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Sophia Kearney and Steven Braines were sick of just talking about it. As artist managers and longstanding dance world figures, the U.K.-based pair often found themselves on panels at dance industry conferences discussing the lack of inclusivity in the scene, why things needed to change, and how. Eventually they decided to just do it themselves.
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They started pitching the idea for an intersectional, kind of gritty, sort of loose, pleasantly naughty, fully debaucherous and hopefully transformational kind club night at ADE 2017, taking meetings with marquee clubs including London’s Ministry of Sound, Ibiza’s Pacha and Amnesia and spots in Canada, Berlin and beyond. Every single person they pitched to said yes and offered them a budget to make the vision real.
“I remember, we stood under an umbrella in the pissing rain trying to find the next meeting,” says Kearney, “and we just looked at each other like, ‘Okay, now we have to deliver this in four countries in the next six months.’”
They figured it out on the fly, and in the past six years have turned HE.SHE.THEY. into a traveling nightlife bacchanal of music, dancing and freedom of expression that eschews the corporatization/homogenization of the scene that’s happened in many sectors and instead books every single type of DJ (white/black/brown/straight/gay/trans/cis/queer/male/female/etc.) features every single type of dancer (thick/think/curvy/flat/tall/short/etc.) and welcomes every single type of audience member.
There’s no dress code or impossible door policies. Crowds are only asked to abide by ground rules pasted on the walls of any given venue: no ableism, no ageism, no bodyshaming, no homophobia, no misogyny, no racism, no sexism, no transphobia.
Six years after launching, HE.SHE.THEY. is in the midst of its biggest season yet, with an eight-show residency in the coveted Friday night slot at legendary Ibiza mega-club Amnesia, shows in London, New York, Los Angeles and beyon and stage takeovers at events including the U.K.’s Secret Garden Party. The brand has also launched a record label, with releases by Anja Schneider, Rebekah, Cakes Da Killa, Eris Drew and Maya Jane Coles, the the latter of whom Braines also manages. On Saturday (June 24), HE.SHE.THEY will host a stage at the 12-hour Planet Pride month event taking over New York City’s Avant Gardner, with a lineup including ballroom legend MikeQ, sister house duo Coco & Breezy, RuPaul’s Drag Race star Aquaria and London producer and drag queen Jodie Harsh.
The goal, says the pair — who are funny, down to earth, impassioned and loquacious as they Zoom with Billboard from Ibiza — isn’t to create a night for any one type of clubgoer, but rather to bring all types of people together in a diverse, inclusive, and most crucially, fun, setting. Here, they hope, people will see fellow patrons like themselves and fellow patrons not like themselves, with the intersectionality of lineups and audiences not just fostering fired-up dancefloors, but meaningful, resonant experiences where people learn a bit about each other, learn to be less fearful by people not like themselves and then take those lived experiences back out into the world when the party’s over.
“Hopefully,” Kearney says, “that then trickles out into society, of, ‘OK, well I had a laugh and a joke and a shared musical experience with this person on the dancefloor, maybe I might not need to stare at them. Maybe I might speak up if I see somebody else being horrible to them, because I’ve had this shared experience of realizing that we’re all the f–king same.’”
Tell me about the importance of bringing HE.SHE.THEY to Ibiza.
Kearney: We just feel like Ibiza was lacking a bit of that grittiness, a bit of that sweaty naughtiness that it was born upon and known for initially. And whilst we’re a big fan of going out here, and we have many friends that work at all the clubs, we felt like the danceflooors were maybe — and also this is an overarching reason of starting HE.SHE.THEY. — just slightly sterile in places and a bit more about going to the concert of an artist, rather than being there to discover something about yourself, and everybody else you’re meeting on the dancefloor and getting lost in that musical journey. We also felt a lot of the lineups we were seeing perhaps weren’t as inclusive as they could be.
Doing this at a mega-club like Amnesia and bringing a queer party to a not necessarily explicitly queer space —
Braines: HE.SHE.THEY is queer, but it’s more that queer is one strand of it. It’s about diversity and inclusion, and if anything, intersectionality. If you’re a black trans woman, it should be good. But if you’re a straight white man, it should be good…
My experience, anecdotally — I was originally kind of in the closet and then started going to queer knights, but I had no queer friends. My best friend, who’s a straight Iranian Muslim, used to be the person who went clubbing with me. So I actually know the importance of allyship in that way. And also sometimes, I don’t want to be just in a gay space, like “Oh, because my d–k gets hard for a man means I have to go this club.”
