Cover Story
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On Oct. 27, 2018, Portugal. The Man played its second sold-out hometown show at Alaska Airlines Center, a 5,000-capacity arena in Anchorage. It marked the end of a globe-spanning two-year trek promoting Woodstock, the band’s 2017 album that yielded its Grammy Award-winning crossover hit, “Feel It Still.” But as soon as the celebratory finale ended, frontman John Gourley was crying in a bathroom.
“I just broke down in tears,” he remembers. “The second we got offstage I was just realizing that emotionally, we took on so much for an introvert [like myself] who just prefers being at home. And being thrown into all of that, it was really intense. But we didn’t realize until that night, like, ‘Oh, wow. This is… difficult to do.’ ”
He had no idea that the following years would prove even more trying. That after having the biggest hit of the band’s career, Portugal. The Man would nearly fall apart. And that, 20 years after the group formed in Alaska in the early 2000s, he would be forced to face his anxieties as a frontman who cringes at attention to prevent its fragmentation.
Today, Gourley is back where he feels at ease. At 42, a boyish wonderment consumes him as he walks his father’s woodsy plot of land in Wasilla, just over 40 miles north of Anchorage. There’s the main house and its attached garage with floor-to-ceiling shelves of construction materials — the family business — and a greenhouse in the back. There’s the detached garage that stores a motorboat. And there are two small guest homes, one filled with music memorabilia, including sleeves of vinyl albums that inspired Gourley as a kid: The Beatles’ Revolver, the Bee Gees’ Idea, Jefferson Airplane’s Crown of Creation and dozens more. There’s a Portugal. The Man poster on one wall, and above the door frame, a life-size ticket stub from that last night of the band’s 2018 tour.
Portugal. The Man — a name inspired by David Bowie’s larger-than-life fame, contrasting the enormity of an entire country with a single person — initially formed as a side project led by Gourley and bassist Zach Carothers, both of whom got their start in the emo band Anatomy of a Ghost. The longtime friends and bandmates met at Wasilla High School and quickly started making music together — while also quickly realizing that to make it their career, they would have to leave Alaska.
“It was kind of my push,” says Gourley, who has since operated much like the Wizard of Oz, quietly leading from behind a curtain. “ ‘We’re going to leave Alaska and just keep going.’ So we bought a minivan and a rice cooker — we had no money at the time and probably spent more money on gas looking for a rice cooker at Goodwill. We found one for six bucks, went to the Asian market and got a 5 pound bag of rice and just went out on tour.”
Gourley at his father, John Gourley Sr.’s, house in Wasilla, standing in front of the tree he climbs in the music video for “Noise Pollution” off Woodstock.
Brian Adams
By 2004, they had made Portland, Ore. — a 44-hour drive southeast of Anchorage — their home base, fleshing out the band with drummer Jason Sechrist and keyboardist Ryan Neighbors along the way. In 2006, Portugal. The Man independently-released its debut album, Waiter: “You Vultures!” and within months signed with manager Rich Holtzman (currently senior vp of marketing and artist development at AEG Presents), who helped the act establish a five-year plan.
Festival appearances at Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza followed, as did four more independently released albums, arriving annually. All the while, Gourley maintained an unusual relationship with his role in the group: As much as he could, he avoided being a frontman entirely. He leaned on Carothers and the other band members to help absorb the spotlight, even performing with his back to the crowd.
By 2010, five years into its existence, Portugal. The Man signed a deal with Atlantic Records. “I just felt that they were so original and didn’t sound like any band out there at the time,” says Craig Kallman, the label’s chairman/CEO. He was so impressed, in fact, that he brought another then-rising signee — Bruno Mars — to see the band perform at the tiny (and since-closed) Los Angeles venue Space 15 Twenty. After the set, Mars offered a pivotal piece of feedback to Gourley: “That show was so cool, but all I could see was your ass.” Gourley has played facing his growing live audiences ever since.
Portugal. The Man has released three studio albums on Atlantic: 2011’s In the Mountain in the Cloud, 2013’s Evil Friends and 2017’s Woodstock. But while all landed in the top 50 of the Billboard 200, Woodstock altered the band’s trajectory completely, thanks to breakout single “Feel It Still.” The groovy, uptempo song — which samples The Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman,” a Gourley family favorite on trips by dogsled to the grocery store — became an undeniable, and entirely unexpected, career-defining hit, and ushered in a series of firsts for the band.
“Feel It Still” scored Portugal. The Man its first Billboard Hot 100 entry, peaking at No. 4; it became the band’s first No. 1 on several charts, including Alternative Airplay, Hot Rock & Alternative Songs and Pop Airplay; and it earned the band its first Grammy nomination and win for best pop duo/group performance. (Gourley gave his trophy to Holtzman.) To date, “Feel It Still” has racked up 1.21 billion on-demand official U.S. streams and generated approximately $25 million globally (in recorded music and publishing royalties) from track sales, streams and radio play, Billboard estimates based on Luminate data. It’s also a go-to among music supervisors; the song has been Shazammed over 20 million times, earning key synch placements in the trailer for the film Peter Rabbit and shows including Love, Simon and Riverdale.
Though Gourley often refers to the hit vaguely as “that song,” he’s grateful for the success it brought the band. “ ‘Feel It Still’ gave us so much,” he says. “We have houses, I have a car… it feels so special and I’m just so gracious of everything that came along with that song.” But “emotionally, it was really difficult. It was this really stressful period for the band, just having that crossover success.”
Even so, the band believed it was ready to hit the ground running with its ninth album and hoped to return to the frequent release schedule of its early days. Mainstream success afforded the group its pick of producer, and the band ultimately landed on Jeff Bhasker, whom Gourley had dreamed of working with since Bhasker produced Kanye West’s game-changing 808s & Heartbreak. What was on track to be a two-year project became three, and then five, with the band finally turning in the album last December — and along the way, everything changed.
During that five-year period, the band members variously faced personal loss, addiction, a potentially career-ending health issue and an “aggressively progressive” diagnosis, all of which happened amid the isolation of the pandemic.
In 2019, Chris Black — a close friend who, after meeting the group in Los Angeles in the 2010s, became its unofficial DJ and MC — died suddenly. Black always kept the band members laughing, quick to crack a joke or put someone in their place. “It’s not common for a band like us to have an MC, but it made me feel really good,” says Gourley.
“He was also the glue for all of our friends,” he adds. “The thing that I miss the most is the way he held that friend group together… it just slipped away a little bit, and I think it’s difficult, recognizing that.” Coupled with the fact that, for the first time, the band members were living apart for an extended period of time through the pandemic, a natural rift formed — or perhaps widened — within it, leaving its lineup in limbo. Portugal. The Man has a long history of revolving musicians — its Wikipedia page includes a color-coded timeline of 13 past and present members’ histories — and Gourley and Carothers are the only two who appear on every album; the current lineup consists of Gourley (vocals, guitar), Carothers (vocals, bass), Zoe Manville (vocals, percussion), Kyle O’Quin (keys) and Eric Howk (guitar). (After rejoining in 2016, drummer Jason Sechrist has exited again.)
Gourley at his father’s house in Wasilla.
Brian Adams
The second of two guest homes on John Gourley Sr.’s plot of land, which houses music memorabilia.
