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Maren Morris downs a shot of tequila with a wince. “I love that we’re taking shots and then saying, ‘OK, so let’s talk about Ron DeSantis,’ ” Morris says with a chuckle. The four drag luminaries she’s toasting with today — Eureka O’Hara, Landon Cider, Sasha Colby and Symone — grimace through their own post-shot puckers […]
Jelly Roll will perform at Billboard‘s inaugural Billboard Country Live in Concert event in Nashville on June 6.
In January 1999, one month after he turned 14, Jason DeFord was baptized by full immersion at Whitsitt Chapel Baptist Church in Antioch, Tenn. By the end of that year, he was incarcerated for the first, but not the last, time. For the next decade, DeFord cycled in and out of juvenile and then adult correctional facilities for crimes ranging from aggravated robbery to drug dealing.
“I got baptized in here some 20 years ago and have since done nothing but go to prison, treat a bunch of people wrong, make a lot of mistakes in life, turn it around, [then] go on to be a f–king multimillionaire and help as many people as I possibly can,” says DeFord today, a hint of awe in his voice as he sits in a red upholstered pew at Whitsitt Chapel. The 38-year-old — now better known as the inspirational, tattoo-covered artist Jelly Roll — recently returned to the church for the first time in decades. “It’s the f–king wildest story ever to me — maybe because I’m the one f–king in the middle of it — but that sh-t’s crazy.”
Jelly (whose mother christened him with the nickname when he was little) has risen from the streets of Antioch to the upper reaches of Billboard’s rap, rock and now country charts, and even played the revered Grand Ole Opry. But he still struggles to reconcile that hopeless past with his prosperous present and seemingly limitless future. On the gut-wrenchingly raw Whitsitt Chapel, out June 2 on Bailee & Buddy/Stoney Creek Records/BMG, Jelly relives his search for refuge and redemption in a world where sinners outnumber saints and hell often feels closer than heaven. As he sings on “Save Me”: “I’m a lost cause/Baby don’t waste your time on me/I’m so damaged beyond repair/Life has shattered my hopes and dreams.”
“That’s what country is, anyway, right? Three chords and the solid truth,” says Jelly, paraphrasing legendary songwriter Howard Harlan’s oft-quoted description of a good country song.
Much of Jelly’s own truth is written in ink on his face. There’s a heart with a lock, a rose, three crosses and a tear drop. There’s his 7-year-old son Noah’s name. His hair has grown over his 15-year-old daughter Bailee’s name, but it’s there, too. On his left cheek, there’s an apple core, an homage to some of his die-hard fans who called themselves the Bad Apples. Emblazoned across his forehead, Jelly’s latest tattoo describes who he is now: “Music Man.”
Music was his way out — it just took him decades to get here. He wrote his first rap when he was 9 or 10, and by the time he was in eighth grade, he was passing out mixtapes of his music in the high school parking lot. “There was a place in Antioch that would let us cut demos for like 30 bucks an hour,” he says. “We had a dude who had a rolling keyboard and he’d make beats.”
Nahmias jacket, RCSLA t-shirt, Rolex watch.
Eric Ryan Anderson
But his love of music couldn’t keep him out of trouble. Everyone around him had a hustle — even his father, who ran a wholesale meat business, was a bookie on the side — and he wanted one of his own. “As f–ked up as this may sound, there were drug dealers and drug users,” he says. “I wanted to be the guy getting money, not the guy losing it.”
Jelly has three older half-siblings, but he’s the only child from his parents’ union, which he says was his father’s fifth or sixth. His parents divorced when he was 13, and Jelly felt responsible for his mother, who suffered from mental health and substance abuse issues. “I told my dad before he died [in 2019], ‘I wonder, if I’d have moved in with you when you divorced, if I’d have went to Vanderbilt [University] or something.’ But I felt this need to take care of my mother back then. I think that’s what really did it, too,” he adds, in terms of why he turned to crime. “When he left, I was like, ‘Somebody’s got to do what he was doing, at least trying to figure out some money.’ ”
Still, he never abandoned music entirely. Customers who bought quarter ounces of cocaine also got a free mixtape of his raps. “I always knew that the music was my only chance because I knew [from] the way that people in the community responded to it that it could be big,” he says.
Jelly says when he was 16, he was arrested for aggravated robbery and charged as an adult. “I never want to overlook the fact that it was a heinous crime,” he says, his voice still filled with remorse. “This is a grown man looking back at a 16-year-old kid that made the worst decision that he could have made in life and people could have got hurt and, by the grace of God, thankfully, nobody did.”
But he’s also bitter that at such a young age the judicial system offered him little chance at rehabilitation. “They were talking about giving me more time than I’d been alive,” he says of a potential 20-year sentence. (He ultimately served over a year for the charge, followed by more than seven years’ probation.) “I hadn’t hit my last growth spurt. I was charged as an adult years before I could buy a beer, lease an apartment, get a pack of cigarettes … I feel like the justice system at that point kind of parked me on my only set path.”
Tennessee has a zero-tolerance policy for violent offenders, so that one charge is still on his record — and has very real repercussions. Jelly, an avid golfer, tried to buy a house in a community with its own course not long ago and was rejected. “Imagine changing your life in such a way that you can afford the kind of house in this community I was looking at,” he says. “My money was welcome, but I wasn’t, all because of something I did [almost] 24 years ago.”
Jelly can’t vote, or volunteer at most nonprofits, or own a firearm. Until recently, he couldn’t get a passport, which limited his ability to tour abroad. “The trick is when America finally says, ‘We’ll let you leave,’ the amount of countries that won’t let you come in … We had to cancel my London debut show.”
That cancellation is one of the few roadblocks that Jelly has faced recently. But after years of struggling, he’s finally knocking down the doors that once seemed closed. He’s writing with Miranda Lambert and Ashley McBryde, the latter of whom will open for him in select cities on his 44-date North American arena tour later this summer. Drake responds to his Instagram posts, and Garth Brooks, the artist he has seen most in concert, greeted him with a massive bear hug when they met in May at the Academy of Country Music Awards. In May 2022, he topped Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart with “Dead Man Walking,” only to reach the summit of the Country Airplay chart seven months later with “Son of a Sinner.” Starting in 2022, he spent a record-setting 28 weeks at No. 1 on the Emerging Artists chart, which ranks the most popular developing acts in all genres.
But a difficult truth follows him: As he sings on “Unlive,” a Whitsitt Chapel track featuring rapper Yelawolf and co-written with McBryde, “you can’t unlive where you’re from.”
It’s April 20 — the widely recognized day of celebration for cannabis enthusiasts — and by the smell of it, Jelly Roll has already partaken by the time he arrives at the Grand Ole Opry, where Billboard first meets him. “As I walked in here, my publicist was a little worried about it, and I said, ‘Let me tell you something: I’m as high as I can be every time you’ve ever seen me,’ ” Jelly admits with a shrug. “The day doesn’t change that.”
As it is for so many country artists, the Grand Ole Opry was “holy ground” to Jelly even before he made his debut there in November 2021. After being released from jail in 2009 — while still wearing an ankle bracelet — he scraped together the money to see Craig Morgan there; while in jail, Jelly would play his 2002 hit “Almost Home” endlessly. He cried as Morgan played the song at the Opry, thinking, “’That’s what I want to do. I want to make people feel the way this makes me feel.’”
Several times during the day, Jelly steps outside to smoke a joint. He says it’s “better than Xanax” for his mental health and anxiety (he’s launched his own cannabis line, Bad Apple). He has cut down somewhat on his drinking and stopped taking the other harmful drugs “that really had a hold of my life,” including cocaine, pain pills and codeine. But those substances still have a hold on people from his past. “Unfortunately, my friends in Antioch haven’t quit dying from fentanyl or are getting locked up or still doing time. I’m still accepting collect calls to this day.” He estimates he has been to funerals for 30 friends who have died, mainly from drugs.
At April’s CMT Awards, Jelly won all three categories for which he was nominated. But the week was bittersweet. “I’d just had a friend overdose on fentanyl. I missed his funeral because I was camera blocking [for the awards telecast],” he says.
That’s Jelly’s life now. Though he lives on the other side of Nashville from where he grew up, part of him remains firmly planted in Antioch, while another part has Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on speed dial, sits courtside at a Los Angeles Lakers playoff game in the same row as Adele and proudly shows off his latest chain, with a pendant that reads “Son of a Sinner” in diamonds. After Jelly’s song of the same title became his first No. 1 on Country Airplay, he went to the Icebox in Atlanta — “Where all the rappers like Lil Baby go,” he says — and had identical chains made for him and his co-writers ERNEST and David Ray Stevens.
“New playground, new playmates,” he says of his life today. “I live in a totally different space. But I’m always conscious of keeping in touch with where I’m from. My heart is to help,” he says of his old Antioch connections, even as he admits he has had to cut off old buddies still living what he calls “a certain life. They know I love them, but I can’t afford to risk being on the phone with you and [it] sounds like I’m involved in something I’m not involved with. I might not talk to you, but I’m still bonding you out.” To make a clean break, Jelly recently got rid of his cellphone for several months. Only a handful of people have his new number.
At 23, while incarcerated for drug dealing, Jelly “all but gave up,” he says. “I was like, ‘I’m going to die in prison or young.’ ” Then he experienced what he calls his “road to Damascus” moment. “May 22, 2008. A guard knocks on my cell door midafternoon during lockdown,” Jelly recalls. “He goes, ‘You had a kid today.’ I’ve never had nothing in life that urged me in the moment to know that I had to do something different. I have to figure this out right now.”
Jelly knew when he went to jail that a woman he had been seeing was pregnant, but he says impending fatherhood had just felt like another mistake in a litany of bad decisions. “I was just irritated by it,” he says. “Like, ‘I’ve really f–ked up now.’ ” But Bailee’s birth inspired him to change. He was granted a transfer from the violent offenders unit to the education unit and started studying for his GED — which, much to his surprise, he passed on his first try. “I spent less than 60 to 70 days in high school. I thought I was a real dumbass. I thought I was learning disabled,” he says. “I walked in there and smacked that b-tch out of the park.”
Once released, he met his daughter on her second birthday. “I grilled hamburgers and hot dogs,” he says. Bailee now lives with him and his wife, Bunnie, whom he married in 2016, and he frequently sees Noah (nicknamed Buddy), who is from another relationship. He calls Bunnie, a former sex worker who now hosts the popular Dumb Blonde podcast, “a beacon of change in my life. You’re talking about a woman that came in and took a child that was soon to be born and a child that [we were] soon to have full custody of,” he says. “I would have never got custody of my daughter without her. I wouldn’t have had the stability or the money.”
After his release, Jelly turned to making rap music his career, independently releasing albums, posting music on YouTube and taking any gig he could. From 2010 to 2015, he lived in an old van, driving wherever there was work. “I’d go to Columbus [Ohio] and do $50 features; I’d sell rap verses for 50 bucks,” he says. “I was so petrified of sitting idle because I was afraid I would resort back to what I felt like I knew.”
Jelly Roll photographed on April 21, 2023 at Warren Studios in Nashville.
Eric Ryan Anderson
Though Jelly’s breakthrough on the country charts is recent, he first appeared on Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart in 2011 with the independently released Strictly Business, a collaborative album with Nashville rapper Haystak. It peaked at No. 67 — which is news to him today: “That makes me want to call my distributor and get an audit on the money,” he says with a laugh.
Over the next five years, Jelly — who taught himself the ins and outs of the music business through various partnerships with artists and both local and national distributors — charted several more albums, including 2013’s No Filter with Lil Wyte, which reached No. 17 on Top Rap Albums. He collaborated with friend Struggle Jennings on the Waylon & Willie series of four rap albums, released between 2017 and 2020, and named after Jennings’ step-grandfather Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson. The volumes addressed bleak topics including substance abuse and the inescapable weight of a troubled past (even in the pursuit of love, as on the RIAA gold-certified single “Fall in the Fall”).
On such efforts, Jelly would occasionally sing, though he says he was “petrified” to do so for an entire track. But some liquid courage, karaoke and Bob Seger helped him find his voice. He bursts into “Old Time Rock & Roll”: “Risky Business, baby,” he says, name-checking the 1983 movie that gave Seger’s tune a new life. “Any time that song comes on, I’m single for three minutes. I’m Elvis Presley. I’m singing to women. It just brings it out of me.”
“There are not many artists out there that can rap like he does and then switch over to a soulful, melodic voice that’s instantly recognizable,” says fellow country artist and longtime friend Brantley Gilbert, who co-wrote and sings with Jelly on Whitsitt Chapel’s “Behind Bars.” “He is one of the most genuine people you’ll ever meet. He’s consistently himself and never changes who he is to fit a certain mold. He has had some experiences that not many artists in this genre can say they’ve had, so he’s able to open up a whole new world to folks while making those experiences relatable to everyone.”
“Save Me” — which initially appeared on Jelly’s 2020 independent album, Self-Medicated, and which he remade with Lainey Wilson for Whitsitt Chapel — was one of the first songs Jelly released as a singer with no rapping. “We were all in the darkest place we’d been in a long time when I wrote that song in May 2020. They were still spraying boxes with Lysol,” he says. “We were all living with our own thoughts a little more than we’re used to.”
His ability to capture the truth of the moment earned Wilson’s respect. “Jelly goes against the grain and is 100% himself 100% of the time,” she says. “I love that about him as a human and an artist.” After “Save Me” came out, labels started calling. “My heart was to do country music and be respected on these streets that I grew up on,” says Jelly, who is now managed by John Meneilly. (Jonathan Craig serves as his day-to-day manager.) “And [BMG Nashville president Jon] Loba got it. But he also knew that I wasn’t willing to give up control of my masters or my creativity, so he was open to us working out a deal that could reflect that. It’s a fair partnership.”
After Stoney Creek vp of promotion Adrian Michaels heard Jelly, he brought him to the attention of Loba, who Googled the video for “Save Me” and was sold. “I saw that pain, vulnerability, that tenderness,” Loba says. “I loved his vocal. I just said, ‘That’s a country song.’ I was convinced his storytelling, his heart and his brand would be accepted by our genre.”
Though Whitsitt Chapel, produced primarily by Grammy nominee Zach Crowell, bears the name and likeness of its namesake rural, red brick church, Jelly made the project for people like himself who may not find salvation on Sunday morning. As he professes on current single “Need a Prayer,” “I only pray when I ain’t got a prayer.”
“You’ll never see a man pray harder than as soon as sh-t gets tight,” he says. “I was like, ‘What if worship music is honest? What would my worship song sound like to God?’ ”
History has a funny way of repeating itself. Just as Jelly’s friends took him to church when he was 14, last year, Bailee started attending a small church with her friends and asked Jelly to accompany her — an experience that started him on his path back to Whitsitt Chapel.
“That little back-road church reminded me so much of this little church, and it was just so nostalgic because Bailee’s getting in trouble [and] smoking weed,” he says. “She’s going through what 15-year-olds go through. I went through all that. I know that’s whenever my life turned all the way worse. It started bringing up all these emotions of me being right there on that fence.”