Our friend group is naturally like an ’90s United Colors of Benetton ad. It’s just naturally really diverse. Why would we then have to all code switch on a night out? You don’t have to at work, you don’t have to in the supermarket or the cinema — but then when it’s clubs, it’s like, “This is for you, this is for you, this is for you…”
Tell me what it looks like inside the club on any given night.
Kearney: We don’t have a strict dress code or a door policy, because there are some people who’ve come to our events who might dress in jeans and a black T-shirt for the first party. The next party, you’ll see them they’re experimenting with latex or something because they feel comfortable.
Braines: That safer space thing becomes a ghetto if you don’t have other spaces where people can be more clear and democratized. We don’t like, villainize a straight white man, we’re just saying that the whole pie shouldn’t be for you. And same in queer spaces. It shouldn’t just be for queer sis white males.
Kearney: I’m a straight woman for example, so for me, for the party to be inclusive — one of the most important things for me at HE.SHE.THEY. is seeing different body types. I want to look up and see all different body types sweating and loving it, because I feel like I can lose my inhibitions in that space. And I can take my clothes off and wear a bit less, maybe some days I don’t want to, but some days I do. That’s so important in a space where often I might have gone and just seen only a very specific size and shape and movement style — everything’s for a show, everything’s for the male gaze, it’s all about the guys. Everyone wants to be the male DJ in the booth and maybe wants to date the dancers on the stage…
I still felt a little ostracized in those places — like I wasn’t good enough to be one of those dancers on the stage, and therefore, I would dance in a different way, or I would cover myself. It’s just about, “How can we have as many different types of representation behind the decks and with the dancers, to make the maximum amount of people who are coming through our doors — a crowd that’s then naturally more diverse because of the people that you’re booking and what you’re doing — be able to lose their inhibitions and have that clubbing experience that’s such a release from everything everyone’s going through in normal life?” These spaces are so important now. Just as important as at the beginning.
What are the considerations when putting together a lineup?
Kearney: We still book straight sis white men on our lineups, but they’ll generally only tend to be one on a lineup. We hope to platform other people, and we hope to bring the fans of — let’s say we’ve got Ben Klock, Marcel Dettmann — we hope their fans come and then experience a queer black woman who’s directly supporting them and become a fan of that DJ, and also be surrounded by all different types of people on the dancefloor.
Braines: And also for instance, as a queer guy, I don’t just like queer DJs. The thought is that if you look up at the DJ booth at various points in the night, you might not see exactly you. But in the DJ booth at one time, you’d have seen a female DJ, and quite possibly a trans or non binary DJ, and a male DJ and someone of color.
What are the conversations like that you’re having with the venue operators when bring your party to a place like Amnesia or the Brooklyn Mirage?
Kearney: Every single one is different. We’re in a fortunate position where we were music managers by trade, so we had an existing reputation in terms of being good at what we did. We were constantly being put on all these panels at ADE, IMS, Miami Music Week, where I would be put on as a female manager or exec. Stephen would be as a queer person. Everyone was talking about all the problems, but no one was really doing anything to fix it. I think it was largely because a lot of people who were in power just didn’t know how to do it, and didn’t know how to do it authentically.
After moaning at how we’d been put on all these panels for years, we kind of realized, “Well, actually, I don’t know who else in music has this unique point of being able to have peoples’ ear to explain why it’s important… and also be able to deliver something that isn’t box-ticking or tokenistic — and they know they can get things wrong in front of us or ask questions. We’re not here to shoot anybody down or make anyone feel bad if there’s a genuine willingness for learning and change. We’re not perfect, we’re still learning s— every single time. We get things wrong. We check each other on stuff. It’s an ever-growing process of learning.
But in terms of the conversations, they’re different every time. A club in Amsterdam, for example, might be looking to turn the dial on their inclusivity by having more of a gender split in their audience. Whereas there are other clubs that are very much 50/50 in terms of gender, but perhaps the club hasn’t ever catered to queer people on a Friday or Saturday night. It’s about meeting people where they are and hoping to turn the dial the best way we and they can without it being forced and extreme.
In terms of the political climate in the U.S., are there special considerations when you’re bringing the party here? It’s a transphobic moment, women’s rights are being stripped. Obviously, you’re operating in larger cities where these problems are arguably not as palpable, but is there anything you do differently here because of what’s going on?
Kearney: No, but with with the certain attacks and different things that have happened in the U.S. at queer venues and different stuff, there’s a certain level of risk of something happening at our party on a weapon level level that is very unlikely to happen in other territories. That’s something I think about; it’s something that also makes me feel even more passionate about being there… Again, the education and the welcoming of everybody is surely even more important in those places, because they’re even more likely to need to get along with each other and to stick up for each other, because it is more dangerous.
