and it was also the first time that I was doing something like this — preparing a character, studying lines. These are new things for me and I’m not used to it. It’s very different from making an album and making music. For some reason, I didn’t completely go crazy, and we’re still here.
Did any of that experience seep into the album?
[Euphoria creator] Sam [Levinson] and I are both very sensitive people. For some reason, whatever he’s creating for me resonates for this moment. When we were shooting, when we spoke about the [show’s] story, I didn’t know him that well. I really admired his work, but I didn’t know how his mind worked, how he is as an artist. I realized he has so much sensibility and I connected so much with that, not just with his work, but also him as a person.
How did that role come about?
I shared that I really wanted to start acting, that it was something that I would love to do. The only thing I had done was [the Pedro] Almodóvar [film Pain and Glory in 2019], and when I was 16 I studied theater for a year. I feel like being a musician and being onstage is being a performer, but I had never experienced it as being filmed, learning lines; it’s a very different job. I had done it with Almodóvar, but I was like, “I would love to do it with somebody like Sam, somebody that has a vision as strong as him. Or someone like Sofia Coppola.” So then I heard the third season was happening and I was like, “I would love to audition.”
You had to audition?
Of course! Because I’m not an actress, and that was really scary. But at the same time, something told me that I was supposed to do it. So I did an audition tape, then met an audition person and then something else, and then it happened.
Rosalía photographed September 24, 2025 at Quixote Studios in Los Angeles. Araks bra, Claire Sullivan skirt, Louis Verdad hat.
Alex G. Harper
At the end of your album, you address the concept of death. Are there things in your life that you worry about not having enough time to do?
No. Whenever God decides it’s time to go, it’s time to go. Whatever I have come here to do, I feel like I’m doing; whenever I have to leave, I will leave. That’s how I try to live. I would love to know how it feels to be 100 years old, but that’s not on me to decide. But I would love to keep writing, I would love to keep making music, I would love to keep learning how to cook better, I would love to keep studying — one day I would love to go to college again and study philosophy or theology — and I would love to keep traveling. There are so many times that I travel and feel like I haven’t seen enough or haven’t had enough time to just experience places.
But for now, I’m dedicating myself to my mission, which is making albums and performing. And for me, performing is an act for others. I don’t like touring. I like to be onstage and I love my fans, so I do it. But I love being in my home, calm, reading, cooking, going to the gym, lifting weights and going to sleep. Literally, that makes me so happy; I don’t need a lot. (Laughs.) When you travel, it’s much harder; psychologically it’s a challenge, always. But I also know that there are other jobs that have so much complexity and challenges, and I feel so grateful that I can be a musician.
What’s the biggest challenge that you feel like comes with this career?
The price you pay, the sacrifice, the amount of moments that you lose with your family, with your loved ones. My grandpa died when I was at the Latin Grammys in 2019, and I was about to perform when I found out. I couldn’t even be at the burial. Those things, I’ll have to live with the sadness and the regret of not being there. Those are things that are not the good side of being a musician: always struggling, always being committed to whatever you’re doing, to the people who are there in the audience that night who paid for their ticket to see your performance. Maybe that’s the thing they’re looking forward to the most that week. The price is really high, but this is what I chose, and I’m fully conscious that this is the decision I’ve made.
In releasing this album, what would success look like for you?
Success, for me, is freedom. And I felt all the freedom that I could imagine or hope for throughout this process. That’s all I wanted. I wanted to be able to pour what was inside, outside. And those inspirations, those ideas, make them into songs. I was able to do that, and I will not ask for more.
This story will appear in the Nov. 15, 2025, issue of Billboard.
Trending on Billboard Rosalía offers an exasperated laugh as she sits down, having tried on a variety of equally stunning outfits only to end up in the casual clothes she arrived in: black pants and a camo jacket lined with fur. It’s the same jacket she was spotted wearing at a Parisian cafe in early […]
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On a late-spring night, Downtown Miami was a place out of time. Thousands of people gathered dressed to the nines, the women rocking sequined gowns and kitten heels, the men wearing tailored suits and polished dress shoes. Their attire fused Puerto Rican culture and Mafia fantasy and seemed beamed in from decades ago — but the crowd entering Miami’s Kaseya Center on this warm evening wasn’t there for an act of yesteryear, but rather one of the hottest arena artists on the planet.
“It was a whole vibe,” Rauw Alejandro says over Zoom months later, now off the road and back home in Puerto Rico. “It felt like we went back to the past and you can feel that energy. It’s not mandatory, but if you dress up, you’ll have more fun because you’re immersed in the story. You’re literally traveling to that time and age.”
Like many arena and stadium stars today, the 32-year-old reggaetón star encouraged audiences to follow a special dress code for his show. His Cosa Nuestra tour this year channeled the elegance and glamour of a certain 1970s New York, along with the Cosa Nostra that ruled it. For the shows, he constructed an alter ego: Don Raúl, a suave Nuyorican hipster living in the Big Apple.
“I lived in New Jersey at an uncle’s house after Hurricane Maria [in 2017],” says the artist born Raúl Alejandro Ocasio Ruiz, who considers New York his second home and whose father was born in Brooklyn. “I went there to work for a year and took the train to the city to continue to do my music. I’m in Puerto Rico most of the time, but for work, my base is New York. So I moved back there three years ago when I was looking for inspiration for this new chapter. I was immersed in the culture… all the Broadway shows, jazz clubs, speakeasies, and I worked with that aesthetic for my new project.”
Rauw Alejandro will appear in conversation during Billboard‘s Live Music Summit, held Nov. 3 in Los Angeles. For tickets and more information, click here.
With Cosa Nuestra, Rauw created a world for his fans to soak themselves in — one far from a typical reggaetón concert. The Broadway-inspired, four-act show featured sophisticated costumes, a six-piece live band and eight dancer-actors, all part of a storyline driven by Rauw’s biggest hits.
The show follows Rauw’s Don Raúl as the young immigrant tries to make it in the big city — and along the way falls in love, experiences betrayal and even gets arrested. “What makes my tour unique is the smoothness of the storytelling and how it connects with my songs from the beginning to the end,” Rauw says. “I think I’m setting the bar very high.”
The ambitious concept has yielded returns that would please Don Raúl. Across spring and summer legs in North America and Europe, respectively, the Live Nation-produced tour grossed $91.7 million and sold 562,000 tickets, according to Billboard Boxscore, making Rauw’s fifth tour the most lucrative of his career. He just returned to the road for dates in South America and Mexico and will wrap the tour with a five-date residency at San Juan’s Coliseo de Puerto Rico José Miguel Agrelot — his second multidate run at the venue this year — in November.
With its achievements, the trek, in support of Rauw’s fifth studio album, 2024’s Cosa Nuestra, has mirrored his chart success. The album and tour take their name and inspiration from another Cosa Nuestra, the genre-defining 1969 salsa album by Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe, two influential salsa figures who revolutionized the golden era of big-band artistry and popularized the genre in the ’60s and ’70s with the culture-shifting Fania label. For the set, Rauw fused his signature perreo, electro-funk and R&B with bomba, salsa and bachata for a sound entirely his own.
Alejandro backstage at Kaseya Center on May 30 in Miami.
Marco Perretta
Audiences responded: Upon its November release, Cosa Nuestra debuted at No. 1 on Top Latin Albums and Top Latin Rhythm Albums and at No. 6 on the Billboard 200, marking his highest-charting set, and first top 10, among five career entries. In late September, Rauw unleashed another album, the “prequel” Cosa Nuestra: Capítulo 0, which debuted at No. 3 on both Top Latin Albums and Top Latin Rhythm Albums.
“The meaning of Cosa Nuestra is so big that I have to release 20 albums to explain its concept. There’s no time to do that in just one album,” Rauw says with a laugh. “I’m going to continue to bring my roots to the world. Nowadays, I feel so connected with my people and am very proud of where I come from. I don’t have to look outside when I have everything here.” This is how Rauw’s globe-trotting tour came together.
‘I Want To Work With the Best Teams in the Industry’
Rauw’s 2023 Saturno tour grossed $50.2 million but had its entire Latin American leg canceled due to technical and logistical problems. Duars Entertainment, the company led by Rauw’s then-manager, Eric Duars, produced the tour through its Duars Live division, and afterward, Rauw and Duars parted ways. Rauw’s new team, led by the trifecta of co-manager Jorge “Pepo” Ferradas (who has managed Latin stars including Shakira) and longtime Rauw associates Matías Solaris and José “Che” Juan Torres, is now helping him streamline his operation.
Rauw Alejandro: For me, it was very frustrating not completing the Saturno tour. I’m not going to lie: There were months that I would cry in my shower, in my bed, f–king frustrated because I put so much effort in what I do. I took my time. I trained a lot. There were many things that were out of my control. My old team was a mess and disorganized. I consider myself one of the best artists right now, so I want to work with the best teams in the industry.
Jorge “Pepo” Ferradas, co-manager: I received a call from one of Rauw’s lawyers and [his] business adviser, “Che” Juan, and he told me that Rauw was creating a company where he would, in a sense, be the director. I met Matías [Solaris], Rauw’s personal manager, and we created this trilogy management format. We are three different people who have been able to tackle all areas of the business, slightly breaking the norm of having a single manager.
Rauw: After having the same management for seven, eight years, for me, it was a huge change in dynamic in my work and it was challenging. I was kind of scared because there were things I didn’t know how to do. But now, it feels nice to have a team who believes in you and in your project. They’re not afraid to lose anything; they just want an artist that can create and bring new things to the table.
Alejandro (left) with his stage manager Orlando backstage at Kaseya Center.
Marco Perretta
Alejandro (center) with family and friends backstage at Kaseya Center. From left: friend Francis Diaz, uncle Rodny, mom Maria Nelly, and assistant Jose Rosa.