Nahmias jacket, RCSLA t-shirt, Jason of Beverly Hills necklace, Icebox necklace.
Eric Ryan Anderson
After going to church with Bailee, Jelly ditched all but two of the 70 songs he had written for a new project and started on what would become Whitsitt Chapel, which also addresses the hypocrisy he has witnessed from so-called Christians questioning his faith (particularly on songs like “Nail Me”).
“I never thought that I would do something in life that would make people care to hear my story. So equally, I never thought that my story would ever be judged,” he says. “It just hurt my spirit. It was all happening while I’m cooking this album. I had Christian people that were judging my faith based on my use of language or marijuana or drinking references. I just felt really cornered, and it felt really judgy.”
Loba has a message for any Christians who question Jelly’s faith: “I say to them, ‘He will bring more people to God than 95% of the pastors.’ He is touching an audience that has felt invisible [and] dismissed. On the album, there’s hope that you can be redeemed.”
So for Jelly, Whitsitt Chapel is a starting point, not a destination. “Whitsitt Chapel planted the seed of a higher power. We were a very Southern family, so [we did] a lot of praying before dinner and stuff, but it was the first time I feel like I separated from the house and found God by myself,” he says. “So if I was going to make an album that felt so faith-based, I wanted it to reflect where I felt like it started. I think we’re all trying to wash away something.”
Jelly Roll loves Winnie the Pooh. He also loves Jim Croce and James Taylor. And he especially loves the 1993 Disney movie Cool Runnings, loosely based on the story of the 1988 Jamaican Olympic bobsled team. “Because 98% of every problem in my life I caused, but one or two times in my life the most heartbreaking things I dealt with was the stuff I didn’t cause,” he explains. “Cool Runnings made me understand that sometimes you can do everything right and the sled still breaks. I needed that for the sh-t I went through in life.”
To sort through the wreckage of his past, he’s in intensive therapy, including “timelining” his life. He’s up to age 12. Therapy “is one of the first things I splurged real resources on,” he says. “I found [trauma] to be like one of the roots of probably my obesity, right? This isn’t a lack of discipline. I run a multimillion-dollar business. I work 12, 15, 18 hours a day. I’m a disciplined man. It’s got to be something else.”
As he fights to “overcome some of these demons that I’ve had to deal with,” he’s also taking Bailee to therapy. “Her father was in jail when she was born. Her mother ended up hooked on heroin and disappeared,” he says. “I’m watching the cycle still continue. That’s another reason it’s so easy to draw inspiration from my songs: I’m still watching it in real time.”
He looks at his life in two acts now: Act 1 is the Jelly who used to do bad things; Act 2 is the Jelly of today. “I was a less-than-desirable human in that era,” he says of the time before Bailee was born. “I like to separate myself from that guy like two different people now because it’s the way I’ve made peace with that. And that dude wasn’t a good dude, man.”
Asked if he believes God has forgiven him, Jelly goes silent and tears up. After a long pause, he says, “I think God forgave me way faster than I forgave myself.” As for what it will take for him to forgive himself? “Being a man of service. Trying to care about people.”
Nahmias jacket and pants, RCSLA t-shirt, Icebox chain and bracelet, Rolex watch, Kaws x Air Jordan sneakers.
Eric Ryan Anderson
In December, Jelly sold out Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena — an astonishing feat not just because he’s still a developing artist, but because the venue is just a little over a mile from where he turned 15, 16 and 17 as inmate No. 00364950 in Davidson County Juvenile Detention Center. (The run-up to the concert and Jelly’s compelling backstory are captured in the Hulu documentary Jelly Roll: Save Me, which premiered May 30.)
Jelly, who is booked by CAA’s Hunter Williams, donated all his money from the Bridgestone concert (over $400,000) to Impact Youth Outreach and other organizations to, among other things, build studios in that same juvenile detention center, and he has already pledged to help fund a studio in a new building opening at the center in five years.
“More than anything, I just want to try to help these kids” who are now incarcerated, says Jelly. He wants them to understand that he believes in them in the way he wishes someone, anyone, had believed in him when he was younger. He funds programs at the facility to teach kids Pro Tools and offer them classes with visiting producers and engineers. “Who knows where I’d be if they had a real education unit in juvenile at the time,” he says. “If they’d had a studio, if they’d had trade work and I was being inspired every day instead of being reprimanded.”
And his plans go far beyond the detention center. The day before this interview, he bid on a $4 million building in North Nashville that he wants to turn into a community center. Beyond music, helping at-risk kids may be Jelly’s true calling. “Whenever I’m done doing the circus of the music business and I want to leave the carnival and be a normal human, that’s what I’ll do,” he says.
For now, his own honesty and search for redemption are resonating with fans, who comment on his social media that his songs have saved their lives. “Who in life can say they really helped somebody in the darkest moment of their life that was fixing to kill themselves?” he says. “I look at that as something that inspires me to do more.”
He hears the same praise face-to-face. As he leaves Billboard’s photo shoot at an old paint factory, a worker rushes out to tell him that because of Jelly’s music, he’s approaching 18 months of sobriety. Jelly asks the exact date, not once but twice, and tells him he will be thinking of him on that day.
Fans also recognize him and want to party with him — an offer he happily accepts. During a video shoot the day before at Tin Roof, a bar he and his father used to frequent on Lower Broadway, some bros from Pennsylvania recognize him, and filming halts while Jelly joyously glad-hands and buys a round of tequila shots.
Bunnie calls the public smile that hides the pain so evident in Jelly’s songwriting “the Robin Williams effect,” referring to how the late comedian’s outward exuberance masked inner turmoil. “My wife is like, ‘[People] would never think that this lifetime of pain and carrying caskets and death and drug addiction and all this dark sh-t would come out of you if [they] just met you at a bar,’ ” he says.
But those who have listened to his music already feel a certain kinship with Jelly — and he has a message for them: “I want to be a guidepost of hope for people to know that losers can win. That who you were isn’t who you are.”
It’s a message he still tells himself. And as he moves forward, he wouldn’t mind if his good works brought him a pardon from Tennessee’s governor. “A pardon would change my whole life,” he says, then quickly adds that he would only accept it if it came with a change of policy for currently incarcerated youth. “Maybe we’re disciplining an age group that should be rehabilitated. I just want to have that conversation, and if it can end in a pardon, f–king let’s go.”
A pardon would mean having many of his rights restored — and should it happen, he may have to take a little joyride around a certain ritzy neighborhood that didn’t believe in second chances. “I’d love to move back to that neighborhood and ride around in my golf cart blaring gangster rap music, flipping people off,” he says with a wry chuckle. “I’m joking, but I’m not.”
This story will appear in the June 3, 2023, issue of Billboard.
At the beginning of 2021 — a year before she introduced herself to the world as Ice Spice, with her signature cinnamon curly afro — Isis Gaston wrapped her hair into two braids and tucked them underneath a silk scarf. Wearing a black lounge set, she smiled for the camera while a sample of Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” faded into the background and the hook of “Buss It,” rapper Erica Banks’ breakout 2020 single, started. The clip cut, and Gaston, now clad in a teal cut-out dress, dropped it low and twerked with her long, light brown locks cascading over her frame.
The viral video was just one of millions from the “Buss It” TikTok challenge, which helped Banks earn her first Billboard Hot 100 entry, a Travis Scott remix and a partnership with Warner Records in conjunction with her own label, 1501 Certified Entertainment. But for the then-21-year-old Gaston, who was just mustering the courage to record her own music, the TikTok trend and the way it boosted Banks’ career seemed like something she could achieve, too.
“It was so funny — I was already working on my first song ever that I was recording. I had already wrote little raps and sh-t before that, [but] it took me a lot to get to recording. I was halfway done with it when I did the ‘Buss It’ challenge. When I saw it going so viral, I was like, ‘Damn, imagine that was my song I was twerking to,’ ” she recalls today with a chuckle. “The next month, I put out my first song and took it from there.”
In March 2021, Ice Spice dropped her sharp-tongued debut single, “Bully Freestyle,” which was produced by RIOTUSA, whom she had met through a mutual friend while attending the State University of New York (SUNY) at Purchase. For the next year-and-a-half, Ice refined her craft — and in August 2022, she independently released “Munch (Feelin’ U)” and finally experienced the success she had always envisioned.
“Munch” — or, as Ice defined it, “somebody that’s really obsessed with you that’s just fiending to eat it” — immediately entered the pop culture lexicon. After delivering the deliciously cynical line “You thought I was feeling you,” Ice spends the song shooting down voracious admirers and envious haters alike with cutthroat bars that bounce off RIOTUSA’s menacing production. In the official music video, she smizes before flashing cameras, twerking once again — but this time while wearing a pale green tube top, denim booty shorts and neon orange nails that complement her now-famous ’fro. TikTok users devoured “Munch” (which has since accumulated 2.4 billion views on its hashtag); Drake played it on his SiriusXM channel, Sound 42; and the song quickly became the New York drill anthem of the summer. Audiences crowned Ice “the People’s Princess.”
“I saw all of my supporters being like, ‘She’s the People’s Princess! She’s Princess Diana!’ ” Ice remembers. “At first, I was confused. I was like, ‘Um, Princess Diana? Out of everybody?’ But [then] I was like, ‘F–k it, she’s iconic.’ ” And judging by the way Ice, now 23, commands the luxurious high-rise apartment at 432 Park Ave. — one of the tallest residential buildings in the world, where our conversation is happening — she’s now well aware of her sovereignty. She struts the hallway in cotton candy-toned regalia: a baby blue velvet cropped hoodie, MRDR BRVDO jeans with pink distressed patches and cloud-dyed Air Force 1s. Her omnipresent $100,000 chain featuring a diamond-encrusted cartoon rendering of her face hangs around her neck, and she frequently checks herself out in a metallic pink Balenciaga Le Cagole rhinestone-embossed purse with a heart-shaped mirror.
Alaïa bodysuit, Stuart Weitzman shoes, Le Vian jewelry.
Christian Cody
Last fall, about a month after the release of “Munch,” Ice signed a label deal with 10K Projects and Capitol Records. At the beginning of 2023, she treated her fans (collectively called the Spice Cabinet, individually known as Munchkins) to her debut EP, Like..?, a six-song set named for her signature interjection, which further flashed her lyrical vocabulary and expanded her drill sound. The project debuted in the top 10 of Billboard’s Top Rap Albums chart and the top 40 of the Billboard 200, while its Lil Tjay-assisted “Gangsta Boo” debuted at No. 82 on the Hot 100, marking Ice’s debut entry on the chart. When she joined forces with fellow online sensation PinkPantheress on “Boy’s a liar Pt. 2” in February, the track vaulted both artists to No. 3 on the Hot 100.
Like her memorable one-liners, Ice’s hits keep coming: In April, her idol, Nicki Minaj, hopped on the remix of Like..? track “Princess Diana,” which debuted at No. 4 on the Hot 100 and became the first No. 1 on Hot Rap Songs by two co-billed women in its 34-year history.
“The first time I met her, I knew she was special. I got that tingling feeling [I get] every time when you meet that [kind of] artist,” says Michelle Jubelirer, CEO/chair of Capitol Music Group. “I knew she was a global superstar in the making.”
But despite projecting confidence, Ice is still adjusting to the spotlight. And if she was once a bit shocked by the Princess Diana comparisons, she has lately come to understand the late icon’s plight a little better, as she’s increasingly faced her own share of alarming encounters with onlookers. When she performed at a New York Fashion Week afterparty in February, fans swarmed her by the DJ booth, prompting security to escort her offstage midperformance. Ice even had to push people off herself.
“I’m not going to lie: I was scared in that moment. I was kind of worried because we was a little outnumbered that night,” she confesses. But her tone swiftly shifts to gratitude: “But looking back, I was like, ‘This is really a blessing being able to just see how excited people are to see me perform.’ ”
Balancing exposure and privacy is tough for any rising artist and their team. Her manager, James Rosemond Jr., remembers hip-hop super-agent Cara Lewis (who now counts Ice as a client alongside the likes of Travis Scott and Eminem) and promoters blowing up his phone after the performance about what had happened, even though it never posed a threat to him, given the security measures they had in place.
“It’s been eight months since ‘Munch,’ and as anybody can see, it went from zero to 100 — real quick,” he says in April, nodding to the Drake song. He met Ice in March 2022 through his client Diablo, a DJ-producer who was working with her for the first time at New York recording studio Blast Off Productions. “Me and her manifested each other — I was looking for a female act, and she was looking for a manager,” he says. Rosemond, 30, now manages Ice, RIOTUSA and Diablo under Mastermind Artists, the management and label company that he started in 2019. But the last year has taught him that management isn’t just about discovering and developing great artists — it’s also about protecting them. And at this transitional stage in Ice’s career, where she falls somewhere between rising rap star and culture-shifting sensation, Rosemond is having “real conversations” with her about what’s happening while giving her the space to say no.
Jubelirer and 10K co-presidents Zach Friedman and Tony Talamo are betting on Ice to become the next “global superstar,” a term all three use independently. But as they root for her to take off — “It’s a rocket, and we’re just holding on,” Friedman says — she’s still finding her footing. “It’s been less than a year of me being famous, so it is definitely an adjustment,” she admits. As she aims to live up to the lofty title that industry patrons and fans have anointed her with while still protecting her peace and privacy, Ice is trying to enjoy the lightning-fast ride while steeling herself for all that comes with it.
Isis Gaston was born one of one.
Entering the world on Jan. 1, 2000, she was practically predestined to rule her generation. Growing up in the Bronx, she admits with a sigh, she found her birthday “annoying, [because] everybody else is just celebrating New Year’s, but it’s my birthday.” But long before she assumed any title, she knew how to set an example. Ice’s four younger siblings looked up to her, and in turn, she looked up to her father — an underground rapper.
“While I was growing up, I wasn’t like, ‘My father’s a rapper, so I’m going to be one, too,’ ” she says; still, “seeing somebody go to the studio and always hearing hip-hop music,” like New York heavyweights Jay-Z, 50 Cent and Wu-Tang Clan, planted the seeds for her career. And while she didn’t manifest becoming a rapper, “I did manifest being successful,” she says matter-of-factly. Ice credits her mother, along with Rhonda Byrne’s book The Secret, for teaching her about manifestation and the law of attraction when she was just 10 years old.
Miu Miu top and skirt, Stuart Weitzman shoes, Le Vian and Jennifer Fisher jewelry.
Christian Cody
It wasn’t until 2019, when fellow New Yorker Pop Smoke popped off, that Ice grew interested in drill music, the hip-hop subgenre characterized by nihilistic and realistic lyrics about the inescapable prevalence of violence in major cities, punctuated with gunplay-like production loaded with rattling hi-hats and ad-libs like “Brrrrrrrap!” and “Grrrrr!”
