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Brandi Carlile thinks she might have an problem with co-dependency.
She may well be the most decorated Americana artist in recent memory; she’s won 11 Grammys over the course of the last six years (among a whopping 26 career nominations) alongside a pair of Children’s and Family Emmy Awards and an Oscar nomination. She routinely sells out arenas and has been heralded by many as a singular live performer. She’s even sent four of her eight albums to the top ten of the Billboard 200.
But even still, the 44-year-old singer-songwriter says that she’s long felt a sense of “inadequecy” when it comes to both her everyday life and her career, thanks to what she deems a reliance on the companionship of others. It’s not hard to see why she might feel that way — Carlile is one of the most sought-after collaborators, with featured appearances on songs from modern pop stars like Miley Cyrus and Sam Smith, to musical legends like Elton John and Joni Mitchell.
“That’s kind of permeated my personality since I was a little girl. I don’t want to spend the night with myself, I don’t want to go have a meal with myself, I would never watch a movie by myself,” she tells Billboard on a video call. “My aversion to aloneness makes me feel a bit unevolved. Is my tendency to be with, to be in service to, to walk with other people really me being unevolved? Or is it just who I am? I guess I’m still pulling it apart.”
Those thorny questions rest at the center of Carlile’s remarkable eighth solo studio album, Returning to Myself (out today via Interscope Records/Lost Highway). Written and produced alongside pop-rock maestro Andrew Watt with additional work from The National’s Aaron Dessner and Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, the album tracks Carlile’s own untangling of deeply personal insecurities around ego, legacy, politics and independence. A mid-life crisis has never sounded quite this poetic.
The artist says that her new album was born, oddly, from her lack of desire to get back to creating solo albums. “Part of me really didn’t want to do it. Part of me wanted to just go back to being knee-to-knee with all my collaborators and writers and producers and friends,” she says. “It’s incredibly affirming when the people that you idolized growing up are looking at you going, ‘You’re really good, you’re very, very good.’ And that could be an addiction in and of itself — you can very easily just live in that affirmation and never take another risk.”
Those idols include John, who Carlile released an entire duets album with earlier this year, Who Believes In Angels? Carlile recalls being 11 years old living in Washington state, where “there wasn’t an inch of my bedroom wall that didn’t have an Elton John poster on it,” citing her “profound” love for John and his music.
Then there’s Mitchell, who Carlile famously brought out for her first live performance in decades at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival before going on to organize a series star-studded “Joni Jam” concerts to reintroduce the world to one of the most influential musicians of the last century. Tanya Tucker is another decorated performer who Carlile re-centered the spotlight on after decades away, by producing her lauded 2019 album While I’m Livin’ and co-starring in her 2022 documentary The Return of Tanya Tucker.
The through-line between every collaboration with one of her “superheroes,” Carlile notes, is the presence of a cause for her to take up. “Tanya was not getting her flowers — she was getting a stigma that she certainly didn’t deserve. With Joni, she had her flowers, but she didn’t know it,” she says. “Even for smaller artists, like Brandy Clark, she wasn’t being seen for the genius she is in country music … there was always some cause, and then that cause has to intersect with musical undeniability. And in that case, you know, these people are an embarrassment of riches.”
But when beginning her work on Returning to Myself, Carlile wasn’t finding a cause. She had reached the proverbial mountaintop of her professional career, and was now left to try and find some new cliff face to ascend. She remembers one particularly hard songwriting session, where she, Watt and her band were sitting in an expensive studio space creating melodically fascinating passages, and she couldn’t find any words to put to them.
“I was just in there watching money fly out the window, because I just couldn’t make the songs happen,” she says, grabbing fistfuls of her coiffed blonde hair as she recalls the stressful day. “I kept going to this little office space at the back of the studio and basically hiding from everyone. It was so destabilizing.”
In that office, Carlile noticed a purple Rhodes piano — “I think it was just there as decoration,” she offers — and sat down at it. She pulled up a poem on her phone that she had written weeks prior about wisdom and age, started putting a simple melody to it, and within 15 minutes had constructed the emotionally complicated track “A Woman Oversees.”
Writing lyrics separately from the music composition proved to be uncharted territory for Carlile — throughout her two decade career, Carlile routinely wrote her music and lyrics in concert with one another. In establishing a new precedent for the album, the singer-songwriter found that she was starting to deconstruct her own ideas about how music gets made.
“If there’s anywhere that I’m on thin ice with my ego, it’s trying to work in musical complexity where it isn’t needed. But when you have the words first and you’re now suddenly in the studio, the music has to be natural. It can’t be overthought, it can’t be intentionally complex,” she says. “I did a lot less in terms of the musical math on this album than I ever have before. I was really open to two-chord soundscapes, and I have to say, I’m finding it really emotionally fulfilling.”
Carlile is just as quick to credit Watt and Dessner’s work with her on the album for its sonic cohesion, noting that while the two had never worked together before, their collaboration on this album helped make it what it was. “I kind of Parent Trap‘d them,” she jokes. “I’m kind of culty, to the point where I’m like, ‘No, I need everyone to love each other and know each other! Will you guys come together on every song and show up in the studio and please be friends? Will you guys be friends for me?’ And they f–king did, man. It was amazing.”
When talking about Returning to Myself, Carlile keeps coming back to one other album in particular: Wrecking Ball, the 1995 magnum opus from Americana star Emmylou Harris. The projects may differ in tone and genre, but Carlile instead points to Wrecking Ball‘s larger cultural footprint as her true inspiration.
“She was trying to own the narrative and have some agency over who people believed Emmylou Harris was. The way that she asserted her Emmylou Harris-ness was to do something so unexpected sonically that it challenged the psyches and the ears of Americana listeners,” Carlile recalls. “That’s the ethos that really resonated with me. It wasn’t like I took a swing for that level of genius or refinement. It was more like I wanted to feel the same way.”
One of the most unexpected sonic turns Carlile makes on her new album arrives with its sixth track, the surging rock anthem “Church & State.” Amidst an album of plaintive, introspective folk songs, “Church & State” roars with rebellion and electrifying anger, as Carlile rails against the political powers that have tried to decide the future for her and her community.
The song was written largely on the night of the 2024 election, when Donald Trump won a second term in office. Carlile recalls the rage she felt as she watched the results come in. “I just saw my marriage hanging in the balance. Everything that my kids depend on in terms of feeling, and living within the legitimacy of our family, and how we walk through the world together,” she said. “I was just so, so angry, and stressed out, and I’m in need of some catharsis.”
She remembered a riff that one of her oldest friends and collaborators Tim Hanseroth had sent to her months prior. The two had joked about a time when Billie Jean King had once told Carlile, “‘We Are the Champions’ is too f–king slow, somebody needs to write a sports anthem that’s actually up tempo,” and Hanseroth made good on that promise with a pounding bassline that became the heartbeat of the song. “Writing that song was like I was running a mile; it just was coming out of me,” Carlile says.
The lyrics that came pouring forth concerned the “frailty” of right-wing politicians, reminding them that when their day comes, this will be how they’re remembered. She puts it much more succinctly in our conversation: “Time waits for no one, and no one stays a strongman forever,” she says with a smirk.
As they began to put the track together in a studio, Carlile pitched an odd idea to Watt, Dessner and her band. What if, instead of a guitar solo on the bridge, she simply performed a spoken-word rendition of an 1802 letter written by then-President Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptists Association? The choice may seem strange, but Carlile points to the famous missive for creating the oft-cited “wall of separation between church and state” that is fundamental to the functioning of American democracy.
“I think it might be the one of the most important pieces of text that has ever been introduced into the American political system. It is so timelessly wise, and it should offend no one — yet I know it will offend many,” Carlile says, before staring directly into her camera. “And if you’re offended by it, you are the problem. Period.”
Carlile knows there will even be some in her own fanbase who would prefer that she not speak out on political topics. But she says she cannot afford to stay quiet, especially when her existence is at-issue in the current administration. “We have no choice but to wake up and be political every day because we’re women and we’re gay and this is how we now have to live our lives in this country,” she says, exasperation punctuating each word. “There can be no ‘shut up and sing’ as an option for me, that’s just not possible.”
Even with its sonic left-turn, “Church & State” still finds itself fitting into the rest of Returning to Myself, as it finds Carlile re-examining and reaffirming her own relationship to religion and politics, the same way she re-examines her relationship to age on the emotionally bare “Human,” or reaffirms her marriage on the loving ballad “Anniversary.”
But there’s still the question of her “cause” for Returning to Myself — for an artist who has moved forward with a clear sense of purpose on each one of her projects, collaborations and performances, what principle guided Carlile through this latest phase of her career?
A pregnant pause forms as Carlile considers her answer. “I dropped out of school at 16, and I moved away from home at 17, I immediately had to work in order to survive. I had no skills and no driver’s license, and all I could do to make a living and pay for my rent was find places that would let me sing live,” she says, her brow furrowing as she thinks back to her earliest performing days. “As long as I can remember, I have had to make music my job.”
She smiles as she corrects herself. “There was a time, though, when I was a teenager and I could just sit on my bed and cry and just feel this magnetic draw into the magic of music. I hadn’t felt that feeling for a long, long time, and I could barely remember what it even was,” she says. “I needed to go back to that bedroom before the hustle and figure out what I loved about this. What can I unlearn about song structure? Can I become innocent about this again? So my next steps are going to be to find and stay in that innocence for as long as I possibly can.”
Warner Music Australia are currently in the midst of a purple patch in their home country, with Warner Music Group’s Down Under division recently clocking up a “historic” showing on the ARIA Singles chart.
The success in question relates to the two recent ARIA charts – dated Monday, June 9 and June 16 – which sees nine of the positions across the fortnight’s top fives held by WMA artists.
While Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” sits in the top spot on the June 9 chart, it’s joined by a double-header from sombr by way of “Undressed” and “Back to Friends,” with Ravyn Lenae’s “Love Me Not” and Tate McRae’s “Just Keep Watching” rounding out the top five.
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The tune is largely the same in the June 16 chart, with the only difference being the insertion of Sabrina Carpenter’s “Manchild” in the No. 2 spot. The remainder of both charts’ top ends are filled out by familiar contemporaries, including Benson Bone, Bruno Mars (both with Lady Gaga and Rosé), Teddy Swims, and perennial favorites Fleetwood Mac and the Goo Goo Dolls.
All told, the first week hosts a total of 11 WMA acts in the top 20, with that number dropping by just one for the following chart, resulting in a majority representation.
Reflecting on the success of the recent achievement, Dan Rosen, President of Records And Publishing, Australasia, Warner Music Group, explains that it’s a “phenomenal effort” to achieve these “historic levels of chart share.”
“These things are built up on years of hard work from teams around the world, in terms of artist development, A&R, and connecting with culture,” he explains. “We’ve been able to cement that here in Australia.
“Our mission is to make our global artists local, and local artists global,” he adds. “It has been amazing to see, in terms of making this next generation of great Warner acts feel part of our local culture and getting them on ground and building them up.”
Rosen – who was recently named as one of Billboard’s 2025 Global Power Players – also focused on some of the specific artists that fall under his purview, specifically looking at the success of Australian and New Zealand artists on the global stage.
“We’ve always known that Aussies and Kiwis are as good as anyone else in the world, and I think the global platforms now give us the opportunity to really showcase that,” he explains. “Building that next generation of Aussie and Kiwi acts on the global stage has been a big job and a heavy lift, but we’re really starting to see results.”
Among the successes that Rosen looks at fondly are the likes of Auckland alternative pop outfit Balu Brigada,who topped the Alternative Airplay chart with their debut single “So Cold,” with latest single “Backseat” also making impressive moves globally.
CYRIL also scores a mention from Rosen, with the Darwin DJ having seen plenty of success on the radio charts, while his recent track “There She Goes” has topped the TikTok charts.
“We’ve always had wonderful export artists and are really excited seeing this next generation come through in both the indie rock and dance genres, which we’ve traditionally been very strong in,” he adds.
Notably, the recent chart success from WMA also comes accompanied by some less-than-stellar news of the Australian industry as a whole, with the entirety of the Singles chart’s top 50 being devoid of any local acts.
The only Australian influence that can be found is within Doechii’s “Anxiety,” which prominently samples Gotye’s 2011 single “Somebody That I Used to Know.” The Albums chart is slightly more promising, with Jimmy Barnes’ Defiant album in the top spot for June 16, though the rest of the top 20 lacks any locals.
This lack of Australian artists isn’t new, however, with ARIA’s 2024 end-of-year charts comprising just 5% local content.
“It’s tough out there,” Rosen agrees, referencing a need for local acts to be visible in order to make an impact on the charts. “There’s no doubt we can’t shy away from that impact on the chart here, but I think these things are cyclical and I’m incredibly optimistic of this next generation of Aussie acts that will impact the charts, both here and overseas.
“It’s definitely a moment in time. We can’t pretend it’s not happening, but we need to set ourselves up for what success looks like in the future and to me, that’s very much around the acts that can impact globally.”
The recent chart successes from WMA can also be traced back to the importance of having artists performing in the local market – a necessity which Rosen labels as “fundamental.”