Marco Perretta
Ferradas: Rauw was determined to grow in every area. He knew he was facing the challenge of making perhaps the most important album of his career to date, and we understood that to present it live, we had to put on the best possible production that would reflect the artist’s growth. We had to find strategic partners, in this case Live Nation and UTA [where Rauw signed in 2024], who knew how to think, dream and execute on a grand scale.
Rauw: You either get stuck or you evolve. Now I’m doing the music that I want with the people that I want and I feel really happy. This has been the best year of my career.
‘He Wanted Them To Be Classy With Suits and Ties’
When Rauw headlined New York’s Governors Ball festival in 2024, he introduced his new alter ego by wearing a pinstripe suit reminiscent of a ’70s Nuyorican hipster. But Don Raúl had been in the works well before that — and Rauw would have to wait a little longer to bring him to the masses.
Ferradas: Planning and timing are key to making things happen. Often, the public doesn’t see or isn’t aware of how much time a project like this takes.
Felix “Fefe” Burgos, choreographer: Rauw and I always have conversations, and when he first proposed this entire [Cosa Nuestra] concept to me, I thought, “Oh, damn!” He’ll be working on an album, and we’ll start talking about the next one. As we’re working on one tour, we’re already working on another one. We knew from a long, long, long time ago that he was going to release an album that was going to be very band-incorporated. When he was doing [2022 album] Saturno, he was already talking about Cosa Nuestra.
Adrian Martinez, creator and show director/co-founder of creative agency STURDY: A year before the [Cosa Nuestra] tour started, Q1 of 2024, I went to New York to meet with Rauw and start talking about what Cosa Nuestra was going to be. He played me [lead single] “Touching the Sky” for the first time and told me that was going to be the vibe. We walked around the city that same night for about two hours, went to different parts, took photos of buildings and talked about architecture. We went to eat, went to a bar and talked about what we wanted to do. These were all super-early ideas, but we had a year to develop [them]. It gave us an ample amount of time to really home in on the details.
Rauw: It was difficult to create this tour. I like to wait for people to listen to the album and see how they respond before I create the show rundown — which songs am I going to take out of my old catalog? Which are the new songs I’m going to add? It’s a whole lot of thinking to make it smooth and nice, and that takes time. It all started after my performance at Gov Ball in June.
Alejandro performs at Viejas Arena on April 30 in San Diego.
Marco Perretta
José “Sapo” González, musical director: Right before Saturno came out, Rauw was already saying he eventually was going to need a full band but that he wanted them to be classy with suits and ties. This all became reality for his performance on the Today show in [2024] and he never looked back.
Ferradas: Last year, the strategy was to do festivals and TV specials, always knowing that the tour would be scheduled for 2025. He [played] several [festivals], including Sueños in Chicago, Global Citizen in New York and [played] the MTV Video Music Awards for the first time.
Mike G, partner/agent, UTA: His team invited us to a one-week camp to share ideas and strategies, so they really let us form part of his overall business, which I think gave us an advantage as agents. The more we know about a project, we can plan a lot better.
Rauw: As an artist, what helps me a lot is to plan my work two to three years ahead. I don’t like to repeat myself in projects. I like to do different music, and having a map and being organized helps me go through it. I get a lot of inspiration and I’m always taking notes. Yes, I’m in this chapter right now, but I’m already planning my next one. I think that helps me [remain] innovative and versatile in this industry.
‘It’s a Broadway Show in an Arena’
Rauw knew he wanted a special live treatment for the world he had created on Cosa Nuestra. But translating the album to the stage — and with the elaborate, Broadway-caliber production he wanted — was tough.
Martinez: We knew it was going to be all New York. It was inevitable. Immediately, we thought of the things that were important to New York and how these stories were told. Personally, I thought of West Side Story. How do we take inspiration from that to give an ode to what’s come before? Rauw and I even went to see The Great Gatsby together [on Broadway]. Then we sat together for two straight days to write the script and [develop] what the narrative was going to be. We had a blank page up on his TV, and we went through all the acts.
Mike G: His tour is a movie, very cinematic. I think he set the bar very high. It’s about cultural ownership, authenticity, about pride. The production feels very personal. You follow the storyline, you get invested in it, and that’s hard to do during a concert. He’s telling a story while playing some of his best records.
Rauw: Cosa Nuestra is not a stadium show. It’s a Broadway show in an arena. I would even say it’s the biggest Broadway show. In a stadium, you [wouldn’t] be able to see all the details because it’s too big. We planned this show for arenas.
Alejandro performs at Toyota Center on April 17 in Denver.
Marco Perretta
Alejandro performs at United Center on May 9 in Chicago.
Marco Perretta
Burgos: The part I felt was challenging was, “How do we make a concert into a Broadway play?” Because at the end of the day, this isn’t a Broadway play. This is a concert, but you want it to feel like a show.
Martinez: There were so many props, production elements that all had to work together so closely. We were down to milliseconds on transitions. The Saturno [tour] was also time-coded but [had] less going on and more just [relied] on him singing, dancing and interacting with the crowd. There weren’t really any theatrics [on that tour] compared to what we did in Cosa Nuestra.
Burgos: Everything in that show is choreographed. We needed the cues to be perfect because there was very little room for freedom in certain aspects. When we did the choreography for [the tours supporting 2020’s] Afrodisiaco and [2021’s] Vice Versa, yeah, you can floor-hump because that was the vibe, but for Cosa Nuestra, he wanted it to be classy. We wanted the choreography to be sensual but not vulgar.
Rauw: Throughout my entire career, I’ve been focusing on being one of the best performers in the world, and I focused a lot on dancing, but having a live band was my dream. It allowed me to explore different sounds while feeling more classic, more clean, more elegant.
González: The band unifies all of his catalog into this new universe. The best example is what we did with [Saturno’s] “No Me Sueltes,” which now passes through a bunch of musical genres and fits right into Cosa Nuestra. The band also adds versatility and energy and a vibe. It’s not a background band — everything is about enhancing Rauw and making that connection with the fans stronger.
Martinez: We were all feeling like we were taking a huge risk. This was never done in the genre. How were people going to react to the pace? When you break down the show, it’s so different from your typical concert. We said, “As long as we’re all on the same page about this, it could be great, or not” — but we believed in it.
Alejandro performs at Toyota Center on May 6 in Houston.
Marco Perretta
Alejandro performs at The O2 Arena on June 17 in London.
Marco Perretta
Sean Coutt, merchandise creative director/founder of fashion label Pas Une Marque: Cosa Nuestra is almost a personal story of Rauw and his upbringing in New York, so creatively, [the merchandise] had to tie in. Rauw approved every single design himself. That really shows that he’s very dedicated to his fans and that he cares about what we’re putting out. He really wants that to be an opportunity for fans to see that he’s not only creatively onstage but also 360.
Rauw: I make the final decisions on everything related to the tour: the music, the stage, the band, the dancers, the lighting, the props. I’m very involved with all the teams. I have a huge team who are the best, but I’m very picky and need to see everyone’s work.
Ferradas: Rauw represents this generation of artists who are superinformed, involved and very clear about what they want. He always fought to achieve what he wanted, and he corrected us every step of the way so things would come out as he envisioned it. It came naturally. He’s very involved in the artistic side of things.
‘He’s a Cultural Icon’
With a new team in tow that’s helping him reach an even larger global audience, Rauw is gearing up for his next career move — and a much-needed vacation.
Ferradas: We knew we wanted to start in the United States; it was key to be able to showcase the show there and hold 30 concerts, including [four dates in] Puerto Rico. We knew we had to go to Europe in the summer and continue in Latin America, where the most loyal fans are, and then come back and finish in Puerto Rico.
Mike G: In London he played at the O2 Arena for the first time, and Germany is always a unique market, but he did extremely well. We were never worried about any market. We were very confident, even about the ones he had never visited before. I know there’s going to be growth and opportunity moving forward in Asia. He held a festival there last year, so I think that’s going to be another great market for him.
Rauw: I would love to conquer Asia with my music; it’s one of my goals. I’ve been to Japan many times and performed there for the first time last year. It’s totally different performing for them. Japanese people are really organized. It’s not like us Latinos that are loud and crazy. Setting a new goal is what always keeps me going and gives me energy to continue working and craft my art.
Alejandro backstage on the opening night of the Cosa Nuestra tour at Climate Pledge Arena on April 5 in Seattle.
Marco Perretta
Hans Schafer, senior vp of global touring, Live Nation: When you talk about global benchmarks, Rauw’s position competes on the same level as top global pop acts, not just within Latin music. When we talk about his place in the industry and what this tour has accomplished, it’s as high up with any of the other global acts, regardless of genre.
Mike G: He’s a cultural icon and he’s growing outside of his core genre. The unique thing about Rauw — and what separated him from a lot of artists in certain key markets — is that he can do 50,000-plus tickets.
Schafer: When we look at some of the tours internationally that we’ve been doing, including Rauw’s European leg that we did in the summer, you see the diverse markets and that those fans are there. Those fans are crossing over, even more so than what we’ve seen in the past.
Mike G: When you think about Rauw, he is in the conversation. His work ethic, high energy; he’s physically dynamic, he’s got a strong stage presence. He has that crossover appeal; he has a loyal fan base. The demand is big, it’s major. If he wanted to do stadiums next year, he could do it, but he needs to take a vacation first. He needs to put his phone down, rest, and when he’s ready, we can plan accordingly. He has that luxury.
Rauw: I haven’t taken a break since I started touring this year. I began working on this tour after my birthday [Jan. 10] and continued working until today. My next vacation is going to be Christmas. After the holidays, I’m probably going to disappear for a while, but meanwhile, I’m already with a small notebook and taking notes for my next chapter.
This story appears in the Oct. 25, 2025, issue of Billboard.
