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It was May 1977, and Queen had just finished its encore at Bingley Hall in the English town of Stafford when the crowd, rather than dispersing and heading home, began to sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Originally featured in the 1945 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical Carousel, Gerry & The Pacemakers had popularized the tune with their 1963 version, and shortly after, it became an anthem of the British soccer club Liverpool FC. The spontaneous incident at Bingley Hall would forever change the cultural landscape: It inspired singer Freddie Mercury and guitarist Brian May to write two of Queen’s most iconic songs.
“The story we’ve been told is that Brian and Freddie said, ‘Why don’t we write our own anthems?’ ” says Dominic Griffin, vp of licensing at Disney Music Group, which owns the North American rights to Queen’s music. “So Brian wrote ‘We Will Rock You,’ Freddie wrote ‘We Are the Champions,’ and they started finishing their shows with those. I’m not sure if there was one particular moment, but the band began to realize that there was not much difference between the crowd at a rock show and the crowd at a football game. It was having the same reaction.”
Whether due to its stomp-clap beat, call-to-action lyrics or simple melody — or more likely a combination of all three — “We Will Rock You” in particular became one of the most widely recognized songs in history, especially at sporting events, where it blares nightly in arenas and stadiums around the world. According to BMI, “We Will Rock You” is the song in the performing rights organization’s 22 million-plus-track repertoire most played at NHL, NFL and MLB games. It accumulated over 9.5 million U.S. radio and TV feature performances from its 1977 release through the third quarter of 2023.
That’s no accident. Since acquiring Queen’s catalog in 1990, both Disney and the band have encouraged radio stations to use “We Will Rock You” and “We Are the Champions” in promos, allowed sports stadiums and teams to use them to soundtrack highlights and hype videos (which require additional approval, separate from the blanket public performance license that all venues need to simply play a song in a public space) and licensed them to now-classic sports films like The Mighty Ducks, Any Given Sunday and The Replacements. The label’s research data, including figures from Radio Disney, showed that all generations reacted to the songs.
“I think it was a way for sports teams to play something that appeals to everyone in the venue,” Griffin says. “Those Queen songs tick all the boxes because the lyric is great for sporting events and they’re just natural anthems, and the band went out to write an anthem for an arena that turned into a sports anthem.”
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In the decades since, an elite set of songs like these has become a genre unto itself, so known as sports anthems that they’re almost divorced from the original context in which they were released — call it “the Jock Jams effect,” after the compilation albums from the mid-’90s that featured hype-up tracks like House of Pain’s “Jump Around” and Tag Team’s “Whoomp! (There It Is).” But more modern songs have also joined the pantheon in recent years, like The White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army” and DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s “Turn Down for What,” which are near-omnipresent at current sports games.
“It becomes folk music when things like that happen,” Jack White said of “Seven Nation Army” on the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast in 2022. “It just becomes ubiquitous. I’m sure many people who are chanting the melody have no idea what the song is or where it came from or why, or whatever — it doesn’t matter anymore, and that’s just amazing.”
“We’ve been fortunate that several of Lil Jon’s songs have become incredible stadium anthems over the years,” says the artist’s manager, Rob Mac. “With ‘Turn Down for What,’ we knew that record felt massive, but the video really helped to boost the song as well. His music has always hyped up fans and crowds — his voice and energy [lend themselves] to that, and people really embrace and connect with it. His music became part of the experience inside a stadium.”
Still, plenty of factors must align — not just the fundamentals of what makes a song appealing to the masses, but also hard work behind the scenes and a little luck — for a song to take off in a sports setting. Labels are constantly pitching not just legacy artists, but new acts and songs to local teams and TV networks hoping for a placement. If a song makes the cut, it can be a massive boost for an artist.
“We spend a lot of time trying to get our new artists played inside sporting arenas because you’re reaching anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 people at a time and you’ve got a captive audience who can’t turn the radio off,” says Griffin, noting the success Disney has had with acts like Demi Lovato, almost monday and Grace Potter, whose “The Lion, the Beast, the Beat” soundtracked multiple promos for the Detroit Lions during this year’s NFL playoffs. “Any time you can get your music in front of that many thousands of people, it certainly helps with recognition.”
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Take “Swag Surfin’ ” by Fast Life Yungstaz, for one extreme example: The song has been a staple at the Kansas City Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium for a few years now, played when the defense needs a big stop or the crowd needs an energy boost. In the weeks leading up to the NFL playoffs, the song averaged between 350,000 and 400,000 on-demand streams per week; that number jumped to over 1 million the week the Chiefs beat the Miami Dolphins in the playoffs, when Taylor Swift was seen doing the song’s signature dance alongside Chiefs fans.
“In the arena business, when you’ve got 20,000 or 40,000 people and you’re trying to get them to do something, sometimes it’s the big, dumb gesture that really wins the day. Whether it’s some goofy guy dancing on the scoreboard or something that’s telling you to get up and yell, or a song that’s got a simple melody where everybody can participate, that really seems to be the most effective,” says Ray Castoldi, who has been Madison Square Garden’s music director/organist since 1989; in his role, he also frequently selects the music for New York Knicks and New York Rangers games and occasionally plays the organ for the New York Mets at Citi Field.
Castoldi says he’s constantly looking for new songs to add to his game playlist and that he regularly tests out new material in the Garden — but that the rotation remains pretty steady, with around 300 songs on tap for any given game. “Arena standards are songs that appeal on such a wide basis that you almost can’t help yourself — it’s something in human nature where it motivates a large group of people,” he says. “I always see the equation as: You play the music for this huge assemblage of people and you want to get them all riled up and get their energy going, and then they give that energy to the players.”
And once a song reaches that threshold, it achieves a new, almost mythic status that can long outshine the rest of an artist’s oeuvre. House of Pain racked up 87 million on-demand U.S. streams in 2023, according to Luminate; 75 million of those were for “Jump Around.” Even for an act as beloved and popular as Queen, which tallied 1.3 billion streams in 2023, 8% of its streams were “We Will Rock You.” As Brian May said in 2017 — in an interview after Billboard named that song the No. 1 jock jam of all time — “They’re beyond hits. We don’t have to sell them in any way.”
This story will appear in the Feb. 10, 2024, issue of Billboard.