Drill originated on Chicago’s South Side in the early 2010s, defined by dark, slow tempos (borrowed from Atlanta trap music) and popularized by Chief Keef and Lil Durk, among others. Soon, the style traveled across the pond — and intermingled with grime, garage and road rap, molding U.K. drill. In Brooklyn, Bobby Shmurda and Rowdy Rebel started borrowing from Chicago drill’s sinister storytelling and injecting New York’s boisterous energy. They rapidly became hometown heroes: Both rappers scored label deals with Epic Records, and Shmurda’s smash “Hot N—a” landed in the top 10 of the Hot 100. Yet their promising come-ups — and New York drill’s emergence — stalled in December 2014, when Shmurda, Rebel and affiliates in the GS9 hip-hop collective were arrested on conspiracy to murder, weapons possession and reckless endangerment charges.
But within five years, the Brooklyn drill scene had a new figurehead: The 20-year-old Smoke, who lent his gruff yet suave voice to ominous 808 drum loops, courtesy of U.K. drill pioneer 808MeloBeats, for hits like “Welcome to the Party” and “Dior” that became street anthems. “I feel like Pop Smoke brought this new life back to it, and I was just obsessed,” Ice says of the rapper, who was murdered in February 2020. “He brought a lot of light into New York and definitely paved the way for a lot of current drill rappers.”
When Ice enrolled at SUNY Purchase, she pursued friendships with producers who could help her make her own mark in the drill scene. “I had a couple producer friends on campus that never would f–king send me a beat. And I’m like, ‘Hello?’ Nobody wanted to send me beats but RIOT,” she says of the producer — the son of WQHT (Hot 97) New York DJ/radio personality DJ Enuff — who became her go-to collaborator.
“Ice and RIOT are like Shaq and Kobe. You just don’t break it up. You let them do their thing, and they’re going to cook every night,” says 10K’s Talamo.
Alaïa playsuit, Stuart Weitzman shoes, Tiffany & Co. jewelry.
Christian Cody
The duo started off by sampling 2010s EDM hits like Zedd and Foxes’ “Clarity” and Martin Garrix and Bebe Rexha’s “In the Name of Love” to soften drill’s rough edges and contrast Ice’s low-pitched, laid-back voice with pitched-up, bubblegum pop melodies and flashes of tenderness in the lyrics.
“Back in 2021, there was a big wave of sample drill where they were sampling a whole bunch of popular tracks. But I like finding things that either I had a connection to or are abstract samples,” RIOT explains. “So with ‘No Clarity,’ I was going through old EDM tracks, and when I came across it, it was real nostalgic for me because I loved that song when I was 12. I’m like, ‘Yo, we have to do this one!’ I made the beat, and Ice loved it.”
They didn’t clear the sample for the song, released in November 2021, but Zedd let it fly — and even invited Ice to perform it with him at Miami’s Ultra Music Festival in March. “Funny thing about that performance is right before I went onstage, his laptop wasn’t working. And he said that that hadn’t happened to him in 10 years, so I was like, ‘It’s because I’m here,’ ” she recalls. “It ended up working out fine. I went out there and did ‘In Ha Mood’ and ‘No Clarity’ real quick, but the crowd was definitely a different crowd that I’ve never performed for.”
Zedd’s stage setup at Ultra, with smoke cannons firing right at the artist, also felt foreign to her. But as she has quickly graduated to large stages, one aspect of performance has been unexpectedly familiar: The athleticism required to run around them brings Ice back to her volleyball days in high school and college. “That’s what be motivating me to go into the gym. I’ve been working out lately, and I’m going to have that breath control down pat, feel me?” she says.
Christian Cody
While Ice adapts to bigger stages, Rosemond is adapting to higher-stakes management operations — and drawing from old inspirations. Those include one of his college textbooks, All You Need To Know About the Music Business by Donald S. Passman, or as Rosemond calls it, “the bible of the music business.” After dropping out of Bay State College in Boston, he flew to Los Angeles to meet with Passman, a family friend, to get advice that helped him start his previous management company, RoyalDream Projects, in 2012. And like Ice, he also learned a lot from his father, James “Jimmy Henchman” Rosemond, the famed hip-hop mogul who formerly managed The Game, Gucci Mane and many more.
“I was privy to a lot of his deal-making, and me being a sponge allowed me to soak up what contracts looked like and how to approach labels,” Rosemond says. Before labels began approaching Ice, he advised her, “ ‘Let’s do it ourselves first.’ Deals came to her — production deals, 360 deals — but they were deals that I knew could be better, and in order to get a better deal, you have to go out and do it yourself.”
While Ice’s team independently released her first two major singles, “Munch” and “Bikini Bottom,” Rosemond tapped Create Music Group for distribution, after the company partnered with WorldStar HipHop in 2021 to launch a full-service music distribution hub called WorldStar Distro. “I knew Create Music had sister companies — WorldStar, Genius, Datpiff. So my thing was, ‘Here’s this record. Here’s the vision,’ ” he explains. From there, Rosemond made sure those branches executed the vision: WorldStar HipHop premiered Ice’s music videos on its YouTube channel, while Genius had her perform “Munch” on its Open Mic series. “We was able to be very strategic with it — and it worked.”
Christian Cody
To help him and Ice navigate the ensuing label bidding war and emerge with the friendliest possible terms, including owning her masters and publishing, Rosemond hired his high school acquaintance Leon Morabia, an attorney from the newly merged powerhouse firm Mark Music and Media Law, P.C., which represents established acts from Billie Eilish to Guns N’ Roses. So when he and Ice arrived at a dinner meeting with 10K and Capitol at Nobu Malibu last summer, “We wasn’t freestyling it. We had that vision walking in,” he says.
“We were not going to leave that dinner until we knew that she would be an artist that we would be building together and working together until the day she stops performing,” says Jubelirer.
After Morabia made sure the most important terms were in her favor, Ice inked her deal with 10K and Capitol, which immediately began assisting in the promotion of singles to radio and clearing samples, like Diddy’s “I Need a Girl (Pt. 2)” on “Gangsta Boo,” released in January. But Ice had secured assurances that her creative autonomy would remain intact. “No one on the label side touches the music. There is no traditional A&R with her. No one’s picking beats, no one’s saying, ‘Do this, do that,’ ” Friedman says. “It’s all her. We’re on her schedule.”
Ice is currently prepping the deluxe version of Like..? for this summer; while that project keeps her in the discourse, she can complete and release her debut album at her own pace. But Ice and RIOTUSA are manifesting even bigger things ahead.
“I just want more accolades. I just want to put out more music,” she says, while RIOTUSA adds, “I want to have multiple No. 1s on the Hot 100 chart. I want to have Grammys. I just want to have timeless music.” He followed Ice’s lead by writing down his goals in a journal every day. “At first, I was a little skeptical, feel me? But I started writing, and literally every single thing we started writing just started coming true. I’m on my fourth book now.”
When asked about their dream collaboration, both Ice and RIOTUSA are at a loss for words because they’ve already checked it off with Minaj. Ice credits Rosemond for ultimately making her dream come true. “I’m listening to her. Who’s her idol? Nicki, Nicki, Nicki, Nicki, Nicki. My thing is, how do I get her Nicki? And it’s being persistent,” he says. “It took months to get Nicki on board, and it happened.” (In tandem with the remix’s release, Minaj announced on her Queen Radio show that she established a partnership with Ice under Minaj’s new label, Heavy On It, but Rosemond declined to comment on the matter; Minaj’s reps did not respond to a request for comment.)
The destined alliance between rap’s newly crowned princess and its long-reigning queen had been fulfilled, exciting the Spice Cabinet and the Barbz. At the end of the music video, Ice and Minaj exchange wide-eyed glances and grins à la Minaj and Beyoncé’s 2015 “Feeling Myself” video, which Rosemond says was unplanned but demonstrates their “chemistry. And that’s big with Ice. She wants to work with people who want to work with her, but she’s very selective. It has to make sense.”
PinkPantheress felt similarly about “Boy’s a liar” when her label, Warner Music UK, pressed her to release a remix. “People kept mentioning it to me for charting reasons, but I was not really interested,” she tells Billboard, adding that she was only open to the idea if it involved another up-and-coming female artist who piqued her interest.
“[Ice] was kind of perfect. I saw she was following me, so I casually asked her if she would be down to do a remix. And she was really up for it. It was just literally through the DMs,” Pink recalls, while Ice adds, “I knew our fans would really appreciate it because I saw them wanting us to collab for a little bit.” In a matter of days, Ice sent over her verse, and Pink’s engineer, Jonny Breakwell, added it to the track. The next week, the British singer-songwriter-producer jetted to New York to shoot the video, and she instantly connected with her Bronx-bred collaborator. “Being Gen Z ‘It’ girls of the internet era, I feel like we had a lot in common, even though we’re from two completely different places,” says Pink.
The professional camera crew captured the duo’s chemistry, but one fan’s surreptitiously filmed video started a “wildfire,” as Ice calls it, on TikTok one month before “Boy’s a liar Pt. 2” dropped. After she was caught off guard by the remix blasting throughout the neighborhood, the guerrilla filmer had spotted Ice and Pink filming in a nearby fire escape. She wasn’t the only local who observed the shoot. “There was a little group of boys down the block just screaming the whole time,” Ice recalls. “And then they was on the roof of the other building, watching us do the roof scenes, screaming. It was so funny.”
By now, Ice has learned that such distractions come with the territory — after all, as she raps in the song, “In the hood, I’m like Princess Diana” — and aren’t likely to let up any time soon. If she can laugh at them or make them work in her favor, she’ll eventually become the global superstar she intends to be. She’s already a face of two huge celebrity brands, Beyoncé’s Ivy Park and Kim Kardashian’s SKIMS. And she’s not shying away from the cameras any time soon: She’s also interested in acting. “But right now, I’m focused on music,” she says. “I’m still learning a lot, to be honest. But I’m so happy I’ve put in that time and that work — because it’s paying off.”
This story will appear in the May 13, 2023, issue of Billboard.
As Luke Combs’ booking agent, WME partner Aaron Tannenbaum, began plotting the European leg of the country star’s massive 2023 world tour, he encountered some promoters, in places like Hamburg, Germany, and Zurich, who were skeptical that a country act would sell tickets in Europe. So he repeated a kind of mantra to them: “You can always count on Luke Combs.”
He was right: Combs sold out all nine European dates he booked (and in substantially larger venues than initially planned). But the mantra — a testament not only to Combs’ dependability as a global touring act but to his rock-solid character — has plenty of less glamorous applications, too. Today, Combs, 33, is sitting in his manager’s Nashville office (a memento-filled monument to, well, him) at the beginning of our interview when a staffer pops her head in. “Nicole [Combs’ wife] needs your keys,” she says. The base of his 9-month-old son Tex’s car seat is in Combs’ truck, and Nicole needs to take the little guy to daycare.
“Do you know how to get it out?” Combs asks hesitantly. He starts to explain, then jumps up. “I’ll just do it, it takes literally one second.” He turns to me. “Baby stuff!”
You can always count on Luke Combs, and that is basically his brand. Without a shtick beyond “everyman,” Combs now fills stadiums nationwide as the Country Music Association’s reigning entertainer of the year, hot off his 15th No. 1 single on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart. Just your neighborhood consistent, reliable global sensation, on the cusp of bringing country to one of the widest non-pop crossover audiences it has ever had, signature red Solo cups in hand and fishing shirt on as he constructs a kind of fame that’s built to last.
“He’s just Luke, our friend, you know?” says his longtime tour manager, Ethan Strunk, who has been with Combs since he pitched himself to the singer when Combs walked into the Opry Mills Boot Barn in Nashville, where Strunk was working in 2016. “How little Luke has changed is baffling to me. There’s no way I could do it. He’s the same funny, funny guy. People say that all the time, but it’s just the truth.”
With his fourth studio album, Gettin’ Old (which arrived March 24 on River House Artists/Columbia Nashville), and an ongoing 16-country international tour, which kicked off at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on March 25, Combs not only wants to cement his place at the top of the country heap but prove that he can transcend it — without changing anything about himself or his music. As Combs puts it, “The music has the ability to reach a lot more people than the marketing behind it does. We have a little bit of something for everybody, and that’s the way I want it to be.”
HB shirt, Harbor Bay T-shirt, Joe’s Jeans jeans, M.L. Leddy boots, Miller Lite vintage hat.
Eric Ryan Anderson
The North Carolina native has colored outside of country’s lines from the start. He built buzz on social media and through local live shows before signing with Lynn Oliver-Cline of River House Artists, and though he did eventually do some conventional radio circuits and a little time in the opening-slot trenches, it only took him two years to go from playing 250-capacity clubs to headlining his first arena tour.
His team, which has remained more or less the same since he started touring heavily in 2015, attributes his massive and rapid success in part to the unorthodox approach it has taken from the beginning. “The strategy was, ‘Let’s play the rooms that a rock act would play,’ ” says his manager, Chris Kappy, of the early days. “We didn’t play all the honky-tonks like everybody else did.”
“We had the mentality that we needed to push the limits of what you would think a country artist can and would do,” adds Tannenbaum. He booked Combs outside the genre at festivals like Lollapalooza (2018), Bonnaroo (2017) and Austin City Limits (2017) — and out of the country (in the United Kingdom and Australia), building a foundation for the international draw he has now. “Everything we’re doing as far as expanding globally, it’s not really off-script,” Tannenbaum says. “It’s just a different iteration of the same thing we’ve been doing since the beginning.”
That thing is an ever-growing iteration of Combs, the singer-songwriter, which, to the outsider, hasn’t changed all that much from his 250-person club dates. “Even when we started out in arenas, we didn’t want any fire or any crazy stunts,” says Combs. “You just come out and do the show, right? I think sometimes that can be so powerful in and of itself.” (He adds with jovial self-deprecation: “I’m not running around like Kenny Chesney.”)
Combs started sprinkling in stadium dates when he resumed touring following the pandemic pause in 2021, starting with Kidd Brewer Stadium at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C., his would-be alma mater had music not come calling. Some initial trial and error was necessary because no one on his team had ever been part of a stadium tour.
“We always wanted the show to be about the music and to feel intimate somehow — which is a mega challenge in a stadium,” says Combs. “How do you entertain that many people? How do you make it an experience worth coming back to? There are people traveling a long way to come to this.”
Yet so far he has resisted the temptation to entice return customers by adding more eye-popping elements to his set. The show is Combs and seven band members, with strategically positioned video monitors to make everyone in the stadium feel as close to Combs as possible — and that’s basically it.
“I’m not flying in on a motorcycle,” he quips. “Live band, no tracks. Everything going out of the speakers, we’re f–king playing it when you hear it.”
That’s not to say Combs doesn’t see the value in elaborate stadium production — it’s just not for him. “Taylor Swift is like going to see Ringling Bros., and my show is like going to a demolition derby,” he jokes. “You’re coming to drink beer and be like, ‘Hell yeah.’ ”
Luke Combs photographed on March 14, 2023 at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium.
Eric Ryan Anderson
There has been something of a learning curve as Luke Combs Inc. has adjusted to a stadium-size setup. For example, the thrust stage used at Combs’ first stadium shows — Kidd Brewer in 2021 and Atlanta, Denver and Seattle in 2022 — was 8 feet tall, making it nearly impossible for Combs to see, much less connect with fans in the pit.