Trending on Billboard On a late-spring night, Downtown Miami was a place out of time. Thousands of people gathered dressed to the nines, the women rocking sequined gowns and kitten heels, the men wearing tailored suits and polished dress shoes. Their attire fused Puerto Rican culture and Mafia fantasy and seemed beamed in from decades […]
Nearly a decade before contemporary Christian music (CCM) star Brandon Lake was headlining arenas, topping Billboard’s Christian Airplay charts and winning Grammy Awards, he was a young church worship leader in Charleston, S.C., who just wanted to record an album — and took an unorthodox route to making that happen.
“I did a GoFundMe campaign. I said, ‘If you pledge a certain amount, I’ll tattoo your name on my leg,’ ” explains Lake, 34, as he sits across from me onstage in the sanctuary of Seacoast Church, the Charleston megachurch where he began leading worship as a teenager. He taps his left leg: “So I have 22 last names of folks who donated tattooed on my thigh.”
In 2016, he released the result of that campaign, Closer — and since then, his songwriting skill; gritty, full-throttle vocals; and willingness to address sensitive topics like anxiety and mental health in his music have made him one of the biggest stars in the CCM world. He has released four more albums and dominated Billboard’s Christian music charts, landing 43 entries on Hot Christian Songs, including 2023’s 31-week No. 1 “Praise,” recorded with the collective Elevation Worship.
But though he remains deeply committed to the Christian market, Lake is also looking beyond it. He recently earned his first crossover hit, making his Billboard Hot 100 debut in November 2024 when the raw, soulful “Hard Fought Hallelujah” bowed at No. 51. In February, he teamed with country hit-maker and fellow ink aficionado Jelly Roll for a collaborative version of the song.
“I just wanted to share this with somebody who really gets this story, who’s lived it,” he says of recording the song about hardship-tested faith with Jelly Roll. “Now to see him carrying this song and how we carry it together and it’s impacting so many lives — that’s the goal.” He adds, “We’re in a perfect time for this kind of collaboration to happen… The truth is, all of us are just as messed up — it’s just some of us are good at hiding it and putting a mask on. Everyone’s on a journey.”
Brandon Lake photographed May 22, 2025 in Charleston, S.C.
Will Crooks
Lake’s Hot 100 debut comes as CCM is having a major moment on the all-genre chart. “Hard Fought Hallelujah” and Forrest Frank’s “Your Way’s Better” appeared simultaneously on the chart this year — the first time in more than a decade that two CCM songs were on the Hot 100 at the same time. The last time a non-holiday song recorded by a primarily CCM artist reached the Hot 100 was Lauren Daigle’s “You Say,” in 2019.
Those breakthroughs occurred amid an overall rise in consumption of CCM over the past 18 months. According to Luminate, in the first half of 2024, sales of track-equivalent albums, streaming-equivalent albums and on-demand audio for the genre grew 8.9%, with CCM ranking as the fourth-fastest-growing musical genre after pop, Latin and country. The music’s broadening sounds, as well as increased collaborations between CCM and secular artists over the past several years, have helped CCM songs become more heavily integrated into mainstream playlists: Spotify has noted that during the past five years, CCM experienced a 60% growth rate globally and a 50% growth rate in the United States on its platform, as artists previously confined to the genre started to penetrate mainstream spaces.
That strong upward trajectory owes in large part to a new generation of CCM artists such as Lake, Frank, Josiah Queen and Seph Schlueter. They relish crossing genre lines: Frank’s music, for instance, is more rooted in pop and hip-hop, while Lake’s songs anchor worship lyrics aimed at church congregations in a range of sounds including rock, blues and country. And they are also digital natives who have been intentional in harnessing the power of social media and streaming to widen the genre’s audience; a viral TikTok dance clip, for instance, gave Frank’s “Your Way’s Better” a major streaming boost.
Lake was among Luminate’s top five CCM artists in the first half of 2024, and his star has only risen since then. During his appearances at CMA Fest, held June 5-8, a social media clip of him and Jelly Roll performing “Hard Fought Hallelujah” earned over 1 million views, while a clip of the audience singing Lake’s hit “Gratitude” a cappella during a separate CMA Fest appearance earned more than 3 million views in just over 48 hours. The success of “Hard Fought Hallelujah,” in particular, has put Lake — and his faith-centered message — before broader and more mainstream audiences than he ever dreamed of: performing on American Idol, joining Jelly Roll onstage at Stagecoach in front of 75,000 fans, playing the Grand Ole Opry and CMA Fest.
From the start, collaboration has been key to Lake’s success. Closer was circulated in church and worship music circles, leading him to some of his first songwriting connections, like Tasha Cobbs Leonard, Nate Moore and Maverick City Music co-founder Tony Brown, with whom he co-wrote Cobbs Leonard’s Grammy-nominated 2019 song “This Is a Move.” Other early co-writes included team-ups with worship music collectives Maverick City Music, Bethel Music and Elevation Worship; all helped Lake expand his sound. Alongside more traditional-sounding worship anthems, his 2021 album, House of Miracles, included the soulful rock song “I Need a Ghost.”
Later that year, Elevation Worship’s “Graves Into Gardens,” co-written by and featuring Lake, topped the Christian Airplay chart and was certified platinum by the RIAA. “That’s when the floodgates opened,” he recalls. “I was getting calls from everywhere, asking me to do a concert or do collaborations — I can’t even remember how many collabs I’ve done, songs I’ve written with other people that were like, ‘Let’s just do it together.’ ” At the time, Lake notes, he didn’t even have a manager. (Since 2021, he has been with prominent CCM management company Breit Group.) “I literally kept all of my dates I said yes to in my Notes app,” Lake explains. “My manager now has that framed, I think, because of how much we’ve grown. I learned so much being around so many of my heroes.”
In 2023, Lake cemented his solo hit-maker status when “Gratitude” topped Hot Christian Songs for 28 weeks. Since, he has continued notching solo and collaborative hits, including “Fear Is Not My Future” with Maverick City Music and “Love of God” with Phil Wickham. (He’ll tour arenas and stadiums with the latter this summer.) And on June 13, he released his fifth studio album, King of Hearts, on Provident Entertainment.
Sonically, the album finds Lake deepening his exploration of diverse genres, including country (“Daddy’s DNA,” “Spare Change”), gospel (“I Know a Name,” with luminary CeCe Winans) and hard rock (“Sevens”), and features additional collaborations with writer-producer Hank Bentley and Christian rapper Hulvey, among others.
And amid the run-up to releasing King of Hearts, Lake launched another major project. In early 2025, CCM supergroup Sons of Sunday debuted, featuring Lake alongside Moore, Steven Furtick, Pat Barrett, Chris Brown and Leeland Mooring. The group has already notched four entries on Hot Christian Songs, and its self-titled debut album bowed at No. 3 on the Top Christian Albums chart upon its release in May.
“My favorite things I’ve ever created were created in community, so I think that’ll be a huge piece of my future,” Lake says. “I’ll roll with anybody who wants to go after the same things, who has the same values as me.”
Brandon Lake photographed May 22, 2025 at Seacoast Church in Mount Pleasant, S.C.
Will Crooks
As his star rises, he has stayed close to his South Carolina roots. Instead of moving to Nashville, the epicenter of the CCM industry, Lake lives with his wife, Brittany; their three sons; and a menagerie including cows, mini-donkeys and two dogs on a sprawling rural property just outside Charleston. Much of King of Hearts was recorded in a three-room Charleston studio owned by Lake’s longtime collaborator, producer-writer Micah Nichols. And even when he’s on the road, Lake makes a point of staying connected to his hometown: In 2022, he concluded the first leg of his first headlining tour with two sold-out shows at Seacoast Church; next May, he’ll wrap his 48-city King of Hearts tour at Charleston’s 12,000-seat Credit One Stadium.
But regardless of venue size or location, Lake’s goal remains the same. “When we go out on tour and it’s this huge production, huge lights and sound, I’m not doing anything other than just having church — just maybe a few more lights in cool moments,” he says with a chuckle. “It’s entertaining, but really, I want [concertgoers] to be able to say, ‘I went to the King of Hearts tour, and my life has forever changed.’ ”
What do you recall about your first time performing?
I’ve been a part of [Seacoast Church] since I was probably 13 or 14 years old. They encouraged me and gave me opportunity after opportunity to learn and fail and grow. This is where I learned how to write songs. Someone overheard me singing in a small group in someone’s living room and asked me to sing. I sang for the first time at church, and I remember feeling so vulnerable, which to this day I still do. It’s this love-hate relationship every time I step out on the platform, especially on tour — it’s like the weight of the night feels like it’s on my shoulders, but at the same time, I try to remember it’s not about me: People are coming to hear these songs and have a real experience with God.
Will Crooks
Early in your career, you started working with popular worship collective Bethel Music. What was it like making that transition from leading worship at your local church to being on a larger tour with a collective?
Going from local church to being on tour in front of thousands of people overnight was a dream come true and, in the same season, writing with all my heroes. Everybody that was on my bucket list of getting to write with them, it all happened in the span of a few weeks. What came quickly after that was a valley — I never expected what it would do when I came home and came off that high. That taught me a lot. I did a whole record around mental health [2022’s Help!]. I’d never experienced depression, anxiety, panic attacks ever in my life until I came home from all my dreams coming true, but my adrenaline was just totally shot. I just went into this super-dark place, and it wasn’t long, but it was long enough to be like, “I need some help.” I had to relearn to go to God first and most, to fix what was going on.
I’ve had to learn over the past few years how to tour and record and balance family and this career the healthy way. There’s a reason why I only tour on the weekends. [The King of Hearts tour comprises four-show runs that are booked for Thursdays through Sundays.] My wife and I discuss every opportunity I get to make sure that we’re on board as a family. I want to be 50 years old and still be able to tour. That’s why I have a health coach, a performance coach. I’m trying to get healthy in every aspect of my life.
Sonically, King of Hearts is the most varied album of your career. Why was that important to you?