On “A Symptom of Being Human,” Shinedown’s sweeping No. 1 Mainstream Rock Airplay current hit, lead singer Brent Smith sings about the all-too-relatable condition of feeling isolated even when surrounded by others: “Sometimes I’m in a room where I don’t belong/ And the house is on fire and there’s no alarm.”
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That vulnerability has been a mainstay of the rock band’s career, which has yielded a record-setting 19 No. 1s on the Mainstream Rock Airplay chart spanning more than 18 years. On Tuesday night at Hollywood & Mind’s “Minds Matter: Spotlight on Shaping a Healthier Music Industry” conference at West Hollywood’s London Hotel, Smith talked in depth about musicians and mental health and how communication is the key to sustaining a healthy balance in a creative, often unstable profession.
Smith’s panel was moderated by Ryan Dusick, a founding member of Maroon 5, who is now a therapist. Dusick got the discussion off to a candid start, detailing how in 2006, as Maroon 5’s stardom was rising, he suffered a breakdown that effectively ended his musical career. “I had to walk away from it,” he said. “I grieved that loss for another decade, struggling with alcoholism and other debilitating effects.” Once he was in recovery, Dusick realized he had experienced “a mind, body and spirit breakdown. … I’m one of the fortunate ones who survived.”
Through songs like “Get Up” and “Sound of Madness,” Shinedown has addressed mental health issues. “I’m in a band that’s been talking about mental health for the better part of two decades,” Smith said. And while taking care of one’s mental health is at the forefront of many conversations these days, it wasn’t always the case. “Before it was in the mainstream and brought to the forefront, it was something that was looked at as a bit of a weakness. Sometimes people would just say that you had a case of the Mondays and things of that nature,” Smith said. “It’s not taboo to talk about your feelings on the road anymore. It doesn’t make you weak; it makes you strong.”
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Crucial to maintaining a stable mental condition is communication. “We’re on the road 280 days a year,” Smith said. “You’ve got to talk to each other. In some cases, the bravest thing you can do is get someone off the road. In some cases, it’s potentially going to save their life. I want people to live to fight another day.”
As Smith says in the clip above, the key to success in the music industry is to always have “another mountain” to climb and to understand that life is a series of peaks and valleys. “When it comes to mental health, the most powerful thing is to speak up,” he said.
Speaking up was a theme throughout the day’s five intimate conversations, which also included developing artist Em Beihold, who talked about how to maintain habits that foster strong mental health, especially amid music industry pressures; as well as radio and TV host Matt Pinfield, who suggested an action as simple as promoting artists you like through your social media can help alleviate the pressure those artists feel to always be pushing their own work. Other speakers included Lucas Keller, founder/president of Milk & Honey Music + Sports; Alison Malmon, founder/executive director of Active Minds; Mary Rahmani, founder of Moon Projects, a joint venture label with Republic Records; Jaclyn Ranere, CMO of Sofar Sounds; Kakul Srivastava, CEO of Splice; Yuli, a Grammy-nominated artist, multi-instrumentalist and producer; and Marshai Iverson, managing director of mental health and addiction recovery services at MusiCares. Sponsors included Splice, Active Minds and Sofar Sounds.
Hollywood & Mind was founded in 2023 by veteran journalist (and Billboard contributor) Cathy Applefeld Olson to address the intersection of the entertainment industry and brain health sector, working with executives and talent across multiple sectors, including music and film, to elevate mental health and wellness.
The Jan. 30 event was Hollywood & Mind’s third since launching with the Hollywood & Mind Summit held last May that featured, among others, Demi Lovato discussing mental health. In September, the company hosted an event in partnership with Bumble focused on our crisis of loneliness that featured Tiffany Haddish, singer/songwriter Rachel Platten, and California first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom among speakers. The second annual Hollywood & Minds Summit will take place May 9 at UTA in Los Angeles.
On the Friday before his Saturday Night Live debut, Noah Kahan is still nursing the wounds from an L he took at 30 Rock earlier in the week.
Kahan, the show’s next musical guest, was filming SNL’s obligatory midweek ads alongside cast member Sarah Sherman and host Emma Stone. “I always thought that I could be, like, a funny actor,” says the rising singer-songwriter — who is, indeed, pretty funny on social media. “Did not go down like that.” While Sherman and Stone easily bantered, the usually witty and loquacious Kahan stood stone-still, giving wooden readings of his couple of short lines.
“I was definitely super-nervous and just kind of like, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” recalls Kahan, 27, still in slight disbelief at his own frozenness. “I feel like I’m usually able to navigate through [moments like that] and make it look OK. But that one, I was like, ‘Man, I just got dominated by Emma Stone and Sarah Sherman.’ ”
It’s a minor loss worth noting — simply because Kahan has had so few over the last year-and-a-half. After an occasionally frustrating first seven years on a major label — he signed to Mercury Records/Republic Records in 2015, recording two albums in more of a folk–pop, James Bay-esque mold — Kahan finally struck pay dirt with 2022’s Stick Season, following both a sonic pivot to alt-folk and a thematic shift to more personal, geographically specific writing based on his experiences growing up in northern New England. The rousing title track went viral on TikTok that summer, and the album debuted at No. 14 on the Billboard 200 in October, Kahan’s first time making the chart.
But 2022 was just the warmup for the cold-weather singer-songwriter, whose sepia-toned ballads and stinging-throat stompers — as well as his breakout hit, named for the time of year in the Northeast when the trees go barren — have made him something of an unofficial ambassador for late autumn. Kahan’s crossover became undeniable in June with the release of his Stick Season deluxe edition, subtitled We’ll All Be Here Forever.
The reissue shot the album to No. 3 on the Billboard 200, largely on the strength of seven new tracks — one of which, the barnstorming, back-of-a-cop-car lament “Dial Drunk,” became his first Billboard Hot 100 hit, after an extensive tease on TikTok. That song went top 40 following the release of its remix featuring fellow Mercury/Republic star Post Malone — which also kick-started a run of new Stick Season remixes, with guests like Kacey Musgraves, Hozier and Gracie Abrams, who boosted their respective tracks onto the Hot 100 for the first time.
Noah Kahan photographed on December 1, 2023 in New York.