“Especially coming off doing the 360 arena thing, where you’re right in the middle and everybody feels pretty close, you go out in the stadiums and man, once the spots hit you out there, you almost can’t see anything,” says Combs. “You can see two rows of people, and then there’s just like infinite blackness.”
This time, the thrust will be both larger and at a lower level than the main stage. “You’re more in the crowd,” Combs adds. “I really wanted to feel that. I love playing small clubs, and feeling like people are right there is really nice.”
“Fans first” is the slogan of Kappy’s Make Wake management company, and one that permeates its decisions. Combs’ fans, called the Bootleggers, are so named for one of his early “hits” (his scare quotes), “Let the Moonshine,” and its ties to his Appalachian upbringing. He and Kappy started a private Facebook group for Bootleggers in 2015, the same year Kappy began managing a then-unsigned Combs; today, it has over 175,000 members, despite being entirely separate from the official Bootleggers club that fans can now sign up for on Combs’ own site to access perks and presales. One of those perks is the VIB (Very Important Bootlegger) meet-and-greet giveaway — which is the only VIP offering on Combs’ tours and completely free.
“I’ve always just felt really weird about, like, charging people to meet me,” he says. “Maybe that’s just me feeling like, ‘Well, it’s not worth it.’ ” By making meet-and-greets almost completely random (25 fans are chosen per show through a lottery on Combs’ site), Combs gets to see “a real representation of who’s there,” as he puts it. “I just want to meet people who came to the show, whether it’s their first show or their 50th show. It’s like people who would have never gotten the chance to meet me or could never have afforded it. Because I couldn’t have afforded that growing up.”
His manager is willing to put it more bluntly. “That’s not the type of people we want,” Kappy recalls telling a banker when turning down a $5,000 offer to meet Combs at the AT&T Stadium show. “I’d rather have the guy who can barely afford to come to the show because that’s more of a real fan than you wanting a picture with Luke for your Instagram.”
“I always want my fans to understand that I’ve never made any decisions based off how much money I can get out of them,” Combs says. “It already costs so much to do anything, right? I want them to love the music and feel like they saw a great show that someone put a lot of f–king thought into and did it at a price that was affordable to them.”
Asos shirt, Harbor Bay T-shirt, Joe’s Jeans jeans, Bass Pro Shops hat.
Eric Ryan Anderson
That’s why he has kept ticket prices at pre-pandemic levels (an average of $88) and has a section of $25 tickets at every show; why he has free preparties and tailgates attached to most of his stadium dates; why he refunded fans after a set in Maine last year because he felt like his voice wasn’t up to snuff (despite the fact that he did perform a shortened set); why he doesn’t only tour in the places where it’s most straightforward and lucrative. Combs is playing the long game.
“We’re trying to build a career so people can meet at a Luke Combs show and then eventually bring their kids to it and be like, ‘This is how it all happened,’ ” Kappy explains.
“Could I have gone out and done super-mega platinum tickets at even more stadiums and made an assload of money? Probably so,” Combs adds. “But I think eventually the fans will be like, ‘I’m not doing that again.’ ”
And it’s still more efficient for him: nearly 1 million tickets sold for 2023, for the fewest dates (39) he has worked in years. For 16 weeks, he’ll bus into North American cities on Thursday night, rehearse Friday, play Saturday and return to his home outside Nashville on Sunday. Then, after three weeks in Australia and three weeks in Europe and the United Kingdom (with a sizable break in between), he’s done for the year, without needing to bring Nicole and baby Tex along for the ride. “One show a week is like … dude!” he says. “People dream about doing one show a week.”
Combs’ international appeal is rooted in that same fans-first ethos. He went to play in Australia when it wasn’t profitable; now, the only reason he’s not booking multiple nights at stadiums there is because his trip coincides with the Women’s World Cup and all such venues are booked.
“There was a trust factor between he and I,” Kappy explains. “I said, ‘Look, I need you to do this, and you’re going to lose money. But instead of going and playing Raleigh every July at the amphitheater, you’re going to build markets.” Now Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, Australia, are among Combs’ top 10 streaming cities worldwide; some of the cities in Oceania where Combs is selling out arenas on this year’s tour, he has never even played before.
“People in our genre have always been so content with just doing [the] lower 48 because that has been good, that has been great. That has been safe. That’s where the money is,” says Combs. “But I feel like country music has such a place in the world outside of just the States.”
Luke Combs photographed on March 14, 2023 at the Nashville Municipal Auditorium.
Eric Ryan Anderson
There is no template for what Combs has been able to accomplish internationally, and the biggest hurdle, according to his management team, has been getting promoters on board without any comparable artists to reference — mostly by insisting repeatedly that the demand is nearly insatiable. “We didn’t come here to punt,” Kappy says. “So the goal is like, ‘Let’s throw a Hail Mary.’ And a lot of our Hail Marys are getting caught.”
A favorite anecdote among Team Combs is about when the singer played Quebec City’s multigenre Festival d’Été last summer — a booking that apparently made some of the event’s organizers nervous.
“I had personally been aggressively pursuing that opportunity for Luke for five years, and I kept getting back, ‘No, country doesn’t really work up here. He’s not a headliner,’ ” says Tannenbaum. Combs drew upwards of 70,000 people.
“Everybody was singing every word to every song — even the deep cuts — but then he would stop and everyone was speaking French,” Kappy recalls.
“He’s a unicorn,” says Tannenbaum. “I don’t really know how else to say it.”
That Quebec City date helped raise their expectations for this international tour. “We believed we had something really big with this,” Tannenbaum explains. “However, there wasn’t much precedent for the promoters to calibrate their expectations on, and the comps the promoters did have didn’t perform very well.”
So Tannenbaum and his colleagues at WME agreed to book European venues they felt confident Combs could fill several times over, because those were the ones they could get promoters to sign on with, and were prepared with options to upgrade all of them to larger rooms if tickets sold well enough. Every single European date got upgraded. Combs’ Copenhagen show in October, for example, was initially booked in a 1,500-capacity club; due to demand, it was upgraded to a 12,000-seat arena. “We’re not stopping there — South America is our next big, big goal,” says Tannenbaum. “By and large, this is virgin territory for artists coming from the world Luke has established himself in. But we’ve overcome similar barriers and precedents elsewhere in the world, and we expect to achieve the same success in these markets.”
And incredibly, Combs has been able to reach pop star levels of global success with nary a whiff of pop crossover, aside from a CMT Crossroads special with Leon Bridges and a cover of Ed Sheeran’s “Dive.” (He does cover Tracy Chapman on his new record, a decision made partly out of his personal fear that some people today might not know “Fast Car.”)
“Luke Combs is a country artist, and Luke is very happy being just a country artist,” says Kappy. “If the opportunity presented itself to do something in that world, sure, but we’re not looking to take a song to [adult top 40] or something like that when we’re still reaching new ears. Three chords and the truth work everywhere.”
Though he might make it look easy, taking over the world as Luke Combs, regular guy, has its challenges. “I think what has been one of my biggest assets has also been one of the things that was the hardest for me,” Combs says. “I am just me. There’s not, like, an act. My driver license says ‘Luke Combs’ on it. I’m 300 pounds with a neck beard. I can’t go out and not wear a hat and people don’t know who I am.
“I struggled with that a lot because I almost felt trapped, like a zoo animal or something,” he continues. “Now I don’t even think about it anymore.”
So Combs signs the autographs and takes the pictures, accepting them as a sometimes invasive part of the job he signed up for, and reminding himself that he would much rather people hate his music and think he’s a “pretty sick dude” than the opposite. He would prefer to insulate his son (and, soon, Tex’s little brother: Combs and Nicole just announced they’re expecting) from the craziness that comes with superstardom but knows that it’s only a matter of time before he has to explain why people come up to them in the grocery store.
“I don’t want him to be like, ‘My dad’s so great because he’s a country singer,’ ” he says. “I want him to be like, ‘My dad’s so great because he gives a f–k about me and goes fishing with me and listens to my problems and helps me when I’m scared.’ ”
It’s hard to find a chink in Combs’ grounded armor, a reason not to buy in the way that hundreds of thousands of fans now have — trusting that whether or not they speak his language, or relate to his songs’ Southern touchstones, or also wear hunting gear and cowboy boots and Crocs (with whom he has collaborated on a comfy clog), they can count on him to make them feel something. They can do that without spending their savings because accessibility is a top priority for Combs and his team, right after the music. “Look at how much money we’re making,” he says. “Does it really even matter if we make double? What’s the difference between having $5 million and $500 million? How much happier are you? Is it that much? Or is it like 1% happier?”
Instead, he wants to chart a career, and a life, that’s extraordinary in its very ordinariness.
“I didn’t get into music to be famous or rich,” Combs concludes. “I got into music because I love singing. I love singing for big crowds of people, and I feel like I’m good at it. People like to hear me do it. And I want to continue to do that as long as possible.”
This story will appear in the April 1, 2023, issue of Billboard.
As the lights dimmed for Rauw Alejandro’s sold-out show at Miami’s FTX Arena in April 2022, Rosalía — wearing head-to-toe black, eyes hidden behind enormous shades — was quietly ushered to a second-row seat. For once, the spotlight was not on the stylish Spanish artist, but on her boyfriend: a compact, wiry dynamo who, for the next two hours, steamrolled relentlessly from hardcore reggaetón to ’90s-inspired dance bops, supported by a troupe of dancers performing dazzling choreography.
“What Raúl does — sing and dance in a show from beginning to end — no other Latin artist does that,” Rosalía whispered, her voice low but bursting with pride.
A year later, the moment still encapsulates the dynamic of perhaps the most fascinating couple in music right now. Rosalía and Puerto Rican reggaetón star Rauw, both 30, have been together for nearly four years. But even as their relationship and individual careers have flourished — he was No. 3 on Billboard’s 2022 year-end Top Latin Artist chart (behind only Bad Bunny among men), she No. 14 — they’ve rarely appeared in public or given interviews together, and have yet to perform or even collaborate together. Until now.
On March 24, the duo released RR, a three-track EP that is as public and passionate a declaration of love as it gets. On the trio of songs — “Beso,” “Promesa” and “Vampiros” — both artists manage to sound like themselves, while creating an entirely different, beautifully intertwined sonic mix of techno pop with urban beats that moves from dreamy romantic to ’90s dancefloor. At the end of the recently released “Beso” video, Rosalía tearfully displays a diamond ring — confirming the two are now engaged.
Out jointly on Columbia/Sony Music U.S. Latin (Rosalía is signed to Columbia; Rauw to Duars Entertainment, which releases his music through a joint venture with Sony Music U.S. Latin), RR arrives as two of the top recording and touring acts in the world have launched separate outings. Rosalía’s 20-date festival tour, which kicked off at Lollapalooza Argentina on March 17 and includes prominent billings at Coachella and Primavera Sound, follows her Motomami world tour, which grossed $33.7 million and sold 443,000 tickets worldwide, landing her at No. 65 on Billboard’s year-end Top Ticket Sales chart and No. 7 on the year-end Top Latin Tours list, according to Billboard Boxscore.
“Rosalía is truly a global artist, and we focus on markets all over the world. Anywhere where her music is played, anywhere where there is a fan, is important to us,” says her mother, Pilar Tobella, who has always been part of her management team.
Rauw’s ambitious 80-plus-date global arena tour, which kicked off March 4 in Tampa, Fla., and already included back-to-back sold-out dates at the Miami-Dade Arena, comes on the heels of his Vice Versa tour, where he played 100 smaller shows globally between July 2021 and July 2022, grossing $24.5 million and selling 327,000 tickets across 54 of those shows.
Both artists’ growth in capacity underscores their individual appeal and the growing global appetite for Latin music. But the concurrence of their individual treks and RR’s release is a happy accident — the culmination of intense personal and artistic commitment finally ready to be unveiled.
“We wanted to make our relationship solid and build its foundations, and then, if music was meant to come, it would come,” says Rosalía.
“Plus, we were in different stages in our careers, and we wanted to make our fans focus on what we were doing, which was our individual projects,” adds Rauw. “People love drama in the entertainment world, and a romantic relationship will always take precedence. We felt if ours came to light, the effort we’ve both done toward our projects and our music would come second.”
On Rauw: Ludovic de Saint Sernin scarf and pants. On Rosalía: Ludovic de Saint Sernin coat.
Kanya Iwana
Seated side by side in matching black Gucci suits and starched white shirts, Rauw and Rosalía look, and act, symbiotic. In conversation, their speech patterns mimic their musical collaboration: They finish each other’s sentences, pick up where the other leaves off and fill the tiny pockets of breath that remain open.
“I love the absolute independence they have with their creations, their careers and their ideas,” says Sony Music Latin Iberia chairman/CEO Afo Verde, who has been close with both artists throughout their careers and who invited them to record portions of RR at the label’s 5020 recording studio in Miami. “But you clearly hear both of them in what they’ve done together.”
Rosalía has gained a cult-like following — not just for her genre-defying blending of flamenco with hip-hop, reggaetón, electronica and Latin dance rhythms, delivered with her ethereal yet powerful vocals, but also for conceptual concerts that straddle performance art and more traditional music and dance shows.
In Rauw, she has found an artistic kindred spirit, albeit one who occupies a slightly different lane. He is reggaetón to his core, but like her, he pushes his genre’s boundaries — in his case, by incorporating ’90s pop, house and club influences.
Okane coat, Phoebe Pendergast sunglasses, Marco Panconesi jewelry.
Kanya Iwana
And so, when Rauw (real name: Raúl Alejandro Ocasio Ruiz) and Rosalía finally met at a Las Vegas hotel lounge during the 2019 Latin Grammys after months of Instagram DMs, their mutual reflection of each other’s innermost artistic essence unsurprisingly sparked a romantic flame.
She wore a black Alexander Wang jumpsuit, he a blue and yellow bomber jacket; she drank water, he had whiskey. It was love at first sight, says Rauw: “100%.” Behind-the-scenes collaboration quickly ensued, with Rosalía co-writing two tracks for his 2020 album, Afrodisiaco. Still, their careers remained on separate ascending paths. On the road, Rosalía scored key marquee festival bookings like Lollapalooza and Coachella, while Rauw worked his way from clubs to theaters to his current in-the-round arena setup.
Rauw, who is more prolific in the recording studio than Rosalía, has placed five top 10s on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart, including 2021’s No. 1 Vice Versa. Rosalía, signed to Columbia Records, has two top 10s on the chart, but two Grammy Awards and 11 Latin Grammys (compared with his two), including two for album of the year.
Finally, last year, they began recording together. “One day, out of the blue, Rosalía sent me the three tracks, and I loved them,” says Rauw’s manager, Eric Duars, who also books and promotes his tours. “People may think it’s a couple’s project, but I see it as two artists coming together to do something very special. I’m always involved in the production of Rauw’s music, but here, they knew exactly what they wanted.”
“I think this will raise the bar for both of them across the globe,” says Jen Mallory, president of Columbia Records. “It’s not as if it was two labels saying, ‘You should collaborate.’ It’s something they did together in a very special, safe, creative space. I think there’s a beautiful symbiotic opportunity.”