Give me an example of moments at one of your parties recently when everything was happening, and you were like, “OK, this is exactly what it’s about.”
Kearney: There was one where a guy messaged me ahead of one of the parties and said, “Hey, can I come to fabric and can I have five names on the list?” I was like, “Sure.” He messaged me afterwards saying, “I just had to send you a message, because last time we met I had a girlfriend and I didn’t know I was queer. The guest list I asked for was for my now boyfriend and four of my straight mates. I wanted to come out to them, but I didn’t want it to be this massive deal, and I didn’t want to take them to a queer space. Taking them to dinner felt too formal. So I just said, ‘Hey, I’ve got guest list for this for this night at fabric. It’s these DJs playing, come down.”
He told me that they all came and met each other. He introduced the guy as his boyfriend and they spent the whole night raving together and had a great time. It’s things like that that spur us on, because I don’t know where else they would have done that, if the party didn’t hit point of all the straight mates being like, “Oh, our friend’s invited us to fabric and look at the lineup — I know that male DJ that I’ve seen three times before. I don’t know the rest of the lineup, but my mates invited me.” Then they turn up and some people are dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, but then there’s a guy standing in a rubber apron with his bum out, and there’s a girl with a harness with her [chest] out and my friend is telling me he’s with this guy now. Like, chill. Great. Let’s get a drink. Let’s have a dance.
I read that DM from him on a train, and I just burst into tears.
You guys are obviously independent. In terms of massive operators in the space – AEG, Live Nation, what would you recommend they do to make their own dance shows more inclusive?
Braines: With Live Nations and AEGs, because they’re so big, I think you need to change and diversify the workforce itself and the decision-makers at all levels. Because then that does naturally elicit some of these things. Some of the big festivals, rather than having a non-branded dance stage that tends to be the same eight DJs or whatever, use a local promoter, or us, or whoever. There’s so many different collectives. Give them a platform; or have your four people you know are going to sell the tent out, and then go and have a few different collectives. Realistically, hardly anyone is coming for the first two hours of a festival [anyways], so you have a lot of plasticity of what you can play with for that opening slot.
Kearney: I try and think, if we’re putting people on at the very beginning, who are those people that can take the building block of saying “I opened for HE.SHE.THEY, I opened for this big DJ.” Who are those building blocks of information and bio and CV things most useful to, so they can go and grow and pitch to other people and get this other opportunity over here.
Braines: Most importantly, no one’s s–t. Never give a platform to someone who isn’t good.
On Oct. 27, 2018, Portugal. The Man played its second sold-out hometown show at Alaska Airlines Center, a 5,000-capacity arena in Anchorage. It marked the end of a globe-spanning two-year trek promoting Woodstock, the band’s 2017 album that yielded its Grammy Award-winning crossover hit, “Feel It Still.” But as soon as the celebratory finale ended, frontman John Gourley was crying in a bathroom.
“I just broke down in tears,” he remembers. “The second we got offstage I was just realizing that emotionally, we took on so much for an introvert [like myself] who just prefers being at home. And being thrown into all of that, it was really intense. But we didn’t realize until that night, like, ‘Oh, wow. This is… difficult to do.’ ”
He had no idea that the following years would prove even more trying. That after having the biggest hit of the band’s career, Portugal. The Man would nearly fall apart. And that, 20 years after the group formed in Alaska in the early 2000s, he would be forced to face his anxieties as a frontman who cringes at attention to prevent its fragmentation.
Today, Gourley is back where he feels at ease. At 42, a boyish wonderment consumes him as he walks his father’s woodsy plot of land in Wasilla, just over 40 miles north of Anchorage. There’s the main house and its attached garage with floor-to-ceiling shelves of construction materials — the family business — and a greenhouse in the back. There’s the detached garage that stores a motorboat. And there are two small guest homes, one filled with music memorabilia, including sleeves of vinyl albums that inspired Gourley as a kid: The Beatles’ Revolver, the Bee Gees’ Idea, Jefferson Airplane’s Crown of Creation and dozens more. There’s a Portugal. The Man poster on one wall, and above the door frame, a life-size ticket stub from that last night of the band’s 2018 tour.
Portugal. The Man — a name inspired by David Bowie’s larger-than-life fame, contrasting the enormity of an entire country with a single person — initially formed as a side project led by Gourley and bassist Zach Carothers, both of whom got their start in the emo band Anatomy of a Ghost. The longtime friends and bandmates met at Wasilla High School and quickly started making music together — while also quickly realizing that to make it their career, they would have to leave Alaska.