Wesley Mann
As Kahan talks to Billboard in December, he’s also ending 2023 with a number of notable firsts: his first Grammy Award nomination (for best new artist at the Feb. 4 ceremony), the announcement of his first major festival headlining gig (Atlanta’s Shaky Knees this May) and, of course, that SNL debut — which he had originally manifested in a 2021 tweet (“I wanna perform on SNL I don’t even care if it’s a off-brand version called Sunday Night Live”).
And in the end — even if his underwhelming teaser performance didn’t lead to any acting opportunities on his episode — his ripping performances of “Dial Drunk” and “Stick Season” still made for an overall win. Now, with winter on the horizon as we speak, the self-aware Kahan jokingly wonders if his appropriately dominant late-year run may be coming to its seasonal close.
“My time is ending, and we’re going into Bon Iver era now,” he says with a laugh. “He gets the baton.”
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Much like the trees’ gradual-then-sudden shedding of their autumn leaves, Stick Season’s takeover may seem — to anyone who wasn’t paying attention — like it came out of nowhere.
But Kahan had been growing his audience steadily, albeit slowly, for nearly a decade. It helped that he had the continued faith of Mercury/Republic, which longtime co-manager Drew Simmons says believed in Kahan’s talent from the first moment he auditioned for the label.
“He just played a couple of songs acoustic for them in their lounge space — and I remember [Republic founder and CEO] Monte Lipman popped in for a minute and was basically like, ‘Sign this kid tomorrow,’ ” Simmons recalls. “He said to Noah, ‘You have no idea how good you are.’ ”
Kahan’s first two albums, 2019’s Busyhead and 2021’s I Was / I Am, showed his talent and promise — particularly his ability to build worlds within a song and his ease with writing and performing shout-along choruses — but their brand of folk-pop aimed perhaps a little too squarely for a top 40 crossover bull’s-eye and suffered for their studiousness. But though both sets’ commercial performance was underwhelming, they allowed Kahan to develop his chops as a road warrior, gigging constantly around the country at midsize venues and developing a devoted following. “Noah’s story is one of proper artist development,” Simmons says. “He’s eight, nine years into his career, but those were really important years for his personal growth, his songwriting growth, his ability to own a live stage.”
Noah Kahan photographed on December 1, 2023 in New York.
Wesley Mann
But it was Kahan’s Cape Elizabeth EP, released between his first two albums in 2020 at the early height of the COVID-19 pandemic, that offered a blueprint for his later Stick Season success. He pulled back on the busy top 40 production and penned four of the EP’s five intimate tracks without co-writes — and while Cape Elizabeth made minimal mainstream impact, fans’ immediate connection to it showed that Kahan was on to something.
“The path he is on now started during the pandemic while he was home in Vermont and we were all trying to figure out what to do,” says Ben Adelson, executive vp/GM at Mercury. “He had written a lot of great folk songs that he wanted to self-record at home and that became Cape Elizabeth. We fully supported it, and that really helped set the stage for what has come.”
It also helped that around the same time, the mainstream winds were starting to blow back in Kahan’s direction. TikTok’s rise to prominence had provided the world a new, effective communal space for sharing music. And as the global pandemic forced everyone indoors (and inward), Kahan’s brand of introspective, reflective songwriting suddenly found an audience in listeners yearning for simpler times.
That shift could be seen in the slow-building success of organic-sounding, Americana-leaning country singer-songwriters like Tyler Childers and Zach Bryan, both of whom grew star-level followings in the last few years. And of course, no one forecast (or accelerated) the changing tides more than Taylor Swift, whose pair of rootsy 2020 surprise releases (folklore and evermore) put up equivalent numbers to her more pop-oriented releases and effectively raised the commercial ceiling for main-character alt-folk, a more Gen Z-friendly revival of the folk-pop boom of the early 2010s.
“The biggest artist in the world is writing very grounded folk music that tells stories,” recalls Kahan of Swift’s pivot. “And it allowed a huge new audience to find interest in that and to tap into that world. You know, some of these kids might not have been listening to music when Mumford & Sons, when Lumineers [were first around]. Taylor doing that brought that new generation to folk and folk-pop. And I definitely think that helped bring visibility, and some sort of significance, to what I was doing.”
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Nearly a decade since the commercial heyday of those strum-and-stomp hit-makers, they remained core influences on Kahan — “I never stopped f–king listening to Mumford & Sons,” he says — so when he decided to head in a new creative direction, alt-folk was a natural home for him. But while most of those groups tended to go lyrically broad with their arena-aimed anthems, Kahan narrowed his writing focus to his own experiences: growing up in Strafford, Vt., and Hanover, N.H., and the struggles with anxiety and depression he’s still navigating today.
“I like to think that storytelling is something that can always bring success, if you tell it in the right way and if you tell it with the right intention,” he says. “And so my intention behind this project actually was really pure — just to talk about New England and to talk about my childhood and my family. I wanted to examine those things, and I wanted to think about my hometown and think about my parents and think about my journey with mental illness — and I have a hard time doing that without writing songs.”
Unlike the previous generation of alt-folkies, Kahan is also, well, funny. His brand of humor is unmistakably influenced by his Jewish heritage on his father’s side — he refers to himself as “Jewish Capaldi” at live shows and says “sometimes I just feel like Larry David walking around” — and makes for a marked contrast from his avowedly straight-faced, chest-pounding antecedents, many of whom sang implicitly or explicitly about Christian themes.
“Growing up half Jewish and having this face on me… it has kind of been a big part of my identity,” he says, laughing. “I’m not going into a song, ‘Let’s get this one extra Jew-y.’ But I think it plays into the cultural aspect of [my music] — into the humor. And down to my diet. Like, I got the acid reflux stomach, just like my dad.”
Noah Kahan photographed on December 1, 2023 in New York.
Wesley Mann
Religion aside, Kahan’s mannerisms — the mile-a-minute speaking, the gently anxious energy, the self-deprecating and filter-free humor — should be familiar to anyone burdened with both an overachiever’s self-confidence and a late-bloomer’s insecurity. Ultimately, the biggest factor in Kahan’s leap to stardom might be the generation of terminally online, oversharing introverts that recognizes itself in his personality (both onstage and on social media) as well as in his lyrics. And that manifests at his shows, which are increasing in size — beyond festival headlining, Kahan will embark on his first amphitheater and arena tour this summer — without losing their immediacy and intensity, as crowds in the thousands now shout Kahan’s incredibly personal words back at him.