Touching on different genres isn’t something I set out to do. I’ve been a sponge and soaked up the gold from people I’ve been surrounded by. Growing up, [I listened to] Christian music and James Taylor. I’d come home from school and turn on CMT [Country Music Television]. So I grew up around country [music] and discovered rock’n’roll later. I had a metal garage band for a little while and just loved all genres of music. I was trying to learn from all these different expressions of music … So now when I go write a song, I’m less focused on “What does this need to sound like?” and more on “What am I feeling right now?”
“Sevens” is the most rock-leaning song on the album. What was that writing/recording session like?
We went to a Royal Blood and Queens of the Stone Age concert down the street from this studio, and a few days later, I just wanted to write a big-riff rock tune. I picked up a guitar, started playing and [writer-producer] Micah [Nichols] and I started chasing it. The chorus that you hear is the demo vocal from the day we wrote it. I would say 70% of King of Hearts is filled with demo vocals.
How did Jelly Roll come to be on “Hard Fought Hallelujah”?
I released [the solo version of] this song, and then I felt like, “This is too special to not share this song with somebody.” Thinking about the lyrics, I was like, “Man, I think Jelly Roll would resonate with the story of this song.” I’ve been so inspired by his story, the things he’s overcome. I remember seeing him sing “Believe” with Brooks & Dunn [at the 2024 CMA Awards], and I just bawled my eyes out. It gave me all the faith to reach out. The craziest part of that is he had already heard the song on TikTok and loved it. We hopped on the phone, and we didn’t talk music for the first hour. We just instantly became like brothers and talked about life, parenting, touring, family. It was a real friendship off the bat. There’s a reason why he is on top of the world right now, and it’s not just because his songs are amazing — it’s because he’s amazing.
You have stayed close to your roots in Charleston. Have you been tempted to move to Nashville?
I love Nashville, but I like it being a home away from home. [Charleston] is where my roots are and being here with those that remember the 15-year-old Brandon, they know me the best. I want to make music that gives people faith and hope to keep going, and the people I’ve surrounded myself with, they get that the best. So it makes the most sense to stay here.
As your career has grown beyond CCM in terms of music listener recognition, has there been any kind of backlash or criticism from music listeners or the industry?
I think historically, any time something has shifted outside of what had been done previously, it can make people take pause and maybe be even a bit uncomfortable with it … or make it feel like it’s an either-or situation. And if you only are using Instagram as a metric, I can see why someone would maybe want to position it that way. But I don’t think of it that way … To me, this is a lifestyle and teachings that live through music, and however that is connecting and wherever that is connecting, I will always want it to be as much and as far as possible.
CCM is having a moment on the Billboard Hot 100, with “Hard Fought Hallelujah” and Forrest Frank’s “Your Way’s Better” charting simultaneously. Why do you think the genre is surging?
I think the reason why Christian music is probably more consumed now than years ago is because there’s a greater level of hunger for what’s real and what’s true. The fact that American Idol did a whole night around Easter, I think it just goes to show people are desperate for something that is going to lift their spirit. And I’ve got too many stories — I think what keeps me going, and I think what would keep a Forrest Frank going and what keeps a Josiah Queen writing these songs, is getting flooded with testimonies. People are hungry for authenticity. They’re not just looking for entertainment. They’re looking for an encounter with something that’s real. There’s nothing more real than God.
It’s 2 a.m. on a May morning in Aguascalientes, Mexico, long past most people’s bedtimes. But inside the Palenque of Feria de San Marcos — a venue in this central Mexican city — Carín León is entering the third hour of a performance where he has sung nonstop while pacing the small 360-degree stage like a caged lion.
Palenques, found in most Mexican cities and towns, were originally designed and used for cockfighting, and most have been transformed into concert venues that put artists in shockingly close proximity to their fans, with no ring of security around the tiny stage. The palenque circuit is de rigueur for Mexican artists, even a superstar like León — a burly man who tonight looks even bigger thanks to his ever-present high-crown cowboy hat.
Nearly 6,000 fans surround him in arena-style seating, the steep, vertical layout allowing everyone a close view of the man below, flanked by his backing ensemble: a norteño band with electric guitars, a sinaloense brass section, backup singers and keyboards — nearly 30 musicians in all, who wander about, grab drinks, chat and return to the stage throughout the show. León leads the organized chaos, traversing repertoire that, during the course of the evening, goes from corridos and norteño ballads to country and rock’n’roll.
“I think it’s the most Mexican thing possible in music, a palenque. I always say you have to see your artist play in a palenque to understand it,” León tells me a few hours before the show. He has been playing them for years throughout the country, like most regional Mexican artists do. They’re places of revelry and drink, a rite of passage, and the place to test new sounds.
“As artists, we appreciate that experience,” he adds. “We love it because you have people so close to you. You can be with them, have drinks with them — it’s a very interesting artist-fan communion.”
We’re chatting between sips of tequila at a country house on the outskirts of Aguascalientes, and despite the stifling afternoon heat, León keeps his hat on, looking stately in his boots and black jacket with metal buckles. Soft-spoken but emphatic, the 35-year-old música mexicana star alternates between Spanish and English, which he speaks with the American-sounding but accented cadence of someone who learned it by ear from transcribing songs by hand, but never in a classroom.
“I always had trouble with my accent when I sang,” he says. “But I didn’t want to lose the accent because it makes you unique. [An accent] is more valid now. I always want to ensure the music is good, refine it, make it better. But we’re coming from the 2000s, when music [production] was perfect. Now value is given to what’s natural, and that includes having an accent.”
Christopher Patey
While at his core León is a regional Mexican artist who performs contemporary banda and norteño, he loves collaborating with artists spanning many genres and incorporating regional sounds from around the world into his music: Spanish flamenco, Colombian vallenato and salsa, Puerto Rican reggaetón. And as he blends these sounds in unexpected ways, León has found an avid and growing audience.
In 2024, he crisscrossed the world on his Boca Chueca tour, playing 81 palenque, arena and stadium dates in the United States and Latin America. Of 1.3 million total tickets sold, according to his management, 374,000 were reported to Billboard Boxscore for a gross of $51.2 million, making it one of the year’s most successful Latin tours. This year, he’s scheduled to play 40 more shows, including Chilean and Colombian stadiums, Spanish arenas and German theaters — a leap few regional Mexican acts, whose touring is usually restricted to the United States and Mexico, have accomplished at such a scale.
But León has transcended mere geographic borders. Last year, after releasing singles with country star Kane Brown and soul musician Leon Bridges, León became the first artist to perform mainly in Spanish at the Stagecoach country music festival, just a couple of months after making his Grand Ole Opry debut. On June 6, he became the first regional Mexican artist to play CMA Fest, as a guest of Cody Johnson, who invited him to perform the bilingual “She Hurts Like Tequila” with him as part of his set at Nashville’s Nissan Stadium.
“What struck me most was how effortless it felt,” Bridges says of working with León on the bilingual duet “It Was Always You (Siempre Fuiste Tú).” “We come from different musical backgrounds, but the emotion, the storytelling — that was shared. Collaborating with him wasn’t about chasing a fusion — it was about two artists trusting each other to make something honest. Going down to Mexico and being immersed in his world was a powerful reminder of how universal that connection through music really is.”
From a purely commercial standpoint, León has no need to take musical risks like this beyond the Latin realm. In the past five years alone, he has notched three entries on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart, including Colmillo de Leche (2023) and Boca Chueca, Vol. 1 (2024), which both reached the top 10. He has placed three No. 1s on the Latin Airplay chart, seven No. 1s on Regional Mexican Airplay and 19 entries on Hot Latin Songs, including three top 10s. He’s a widely sought-after collaborator for pop stars (Camilo, Maluma, Kany García, Carlos Vives), Spanish stars (Manuel Carrasco, El Cigala), Mexican legends (Pepe Aguilar, Alejandro Fernández) and fellow current chart-toppers (Grupo Firme, Gabito Ballesteros) alike.
But regardless of what sounds he’s working with, or whether his collaborator is an established name or an untested act (a particular favorite of his), León knows what he likes. That confidence is at the core of his and manager Jorge Juarez’s strategic plan to make him a truly global artist — and for the past year, they’ve set their sights on country music, hoping to bridge the divide between two genres that, despite their different languages, are in fact remarkably similar.
“It’s something that fills me with pride and something that’s been very difficult to achieve as a Mexican and as a Latin: to reach the center of the marrow of this country movement,” León says. “To get to know this [country music] industry and start moving the threads to act as this missing link between regional Mexican and country music.”
Carín León photographed April 29, 2025 at Gran Ex-Hacienda La Unión in Aguascalientes, Mexico.
Christopher Patey
León first tested the country waters back in 2019 with a Mexican/country version of Extreme’s “More Than Words,” recorded in English and Spanish. Though it now has 14 million streams on Spotify, “it’s kind of lost because there was so much other stuff happening at the time,” he says. It was a risky move, especially coming when León was not yet the established star he is today. But to him, it was one worth taking.
“It was the perfect excuse to show something different,” he says. “And it was amazing. It was so liberating. Because I was trapped in this box that was regional mexicano at that time, and [this song] was very fun for me.”
Country and regional Mexican are, truly, natural siblings. Both genres are anchored in storytelling, with acoustic instrumentation and guitars central to their sound. Boots, hats and fringe jackets are staple outfits for artists and fans alike. And though they stem from different cultures, both are, as León puts it, “roots genres” with their foundations in regional sounds.
Unsurprisingly, other Latin artists have forayed into country before — but none have brought León’s existing level of Latin music stardom, nor have they generated the buzz and impact that he has since releasing his first country team-up, “The One (Pero No Como Yo),” with Brown in March 2024. Since then, he has spent weeks in Nashville, working with local producers and songwriters for a country-leaning album featuring other major names that’s slated for a 2026 release.
For country music, that’s good news. According to the Country Music Association’s 2024 Diverse Audience study, 58% of Latino music listeners consume country music at least monthly, compared with 50% when the last study was conducted in 2021. Finding the right opportunity to tap that market had long been in the Grand Ole Opry’s sights. “And then,” says Jordan Pettit, Opry Entertainment Group vp of artist and industry relations, “the opportunity with Carín came up.”