“It was kind of my push,” says Gourley, who has since operated much like the Wizard of Oz, quietly leading from behind a curtain. “ ‘We’re going to leave Alaska and just keep going.’ So we bought a minivan and a rice cooker — we had no money at the time and probably spent more money on gas looking for a rice cooker at Goodwill. We found one for six bucks, went to the Asian market and got a 5 pound bag of rice and just went out on tour.”
Gourley at his father, John Gourley Sr.’s, house in Wasilla, standing in front of the tree he climbs in the music video for “Noise Pollution” off Woodstock.
Brian Adams
By 2004, they had made Portland, Ore. — a 44-hour drive southeast of Anchorage — their home base, fleshing out the band with drummer Jason Sechrist and keyboardist Ryan Neighbors along the way. In 2006, Portugal. The Man independently-released its debut album, Waiter: “You Vultures!” and within months signed with manager Rich Holtzman (currently senior vp of marketing and artist development at AEG Presents), who helped the act establish a five-year plan.
Festival appearances at Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza followed, as did four more independently released albums, arriving annually. All the while, Gourley maintained an unusual relationship with his role in the group: As much as he could, he avoided being a frontman entirely. He leaned on Carothers and the other band members to help absorb the spotlight, even performing with his back to the crowd.
By 2010, five years into its existence, Portugal. The Man signed a deal with Atlantic Records. “I just felt that they were so original and didn’t sound like any band out there at the time,” says Craig Kallman, the label’s chairman/CEO. He was so impressed, in fact, that he brought another then-rising signee — Bruno Mars — to see the band perform at the tiny (and since-closed) Los Angeles venue Space 15 Twenty. After the set, Mars offered a pivotal piece of feedback to Gourley: “That show was so cool, but all I could see was your ass.” Gourley has played facing his growing live audiences ever since.
Portugal. The Man has released three studio albums on Atlantic: 2011’s In the Mountain in the Cloud, 2013’s Evil Friends and 2017’s Woodstock. But while all landed in the top 50 of the Billboard 200, Woodstock altered the band’s trajectory completely, thanks to breakout single “Feel It Still.” The groovy, uptempo song — which samples The Marvelettes’ “Please Mr. Postman,” a Gourley family favorite on trips by dogsled to the grocery store — became an undeniable, and entirely unexpected, career-defining hit, and ushered in a series of firsts for the band.
“Feel It Still” scored Portugal. The Man its first Billboard Hot 100 entry, peaking at No. 4; it became the band’s first No. 1 on several charts, including Alternative Airplay, Hot Rock & Alternative Songs and Pop Airplay; and it earned the band its first Grammy nomination and win for best pop duo/group performance. (Gourley gave his trophy to Holtzman.) To date, “Feel It Still” has racked up 1.21 billion on-demand official U.S. streams and generated approximately $25 million globally (in recorded music and publishing royalties) from track sales, streams and radio play, Billboard estimates based on Luminate data. It’s also a go-to among music supervisors; the song has been Shazammed over 20 million times, earning key synch placements in the trailer for the film Peter Rabbit and shows including Love, Simon and Riverdale.
Though Gourley often refers to the hit vaguely as “that song,” he’s grateful for the success it brought the band. “ ‘Feel It Still’ gave us so much,” he says. “We have houses, I have a car… it feels so special and I’m just so gracious of everything that came along with that song.” But “emotionally, it was really difficult. It was this really stressful period for the band, just having that crossover success.”
Even so, the band believed it was ready to hit the ground running with its ninth album and hoped to return to the frequent release schedule of its early days. Mainstream success afforded the group its pick of producer, and the band ultimately landed on Jeff Bhasker, whom Gourley had dreamed of working with since Bhasker produced Kanye West’s game-changing 808s & Heartbreak. What was on track to be a two-year project became three, and then five, with the band finally turning in the album last December — and along the way, everything changed.
During that five-year period, the band members variously faced personal loss, addiction, a potentially career-ending health issue and an “aggressively progressive” diagnosis, all of which happened amid the isolation of the pandemic.
In 2019, Chris Black — a close friend who, after meeting the group in Los Angeles in the 2010s, became its unofficial DJ and MC — died suddenly. Black always kept the band members laughing, quick to crack a joke or put someone in their place. “It’s not common for a band like us to have an MC, but it made me feel really good,” says Gourley.