“No one else can tell my own story,” Kahan says. “And if people want to hear your story, then you’re in a really awesome position, because you hold the key to your own memories and people are interested in what those memories mean to you — and find connections to their own memories, to their own lives.”
While Kahan may have joked in December about passing the folk torch to Justin Vernon — the genre’s esteemed dead-of-winter representative — Stick Season actually has no end in sight. Kahan’s touring in support of the album will take him through Europe and Canada the next few months, before bringing him back to the United States this summer. Meanwhile, the remixes continue to roll out, most recently one with Sam Fender — maybe the closest thing to Kahan’s northeast England equivalent — on late-album highlight “Homesick.”
Most remarkably, the title track that kicked off this Kahan era a year-and-a-half ago is still growing on the Hot 100, recently hitting the top 20 for the first time, while the album it shares its name with snuck back into the Billboard 200’s top 10. Kahan also just announced a new Stick Season (Forever) reissue, due Feb. 9, which will include the entirety of his latest deluxe set, plus all of his previously released recent collaborations, two fresh ones and a new song, “Forever.” “We’ll All Be Here Forever” is starting to sound less like a lament and more like a premonition.
At a time when most albums struggle to maintain listener attention for a full month, let alone a year or longer, the extended impact of Stick Season is stunning — and Kahan and his team have savvily maximized its longevity, resulting in one of the biggest glow-ups a new artist has experienced this decade. He now counts superstars like Bryan and Olivia Rodrigo as both friends and peers; the latter covered “Stick Season” for BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge and even sent him flowers after his best new artist Grammy nod, an award she herself won two years earlier. (“It was so incredibly sweet… she’s just a star, and she’s so nice,” Kahan says.)
It’s reasonable to wonder, at this point, if there’s a Stick Season saturation point — both for fans and for Kahan himself. He played over 100 gigs in 2023, and at press time, already had almost 80 on the books through September, with more likely on the way. With the number of opportunities available to him increasing along with his popularity, it’s a potentially perilous time for an artist who has been open about his mental health struggles — particularly while on the road — and who has waited for his moment as long as Kahan has.
“I have a real scarcity mindset,” he says. “Who knows when this will come again? So you have to take advantage of every opportunity. I think that mindset makes sense in a lot of ways, but in some ways it hurts you. Sometimes I overextend and feel like I’m overpromising and not able to deliver when the moment actually comes.”
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To that end, Kahan and his team have focused on how to balance his drive and his overall well-being. “We are saying no to a lot more than we ever have in the past,” Simmons says. “But I think he wants to make the most of this. He wants to be around for a long time, and he wants to put the work in, and he’s not afraid of that. So he’s kind of applying the mentality he had from the first seven or eight years of his career… it’s a grind, and it’s a lot of travel, a lot of work. But he is up for it.”
When Kahan does finally leave Stick Season behind, he’ll do so with the kind of established rabid fan base and artistic freedom to make him the envy of nearly every current performer not named Taylor Swift or Beyoncé, and plenty of room still to grow. Still, Kahan is ambivalent about how much bigger he even wants to get. He cops to being “super-competitive” both creatively and commercially, but also recognizes that “the level of microscopic attention that that next level seems to bring” might not necessarily be the best thing for him.
“Some days I’m like, “Man… I want to play f–king Gillette [Stadium] next!’ And then sometimes I’m like, “Whew, let’s just go back and play [New York’s] Bowery Ballroom and, like, chill out and play a bunch of acoustic songs,” he says. “I have to fight back against the next ‘more more more’ thing sometimes. Because it never really brings you whatever you think you’re going to get from it. It never brings you the total satisfaction and, like, self-peace that you think it would.”
Ultimately, though, he’s satisfied with his hard-earned level of current success and somewhat Zen about what may follow — even accidentally echoing the subtitle of the latest Stick Season edition while explaining his mindset.
“I think it’s about being optimistic about the future, but also being realistic about what you’re going to feel when you get there. And realizing that if you feel good here — and we’re here forever — then we’d be OK.”
This story will appear in the Jan. 27, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Source: Hip-Hop Wired / iOne Digital
The Witness To History: 50 Years of Hip-Hop Greatness returns with its latest episode which features top tier MC’s Method Man and Royce Da 5’9″. Repping Staten Island and Detroit, respectively, these two rappers have created thick chapters for themselves in the book of Hip-Hop.
Hip-Hop Wired Director of Content Alvin aqua Blanco held an enlightening conversation with Method Man, which touched on everything from the Wu-Tang Clan, to his acting to the mark Staten Island aka Shaolin has made on the culture. The Morning Hustle’s Kyle Santillian linked up with Royce, who discussed the impact of Detroit on Hip-Hop as well as the dynamic he shared with fellow Motor City native and great friend Eminem.
In 2019, Alabama-born country–rock quintet The Red Clay Strays were plugging away at building a core fan base, playing small clubs and festivals around the Southeastern United States in hopes of exposure. “We were a bar band at the time, playing honky-tonks [with] no stability, really just chasing the dream,” harmonicist/guitarist/vocalist Drew Nix says. In the same breath, he acknowledges the toll such commitment took on their romantic partners. “We were like, ‘Our women have the short end of the stick of this. I wonder why they even like us.’”
The notion led Nix and the group’s lead singer Brandon Coleman, along with songwriter Dan Couch, to write “Wondering Why,” the band’s breakthrough hit from their 2022 album Moment of Truth, putting them on the mainstream map.
The bluesy romantic ballad depicts a committed, if unlikely, love story between an upper-class woman and a working-class man. (“I don’t know what happened, but it sure don’t add up on paper/ But when I close my eyes late at night, you can bet I thank my maker,” Coleman croons in the opening verse.) More than a year after its release, “Wondering Why” made its debut on the Billboard Hot 100 — in late December, no less, even amid the typical influx of holiday songs on the all-genre chart. Now, the band’s first entry rises to a new No. 71 high on charts dated Jan. 20 as it builds at radio and streaming.