“Look at Benson Boone and Teddy Swims, we brought both artists out to market really, really early,” Rosen recalls. “Benson Boone played a small sold-out show at the Lansdowne [in Sydney]. Teddy Swims’ first great, Hot Hits was in New Zealand with ‘Lose Control,’ and New Zealand and Australia are still his top two markets anywhere in the world.
“I think the number one most important thing is to get artists to market,” he continues. “So you see how great they are, Aussie fans can fall in love with them and we can connect them with local culture. And that’s really our job here, to work with our partners.
“We’ve got incredible partnerships with Atlantic Records and Warner Records and we’ve worked with them from early days about ‘How do we help you break this artist in the market?’ We value those partnerships, we work incredibly hard with them, and we bring those artists as early as we can and start seeding them into the local culture and building their fanbase.”
In addition to his current role with WMA, Rosen took on new duties this year with publishing, with the recent good news of a strong showing in the charts undoubtedly leaving the entire team feeling content.
“I’m just the figurehead at the top and it’s a lot of hard work from the teams,” he explains. “I think we’ve got the most passionate and hardworking team across both records and publishing in the market and I feel very proud to lead them.
“We’re not going to rest on our laurels,” he adds. “Lots more to achieve, lots more to do, but I think you have to celebrate the wins. We all know how hard we work in this business, so it’s good to celebrate the wins, but we’re off to work out what comes next.”
Nearly a decade before contemporary Christian music (CCM) star Brandon Lake was headlining arenas, topping Billboard’s Christian Airplay charts and winning Grammy Awards, he was a young church worship leader in Charleston, S.C., who just wanted to record an album — and took an unorthodox route to making that happen.
“I did a GoFundMe campaign. I said, ‘If you pledge a certain amount, I’ll tattoo your name on my leg,’ ” explains Lake, 34, as he sits across from me onstage in the sanctuary of Seacoast Church, the Charleston megachurch where he began leading worship as a teenager. He taps his left leg: “So I have 22 last names of folks who donated tattooed on my thigh.”
In 2016, he released the result of that campaign, Closer — and since then, his songwriting skill; gritty, full-throttle vocals; and willingness to address sensitive topics like anxiety and mental health in his music have made him one of the biggest stars in the CCM world. He has released four more albums and dominated Billboard’s Christian music charts, landing 43 entries on Hot Christian Songs, including 2023’s 31-week No. 1 “Praise,” recorded with the collective Elevation Worship.
But though he remains deeply committed to the Christian market, Lake is also looking beyond it. He recently earned his first crossover hit, making his Billboard Hot 100 debut in November 2024 when the raw, soulful “Hard Fought Hallelujah” bowed at No. 51. In February, he teamed with country hit-maker and fellow ink aficionado Jelly Roll for a collaborative version of the song.
“I just wanted to share this with somebody who really gets this story, who’s lived it,” he says of recording the song about hardship-tested faith with Jelly Roll. “Now to see him carrying this song and how we carry it together and it’s impacting so many lives — that’s the goal.” He adds, “We’re in a perfect time for this kind of collaboration to happen… The truth is, all of us are just as messed up — it’s just some of us are good at hiding it and putting a mask on. Everyone’s on a journey.”
Brandon Lake photographed May 22, 2025 in Charleston, S.C.
Will Crooks
Lake’s Hot 100 debut comes as CCM is having a major moment on the all-genre chart. “Hard Fought Hallelujah” and Forrest Frank’s “Your Way’s Better” appeared simultaneously on the chart this year — the first time in more than a decade that two CCM songs were on the Hot 100 at the same time. The last time a non-holiday song recorded by a primarily CCM artist reached the Hot 100 was Lauren Daigle’s “You Say,” in 2019.
Those breakthroughs occurred amid an overall rise in consumption of CCM over the past 18 months. According to Luminate, in the first half of 2024, sales of track-equivalent albums, streaming-equivalent albums and on-demand audio for the genre grew 8.9%, with CCM ranking as the fourth-fastest-growing musical genre after pop, Latin and country. The music’s broadening sounds, as well as increased collaborations between CCM and secular artists over the past several years, have helped CCM songs become more heavily integrated into mainstream playlists: Spotify has noted that during the past five years, CCM experienced a 60% growth rate globally and a 50% growth rate in the United States on its platform, as artists previously confined to the genre started to penetrate mainstream spaces.
That strong upward trajectory owes in large part to a new generation of CCM artists such as Lake, Frank, Josiah Queen and Seph Schlueter. They relish crossing genre lines: Frank’s music, for instance, is more rooted in pop and hip-hop, while Lake’s songs anchor worship lyrics aimed at church congregations in a range of sounds including rock, blues and country. And they are also digital natives who have been intentional in harnessing the power of social media and streaming to widen the genre’s audience; a viral TikTok dance clip, for instance, gave Frank’s “Your Way’s Better” a major streaming boost.
Lake was among Luminate’s top five CCM artists in the first half of 2024, and his star has only risen since then. During his appearances at CMA Fest, held June 5-8, a social media clip of him and Jelly Roll performing “Hard Fought Hallelujah” earned over 1 million views, while a clip of the audience singing Lake’s hit “Gratitude” a cappella during a separate CMA Fest appearance earned more than 3 million views in just over 48 hours. The success of “Hard Fought Hallelujah,” in particular, has put Lake — and his faith-centered message — before broader and more mainstream audiences than he ever dreamed of: performing on American Idol, joining Jelly Roll onstage at Stagecoach in front of 75,000 fans, playing the Grand Ole Opry and CMA Fest.
From the start, collaboration has been key to Lake’s success. Closer was circulated in church and worship music circles, leading him to some of his first songwriting connections, like Tasha Cobbs Leonard, Nate Moore and Maverick City Music co-founder Tony Brown, with whom he co-wrote Cobbs Leonard’s Grammy-nominated 2019 song “This Is a Move.” Other early co-writes included team-ups with worship music collectives Maverick City Music, Bethel Music and Elevation Worship; all helped Lake expand his sound. Alongside more traditional-sounding worship anthems, his 2021 album, House of Miracles, included the soulful rock song “I Need a Ghost.”
Later that year, Elevation Worship’s “Graves Into Gardens,” co-written by and featuring Lake, topped the Christian Airplay chart and was certified platinum by the RIAA. “That’s when the floodgates opened,” he recalls. “I was getting calls from everywhere, asking me to do a concert or do collaborations — I can’t even remember how many collabs I’ve done, songs I’ve written with other people that were like, ‘Let’s just do it together.’ ” At the time, Lake notes, he didn’t even have a manager. (Since 2021, he has been with prominent CCM management company Breit Group.) “I literally kept all of my dates I said yes to in my Notes app,” Lake explains. “My manager now has that framed, I think, because of how much we’ve grown. I learned so much being around so many of my heroes.”
In 2023, Lake cemented his solo hit-maker status when “Gratitude” topped Hot Christian Songs for 28 weeks. Since, he has continued notching solo and collaborative hits, including “Fear Is Not My Future” with Maverick City Music and “Love of God” with Phil Wickham. (He’ll tour arenas and stadiums with the latter this summer.) And on June 13, he released his fifth studio album, King of Hearts, on Provident Entertainment.
Sonically, the album finds Lake deepening his exploration of diverse genres, including country (“Daddy’s DNA,” “Spare Change”), gospel (“I Know a Name,” with luminary CeCe Winans) and hard rock (“Sevens”), and features additional collaborations with writer-producer Hank Bentley and Christian rapper Hulvey, among others.
And amid the run-up to releasing King of Hearts, Lake launched another major project. In early 2025, CCM supergroup Sons of Sunday debuted, featuring Lake alongside Moore, Steven Furtick, Pat Barrett, Chris Brown and Leeland Mooring. The group has already notched four entries on Hot Christian Songs, and its self-titled debut album bowed at No. 3 on the Top Christian Albums chart upon its release in May.
“My favorite things I’ve ever created were created in community, so I think that’ll be a huge piece of my future,” Lake says. “I’ll roll with anybody who wants to go after the same things, who has the same values as me.”
Brandon Lake photographed May 22, 2025 at Seacoast Church in Mount Pleasant, S.C.
Will Crooks
As his star rises, he has stayed close to his South Carolina roots. Instead of moving to Nashville, the epicenter of the CCM industry, Lake lives with his wife, Brittany; their three sons; and a menagerie including cows, mini-donkeys and two dogs on a sprawling rural property just outside Charleston. Much of King of Hearts was recorded in a three-room Charleston studio owned by Lake’s longtime collaborator, producer-writer Micah Nichols. And even when he’s on the road, Lake makes a point of staying connected to his hometown: In 2022, he concluded the first leg of his first headlining tour with two sold-out shows at Seacoast Church; next May, he’ll wrap his 48-city King of Hearts tour at Charleston’s 12,000-seat Credit One Stadium.
But regardless of venue size or location, Lake’s goal remains the same. “When we go out on tour and it’s this huge production, huge lights and sound, I’m not doing anything other than just having church — just maybe a few more lights in cool moments,” he says with a chuckle. “It’s entertaining, but really, I want [concertgoers] to be able to say, ‘I went to the King of Hearts tour, and my life has forever changed.’ ”
What do you recall about your first time performing?
I’ve been a part of [Seacoast Church] since I was probably 13 or 14 years old. They encouraged me and gave me opportunity after opportunity to learn and fail and grow. This is where I learned how to write songs. Someone overheard me singing in a small group in someone’s living room and asked me to sing. I sang for the first time at church, and I remember feeling so vulnerable, which to this day I still do. It’s this love-hate relationship every time I step out on the platform, especially on tour — it’s like the weight of the night feels like it’s on my shoulders, but at the same time, I try to remember it’s not about me: People are coming to hear these songs and have a real experience with God.
Will Crooks
Early in your career, you started working with popular worship collective Bethel Music. What was it like making that transition from leading worship at your local church to being on a larger tour with a collective?
Going from local church to being on tour in front of thousands of people overnight was a dream come true and, in the same season, writing with all my heroes. Everybody that was on my bucket list of getting to write with them, it all happened in the span of a few weeks. What came quickly after that was a valley — I never expected what it would do when I came home and came off that high. That taught me a lot. I did a whole record around mental health [2022’s Help!]. I’d never experienced depression, anxiety, panic attacks ever in my life until I came home from all my dreams coming true, but my adrenaline was just totally shot. I just went into this super-dark place, and it wasn’t long, but it was long enough to be like, “I need some help.” I had to relearn to go to God first and most, to fix what was going on.
I’ve had to learn over the past few years how to tour and record and balance family and this career the healthy way. There’s a reason why I only tour on the weekends. [The King of Hearts tour comprises four-show runs that are booked for Thursdays through Sundays.] My wife and I discuss every opportunity I get to make sure that we’re on board as a family. I want to be 50 years old and still be able to tour. That’s why I have a health coach, a performance coach. I’m trying to get healthy in every aspect of my life.
Sonically, King of Hearts is the most varied album of your career. Why was that important to you?
Touching on different genres isn’t something I set out to do. I’ve been a sponge and soaked up the gold from people I’ve been surrounded by. Growing up, [I listened to] Christian music and James Taylor. I’d come home from school and turn on CMT [Country Music Television]. So I grew up around country [music] and discovered rock’n’roll later. I had a metal garage band for a little while and just loved all genres of music. I was trying to learn from all these different expressions of music … So now when I go write a song, I’m less focused on “What does this need to sound like?” and more on “What am I feeling right now?”
“Sevens” is the most rock-leaning song on the album. What was that writing/recording session like?
We went to a Royal Blood and Queens of the Stone Age concert down the street from this studio, and a few days later, I just wanted to write a big-riff rock tune. I picked up a guitar, started playing and [writer-producer] Micah [Nichols] and I started chasing it. The chorus that you hear is the demo vocal from the day we wrote it. I would say 70% of King of Hearts is filled with demo vocals.
How did Jelly Roll come to be on “Hard Fought Hallelujah”?
I released [the solo version of] this song, and then I felt like, “This is too special to not share this song with somebody.” Thinking about the lyrics, I was like, “Man, I think Jelly Roll would resonate with the story of this song.” I’ve been so inspired by his story, the things he’s overcome. I remember seeing him sing “Believe” with Brooks & Dunn [at the 2024 CMA Awards], and I just bawled my eyes out. It gave me all the faith to reach out. The craziest part of that is he had already heard the song on TikTok and loved it. We hopped on the phone, and we didn’t talk music for the first hour. We just instantly became like brothers and talked about life, parenting, touring, family. It was a real friendship off the bat. There’s a reason why he is on top of the world right now, and it’s not just because his songs are amazing — it’s because he’s amazing.
You have stayed close to your roots in Charleston. Have you been tempted to move to Nashville?
I love Nashville, but I like it being a home away from home. [Charleston] is where my roots are and being here with those that remember the 15-year-old Brandon, they know me the best. I want to make music that gives people faith and hope to keep going, and the people I’ve surrounded myself with, they get that the best. So it makes the most sense to stay here.