Brian Adams
With the band members — who, up until Woodstock, had lived together — now by necessity living in the separate homes they only recently were able to afford, they were left alone with more time on their hands than ever before. By the end of 2018, Gourley was experiencing the worst pain of his life. He broke his jaw (the left side, he learned, had actually been broken for years; the right side snapped from the resulting pressure) and later split two teeth. He was bedridden for months, largely unable to sing or perform for over a year.
Then, in 2021, Gourley and Manville (who married in 2017) learned that their 11-year-old daughter, Frances, had a rare neurodegenerative genetic disease known as DHDDS, which shares symptoms with both dementia and Parkinson’s (she is one of only six known patients with her specific mutation). By June 2022, Howk, Carothers and O’Quin had all battled different addictions and entered rehab (the three members declined to share further related details).
Now, come June 23, Chris Black Changed My Life — the album that began with Bhasker almost five years ago — will chronicle the band’s turbulent last few years following the runaway success of “Feel It Still.” Though the album is finished, the band is still working itself out — and determining in real time how to juggle what comes next, from promotion to touring. With the band members’ relationships and finances riding on this album’s success, Gourley is now embracing the role he has long avoided: an actually-front-facing frontman.
“Everybody has their personal things going on. We finally understand what has been happening with Frances,” he says. “The stakes have changed. The motivation has changed. The reason I’m doing this — it has all changed. I can’t be the anxiety-ridden kid anymore. There’s this moment of adulthood and growing up or whatever it is… It’s stepping out and taking on that role in a way that I haven’t in the past.”
“Who the f–k is Portugal. The Man?”
That’s the question Jeff Bhasker found himself asking in 2017, when he randomly browsed iTunes after a period where he had tuned out popular music. “No. 1, ‘Feel It Still’ by Portugal. The Man,” he recalls. “Just the name of their band was kind of arresting and makes you curious. It got me really interested in who they were.”
About a year later, the group showed up at his door. “We were traveling around L.A. doing the tour of producers that wanted to work with us post-massive song and they’re all like, ‘They must have another one in there!’ I’ve written a hundred songs, dude. I have one,” Gourley says with a laugh.
To determine who should produce its next album, the band decided the best approach was to just get in the studio and write. Bhasker was at the top of its wish list — but when the band members arrived, instruments in hand, at his house, he proposed they have a conversation before jumping in. “We just listened to music and talked about Alaska and experience and clicked as people,” says Gourley.
“I like to let the artist tell me who they are and meet them where they’re at,” Bhasker explains. “It was so interesting hearing about the white van and the rice cooker — just on the highest level of being a broke band. I love the way they describe their progression of like, ‘Well, on the first album, we learned how to play our instruments.’ ”
Gourley skipping rocks.
Brian Adams
Gourley at Knik Lake.
Brian Adams
Bhasker says the years that followed — pandemic aside — felt like an “Usain Bolt-level sprint to finish the album,” with the band clocking hours at studios in Los Angeles, New York and Portland, as well as Bhasker’s studio in Malibu, Calif., and Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, where Portugal. The Man recorded its first album with Atlantic over a decade prior.
After first signing with the label, Gourley explains, he’d felt the need to bring his bandmates into the studio for his mostly solitary writing process. (Through In the Mountain in the Cloud, the sole writing credits on the band’s albums are his.) “It was just this feeling of like, ‘We’re a band — everybody comes in,’ ” he says. “And I think it was also the expectation of producers a lot of the time. They always think, ‘Stick Portugal. The Man in a room and they’ll just jam and sing.’ That has been the process every single time, and we had never done it pre-Atlantic.”
For the band’s ninth album, everyone left the studio at first — “It felt more personal,” Gourley says — though O’Quin eventually joined most sessions, and Carothers and Manville are credited as co-writers on several tracks.
Gourley recalls his first recording session while still rehabbing his jaw, working again with Electric Guest’s Asa Taccone (who co-wrote and co-produced “Feel It Still”) on four tracks that made it onto Chris Black Changed My Life. Looking back now, he says the brooding and downtempo “Plastic Island” stands out most because he can hear himself literally singing through his teeth, since he still couldn’t open his jaw all the way. On the song, he wonders: “Is it the end, my friend?” The album’s pensive closing track — the nearly six-minute-long “Anxiety:Clarity” featuring veteran songwriter and ASCAP president Paul Williams — opens with the line: “I’m not supposed to be here.”
“That’s the way I was feeling coming out of everything and finally getting to express myself after two years of like, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do this again,’ ” says Gourley. “I laid in bed thinking I would never be able to do anything ever again. I thought I was going to die. I thought about Frances, and what’s she going to do? I was depressed.”
Frances herself appears on the album, singing on “Ghost Town” and “Time’s a Fantasy”; Gourley calls the latter, which also features Canadian rapper Sean Leon and Bhasker, one of the album’s heavier songs. “We had just found out that Frances has this very rare genetic disease,” he recalls. “Zoe and I were just bawling in the studio with Jeff and Sean, and Frances ended up singing on it. She must have felt some spiritual connection to this song because it’s so slow and emotional, but she would hear it and loved singing [the line], ‘I got a feeling it’s gonna be just fine.’ ” (The band recently launched a donation page called Frances Changed My Life to raise money to fund both multimillion-dollar research and treatment for her.)
An old boat seen in a Portugal. The Man music video on Knik Lake stuck in the silt flats.
Brian Adams
Gourley wears a shirt honoring the band’s late friend and unofficial member Chris Black.
Brian Adams
Bhasker says nailing down the album’s subject matter was understandably difficult. “It’s all about John’s anxiety, and all of them and everything they went through and are all going through as a band, as a family, as people who just struggled to achieve a dream — and achieved it,” he says. “And then maybe questioned, ‘What are we doing here, and what do we really stand for?’ ”
Both Bhasker and Gourley recall their time at Sonic Ranch in the fall of 2022 fondly, mostly because that’s where a thematic track list started to take shape. “To see the album kind of emerge, and most of all to see a smile on John’s face… it was kind of like a ’70s movie where they would just shoot endless footage and hope there’s a movie in there,” says Bhasker. “And then to see the movie unfold and work was the most satisfying moment.”
The end result is a deeply layered and complex album that is equally beautiful and heartbreaking; with everything Gourley and the band have endured, and continue to experience, how could it be anything else? Even the uptempo lead single, “Dummy,” co-written with Taccone (and which debuted in a Taco Bell commercial), hints at the album’s unifying ethos: “Everyone I know is running from the afterlife,” sings Gourley.
“It is our best album,” Gourley confidently states. “I was really surprised when we got to the end of it, because this had been the thing that I had been searching for forever. It’s these really tight, concise ideas, like, ‘Can you tell a story in a sentence?’ I obsess over that, and I feel like this record, we did it. I did the thing that we were chasing. This is what I have been trying to write forever.”
Gourley exhales, taking in the towering snowcapped mountains of Hatcher’s Pass, just north of Wasilla. These are the mountains he would ditch high school to snowboard with Carothers. The same ones he recently carried Frances up while she napped on his shoulders. And the same ones that today are prompting him to wonder why he ever left. “I just miss Alaska so much,” he says with a sigh.
In a recent clip on Instagram — part of the band’s Knik Country Broadcast series, in which Gourley answers quick-hit questions — Gourley said, “Everything I’ve ever written is about Alaska.” It’s also fair to say everything that Portugal. The Man does is for Alaska.