At León’s Opry debut in 2024, “we had a lot of audience there, more than normal,” Pettit recalls. “The show itself absolutely blew my expectations.” The plan had been for León to play three songs, but the crowd clamored for more, and the musician obliged with a fourth. “I can think of only one or two occasions in my seven years here where I’ve seen an artist get an encore,” Pettit says. “It was really, really awesome to see the worlds collide.”
León’s worlds have been colliding since he was born Óscar Armando Díaz de León in Hermosillo, Mexico, a business hub and the capital of the northwestern state of Sonora, located 200 miles from the U.S. border at Nogales, Ariz. That proximity, coupled with his family’s voracious appetite for music, exposed him to a constant and eclectic soundtrack that ranged from Cuban troubadour Silvio Rodríguez and corrido singer Chalino Sánchez to country stars Johnny Cash and George Strait to rock mainstays like Journey, Paul McCartney and Queen.
“What’s happening now in my career is the result of the music I ingested since I was a kid,” he says. “Music gave me the incentive to learn about many things — the origin of other countries, political movements linked to music, cultural movements. I’m very freaky about music. Everything I have comes from the music I listened to.”
When León finally started dabbling in guitar, he gravitated to the music closest to his roots, regional Mexican, and eventually adopted his stage name. By 2010, he was the singer for Grupo Arranke, which through its blend of traditional sinaloense banda brass and sierreño guitars eventually landed a deal with the Mexican indie Balboa. After a slow but steady rise, Grupo Arranke garnered its sole Billboard chart entry, peaking at No. 34 on Hot Latin Songs in 2019 with “A Través del Vaso,” penned by veteran songwriter Horacio Palencia.
Then the coronavirus pandemic hit, and León switched gears: He went solo, signed to indie Tamarindo Recordz and began releasing music at a prolific pace, launching what he now calls his “exotic” cross-genre fusions.
He scored his first top 10 on a Billboard chart with “Me la Aventé,” which peaked at No. 6 on Regional Mexican Airplay in 2019. But his true breakouts were two live albums recorded and filmed in small studios during lockdown, Encerrados Pero Enfiestados, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 (Locked Up, but Partying). The bare-bones sets, featuring León singing and playing guitar with a stripped-down accompaniment of tuba and guitar, struck a powerful chord. At a time when teenage performers with gold chains and exotic cars were propelling corridos tumbados and música mexicana with hip-hop attitude up the charts, this 30-year-old relative unknown with a poignant tenor that oozed emotion was performing regional Mexican music with a Rhodes organ, a country twang and, with his cover of ’90s pop hit “Tú,” a female point of view. No one else sounded like him.
Christopher Patey
Those acoustic sessions “were the first things I realized could make the audience uncomfortable [and] question what they were hearing,” León recalls. “Wanting everyone to like you works, but it doesn’t let you transcend. I think things happen when you change something — for good or bad — and you get that divided opinion. All my idols — Elvis, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash — were people who swam against the current. And not in a forced way, but in a sincere way, exposing vulnerabilities. We knew it was good stuff. And things began to happen.”
During the pandemic lockdown, León had the time and creative space to experiment and explore a new openness within regional Mexican music, a genre where artists used to seldom collaborate with one another. In 2021, he notched his first No. 1 with “El Tóxico,” a collaboration with Grupo Firme that ruled Regional Mexican Airplay for two weeks.
Then, Spanish urban/flamenco star C. Tangana DM’d him on Instagram and invited him to collaborate on “Cambia!,” a song from Tangana’s acclaimed album El Madrileño that also featured young sierreño star Adriel Favela and can best be described as a corrido flamenco. The track “blew my mind,” León says — and exposed him to a completely different audience. “It taught me divisions are literally only a label. When I heard that album, I understood music has no limits. C. Tangana is to blame for what’s happening with my music now.”
Collaboration requests from artists seeking León’s unique sound (and sonic curiosity) started to flow in at the precise time that he was itching to explore and globalize his music. In 2022, after recording the pop/regional Mexican ballad “Como lo Hice Yo” with Mexican pop group Matisse, he met the band’s manager, Jorge Juárez, co-owner of well-known Mexican management and concert promotion company Westwood Entertainment. The two clicked, and when León’s label and management contract with Tamarindo expired in early 2023, he approached Juárez.
“There comes a time when managers and the artist have to be a power couple,” León observes. “I found the right fit with Mr. Jorge Juárez. He’s a music fiend; he has a very out-of-the-box vision. That’s where we clicked. And he had huge ambition, which is very important to us. He’s the man of the impossible. We want to change the rules of the game.”
In León, Juárez says he saw “a very versatile artist who could ride out trends, who could become an icon. He wasn’t looking to be No. 1, but to be the biggest across time. He had so many attributes, I felt I had the right ammunition to demonstrate my experience of so many years and take him to a global level.”
Juárez, who shuttles between his Miami home base and Mexico, is a respected industry veteran who has long managed a marquee roster of mostly Mexican pop acts including Camila, Reik, Sin Bandera and Carlos Rivera. He’s also a concert promoter with expertise in the United States and Latin America. He sees León as having the potential to become “the next Vicente Fernández,” he adds, referring to the late global ranchero star.
Because León had parted ways with Tamarindo, which kept his recording catalog, he urgently had to build a new one. He and Juárez partnered in founding a label, Socios Music, and began releasing material prolifically, financing the productions out of their own pockets. Since partnering with Juárez, León has released three studio albums: Colmillo de Leche and Boca Chueca, Vol. 1, which both peaked at No. 8 on Top Latin Albums, and Palabra de To’s, which reached No. 20. Beyond the catalog, they had three other key goals: finding a tour promoter with global reach, building the Carín León brand and expanding into country.
AEG, which León and Juárez partnered with in 2023, could help with all of it. Last year, the promoter booked León’s back-to-back performances at Coachella and Stagecoach — making him one of very few artists to play both of the Southern California Goldenvoice festivals in the same year — as well as his slot opening for The Rolling Stones in May in Glendale, Ariz. AEG president of global touring Rich Schaefer says they sold over 500,000 tickets for León headline shows in the United States since they started working together, including a 2024 sellout at Los Angeles’ BMO Stadium.
“There are few artists who put out as much music as Carín does on a regular basis,” Schaefer adds. “He’s able to sing and speak fluently in two languages, which has already opened a lot of doors both in the States and abroad. Our team works very closely with Jorge and his team, and he has a deep understanding of how to approach international territories. With a little luck, Carín is poised to take over the world.”
Carín León photographed April 29, 2025 at Gran Ex-Hacienda La Unión in Aguascalientes, Mexico.
Christopher Patey
That international viewpoint also informed León’s approach to recording. When Juárez set out to unlock country music for his client, he first contacted Universal Music Publishing Group head Jody Gerson — “our godmother,” as Juárez likes to say. “She opened so many doors to us.”
Gerson first met León in 2023, after Yadira Moreno, UMPG’s managing director in Mexico, signed him. “It was clear from my first meeting with him that he possessed an expansive vision for his songwriting and artistry that would take him beyond Mexican music,” Gerson says. “Before signing with us, he wanted to make sure that we were aligned with his ambitions and that he would get meaningful global support from our company, specifically in Nashville. Carín actually grew up listening to country music, so his desire to collaborate with country songwriters is an organic one.”
Beyond opening the door to working with Nashville producers and songwriters, Gerson also connected Juárez and León with Universal Music Group chief Lucian Grainge, who in June 2024 helped formulate a unique partnership between Virgin Music Group, Island Records and Socios Music. Through it, Virgin and Island distribute and market León’s music under Socios, with Virgin distributing and marketing to the U.S. Latin and global markets and Island working the U.S. mainstream market.
The agreement encompasses parts of León’s back catalog as well as new material, including 2024’s Boca Chueca, Vol. 1, which featured his bilingual collaborations with Brown (“The One [Pero No Como Yo],” which peaked at No. 46 on Hot Country Songs) and Bridges.
He plans to deliver Boca Chueca, Vol. 2 before the end of the year and just released a deluxe version of Palabra de To’s that includes new pairings with Maluma (their “Según Quién” topped the Latin Airplay chart for four weeks in 2023 and 2024) and first-time duets with ranchera star Alejandro Fernández and flamenco icon El Cigala.
While flamenco is another passion point for León, the country album — his “first magnum opus,” he says — is his most ambitious goal. Already, he has worked in Nashville with major producers and songwriters including Amy Allen, Dan Wilson and Natalie Hemby. On the eclectic project, he says, “Some stuff sounds like James Brown, some stuff sounds like Queen, some stuff sounds like regional Mexican with these corrido tumbado melodies, but in a country way. It’s very Carín. It’s what’s happening in my head and in my heart.” He won’t divulge all of its guests just yet, but he says it includes friends like “my man Jelly Roll” and other big stars he admires.
It’s new territory for a Latin act, and León is acutely aware of the fact. But he’s approaching it from a very different point of view. “I’m not a country artist,” he says flatly. “I’m a sonorense. I have regional Mexican in my bones. But I love country music, and I’m trying to do my approach with my Mexican music and find a middle point. It’s not easy. You have a lot of barriers because of the accent, because of the language, the racial stuff.”
For some successful regional Mexican artists who tour constantly and make top dollar, the trade-off is not worth it; financially speaking, they don’t need to open new territories or genres and the audiences that come with them. But for León, “the money trip passed a lot of years ago,” he says with a shrug, taking a last sip of tequila and adjusting the brim of that ever-present accessory he shares with his country friends. “I need to change the game,” he adds. “I’m hungry to make history, to be the one and only. I’m so ambitious with what I want to do with the music. It’s always the music. She’s the boss.”
It’s 2 a.m. on a May morning in Aguascalientes, Mexico, long past most people’s bedtimes. But inside the Palenque of Feria de San Marcos — a venue in this central Mexican city — Carín León is entering the third hour of a performance where he has sung nonstop while pacing the small 360-degree stage like […]
Am I the first person to feel strange calling you ‘weird’?”