As your career has grown beyond CCM in terms of music listener recognition, has there been any kind of backlash or criticism from music listeners or the industry?
I think historically, any time something has shifted outside of what had been done previously, it can make people take pause and maybe be even a bit uncomfortable with it … or make it feel like it’s an either-or situation. And if you only are using Instagram as a metric, I can see why someone would maybe want to position it that way. But I don’t think of it that way … To me, this is a lifestyle and teachings that live through music, and however that is connecting and wherever that is connecting, I will always want it to be as much and as far as possible.
CCM is having a moment on the Billboard Hot 100, with “Hard Fought Hallelujah” and Forrest Frank’s “Your Way’s Better” charting simultaneously. Why do you think the genre is surging?
I think the reason why Christian music is probably more consumed now than years ago is because there’s a greater level of hunger for what’s real and what’s true. The fact that American Idol did a whole night around Easter, I think it just goes to show people are desperate for something that is going to lift their spirit. And I’ve got too many stories — I think what keeps me going, and I think what would keep a Forrest Frank going and what keeps a Josiah Queen writing these songs, is getting flooded with testimonies. People are hungry for authenticity. They’re not just looking for entertainment. They’re looking for an encounter with something that’s real. There’s nothing more real than God.
“I look back at that time, and it was so romantic,” Ryn Weaver tells Billboard, “and I was so young, and so brave, and so scared, and kind of staying high so I didn’t have to come down.”
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Weaver needs every adjective she can find to describe the personal and professional whirlwind that she experienced a decade ago. In June 2014, the singer-songwriter born Aryn Wüthrich made her debut with “OctaHate,” a sleek, lightly swaying synth-pop gem with effervescent verses and a hammered-down hook; she uploaded the track onto Soundcloud, and it rapidly took off with pre-TikTok social media shares and critical approval.
Pop Twitter noted the song’s pedigree — not only did “OctaHate” boast a co-writing credit from a then-red-hot Charli XCX with Weaver, but Benny Blanco, Passion Pit leader Michael Angelakos and Norwegian polymath Cashmere Cat all helped pen and produce the song. But more immediate were 21-year-old Weaver’s dynamic voice and theatrical delivery, adding dramatic heft to each of the song’s finely crafted melodies. Combined with the news that “OctaHate” preceded a debut album that Blanco and Angelakos would co-helm, and that Blanco would release through his Interscope imprint Friends Keep Secrets, Weaver appeared to have the skills and industry buy-in to become an alt-pop star.
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Weaver’s debut, 2015’s The Fool, brimmed with promise and personality, debuting at No. 30 on the Billboard 200 and prompting a headlining tour and festival dates over the following year. None of the follow-up singles built upon the commercial success of “OctaHate,” though, and a follow-up album never materialized. “It was also very sad, and very heartbreaking,” Weaver says today, “and I was very lost, even though I was just charging into the night.”
In the years since, Weaver’s name would pop up as a co-writer on songs like 2019’s “Dream Glow” by BTS and Charli XCX, and 2021’s “Just For Me” by SAINT JHN and SZA; “Pierre,” the anthemic fan favorite from The Fool, has also been a perennial TikTok favorite, inspiring multiple trends beginning in 2021 and racking up even more U.S. on-demand streams at this point than “OctaHate” (111.7 million to 63.4 million, according to Luminate). Yet Weaver, whose wit and sincerity once made her a must-follow on Twitter and Instagram, mostly vanished from social media, and years passed between updates on in-the-works music.
On Monday (June 16) — the 10-year anniversary of The Fool — that wait finally ended. “Odin St” may be Weaver’s first official single in a decade, created with a darker tone (courtesy of co-producers Benjamin Greenspan and Constantine Anastasakis) and a more mature perspective. But longtime fans will recognize the idiosyncratic wordplay, loping syllables and ornate hooks that bend toward a major chorus, all as magnetic today as when Weaver barreled into view a decade ago.
Now 32 and without a label — she’s no longer working with Blanco but describes their parting as amicable, and says that she still keeps in touch with Angelakos — Weaver says that “Odin St” will lead into the sophomore act that she always knew she had inside of her, but which required time to germinate.
“I went through a very singular, and yet kind of clichéd, experience,” Weaver explains of her early stardom, “where I didn’t feel like I could fully communicate it yet. It was, like, above my pay grade, the language to discuss what was going on. I needed some space from certain experiences to actually be able to write from a place of clarity.”
Ahead of the release of “Odin St,” Weaver discussed where she’s been, and where she finally hopes to go next. (Ed. note: this interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.)
Where did “Odin St” come from?
Chronologically, the song is where The Fool ended. [The album’s final song, “New Constellations”] ends, “You can run, if you want to.” I think it’s pretty clear that I left my label — I asked to be released — and so I moved to L.A., across the country, and my manager picked out a place for me to stay. It was on Odin Street in Los Angeles, and I didn’t know the lore of Odin at that time, but it was this safe haven, bunker, Grey Gardens situation. I hid there, I guess, and waited for some dust to settle.
And then later, thinking about the lore of Odin, I just love that he’s the god of wisdom, and he represents people who are willing to give up everything on their journey for their acquisition of wisdom. I felt like that was such a poem in and of itself — being on Odin Street, and knowing that was my journey, but it’s a very long journey to actually acquiring wisdom. It was also the inverse — I was making the first step, but in reality, I was partying, and hiding, and I was with someone I shouldn’t have been with. And so it was kind of this house down the road from wisdom.
When did you start piecing the actual song together?
I think I started an idea for it like three years later, and then I scrapped that. And then I went in with [producer-songwriter] Active Child, and we started something – but it was almost too joyful in a way, too romantic. I started the verse there, and then we didn’t see each other through COVID. And then I was writing with a guy named Constantine, whose artist project is Blonder, and we were writing for a young artist that my friend was managing, in the desert. We got on very well, and we got back home and were talking about working together. He has this very interesting dark guitar tone.
We hung out all night, and I think it was 7:00 AM when we started writing it. Funny enough, the song is in the key that it’s in because of my throat — I was like, “It’s 7:00 AM, this is where I can sing this song.” And we even tried to change it a couple times, but key characteristics are so important. We lifted it a half [key], and then it sounded like a jingle. I was like, “We’re keeping it where it is, because it’s dark, and it’s gritty.”
“Odin St” has been rumored to come out for a few years now. Why was now the right time?
For my fans, I love the idea of putting something out on the 10-year for The Fool. We never did a re-pressing — we did one pressing, and people constantly ask me, “Can I get a record?” I don’t have any! But this song is literally where I left you, and it’s a darker color palette. I like that it’s lower — I wasn’t really encouraged to sing in a lower register on the first record. So this is also kind of a break-free moment, of I can do whatever I want. And I also just think it’s a foray into a darker new chapter, while still being light enough.
How close was this moment to happening in the past? Were there starts and stops?
There were so many starts and stops. There have been three separate times I was getting ready, and there were different songs, too. There was one that I was like, “I feel like that’s the wrong story to start with.” I would get close, and then pull back. I’ve had to get to a point of regaining a lot of self-trust, because working with super-producers and then leaving — you have a splash like that, and then you’re coming back, and there’s this feeling like, “This is different.” So I think I was scared.
I was never lying to anyone. I always thought I would release something, but then the logistics of it come into play. It costs money. I don’t want to give away my power and immediately sign somewhere. Maintaining autonomy was also important to me. I think, at this moment in time, I am able to do that.
Was co-writing for other artists, or serving as a guest vocalist, ever a lane you considered?
I’ve written for other people — I wrote for SAINt JHN and SZA, and I did something for BTS. I’ve had a lot of random, lucky cuts. If you take this much time off — I’m not connected in the industry through family, I don’t have a giant trust fund or anything. I felt like the universe was protecting me, being like, “Here’s this Head and the Heart song, you can keep going.” That was also a really nice way to pull back and de-center myself, especially while I was pulling back the arrow and deciding what this new chapter would look like.
I turned down a couple really big features at the time, but I think it was because I wanted to establish myself as an artist with my voice. The music industry has changed, but at the time, I felt there was a bit of a trap in being a features artist. I really wanted for my first big feature for everyone to be like, “Oh, damn, they’re working together!,” not, “Who the f–k is that?” I was pretty stubborn about wanting to continue to develop my own voice to where it feels like, that is a worthy collaboration, instead of being thrown onto something. I was maybe a little cagey, but I stand by that decision.
Around the release of The Fool, you were all over social media and constantly online. And then you took a step back for a long time.
Well at the time, I wasn’t releasing — I don’t know how many selfies or how much content the world really needs. But also, I started seeing someone who’s wonderful, and who doesn’t have social media. And I was like, “Wow, I want to do that for a minute.” It was like, what am I trying to get here? Am I going to post a snippet? Am I going to react or bandwagon? I was like, “They don’t need me right now. Open up the stage for the people they need right now.”
I’ve been onstage my whole life, since I was four, and was a bit of an overachiever in that sense. I was performing professionally at events, and singing for sports games, and then I was the lead in plays, and I was in bands, and then I got into [NYU], and then I dropped out of school, and then I met Benny, and everything was just like, good, good, good, good. And I didn’t understand myself outside of the context of other people, and my value was heavily tied to my ability to entertain or perform.
I think the time off has been really transformative, in the sense that you really do have to find what your intrinsic value is. That was a very painful process. And this is the longest I’ve not been onstage in my life, but it was so crucial to my general development. So I think you have a couple of little ego deaths in there, where you don’t need to fight for attention.
So what were your areas of interest while you were detached? Did you pick up new hobbies?
I traveled a bit. I’ve gone on weird hiking road trips. I got a sewing machine. I got back into painting. I hung out with my friends and my family a lot. I was a good cat mom. I go dancing, I exercise, I swim in the sea. I was living my life! I do have to acknowledge screens — it’s a very depressing truth that we all binge more than we want to, and we all are on our phones more than we want to be, and I’m trying not to do that, but sometimes my nights are that. I was a bartender for a second. I’ve been in therapy. I’m doing what anybody else is doing.
Did you ever consider leaving music altogether?
I did, but I didn’t. You can talk yourself in and out of everything — I was like, “Maybe I’ll go to school and study semiotics! I’ll go write a book!” Or I was like, “Maybe the industry is too toxic!” I was in a very different industry, pre-MeToo, and women were pitted against each other in different ways. There was a little bit of seeing how the sausage was made, and being there, the industry felt strange.
More for the drama of it, I was like, “Maybe I’ll leave.” And I had enough reasons to, and most people would have. But I think I always had that thing that was like, “It’ll be next year.” It was more prolonging the [return], and never like I was actually going to pivot.
When you did check in with the rest of the world, how meaningful was it to read fan messages asking about a comeback or hoping you were working on new music?
Super meaningful, and also heartbreaking. You take this much time off, some of it is trying to find your next perfect-match collaborator. You’ll do some of the speed dating, and someone will want to do “OctaHate 2.0,” when you’re trying to transform. So sometimes I’d get those messages, and especially when I felt so far away from releasing, I was like, “I want to be there too. I’m figuring it out.” But it also kept me going, knowing that I had such a strong fan base and people that really love me. I also kept in touch with so many of them.
I had isolated for a long time, and became sort of hermetic. I like that side of myself, but I also need people. It’s like in the Peter Pan play, where Tinker Bell starts dying and needs everyone in the audience to say, “I do believe in fairies, I do, I do,” to survive. When you’re out of the public eye, and you don’t know how necessary what you have to say is at all — having people being like, “We believe, we care, we’ll listen,” that matters.
How does it feel to be on the precipice of releasing new music?
I feel really calm, in a way. I think I was so frantic with “OctaHate” — it was one of those releases where it was like, “We’re just gonna put this out today!” “Oh, we are?” It was horrifying. I threw up that day. I was like, “Oh God, this is happening.” But I’ve waited so long now that I feel ready to go.
We have a couple more songs coming down the pipeline, and then I think we’re going to do an announcement for… other stuff. But as of now, I just want to focus on this. I’m also actively in EMDR, which is really cool. I’m really preparing myself to come back to the industry from every angle, and feel really like secure and stable coming back. So it’s like, a nice summer, getting me ready to to do the damn thing.
Are you thinking about playing shows?
Oh, yeah. I mean, that’s kind of my favorite part of it. I love writing, but being onstage in that communal heartbeat thing — where someone can be attached to the work for a completely different reason [than someone else], but everyone’s singing it at each other — it’s just this electricity.
I remember before I first went on tour, I was doing radio promo and all this stuff that made me feel disconnected from what I was doing. And as soon as I went on tour, I was like, “Oh my God, this is it — I’m a road dog, I am a sailor.” I grew up doing theater, show after show, and it’s always different. And getting to interact with people, hanging with them after the show — I had people coming on the bus and doing shots with me, and it was just so fun and free. I will be a better girl this time! I mean, you can only pull that off at 22. But, yeah, that’s the best part of it, to me.
What do you expect to feel when you return to the stage and start performing songs from The Fool?