“He was also the glue for all of our friends,” he adds. “The thing that I miss the most is the way he held that friend group together… it just slipped away a little bit, and I think it’s difficult, recognizing that.” Coupled with the fact that, for the first time, the band members were living apart for an extended period of time through the pandemic, a natural rift formed — or perhaps widened — within it, leaving its lineup in limbo. Portugal. The Man has a long history of revolving musicians — its Wikipedia page includes a color-coded timeline of 13 past and present members’ histories — and Gourley and Carothers are the only two who appear on every album; the current lineup consists of Gourley (vocals, guitar), Carothers (vocals, bass), Zoe Manville (vocals, percussion), Kyle O’Quin (keys) and Eric Howk (guitar). (After rejoining in 2016, drummer Jason Sechrist has exited again.)
Gourley at his father’s house in Wasilla.
Brian Adams
The second of two guest homes on John Gourley Sr.’s plot of land, which houses music memorabilia.
Brian Adams
With the band members — who, up until Woodstock, had lived together — now by necessity living in the separate homes they only recently were able to afford, they were left alone with more time on their hands than ever before. By the end of 2018, Gourley was experiencing the worst pain of his life. He broke his jaw (the left side, he learned, had actually been broken for years; the right side snapped from the resulting pressure) and later split two teeth. He was bedridden for months, largely unable to sing or perform for over a year.
Then, in 2021, Gourley and Manville (who married in 2017) learned that their 11-year-old daughter, Frances, had a rare neurodegenerative genetic disease known as DHDDS, which shares symptoms with both dementia and Parkinson’s (she is one of only six known patients with her specific mutation). By June 2022, Howk, Carothers and O’Quin had all battled different addictions and entered rehab (the three members declined to share further related details).
Now, come June 23, Chris Black Changed My Life — the album that began with Bhasker almost five years ago — will chronicle the band’s turbulent last few years following the runaway success of “Feel It Still.” Though the album is finished, the band is still working itself out — and determining in real time how to juggle what comes next, from promotion to touring. With the band members’ relationships and finances riding on this album’s success, Gourley is now embracing the role he has long avoided: an actually-front-facing frontman.
“Everybody has their personal things going on. We finally understand what has been happening with Frances,” he says. “The stakes have changed. The motivation has changed. The reason I’m doing this — it has all changed. I can’t be the anxiety-ridden kid anymore. There’s this moment of adulthood and growing up or whatever it is… It’s stepping out and taking on that role in a way that I haven’t in the past.”
“Who the f–k is Portugal. The Man?”
That’s the question Jeff Bhasker found himself asking in 2017, when he randomly browsed iTunes after a period where he had tuned out popular music. “No. 1, ‘Feel It Still’ by Portugal. The Man,” he recalls. “Just the name of their band was kind of arresting and makes you curious. It got me really interested in who they were.”
About a year later, the group showed up at his door. “We were traveling around L.A. doing the tour of producers that wanted to work with us post-massive song and they’re all like, ‘They must have another one in there!’ I’ve written a hundred songs, dude. I have one,” Gourley says with a laugh.
To determine who should produce its next album, the band decided the best approach was to just get in the studio and write. Bhasker was at the top of its wish list — but when the band members arrived, instruments in hand, at his house, he proposed they have a conversation before jumping in. “We just listened to music and talked about Alaska and experience and clicked as people,” says Gourley.
“I like to let the artist tell me who they are and meet them where they’re at,” Bhasker explains. “It was so interesting hearing about the white van and the rice cooker — just on the highest level of being a broke band. I love the way they describe their progression of like, ‘Well, on the first album, we learned how to play our instruments.’ ”
Gourley skipping rocks.
Brian Adams
Gourley at Knik Lake.
Brian Adams
Bhasker says the years that followed — pandemic aside — felt like an “Usain Bolt-level sprint to finish the album,” with the band clocking hours at studios in Los Angeles, New York and Portland, as well as Bhasker’s studio in Malibu, Calif., and Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, where Portugal. The Man recorded its first album with Atlantic over a decade prior.
After first signing with the label, Gourley explains, he’d felt the need to bring his bandmates into the studio for his mostly solitary writing process. (Through In the Mountain in the Cloud, the sole writing credits on the band’s albums are his.) “It was just this feeling of like, ‘We’re a band — everybody comes in,’ ” he says. “And I think it was also the expectation of producers a lot of the time. They always think, ‘Stick Portugal. The Man in a room and they’ll just jam and sing.’ That has been the process every single time, and we had never done it pre-Atlantic.”
For the band’s ninth album, everyone left the studio at first — “It felt more personal,” Gourley says — though O’Quin eventually joined most sessions, and Carothers and Manville are credited as co-writers on several tracks.