John Mayer — bespectacled, grinning goofily, very much nerding out — is sitting across from “Weird Al” Yankovic, interviewing the Hawaiian shirt-clad parody music king, who is sitting across from him for his SiriusXM show, How’s Life With John Mayer.
“You can call me Al, like Paul Simon says,” Yankovic says with smile, before adding that the most normal thing about him is, probably, his pancreas.
It’s a funny quip, but also an understatement. Let’s just get this out of the way: “Weird Al” Yankovic is, beneath his accordion-playing, polka-loving surface, exceedingly normal. He likes long evening walks to get his steps in. He enjoys seeing movies and trying out new restaurants with his wife and daughter, who just graduated college. He grumbles good-naturedly about the ongoing renovation of his home in the Hollywood Hills. (“It’s going to look almost exactly the same as it did before, except it cost a fortune!”) The 65-year-old artist’s one attempt at rock star behavior, back in his early-’80s heyday, was comically un-vain: On a touring rider, he requested, in the spirit of Van Halen’s famed ban on brown M&M’S, “one really horrible Hawaiian shirt for every show I did.” (On that run, he did 200, and a collection that now extends to a storage unit somewhere in greater L.A. began.)
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Still, if not precisely weird, Yankovic is truly singular. His catalog can be divided into two types of songs: intricately crafted, meticulously arranged, hilarious yet never mean-spirited parodies of hits by acts ranging from Michael Jackson to Coolio to Nirvana to Lady Gaga, and original pastiches, for which he deep dives into artists’ catalogs to create songs that, with eerie accuracy, mimic the sounds and idiosyncrasies of those genre-spanning artists.
Between the two, he has accomplished feats usually reserved for the very artists he parodies. During each of the first four decades of his career, he has had entries on the Billboard Hot 100, and eight of his albums have reached the top 20 on the Billboard 200 — including his most recent studio release, 2014’s Mandatory Fun, which became his first No. 1 on the chart. He has won five Grammy Awards and an Emmy. Billboard estimates he has sold 12 million albums in the United States (based on RIAA certifications pre-1991 and Luminate data from 1991 on).
Incredibly, he’s done all this without ever changing his essential “Weird Al”-ness. “From day one, there was never even a discussion that would not be about following his singular vision,” says Jay Levey, Yankovic’s manager of 43 years and sometime creative collaborator (notably, they co-wrote the now nerd canon comedy UHF, which Levey also directed). “It’s hard to find any career where there’s literally no compromise, but we might be able to count on one hand the number of compromises he’s made in his career.”
Joe Pugliese
Sometimes, that’s meant turning down lucrative deals, like the $5 million beer endorsement that Yankovic passed on in 1990 because, he feared, the brand was “trying to make me into Joe Camel.” Many times, it’s meant standing up to record-label executives, like when, amid his “draconian” first album contract with Scotti Brothers (an indie then distributed by CBS), he was asked to shoot 10 music videos on a $30,000 budget simply because he’d proved he could do one for $3,000. (“I’m like, ‘No. No, I can’t!’ ”)
But just as often, it’s meant embracing an open-to-anything spirit that seems to almost always work out in his favor. Yankovic decided very early in his career to ask permission of any artist he parodied — not because the law required it (it doesn’t) but because he simply had no interest in making enemies. With very few exceptions, it turned out, the artists said yes, even supposedly impossible-to-convince ones like “American Pie” scribe Don McLean, who OK’d “The Saga Begins,” Yankovic’s 1999 parody that essentially summarizes the plot of Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace. “When I heard his version, I thought it was better than the original. The sound quality was superb,” says McLean, who calls Yankovic a “straight-ahead good boy” who “could be on Leave It to Beaver.”
Thanks to that combination of earnest good intentions, work ethic, backbone and obsession with quality, Yankovic finds himself in an unusual position today: He’s no novelty relic of the ’80s, but a truly cross-generational artist. In the past six years alone, he’s portrayed Rivers Cuomo in Weezer’s “Africa” music video, played accordion (and appeared in the video) for teen rock band The Linda Lindas’ 2024 single “Yo Me Estreso” and lip-synced dramatically in a tux in Clairo’s “Terrapin” video. “Growing up with his videos was a massive thing in my generation,” says Clairo, 26. “Back when YouTube was really simple, it really hit home for us in middle school to watch his parodies. He always knew how to draw people in.”
He and his team will prove just how true that still is when Yankovic heads out on the Bigger and Weirder Tour this summer. It’s his fastest-selling, biggest-grossing tour yet, according to his agent, Wasserman Music’s Brad Goodman, and his biggest by other metrics, too: an eight-piece band (his largest yet) onstage; first-time venues bigger than any he’s played before, including New York’s Madison Square Garden and L.A.’s Kia Forum; a mini-Las Vegas residency (the tour will open June 13 with six sold-out nights at The Venetian); and stops both expected (Red Rocks Amphitheatre) and less so (Riot Fest) on the route. And the concert itself is a trademark Weird Al spectacle: part rock show, part revival tent, part Broadway musical, all “joy bomb,” as actor and longtime fan Andy Samberg puts it.
Whether it becomes a springboard for the next Weird Al era is anyone’s guess — including Yankovic himself. Right now, he has no further plans to release albums; and since Mandatory Fun arrived over a decade ago, he’s only sporadically released new music, most recently the 2024 “Polkamania!” single (the latest in his long-running series of madcap polka medleys, this one recapping the past decade’s pop highlights, all sung in Yankovic’s manic tenor). Around that time, his contract of roughly 20 years with Sony ended, and he decided not to renew with the label, or sign with anyone else.
“Nobody owns any piece of me,” he says, exhaling. “I’m at a point in my life where if something isn’t going to be fun or a pleasant experience, I have no problem saying no, even if it’s a lot of money or a lot of eyeballs. I can do literally whatever I feel like doing.”
Then again, for Yankovic, that’s always been true.
“When I was a kid, I used to fantasize about being the next Weird Al, like it’s a position he applied for and got,” says Lin-Manuel Miranda, a lifelong fan who’s now also friends with Yankovic. “And then you grow up and realize, ‘Oh, there’s only one of that guy.’ We’re not going to see another Weird Al.”
On an overcast April afternoon a few days after the Mayer taping, Yankovic meets me for lunch at Crossroads, a vegan spot in West Hollywood where, years ago, he ate his first Impossible Burger. He’s quick to jokingly note that he is not a member of the city’s “vegan elite” — still, as he walks in, a man walking a golden retriever stops his phone conversation to stare and declare, “It’s that Al Yanko-vich guy!”
Despite his talent for writing songs about junk food (“My Bologna,” “The White Stuff”) and the fact that he once consumed the world’s most ungodly snack, a Twinkie Dog, in UHF (watch and barf a little), he’s been vegan since the early ’90s.
Chalk it up to veganism, staying out of the sun (“I melt in direct sunlight”) or following the directions of his longtime hair stylist, Sean James, very well (he never blow-dries those famous ringlets, hence their eternally bouncy and well-defined nature), but Yankovic has an ageless quality that lends many of his fans to liken him to mythological figures. “He’s Santa Claus for nerds of a certain stripe,” Miranda says, a comparison Mayer had also made (as well as to Forrest Gump). His curls may be a little grayer, but his ultra-expressive face — acrobatic eyebrows in particular — reflects his eternal curiosity and up-for-anything-ness.
As we settle in for almond ricotta-stuffed zucchini blossoms and meatless bolognese, Yankovic is particularly animated recounting his previous weekend, when he made his latest surprise appearance: his Coachella debut. To close out its surreal set, the crew from the cult-favorite kids show Yo Gabba Gabba! brought out a cast of characters both human (Thundercat, Portugal. The Man’s John Gourley) and not so much (cartoon mascots like Sleestak, PuffnStuf and Duo the Duolingo owl) to sing “The Rainbow Connection” with its composer, Paul Williams — and, on lead vocals, Yankovic.
“I’ve had a pretty bizarre life, so it wasn’t like, so unusual,” Yankovic reflects. “But it was definitely a little bit of an out-of-body experience.” He admits that the “hey kids, let’s put on a show” energy was fun and that the invite wasn’t a total shock (having appeared on a season-three episode as an accordion-playing circus ringmaster, he’s tight with the Gabba group). Still, he speaks of such invites with a kind of humble awe.
“Nothing I’ve ever done was me thinking, ‘Boy, I hope kids discover this 40 years from now,’ ” he says. Starting in the ’80s, he released an album almost every year “because I was afraid I would be quickly forgotten. It was drilled into me: ‘You’re a comedy artist, you’re a novelty artist, you’re lucky if you’re a one hit-wonder — you’re not destined to have a long career.’ I wanted to grab that brass ring every time I went around.”
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Coming up concurrently with the birth of MTV, and savvily taking advantage of it, helped Yankovic snatch that ring. He had a keen ear for (and good taste in) hits at a time when, thanks to both MTV and top 40 radio’s prevalence, a monoculture reigned — and perhaps even more importantly, he knew the power of a viral video before such a thing existed.
Tweaking hits like Jackson’s “Beat It” (“Eat It”) and Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” (“Like a Surgeon”), Yankovic created new songs that, thanks to his painstaking re-creations of their arrangements, were immediately recognizable but rewarded repeated consumption — as did their accompanying videos, in which Yankovic demonstrated his incredible eye for detail and formidable acting chops. “MTV was on like video wallpaper in the background 24 hours a day,” he says of that time. “They were hungry for content, and I was anxious to give them content.”
Since then, Yankovic’s understanding of the promotional power of visuals has remained prescient — take when, leading up to Mandatory Fun’s arrival, he insisted on releasing a music video on YouTube each day (not all at once, as some advised) to whet fans’ appetites for the album. And his genre-agnostic approach to making music has proved ahead of its time, too. Before hip-hop was widely accepted as pop, he was especially drawn to rap. “A lot of pop songs are very repetitive,” he says. “How can I be funny in seven syllables, you know? But rap songs, I mean, it’s nothing but words, and it’s easy to craft jokes that way.”