I mean, hopefully no one is the same person as they were a decade ago. I want to say something in defense of The Fool, though. I feel there was a while where I couldn’t listen to it — almost like, “What was that? Oh, my God.” There’s a lot of things that I was embarrassed about when I was younger, like doing theater and this and that. But to me, they’re like, these beautiful baby pictures. And I was just so brave and young, and there was no thought about anything, other than “I only have this many days to write an album, so I’m gonna do it.” And it was high-pressure, high-stakes. I was living a very exciting life. And I just have so much love for that album.
I’m sure we’ll reimagine some of the instrumentation, but for some of them, we won’t. It’s a chapter that literally gave me the ability to be talking to you right now, and gave me the ability to have fans and have opportunities. I re-listen to it now, and not to toot our horn, but with Benny and Michael and me, it was a sound that’s got legs, and it feels timeless. The songs are strange, but still big. And I feel like that is the way I write.
I do feel like these two albums are going to be companion pieces — the first one is very bold and bright, and there’s a lot of darkness in what I wrote, even if the energy isn’t. And the newer stuff is a bit of a photo negative. Different colors, but it’s not like I’m not a romantic, theatrical, intense person still. I’ve just matured.
Roughly a decade ago, Bruno Boumendil, the French producer who goes by the name Folamour, perfected a distinct strain of soul-sampling house music, fragile yet fierce.
For source material, he mined plush soul ballads from the late ’70s and early ‘80s, dropping vocal snippets into productions that flew forward, so the charismatic voices seemed to be battling to maintain their stately dignity. He programmed his drums to start low in the mix before they reared up and lashed out, and used repetition to push tracks to dramatic climaxes, looping to lethal effect.
After an early run of success that included “When U Came Into My Life” (2016), “Ya Just Need 2 Believe in Yaself” (2017) and “I Know It Has Been Done Before” (2018), Boumendil pivoted. Though he never stopped making dance music, he started sprinkling it in among neo-soul and hip-hop tracks. But in recent years, he has been battling a creative funk.
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“I started to feel like everything was just a routine,” Boumendil explains. “I was doing gigs and creating music, but I wasn’t really thinking about it anymore.”
His new album, Movement Therapy, out June 13, comes after he forced himself to turn off autopilot, “to actually think about what I’m doing and be more than just someone going on stage and playing for two hours.” The first song on the record is a spoken-word manifesto: “For a while, I stopped moving and I felt dead inside. My soul and body were losing their light and purpose, I felt devoid of love for myself. Then I understood that I needed to stay in movement.”
In search of the lost spark, Boumendil fully recommitted to the style that initially boosted his career. He calls Movement Therapy his “first proper house music album.”
Boumendil, bearded, beaming and wearing his trademark bucket hat, spoke via Zoom from Paris, where he is based. He’s eager to discuss the intricacies of his production process and earnest about his passion for full-length albums — this is his fifth. “The format is tougher to present than big singles,” he says. “But I just love albums too much. It’s always nice when people want to dig into it.”
While France has a proud tradition of sample-based house music — the “French Touch” of Daft Punk, Cassius, and more — Boumendil was not raised in dance clubs. He grew up in Lyon, where much of his early listening was informed by his father, who enjoyed jazz and punk, funk and stadium rock. Later Boumendil fell hard for ‘90s hip-hop from New York, the boom bap made by the likes of DJ Premier, Pete Rock, and Q-Tip, where heady samples collided with hefty beats.
A love for rap led him obliquely to house, as if he snuck into the club through a side door: Both genres love a choice sample, even if they prefer different tempos. “I started to feel the connection,” Boumendil says, “and around 2010 to 2012, started falling in love with Kerri Chandler, Moodymann, Theo Parrish, all the old-school guys from Chicago and Detroit.” (Some of these “old-school guys” were a key influence on French Touch in the first place — when Daft Punk debuted their 1997 Essential Mix for BBC, they kicked it off with “Hear the Music,” from Chicago stalwart Paul Johnson.) Boumendil started DJing as a way of sharing his growing record collection.
Production came later, in 2014, when he was laid up in bed for three months with an illness. “I was like, ‘Okay, I have two options,’” he recalls. “I can watch Lost for like the 15th time, or I can try to do something better.” A friend helped tip the scale by introducing him to the production software Ableton.
He improved quickly. “Baise en Ville,” from the following year, mixed snatches of Jodeci’s volcanic lament “Cry for You” with soothing piano house. But Boumendil says it wasn’t until 2017 that his music started getting widespread attention. That year he put out “Lost Frequencies” — which flips “Lady,” a 1995 classic from one of Boumendil’s favorite artists, the neo-soul savant D’Angelo — as well as “Ya Just Need 2 Believe in Yaself,” one of his most-streamed songs, and the album Umami via Classic Music Company, the label co-founded by dance luminaries Derrick Carter and Luke Solomon.
Boumendil saw that burst of activity as the close of a chapter. After years of chopping samples on his MPC, he decided to start playing more instruments — sometimes hiring musicians to help — and making “slower stuff.”
Not anymore: Movement Therapy whizzes toward the dancefloor and rarely lets up. “Feel the Power,” “a song about the energy we feel when we are all together in a party,” detonates almost immediately and borrows its over-the-moon vocal from a ‘90s rave track, Love Decade’s “So Real.” In “Everyone’s Beautiful When They Do What They Love,” the bass hits as if it’s trying to maul its way out of the speakers. “I wanted to feel that growl, like it was an animal or something really savage,” Boumendil says.
While crafting Movement Therapy, he purposefully broke his studio routine in several ways as part of an effort to banish his malaise. “The musician’s life never stops — it’s hard to say, ‘I’m not doing shows for six months,’” Boumendil points out. “I had to feel a difference while I was still doing the things that made me feel that way [‘dead inside’], which was super tough.”
For the first time ever, he club-tested early versions of every song on the album. “One of the goals of coming back to house music was to have that link where on Thursday I can be in my studio making something, and on Friday I can try the song in a set,” Boumendil explains. After numerous tweaks — he’s been lucky to find a mastering engineer “who doesn’t mind doing like, 20 versions of a song” —”Ca Va Aller” and “Everyone’s Beautiful When They Do What They Love” have “been working super well” on the dancefloor.
In addition to establishing a new feedback loop between the club and the studio, Boumendil added more electronic touches after years of being committed to analog instrumentation. On both “Ca Va Aller” and “Everyone’s Beautiful When They Do What They Love,” synthesizers glitter like pennies at the bottom of a fountain.
The same goes for “Pressure Makes Diamonds,” the album’s lead single, originally released almost a year ago. “It’s always a bit unexpected [when I play that] in my set, because it has that really electronic, modern lead, which doesn’t really fit with the old-school funk, disco, and soul I usually play,” Boumendil acknowledges.
But queuing up the track serves as another way for him to scramble his old routines. There is a point in the song after the second verse where the drums and vocal fall away before revving up again, and when Boumendil hears it, he’s repeatedly been close to tears.
Treasuring these moments — “stepping back, understanding the power of dancing, and loving the music that makes you move” — is part of his larger project of creative rejuvenation. “I’m still working on it,” Boumendil says. “But I’ve never felt better about how I do things than I do right now.”
In 2023, the producer Kevin Saunderson wandered into the home studio he shares with his son Dantiez in Detroit. What he heard blasting from the speakers seemed familiar. “I said, ‘Man, that sounds like me!’” Saunderson recalls with a laugh. “[Dantiez] used some of my bass sounds.”
As one of three men widely credited with inventing Detroit techno, Saunderson is used to encountering artists who have borrowed scraps of his style. But this time, he got a chance to put his own twist on another producer’s unwitting homage.
“We’re always around each other,” Saunderson says of Dantiez. “We’ve already been doing Inner City [another group] together, and he sounds like me in some ways. So I thought, why don’t we just do an album together?” That release, e-Dancer, which takes its name from one of Saunderson’s projects in the 1990s, is due out June 13.
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The two men spoke to Billboard over Zoom from their Detroit home: Dantiez, laid back, lounged on a couch in one part of the house, while the elder Saunderson spoke passionately in another room about the genre he helped create. He has embraced the role of elder statesman and techno historian in recent years, doing frequent interviews about the style’s origins and even guest editing a series for Mixmag. “I’ve been in it since the beginning — I’m the beginning of this movement in many ways,” he explains. “I’ve seen a lot, and I want to be a driving force trying to educate people to our music.”
Over more than three decades, Saunderson’s discography has ranged from vocal dance-pop classics — Inner City’s “Good Life” and “Big Fun” — to the scrappy, scraping techno on e-Dancer’s canonical album, 1998’s Heavenly. “If you opened the techno songbook, Kevin Saunderson may have the most diverse — and in some ways, most prescient — discography of all,” Sam Valenti, founder of the label Ghostly International, wrote in January. “In any other country,” Valenti added, “he’d be given every tribute and lifetime achievement award imaginable.”
The producer DJ Spinna put it more simply in a recent Instagram comment: “Just Want Another Chance” — the song in which Saunderson invented the “Reese Bass” sound that he heard Dantiez using in the studio — “changed my damn life!!”
e-Dancer started as a retort to a dance world that often polices its borders, wary of the potential for dilution that accompanies mainstream success. Inner City’s first two singles traveled far beyond Detroit and even the wider, if still insular, world of dance-heads, becoming top 10 hits in the U.K. (“Good Life” also cracked the Hot 100 in the U.S.) “I had all that success with Inner City, and all the Detroit guys were joking with me — ‘You’re commercial, now we can’t play “Big Fun” in the club,’” Saunderson explains. “It ain’t underground enough.” e-Dancer was meant to demonstrate that Saunderson still “had that other sound” in his arsenal.
He put out the first e-Dancer single in 1991; the title was “Speaker Punishing,” suggesting this wasn’t easygoing ear-candy. The follow-up, “Pump the Move,” put harsh chattering electronics front and center — softening them slightly with a cushy synthesizer line — while the B-side was squirrely and agitated, with the strafing energy of acid house. Heavenly collected tracks from these singles along with more songs from the mid-1990s.
In the last decade, Saunderson has decided to revisit some of his early successes. Nearly 20 years after Heavenly, he gently retouched the songs on Heavenly Revisited (2017), and followed that with Re:Generate (2021), which gave producers like Adam Beyer, Robert Hood and Special Request a chance to rework tracks from the original album. In 2019, Saunderson also relaunched Inner City, enlisting Dantiez — now a dance music producer in his own right — to join the new version of the group with Steffanie Christi’an handling vocals in place of original singer Paris Grey.
Father and son have established a working routine that Saunderson summarizes as “he starts it, and usually I finish it.” “Even though we live together,” adds Dantiez, who also puts out music on his own and with his brother, “it’s hard to actually get us both in the studio at the same time.”
Between start and finish, though, tracks undergo endless tweaks. “I usually go through six, seven, eight versions of a song before it even makes it to [Saunderson],” Dantiez says.
And even with the album due out shortly, they continue to iterate. The early advance copy sent to Billboard had a hard-driving, string-soaked vocal cut titled “Symbolical,” but Saunderson said he would likely pull out the drums before e-Dancer came out, making the song “real ambient, just the violin and her voice.” A previous version of the album-closer “Escape” — which pairs revving synths with a mean, ankle-level bass line — featured a male vocal, but it was later removed.
The Dantiez track that reminded Saunderson of his own work is “Emotions,” the second song on e-Dancer, which lays out the album’s throughline: A bass, frayed around the edges, that skulks and snarls under many of the tracks, seemingly spoiling for a fight. That buzzsaw sound reappears on “Dancer,” with wordless vocals wafting above it, “Frequency,” where the synths stutter and screech like rusted car brakes, and “Reece Punch,” which pairs it with pounding four-note piano runs. Dantiez once said that the key to a killer club track is “a big kick and a great bassline,” and he stayed true to that principle on e-Dancer.
Since Saunderson’s output has been so “prescient,” as Valenti put it, he remains at ease even as techno continues to evolve around him. The style has gone through “so many different phases,” Saunderson says. “Tech house became very popular. I was always in between [genres] — I could do something very techno or really house. I never said I was doing tech house at the time, but it’s really an in-between version of house and techno [like what I was doing].”
Lately Saunderson has noticed that in the U.S., “the trend seems like everything has gotten faster.” It can be “a little complicated” following up a set from a DJ who is racing along at 150 beats per minute, but he’s seen that before too — as Saunderson posted on Instagram recently, he’s been “playing hard ‘n fast long before TikTok techno was a thing.” When playing out new tracks in his sets, he has found that “Melodica,” “Emotions,” “Dancer,” and “Frequency” have elicited the strongest response from club goers.
Following the release of e-Dancer, Saunderson and Dantiez will take their act on the road, performing at Loveland and MUTEK Montreal. They also have a party in Detroit, The Hood Needs House, that they are hoping to bring to other cities. On top of that, Saunderson maintains a busy solo DJ schedule, including a recent party at Detroit’s Movement Festival. At the event, he described recently as “techno Christmas,” he celebrated his KMS Records label and also featured his two sons — Damarii along with Dantiez — in the lineup.