Gourley recalls his first recording session while still rehabbing his jaw, working again with Electric Guest’s Asa Taccone (who co-wrote and co-produced “Feel It Still”) on four tracks that made it onto Chris Black Changed My Life. Looking back now, he says the brooding and downtempo “Plastic Island” stands out most because he can hear himself literally singing through his teeth, since he still couldn’t open his jaw all the way. On the song, he wonders: “Is it the end, my friend?” The album’s pensive closing track — the nearly six-minute-long “Anxiety:Clarity” featuring veteran songwriter and ASCAP president Paul Williams — opens with the line: “I’m not supposed to be here.”
“That’s the way I was feeling coming out of everything and finally getting to express myself after two years of like, ‘I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do this again,’ ” says Gourley. “I laid in bed thinking I would never be able to do anything ever again. I thought I was going to die. I thought about Frances, and what’s she going to do? I was depressed.”
Frances herself appears on the album, singing on “Ghost Town” and “Time’s a Fantasy”; Gourley calls the latter, which also features Canadian rapper Sean Leon and Bhasker, one of the album’s heavier songs. “We had just found out that Frances has this very rare genetic disease,” he recalls. “Zoe and I were just bawling in the studio with Jeff and Sean, and Frances ended up singing on it. She must have felt some spiritual connection to this song because it’s so slow and emotional, but she would hear it and loved singing [the line], ‘I got a feeling it’s gonna be just fine.’ ” (The band recently launched a donation page called Frances Changed My Life to raise money to fund both multimillion-dollar research and treatment for her.)
An old boat seen in a Portugal. The Man music video on Knik Lake stuck in the silt flats.
Brian Adams
Gourley wears a shirt honoring the band’s late friend and unofficial member Chris Black.
Brian Adams
Bhasker says nailing down the album’s subject matter was understandably difficult. “It’s all about John’s anxiety, and all of them and everything they went through and are all going through as a band, as a family, as people who just struggled to achieve a dream — and achieved it,” he says. “And then maybe questioned, ‘What are we doing here, and what do we really stand for?’ ”
Both Bhasker and Gourley recall their time at Sonic Ranch in the fall of 2022 fondly, mostly because that’s where a thematic track list started to take shape. “To see the album kind of emerge, and most of all to see a smile on John’s face… it was kind of like a ’70s movie where they would just shoot endless footage and hope there’s a movie in there,” says Bhasker. “And then to see the movie unfold and work was the most satisfying moment.”
The end result is a deeply layered and complex album that is equally beautiful and heartbreaking; with everything Gourley and the band have endured, and continue to experience, how could it be anything else? Even the uptempo lead single, “Dummy,” co-written with Taccone (and which debuted in a Taco Bell commercial), hints at the album’s unifying ethos: “Everyone I know is running from the afterlife,” sings Gourley.
“It is our best album,” Gourley confidently states. “I was really surprised when we got to the end of it, because this had been the thing that I had been searching for forever. It’s these really tight, concise ideas, like, ‘Can you tell a story in a sentence?’ I obsess over that, and I feel like this record, we did it. I did the thing that we were chasing. This is what I have been trying to write forever.”
Gourley exhales, taking in the towering snowcapped mountains of Hatcher’s Pass, just north of Wasilla. These are the mountains he would ditch high school to snowboard with Carothers. The same ones he recently carried Frances up while she napped on his shoulders. And the same ones that today are prompting him to wonder why he ever left. “I just miss Alaska so much,” he says with a sigh.
In a recent clip on Instagram — part of the band’s Knik Country Broadcast series, in which Gourley answers quick-hit questions — Gourley said, “Everything I’ve ever written is about Alaska.” It’s also fair to say everything that Portugal. The Man does is for Alaska.
In 2020, while still enjoying the “Feel It Still” high, the band launched the PTM Foundation — the acronym is a double-entendre that also stands for Pass the Mic — which advocates for human rights, community health and the environment, with a particular focus on Indigenous Peoples. (In 2022, the foundation raised $93,000 in grants given to 40 different tribes, impact organizations and community groups.) The band was always intended to serve more than itself, operating with curiosity and care for the surrounding world — and questioning its place in it.
When Bhasker started working with Portugal. The Man, it had been a while since his last collaboration with a band (by his estimation, it was with fun. on its 2012 smash hit, “We Are Young,” featuring Janelle Monáe). “It was definitely a challenge to navigate all the dynamics and all the growth and all the changes they had been going through — and especially during COVID, when everyone was going through all kinds of existential changes and being faced with a lot of really deep, personal struggles and revelations in their lives.”