In 2020, while still enjoying the “Feel It Still” high, the band launched the PTM Foundation — the acronym is a double-entendre that also stands for Pass the Mic — which advocates for human rights, community health and the environment, with a particular focus on Indigenous Peoples. (In 2022, the foundation raised $93,000 in grants given to 40 different tribes, impact organizations and community groups.) The band was always intended to serve more than itself, operating with curiosity and care for the surrounding world — and questioning its place in it.
When Bhasker started working with Portugal. The Man, it had been a while since his last collaboration with a band (by his estimation, it was with fun. on its 2012 smash hit, “We Are Young,” featuring Janelle Monáe). “It was definitely a challenge to navigate all the dynamics and all the growth and all the changes they had been going through — and especially during COVID, when everyone was going through all kinds of existential changes and being faced with a lot of really deep, personal struggles and revelations in their lives.”
As Gourley sees it, the success of “Feel It Still” — paired with perhaps too much time apart — amplified and exposed those individual struggles. “I think with that song being so successful so late in our career, it’s a rare thing,” he says. “Eighth record, a song like that? There comes complacency: ‘I’m content. I have a house. I don’t have to do this.’ But I still feel very hungry.”
A pair of moose on the way down from Hatcher’s Pass.
Brian Adams
Gourley on the road through Hatcher’s Pass.
Brian Adams
Playing so many festivals, in particular, he believes, can be “the death of a band… I was forgetting lyrics to ‘Feel It Still’ because of the monotony — and I love that song. I love that song more than any song we’ve ever written. I have never been built to show up and play a setlist, and we got stuck in that for a long time. I think people want comfort, and I feel like comfort is actually not the best thing for creativity.”
Portugal. The Man relentlessly toured through 2019 and resumed in 2022, co-headlining arenas with Alt-J. But this year, despite a new album, its schedule is significantly pared down. In June, it returned to Bonnaroo and in August will play Lollapalooza Chicago followed by the Austin City Limits festival in October. Otherwise, it has booked only a handful of headlining shows at iconic venues in key territories, like Colorado’s Red Rocks, New York’s Radio City Music Hall and Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl. The band’s live lineup adds four new musicians to the mix, including a new drummer.
When speaking of what the band’s present — and future — looks like, it’s clear Gourley isn’t entirely sure what to say, or how. He’s cautious not to speak only for himself but also not for anyone else, often seesawing between “I” and “we.” (The band’s other members did not speak for this story; for this album cycle, Gourley has chosen to do press by himself.) He recalls a particular phone call with legendary musician and singer Edgar Winter, whose “Dying To Live” is sampled on the Chris Black Changed My Life track “Champ.”
“This is what I would say about the situation with the band,” says Gourley. “It’s a pretty easy way to sum it up: [Edgar] called me one day and said, ‘I’m going to tell you about the best band I ever played in. The best band I ever played in lived in Chicago in a one-bedroom apartment. We had all had success, but we lived in a one-bedroom apartment. We could all afford things, but we lived in a one-bedroom apartment. We ate together, we slept together, we had this experience together. As soon as we got our own places, we stopped being the best band I ever played in.’
“The thing is, no matter where I go, I’m still sleeping on the floor in that one-bedroom apartment,” continues Gourley, speaking in a slow, hushed voice. “For this band to keep going, you have to have that excitement constantly around you, so you don’t forget that we worked really hard to get [here].”
He already has his sights set on the album after this one. “I am so excited to go back into outer space and do the craziest [stuff] and experiment with structure post-this record,” he says.
But for now, he’s grounding himself where it all started — running around with his nieces and nephews at his father’s house, hanging from wooden beams like monkey bars. Fortunately for Gourley, he can always come back home. As his father fondly jokes, “When he started playing music, we lost our best roofer.”
After all this time, it seems a fair trade. Gourley found himself.
06/22/2023
John Gourley in his home state of Alaska.
06/22/2023
In February, when Kaytranada’s stage manager, Tamir Schlanger, texted him to ask if he had a vision for his Coachella performance, the artist responded with screenshots of the giant metallic head from The Wiz, the 1978 musical film featuring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. He wondered: Could Schlanger replicate it, but with his own head?
Out of context, the images were menacing — the almighty wizard, spewing smoke and lasers — but funny, too; one featured Richard Pryor’s character, a failed politician from New Jersey named Herman Smith, peeping up sheepishly through the hole in The Wiz’s eye. All smoke and mirrors. Was the 30-year-old producer-DJ commenting on the steely facade of celebrity? Was the production meant to highlight the dichotomy between Louis Kevin Celestin, the shy kid born to Haitian immigrants who grew up in a quiet Montreal suburb, and the Grammy-winning musical wiz better known as Kaytranada?
“There really was no thought process at all, honestly,” Kaytranada admits about a month after his performance, emphasizing that the decision was purely aesthetic: He was just a fan of the movie and noticed his own physical resemblance to The Wiz’s face. “I just wanted to make something iconic,” he says.
Prior to his Coachella performance, there was little disputing Kaytranada’s accomplishments behind the scenes, where he had cultivated a reputation as a personally reserved but musically boisterous tastemaker. Over the course of two albums, 2016’s 99.9% and 2019’s Grammy-winning Bubba, he established himself as a go-to producer and deft collaborator, a singular artist able to adapt his sound to the strengths of everyone from hip-hop stars like Chance the Rapper to experimental R&B singers like Kelela while still maintaining his distinct style: a feel-good blend of dance, R&B, Afrobeats, disco and hip-hop. In the process, he also became one of the biggest gay Black artists in a genre of increasingly influential music founded by gay Black artists.
Kaytranada has jokingly called his music “Black tropical house” and “futuristic disco,” though today, speaking to Billboard, he describes it as “a new era of new jack swing.” And there is a definitive swing that distinguishes his production style, which borrows from elements of the Haitian dance genre compas, including the slightly off drum placements that imprint his otherwise sleek productions with a soulful, human touch. What has become known as the “Kaytranada sound” — a term he feels sometimes boxes him into the past — lies in the tension between the comfort of nostalgia and the excitement of the future, and has earned him collaborations with artists he aspired to be like growing up, like Pharrell Williams.
“He has a refreshing energy and approach to music,” Williams says. “And we’re all so blessed that dance music is at the center of what he does — which is, make us dance in color.”
Marni top, pants, and blazer.
Joelle Grace Taylor
Since he caught the internet’s attention with early SoundCloud remixes of Missy Elliott and TLC, along with a freewheeling, widely memed 2013 Boiler Room set filmed in Montreal that has amassed 19 million YouTube views (Top comment: “This party should have its own Wikipedia page”), Kaytranada’s vibrant dance music has captivated audiences across the world. But there was something different about the Kaytranada who DJ’d in front of a giant sculpture of his own head during a prime-time slot at Coachella’s massive Outdoor Theatre.
It wasn’t just that lasers shot out of that head as he danced playfully to hits spanning his discography or how he hyped up the crowd while premiering his remix of Beyoncé’s 2022 disco-funk banger, “CUFF IT.” Nor was it the guest appearances from Kali Uchis and Aminé the first weekend or H.E.R., Tinashe and Anderson .Paak the second — all Kaytranada collaborators whose relationships with the producer extend beyond the studio. Instead, it was the unmistakable confidence fueling his showmanship, which finally mirrored the assured and sprightly pulse of his music.