As Rosalía prepares for her European tour and Rauw crisscrosses the United States, onstage appearances together seem inevitable and should be an additive for both artists: Rosalía has a bigger following in Europe and among English speakers, while Rauw is firmly entrenched in the Latin American and U.S. Latin markets. But both say their respective fan bases have gradually warmed to each other.
“Many people who only listened to you before now listen to me, and the other way around, too,” says Rosalía. Much like their music together, “It wasn’t planned, but it’s a blessing.”
You’ve jointly released music and have often prepared for your tours together. What have you learned from each other?
Rauw Alejandro: Rosi has a more solid music base than I do in the sense that I’m more extroverted in my music, but she’s far more disciplined. When you work with someone so disciplined, it’s impossible not to take something from that. And I’m disciplined, mind you; otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.
Rosalía: You are, baby.
Rauw: But she’s a freak-crazy workaholic. Piano lessons, dance lessons, voice lessons; what else can you learn when no one sings like you? At the beginning, I didn’t really get it, but after some time, I said, “OK, let me try to follow her lead and see.” And the difference is huge. If doing something is positive for her career, why can’t I also absorb that if it adds to my career?
Rosalía: You are far more relaxed. You’re someone who really lets go. It’s as if you have a lot of faith and just an organic feel. You’re always telling me to relax, to let go more. And just telling me that teaches and helps me. You balance me.
Rauw: I tell her my secrets, and she tells me hers. The same energy I put into my things, I put into hers.
Rosalía: Same.
Rauw: And we watch each other’s backs. At a visual, stage level, we share ideas; also styling, outfits. We’re two individual, independent artists, but we’re a couple. And we kind of represent each other mutually. If I’m going to go out there and do something crazy, I sometimes think, “Heck, no: I’m Rosalía’s boyfriend.” I need to raise the bar, understand? We’re taking care of our prestige and our work and ensuring it always looks the part. We motivate each other to keep rising to an infinite level.
Rosalía: For example, he’ll be out there during my sound check, and when I’m done, he’ll say, “I noticed this or that.” It’s as if he were my ears. (To Rauw) When you’re taping a video, I’m there, and I’m not there as your girlfriend. I’m literally there as the stylist or the stylist’s assistant, or whatever they need me for. I’m there because I love you and I want to help. How can I help? And if I can help being your stylist’s assistant, well, that’s what I’ll do.
Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro photographed by Kanya Iwana on February 11, 2023 at Ace Studios in Miami. On Rosalía: Gucci suit, shirt, tie, gloves and shoes. On Rauw: Gucci suit, shirt, tie, gloves and shoes, Maria Black jewelry.
Kanya Iwana
In making music, what does each of you bring to the table that the other one lacks?
Rosalía: I’m more of an overthinker in terms of the music process, and it’s helped me a lot [when doing] music with him because he’s super intuitive. His approach and his energy were especially positive to close the songs.
Rauw: Naturally, I help close the songs. Otherwise, we’d never finish. This girl is always looking for …
Rosalía: The twist.
Rauw: The twist. Rosi is very exacting. She can play anything on the piano, and I play more by ear. She has like seven doctorates in music; my doctorates are with my ears.
Rosalía: Your father, your grandfather [are both musicians]. I didn’t come from that, so I had to study. You studied, but in a different way. There are many paths to becoming a musician.
Rauw: But yeah, we complement each other in the studio. In music, we have a few different opinions, but we let each other flow.
You’ve collaborated with others. How is this different?
Rauw: In terms of collaborations, the big difference is you’re collaborating with the love of your life. At least, I am.
Rosalía: Me, too.
Rauw: That alone makes it more special, and it’s easy to open your heart because you’re with that person and the level of commitment to production and lyricism rises.
Was it scary to open up like that?
Rauw: Not for me.
Rosalía: But I understand what you mean. There was a point, for example, when I was writing “Promesa” where I wanted to make a list of all the things I wanted to do with you. And at the end, it’s like a declaration of saying, “I want to be with you my entire life.” Writing that in a way that I can look back at in 40 years and say, “I was honest” — well, that’s a challenge.
Dancing is such a big element in both your shows. What does dance mean to each of you?
Rosalía: It’s another discipline, another extension of my artistic expression. It’s something that helps me feel free onstage. I still don’t dance as well as Raúl, but I’m working on it because Raúl is a whole other level in terms of dance. I always think, “I have to try harder, I have to try harder!”
Rauw: (Laughs.) You dance well! It’s different styles. I also love watching Rosi. She’s so strong, so confident in her show. Her act is very, very heavy duty. She’s one of those people who practices seven thousand times. Rosi’s flamenco segments are very strong. People go nuts.
Rosalía: I practice twice as much as you, and you dance twice as well as I do. Even outside the scope of Spanish-language music, I don’t think anyone does it like you.
Can each of you describe your touring trajectory? How did you begin?
Rauw: I began in clubs, then festivals, then theaters, then small venues and then arenas and now stadiums. And it was all in the Latin circuit, until my [2021] album Vice Versa, which allowed me to tour big venues in the U.S. for the first time. A big departure for me was playing [four sold-out dates] at el Choliseo [Coliseo de Puerto Rico in San Juan] in 2021. It was my first arena, and everything changed after that. Expectations grew, and the perception was immediately different.
Has your audience changed?
Rauw: They’re mostly Latins. But here in the U.S., they’re Latins who speak English. They listen to music in Spanish, but they converse in English. I hear it when my videographers film the crowds here in the U.S. That says so much about the popularity of Spanish-language music.
And you, Rosalía?
Rosalía: Bars. Bars. I started in bars. Then theaters, then arenas and festivals. Arenas only in my country, and at the same time, I was playing festivals around the world.
Rauw: You’re always most popular in your own country. And then the goal is to conquer other places little by little. Used to be I could fill an arena in Puerto Rico but not in Texas. Then I could do New York, but not Ohio. Then, all of a sudden, all you play are arenas.
Ludovic de Saint Sernin coat, Cruda Shoes.
Kanya Iwana
How did you conceive your current tours?
Rauw: My tour changes every year as I learn more as an artist, just as my recordings change. When I went into the studio to record Saturno [released in November 2022], I was thinking about the tour, and I began to plan musically around that. That’s something I didn’t do before. This project is very focused on dance and on musical energy because everything is very upbeat. Obviously, there are a few ballads inside the album, and I’ll sing some of my old hits, but the tour’s backbone is [that feeling of] “Let’s go crazy!” More uptempo, very ’90s. There’s a visual element, but this is a 360 show, so the focus is on the center and on the lighting.
Rosalía: I try to make every tour different. I start with the music; that’s the axis of everything. But at the same time, everything is connected. Everything feeds on itself. There are choreographies that lead me to make different music or music that I develop thinking about a choreography. Music is the spark, but the show gets created from many different points.
What can you tell us about your upcoming shows?
Rosalía: In some ways, it will be similar to Motomami because a lot of the music is electronic, so having musicians onstage is not necessary nor does it make sense. Plus, I very much like the stage as a canvas for movement. That’s where I’m motivated now.
It’s interesting: Both of you are musicians’ musicians, but you’ve opted for more of a spectacle route.
Rosalía: It depends on the projects. If this were like my first album, which was voice and guitar, this staging wouldn’t make sense. There is no better or worse. Sometimes people have prejudices [about] if having musicians is better or not. Joder, I’m singing for an hour and 50 minutes; I’m playing the piano, I’m playing guitar. I think there’s enough music.
Rauw: I, on the other hand, come from a sports background. I’m a soccer player, and that really defined me. Athletes can play at their peak usually up to when they’re 33, 35, because it requires a lot of physicality. I can do these very physical and taxing tours now when I’m young. I don’t think I can play this type of tour when I’m older. I still have time to play concerts with a full band, a little more chill, a little more musical and project another vibe.
As you embark on new tours, what’s one word that describes each of you onstage?
Rosalía: Freedom.
Rauw: Beast mode.
Most people may not realize just how physical both your tours are. Rauw, when I walked in today, you were massaging your shoulders with your Theragun, and you’re still in rehearsal mode. How do you prepare? Do you train together?
Rauw: We have different routines because our bodies are different and our objectives are different, but cardio is always in there. Actually, at this stage [with the tour about to start], I do less cardio because there’s a lot of dancing onstage. We rehearse from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. every single day, with a lunch break. And I travel with a physio[therapist] and a chiropractor.
Rosalía: We also train together at the gym. We combine HIIT and cardio workouts. I train five, six days a week from approximately 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and then I stay till about 10 p.m., making music. I rehearse between five and six months for a tour, but if it were up to me, I’d prep a whole year.
Rosalía, how different is it to play European countries versus Latin America?
Rosalía: I don’t change the show. When all is said and done, a stage is a stage. The way I approach that stage, how sacred that stage is for me, never changes, no matter where I am, big or small. [Audience-wise], there are cultures who demonstrate their appreciation in different ways; some are louder, some are more internal, but that doesn’t mean it’s worse or better. It’s simply different, and I try to always be generous onstage.
So even though your tour is very rehearsed, you take liberties?
Rosalía: There’s improvisation, 100%. That’s the magic.
Rauw: Always.
Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro photographed on February 11, 2023 at Ace Studios in Miami.
Kanya Iwana
In the past three years, do you see a difference in the reaction and perception of Latin tours and music in Spanish?
Rosalía: People are very receptive to music in Spanish. You see its presence around the world, even in festival headliners.
Rauw: The movement has grown so much that today we can tour places we wouldn’t have been able to before. Reggaetón is my base, and countries like Germany and Holland were not available to us before.
Your tours look expensive.
Rosalía: To me, the audience’s experience is more important than the numbers. It’s something I apply to the way I make music and to how I build the tour and a show. Making the show as exciting as possible is more important than being profitable. Plus, people may think artists make lots of money on tours, but many times, you have to invest. Something that looks profitable may not be.
Touring is hard. How do you cope with the challenges of tour life?
Rosalía: Notwithstanding the joy and goodwill, and the love you get from fans, it’s very draining. It’s like constantly building and destroying your home. You arrive at a hotel, you organize everything with all the care in the world, and the next day, you have to dismantle everything and leave. Being a nomad isn’t easy psychologically or emotionally. But it helps me a lot that you and I speak so much over FaceTime.
Rauw: I try to think about the future and be as positive as possible within the sacrifices we make. We’re human. There are days when you really don’t want to do it; you feel that pressure. But thinking about the future helps me: There’s one life to live, it goes by fast, and this is only one little sliver of my life where I’ll be able to enjoy this. Afterward, the cycle of life will take us to another stage, and someone will be in this place, touring and living the moment. I’m just trying to enjoy it to the fullest because it’ll go by fast.
You’re both in such a good moment in your careers. What will happen when one of you is up and the other is down?
Rauw: When I met Rosi, she was positioned much better than me, and that was never a problem.
Rosalía: I’m lucky to be your partner, and I want to be there for you, sabes? And I feel you’re there for me, independent of the careers. For me, our relationship is first, and then there’s everything else. Of course my career is super important in my life, but at the same time, in my life, you’re my companion, and everything else comes second.
This story will appear in the April 1, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Kx5, presented by Carnival, will perform at Billboard Presents The Stage at SXSW, on March 18.
The show was going so well. An hour into the set from Kx5 — the electronic music supergroup of genre leaders Kaskade and deadmau5 — it was, as intended, a dazzling feat of light, sound, video and the emotional punch of those elements combined. Then the power went out, and Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum — and the 46,000 fans assembled there on that drizzly night in December — were thrust into silent darkness.
From the front of the house, deadmau5’s longtime manager, Dean Wilson, sprinted backstage — where, he says, he found “everybody running around like headless chickens, screaming, ‘Generator’s on fire!’ ”
The generator was not supposed to be on fire. However, it had turned itself off due to overheating and was emanating smoke. Its programming had then instructed three backup generators to also shut down to avoid igniting the 17,000 gallons of diesel fuel inside. Frantic staffers worked to salvage what had been billed as a landmark live performance — one that cost “almost seven figures to design and over seven figures to execute,” says Kaskade’s manager, Ryan Henderson.
Success seemed unlikely. “When you have a major failure like that, normally something then doesn’t work,” Wilson says. “Something’s not rebooted properly. Some configuration can’t restart because it has crashed so badly.” But when deadmau5 hit the button that would, in theory, restart the show, restart it did. The performance, co-produced by Live Nation affiliate and powerhouse electronic music promoter Insomniac Events alongside both artists’ teams, set a record for the biggest ticketed global headliner dance event of 2022.
“I’ve been working in the electronic/dance space since the early ’90s,” says UTA’s Kevin Gimble, who represents deadmau5, Kaskade and Kx5. “I have been fortunate to have a lot of incredible moments throughout my career. However, nothing — and I mean nothing — can compare to the emotions that were stirred within me seeing [nearly] 50,000 people inside that building singing ‘I Remember’ in unison. Pure f–king magic.”
As Kx5, deadmau5 and Kaskade have formalized a collaborative relationship that began with the aforementioned moody 2008 classic — one of EDM’s first defining tracks, the penultimate song played during the L.A. Coliseum performance and, in dance parlance, an all-time banger. In 2009, they released a follow-up single, “Move for Me.” Now, 14 years later, they are leveling up the partnership with the March 17 arrival of Kx5’s eponymous debut album, which is being released on deadmau5’s independent label, mau5trap Recordings.
The show wasn’t just a full-circle moment for Kx5: It was one for dance music itself. In June 2010, deadmau5 and Kaskade, playing separately, were among the last electronic artists to perform at the L.A. Coliseum during what would be the final Los Angeles iteration of Electric Daisy Carnival. Produced by Insomniac and featuring then-rising acts like Avicii and Swedish House Mafia, the festival created a maelstrom of headlines (and lawsuits) when a 15-year-old girl who had snuck into the event died after overdosing on MDMA. In the aftermath, Los Angeles sent EDC packing to Las Vegas, and the venue became a no-fly zone for electronic music — and, aside from a handful of shows throughout the 2010s, most other genres, too — even as EDM was becoming a major commercial force in the United States.
“We’d heard rumors they were going to start doing more shows at the Coliseum, and I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if we were the first electronic act to do a show back in that venue?’ ” Wilson recalls. “We were absolutely the test case.”
“Kaskade kind of straddles the line between electronic and pop music,” says Henderson of why promoters book the producer in venues where dance music might be otherwise verboten. “People don’t associate him with rave culture as much as you’d think.”
On Kaskade (left): Dior jacket and sneakers, Mouty pants, Oscar & Frank eyewear. On deadmau5: Amiri jacket, pants, and sneakers.
Austin Hargrave
With the December show filed as a win, deadmau5 and Kaskade symbolically marked a decade-plus run during which they became two of the genre’s most successful artists. Alongside peers like Swedish House Mafia, Avicii, Calvin Harris and Skrillex, they helped create the superstar DJ template of Vegas residencies, arena shows, festival headlining and massive paychecks. To date, Kaskade’s catalog has aggregated 736 million U.S. streams, according to Luminate, and deadmau5’s has clocked 1.5 billion.