As Gourley sees it, the success of “Feel It Still” — paired with perhaps too much time apart — amplified and exposed those individual struggles. “I think with that song being so successful so late in our career, it’s a rare thing,” he says. “Eighth record, a song like that? There comes complacency: ‘I’m content. I have a house. I don’t have to do this.’ But I still feel very hungry.”
A pair of moose on the way down from Hatcher’s Pass.
Brian Adams
Gourley on the road through Hatcher’s Pass.
Brian Adams
Playing so many festivals, in particular, he believes, can be “the death of a band… I was forgetting lyrics to ‘Feel It Still’ because of the monotony — and I love that song. I love that song more than any song we’ve ever written. I have never been built to show up and play a setlist, and we got stuck in that for a long time. I think people want comfort, and I feel like comfort is actually not the best thing for creativity.”
Portugal. The Man relentlessly toured through 2019 and resumed in 2022, co-headlining arenas with Alt-J. But this year, despite a new album, its schedule is significantly pared down. In June, it returned to Bonnaroo and in August will play Lollapalooza Chicago followed by the Austin City Limits festival in October. Otherwise, it has booked only a handful of headlining shows at iconic venues in key territories, like Colorado’s Red Rocks, New York’s Radio City Music Hall and Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl. The band’s live lineup adds four new musicians to the mix, including a new drummer.
When speaking of what the band’s present — and future — looks like, it’s clear Gourley isn’t entirely sure what to say, or how. He’s cautious not to speak only for himself but also not for anyone else, often seesawing between “I” and “we.” (The band’s other members did not speak for this story; for this album cycle, Gourley has chosen to do press by himself.) He recalls a particular phone call with legendary musician and singer Edgar Winter, whose “Dying To Live” is sampled on the Chris Black Changed My Life track “Champ.”
“This is what I would say about the situation with the band,” says Gourley. “It’s a pretty easy way to sum it up: [Edgar] called me one day and said, ‘I’m going to tell you about the best band I ever played in. The best band I ever played in lived in Chicago in a one-bedroom apartment. We had all had success, but we lived in a one-bedroom apartment. We could all afford things, but we lived in a one-bedroom apartment. We ate together, we slept together, we had this experience together. As soon as we got our own places, we stopped being the best band I ever played in.’
“The thing is, no matter where I go, I’m still sleeping on the floor in that one-bedroom apartment,” continues Gourley, speaking in a slow, hushed voice. “For this band to keep going, you have to have that excitement constantly around you, so you don’t forget that we worked really hard to get [here].”
He already has his sights set on the album after this one. “I am so excited to go back into outer space and do the craziest [stuff] and experiment with structure post-this record,” he says.
But for now, he’s grounding himself where it all started — running around with his nieces and nephews at his father’s house, hanging from wooden beams like monkey bars. Fortunately for Gourley, he can always come back home. As his father fondly jokes, “When he started playing music, we lost our best roofer.”
After all this time, it seems a fair trade. Gourley found himself.
06/16/2023
The entertainer turns 80 on Saturday. To mark the occasion, here are all 25 of his singles that made the top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100, fearlessly ranked by an OG Fanilow.
06/16/2023
06/13/2023
The band celebrates its ten-year anniversary June 13, 2023.
06/13/2023
When Catie Offerman performed for programmers during Country Radio Seminar on March 14, she provided the Ryman Auditorium audience a mystery worth unwrapping.
Offerman announced her first radio single would be “I Just Killed a Man,” then launched into a slowly unfolding storyline full of dark imagery and phrases: Cops, chalk outlines, a getaway car and a guy begging for mercy in the driveway. The story was spellbinding; Offerman delivered it with a clear, inviting tone; and it was easy to ponder even as she performed it: “Really? Her first radio single is going to be a murder ballad?”
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But after two full verses and two choruses, the bridge shook up the plot: “Just because it ain’t a crime/Don’t mean I won’t be doing time.” More pondering: “How can a murder not be a crime? Oh, it’s not a murder. This song is awesome!”
That’s generally the way people react to “I Just Killed a Man,” though not everybody needs two minutes or so to figure out that the song isn’t quite what the title implies. “I say the name of it, all the women think it’s about killing their ex-boyfriend — I think they get all giddy about it for a second,” Offerman says. “It ain’t about murder, but I’ve never heard heartbreak talked about this way before.”