As someone who came up DJ’ing in Montreal’s experimental hip-hop scene, Kaytranada says he used to judge other DJs for “overdoing it” onstage. “I was like, ‘I want my ones and twos, and that’s it,’ ” he says. “I have the music, and I understand it. I just didn’t want to go extra.” Looking back on his reservations, “it was probably my confidence,” he admits, noting that having a stage manager like Schlanger who is able to bring his “random ideas” to life has also been a tremendous help. “I just didn’t think I deserved to go that far. But now that I have accepted myself, I’m like, ‘OK, I’ll perform with a big crowd. I’ll perform at a stadium.’ That kind of inspired me to do a larger-than-life show.”
“That show is really a visual representation of a decade of hard work,” says William Robillard Cole, Kaytranada’s manager since 2013. The Coachella set, he says, proved to be a “pivotal moment” in not only solidifying trust with the team at RCA, which Kaytranada signed to in 2018, but in establishing the artist as a “true major hard-ticket act,” noting that offers from bookers started pouring in almost immediately. “People are like, ‘Bring the head! Let’s do a tour with the head!’ ”
Robillard Cole attributes Kaytranada’s newfound confidence onstage in part to opening for The Weeknd on his 2022 After Hours Til Dawn stadium tour but also cites two pivotal things that happened long before: Kaytranada coming out publicly in 2016 and moving from Montreal to Los Angeles shortly after, where he has bounced among a series of long-term Airbnbs when he’s not on the road. “As he has gotten older and more comfortable with himself, he has really been able to develop a performance attitude,” says Robillard Cole. “Kay is an entertainer. It’s true to his soul. That dude loves to dance, he loves to entertain people, he loves to DJ, and to see the progression as a performer over the last few years, it has just been incredible to watch.”
Marni suit, Dries Van Noten top, Martine Ali jewelry. Dog Model: Angel Hernandez.
Joelle Grace Taylor
In 2023, that progression promises to continue as Kaytranada heads to Europe in June to support another leg of The Weeknd’s tour. Later this year, he plans to release his third album, though he says it’s too early to discuss particulars beyond the heavier influence of new wave and industrial. And in May, he released a breezy collaborative record with rapper Aminé called Kaytraminé (get it?) that evokes that first sip of a frozen piña colada. Aminé says they selected album guests such as Williams, Big Sean, Amaarae, Freddie Gibbs and Snoop Dogg out of “pure fandom” and connected with each organically, with texts and phone calls rather than working through A&R — a testament, he adds, to Kaytranada’s likability. (The producer says his collaborations are now 60% people who approach him and 40% him reaching out to artists.)
“His master collaborator effect to me is because he’s so nonchalant about everything,” says Aminé, who met Kaytranada through SoundCloud in 2014 when he rapped over the producer’s early breakout, “At All.” “He’ll play the craziest beat and just be like, ‘Yeah, that was pretty cool.’ It’s so funny. I feel like a lot of artists go into sessions with producers who have big names or whatever, and the producers are really f–king intimidating sometimes. They’re like, ‘This is going to be a hit record, man! This is going to get you to the top!’ Corny sh-t that doesn’t really feel like yourself, and I think Kay is really good at giving artists room and just letting them flourish.”
His last album, Bubba, which showcased artists like Estelle, Masego and GoldLink, earned Kaytranada three nominations at the 2021 Grammys, including for best new artist, and a landmark pair of wins: best dance recording for “10%,” his funk-tinged, pay-me-now collaboration with Uchis, and the other for best dance/electronic album. The latter put Kaytranada in the record books as the first Black producer and first openly gay artist to win the category since it was created in 2004.
They’re notable distinctions, considering the foundational role gay Black men have played in dance music for the last 50 years. In places like Chicago, the birthplace of house, dance music was forged out of resistance, with underground clubs functioning as spaces of relative safety and freedom from the racist and homophobic status quo. While smaller clubs, festivals and labels across America center queer Black DJs, that history is rarely acknowledged at today’s typical major dance festivals, where straight white men overwhelmingly dominate lineups. As Chicago DJ Derrick Carter put it in 2014: “Something that started as gay Black/Latino club music is now sold, shuffled and packaged as having very little to do with either.”
“Being a queer artist, being from Canada and of Haitian descent — he’s an outsider in every respect,” explains Def Jam Records CEO Tunji Balogun, who says it was a “no-brainer” to sign Kaytranada to RCA when he was vp there. “But he’s still redefining what an electronic DJ is supposed to look and sound like.”
There’s a dexterity to Kaytranada’s interdisciplinary output that offers multiple points of entry into his work. “I always tell people Kay has three parts to his career: He’s a DJ, he’s a producer and he’s an artist,” says Robillard Cole. “Obviously, that’s not something that’s super common in the music business, and to run a career that has three parts, we’ve had to put in just as much work on the producer side as the DJ side and as much work on the artist side as the producer side. It’s all about strategic partnerships and relationships.”
Those different but connected roles have singularly situated Kaytranada in the dance world. He’s the rare artist who can release a hip-hop record on Friday, then DJ Electric Daisy Carnival on Saturday, as he did in May; someone who’s big enough to headline dance festivals but still eager to work with niche and emerging artists. “He’s either the biggest pop star in the underground or the best-kept secret in the pop world,” Balogun says. “He has dual citizenship. I think he’s becoming that go-to DJ that a pop star will call to freshen up a song, but he’s also still in the trap.”
When Balogun began following Kaytranada online after the latter released his sample-heavy 2013 mixtape, Kaytra Todo, on Jakarta Records, he at first didn’t even register him as a dance artist because he was “on some futuristic hip-hop sh-t. He definitely reminded me of a J Dilla descendant.” Today, he sees Kaytranada as a bridge, someone whose intersections connect music lovers across genres, cultures and generations, like introducing younger listeners to influences such as Madlib and J Dilla — legendary producers who themselves sat at the intersection of hip-hop and dance music and informed Kaytranada’s approach for Kaytraminé — or collaborators like Teedra Moses. (His remix of her 2004 song “Be Your Girl” has far surpassed the original in streams.)
While Kaytranada has intentionally operated “on the outer realm of the industry,” as Robillard Cole puts it, going forward, “the goal is to be the biggest dance artist in the world,” he says, “but [while] staying true to himself. Never compromising. It’s not a monetary goal for us. It’s more respect and critical acclaim than anything. I always tell people that cream rises to the top. It’s the same with good music.” He’s trying to help Kaytranada build a legacy, and paints the image of 25-year-olds flipping through a vinyl shop in the year 2080, geeking out over a Kaytranada record. “That’s what legacy is,” he says.
Marni top, pants, and blazer, Adieu shoes.
Joelle Grace Taylor
No matter his accolades, some professional moments still send Kaytranada spiraling into self-doubt — he’s a Virgo after all, and identifies with the sign’s perfectionist tendencies. But he has increasingly come to understand his value. When I ask him if the remix of “CUFF IT” he premiered at Coachella will ever be released, he shrugs. Parkwood Entertainment, he explains, approached his team about the remix and sent him the vocal stems, but he disagreed with the terms of the proposed contract. (Negotiations are still pending; Parkwood did not respond to requests for comment.) He looks visibly disappointed. He worked hard on the remix and knows it would mean a lot to release it, both to the culture — when Beyoncé’s 2022 album, Renaissance, deeply indebted to house and disco trailblazers, won the Grammy for best dance/electronic album, she thanked “the queer community for your love and for inventing the genre” in her acceptance speech — and to his own career. But he also seems resolute.