They remain two of the scene’s most elite acts, having influenced a generation of fans and artists alike. John Summit, the 28-year-old dance phenom who opened the Coliseum show, told Wilson that deadmau5’s “Ghosts ‘n’ Stuff” was the reason he started making music. (Later in 2023, Summit will release the first official remix of “I Remember.”)
But while Kx5’s out-of-the-gate success was made possible by each artist’s individual popularity and the near mythological status of their previous collaborative output, the project is more about their own enjoyment than the new creative directions some of their peers have followed as their careers have progressed.
“It was literally a product of us saying, ‘F–k it,’ ” says deadmau5, born Joel Zimmerman, in his pronounced Canadian accent. “I’m not saying we don’t love it, but we don’t need it, financially speaking. It’s just something we want.”
On this Monday afternoon in Los Angeles, deadmau5, who’s based in Toronto, sits alongside Chicago native Kaskade (real name: Ryan Raddon), who is now based in L.A. Deadmau5 makes infrequent eye contact and uses a variation of “f–k” upwards of 40 times during the 45-minute conversation. “Dude” is the interjection of choice for Kaskade, who wears reflective-lensed sunglasses.
As they tell it, Kx5 (pronounced “kay five”; the “x” is silent) is essentially the result of friendship meeting market demand and pandemic downtime. Crowds would still “freak out” when Kaskade dropped “I Remember” in his sets and, he says, “every time I’d see Joel at a festival, I’d be like, ‘Man, we should probably do something together.’ He’d be like, ‘Yeah, we probably should.’ ”
When live events paused, Kaskade called him to make it official, saying, “OK, seriously, I don’t have anything to do. Let’s do something.” They started emailing productions back and forth, with tracks taking shape as the pandemic wore on.
Kaskade photographed on February 6, 2023 in Los Angeles. Givenchy sweater.
Austin Hargrave
Kx5 soft-launched in July 2021 during Kaskade’s headlining set at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif. Produced by Insomniac and marking the first public concert at the new venue, the show sold 27,000 tickets and grossed $2.6 million, according to Billboard Boxscore. It also featured a surprise opening set from deadmau5, who returned later to play “I Remember” alongside Kaskade. (They didn’t play any Kx5 music, nor did deadmau5 don the plastic mouse helmet he has long worn during solo performances.)
Shortly after the SoFi show, UTA’s Gimble began conversations with Insomniac and Live Nation about a Kx5 play at the Coliseum. Nearly six months later, on Jan. 3, 2022, deadmau5, Kaskade and their managers met in L.A. to strategize Kx5. Discussions around the artists doing something official together had started ahead of the pandemic, when they were offered a back-to-back set at HARD Summer 2020. When that show was canceled amid lockdowns, HARD promoter Insomniac shifted the offer to EDC 2022, where Kaskade and deadmau5 decided to debut the Kx5 live show. But they still needed a lead single.
Wilson, who has managed deadmau5 since the artist launched that persona in 2006, had been sitting on a top-line demo of a song called “Escape” from U.K. songwriters Camden Cox, Will Clarke and Eddie Jenkins. Deadmau5 had been tinkering with the demo’s production but was concerned, Wilson says, that it didn’t sound “new enough” compared with his more recent output.
Nonetheless, at the January 2022 meeting in L.A., Wilson told Kaskade they had a track that might work as Kx5’s first release. “Joel looks at me like, ‘What?’ ” Wilson says. “And I play ‘Escape,’ and Ryan goes, ‘We’ve got to do that.’ ”
Deadmau5 sent parts of the song to Kaskade, who soon completed it. (“Let’s make it radio-ey,” says deadmau5 of their goal for it. “Let’s make it ‘I Remember’-ey. Strip it back, keep some of that early-2000s vibe to it.”) Released in March 2022 — three months before the debut Kx5 performance at EDC — critics and fans hailed “Escape” as a triumphant return to form, a fresh take on the dreamy, sexy yet melancholy slowburn style the duo had forged with “I Remember.”
“Escape” has garnered 47.7 million official U.S. on-demand streams. And by the time the song (featuring British singer Hayla) hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Dance Mix Show/Airplay chart in April 2022, Kaskade and deadmau5’s idea for a Kx5 EP had expanded into plans for an album. “Don’t threaten us with a good time,” the latter jokes about the project’s growth. Kaskade laughs.
In July 2022, Kaskade joined deadmau5 at his home studio in Toronto. “It ended up being a lot of hanging out, wake-surfing, chilling and talking about music,” recalls Kaskade. “We had a songwriting session that went until, like, four in the morning. I couldn’t stay up anymore.”
While they keep different hours, they agree that working together is a more streamlined process than when they record individually. “The benefit of doing it together is you get to bounce ideas off somebody else,” Kaskade says. “Usually when you’re in your own space, it’s like, ‘I think this is the end?’ With somebody else in the mix, I send it over to Joel. Like, ‘I think it’s done. What do you think?’ ” Working together, they agree, also eliminates expectations among their fans. “They don’t know what to think,” says Kaskade. “They’re like, ‘Let’s see what this is about.’ ” The resulting 10-track album is simultaneously sophisticated and tough, featuring complex and inventive progressive house productions that pulse and glow. Lyrics — largely about love and the loss of it — ride achingly pretty, often haunting melodies.
“Ryan excels as a songwriter and in arrangement and structure, where I suppose I excel in mastering, engineering and the more technical components of sound versus the idea,” deadmau5 says. “He’s got his wheelhouse, I’ve got mine, and we don’t overlap a lot. Like, I would sooner shoot myself in the leg before I’m like, ‘Here, Ryan, master this.’ ”
deadmau5 photographed on February 6, 2023 in Los Angeles. Amiri jacket.
Austin Hargrave
Their differences run deeper than their production strengths. While deadmau5 has been known to stay awake for three days straight making music, Kaskade appears to sleep regularly. Deadmau5 smokes cigarettes; Kaskade does not. Deadmau5 drinks Corona. Kaskade, a practicing Mormon, is sober. He remarks that it’s surreal to be doing an interview for the cover of Billboard. Deadmau5 announces he would rather be at home playing video games.
“I call them the odd couple,” says Wilson. “They’re yin and yang, chalk and cheese, completely different ends of the spectrum, but they ultimately have a respect for each other as producers.” And respect from deadmau5 is rare: In EDM’s heyday, he used Twitter to insult everyone from Justin Bieber (“little f–king d-ckhead”) to Disney, which in 2014 sued him over the similarities between his “mau5head” and its Mickey Mouse logo. (“Disney thinks you might confuse an established electronic musician/ performer with a cartoon mouse. That’s how stupid they think you are.”) In 2015, he published a Tumblr post about dealing with depression exacerbated by social media; his team now runs his accounts.
Deadmau5’s prickly (if, by now, predictable) nature makes his creative, and personal, alchemy with Kaskade all the more remarkable. “Joel doesn’t … he has very, very few relationships like that,” Wilson continues. “Joel’s a self-contained machine. His studio is in the middle of the house. He works predominantly on his own. He doesn’t do massive collaborations on a regular basis. But I think he likes Kx5 because it’s so different than it being all about the mouse head. There’s pressure in that, but with the two of them, you can see Joel go, ‘This is a bit of fun.’ It’s much more of the relaxed, funny Joel because he’s got a sparring partner, a foil, someone he can joke with. You can’t do that if you’re doing it on your own.”
The fact remains that Kx5 has an expiration date. The pair is scheduled to play just five more shows beyond South by Southwest, all U.S. festival sets, starting at Miami’s Ultra Music Festival in late March and ending in September at a currently unannounced East Coast event. (Although “nobody’s closing the door on what this could be in the future,” Henderson says. “There’s something special here.”)
“We can show up and crush a big event, but I’m not going to f–king hammer it until we’re both over it,” says deadmau5. “I don’t want to be f–king Siegfried & Roy over here doing 20 shows a night in f–king Vegas. We’ll just do some nice, big, iconic-looking plays, then f–king Ryan’s off Kaskade-ing and deadmau5 is out deadmau5-ing.”
Indeed, as EDM elder statesmen (relatively: Kaskade is 51, and deadmau5 is 42), they can do a one-off super pairing without relying on it for relevancy or income. (That said, the impact of Kx5 “feeds residual revenue streams” like streaming numbers and solo plays for each individual artist, Henderson says, adding that Kaskade just signed a three-year, eight-figure Vegas residency deal. “I’m not saying the Kx5 brand contributed to that,” Henderson adds, “but it definitely didn’t hurt it.”)
Kaskade (left) and deadmau5 of Kx5 photographed on February 6, 2023 in Los Angeles. On Kaskade: Louis Vuitton jacket. On deadmau5: Amiri jacket.
Austin Hargrave
But having come up, says deadmau5, “right at the turning point” when EDM was the world’s most lucrative genre, his and Kaskade’s brands are now foundational to the music’s culture, and their businesses extend well beyond streaming. “The money is in ancillary goods,” deadmau5 says. “Tangible items [like merchandise], appearances, shows, production.” He adds, “I don’t think I’m going to be f–king donning a mau5head in my 50s,” noting he may shift into managing mau5trap acts as he gets older and tours less.
But since they broke through in the EDM golden age, paths to success in the wider industry have become more difficult, making it harder for both emerging and established artists to score crossover hits. By the time Kx5 drops, eight of its singles will already be out because, says Wilson, digital service providers would only support two tracks if they were all released at once — and thus no one would hear most of the music. While deadmau5 has over 10 million fans across Instagram and Facebook, Wilson says the algorithms won’t allow communication with most of them. He also says that despite the success of “Escape” on dance radio and the $300,000 put behind its campaign — “We spent hundreds of thousands working that record. Who else has got that kind of money?” he asks — they couldn’t get the song on Spotify’s Today’s Top Hits playlist. “You break down those playlists, and they’re all predominantly major-owned acts,” says Wilson, who co-founded mau5trap with deadmau5 in 2007. “It’s a closed shop.”
Still, the strength of deadmau5 and Kaskade’s respective brands reduces the need for Kx5 to generate revenue. “They’re definitely investing more than they’re making,” Henderson says. “This whole project is for the fans. This isn’t getting these guys together, throwing them on a stage, exploiting their legacy and bringing in a bunch of money. It’s about making something special for their fans. They 100% sacrifice income to play together.”
Kaskade concedes that since corporate interests entered the mix during the EDM boom, the scene has become “more predictable” — or, as deadmau5 puts it, now “it’s all a bunch of little douche nozzles that know the trends, and how this is going to work, and you have to do it like this, and it homogenizes it all to sh-t.” The optimist of the duo, Kaskade believes there will always be an underground and the unpredictable music it fosters, but “just not like it was 20 years ago or 10 years ago, when the majors got involved.”
But while Wilson says EDM is often treated as the “poor relative” among other more visible genres in the wider industry, it remains “a great multibillion-dollar business with very successful festivals and a fan base that is very deep and that buys our tickets.”
“Is it commercially viable in terms of pop album sales? F–k no,” says deadmau5. “Is it commercially viable? Hell yeah. If it wasn’t, we wouldn’t be doing this. I’d be your stock boy at Bed Bath & Beyond.”
In the end, the L.A. Coliseum show earned $3.7 million. Kx5 didn’t have to cover the cost of a new generator.
Penske Media Corp. is the largest shareholder of SXSW; its brands are official media partners of SXSW.
This story will appear in the March 11, 2023, issue of Billboard.
The show was going so well. An hour into the set from Kx5 — the electronic music supergroup of genre leaders Kaskade and deadmau5 — it was, as intended, a dazzling feat of light, sound, video and the emotional punch of those elements combined. Then the power went out, and Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum — and the 46,000 fans assembled there on that drizzly night in December — were thrust into silent darkness.
From the front of the house, deadmau5’s longtime manager, Dean Wilson, sprinted backstage — where, he says, he found “everybody running around like headless chickens, screaming, ‘Generator’s on fire!’ ”
The generator was not supposed to be on fire. However, it had turned itself off due to overheating and was emanating smoke. Its programming had then instructed three backup generators to also shut down to avoid igniting the 17,000 gallons of diesel fuel inside. Frantic staffers worked to salvage what had been billed as a landmark live performance — one that cost “almost seven figures to design and over seven figures to execute,” says Kaskade’s manager, Ryan Henderson.
Success seemed unlikely. “When you have a major failure like that, normally something then doesn’t work,” Wilson says. “Something’s not rebooted properly. Some configuration can’t restart because it has crashed so badly.” But when deadmau5 hit the button that would, in theory, restart the show, restart it did. The performance, co-produced by Live Nation affiliate and powerhouse electronic music promoter Insomniac Events alongside both artists’ teams, set a record for the biggest ticketed global headliner dance event of 2022.
Read Kx5’s full Billboard cover story here. Kx5, presented by Carnival, will perform at Billboard Presents The Stage at SXSW, on March 18. Penske Media Corp. is the largest shareholder of SXSW; its brands are official media partners of SXSW.
Image Credit: Austin Hargrave
Givenchy sweater.
Image Credit: Austin Hargrave
On Kaskade: Dior jacket, Oscar & Frank eyewear. On deadmau5: Amiri jacket
Image Credit: Austin Hargrave
On Kaskade: Dior jacket and sneakers, Mouty pants, Oscar & Frank eyewear. On deadmau5: Amiri jacket, pants, and sneakers.
Image Credit: Austin Hargrave
Amiri jacket.
Image Credit: Austin Hargrave
On Kaskade: Louis Vuitton jacket. On deadmau5: Amiri jacket.
Grooming by Christina Guerra. On-Site Production by Kayla Landrum.
Feid, presented by Samsung Galaxy, will perform at Billboard Presents The Stage at SXSW on March 17.
A leaked album was the best thing that ever happened to Feid.
In September 2022, the Colombian singer-songwriter was headlining three consecutive sold-out hometown dates at Plaza de Toros La Macarena — Medellín’s famed bullfighting ring and concert venue — where he performed for more than 30,000 people over the course of the three shows. He was due for some much-needed rest the following Monday. But that never happened.
Instead, the artist born Salomón Villada Hoyos, 30, who also goes by the nickname Ferxxo, received an agitated call from his manager, Luis Villamizar, with the news that his album, Feliz Cumpleaños Ferxxo — scheduled for a December release — had, without their knowledge, arrived much earlier, in the form of a 39-minute voice note first leaked as a link on the internet.
“All my spirits dropped,” he recalls today, still sounding disappointed. “It was incomplete. It was a mess, and I felt rage — but that feeling lasted about half an hour. After that, I talked to my mom to see how we could take advantage of the situation and thankfully, we reacted quickly.”
With help from his team, producers and record label, Universal Music Latino (UML), he took matters into his own hands, working relentlessly for 24 hours to release an album that wasn’t even mixed or mastered yet. Because all 15 tracks had been leaked, Feid changed the title to Feliz Cumpleaños Ferxxo Te Pirateamos El Álbum (Happy Birthday Feid We Leaked the Album) and had his sister, who’s also his longtime graphic designer, create new cover art that acknowledged how the songs had ultimately spread: Though Universal quickly took down the initial leaked link, the audio had already been shared to DropBox and then sent wide through a chain of WhatsApp conversations. (Six of the 15 tracks had already been released as singles at the time of the leak.)