“I find a way to play a few classics each set so people get a good education,” Saunderson says. “Some people may not know who the hell I am. But they hear me, and they get kind of blown away.”
Am I the first person to feel strange calling you ‘weird’?”
John Mayer — bespectacled, grinning goofily, very much nerding out — is sitting across from “Weird Al” Yankovic, interviewing the Hawaiian shirt-clad parody music king, who is sitting across from him for his SiriusXM show, How’s Life With John Mayer.
“You can call me Al, like Paul Simon says,” Yankovic says with smile, before adding that the most normal thing about him is, probably, his pancreas.
It’s a funny quip, but also an understatement. Let’s just get this out of the way: “Weird Al” Yankovic is, beneath his accordion-playing, polka-loving surface, exceedingly normal. He likes long evening walks to get his steps in. He enjoys seeing movies and trying out new restaurants with his wife and daughter, who just graduated college. He grumbles good-naturedly about the ongoing renovation of his home in the Hollywood Hills. (“It’s going to look almost exactly the same as it did before, except it cost a fortune!”) The 65-year-old artist’s one attempt at rock star behavior, back in his early-’80s heyday, was comically un-vain: On a touring rider, he requested, in the spirit of Van Halen’s famed ban on brown M&M’S, “one really horrible Hawaiian shirt for every show I did.” (On that run, he did 200, and a collection that now extends to a storage unit somewhere in greater L.A. began.)
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Still, if not precisely weird, Yankovic is truly singular. His catalog can be divided into two types of songs: intricately crafted, meticulously arranged, hilarious yet never mean-spirited parodies of hits by acts ranging from Michael Jackson to Coolio to Nirvana to Lady Gaga, and original pastiches, for which he deep dives into artists’ catalogs to create songs that, with eerie accuracy, mimic the sounds and idiosyncrasies of those genre-spanning artists.
Between the two, he has accomplished feats usually reserved for the very artists he parodies. During each of the first four decades of his career, he has had entries on the Billboard Hot 100, and eight of his albums have reached the top 20 on the Billboard 200 — including his most recent studio release, 2014’s Mandatory Fun, which became his first No. 1 on the chart. He has won five Grammy Awards and an Emmy. Billboard estimates he has sold 12 million albums in the United States (based on RIAA certifications pre-1991 and Luminate data from 1991 on).
Incredibly, he’s done all this without ever changing his essential “Weird Al”-ness. “From day one, there was never even a discussion that would not be about following his singular vision,” says Jay Levey, Yankovic’s manager of 43 years and sometime creative collaborator (notably, they co-wrote the now nerd canon comedy UHF, which Levey also directed). “It’s hard to find any career where there’s literally no compromise, but we might be able to count on one hand the number of compromises he’s made in his career.”
Joe Pugliese
Sometimes, that’s meant turning down lucrative deals, like the $5 million beer endorsement that Yankovic passed on in 1990 because, he feared, the brand was “trying to make me into Joe Camel.” Many times, it’s meant standing up to record-label executives, like when, amid his “draconian” first album contract with Scotti Brothers (an indie then distributed by CBS), he was asked to shoot 10 music videos on a $30,000 budget simply because he’d proved he could do one for $3,000. (“I’m like, ‘No. No, I can’t!’ ”)
But just as often, it’s meant embracing an open-to-anything spirit that seems to almost always work out in his favor. Yankovic decided very early in his career to ask permission of any artist he parodied — not because the law required it (it doesn’t) but because he simply had no interest in making enemies. With very few exceptions, it turned out, the artists said yes, even supposedly impossible-to-convince ones like “American Pie” scribe Don McLean, who OK’d “The Saga Begins,” Yankovic’s 1999 parody that essentially summarizes the plot of Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace. “When I heard his version, I thought it was better than the original. The sound quality was superb,” says McLean, who calls Yankovic a “straight-ahead good boy” who “could be on Leave It to Beaver.”
Thanks to that combination of earnest good intentions, work ethic, backbone and obsession with quality, Yankovic finds himself in an unusual position today: He’s no novelty relic of the ’80s, but a truly cross-generational artist. In the past six years alone, he’s portrayed Rivers Cuomo in Weezer’s “Africa” music video, played accordion (and appeared in the video) for teen rock band The Linda Lindas’ 2024 single “Yo Me Estreso” and lip-synced dramatically in a tux in Clairo’s “Terrapin” video. “Growing up with his videos was a massive thing in my generation,” says Clairo, 26. “Back when YouTube was really simple, it really hit home for us in middle school to watch his parodies. He always knew how to draw people in.”
He and his team will prove just how true that still is when Yankovic heads out on the Bigger and Weirder Tour this summer. It’s his fastest-selling, biggest-grossing tour yet, according to his agent, Wasserman Music’s Brad Goodman, and his biggest by other metrics, too: an eight-piece band (his largest yet) onstage; first-time venues bigger than any he’s played before, including New York’s Madison Square Garden and L.A.’s Kia Forum; a mini-Las Vegas residency (the tour will open June 13 with six sold-out nights at The Venetian); and stops both expected (Red Rocks Amphitheatre) and less so (Riot Fest) on the route. And the concert itself is a trademark Weird Al spectacle: part rock show, part revival tent, part Broadway musical, all “joy bomb,” as actor and longtime fan Andy Samberg puts it.
Whether it becomes a springboard for the next Weird Al era is anyone’s guess — including Yankovic himself. Right now, he has no further plans to release albums; and since Mandatory Fun arrived over a decade ago, he’s only sporadically released new music, most recently the 2024 “Polkamania!” single (the latest in his long-running series of madcap polka medleys, this one recapping the past decade’s pop highlights, all sung in Yankovic’s manic tenor). Around that time, his contract of roughly 20 years with Sony ended, and he decided not to renew with the label, or sign with anyone else.
“Nobody owns any piece of me,” he says, exhaling. “I’m at a point in my life where if something isn’t going to be fun or a pleasant experience, I have no problem saying no, even if it’s a lot of money or a lot of eyeballs. I can do literally whatever I feel like doing.”
Then again, for Yankovic, that’s always been true.
“When I was a kid, I used to fantasize about being the next Weird Al, like it’s a position he applied for and got,” says Lin-Manuel Miranda, a lifelong fan who’s now also friends with Yankovic. “And then you grow up and realize, ‘Oh, there’s only one of that guy.’ We’re not going to see another Weird Al.”
On an overcast April afternoon a few days after the Mayer taping, Yankovic meets me for lunch at Crossroads, a vegan spot in West Hollywood where, years ago, he ate his first Impossible Burger. He’s quick to jokingly note that he is not a member of the city’s “vegan elite” — still, as he walks in, a man walking a golden retriever stops his phone conversation to stare and declare, “It’s that Al Yanko-vich guy!”
Despite his talent for writing songs about junk food (“My Bologna,” “The White Stuff”) and the fact that he once consumed the world’s most ungodly snack, a Twinkie Dog, in UHF (watch and barf a little), he’s been vegan since the early ’90s.
Chalk it up to veganism, staying out of the sun (“I melt in direct sunlight”) or following the directions of his longtime hair stylist, Sean James, very well (he never blow-dries those famous ringlets, hence their eternally bouncy and well-defined nature), but Yankovic has an ageless quality that lends many of his fans to liken him to mythological figures. “He’s Santa Claus for nerds of a certain stripe,” Miranda says, a comparison Mayer had also made (as well as to Forrest Gump). His curls may be a little grayer, but his ultra-expressive face — acrobatic eyebrows in particular — reflects his eternal curiosity and up-for-anything-ness.
As we settle in for almond ricotta-stuffed zucchini blossoms and meatless bolognese, Yankovic is particularly animated recounting his previous weekend, when he made his latest surprise appearance: his Coachella debut. To close out its surreal set, the crew from the cult-favorite kids show Yo Gabba Gabba! brought out a cast of characters both human (Thundercat, Portugal. The Man’s John Gourley) and not so much (cartoon mascots like Sleestak, PuffnStuf and Duo the Duolingo owl) to sing “The Rainbow Connection” with its composer, Paul Williams — and, on lead vocals, Yankovic.
“I’ve had a pretty bizarre life, so it wasn’t like, so unusual,” Yankovic reflects. “But it was definitely a little bit of an out-of-body experience.” He admits that the “hey kids, let’s put on a show” energy was fun and that the invite wasn’t a total shock (having appeared on a season-three episode as an accordion-playing circus ringmaster, he’s tight with the Gabba group). Still, he speaks of such invites with a kind of humble awe.
“Nothing I’ve ever done was me thinking, ‘Boy, I hope kids discover this 40 years from now,’ ” he says. Starting in the ’80s, he released an album almost every year “because I was afraid I would be quickly forgotten. It was drilled into me: ‘You’re a comedy artist, you’re a novelty artist, you’re lucky if you’re a one hit-wonder — you’re not destined to have a long career.’ I wanted to grab that brass ring every time I went around.”
Joe Pugliese
Coming up concurrently with the birth of MTV, and savvily taking advantage of it, helped Yankovic snatch that ring. He had a keen ear for (and good taste in) hits at a time when, thanks to both MTV and top 40 radio’s prevalence, a monoculture reigned — and perhaps even more importantly, he knew the power of a viral video before such a thing existed.
Tweaking hits like Jackson’s “Beat It” (“Eat It”) and Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” (“Like a Surgeon”), Yankovic created new songs that, thanks to his painstaking re-creations of their arrangements, were immediately recognizable but rewarded repeated consumption — as did their accompanying videos, in which Yankovic demonstrated his incredible eye for detail and formidable acting chops. “MTV was on like video wallpaper in the background 24 hours a day,” he says of that time. “They were hungry for content, and I was anxious to give them content.”
Since then, Yankovic’s understanding of the promotional power of visuals has remained prescient — take when, leading up to Mandatory Fun’s arrival, he insisted on releasing a music video on YouTube each day (not all at once, as some advised) to whet fans’ appetites for the album. And his genre-agnostic approach to making music has proved ahead of its time, too. Before hip-hop was widely accepted as pop, he was especially drawn to rap. “A lot of pop songs are very repetitive,” he says. “How can I be funny in seven syllables, you know? But rap songs, I mean, it’s nothing but words, and it’s easy to craft jokes that way.”
Parodies like “Amish Paradise” (Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise”) and “White and Nerdy” (Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’ Dirty”) are among his most streamed — though he’s been equally adept at literally any microgenre he takes on, from just-electrified Bob Dylan (“Bob,” entirely comprising palindromes) to arty new wave (the Devo pastiche “Dare To Be Stupid”) to crunchy Detroit garage rock (“CNR,” a tribute to Charles Nelson Reilly through the lens of The White Stripes).
“The more you listen to him, the more you get access to making [any genre of parody] sound legitimate,” says Samberg, who calls Yankovic the biggest influence on his own comedic music group, The Lonely Island. “The nature of what he does is incredibly populist. He’s not snooty about it; he’s like, ‘This is what the kids like, and as long as I have a good angle comedically, I’m going to do it.’ And because of that, it’s always appealing to young people.”
Growing up in Compton-adjacent Lynwood, Calif., Yankovic listened to rock radio, but as a teenager found playing the accordion a bit solitary. (His friends’ rock bands weren’t really interested in an accordionist joining up.) “When you take accordion lessons, I think the high-water mark is ‘Maybe someday I’ll play in an Italian restaurant or at a wedding,’ ” he says with a laugh. “I guess I was shameless. I grew up a complete nerd in high school. And when you’re not somebody that’s socially acceptable, you kind of have nothing to lose. I kind of held on to that mentality: Like, you know, ‘Who cares?’ ”
“Weird Al” Yankovic photographed April 17, 2025 at Dust Studios in Los Angeles.
Joe Pugliese
He didn’t look to any particular musician’s career trajectory as one he could follow. “It was more cautionary tales” — and one was especially haunting. One of his idols was Allan Sherman, the satirical singer best known for his 1963 summer camp send-up, “Hello Muddah Hello Fadduh!” “He was the last person to have a No. 1 comedy album before me,” Yankovic continues. “He had three No. 1 albums on, like, the pop charts — incredible! But within a few years, he completely burned out. He made some terrible choices in his personal and professional life and just went off into obscurity and sadly died a few years later. So I was always more concerned about, ‘Don’t mess it up. Keep doing what you’re doing and just try not to make bad choices.’ ”
“In a way, we’re almost always looking over our shoulders at that,” his manager Levey says. He cautiously admits that he and Yankovic have finally reached a level in his career where they’re “no longer at the point where every year [of continued success] is a surprise,” then adds, “I don’t actually even like saying that out loud because it sounds like you’re taking something for granted.”
But if Sherman was a rocket that blasted off only to burst into flames, Yankovic has been the opposite: one that, as Levey puts it, has kept steadily traveling through space — maybe sometimes at a slower speed than others, but never plummeting back down to Earth, buffeted by the most unexpected boosters. Like, say, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, the 2022 parody of a music biopic that Yankovic co-wrote, starring Daniel Radcliffe in the titular role. Despite at first airing only on the Roku Channel, it won almost universal acclaim and a prime-time Emmy, while expanding Yankovic’s universe yet again.