Composed of Coleman, Nix, Zach Rishel (electric guitar), Andrew Bishop (bass) and John Hall (drums), The Red Clay Strays have been making music since 2016, with most of the group meeting during college or through prior gigs. Crafting an amalgam of rockabilly, gospel, soul, blues and hints of country, Coleman’s barrel-chested vocal and 1950s Johnny Cash-meets-Jerry Lee Lewis onstage aesthetic shape what he refers to as “non-denominational rock’n’roll.”
While crafting its sound in the local circuit, the independent band began to add pieces to its team, including Conway Entertainment Group’s Cody Payne as manager. He first met the group in 2019 as a booking agent and later began working with the group through the company’s management arm, Ontourage Management. As his position continued to grow, so did the group’s fan base within the community and online: by the time the members felt ready to record a debut album, Payne played an instrumental role in igniting crowdfunding efforts to help with the financial struggles of paying for studio time.
“I built it on their website, straight PayPal,” Payne says. Despite not having an official monetary goal in mind, he recalls thinking that $30,000 would be enough to get the job done — and was floored as the total quickly soared past that number. “The first week we did over $50,000; by the end of it we had about $60,000.”
The Red Clay Strays
Macie B. Coleman
The Red Clay Strays
Macie B. Coleman
Using analog methods at a Huntsville, Ala. studio, the band spent just over a week creating Moment of Truth, which was subsequently self-released in April 2022. Though it was initially met with tepid commercial returns, at the start of the following year, Payne hired Coleman’s younger brother, Matthew — who is also one of the band’s primary songwriters — as a videographer to help grow The Red Clay Strays’ online presence. The band also signed with WME for booking representation in January 2023, and within the span of a few months, announced a series of high-profile opening gigs for Elle King, Eric Church and Dierks Bentley.
In May, the band began taking meetings with a handful of labels, with the members parsing the decision of whether to sign or remain independent — until they met with Thirty Tigers co-founder/president David Macias. “It just made more sense for us,” Coleman says. “Instead of giving us the dog and pony show, David gave us straight advice. There was no pitch. That’s what I wanted to hear. If I’m betting on anybody, I’m betting on us every time.” By September, following months of touring festivals including Lollapalooza and CMA Fest, The Red Clay Strays had officially signed to Thirty Tigers.
With Matthew’s help, the band began to upload an influx of clips, largely consisting of live performances, to TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. “He was putting out reels and social numbers kept going up,” Payne says. “Wondering Why” has soundtracked more than 71,000 TikTok videos to date, along with a lyric video for the song that has compiled more than 2.5 million YouTube views.
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In the time since, “Wondering Why” has grown across formats and genres: on charts dated Jan. 20, the breakthrough hit holds at highs on Billboard’s Hot Rock Songs and Hot Rock & Alternative Songs charts, reaches a new No. 19 best on Adult Alternative Airplay and sits at No. 22 on Hot Country Songs. Labels have again reached out, says Payne, though the band has no plans to move from Thirty Tigers.
Additionally, despite plans to release a follow-up project by early summer, the recent chart success has spurred second thoughts to “let ‘Wondering Why’ and Moment of Truth breathe a bit,” Payne adds. When the new album does arrive, it’ll boast production from Dave Cobb, thanks to Conway Entertainment Group’s Brandon Mauldin setting things in motion with mutual connection Shooter Jennings. “Since we’ve started, the goal from day one was to work with Dave Cobb,” Coleman says. “The fact that it actually happened is surreal.”
The Red Clay Strays
Macie B. Coleman
From left: Drew Nix, John Hall, Brandon Coleman, Andrew Bishop and Zach Rishel of The Red Clay Strays with their manager Cody Payne (third from left) in Red Rocks, CO.
Macie B. Coleman
In the meantime, the band will continue its Way Too Long headlining tour, in addition to more festival dates, including Boston Calling and Hinterland. Coleman knows as the hype for “Wondering Why” mounts, so too may the pressure to follow it up while the iron is hot — but he’s keeping his cool amid the band’s breakthrough moment.
“Everybody yelling at us to play it from the beginning of the show is kind of crazy, but it’s cool. I’m thankful for the recognition, but I always have it in my mind that people [go] viral for a month or two, then the next thing comes along.”
A version of this story will appear in the Jan. 27, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Source: Hip-Hop Wired / iOne Digital
As the Witness To History podcast chugs along, Hip-Hop Wired decided to look at 50 years of our beloved genre from a fan’s, participant’s and journalist’s perspective. For the latest episode, Senior Editor D.L. Chandler and Director of Content Alvin aqua Blanco chatted about what the culture means to them along with attempting to recap some of the best moments, artists, and more over its five-decade lifetime.
Recapping 50 years of Hip-Hop is frankly an impossible feat, but we did manage to key in on some topics and MC”s we think didn’t get enough burn during the run-up up the culture’s milestone birthday this past August. Regardless, we’ll only continue to big up the best of Hip-Hop, and with a critical eye when necessary until it hits 51 and beyond.
The convo was so fluid we decided to break up the episode into two parts. Tap in above and below. And be sure to check out past Witness To HIstory episodes right here.
HipHopWired Featured Video
Source: Gado / Getty
Martin Luther King, Jr. ‘I Have A Dream’ Speech [VIDEO]
The late, great Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famed “I Have A Dream” speech on August 28, 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial. READ his words (or watch the video) below.
—
“I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.
Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.
In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the “unalienable Rights” of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.
The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.
We cannot walk alone.
And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.
We cannot turn back.
Source: Bob Parent / Getty
There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: “For Whites Only.” We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”¹
I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some of you have come from areas where your quest — quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive. Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed.
Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.
And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
I have a dream today!
I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification” — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today!
I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; “and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.”2
This is our hope, and this is the faith that I go back to the South with.
With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
And this will be the day — this will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning:
My country ’tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrim’s pride,
From every mountainside, let freedom ring!
And if America is to be a great nation, this must become true.
And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire.
Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.
But not only that:
Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.
From every mountainside, let freedom ring.
And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:
Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”
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Recently, d4vd found himself feeling happy – as it turns out, maybe a little too happy.
“Not that being happy is wrong,” clarifies the genre-blurring artist behind Hot 100 hits “Romantic Homicide” and “Here With Me” and who last year scored an opening gig on tour with SZA. But, he says, “I started going into these sessions making songs. I wasn’t making music. I’d go in and be like, ‘Let’s make the best song ever.’ But then I wasn’t being as introspective as I used to be, and I was making such surface-level music. It felt like it wasn’t even d4vd anymore.”