On Sept. 14, just two days after it leaked, the album — powered by syncopated perreos, reggaetón swagger and chill house beats — officially came out. Feid remains unsure of who leaked the set and why. But that’s now beside the point: Feliz Cumpleaños Ferxxo earned him his first top 10 entry on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart, surging from No. 25 to No. 8 in its second week, on the chart dated Oct. 1, 2022. It concurrently became his first entry on the Billboard 200 and peaked at No. 5 on Latin Rhythm Albums. “Normal,” the set’s fourth single, also became Feid’s first Hot Latin Songs entry as a soloist, following five alongside stars like J Balvin, Nicky Jam and Karol G. The track peaked at No. 1 on the Latin Rhythm Airplay chart on Jan. 21.
To maintain momentum, Feid and his team made another swift change of plans, deciding to rebook a previously in-the-works club tour — his first headlining U.S. run — to theaters to reflect his rapidly growing popularity, and to execute the task, from booking to opening night, in less than a month. Hans Schafer, senior vp of global touring at Live Nation, the tour’s promoter, told Billboard at the time that, like the album’s assembly, “everyone worked really quickly to turn this around.” Tickets to the 14-date stint, which began Oct. 13 in Atlanta and wrapped Nov. 25 in Los Angeles, sold out in 24 hours.
Feid photographed on January 12, 2023 at Proper Studio in Miami.
Devin Christopher
Feid has always had a clear creative vision concerning his music, which laces innovative urban beats with the essence of early-2000s reggaetón and lyrics about love. But his biggest barrier to achieving solo mainstream success for himself was trusting that intuition, rather than worrying about others’ opinions. It took years, but Feid finally realized the importance of being faithful to his core identity. And while the album leak was jarring and unplanned, the foundation he laid over more than a decade of making music allowed him to seize the opportunity and explode in popularity. With the tour, his ability to pivot quickly kept yielding successes.
“It was very special to go to the shows and see people dressed as me with green clothes, white glasses and even a gold tooth,” Feid gushes. “After the first show, I told my team, ‘Look carefully at this stage because, God willing, we will never have people as close as we do now. We will have them further and further away.” In other words, Feid expects to be playing U.S. arenas and stadiums before long.
For a teenage Feid, even playing the theaters of his fall tour would have been unimaginable.
As a seventh grader at Colegio San José de La Salle in Medellín, he discovered his passion for performing during a school talent show. Singing Daddy Yankee’s “Rompe (Remix)” with a group of friends as The Three Fathers, “I liked seeing how people were enjoying something I was doing,” he recalls. “I was shaking with nerves, but when I started to sing it all went away.”
That performance and others like it, known as colegios (school tours), are common for aspiring teen artists in Colombia, and they eventually allowed Feid to connect with Alejandro Ramírez Suárez, who would become Latin Grammy-winning producer Sky Rompiendo — and Feid’s longtime collaborator alongside Mosty, Wain, and Jowan and Rolo of production duo Icon Music.
By their early 20s, both Feid (whose moniker sounds like “faith” when spoken in Spanish) and Sky were making names for themselves in their hometown. Feid had already independently released singles such as “Bailame” and “Morena,” both of which gained traction in Latin America; Sky was the mastermind behind J Balvin’s first No. 1 chart hit, “Ay Vamos,” which peaked in March 2015.
Around then, Feid “unintentionally” fell into songwriting after Colombian artist Shako asked if he could record a song Feid had written for himself, called “Robarte Hoy.” “I was still new in the industry and didn’t even know writing for other artists was a thing,” he recalls (a year later, Shako invited him on the remix). One of the first popular tracks Feid wrote was Reykon’s “Secretos,” which ultimately led him to work with Balvin as a writer on the 2016 hit “Ginza,” nabbing Feid an ASCAP Latin award along the way.
“I started taking him to the studio when we had camps for Balvin because he has always had great chemistry,” Sky remembers. “Yes, he helped us write ‘Ginza,’ but the song where he proved himself as a songwriter was ‘Sigo Extrañándote,’ ” another track for Balvin that showcased Feid’s heartfelt, relatable lyricism. As Balvin tells Billboard, “He always brought something fresh to the table, and I always let him know of his potential.”
Suddenly, Feid’s “reggaetón music with pop lyrics” had made him the hip, on-demand songwriter that artists from Thalía to Ximena Sariñana to CNCO wanted to work with. In 2016, he signed an exclusive worldwide publishing administration deal with Universal Music Publishing Group (UMPG) through management and publishing company Dynasty Music Group, helmed by his then-manager, Daniel Giraldo, and Juan Pablo Piedrahita. Soon after, he signed his first record deal with In-Tu Linea, a label then under the Universal Music Latin Entertainment (UMLE) umbrella that was launched by industry veteran Jorge Pino and his longtime colleague Fidel Hernández as COO. Although “many labels showed their interest,” Feid says, Pino and Hernández were the only ones to make the “very special” gesture of meeting him in person.
Feid made his major-label debut with the Balvin-featuring “Que Raro,” which became his first Billboard chart entry, debuting and peaking at No. 26 on Latin Digital Song Sales and peaking at No. 16 on Latin Rhythm Airplay in 2016.
“Today, I highly value that moment that Balvin gave me — the spotlight in which he put me, the type of song it was,” he says. “It was super cool for my career, for my life, for everything I have been building. There are still people who tell me that they followed me or discovered me with ‘Que Raro.’ ”
Soon after, Feid collaborated with artists such as Maluma and Nacho; released his debut album, Así Como Suena, in 2017; received a Latin Grammy nomination for his next one (2019’s 19); and joined “The Avengers,” a collective of urbano artists that included Dalex, Dímelo Flow, Justin Quiles, Lenny Tavárez and Sech and released club bangers such as “Cuaderno” and “Quizas.” Around then, he also stopped writing music for others.
“I needed to find myself as an artist,” he says. Though Feid was gaining popularity writing for big acts, he hadn’t yet discovered his own strong artistic identity, and admits he was following the standards he observed in the industry by being “an average singer releasing average music.” As other Colombian artists of his generation such as Maluma, Karol G and Balvin skyrocketed to stardom, he wondered, “When will it be my turn?”
Then one day, after more than a decade of work, it clicked.
“I decided to take an arepa with cheese in my hand and say that I was paisa,” he proudly states, referring to the local word for someone from Medellín. “I began to be more faithful to who I am and my Colombian roots. At that moment, I opened the coolest door that I’ve ever opened, which was finding my identity and introducing El Ferxxo. It took me a long time to realize that this was what I had to do to really, really connect with people.”
Feid photographed on January 12, 2023 at Proper Studio in Miami.
Devin Christopher
Putting his new alter ego to the test, Ferxxo (pronounced Fercho) began incorporating local Medallo slang into his lyrics, like mor (love), que chimba (how cool) and parchar (hanging out) and replacing letters in his titles with X’s to pique curiosity.
It worked. The Latin Grammys nominated 2020’s Ferxxo (Vol. 1: M.O.R.) and its Justin Quiles-featuring single “Porfa” for best urban music album and best reggaetón performance, respectively. On the strength of an all-star remix featuring Balvin, Maluma, Nicky Jam and Sech, “Porfa” earned Feid his first No. 1 hit on both the Latin Airplay and Latin Rhythm Airplay charts.
As he established his musical identity, Feid recognized that creating a visual one was similarly important. He adopted the color green (most often, a lime shade) as his trademark, starting in early 2022 with the release of the single “Castigo”: Its cover art features a green monster truck and in the music video, Feid is clad in all green.
“It reminded me of the time when I was a huge fan of artists and wanted all the merch that had to do with them. I try to put myself in the shoes of a fan so that the people who follow me have a better chance of feeling closer to me,” he says. Now, he always finds a way to wear it — the color of growth and new beginnings.
As 2021 progressed, it seemed like everything was falling into place for Feid. He inked a worldwide publishing agreement with UMPG, fully transitioned from In-Tu Linea to UML under president Angel Kaminsky’s team and opened Karol G’s Bichota U.S. arena tour.
Still, it wasn’t all smooth sailing — and in fact, his month on the road with Karol was a tough wake-up call. “I feel that 90% of people saw my show for the first time,” he says. “Coming from being a big deal in Colombia and being at the top of the charts to doing a show in Sacramento [Calif.] and having only five people yell ‘Wooo!’ was challenging for me.”
Feid photographed on January 12, 2023 at Proper Studio in Miami.
Devin Christopher
Then, shortly after returning home, a motorcycle accident left Feid with a severely injured left knee that required a two-month recovery. But instead of wallowing in his pain (or just kicking back to watch Netflix), Feid got to work on his next album.
“There were moments of doubt and complications,” says Jesús López, chairman/CEO of Universal Music Latin America & Iberian Peninsula. “It was bad luck for his leg but good luck for his head because he was able to be calmer for a while and work more on the creativity of his album Feliz Cumpleaños Ferxxo.”
Hunkered down with his leg in a cast, Feid organically started engaging more with fans on TikTok. He would flirtatiously react to viral videos in his suave Medallo, create simple dance challenges for his music, tell jokes and, most importantly, preview tracks he was working on, like “Normal.” On TikTok, he realized, it was easier to promote himself (and go viral) than through an interview with a major news platform, and it became one of his biggest marketing tools, attracting new fans outside Colombia in places such as the United States, Mexico and Spain. (Feid now has more than 7.5 million TikTok followers.)
But it wasn’t until two trips to Mexico in 2022 that Feid truly noticed the effects of his social media presence. When he arrived in May for a festival in Monterrey, thousands of fans greeted him at the InterContinental Presidente hotel in Mexico City, prompting Feid and his team to schedule shows of his own in the country. In August, the three resulting headlining gigs — at Auditorio Nacional (Mexico City), Auditorio Citibanamex (Monterrey) and Auditorio Telmex (Guadalajara) — sold almost 20,000 tickets and grossed nearly $1 million, according to Billboard Boxscore. Previously, Feid had only performed in Mexico as a surprise guest for other artists.
“I feel that everything has been gradual in my career, but this was definitely an alert to us that something was happening,” he says with a laugh. “I still don’t want to realize what’s happening. I just want to keep making my music, be with my family, eat frijolitos (beans) and relax, but I can say that Mexico was that moment when we all wondered, ‘What’s going on?’ ”
Today, speaking with me in Miami’s hip Wynwood neighborhood, fame doesn’t seem to have changed Feid — and he’s embracing his paisa identity more than ever. He’s wearing his laid-back, go-to uniform of shorts, sneakers, baseball cap and graphic T-shirt and proudly rocking the first-ever backpack from his collaboration with Bogotá-based brand Totto. He’s polite and warm, arriving early for his Billboard photo shoot (“People’s time is valuable”) and greeting everyone in the room with a chiseled smile and a tight hug. “Que más mi reina? Todo bien?” he asks me — “All good, my queen?”
While it may have taken some extra time to get here, Feid’s down-to-earth appeal is central to why, finally, he’s prospering. Feid attributes his success to “the perfect timing of God,” but those around him know there’s a bit more to it.
“He is real and authentic,” says his manager, Villamizar. “In his music, what he writes, what he says. The DNA of all this success is him and people notice and feel it.”
“He has a lot of perseverance and a lot of persistence that few have,” says Balvin. “Many [artists] would have gotten out of the way by now, but he was always there. Now he is living his best moment, and I’m sure many more blessings will come his way.”
Feid photographed on January 12, 2023 at Proper Studio in Miami.
Devin Christopher
Late last year, Feid released his second collaboration of 2022 with Yandel, and he’s carried that momentum into 2023, earning his first Hot 100 entry with the Ozuna-assisted “Hey Mor” and embarking on his first proper Latin American trek, the sold-out Ferxxo: Nitro Jam Tour promoted by CMN. He’ll headline Chicago’s Sueños Music Festival in May and tour Europe this summer, all while working on his next album. Its “whole concept has to do with how I went from being in the shadows as a composer to everything I am achieving now [as an artist],” he explains.
Feid is covered in tattoos, but one on the right side of his neck is particularly noticeable. In cursive, it reads: Nunca olvides porque empezaste (never forget why you started) — a reminder to stay grounded. “Fe,” or faith, is at the core of what got him here, and what will keep him going forward.
“From the beginning, it was [my dream] to have a vision that only I could have and could spread to people and also surround myself with a team that understood what I wanted to do,” he says. “I have always had a lot of faith in myself and my career — and that is why Ferxxo is called ‘Feid.’ ”
Penske Media Corp. is the largest shareholder of SXSW; its brands are official media partners of SXSW.
This story will appear in the March 11, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Someone has sparked a blunt in the planetarium.
It may be a school night, but no one has come to the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, N.J., to learn. Instead, the hundreds of fans packed into the domed theater on Jan. 26 have come to hear Lil Yachty’s latest album as he intended: straight through — and with an open mind. Or, as Yachty says with a mischievous smile: “I hope y’all took some sh-t.”
For the next 57 minutes and 16 seconds, graphics of exploding spaceships, green giraffes and a quiet road through Joshua Tree National Park accompany Yachty’s sonically divergent — and at this point, unreleased — fifth album, Let’s Start Here. For a psychedelic rock project that plays like one long song, the visual aids not only help attendees embrace the bizarre, but also function as a road map for Yachty’s far-out trip, signaling that there is, in fact, a tracklist.
It’s a night the artist has arguably been waiting for his whole career — to finally release an album he feels proud of. An album that was, he says, made “from scratch” with all live instrumentation. An album that opens with a nearly seven-minute opus, “the BLACK seminole.,” that he claims he had to fight most of his collaborative team to keep as one, not two songs. An album that, unlike his others, has few features and is instead rich with co-writers like Mac DeMarco, Nick Hakim, Alex G and members of MGMT, Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Chairlift. An album he believes will finally earn him the respect and recognition he has always sought.
“I did what I really wanted to do, which was create a body of work that reflected me,” says a soft-spoken Yachty the day before his listening event. “My idea was for this album to be a journey: Press play and fall into a void.”
Sitting in a Brooklyn studio in East Williamsburg not far from where he made most of Let’s Start Here in neighboring Greenpoint, it’s clear he has been waiting to talk about this project in depth for some time. Yachty is an open book, willing to answer anything — and share any opinion. (Especially on the slice of pizza he has been brought, which he declares “tastes like ass.”) Perhaps his most controversial take at the moment? “F-ck any of the albums I dropped before this one.”
Image Credit: Peter Ash Lee
Image Credit: Peter Ash Lee
Image Credit: Peter Ash Lee
Image Credit: Peter Ash Lee
Image Credit: Peter Ash Lee
Lil Yachty, presented by Doritos, will perform at Billboard Presents The Stage at SXSW on March 16.
Someone has sparked a blunt in the planetarium.