“His longevity is a testament to his ability to be himself and stick to what his taste is, because it’s so specific,” Radcliffe says. (“Bob” is his favorite Yankovic track, and he took the opportunity on set to ask his hero how he came up with all the palindromes.) “He threads a really hard-to-thread needle between wholesome fun and something … genuinely deranged and very, very strange. And in a way that is not affected.” At a time when the culture values authenticity above all else, Yankovic is a walking example of it — never not himself.
Unwittingly proving the point, Yankovic gasps in glee as our lunch ends. “Mochi doughnuts!” He shows me a photo his wife has just texted him: a box of the treats for dessert later. Somewhat sheepishly, he explains the occasion: “Eric Idle is coming over for dinner tonight. That’s my big flex for today.”
Later that afternoon, Yankovic meets me in a park near Coldwater Canyon called Tree People. He looks a little like a more aged version of his faux-Indiana Jones in UHF: Hawaiian shirt (a Goodwill buy), sensible shoes, safari hat shielding the waning sun.
“I’m gearing up for a big tour, so I’m mostly just making sure I don’t have a heart attack onstage or pass out or something,” he says of the walks he takes in spots like this. “I think I’ve lost 20 pounds in the past couple months just because I’m not, like, eating junk food at midnight anymore.”
Yankovic’s last tour outing didn’t require much of a physical regimen. In 2022 and 2023, he took to smaller venues for The Unfortunate Return of the Ridiculously Self-Indulgent, Ill-Advised Vanity Tour, a follow-up to the first Vanity Tour in 2018. The idea, he recalls, occurred to him when “I was putting on my ‘Fat’ suit for the thousandth time and I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it just be nice to like, go out onstage and play the songs, sit on a stool and have an intimate evening with fans?’ ”
Joe Pugliese
So Yankovic eschewed the usual production level of his tours — costumes, wigs, the parody hits — for a concept, his agent Goodman says, that the musician himself wasn’t entirely convinced would work. Instead, it allowed him to visit new, smaller major-market venues (Carnegie Hall, Tennessee’s The Caverns) and strengthen his presence in off-the-beaten-path markets (like, say, Huntsville, Ala.) while superserving his ride-or-die fans. When the concept returned in 2022, he played 162 Vanity shows globally (extending into the next year).
“I loved it, the band loved it, the people who showed up loved it, and it definitely scratched that itch,” Yankovic says. “And now,” with the Bigger and Weirder Tour, he’s back to “doing a show for everybody.”
For Bigger and Weirder, Yankovic is in self-described “overpreparer” mode, the hyper-organized creative core of his team. “I came up with the setlist a year ago. I gave the band” — three of whom, as of our meeting, he has yet to meet — “their marching orders and said, ‘Here’s the setlist, here’s your charts, here’s the demos, here are the rehearsal days.’ ” He personally chooses and edits all the show’s video content — clips of Weird Al in Pop Culture (say, on The Simpsons or 30 Rock) over the years that will play between songs and give him and the band time for the most frantic element of the show, which the audience never sees.
“We have stage props, wigs, a lot of costume changes, and a big portion of what we need is a quick-change area behind the scenes onstage, usually 40 by 20 feet,” says Melissa King, his tour manager of nearly 20 years. On Bigger and Weirder, Yankovic will do 20 costume changes, give or take a jacket or hat; his band members will do nine; and all will occur in 45 seconds maximum.
That backstage planning ensures that in front of the audience, the man who has spent his career parodying rock and pop stars is free to embody one himself. “When I speak to [talent] buyers and say, ‘Have you seen the show?,’ if there’s a pause, for sure I know the answer is no,” Goodman says. “Because if you’ve seen the show, it’s just an immediate ‘Yeah, of course, it’s incredible.’ ”
Onstage, Yankovic isn’t just physically “working his ass off,” as Samberg says. “As a vocalist, he’s f–king incredible,” Radcliffe marvels. “He has this amazing, clear tone. His range is so impressive — he does things to his voice that, as somebody who sings a bit in musicals sometimes, if I tried that I’d hurt myself.”
Joe Pugliese
Despite the “bigger” aspects of this tour — like how it will use three trucks instead of the usual one — King is still one of just 11 people comprising the crew. “It’s very lean, but it works because we all work together,” she says. “Al’s a genuine, kind person, and because he is, that’s the way everyone in our camp is.” That ethos extends to both the fans who’ll attend (“There aren’t many arseholes who are Weird Al fans,” Radcliffe observes) and how Yankovic treats them: According to Goodman, he’s kept maximum ticket prices for Bigger and Weirder to $179.50 and has always refused to engage with platinum ticketing.
Right now, the tour is Yankovic’s focus. When he decided against renewing his Sony contract, Levey says, they tested the waters with “very limited outreach” to a mix of indie and major labels. “And we got great offers and I brought those offers to him, and he thought about it and said, ‘I’m really loving this feeling of not being under contract to anybody … Please tell these people how appreciative I am of their generous offers and we’re just not going to accept any of them.’ ”
He’s now independent in the truest sense: He has an imprint, Way Moby, that’s technically now his label, but he describes it more as existing for theoretical recording purposes. He figures he’ll put out a single here and there, contribute to soundtracks if he’s asked and, as always, remain open to what may come — like making a surprise appearance last November to duet with Will Forte on Chappell Roan’s “Hot To Go!” at a charity event or developing a Broadway Weird Al jukebox musical that he says is in the very earliest creative stages, a “bucket list” project.
“When [he had] the No. 1 album in the country, that was such a triumphant moment. I remember us celebrating,” Samberg recalls. “It just shows you — I don’t think anyone else will really touch that space. It’s his space. No one is going to say, ‘I’m going to do what Al does,’ ’cause good luck. He owns that until he doesn’t want to do it anymore.”
The world, Yankovic knows, is also not the same as when he first became famous. “I got a record deal, I got on MTV, and I kind of had the market to myself,” he reflects. “Now the playing field has been so leveled that anybody can upload their material to YouTube or various portals like that. And if the stuff is good, chances are people will eventually see it. I’d like to think that if I was coming up now, I’d still do OK, but it would just be more of a challenge.”
It’s a generous sentiment, a reminder that, as Miranda puts it, one of Yankovic’s many talents is also “reading the room.” But in its humility, it’s also a reminder that, flooded as the market may now be with funny people on the internet, none of them, still, are doing it like Weird Al: the 65-year-old who once thought he’d play accordion at weddings and Italian restaurants, who’s about to make his Madison Square Garden debut.
This story appears in the June 7, 2025, of Billboard.
TikTok is a time machine. Hearing his songs on the app, Khalid finds himself in an earlier era.
Last February, the Billboard Hot 100-topping R&B and pop artist noticed one of his early hits was resurfacing. “Location” — which peaked at No. 16 in 2017 — was connecting with listeners all over again, who were singing along to the yearning lyrics about love in the digital age with a fresh perspective.
“It’s a whole new society, a whole new age of young adults who are experiencing this song,” Khalid says. “I lived it, and I performed it, but to see people who are now the age I was then listening to that song, it’s surreal, funny and nostalgic. It makes me live vicariously through that experience. I’m like, wow, there’s a reason why it resonates with them: because that was real.”
When he first wrote the song, Khalid was a teenager himself. A 17-year-old living in El Paso, Texas, he uploaded the track to SoundCloud without ever considering the impact the now-diamond-certified song might one day have on young lovelorn listeners a decade later.
Trending on Billboard
“Turning 27 this year came with a lot of reflection on life,” he says. “I started to look back at where I was when I was 17. To be able to be in my career for as long as I have, to still have an impact, even to see things going viral on TikTok — I feel like that version of me 10 years ago would be so proud and so happy. And if you had told him all of [what would happen in the next 10 years]?” he says with a chuckle. “He wouldn’t have had a clue.”
Now fully cemented as an in-demand collaborator, global arena artist and reliably charting hit-maker, Khalid is ready to rediscover the innocent version of himself that he was before he found success.
He wants to be the most open and honest version of himself — not necessarily the serious and emotional version Khalid spent years of his life pouring into 2024’s Sincere, but one that is able to relax because he has fully embraced his own identity.
“Not just my moody side, but the fun side,” he says. “The flirty side.”
Though Sincere was a deeply personal album, there was one part of himself Khalid hadn’t quite revealed yet.
In November 2024, Khalid was outed by an ex-boyfriend. Though it’s not how he wanted to share that part of his identity with his fans, with a simple rainbow emoji he confirmed that he is gay and “not ashamed of [his] sexuality.’”
He was never hiding anything, he says, just protecting that part of his privacy. Stepping back onstage and seeing the reaction from his fans reaffirmed his open and honest approach to music.
“I had a moment where I walked out and I looked into the crowd, and I’m singing these songs that — I was obviously gay when I wrote them, but the world may not have known,” he recounts. “Everybody is singing them the same way they were before I was outed! So [that shows me] none of my fans care about my sexual preferences. I think they care about our mutual respect for music.”
Blue Marble shirt, Bonnie & Clyde glasses.
Joelle Grace Taylor
He realized he didn’t have to keep finding ways to protect his privacy. It was a liberating experience, he says, seeing that very little had changed.
“Finding that freedom comes from knowing I can just be myself and still be embraced and appreciated,” he says. “That doesn’t change because the world finds out I’m gay. Because I don’t change because the world finds out I’m gay.”
Though artists express themselves through their music, the songs live their own lives. Once they’re out in the world, fans can project their own feelings and experiences onto them. In some ways, the music belongs to the listener as much as the artist.
After he came out, a fan pointed out that his 2022 song “Satellite” was already “an LGBTQ anthem.” In addition, “Better” has been used as a first dance at multiple weddings, and the 2017 song “Young Dumb & Broke” has become a staple at graduations. As listeners find meaning in the music, it takes on its own dimensions.
“When you’re an artist, you carry a responsibility,” Khalid says. “People will live to your music, people will die to your music, people will give birth, people will be reborn. There’s so much emotion involved in the exchange of music from artists to listeners.”
He uses “Young Dumb & Broke” as an example. The song’s universal experience of the feeling of invincibility of life in your teenage years has persisted from one generation to the next, which is something he would not have predicted.
“ ‘Young Dumb & Broke’ lasting as long as it has now would have never been anything I imagined, because when I made that song, I was so presently focused on being young, dumb and broke,” he says. “When I was singing that song at 19, I probably would have told you that I couldn’t wait to stop singing that song. Now, I love it.”
Khalid says he wants to inspire young Black men to be comfortable being open about their sexuality, but he doesn’t see the music as appealing to any specific kind of listener because of the identity of the person making it.
“Music is subjective,” he says. “If you place yourself in an experience, we can relate to people all across the board. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay, it doesn’t matter if you’re straight. We all have feelings and we all have emotions.”
Khalid is a major star of the streaming era. He has multiple songs in Spotify’s Billions Club (tracks with 1 billion streams), including “Location,” “Young Dumb & Broke” and “Lovely,” his collaboration with Billie Eilish. At his 2019 streaming peak, he spent some time as the most popular artist on the platform.
When he first started, though, those platforms were barely on his radar. Instead, he uploaded his first songs to SoundCloud, the streaming site where users once shared their own music and mixtapes — a popular platform for new musicians. There was very little thought to strategy or rollout.
“Naturally, that led to other apps like YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music and so on. But that’s where it all started,” he recalls. “I remember being on the phone with a friend, like, ‘I’m about to upload my song to the internet.’ It felt so carefree back then — just making songs with my friends and throwing them online. Nobody could have imagined what streaming would become today.”
Though he couldn’t have predicted it, Khalid was uniquely positioned for the streaming era. He’s often categorized as an R&B singer, but he has a genre fluidity that has landed him on a diverse number of Billboard charts: Adult Contemporary, Latin, Rock & Alternative, Rap, Dance. He has a song for every playlist.
As a child, Khalid’s parents were in the Army and he often found himself moving around. He spent six years living in Germany when he was young, then spent some of his formative teen years from eighth grade until just before his senior year in upstate New York, just 20 minutes from the Canadian border.
“Being a military kid, I was like a sponge, just soaking in all the cultures around me,” he recounts. “When I was in northern New York, I got introduced to American folk music, which became a big part of my foundation as an artist and really shaped my songwriting. Then living in Germany exposed me to pop music from a different perspective. And coming from the South, R&B is definitely at my core. So all these different shades of music come together to make who I am.”
PDF top, pants and shoes; Gentle Monster glasses, Magdelena necklace, Rolex watch.
Joelle Grace Taylor
He’d moved to El Paso by the time he released his breakout 2017 debut album, American Teen, but it was inspired by his experiences growing up both there and at Fort Drum, just outside of Watertown, N.Y. Like so many other teenagers growing up outside of a major city, he spent a lot of time bored or partying — and dabbling in music.
“A lot of the stories that ended up inspiring American Teen came from that time in my life,” he recalls. “It was cold and kind of bleak, with not a whole lot to do — but there were definitely a lot of parties. At the time, it was fun and wild. Looking back now as an adult, I’m like, ‘Why did you get yourself into some of those situations?’ But honestly, it was the perfect setting for teenage angst — just growing up, facing challenges and mentally taking notes.”