“I know my worth. I know they reached out to me to do the remix for a reason, and then to be treated back like I wasn’t all that, it’s kind of weird,” he says. “I’m going to keep it at that. I know my worth.”
A different remix jump-started Kaytranada’s career over 10 years ago: his high-octane club rework of Janet Jackson’s “If,” which sounded like the singer had fallen into a vortex. He worked on the song all night in his bedroom after attending a Flying Lotus show in Montreal, inspired by the producer’s ability to fuse electronic elements with hip-hop. Under the moniker Kaytradamus, he uploaded the remix to SoundCloud at 5 a.m. before passing out.
This was in 2012, when SoundCloud was an influential hub for experimental dance music, and Kaytranada woke up that afternoon to an avalanche of notifications. He recalls peering at his phone and thinking, “What the hell is this?” before going back to sleep, too frazzled to comprehend the attention.
Offers to DJ started trickling in, including an invitation from Robillard Cole to play in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he was a business student at Saint Mary’s University, in January 2013. (It was the first time Kaytranada flew on an airplane since immigrating to Canada from Haiti as a child.) “I just never heard music like his before — ever,” he says. “The way he puts synths together, his basslines; everything was slightly offbeat.” After the gig, Robillard Cole asked Kaytranada if he had a manager, promising that he could double his rate at the time to $300 a set. He started organizing Kaytranada’s first tour from his accounting class.
Because touring in America required visas, they went to Europe instead. Their budget was $7,000 Canadian, which meant sharing hotel rooms and traveling by bus. The venues were small; Robillard Cole recalls Kaytranada DJ’ing in a jerk chicken restaurant in Manchester, England. But the risks — which included Kaytranada and Robillard Cole eventually dropping out of high school and business school, respectively — paid off. The tour got Kaytranada in front of influential people in the music industry, which led to his 2014 signing with XL Records, the storied British label that has been home to Radiohead, M.I.A. and Arca.
The deal let Kaytranada expand his clout in Europe, which at the time was more receptive to his music. (The United States is currently his biggest market.) It also helped connect him with bigger collaborators for his debut album, 99.9%, which features artists like Vic Mensa, AlunaGeorge and Craig David. “It was a super-big blessing to be signed with XL back then,” says Robillard Cole, “and we just did it as a one-off, which to this day is one of the best decisions [we’ve] ever made because it allowed us to come over to America and sign with RCA Records next and really grow commercially.”
Dries Van Noten suit, Ferragamo shoes, Acne Studios eyewear.
Joelle Grace Taylor
Kaytranada came out in The Fader in 2016, shortly before the release of 99.9%. To his surprise, he found that as his career started to grow, so did his unhappiness, and he recalls thinking, “I’ve got to come out, or I’m going to go crazy.” “At the time, it was just to confirm to myself and to my brain and to the world that I am indeed gay, because I was gay all my life but I definitely suppressed it,” he says. “Growing up with a lot of kids who are just like, ‘Being gay is hell naw.’ In Haiti, hell naw. You cannot be gay.”
Though his anxiety spiked pre-publication, “his whole mentality and energy changed as soon as that article came out,” says his brother, rapper Lou Phelps. “Like he felt more free. He would be less reserved, less shy with the family.”
Though his success has played an important part in realigning mainstream dance music with its gay Black roots, Kaytranada doesn’t necessarily frame his impact in those terms. He recalls learning about dance music’s history in his early 20s through Maestro, the 2003 documentary about DJ culture featuring luminaries like Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan, and thinking, “Duh — because [house music] sounded very Black,” he says. At the same time, it helped him to better trace his influences; as someone who grew up feeling like “a little weird Black dude” for listening obsessively to acts like Justice and Daft Punk, Kaytranada came to realize that those French electronic artists were themselves borrowing from Black musical genres.
Although he was bullied at his mostly white high school for being small, Black and quiet, kids also regarded him as a tastemaker, someone they approached in the hallways about what they should be listening to — which included everything from Kenyan rock to Linkin Park and the Black Eyed Peas. “I always thought I knew music better than anybody at my school,” he says.
When I ask Kaytranada if he thinks people who come to his shows or participate in dance culture should know about the music’s history, he seems ambivalent. “If you’re into house music, you definitely need to get educated,” he says. “But if you just love the music, that’s cool, too. I don’t really judge when it comes to that.” It’s the kind of noncommittal answer that he tends to give for questions about identity in general, a reticence that suggests he would rather let his work speak for itself. Later, when I ask if he has been able to find gay community in Los Angeles since coming out, he says, “Yes,” then pauses haltingly before acknowledging that he sometimes feels overlooked by the gay community at large for not “proving” that he’s gay enough.
“I thought it was going to be fun,” he says. “[But] it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re not the gay man I thought you was going to be. Oh, your taste is not like my taste. You need to be more gay.’ And that would affect me — but not anymore, because I know I’m really unique at this point. I’m just onto different things.”
Kaytranada photographed on May 11, 2023 at Garibaldina Society in Los Angeles. Commission tank and polo top, Amiri shoes, Martine Ali jewelry, FRED eyewear.
Joelle Grace Taylor
It’s a charge he still seems sensitive about — not being as visibly queer as some other artists — though he insists he’s just being himself, the role model he felt he needed before he came out. Growing up as a hip-hop head, he recalls listening to Mobb Deep’s homophobic lyrics and questioning how he could ever be accepted in the industry. (It might be one reason he always listened to the beats of his favorite rap songs before he delved into the lyrics: “I was always looking at the credits,” he says.)
“Like, how are you going to accept a gay producer?” he recalls thinking. “That was not seen at the time. It seemed impossible.” Mainstream representations of gay men sent him into an identity crisis. “I couldn’t relate to that. I just couldn’t, and I was like, ‘I cannot be gay,’ because I was not into those things,” he says. “That was really a confusing period of my life.”
He points to Frank Ocean coming out on Tumblr in 2012 as a significant turning point in his own self-acceptance. “It kind of made things more possible,” he says, particularly in the world of R&B and hip-hop. And he knows, at this point, that he has become that person for others, too. “When I came out, a lot of musicians secretly came out to me, saying, ‘The [Fader] article moved me.’ And I was like, ‘Word.’ ”
In person, Kaytranada expresses himself with an ease that’s neither flashy nor restrained. Sitting outside of a restaurant on Melrose Avenue, he’s soft-spoken and reserved, burying his hands in his brown Martine Rose track jacket. But over the course of a couple of hours, he grows looser and more expressive, calling the finger sandwiches he orders “cute” (they are cute) and making casual reference to his boyfriend, a photographer he visited Universal Studios with the day before. (Kaytranada’s still a little shaken up from riding Revenge of the Mummy.) They were friends for a year before they started dating in January, and though he’s trying to implement lessons he learned from his last relationship, namely about boundaries, he says they’re together all the time.
At Billboard’s cover shoot the next day, he lies on the floor in a bright orange crop top, balancing against a fallen chair before ending up on his back in the yogic plow pose, his legs flipped over his head. (He started working out two years ago with the help of a trainer and considers himself a “gym rat” now.) Later, he struts out of the dressing room wearing a black suit with a pink wrap around his waist, steps up onto a table and poses like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, his right pointer finger directed skyward. He breaks into a grin as the camera flashes.
Kaytranada’s hands are studded with rings, including the two he bought the night before he won two Grammys. He’s still kicking himself for not superstitiously buying another one before this year’s ceremony, when he was nominated for best dance/electronic recording for “Intimidated,” his silky-smooth collaboration with H.E.R. (He lost — to Beyoncé.) “I bought chains instead,” he says. “I ended up f–king up.”