This story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.
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And that’s the irony of an artist like d4vd – when things feel too defined, he himself feels lost.
The artist born David Burke is a bit of an anomaly. Born in Queens, New York and raised in Houston, Texas, d4vd grew up on a range of influences from Mozart to Chet Baker to eventually Lil Pump. After a classmate introduced him to Soundcloud, he quickly became a fan of then-underground and sonically diverse rappers like Lil Uzi Vert, XXXTentacion and Smokepurpp. (Even today, he says the platform’s algorithm fits his taste “to a T.”) All the while, his gaming obsession (with Fortnite in particular) led him to discover more indie-leaning rock, which he says predominantly shaped his own approach to making music – a venture that started at first as a means to avoid more copyright strikes on the gameplay montages he would post to YouTube.
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Having made his first two EPs (Petals to Thorns and The Lost Petals, both released on Darkroom/Interscope Records) in his sister’s closet using his iPhone and BandLab, d4vd’s music has a refreshingly stripped-back, DIY aesthetic – or, in his own words, an “ethereal nostalgia.” He believes identifying his music by a mood is more important than being defined by any one genre – a belief his managers and label supported from the jump.
“There was a drive to keep things organic and not change the formula,” he says of his early communications with Darkroom. “To let the creativity flow from where it usually came from…and not subjecting myself to any of the boxes of genre.”
Below, d4vd talks with Billboard about his own unusual relationship with genre and whether he thinks the concept will have much of a place in popular music’s future.
You previously told Billboard it’s an honor to be a gateway for music fans, especially young Black music fans, into alternative music. Why is that role so important to you?
I feel like the most important thing right now in the past five years of music has all been image. The driving force of marketing and promotion and everything has been [about] an artistic image.
[At first] I didn’t show my face at all, because I knew the music that I was making wasn’t what Black kids usually would make when they go into music. I had so many friends I tried to get into music and they instantly went for the hip-hop sound or the alt-rap sound or whatever was going on at the time, underground. But then I started making the indie alternative stuff, and I was like, “What if people didn’t know what I look like?” And that was the most important thing for me, because I wanted the art to speak for itself.
SZA spoke in her Billboard cover story about the “luxury” of trying something new and how it’s harder as a Black woman. When you were on tour with her, what did you learn from watching her blend so many influences into one seamless live show?
We didn’t talk about music that much during our time together, but I can see the career trajectory she’s built. And now SZA has become this sound that everybody’s so used to, but it’s all new people finding out about SOS first, and then not contextualizing her past projects. So that’s the thing about music too, there’s so many new ears hearing you every day. And your work isn’t always fully appreciated because of where you started. And people always see where you are [now]. So it’s interesting to see an artist that prolific have such a passion for making everything.
But then there’s a certain demographic that will only listen to one thing, so it’s kind of hard to kind of expand. I think Lil Yachty is doing that the best right now with his [Let’s Start Here] project, and always bringing in new fans to these sounds that have been around for a long time but aren’t fully appreciated because of the culture.
Who do you think your fanbase is?
I wouldn’t say for sure that I have a target audience yet. Although I’ve been making music for like, a year and a half, done a couple tours, we’ve seen the people that come to the shows… but I don’t have a certain group of people that I’m marketing to. So that allows me to kind of be free with the way I create. Right now, the people that listen to my music are people that are fans of certain sounds, not certain artists. So I don’t have to be compared to anybody else, because the fans like the sounds and not the person behind it.
Do you think that’s a specific trait of Gen-Z and how they consume and even discover music today?
I mean, completely. There’s no more artist development now. It’s like, people are marketing songs before artists, and it works sometimes. But the rest of the time it’s like, I’m hearing a song 50 times a day and I still don’t know who made it. And it’s in my playlist too. And I couldn’t care less about the artist. We’re in a weird spot right now, but I think more people are figuring out how to break through. And it’s just interesting to see internet kids take over the music industry.
Do you think in the next few years that we will still be defining music by genre?
Oh, absolutely. I feel like there’ll be even new genres. We’ve created so many subgenres that subgenres are becoming main genres. So I can’t imagine like, years down the line, how music is even categorized.
Have you ever with your team or friends made up a subgenre that could apply to d4vd?
You know what? No, I haven’t done that yet. I should, to be honest. It’d be like, hyper-alternative indiecore. I don’t know. [Laughs.] We can hashtag that.
How do you describe your music to people who may be unfamiliar?
I like to make old sounds new, I did it best with “Romantic Homicide” and “Here With Me.” It’s kind of like the old Morrissey from The Smiths, kind of Thom Yorke Radiohead rawness and passion that was lost due to over-technologized music. Now everything is layered with like, 50 vocal stacks and 50 harmonies and this, that and the third.
And kids’ brains are getting oversaturated with so much stuff. When they hear raw [music], it’s refreshing now – when it shouldn’t be refreshing, it should be how music is. I feel like I’m just taking advantage of the fact that kids are not hearing this kind of stuff around anymore. I feel like Steve Lacey is doing it the best right now, too. Dominic Fike, he’s doing crazy right now too.
And that’s the thing too, with genre. It’s like, we got to bring back the weird people making music. I don’t think I’d ever see Thom Yorke come on Tik Tok like, “Did I just make the song of the summer?”
Do you think some of that weirdness is lost because of social media? Are people too concerned now with how they come across?
Yeah, cause people are too worried about what works. Back in the day nothing worked. Nothing was working. So many things are working right now. Even the way people approach different genres in the same way. I don’t like seeing techno and EDM being promoted the same way an acoustic song is on TikTok…it’s like, I’m dancing to this and I’m crying to that, but they’re being marketed the same way and I’m confused.
Is there an artist or band that you would want to work with that you think would shock people who have listened to you before?
Deftones. I want to work with Chino [Moreno, Deftones frontman] so bad. So bad.
This story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.
Are there any producers that you’ve come across that you would want to work with?
Coming up, it was all YouTube beats, ‘cause I had no connections to anybody in the industry. So I’d go on YouTube and search up this type of beat and that type of beat. And that’s another thing, I wouldn’t go and search up: “indie type beat.” It was like a certain sound or feeling instead of a genre.