His mother was restationed to El Paso before his senior year of high school, and he decided to go with her. Lonely and separated from his friends, he began writing songs and uploading them online. At the time, Right Hand Co.’s Courtney Stewart was managing a number of producers when he was introduced to Khalid through mutual friends on Twitter and heard some of his SoundCloud demos.
“He didn’t know it at the time, but he was writing a generational album in American Teen,” Stewart says. “As soon as I heard that voice and those lyrics, I was like, ‘This is incredible.’ It was something I had never heard before. His tone, the youthfulness of the lyrics and just how it made me feel. So I got on a plane and went and met with him.” (Khalid’s management team now includes Stewart, Mame Diagne, Jordan Holly and Relvyn Lopez at Right Hand.)
Other artists and producers have heard the same thing in his music. His ability to adapt to different sounds and his breadth of universal experiences has made him an ideal collaborator for everyone from J Balvin to Marshmello to Logic to Halsey.
Growing up near the Canadian border may also have endeared him to artists from the country. He’s collaborated with a number of Canadian artists, including Majid Jordan, Tate McRae, Shawn Mendes, Alessia Cara and Justin Bieber. He’s also made a big impact in the country, with 40 songs charting on the Billboard Canadian Hot 100.
Khalid says he loves collaborating, which brings the best attributes of two sounds together. Having another voice in the room can also let him get out of his own head, he says, and recognize when a song is a hit.
Most importantly, he’s sure enough in his own voice that no matter the genre he’s working in or the artist he’s performing with, he’s still recognizably Khalid.
“I think not losing sight and just trusting my voice has led me to be in any sound comfortably because I get to pull up as myself,” he says. “When you feel yourself on a track, you can’t fake it. It’s real.”
Being rather private, Khalid worries he’s created an impression of himself as an introverted person. Now, he’s ready to bust that myth.
“I’m actually extremely extroverted,” he says. “I love to socialize, I love to hang out, I love to see new things and meet new people. I mean, my [2019] album was called Free Spirit, but I really do believe I am one. I made that album only to go into hiding afterward. I don’t feel like that’s very much freedom. But now, I feel like I do have my freedom.”
Embracing his full self has brought him back to the carefree headspace of his SoundCloud days — but with the experience and maturity of an established music career.
“I started off just having fun and when I gained a career, I started to take myself a little too seriously,” he admits. “I had my fair share of time to be serious. Now I don’t have a care in the world. I can just have fun.”
In a recently posted TikTok clip, Khalid is vibing to a snippet of an unreleased song on the streets of Manhattan. In a black hoodie and throwback raver pants and holding a black handbag, he dances along to a track that blends his signature mellow, wise-beyond-his-years vocals with a sound that evokes decadent early-2000s pop by Britney Spears or The Pussycat Dolls. Grinning ear to ear, he stops to take a quick photo with a fan. It takes only 15 seconds to see the comfort and excitement of his new chapter.
“My new era of music feels like I’m finally ready to be the artist I’ve always dreamt of being,” he says. “It goes back to the regressions of when I was a child — imagining myself and thinking, ‘I want to be this artist one day.’ Now I feel like I have the confidence to finally be that artist.”
Libertine shirt, ERL pants, Adidas shoes, Magdelena rings.
When Taylor Swift posted a photo of herself leaning back and smiling, her first six studio albums scattered in front of her, on Friday (May 30), the party was on.
Swift’s announcement that she had successfully purchased the master recordings of her first six albums, for an undisclosed sum from investment firm Shamrock Capital, was met with jubilation by her millions of fans. Swift finally had full control of her intellectual property, in a byzantine music industry where such ownership was incredibly difficult to come by, even for the biggest superstars. The importance of such artistic freedom was not lost on Swift, who rightfully treated the occasion as a hard-fought celebration in a letter to fans on Friday. “To say this is my greatest dream come true is actually being pretty reserved about it,” she wrote.
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As even casual pop culture observers likely know by now, Swift spent over a half-decade re-recording her back catalog to combat this previous lack of creative ownership, with Taylor’s Version albums of 2008’s Fearless, 2012’s Red, 2010’s Speak Now and 2014’s 1989 offering faithful re-creations under her domain. Not only did these re-recorded albums prove wildly successful – as fans rallied around the vision and motivation of their favorite artist, and helped 1989 (Taylor’s Version) score an even bigger debut than the original album – they also inspired real industry change, from other artists exploring ways to re-record their own material to label groups reworking standard contracts to prevent them from doing so.
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Still, the news that Swift had bought back her masters was met with some consternation about the future of the Taylor’s Version albums: Swift wrote that her 2006 self-titled debut was fully re-recorded, while Reputation (Taylor’s Version) was not. “Full transparency: I haven’t even re-recorded a quarter of it,” she wrote of her 2017 full-length.
So will the long-sought-after Reputation (Taylor’s Version) ever get completed? Will Taylor Swift (Taylor’s Version) receive a release date in the near future? What’s the point of a re-recorded album, now that Swift owns all of the original albums? And what do we do, moving forward, with the four Taylor’s Version albums that did get released?
We don’t know the answers yet, but we know how much the Taylor’s Version albums have already given us – including “All Too Well (10-Minute Version),” an irreplaceable linchpin recording in her catalog.
We’ll see if and when this project gets completed, how the Taylor’s Version re-recordings will age, and what versions of her hits and deep cuts fans will gravitate toward in the future. But just because the battle is now over, it’d be shortsighted to declare all for naught. The four Taylor’s Version albums presented her back catalog to a new generation – helping first to prime fans for the globe-conquering, catalog-revisiting Eras tour, and then to help cement her career year while the trek was underway.
Plus, fans received over two dozen unheard “From the Vault” songs — castoffs from the original albums that Swift reworked to include on her Taylor’s Version releases. These previously unheard goodies across the bonus cuts on the four re-recordings ranged from collaborations with Maren Morris and Fall Out Boy, to a late-breaking radio hit in the effervescent Red (Taylor’s Version) dance-pop track “Message in a Bottle,” to another Hot 100 chart-topper in the wistful “Is It Over Now?,” from 1989 (Taylor’s Version).
Which brings us to the greatest “From the Vault” song, and the one that stands as the greatest musical legacy of the entire re-recording project. When Red was released in 2012, the five-and-a-half minute “All Too Well” was positioned on the track list as an extended songwriting showcase in between shorter, more radio-friendly pop singles like “I Knew You Were Trouble” and “22.” While those hits helped Swift transition to pop superstardom with 1989 two years later, the power of “All Too Well” as a richly detailed examination of a failed relationship endured, becoming a fan favorite in the years following Red.
The song, and its cult status, also marked an important inflection point for Swift as a storyteller. A year before Red (Taylor’s Version) arrived in 2021, Swift pivoted away from top 40 on Folklore and Evermore, using an indie-folk aesthetic to explore different characters and narratives with the same care as one of her fiercely embraced album cuts.
A 10-minute version of “All Too Well” had long been teased, and the release of Red (Taylor’s Version) proved to be the perfect occasion for its unveiling. Any Swift purist could have been reasonably worried about the decision to nearly double the length of one of her best-loved songs. Yet the supersized version of “All Too Well” was not overstuffed — instead, “All Too Well (10-Minute Version)” towers above the original. Expanding the song’s world of stray thoughts and heartbreak totems while expertly navigating the story’s twists and turns, Swift turned a for-the-fans album cut into an authoritative epic.
With 10 minutes to work with, Swift lets each new detail of “All Too Well” simmer without building to a boil. The profane keychain that gets tossed her way, her subject’s refusal to “say it’s love,” the inquisitive actress, the charming chats with her father, the heartbroken 21st birthday — each new line is woven into the tapestry of a reflection that already exists, and Swift delivers them with varying degrees of frustration and regret.
Most of Swift’s songs wouldn’t improve if pushed to the 10-minute mark, but the structure of “All Too Well” — verses stacked upon one another, chorus lyrics shapeshifting to reflect her curdling emotion — allows for the bulked-up format. By the time the song starts to fade out with the refrain “Sacred prayer, I was there, I was there,” the passage of time is made explicit, as Swift’s recollections are stored in a time capsule that needed to be made a little bit bigger. Sure, there are new Easter eggs for fans to pore over and peruse – but nothing about “All Too Well (10-Minute Version)” feels forced, and that’s why it provoked such a strong reaction upon its release.
All Too Well: The Short Film, written and directed by Swift, was released along with the 10-minute version, and she performed the song in full on Saturday Night Live the day after its release. With so much pre-release hype and release-weekend promotion, “All Too Well” shot to the top of daily streaming charts immediately – and one week later, the song sat atop the Hot 100, the first Taylor’s Version track to come anywhere close to the chart’s peak. The flashpoint of excitement around its release demonstrated Swift’s still-rising commercial power, about a year before she made it unignorable with the record-setting success of 2022’s Midnights.
It also clued in countless casual listeners to one of her best songs. “All Too Well” isn’t just a fluky chart hit; the song now stands as a defining work for Swift, and an encapsulation of her legacy as a modern songwriter. In the future, critics, writers and historians will need a song to represent Swift’s cultural impact, and that song may very well be “All Too Well” – which simply wouldn’t have been the case without the Taylor’s Version moment.
That impact was on full display during the Eras Tour, where “All Too Well” was performed in its 10-minute incarnation as the final song in the Red portion of the show. Each night, stadiums full of Swifties sang along to its fourth, fifth and sixth verses, and bellowed “F—k the patriarchy!” with uninhibited glee.
Now that Swift’s Taylor’s Version project has entered a new phase of existence, those sing-alongs are worth considering as part of its legacy. “All Too Well (10-Minute Version)” wasn’t just a commercial ploy, or catnip for the critics. It’s now an anthem for all of us.
There was a time when Cynthia Erivo could glide around town on her Razor scooter in peace. “Don’t laugh!” she quips as she reminisces about those halcyon days while sitting in a cozy loft above a cavernous Los Angeles studio. “I’ve been doing it for years!”
Whether maneuvering New York’s busy streets or transporting her from her L.A. home to a nearby studio to record voice-over work, Erivo’s reliable kick scooter was once her preferred mode of transit. But even a decade ago, she was warned that her hobby wasn’t sustainable with the life she was building. “[Director] John Doyle said to me, ‘Cynthia, you’re not going to be able to do that for very long,’ ” she recalls. “And I was like, ‘But why? I’m good! It’s fine!’ ”
His prediction ultimately came true. In the years since making her 2015 Broadway debut in Doyle’s production of The Color Purple, Erivo has transformed from buzzy theater ingenue to certified, capital “S” star by practically every metric. At just 38, the multihyphenate is already nearly an EGOT (she’s only missing her Oscar, despite three nominations); has starred in prestige TV series like The Outsider, Genius and Poker Face; paid tribute to musical legends at the Kennedy Center; and, most recently, scooped up that third Oscar nom with Wicked, the highest-grossing musical adaptation in film history.
Along the way, Erivo hasn’t lost sight of what matters to her, using the star power she has accrued for good. When she publicly came out as queer in 2022, she cited the importance of helping “some young Black queer actress somewhere” feel less alone in the industry. At the top of 2025, she took home GLAAD’s prestigious Stephen F. Kolzak Award for her continuing commitment to promoting visibility for the LGBTQ+ community. And in June, she’ll bring her talents to the massive WorldPride celebrations in Washington, D.C., making sure that everyone hears her voice — including politicians aiming to strip her community’s rights.
For her latest endeavor, though, Erivo decided to take the same energy she puts into both her community and others’ projects and turn it inward. She didn’t take to the stage or the screen, but rather the studio, looking to reinvigorate her solo music career — and the result is her revelatory second album, I Forgive You, out June 6 through Verve and Republic Records.
Back in September 2021, Erivo released Ch. 1 Vs. 1, her debut LP of adult contemporary tracks where she aimed — and, reflecting today, thinks she failed — to provide a soundtrack to her life up until that point. “It never quite felt like it was mine,” she says. She recounts working with a group of “lovely” producers and writers who provided plenty of new ideas and sounds — yet the project itself underutilized her own vocal dexterity. “It didn’t feel like it was one uniform story.”
Cynthia Erivo photographed April 21, 2025 at Milk Studios in Los Angeles. McQueen dress.
Erica Hernández
So when she began thinking about her next album, she started from scratch. On the advice of Wicked co-star Ariana Grande, Erivo met with Republic Records co-president/COO Wendy Goldstein to discuss her strengths and figure out a path forward. What could Erivo do that nobody else could? “Everything fell into place really fast from there,” Goldstein recalls of their first meeting.
The answer was simple: Erivo’s greatest asset is and always has been her protean voice, an instrument that belies her diminutive frame and lets her craft entire worlds of intricate harmonies. Her mother has said she first heard her daughter sing beautifully at a mere 18 months old, though Erivo has since said she first recognized her own innate talent around the ripe old age of 11. Following a brief stint studying music psychology at the University of East London, she dropped out, later enrolling at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London (where she now serves as vice president). After graduating in 2010 and spending three years performing around the United Kingdom, Erivo landed a breakthrough role in the off-West End production of The Color Purple in 2013.