Parodies like “Amish Paradise” (Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise”) and “White and Nerdy” (Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’ Dirty”) are among his most streamed — though he’s been equally adept at literally any microgenre he takes on, from just-electrified Bob Dylan (“Bob,” entirely comprising palindromes) to arty new wave (the Devo pastiche “Dare To Be Stupid”) to crunchy Detroit garage rock (“CNR,” a tribute to Charles Nelson Reilly through the lens of The White Stripes).
“The more you listen to him, the more you get access to making [any genre of parody] sound legitimate,” says Samberg, who calls Yankovic the biggest influence on his own comedic music group, The Lonely Island. “The nature of what he does is incredibly populist. He’s not snooty about it; he’s like, ‘This is what the kids like, and as long as I have a good angle comedically, I’m going to do it.’ And because of that, it’s always appealing to young people.”
Growing up in Compton-adjacent Lynwood, Calif., Yankovic listened to rock radio, but as a teenager found playing the accordion a bit solitary. (His friends’ rock bands weren’t really interested in an accordionist joining up.) “When you take accordion lessons, I think the high-water mark is ‘Maybe someday I’ll play in an Italian restaurant or at a wedding,’ ” he says with a laugh. “I guess I was shameless. I grew up a complete nerd in high school. And when you’re not somebody that’s socially acceptable, you kind of have nothing to lose. I kind of held on to that mentality: Like, you know, ‘Who cares?’ ”
“Weird Al” Yankovic photographed April 17, 2025 at Dust Studios in Los Angeles.
Joe Pugliese
He didn’t look to any particular musician’s career trajectory as one he could follow. “It was more cautionary tales” — and one was especially haunting. One of his idols was Allan Sherman, the satirical singer best known for his 1963 summer camp send-up, “Hello Muddah Hello Fadduh!” “He was the last person to have a No. 1 comedy album before me,” Yankovic continues. “He had three No. 1 albums on, like, the pop charts — incredible! But within a few years, he completely burned out. He made some terrible choices in his personal and professional life and just went off into obscurity and sadly died a few years later. So I was always more concerned about, ‘Don’t mess it up. Keep doing what you’re doing and just try not to make bad choices.’ ”
“In a way, we’re almost always looking over our shoulders at that,” his manager Levey says. He cautiously admits that he and Yankovic have finally reached a level in his career where they’re “no longer at the point where every year [of continued success] is a surprise,” then adds, “I don’t actually even like saying that out loud because it sounds like you’re taking something for granted.”
But if Sherman was a rocket that blasted off only to burst into flames, Yankovic has been the opposite: one that, as Levey puts it, has kept steadily traveling through space — maybe sometimes at a slower speed than others, but never plummeting back down to Earth, buffeted by the most unexpected boosters. Like, say, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, the 2022 parody of a music biopic that Yankovic co-wrote, starring Daniel Radcliffe in the titular role. Despite at first airing only on the Roku Channel, it won almost universal acclaim and a prime-time Emmy, while expanding Yankovic’s universe yet again.
“His longevity is a testament to his ability to be himself and stick to what his taste is, because it’s so specific,” Radcliffe says. (“Bob” is his favorite Yankovic track, and he took the opportunity on set to ask his hero how he came up with all the palindromes.) “He threads a really hard-to-thread needle between wholesome fun and something … genuinely deranged and very, very strange. And in a way that is not affected.” At a time when the culture values authenticity above all else, Yankovic is a walking example of it — never not himself.
Unwittingly proving the point, Yankovic gasps in glee as our lunch ends. “Mochi doughnuts!” He shows me a photo his wife has just texted him: a box of the treats for dessert later. Somewhat sheepishly, he explains the occasion: “Eric Idle is coming over for dinner tonight. That’s my big flex for today.”
Later that afternoon, Yankovic meets me in a park near Coldwater Canyon called Tree People. He looks a little like a more aged version of his faux-Indiana Jones in UHF: Hawaiian shirt (a Goodwill buy), sensible shoes, safari hat shielding the waning sun.
“I’m gearing up for a big tour, so I’m mostly just making sure I don’t have a heart attack onstage or pass out or something,” he says of the walks he takes in spots like this. “I think I’ve lost 20 pounds in the past couple months just because I’m not, like, eating junk food at midnight anymore.”
Yankovic’s last tour outing didn’t require much of a physical regimen. In 2022 and 2023, he took to smaller venues for The Unfortunate Return of the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour, a follow-up to the first Vanity Tour in 2018. The idea, he recalls, occurred to him when “I was putting on my ‘Fat’ suit for the thousandth time and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it just be nice to like, go out onstage and play the songs, sit on a stool and have an intimate evening with fans?’ ”
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So Yankovic eschewed the usual production level of his tours — costumes, wigs, the parody hits — for a concept, his agent Goodman says, that the musician himself wasn’t entirely convinced would work. Instead, it allowed him to visit new, smaller major-market venues (Carnegie Hall, Tennessee’s The Caverns) and strengthen his presence in off-the-beaten-path markets (like, say, Huntsville, Ala.) while superserving his ride-or-die fans. When the concept returned in 2022, he played 162 Vanity shows globally (extending into the next year).
“I loved it, the band loved it, the people who showed up loved it, and it definitely scratched that itch,” Yankovic says. “And now,” with the Bigger and Weirder Tour, he’s back to “doing a show for everybody.”
For Bigger and Weirder, Yankovic is in self-described “overpreparer” mode, the hyper-organized creative core of his team. “I came up with the setlist a year ago. I gave the band” — three of whom, as of our meeting, he has yet to meet — “their marching orders and said, ‘Here’s the setlist, here’s your charts, here’s the demos, here are the rehearsal days.’ ” He personally chooses and edits all the show’s video content — clips of Weird Al in Pop Culture (say, on The Simpsons or 30 Rock) over the years that will play between songs and give him and the band time for the most frantic element of the show, which the audience never sees.
“We have stage props, wigs, a lot of costume changes, and a big portion of what we need is a quick-change area behind the scenes onstage, usually 40 by 20 feet,” says Melissa King, his tour manager of nearly 20 years. On Bigger and Weirder, Yankovic will do 20 costume changes, give or take a jacket or hat; his band members will do nine; and all will occur in 45 seconds maximum.
That backstage planning ensures that in front of the audience, the man who has spent his career parodying rock and pop stars is free to embody one himself. “When I speak to [talent] buyers and say, ‘Have you seen the show?,’ if there’s a pause, for sure I know the answer is no,” Goodman says. “Because if you’ve seen the show, it’s just an immediate ‘Yeah, of course, it’s incredible.’ ”
Onstage, Yankovic isn’t just physically “working his ass off,” as Samberg says. “As a vocalist, he’s f–king incredible,” Radcliffe marvels. “He has this amazing, clear tone. His range is so impressive — he does things to his voice that, as somebody who sings a bit in musicals sometimes, if I tried that I’d hurt myself.”
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Despite the “bigger” aspects of this tour — like how it will use three trucks instead of the usual one — King is still one of just 11 people comprising the crew. “It’s very lean, but it works because we all work together,” she says. “Al’s a genuine, kind person, and because he is, that’s the way everyone in our camp is.” That ethos extends to both the fans who’ll attend (“There aren’t many arseholes who are Weird Al fans,” Radcliffe observes) and how Yankovic treats them: According to Goodman, he’s kept maximum ticket prices for Bigger and Weirder to $179.50 and has always refused to engage with platinum ticketing.
Right now, the tour is Yankovic’s focus. When he decided against renewing his Sony contract, Levey says, they tested the waters with “very limited outreach” to a mix of indie and major labels. “And we got great offers and I brought those offers to him, and he thought about it and said, ‘I’m really loving this feeling of not being under contract to anybody … Please tell these people how appreciative I am of their generous offers and we’re just not going to accept any of them.’ ”
He’s now independent in the truest sense: He has an imprint, Way Moby, that’s technically now his label, but he describes it more as existing for theoretical recording purposes. He figures he’ll put out a single here and there, contribute to soundtracks if he’s asked and, as always, remain open to what may come — like making a surprise appearance last November to duet with Will Forte on Chappell Roan’s “Hot To Go!” at a charity event or developing a Broadway Weird Al jukebox musical that he says is in the very earliest creative stages, a “bucket list” project.
“When [he had] the No. 1 album in the country, that was such a triumphant moment. I remember us celebrating,” Samberg recalls. “It just shows you — I don’t think anyone else will really touch that space. It’s his space. No one is going to say, ‘I’m going to do what Al does,’ ’cause good luck. He owns that until he doesn’t want to do it anymore.”
The world, Yankovic knows, is also not the same as when he first became famous. “I got a record deal, I got on MTV, and I kind of had the market to myself,” he reflects. “Now the playing field has been so leveled that anybody can upload their material to YouTube or various portals like that. And if the stuff is good, chances are people will eventually see it. I’d like to think that if I was coming up now, I’d still do OK, but it would just be more of a challenge.”
It’s a generous sentiment, a reminder that, as Miranda puts it, one of Yankovic’s many talents is also “reading the room.” But in its humility, it’s also a reminder that, flooded as the market may now be with funny people on the internet, none of them, still, are doing it like Weird Al: the 65-year-old who once thought he’d play accordion at weddings and Italian restaurants, who’s about to make his Madison Square Garden debut.
This story appears in the June 7, 2025, of Billboard.
“Am I the first person to feel strange calling you ‘weird’?” John Mayer — bespectacled, grinning goofily, very much nerding out — is sitting across from “Weird Al” Yankovic, interviewing the Hawaiian shirt-clad parody music king, who is sitting across from him for his SiriusXM show, How’s Life With John Mayer. “You can call me […]
TikTok is a time machine. Hearing his songs on the app, Khalid finds himself in an earlier era.