Like, if I get [the top spot] on New Music Friday and a bunch of new people are hearing this for the first time, I’d rather them ask, “Why is this on top of New Music Friday?” than have them be like, “Oh yeah, I understand why it is.” I like my music to make people think about why it’s in the position it is. And “Romantic Homicide” and “Here With Me” did that, and I loved it so much because people didn’t know why [they were taking off]. I want you to not be able to figure it out.
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For artists who are just starting out, is identifying with one genre helpful or hurtful?
It can be both. I feel like whatever makes you confident in your music and your sound, go for it. But I feel like there’s more freedom in not associating yourself with anything. And I feel like most people that start doing music forget that there’s freedom and are going off based on what they see around them. I see the benefits of being like, “Yeah, I just made this song so now I’m gonna make a hundred more like that and see if people like it.”
Whatever makes you confident in your music and your sound and helps you stick to it and not lose the passion for the music…You can lock yourself in a box and also break out of that box later if you want to. So just do whatever you want.
Source: Hip-Hop Wired / HipHopWired.com
While East Coast, West Coast and even Southern cities get plenty of attention when it comes to Hip-Hop, you can’t forget Chicago when discussing the beloved genre. So making sure we documented some official Chi-Town rap lore for the Witness To History podcast was essential.
Hip-Hop Wired presents Witness To History: 50 Year of Hip-Hop Greatness sat down with rap legend Twista, Fake Shore Drive founder Andrew Barber, and rapper (and OG Kanye West homie) GLC to talk all things Chicago Hip-Hop. The Morning Hustle’s Kyle Santillian got these game changers to delve deep into the pride they feel for their city and how they helped push its contributions forward.
Check out the podcast, in video form, above. Be sure to double back and catch up with the Kid Capri episode, too.
“Is Laufey jazz?”
This was a recent topic among the armchair musicologists of Reddit’s r/Jazz thread, who spend much of their time debating the genre. It’s also the title of a 33-minute deep dive by YouTuber and musician Adam Neely where he dissects the 24-year-old cellist, singer and songwriter’s harmonic and chordal choices on a granular, theoretical level in an attempt to answer the question too.
Trying to neatly categorize whether Laufey (pronounced LAY’-vay) makes music that is jazz or something else misses the point of what she is doing. Laufey is building a modern and surprisingly lucrative musical world out of old-school building blocks — ii-V-I jazz chords, classical music motifs, bebop ad-libs — plus more than a pinch of Taylor Swift-ian storytelling.
But it’s Laufey’s wider aesthetic world — “Laufey Land,” as she calls it — that a remarkable number of Gen Z fans are flocking to. While traditional jazz can feel esoteric, Laufey makes it accessible by inviting followers into Laufey Land on social media — a place where her best days involve sipping lattes, reading Joan Didion and wearing the latest styles from Sandy Liang, and where listening to Chet Baker and playing the cello are the absolute coolest, hippest things to do. “It’s all kind of illustrative of my life and my music,” she says, and she shares both online generously.
Laufey Land (which has also become the name of her official fan HQ Instagram account) has also captured the imagination of the music business: sources say she sparked a multimillion-dollar bidding war last year among record labels that have rarely seen so much commercial potential in a jazz-adjacent act, though she remains independent for now. Perhaps that’s because her music renders a wistful, romantic portrait of young adulthood that can feel fantastical yet still within reach. And even if you’re not quite familiar with her own lofty influences — Chopin, Liszt, Baker, Fitzgerald, Holiday — Laufey invites you to sit with her, listen along and get lost in a magical place where, sure, the music is jazz-y, but is also so much more than that.
Raised between Iceland and the Washington, D.C., area, Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir grew up surrounded by classical musicians. Her Chinese mother is a violinist, and her grandparents were violin and piano professors; it was her Icelandic father who introduced her to jazz. “There was just so much music in the house growing up,” she recalls today. “It was a sonic blend of those two.”
Laufey and her identical twin sister, Junia — who now acts as Laufey’s creative director and is a frequent guest star in her TikToks — started playing young. Eventually Junia landed on violin and Laufey on cello (though she also plays piano and guitar). Until college, she saw herself more as a performer and practitioner of music than as a writer of it. But at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, she found many of her new friends were penning their own songs.
This digital cover story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.
Though Laufey says she always listened to pop music as well — she especially loved the storybook tales of early Swift songs — she felt that “oftentimes the lyrics and the storytelling resonated, but the sound [of pop music] wasn’t completely there. I didn’t feel like it was something I could make, and I wanted to make something that sounded more like me.” A self-described “sheltered orchestra kid,” she also didn’t yet have much life experience to expound upon lyrically.
Like so many artists before her, Laufey says she was finally propelled into songwriting when she had her heart broken. Borrowing chords closely related to the Great American Songbook that she had spent so much time studying already, she created “Street by Street,” which eventually became her first single. She was 20 years old. “The way I wanted to write was to find this middle ground between the very old and the very new,” she says. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, you can do this. You can write something new in the style of George Gershwin or Irving Berlin — something older.’ ”
When COVID-19 hit and forced everyone into lockdown, school ended, and to stay in vocal shape, Laufey began posting her takes on jazz standards online, her smooth alto accompanied by either cello arrangements or acoustic guitar. “The day I got back from school and started isolating, I told myself, ‘OK, I’m just going to write and post as many videos online of me singing jazz standards as I can,’ ” she recalls. “I’ll just see where it takes me.” An early video of her singing “It Could Happen to You” “hit some sort of algorithm,” as she puts it, and quickly, her following grew, attracting interest from a number of record labels, though she opted to sign to AWAL instead.
Today — one EP, two studio albums and one live album with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra later — Laufey is quite possibly the most popular artist making jazz or jazz-adjacent music, according to metrics like Spotify monthly listeners (24 million) and Instagram and TikTok followers (2.2 million and 3.6 million, respectively). Her breakout single, the bossa nova-inspired “From the Start,” is a massive hit, with 313.1 million on-demand official global streams, according to Luminate. And she’s now a Grammy nominee: Her second album, Bewitched, released in September 2023, is up for best traditional pop vocal album, an eclectic category this year where she’s the one new talent alongside veterans Bruce Springsteen and Liz Callaway and the late Stephen Sondheim. “It feels very, very validating, especially in the category I’m in,” Laufey says.