Kaytranada photographed on May 11, 2023 at Garibaldina Society in Los Angeles.
Joelle Grace Taylor
Recognition from the Recording Academy, he explains, was never the goal. “My idols, the people I looked up to, they never really had Grammys, so it was whatever. But being nominated, it’s a whole different thing. It kind of alters what you’re aiming for.” Now, he says, he’s “trying to make Grammy-winning albums.”
He gave his two trophies to his mother. They are on display in his childhood home, on top of the piano he grew up playing. The awards feel symbolic, not only of his success as an artist, but as a son. Dropping out of high school was a sore spot for his mother, who didn’t see how music could be a viable career. “When I won a Grammy, it really felt like I graduated or something. Like, I have something that means a lot,” he says. “Your name is in history forever.”
In the beginning, when his parents failed to understand what he did, Kaytranada would show them a documentary about The Neptunes to help demonstrate. But “they understood the Grammys — we had a compilation Grammy CD,” he says, grinning. There was no explanation needed.
“I just want to be remembered as one of the greats in terms of producing, not only dance and electronic but also just production in general,” Kaytranada says. He has his wish list of artists he would still love to work with, but says his dream collaboration would be to produce an entire album for a pop star looking to rebrand his or her sound, similar to how Timbaland reoriented Justin Timberlake’s style when he produced 2006’s FutureSex/LoveSounds. He throws out Justin Bieber’s name as an example. “It’s a matter of longevity, too — and, you know, just happiness. Like, as long as you’re comfortable and you’re happy with your life, that’s a form of success — but don’t forget the money part.”
I ask him if he’s happy, and his voice goes up an octave. “Yes, I’m happy!” he says somewhat apprehensively, as if to acknowledge the corniness of the question, or maybe its impossibility, before dropping back down to his normal register. “I’m saying that looking away, but naw, I’m really happy.” He laughs, then tries one more time: “I’m definitely the happiest I’ve been.”
This story will appear in the June 10, 2023, issue of Billboard.
In February, when Kaytranada’s stage manager, Tamir Schlanger, texted him to ask if he had a vision for his Coachella performance, the artist responded with screenshots of the giant metallic head from The Wiz, the 1978 musical film featuring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. He wondered: Could Schlanger replicate it, but with his own head? […]
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 at the mention of the Florida governor’s (and now, presidential hopeful’s) name. It’s an otherwise cheerful weekday in Los Angeles: Pop jams ranging from ABBA to Doja Cat play in the background as the quintet gabs gleefully about everything from Three’s Company to O’Hara’s adorable dachshund puppy, Princess Pink, who makes occasional appearances nearby.
But the shadow of the world outside can’t stay beyond this room for long. The mention of DeSantis — who recently signed a batch of anti-LGBTQ+ bills into law that collectively amount to a full attack on the civil rights of queer and trans people in Florida — is just one reminder that in 2023 alone, over 450 bills targeting LGBTQ+ rights have been introduced by right-wing politicians into state legislatures across the country, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. That’s more than double the amount of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation introduced in the same legislative session in 2022.
The five assembled today frequently, and fervently, use their respective individual platforms to speak against such attacks on the LGBTQ+ community. O’Hara, Cider, Colby and Symone are alums (and, in a few cases, winners) of some of TV’s most beloved drag reality shows, like RuPaul’s Drag Race and The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula. Morris, who’s moderating today’s discussion, has made a name for herself not only as one of country music’s brightest stars, but as an outspoken advocate — both onstage and off — for queer and trans people, calling out their mistreatment in the music industry and beyond.
The legislation leveled against those communities spans a wide range of issues — censoring discussions of gender and sexuality in public schools, banning best-practice medical care for transgender youth (and in some instances for adults, too), eliminating nondiscrimination protections for the LGBTQ+ community. And another type of legislation has quickly captured national attention: so-called “drag bans.” In March, Tennessee became the first state to pass a bill into law prohibiting “adult cabaret” performances (the definition of which includes “male or female impersonators”) in public or in the presence of minors.
“It’s just now becoming public knowledge how horrible it is there,” says O’Hara, who grew up in Tennessee, her voice quivering. “It’s scary to be trans today and to be a drag queen.” Colby puts it simply: “It’s about controlling queer kids.”
After the state’s ban sparked a legal battle with Memphis-based theater company Friends of George’s, a federal judge temporarily blocked the law. Then, on June 2, U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker ruled that the law violates performers’ First Amendment rights and deemed it unconstitutional. The ruling prevents the law from taking effect in Tennessee’s Shelby County and creates potential for further legal challenges elsewhere in the state. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti has already said that he plans to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
“This ruling is a turning point, and we will not go back,” said GLAAD president/CEO Sarah Kate Ellis in a statement. “Every anti-LGBTQ elected official is on notice that these baseless laws will not stand and that our constitutional freedom of speech and expression protects everyone and propels our culture forward.”
But LGBTQ+ advocates in Tennessee point out that, overturned or not, the law’s initial passage still accomplished one goal: creating a culture of confusion and fear surrounding self-expression in the state. Due to the intentional vagueness of the law, its enforcement would come down to individual interpretation, sparking hypothetical questions like, “If Harry Styles comes and does a concert at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville and has on a frilly shirt or a skirt or a dress…” posits Morris. “What do we do then? In a place like Tennessee, it’s obviously really meant to fearmonger.”
Maren Morris in drag as Willie Nelson photographed on May 9, 2023 in Los Angeles. Hair by Laura Polko at PRTNRS. Makeup by Diane Buzzetta at Blended Strategy. Drag Makeup Consulting by Landon Cider. Manicure by Queenie Nguyen at Nailing Hollywood. Styling by Dani Michelle at The Only Agency. Vintage shirt and bolo tie, Our Legacy jeans, Nick Fouquet hat.
Munachi Osegbu
At least 15 other states, including Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina and Texas, are either considering or have already passed legislation similar to Tennessee’s drag ban — and that’s creating an impending sense of dread that keeps the drag stars and Morris fired up. “If you don’t want to go to a drag show, don’t go to a drag show. If you don’t want to have your kids at a drag show, don’t take your kids to a drag show. But don’t put that on us!” Symone exclaims. Cider nods in agreement. “The only part of ‘grooming’ that I’m doing,” he says, “is grooming kids to find joy in their authentic selves.”
Maren Morris: How have you been coming to terms with the number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills passing through the state legislatures around the country? I live in Tennessee, and I feel like that’s unfortunately at the forefront for a lot of them.
Symone: I don’t think I’ve come to terms with it; I think I’ve just realized that I am in a rage about it. Growing up, it wasn’t like it is now, and it’s frustrating to see all this hate, this vitriol for people who just spread love and only want to be seen and accepted. I cannot believe in 2023 we’re here. Especially after doing the respective [TV] shows that we’ve done and being embraced over all these years, for it to feel like such a backlash is insane to me. I won’t come to terms with it because we deserve everything that you think that we don’t deserve.
Morris: Have you seen it affect your own bookings or your friends’ bookings?
Sasha Colby: Right now, being in gigs with the other season 15 [Drag Race] girls, I feel like in our group chats we’re all very much on high alert and asking our friends, like Aura [Mayari] who’s in Tennessee, “How is it?” I think everyone’s just being very cautious.