It may be a school night, but no one has come to the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, N.J., to learn. Instead, the hundreds of fans packed into the domed theater on Jan. 26 have come to hear Lil Yachty’s latest album as he intended: straight through — and with an open mind. Or, as Yachty says with a mischievous smile: “I hope y’all took some sh-t.”
For the next 57 minutes and 16 seconds, graphics of exploding spaceships, green giraffes and a quiet road through Joshua Tree National Park accompany Yachty’s sonically divergent — and at this point, unreleased — fifth album, Let’s Start Here. For a psychedelic rock project that plays like one long song, the visual aids not only help attendees embrace the bizarre, but also function as a road map for Yachty’s far-out trip, signaling that there is, in fact, a tracklist.
It’s a night the artist has arguably been waiting for his whole career — to finally release an album he feels proud of. An album that was, he says, made “from scratch” with all live instrumentation. An album that opens with a nearly seven-minute opus, “the BLACK seminole.,” that he claims he had to fight most of his collaborative team to keep as one, not two songs. An album that, unlike his others, has few features and is instead rich with co-writers like Mac DeMarco, Nick Hakim, Alex G and members of MGMT, Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Chairlift. An album he believes will finally earn him the respect and recognition he has always sought.
“I did what I really wanted to do, which was create a body of work that reflected me,” says a soft-spoken Yachty the day before his listening event. “My idea was for this album to be a journey: Press play and fall into a void.”
Sitting in a Brooklyn studio in East Williamsburg not far from where he made most of Let’s Start Here in neighboring Greenpoint, it’s clear he has been waiting to talk about this project in depth for some time. Yachty is an open book, willing to answer anything — and share any opinion. (Especially on the slice of pizza he has been brought, which he declares “tastes like ass.”) Perhaps his most controversial take at the moment? “F-ck any of the albums I dropped before this one.”
Lil Yachty photographed on January 25, 2023 at Shio Studio in Brooklyn.
Peter Ash Lee
His desire to move on from his past is understandable. When Yachty entered the industry in his mid-teens with his 2016 major-label debut, the Lil Boat mixtape, featuring the breakout hit “One Night,” he found that along with fame came sailing the internet’s choppy waters. Skeptics often took him to task for not knowing — or caring, maybe — about rap’s roots, and he never shied away from sharing hot takes on Twitter. With his willingness and ability to straddle pop and hip-hop, Yachty produced music he once called “bubble-gum trap” (he has since denounced that phrase) that polarized audiences and critics. Meanwhile, his nonchalant delivery got him labeled as a mumble rapper — another identifier he was never fond of because it felt dismissive of his talent.
“I came into music in a time where rap was real hardcore, it was real street,” he says. “And a bunch of us kids came in with colorful hair and dressing different and basically said, ‘Move out the way, old f-cks. We on some other sh-t.’ I was young and I didn’t really give a f-ck, so I did do things that may have led people to the assumptions that I was a mumble rapper or a SoundCloud kid or I don’t appreciate the history of hip-hop. But to be honest, I’ve always been so much more than just hip-hop.
“There’s a lot of kids who haven’t heard any of my references,” he continues. “They don’t know anything about Bon Iver or Pink Floyd or Black Sabbath or James Brown. I wanted to show people a different side of me — and that I can do anything, most importantly.”
Let’s Start Here is proof. Growing up in Atlanta, the artist born Miles McCollum was heavily influenced by his father, a photographer who introduced him to all kinds of sounds. Yachty, once easily identifiable by his bright red braids, found early success by posting songs like “One Night” to SoundCloud, catching the attention of Kevin “Coach K” Lee, co-founder/COO of Quality Control Music, now home to Migos, Lil Baby and City Girls. In 2015, Coach K began managing Yachty, who in summer 2016 signed a joint-venture deal with Motown, Capitol Records and Quality Control.
“Yachty was me when I was 18 years old, when I signed him. He was actually me,” says Coach K today. (In 2021, Adam Kluger, whose clients include Bhad Bhabie, began co-managing Yachty.) “All the eclectic, different things, we shared that with each other. He had been wanting to make this album from the first day we signed him. But you know — coming as a hip-hop artist, you have to play the game.”
Yachty played it well. To date, he has charted 17 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, including two top 10 hits for his features on DRAM’s melodic 2016 smash “Broccoli” and Kyle’s 2017 pop-rap track “iSpy.” His third-highest-charting entry arrived unexpectedly last year: the 93-second “Poland,” a track Yachty recorded in about 10 minutes where his warbly vocals more closely resemble singing than rapping. (Let’s Start Here collaborator SADPONY saw “Poland” as a temperature check that proved “people are going to like this Yachty.”)
Beginning with 2016’s Lil Boat mixtape, all eight of Yachty’s major-label-released albums and mixtapes have charted on the Billboard 200. Three have entered the top 10, including Let’s Start Here, which debuted and peaked at No. 9. And while Yachty has only scored one No. 1 album before (Teenage Emotions topped Rap Album Sales), Let’s Start Here debuted atop three genre charts: Top Rock & Alternative Albums, Top Rock Albums and Top Alternative Albums.
“It feels good to know that people in that world received this so well,” says Motown Records vp of A&R Gelareh Rouzbehani. “I think it’s a testament to Yachty going in and saying, ‘F-ck what everyone thinks. I’m going to create something that I’ve always wanted to make — and let us hope the world f-cking loves it.’ ”
Yachty says he was already confident about the album, but after playing it for several of his peers and heroes — including Kendrick Lamar, J. Cole, Post Malone, Drake, Cardi B, Kid Cudi, A$AP Rocky and Tyler, The Creator — “their reactions boosted me.”
Yet despite Let’s Start Here’s many high-profile supporters, some longtime detractors and fans alike were quick to criticize certain aspects of it, from its art — Yachty quote-tweeted one remark, succinctly replying, “shut up” — to the music itself. Once again, he found himself facing another tidal wave of discourse. But this time, he was ready to ride it. “This release,” Kluger says, “gave him a lot of confidence.”
“I was always kind of nervous to put out music, but now I’m on some other sh-t,” Yachty says. “It was a lot of self-assessing and being very real about not being happy with where I was musically, knowing I’m better than where I am. Because the sh-t I was making did not add up to the sh-t I listened to.
“I just wanted more,” he continues. “I want to be remembered. I want to be respected.”
Last spring, Lil Yachty gathered his family, collaborators and team at famed Texas studio complex Sonic Ranch.
“I remember I got there at night and drove down because this place is like 30 miles outside El Paso,” Coach K says. “I walked in the room and just saw all these instruments and sh-t, and the vibe was just so ill. And I just started smiling. All the producers were in the room, his assistant, his dad. Yachty comes in, puts the album on. We got to the second song, and I told everybody, ‘Stop the music.’ I walked over to him and just said, ‘Man, give me a hug.’ I was like, ‘Yachty, I am so proud of you.’ He came into the game bold, but [to make] this album, you have to be very bold. And to know that he finally did it, it was overwhelming.”
SADPONY (aka Jeremiah Raisen) — who executive-produced Let’s Start Here and, in doing so, spent nearly eight straight months with Yachty — says the time at Sonic Ranch was the perfect way to cap off the months of tunnel vision required while making the album in Brooklyn. “That was new alone,” says Yachty. “I’ve recorded every album in Atlanta at [Quality Control]. That was the first time I recorded away from home. First time I recorded with a new engineer,” Miles B.A. Robinson, a Saddle Creek artist.
And while they did put the finishing touches on the album in Texas, they also let loose. “We had a f-cking grand old time,” SADPONY says. “We had about 50 people all throughout these houses and were driving in these unregistered trucks, like cartel trucks, around this crazy pecan farm. Obviously, we were all having some fun making this psychedelic record.”
Lil Yachty photographed on January 25, 2023 at Shio Studio in Brooklyn.
Peter Ash Lee
Yachty couldn’t wait to put it out, and says he turned it in “a long time ago. I think it was just label sh-t and trying to figure out the right time to release it.” For Coach K, it was imperative to have the physical product ready on release date, given that Yachty had made “an experience” of an album. And lately, most pressing plants have an average turnaround time of six to eight months.
Fans, however, were impatient. On Christmas, one month before Let’s Start Here would arrive, the album leaked online. It was dubbed Sonic Ranch. “Everyone was home with their families, so no one could pull it off the internet,” recalls Yachty. “That was really depressing and frustrating.”
Then, weeks later, the album art, tracklist and release date also leaked. “My label made a mistake and sent preorders to Amazon too early, and [the site] posted it,” Yachty says. “So I wasn’t able to do the actual rollout for my album that I wanted to. Nothing was a secret anymore. It was all out. I had a whole plan that I had to cancel.” He says the biggest loss was various videos he made to introduce and contextualize the project, all of which “were really weird … [But] I wasn’t introducing it anymore. People already knew.” Only one, called “Department of Mental Tranquility,” made it out, just days before the album.
Yachty says he wasn’t necessarily seeking a mental escape before making Let’s Start Here, but confesses that acid gave him one anyway. “I guess maybe the music went along with it,” he says. The album title changed four or five times, he says, from Momentary Bliss (“It was meant to take you away from reality … where you’re truly listening”) to 180 Degrees (“Because it’s the complete opposite of anything I’ve ever done, but people were like, ‘It’s too on the nose’ ”) to, ultimately, Let’s Start Here — the best way, he decided, to succinctly summarize where he was as an artist: a seven-year veteran, but at 25 years old, still eager to begin a new chapter.
He dug into his less obvious influences: In 2017, he listened to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon for the first time. “I think that was the last time I was like, ‘Whoa.’ You know?” He believes Frank Ocean’s Blonde is “one of the best albums of all time” and cites Tame Impala’s Currents as another project that stopped him in his tracks. All were fuel to his fire.
Taking inspiration from Dark Side, Yachty relied on three women’s voices throughout the album, enlisting Fousheé, Justine Skye and Diana Gordon. Otherwise, guest vocals are spare. Daniel Caesar features on album closer “Reach the Sunshine.,” while the late Bob Ross (of The Joy of Painting fame) has a historic posthumous feature on “We Saw the Sun!”
Rouzbehani tells Billboard that Ross’ estate declined Yachty’s request at first: “I think a big concern of theirs was that Yachty is known as a rapper, and Bob Ross and his brand are very clean. They didn’t want to associate with anything explicit.” But Yachty was adamant, and Rouzbehani played the track for Ross’ team and also sent the entire album’s lyrics to set the group at ease. “With a lot of back-and-forth, we got the call,” she says. “Yachty is the first artist that has gotten a Bob Ross clearance in history.”
Lil Yachty photographed on January 25, 2023 at Shio Studio in Brooklyn.
Peter Ash Lee
From the start, Coach K believed Let’s Start Here would open lots of doors for Yachty — and ultimately, other artists, too. Questlove may have said it best, posting the album art on Instagram with a lengthy caption that read in part: “this lp might be the most surprising transition of any music career I’ve witnessed in a min, especially under the umbrella of hip hop … Sh-t like this (envelope pushing) got me hyped about music’s future.”
“People don’t know where Yachty’s going to go now, and I think that’s the coolest sh-t, artistrywise,” says SADPONY. “That’s some Iggy Pop-, David Bowie-type sh-t. Where the mysteriousness of being an artist is back.”
Recently, Lil Yachty held auditions for an all-women touring band. “It was an experience for like Simon Cowell or Randy [Jackson],” he says, offering a simple explanation for the choice: “In my life, women are superheroes.”
And according to Yachty, pulling off his show will take superhuman strength: “Because the show has to match the album. It has to be big.” As eager as he was to release Let’s Start Here, he’s even more antsy to perform it live — but planning a tour, he says, required gauging the reaction to it. “This is so new for me, and to be quite honest with you, the label [didn’t] know how [the album] would do,” he says. “Also, I haven’t dropped an album in like three years. So we don’t even know how to plan a tour right now because it has been so long and my music is so different.”
While Yachty’s last full-length studio album, Lil Boat 3, arrived in 2020, he released the Michigan Boy Boat mixtape in 2021, a project as reverential of the state’s flourishing hip-hop scenes in Detroit and Flint as Let’s Start Here is of its psych-rock touchstones. And though he claims he doesn’t do much with his days, his recent accomplishments, both musical and beyond, suggest otherwise. He launched his own cryptocurrency, YachtyCoin, at the end of 2020; signed his first artist, Draft Day, to his Concrete Boyz label at the start of 2021; invested in the Jewish dating app Lox Club; and launched his own line of frozen pizza, Yachty’s Pizzeria, last September. (He has famously declared he has never eaten a vegetable; at his Jersey City listening event, there was an abundance of candy, doughnut holes and Frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop-Tarts.)
But there are only two things that seem to remotely excite him, first and foremost of which is being a father. As proud as he is of Let’s Start Here, he says it comes in second to having his now 1-year-old daughter — though he says with a laugh that she “doesn’t really give a f-ck” about his music yet. “I haven’t played [this album] for her, but her mom plays her my old stuff,” he continues. “The mother of my child is Dominican and Puerto Rican, so she loves Selena — she plays her a lot. [We watch] the Selena movie with Jennifer Lopez a sh-t ton and a lot of Disney movie sh-t, like Frozen, Lion King and that type of vibe.”
Aside from being a dad, he most cares about working with other artists. Recently, he flew eight of his biggest fans — most of whom he has kept in touch with for years — to Atlanta. He had them over, played Let’s Start Here, took them to dinner and bowling, introduced them to his mom and dad, and then showed them a documentary he made for the album. (He’s not sure if he’ll release it.) One of the fans is an aspiring rapper; naturally, the two made a song together.
“I want to be Quincy Jones,” Yachty near whispers. Last year, he co-produced a handful of tracks on the Drake and 21 Savage collaborative album Her Loss. And recently, he features on two Zack Bia tracks, one of which he produced, for Bia’s upcoming album. Six months ago, he started living by himself for the first time. “I wish I did it sooner. I wake up, play video games and then I go to the studio all night until the morning,” he says. “That’s all I want to do.” Since finishing Let’s Start Here, Yachty claims he has made hundreds of songs, some experimenting with “electronic pop sh-t” that he can only describe as “tight.”
Lil Yachty photographed on January 25, 2023 at Shio Studio in Brooklyn.
Peter Ash Lee
Yachty wants to keep working with artists and producers outside of hip-hop, mentioning the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and even sharing his dream of writing a ballad for Elton John. (“I know I could write him a beautiful song.”) With South Korean music company HYBE’s recent purchase of Quality Control — a $300 million deal — Yachty’s realm of possibility is bigger than ever.
But he’s not ruling out his genre roots. Arguably, Let’s Start Here was made for the peers and heroes he played it for first — and was inspired by hip-hop’s chameleons. “I would love to do a project with Tyler [The Creator],” says Yachty. “He’s the reason I made this album. He’s the one who told me to do it, just go for it. He’s so confident and I have so much respect for him because he takes me seriously, and he always has.”
Yachty is now hoping everyone else does, too. “I just want people to understand I love this. This is not a joke to me. And I can stand with my chest out because I’m proud of something I created.”
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This story will appear in the March 11, 2023, issue of Billboard.