Tony Luong
The debate about what genre signifiers define Laufey may still matter at the Grammys (and on the Billboard charts, which categorize her as “jazz”), but there is far less need to label music than there once was, benefiting artists like Laufey who bridge disparate sonic worlds. “I think people’s desire to categorize things into genres was so rooted in radio, where they were trying to fit into a certain format to succeed,” says Max Gredinger, Laufey’s manager and a partner at Foundations Artist Management. “I think that is kind of ingrained in us, but now that terrestrial radio has certainly diminished in impact, I think people are still wrapping their heads around this new world.”
Around the time Laufey started to build her audience, TikTok’s reign over music discovery had just taken hold. It’s a place where personality and catchiness count but genre is of no consequence — the perfect platform for an artist like Laufey where she could define her jazz-inflected pop as not just a sound but as an aesthetic, a feeling, a lifestyle both timeless and very much of the moment.
Gredinger calls Laufey and her sister “the 2024 version of what you think of as a marketing executive. I would bet on them to do that job best a trillion times over.” Beyond music and slice-of-life videos, Laufey invites her fans into her process in other ways. She has posted sheet music versions of her songs before releasing them, asking her musician fans (of which there are many) to try to learn the song without hearing any reference and post the results, which she’ll then repost in the lead-up to release day.
She also hosts a book club, with selections — from Donna Tartt’s The Secret History to Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted — that feel akin to her music and her personal style, somewhere between darkly academic and coquettishly feminine. On the release day for Bewitched, she hosted A Very Laufey Day, a sort-of scavenger hunt around Los Angeles, involving everything she likes to do in a day. It included special Laufey Lattes, a display of her book club selections at a local shop and a merchandise pop-up at the Melrose Trading Post; at the end, she treated participants to a secret performance in West Hollywood’s Pan Pacific Park.
“It was like a normal Saturday for me,” Laufey says with a laugh. “I would’ve done all those things either way. I drove around West Hollywood and saw girls in white shirts, jeans and ballet flats carrying lattes and I would roll down the window and say hey and surprise them.” Her fans range from ultra-online teens to nerdy music majors to nostalgic grandparents, but her core base is Gen Z, many of whom do not listen to jazz or classical otherwise.
When she was younger, Laufey says, she never anticipated the mainstream popularity she has now. “If anything, I thought I would go the conservatory route, practice cello and try to get into the best orchestra I could, like my mother did,” she says. “I was so focused on being realistic that I almost didn’t allow myself to dream so big.”
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She remembers one of her first shows after pandemic lockdowns eased up, at New York’s Rockwood Music Hall, where she heard there was a line of fans outside waiting to be let in. “I was really confused,” she says. “I grew up going to symphony concerts primarily, and nobody lines up like that, you just walk in. I was like, ‘Oh, no. Let them in! What is happening?’” It was the first time she realized that her fans weren’t just a number on her screen: They would show up for her in real life, learn all the words to her songs and were shockingly young.
Norah Jones, a hero of Laufey’s and one of the few modern artists to, like her, bridge the jazz-pop divide, says she sees “a lot of similarities” between herself and Laufey. “We both come from a background steeped in jazz and have formed our own paths from there,” Jones says. “[But] because social media and streaming have changed the music industry so much, her journey is also so different from mine.” (The two recently collaborated on a set of holiday songs, Christmas With You.)
Unlike Jones, who has a long-standing relationship with Blue Note Records/Capitol Records, Laufey has opted to stay independent — a clear sign of the times. Industry sources say she recently sparked a multimillion-dollar bidding war among major labels, but she finally decided to keep her business among herself, Gredinger and AWAL (which handles label services and distribution) instead.
“With the kind of music I make,” she says, “I make very individualistic choices. I’m very confident in my music. I know what I want, and my current team at AWAL has let me make those creative decisions. I’ve had a great time being independent, so I haven’t felt like I’ve been lacking anything. Making independent decisions is my main focus.”
In the future, Laufey Land’s borders are likely to only expand further. She envisions her sweeping love songs soundtracking musicals and films someday, like Harry Connick Jr., Jon Batiste and Sara Bareilles have done. The ultimate dream? A James Bond theme. “I’ll just keep on repeating that I want that, so it manifests itself maybe,” she says, smiling.
Batiste, who also knows what it’s like to move between jazz and pop music spaces, thinks she’s on the right track. “Laufey approaches all of these many facets [of a music career] with a great deal of prowess, deftness of craft and insight into how to connect with her community,” he says. “That will only continue to attract more curious listeners.”
“I think there are a lot of barriers to entry to listening to jazz… [It] can be very daunting,” Laufey says. “I’m lucky I was born into that world, but I’m aware of how scary it can seem. It seems like something that’s reserved for maybe older or more educated audiences. I think that’s so sad, because both jazz and classical music were genres that were the popular music of one time. It was for everyone. That’s one of the reasons I want to fuse jazz and classical into my own music: I want to make a more accessible space.”
Tony Luong
She points to artists like DOMi & JD BECK and Samara Joy, young jazz talents she admires who are actively evolving the genre today. “Jazz hasn’t gone anywhere — it’s actually, I think, gone into music more,” Laufey says, pointing to its influence on hip-hop, R&B and pop. “The amount of times I hear a pop song really hitting the charts and everyone’s like, ‘It’s so good’ — in my head, I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s because of this jazz harmony that really draws you in.’”
Her own sound borrows primarily from that of the jazz greats of the 1940s and ’50s — one reason, perhaps, why her songs connect so well. As tracks featuring sizable samples or interpolations of older hits continue to rise on the Billboard charts, experts posit that the pandemic led to an increasing interest in songs that feel nostalgic.
Though Laufey’s work sounds quite different from, say, “First Class” by Jack Harlow, the same primal desire for familiarity and comfort is at the root of its appeal. “I think a lot of the sounds that she pulls from, every person has some connection to,” Gredinger says. “You would be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t have some memory or relationship with jazz or classical. It’s a foundational experience most everyone has had, combined with modern, honest songwriting.”
And it’s the combination of those elements that create the foundation of Laufey’s own brave new world. One where true love is possible, every day is romanticized, major sevenths are essential — and all kinds of listeners are welcome.