Drag is so popular right now [because] it’s hitting a nerve with people, both good and bad. The bad is that they see how good we’re doing and how happy we’re making people and how out of the matrix we are. Kids are coming! It’s not grooming, it’s just making space for them to be themselves.
Landon Cider: When we were hiding and forced to create secret spaces, we found community. We were bonding and forging these relationships in this underground culture. Now that it’s celebrated in the mainstream, it backfired. It’s thrown in our face. We didn’t force it to be mainstream! They did!
Colby: We weren’t allowed in cis spaces. We weren’t allowed to be anything but outcasts. And then we share it with the world, and they just want to colonize our thoughts as well as everything else.
Symone: I think it does scare them because of the kids. The kids are seeing us, and they grow up saying, “Well, why would I need to be anything other than this?” That is scary for people who are not of this generation and who grew up a different way.
Sasha Colby photographed on May 9, 2023 in Los Angeles. Hair by Jazlyn Simons. Makeup by James Michael Perez. Michael Ngo custom bodysuit, gloves, and boots.
Munachi Osegbu
Morris: There is not a “one size fits all” conveyor belt of parenting; everyone has a different thing. Saying that this is all “adult” — some drag is, absolutely! But I’ve seen the Mrs. Doubtfire reference made a lot, where it’s hilarious if it’s a cis [straight] male in drag. Then it’s OK for the kids to see, but God forbid you see someone truly expressing themselves, entertaining and just being free.
Eureka O’Hara: It’s OK if it’s a joke. But we take this seriously — this gives us inspiration and life. I come from East Tennessee, and I went through all of this times 10 living there. It makes me so mad — I have a trans Black sister who just moved in with me a few months ago, and she’s finally doing OK after 19 years of being abused. And that’s what this is.
You all know it’s not about drag. Let’s be real. These [are] scare tactics, and it just gets me so emotional. It’s about how we express ourselves, and it’s about the youth — because we have the queerest youth we’ve ever had right now. And that’s what they’re mad about. These kids are learning about who they are before they’re 18, 25, 30 years old and still have to deal with abuse like this.
Colby: The whole thing with being trans is they sexualize us. It’s funny when it’s a joke, but as soon as they sexualize us, then they’re going to want to control, like how they do with cisgender women, how they do with kids.
Cider: They’re projecting their own hatred and fear of their own community and their own small “safe” spaces.
Morris: What’s that saying? “Every threat from them is an actual admission.”
Colby: Exactly. It’s always them showing their cards.
Symone: I also just want to put out there that people may think now that it’s just the drag queens, it’s just trans people. But if they can do it to them, then they can do it to anybody else. Don’t think that just because they’re attacking us right now that y’all are going to be somehow exempt from it. We’re just the easiest targets. Just look at history.
That’s another thing that I cannot stand — the misinformation. Know what you’re speaking about, know what you’re saying before you speak. You don’t have to like a trans person. But don’t say things that you don’t know anything about. Educate yourself. Don’t put your stuff on somebody else. What did Madonna say? “Don’t hang your sh-t on me.”
Cider: Don’t push your legislature to take control and tell other people what they can or cannot do [with their bodies]. Usually, it is religious reasons why they’re doing all of this because their beliefs are binary. When we have this particular religious control, they want to put fearmongering into what has been celebrated because they don’t understand it.
Eureka O’Hara photographed on May 9, 2023 in Los Angeles. Hair by Jaymes Mansfield. Makeup by Loris Volkle. Marco Marco custom dress.
Munachi Osegbu
Morris: The fact is, they don’t have solutions for actual problems — this is their niche thing that they get to go off on. I’m from Texas, I live in Tennessee, and I do love the community I have there, but these bills almost incentivize us to turn on one another. They’re rewarding us to turn each other in, which feels kind of like a Nazi Germany thing where we turn on our own communities.
Colby: And they call it “patriotism.”
Morris: With drag being more popular than ever right now, how do you think it ultimately influences pop culture?
Colby: We used to be a mirror — like in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, we would mirror pop culture. Now we get to be pop culture. We are who celebrities, designers, artists want to work with or are inspired by.
O’Hara: Obviously, there’s so much bad that comes from the hatred and the discrimination. But to have it be publicly talked about and having these discussions — like, how many celebrities have stood up for drag lately?
Cider: It’s interesting because it’s kind of the flip for me. As a drag king, I don’t see myself and my version of my art form celebrated the way that the art of drag queens is. So it’s bittersweet because I see my sisters being catapulted into this stardom, and I’m so excited and happy for all of them. But when are we going to understand that kings have been around for just as long, if not longer, in some cultures? Sexism and misogyny take over a lot, and that’s why trans women have been hidden in secret, too; it’s that same misogyny, the same sexism.
I am not trans, but when I see my trans siblings getting attacked… If you attack one of us, you attack all of us. And it’s the same when I see my siblings being celebrated — you celebrate one of us, you celebrate all of us. So I’m celebrating them, but I’m still waiting for us to be recognized and fully embraced. We see masculinity celebrated on the runway on RuPaul’s Drag Race all the time — in the Snatch Game or Victoria [Scone] and Mo Heart doing these very masculine looks — but we still don’t see kings.
O’Hara: You talked about the sexism and misogyny — it’s also the heteronormative culture of “Men are men, women are women,” and seeing a drag king is probably even harder for them to see.
Colby: Because they don’t know how to sexualize and objectify you.
O’Hara: Tea!
Morris: Piggybacking on that, these bills are so vague in their language that it’s intentionally hard to know where the line is between what is drag and what is not, and it’s obviously really meant to eradicate the existence of trans people. I mean, even a lot of these [male] country artists wear tighter jeans than I do.
Colby: And have bigger highlights! But that’s the thing: All the beauty in country music is always so good.
Landon Cider photographed on May 9, 2023 in Los Angeles. Hair by Wigs By Vanity. Makeup by Landon Cider. Fontasia L’Amour suit, ORTTU shirt.
Munachi Osegbu
Morris: It’s elevated, right? Dolly Parton famously said that if she wasn’t Dolly, she would be a drag queen. Especially when I’m going into glam for an event, I’m looking at a lot of y’all’s photos. Like, talk about culture and impact — it affects me, too! I want to sit and be beat for the gods! Even that language — I just said something that was totally born out of this community. I exist in this space of country music, where you don’t have to do much to be seen as a brave voice, unfortunately.
Symone: And that’s why it’s so important for you to be here, because country music — and I’ll also add in rap and hip-hop here — those genres need people to come out and say something more than any other [genre] because those are the ones that are the most heteronormative.
Colby: And they have a lot of people’s ears in America. They are two of the most listened-to genres in the country.
Symone: For you to be here and say those things is so important — we need all our divas. We need you to love us now.
Morris: Are there any specific examples of good, helpful allyship that you’ve seen from artists in the last few years?
Cider: Aside from you, I look at somebody like Lizzo and the show she did in Nashville recently [with drag performers].
Symone: Yes, completely. If you’re going to Tennessee this summer for touring, get the girls up there. Get some kings up there, too!
Colby: The local girls, too, because the local performers are the ones in danger here, especially in these small towns with a lot of drag. I’ve noticed that a lot of small Southern towns have these safe spaces for queer people, and they are the ones who are going to feel the impact of all this legislation first. We get to be the face and the voice and try to do our best, but it’s these small towns that we really have to be concerned about.