“Anyone who saw her in that performance knew pretty quickly that she was just a generational talent,” says Jessica Morgulis, Erivo’s longtime manager who began working with her a year before The Color Purple transferred to Broadway in 2015. “In all my days of going to the theater, I’ve never seen the entire audience leap out of their seats mid-song in applause.”
So when it came to creating her own music, Goldstein asked why Erivo wasn’t leaning into her biggest strength. “When you hear Cynthia’s voice, you’re transfixed. I felt like we needed to lead with that,” Goldstein says. “We spoke a lot about how to really highlight her vocals, using it as an instrument with stacking and layering to create beautiful production.”
That, Erivo says, unlocked something for her. “Wendy is a very singular human being who just gets it,” she says. “It was the first time that everything became really clear. To have someone who understands who you are as a musician and a singer and an artist was just a new experience within this space for me as an artist.”
The subsequent project, executive-produced by Erivo and her longtime collaborator, Will Wells, spans pop, soul, jazz, disco, gospel and more, with her voice front and center. But more importantly, after a career dedicated to portraying characters, I Forgive You is just Erivo, telling the world who she is.
“People see a very cookie-cutter version of me, and we do this thing with people where we isolate them or crystallize them in one space and go, ‘She’s just that,’ ” she says. “People don’t know me as a musician in the way they’re getting to know me now.”
As Erivo arrives for our conversation, you’d never guess that she’s coming off one of the biggest performances of her life. Less than 48 hours earlier, she was belting out her forthcoming ballad, “Brick by Brick,” and Prince’s “Purple Rain” alongside maestro Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic during a surprise appearance at the orchestra’s Coachella set. “I was so surprised at how vast that audience was,” she giddily admits. “It was unbelievable.”
Though Erivo remains humbly awestruck by the ensemble inviting her to perform for her biggest crowd to date, her own reputation has preceded her from the jump. “I mean, for anyone who likes singers, all of our algorithms were just filled with endless bootlegs of her singing her f–king ass off,” all-star songwriter Justin Tranter says of her Tony Award-winning Broadway debut.
But while the world was tuned into Erivo’s jaw-dropping performances of The Color Purple’s showstopper “I’m Here,” she found herself focused on something else entirely while playing the character of Celie: her sexuality. “I hadn’t really ever explored [my queerness], I hadn’t really ever discovered or understood or really learned about it,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh, I get to play this woman who is exploring and learning about her own queerness at the same time as trying to discover what love is.’ This sort of wonderful thing happened at the same time — I got to do the same for myself.”
Erivo had been out to her close friends and family since her early twenties, but playing Celie for two years began to open the door to come out publicly, as fully embodying the experience of a queer woman eight times a week slowly made her more assured. “It’s like your feet finally hit the ground,” she explains. “Even the work that I started doing, whether I’m on a set or in a studio, I just felt a lot more relaxed.”
Saint Laurent bodysuit.
Erica Hernández
With that newfound sense of ease came a wave of projects. After closing out her run in The Color Purple, she booked her first film roles, in Drew Goddard’s Bad Times at the El Royale and Steve McQueen’s Widows, holding her own on-screen with stars like Viola Davis and Jeff Bridges. With her starring performance in 2021’s Harriet, Erivo earned her first pair of Academy Award nominations (for best actress and best original song) — had she won, she would have become the youngest person ever to earn EGOT status.
“How lovely is that? To be in this position at this point in my career is one, a privilege — but two, a massive surprise,” Erivo says of her near EGOT. “To be one of those people that’s on the edge of even looking that in the face is quite wonderful.”
Morgulis credits Erivo’s sharp instincts, saying she’s “almost never wrong” when picking projects and pointing to her client’s multiple viral performances at the Kennedy Center Honors, where Erivo has honored Dionne Warwick, Julie Andrews and Earth, Wind & Fire, as an example.
“Often, the producers of something like that will be leaning one way, because whoever it is you’re paying homage to has some favorite song of theirs they want to hear,” she says. “But Cynthia knows herself so well and will say, ‘I know I can really give this individual the best performance from me if we do this other song.’ And every time, she nails it.”
Yet despite her many successes, Erivo says nothing could have prepared her for the cultural phenomenon that was Wicked. She knew the film would do well, but she never predicted it would break box-office records and earn a whopping 10 Oscar nominations. “It’s insane,” she says. “And it’s insane while it’s happening, too.”
Of all Wicked’s achievements, none shocked Erivo as much as the soundtrack’s immediate Billboard chart success. It bowed at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 (the highest debut for a film adaptation of a stage musical in the chart’s history), ruled the Top Album Sales and Vinyl Albums charts, and landed seven songs on the Billboard Hot 100, with her own version of “Defying Gravity” earning the highest position among them at No. 44. “The cast was like, ‘Oh, so it’s just in the ether now? People are just listening to it on their way to work at this point?’ ” Erivo recalls. “It’s really wonderful.”
Miu Miu bra, shirt, and skirt.
Erica Hernández
The second part of the duology, Wicked: For Good, will arrive in November, and Erivo warns fans unfamiliar with the source material that her viridescent heroine, Elphaba, enters much darker territory in the second act. “She’s able to access her rage more,” she says. “The scent I wore changed. The makeup changed. Little shifts that bring you to a more mature version of who Elphaba becomes. And she is delicious in this next one.”
The Wicked Witch of the West isn’t the only one who has changed in between the two films’ releases — with rave reviews and another Oscar nomination for her stellar performance in the first act, Erivo became a household name practically overnight. That transition has occasionally felt scary, especially when it comes to maintaining her personal privacy.
“I think there is an interesting thing that happens, where it’s assumed that because you’re in the public eye, everything is for everyone,” she explains. “But being in the public eye does not stop you from being a human being — you just have eyes on you now. I am totally OK to share some of my life — whenever you see me on the stage, whenever you hear me sing, whenever you see me act, I am sharing. But that doesn’t mean that everything gets to be yours. I should be able to keep something for myself.”
That “something” likely includes her visible, but never publicly confirmed (including for this story) relationship with lauded producer-writer Lena Waithe. “You also wouldn’t want me to share everything — nobody should have to, because then what’s left?” she says with a half-smile. “You can be grateful, but you can still have a boundary.”
But thanks to the groundwork she has laid over the course of the last decade, Erivo says she doesn’t feel flummoxed by her sudden stardom. “I’m glad that I had those breakthroughs before — it’s school for what might come, and it means that here and now, it doesn’t feel like it’s going to sweep me up,” she says. “A lot of us fear that if this happens, you’ll sort of lose yourself. But I still feel like myself.”
There is a moment in “Play the Woman,” an early, R&B-adjacent standout from I Forgive You, when Erivo taps an unexplored topic in her career thus far: unabashed desire. “I could run these hands of mine down the map of your spine/Feel how your heat against my fingertips could make the blood in me rush,” she croons on the pre-chorus before blooming into her glossy head voice: “Could you play the woman for me?/Go slow, ’cause I like what I see.”
Erivo had long wanted to explore sensuality in her acting. But when the parts didn’t materialize, she decided to take matters into her own hands. “Honestly, you rarely get that opportunity as Black women anyway,” she says. “So I was just like, ‘Well, if I don’t put it in my own music, I’ll never get to put it anywhere else.’ ”
Prada top, skirt, and belt.
Erica Hernández
That ethos runs through I Forgive You, as Erivo breaks out of the boxes that the industry at large constructed around her ever-growing career while simultaneously giving voice to the parts of herself that she was once too scared to reveal in public. Whether she’s providing a grooving rumination on self-doubt with “Replay” or delivering an airy ballad about finally finding connection after years of trying on “I Choose Love,” Erivo lays all her cards on the table.
“It wasn’t scary to write because I really didn’t know how else to write it. It had to come,” she explains. “The scary thing was getting ready to share it. When something is personal, you hope that people understand that your humanity exists and they’re not just listening to random stories that come from nowhere.”
When going into their sessions with Erivo, Tranter was already well-aware that she had one of the best voices in the business. What they quickly discovered was just how adept a songwriter she was, too. “She’s a real visionary in that she knows what the f–k she’s doing,” Tranter says. “It’s not even that I was surprised, it’s just that the world doesn’t know her that way. You don’t know what to expect when someone like Cynthia hasn’t been able to reveal all her talents yet.”
That’s a recurring theme in Erivo’s career: One of the main hurdles she faced while working on her debut album was record executives who were unsure how to utilize her talents or market her. She recalls one telling her, “You can sing everything, and we don’t know what to do with you.” Her response? “ ‘Why don’t we just try everything, then?’ ” she remembers. “ ‘If I can do it, then why not try?’ ”
It’s a refrain Morgulis returns to often. With her client’s aspirations spreading across multiple fields of entertainment, the manager says that it’s vital for her to help Erivo remain in control of the projects she’s working on. “That conversation of not putting her in a box and, importantly, not allowing others to put her in a box, is happening on every single level of her team,” Morgulis says. “That act alone kind of sends a message to the industry of who she is and what direction she’s going in.”
And recently, Erivo has applied that philosophy to discussing her identity. After coming out publicly on the cover of British Vogue in 2022, she assumed a rare position in the entertainment business as a Black queer woman in the public eye, and it’s a platform she takes seriously.
Her decision to come out, Erivo says, had less to do with her own sense of self-actualization and more to do with the deep sense of care she feels toward her community. “I think I was actively looking for those who were encouraged to be more themselves,” she says. “I can’t change a person’s opinion of me; if they want to feel some way, there is nothing I can do about that. But I was so excited about being able to at least be one more face where someone could say, ‘Oh, my God, she did it and can still do it. She’s still creating, she’s still making. So maybe I can also do the same.’ ”
Saint Laurent bodysuit.
Erica Hernández
In hindsight, Erivo says she didn’t feel any trepidation about her decision to come out and didn’t notice any significant change in the roles she booked or the feedback she received for her performances. “Maybe I’m naive and wasn’t paying attention to it, because I’m sure there was [pushback],” she confesses.
The one notable exception came in early 2025, when the Hollywood Bowl announced that Erivo would star in the titular role of its upcoming three-night production of Jesus Christ Superstar. A predictable wave of conservative outrage followed at the thought of a Black queer woman portraying Jesus Christ, accusing the actress and the production itself of “blasphemy.”
Erivo can’t help but laugh. “Why not?” she chuckles with a shrug, before adding that most of those comments don’t seem to understand the critical lens of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. “You can’t please everyone. It is legitimately a three-day performance at the Hollywood Bowl where I get to sing my face off. So hopefully they will come and realize, ‘Oh, it’s a musical, the gayest place on Earth.’ ”
It’s easy for Erivo to dismiss a vocal minority decrying the mere announcement of her casting in a limited-run performance; it becomes much harder when the conversation turns to politics. Like many, she has watched in horror as the Trump administration has attempted to strip the rights of and federal protections for queer and trans people across the country through a flurry of executive orders.
Erivo doesn’t pretend to have all of the answers. “I’m trying to be a person you can get positive things from, because that is the only way you can balance this stuff,” she says with a sigh. But when she looks at something like the current administration’s “anti-woke” takeover of the Kennedy Center — the place where she has delivered some of her most iconic performances to date — she can’t help but feel a sense of dread. “I don’t know who gains what from that. I hope that it comes back,” she says. “It’s really sad to have to watch this happen to it. The Kennedy Center is supposed to be a space of creativity and art and music for everyone.”
Yet Erivo refuses to let that dread rule her actions. It’s part of why, during Pride Month, she will perform a headlining set at the closing concert for WorldPride in Washington, D.C., alongside Doechii. “I want to encourage people to not decide to just tuck away and start hiding and not being themselves anymore, because that is exactly what they want,” she says. “The more yourself you are, the more you are in front of people who don’t necessarily understand, the better understanding starts to happen.”
Tranter points to that sentiment as a perfect example of why Erivo has become such a powerful voice in the entertainment industry. “Cynthia being Black and queer, and being one of the most famous people alive in this moment while our community is dealing with what we are dealing with, is no mistake,” they say. “For someone as talented as her to be a beacon for young Black queer people all over the world, to be in the most successful movie and releasing a gorgeous, poetic album in this moment is no accident.”
It’s apparent that Erivo holds herself to an incredibly high standard. As Morgulis rattles off the singer’s schedule for the next few months — wrapping up filming on the forthcoming feature film adaptation of Children of Blood and Bone, hosting the 2025 Tony Awards and performing at least six solo concerts around the country, among dozens of other obligations — she must pause for a breath. “It’s a lot,” she says. “But she can do it.”
But today, the singer stops short of perfectionism. Even in a career as fortunate as hers, she knows that she cannot be everything to everyone. “I used to say, ‘I don’t want to make any mistakes. I don’t want to get anything wrong,’ ” she recalls. “What I’m leaning toward is just trying to be the best version of myself, full stop. And hopefully, the best version of myself is enough for those who want it.”