Last February, the Billboard Hot 100-topping R&B and pop artist noticed one of his early hits was resurfacing. “Location” — which peaked at No. 16 in 2017 — was connecting with listeners all over again, who were singing along to the yearning lyrics about love in the digital age with a fresh perspective.
“It’s a whole new society, a whole new age of young adults who are experiencing this song,” Khalid says. “I lived it, and I performed it, but to see people who are now the age I was then listening to that song, it’s surreal, funny and nostalgic. It makes me live vicariously through that experience. I’m like, wow, there’s a reason why it resonates with them: because that was real.”
When he first wrote the song, Khalid was a teenager himself. A 17-year-old living in El Paso, Texas, he uploaded the track to SoundCloud without ever considering the impact the now-diamond-certified song might one day have on young lovelorn listeners a decade later.
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“Turning 27 this year came with a lot of reflection on life,” he says. “I started to look back at where I was when I was 17. To be able to be in my career for as long as I have, to still have an impact, even to see things going viral on TikTok — I feel like that version of me 10 years ago would be so proud and so happy. And if you had told him all of [what would happen in the next 10 years]?” he says with a chuckle. “He wouldn’t have had a clue.”
Now fully cemented as an in-demand collaborator, global arena artist and reliably charting hit-maker, Khalid is ready to rediscover the innocent version of himself that he was before he found success.
He wants to be the most open and honest version of himself — not necessarily the serious and emotional version Khalid spent years of his life pouring into 2024’s Sincere, but one that is able to relax because he has fully embraced his own identity.
“Not just my moody side, but the fun side,” he says. “The flirty side.”
Though Sincere was a deeply personal album, there was one part of himself Khalid hadn’t quite revealed yet.
In November 2024, Khalid was outed by an ex-boyfriend. Though it’s not how he wanted to share that part of his identity with his fans, with a simple rainbow emoji he confirmed that he is gay and “not ashamed of [his] sexuality.’”
He was never hiding anything, he says, just protecting that part of his privacy. Stepping back onstage and seeing the reaction from his fans reaffirmed his open and honest approach to music.
“I had a moment where I walked out and I looked into the crowd, and I’m singing these songs that — I was obviously gay when I wrote them, but the world may not have known,” he recounts. “Everybody is singing them the same way they were before I was outed! So [that shows me] none of my fans care about my sexual preferences. I think they care about our mutual respect for music.”
Blue Marble shirt, Bonnie & Clyde glasses.
Joelle Grace Taylor
He realized he didn’t have to keep finding ways to protect his privacy. It was a liberating experience, he says, seeing that very little had changed.
“Finding that freedom comes from knowing I can just be myself and still be embraced and appreciated,” he says. “That doesn’t change because the world finds out I’m gay. Because I don’t change because the world finds out I’m gay.”
Though artists express themselves through their music, the songs live their own lives. Once they’re out in the world, fans can project their own feelings and experiences onto them. In some ways, the music belongs to the listener as much as the artist.
After he came out, a fan pointed out that his 2022 song “Satellite” was already “an LGBTQ anthem.” In addition, “Better” has been used as a first dance at multiple weddings, and the 2017 song “Young Dumb & Broke” has become a staple at graduations. As listeners find meaning in the music, it takes on its own dimensions.
“When you’re an artist, you carry a responsibility,” Khalid says. “People will live to your music, people will die to your music, people will give birth, people will be reborn. There’s so much emotion involved in the exchange of music from artists to listeners.”
He uses “Young Dumb & Broke” as an example. The song’s universal experience of the feeling of invincibility of life in your teenage years has persisted from one generation to the next, which is something he would not have predicted.
“ ‘Young Dumb & Broke’ lasting as long as it has now would have never been anything I imagined, because when I made that song, I was so presently focused on being young, dumb and broke,” he says. “When I was singing that song at 19, I probably would have told you that I couldn’t wait to stop singing that song. Now, I love it.”
Khalid says he wants to inspire young Black men to be comfortable being open about their sexuality, but he doesn’t see the music as appealing to any specific kind of listener because of the identity of the person making it.
“Music is subjective,” he says. “If you place yourself in an experience, we can relate to people all across the board. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay, it doesn’t matter if you’re straight. We all have feelings and we all have emotions.”
Khalid is a major star of the streaming era. He has multiple songs in Spotify’s Billions Club (tracks with 1 billion streams), including “Location,” “Young Dumb & Broke” and “Lovely,” his collaboration with Billie Eilish. At his 2019 streaming peak, he spent some time as the most popular artist on the platform.
When he first started, though, those platforms were barely on his radar. Instead, he uploaded his first songs to SoundCloud, the streaming site where users once shared their own music and mixtapes — a popular platform for new musicians. There was very little thought to strategy or rollout.
“Naturally, that led to other apps like YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music and so on. But that’s where it all started,” he recalls. “I remember being on the phone with a friend, like, ‘I’m about to upload my song to the internet.’ It felt so carefree back then — just making songs with my friends and throwing them online. Nobody could have imagined what streaming would become today.”
Though he couldn’t have predicted it, Khalid was uniquely positioned for the streaming era. He’s often categorized as an R&B singer, but he has a genre fluidity that has landed him on a diverse number of Billboard charts: Adult Contemporary, Latin, Rock & Alternative, Rap, Dance. He has a song for every playlist.
As a child, Khalid’s parents were in the Army and he often found himself moving around. He spent six years living in Germany when he was young, then spent some of his formative teen years from eighth grade until just before his senior year in upstate New York, just 20 minutes from the Canadian border.
“Being a military kid, I was like a sponge, just soaking in all the cultures around me,” he recounts. “When I was in northern New York, I got introduced to American folk music, which became a big part of my foundation as an artist and really shaped my songwriting. Then living in Germany exposed me to pop music from a different perspective. And coming from the South, R&B is definitely at my core. So all these different shades of music come together to make who I am.”
PDF top, pants and shoes; Gentle Monster glasses, Magdelena necklace, Rolex watch.
Joelle Grace Taylor
He’d moved to El Paso by the time he released his breakout 2017 debut album, American Teen, but it was inspired by his experiences growing up both there and at Fort Drum, just outside of Watertown, N.Y. Like so many other teenagers growing up outside of a major city, he spent a lot of time bored or partying — and dabbling in music.
“A lot of the stories that ended up inspiring American Teen came from that time in my life,” he recalls. “It was cold and kind of bleak, with not a whole lot to do — but there were definitely a lot of parties. At the time, it was fun and wild. Looking back now as an adult, I’m like, ‘Why did you get yourself into some of those situations?’ But honestly, it was the perfect setting for teenage angst — just growing up, facing challenges and mentally taking notes.”
His mother was restationed to El Paso before his senior year of high school, and he decided to go with her. Lonely and separated from his friends, he began writing songs and uploading them online. At the time, Right Hand Co.’s Courtney Stewart was managing a number of producers when he was introduced to Khalid through mutual friends on Twitter and heard some of his SoundCloud demos.
“He didn’t know it at the time, but he was writing a generational album in American Teen,” Stewart says. “As soon as I heard that voice and those lyrics, I was like, ‘This is incredible.’ It was something I had never heard before. His tone, the youthfulness of the lyrics and just how it made me feel. So I got on a plane and went and met with him.” (Khalid’s management team now includes Stewart, Mame Diagne, Jordan Holly and Relvyn Lopez at Right Hand.)
Other artists and producers have heard the same thing in his music. His ability to adapt to different sounds and his breadth of universal experiences has made him an ideal collaborator for everyone from J Balvin to Marshmello to Logic to Halsey.
Growing up near the Canadian border may also have endeared him to artists from the country. He’s collaborated with a number of Canadian artists, including Majid Jordan, Tate McRae, Shawn Mendes, Alessia Cara and Justin Bieber. He’s also made a big impact in the country, with 40 songs charting on the Billboard Canadian Hot 100.
Khalid says he loves collaborating, which brings the best attributes of two sounds together. Having another voice in the room can also let him get out of his own head, he says, and recognize when a song is a hit.
Most importantly, he’s sure enough in his own voice that no matter the genre he’s working in or the artist he’s performing with, he’s still recognizably Khalid.
“I think not losing sight and just trusting my voice has led me to be in any sound comfortably because I get to pull up as myself,” he says. “When you feel yourself on a track, you can’t fake it. It’s real.”
Being rather private, Khalid worries he’s created an impression of himself as an introverted person. Now, he’s ready to bust that myth.
“I’m actually extremely extroverted,” he says. “I love to socialize, I love to hang out, I love to see new things and meet new people. I mean, my [2019] album was called Free Spirit, but I really do believe I am one. I made that album only to go into hiding afterward. I don’t feel like that’s very much freedom. But now, I feel like I do have my freedom.”
Embracing his full self has brought him back to the carefree headspace of his SoundCloud days — but with the experience and maturity of an established music career.
“I started off just having fun and when I gained a career, I started to take myself a little too seriously,” he admits. “I had my fair share of time to be serious. Now I don’t have a care in the world. I can just have fun.”
In a recently posted TikTok clip, Khalid is vibing to a snippet of an unreleased song on the streets of Manhattan. In a black hoodie and throwback raver pants and holding a black handbag, he dances along to a track that blends his signature mellow, wise-beyond-his-years vocals with a sound that evokes decadent early-2000s pop by Britney Spears or The Pussycat Dolls. Grinning ear to ear, he stops to take a quick photo with a fan. It takes only 15 seconds to see the comfort and excitement of his new chapter.
“My new era of music feels like I’m finally ready to be the artist I’ve always dreamt of being,” he says. “It goes back to the regressions of when I was a child — imagining myself and thinking, ‘I want to be this artist one day.’ Now I feel like I have the confidence to finally be that artist.”
Libertine shirt, ERL pants, Adidas shoes, Magdelena rings.