Symone photographed on May 9, 2023 in Los Angeles. Hair by Gigi Goode. Makeup by RYLIE. Marko Monroe custom dress.
Munachi Osegbu
Morris: For anyone who may be reading this, what can people do to help?
Symone: Vote. That’s first and foremost.
O’Hara: Go to these organizations that work with lobbyists to watch out for the progression of these bills. Because it’s not just at a state and national level that we’re being harmed. It’s the small community governments, it’s the city governments, it’s these local places. We have organizations like ACLU and places of that nature, every state has those lobbyists — the Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition would be a great one for anyone to donate to. Of course you have to vote, but we scream that all day every day. It’s not just about voting for the president.
A lot of times, I think the most important thing is to take care of the people around you who aren’t being looked after. Talk to the quiet queer kids that look scared, that aren’t being social. Go befriend the people that don’t look happy. Stop being mean girls, and that goes for gay people, too. Step up and be there for each other, for someone other than yourself and the people who make you feel cool.
Cider: Be an active ally when it matters. If you’ve shared a smile, a laugh, a memory with a queer person, don’t let that memory hide in the closet. Take that memory where it counts — to your pulpits, to your family reunions, to the locker rooms, to the places where you know you’re going to get sh-t on for speaking out for us. That’s where it matters the most because maybe it’ll open some eyes.
Colby: I always tell my cis-het friends who have children, “You don’t have to go to every protest and stand on your soapbox. What you do have control over is the kids you created. All you can do is leave this world a little better than you left it. Make those kids allies.”
Morris: Is there anything y’all want to ask me?
Cider: You’re using your platform beautifully already, and we appreciate you, we thank you for everything. But it’s also not a hard thing to do, to be an ally and to use your platform in the way that you do. How would you encourage your peers to do the same?
Morris: I have heard the term “Shut up and sing” more times than I can count — that’s always the cutesy little threat that they like to make. So I would say to my peers who are artists and to record-label heads, publishers, songwriters: I don’t think any of us got into this art form to be an activist, but that’s ultimately thrust upon you to exist in this space and to feel like you can sleep at night. You’re going to lose fans along the way — that is just part and parcel of being public-facing. But there is a lane that you’re widening; I see it year over year at my shows, the crowd feels so diverse and so safe. I know everyone likes money, but is it worth your biography saying that you never picked a side because both sides pay money to buy a T-shirt?
This story will appear in the June 10, 2023, issue of Billboard.
I grew up being a huge country music fan, especially of people like The Chicks. Watching their career spiral in such a ridiculous, unfair way was always in my mind — it doesn’t leave your brain once you witness these idols of yours being so unfairly criticized and their careers, at least at the time, ending just for exercising their rights. There is this pressure to stay silent in country music, I think, because of what happened to The Chicks. Artists just look at it like, “It’s good for business to shut the f–k up.” And that just never really sat well with me.
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I think that’s why I’ve become a little bit of a rebellious adolescent in country. In some ways, there’s good in that; you want things to be better, you want everyone to be on the same page, you want everyone to be equally treated. There’s this passion there. But there’s also that sort of insanity and delusion of thinking you can do it all yourself. It’s ridiculous and kind of an almost white savior complex way of thinking: “I’m going to change it all from the inside — me, myself and I.” I’ve had to really take a step back and realize how to not center myself in this conversation every f–king time.
There’s always going to be this nugget of ego in all of us, but I think particularly for someone that looks like me, the education of the last few years has been to shut up and listen to those who are living these horrors every day. I’m shutting up to listen to people that are smarter than me. I am not some torch-carrying savior of country music.
I have not been pulled from the radio — at least not as a reaction to my actions. I’ve certainly lost fans along the way. But I think that’s sort of like spring cleaning. I don’t want to make three albums and go away forever; this is it for me. I don’t love anything else as much as I love performing and writing songs. So, with the effects of the “punishment phase” of speaking out, I couldn’t give a sh-t because I’m going to be doing this for the long haul. You lose some people along the way, but you solidify those that you had from the get-go.
The way the country music industry has treated LGBTQ people has been awful — there’s been almost no representation. There are people like Ty Herndon, who wasn’t able to come out until he was basically not in the industry anymore. But there is progress being made: T.J. Osborne, one of my closest friends, came out a couple years ago, and there’s such support behind him because it’s like, “Yeah, it doesn’t matter.”
In my career, I have been pretty clear with my values and putting my money where my mouth is, and over time, I’ve achieved a larger audience. So to anyone who’s a juggernaut of the industry or to new artists just trying to break right into this: I have worked bit by bit to build my business to where it is. When you speak out or you show up to a rally, you’re going to gain fans and you’re going to lose fans. Even if it’s for a piece of legislation that’s going to affect people’s bodily autonomy, or their way of making a living, or who they can marry, it is going to be political to the other side. You’re going to lose some people, but you’ll also gain some that never looked in your direction before. On a moral level, as a fan, wouldn’t it be so nice to know that you’re paying for a ticket or a T-shirt of somebody that isn’t a sh–ty person? Being inclusive is good for business because you open yourself up to the world.
When I was a guest judge on Drag Race, I did feel like I just wanted to speak from my heart and apologize [for country music’s treatment of the LGBTQ community] as an artist that comes from the genre. I felt like country music in some ways gets overlooked in that community because they rightfully assume it’s not a welcoming community. No “sorry” is going to undo the decades of harm that the country music industry has done to LGBTQ people in terms of representation. I was trying to say that there’s a lot of good people in this genre, and I hope that you don’t write it off forever because of what some artists said on their stage.
We live really close to the Covenant School [where a mass shooting took place in March], and that feeling of being swallowed by this grief, as a mother, has been really tough. My heart is just broken every day, having to pass the entrance of that school. But weirdly, I have never felt more connected to this town than in the last two months. When I went to one of the protests after the shooting, I saw mothers that I’ve had wine and disagreements with, and everyone was so emotionally raw at that moment. It’s awful that it took something so horrible to make that happen, but something in me switched, and I felt like, “I’m really lucky to live here right now.” Community like that is happening on the battlegrounds of these protests. It all comes back to the community that you’ve got to go out and build for yourself. It’s not going to come to you.
And there really is no community like here in Nashville. I’ve heard other songwriters from other places say they’ve been to L.A., they’ve been to New York, they’ve done writing trips abroad, but there’s just something different about Nashville. My heart is country music, and it’s writing songs that are stories, and it’s the collaboration of Nashville writing. It’s a lot harder to try and start over in some other way. I’ve just decided that you have to till the soil you’re on. Don’t get into the greener pastures complex.
For myself, I’m getting out of the sort of game of being the hall monitor of country music, even if I’m probably setting myself up for failure. Everything I’ve done has not been in vain; I’ve been so bowled over by the acceptance and positivity from the LGBTQ community. But I feel like I cannot look at the bad apples anymore. I’m done giving into what they want, which is attention. I think the whole “When they go low, we go high” thing is applicable here. Sometimes I fall into that trap of saying, “No, beat them at their own game. Sink to their level because they don’t operate on the high road.” There’s absolutely truth to that, and sometimes, yeah, you need to ruffle some feathers and not do this whole “Kumbaya” hand-holding thing. But clapping back on Twitter and expecting a different result doesn’t work for me anymore. I’m going to look to where the people are helping and just Mister Rogers this b-tch. —AS TOLD TO STEPHEN DAW
This story will appear in the June 10, 2023, issue of Billboard.
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.