Circumstances lined up nicely for “I Just Killed a Man,” a title that emerged before the final day of a songwriting camp in Nashville last August that had a handful of composers focused specifically on material for Offerman. At the end of the day’s work on Aug. 9, two of the writers — Ryan Beaver (“Party Mode”) and Joe Clemmons (“Rose Needs a Jack”) — hung out at Beaver’s place to brainstorm for the next day. They flipped on the TV, and the Netflix menu fortuitously promoted a series that debuted that same day: I Just Killed My Dad. A couple of word changes and “I Just Killed a Man” led them down a creative road that compares a breakup to a murder.
“We just started throwing lines back and forth, not co-writing, but just nonchalant,” recalls Clemmons. “You know — ‘They won’t lock me up for this one’ – playing with the metaphor.”
Beaver called his neighbor — songwriter Jessie Jo Dillon (“Memory Lane,” “Break Up in the End”), who was also part of the Offerman camp – and clued her in. And when they arrived the next morning, it wasn’t long before they shared the concept with Offerman and songwriter Benjy Davis (“Made for You”). Clemmons broke into a progression on guitar with and came up with a signature instrumental lick at the same time, and everyone pitched in.
“Catie started singing the chorus melody,” Beaver remembers. “It was such a collaborative effort. Benjy was such a great editor and writer that day; Joe was great. I mean, it’s really rare to feel that way because you sort of feel like you need a leader, or somebody has a better vision, and then the others are helping fulfill that. But not that day. This was a day where everybody was firing.”
“It was one of those days,” adds Dillon, “where you feel like you’re almost getting it from somewhere else.”
They wrote it in 6/8, an alternative to the typical 4/4 time signature. While it’s not the usual framework, it has undergirded such stalwart titles as Keith Urban’s “Blue Ain’t Your Color,” Chris Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey” and Jason Aldean’s “You Make It Easy.”
“I Just Killed a Man” “reminds me of [Little Big Town’s] ‘Girl Crush’ in a way,” Offerman says, citing another 6/8 predecessor. “The subject matter, you’re kind of like, ‘Whoa, what’s going on here?’ And then you just can’t help but being soaked up in the feeling of the tune.”
The metaphor in “I Just Killed a Man” works in great part because songs typically treat the person who ended a relationship as a villain. But verse two cast both people in the breakup as victims of the situation. Still, it’s easy to picture the stanza as a confession in an interrogation room. “Jessie pretty much wrote the whole second verse by herself,” says Clemmons. “Obviously we’re all helping and everything, but she had that line, ‘Tonight it’s just whiskey and guilt on the rocks.’ And that is such a Jessie Jo Dillon line. I’m pretty sure she spit that whole thing out.”
As fluid as the writing session was, “I Just Killed a Man” ended up running long. Davis was key in trimming the excess. “At some point, we were messing with some kind of pre-chorus, and I remember really liking what it said,” Dillon notes. “But it was one of those things that I think happens in songs sometimes where you kind of have to — no pun intended — kill off your favorite character, because it just felt so good to go into the chorus as quick as we did.”
Beaver and Clemmons wasted no time working up a demo that night at Beaver’s home. The recording laid out a strong map for the final product, kept musically lean. “I’m in a two-bedroom, two-bath, little condo, and one of the rooms is just set up for music gear and recording,” says Beaver. “Joe and I kept it really simple. I was like, ‘Man, this just needs to be about this story. It needs to be about this vocal.’ ”
That made it a difficult piece to get right when Offerman and producer Dann Huff (Kane Brown, Brantley Gilbert) cut it at Nashville’s Blackbird Studios. Two electric guitars played the instrumental signature lick in unison an octave apart, but even as they tried to minimize distractions from the melody and plot, the track was still too busy. “This kind of song, you can screw it up just because it’s a whisper,” Huff says. “There’s no grandstanding.”
They later went through a couple rounds of cuts in the production, muting instruments to give space for the story to fully resonate. Offerman recorded her final vocal at Huff’s home studio, singing it several days in a row among a batch of songs. Each day, she became a little more relaxed with the process and a little more in touch with the piece’s emotional subtleties.
“Some singers try to over-emote, overtell a story, overact,” says Huff. “In this one, I vaguely remember us speaking about the fact that there needs to be an air of desperation, a quiet desperation. Not overly dramatic — that spoils the story. It’s just that ache and the resolve to the emotional part of the lyric.”
Offerman and her creative associates were all pleasantly surprised when MCA Nashville chose the 6/8 ballad with murderous allusions as her first radio single, releasing it via PlayMPE on May 8. Based on the reaction she received at the Country Radio Seminar show, she’s bound at the very least to grab programmers’ attention.
“When you send them a text, or a message in their inbox, that says ‘I Just Killed a Man,’ you know at least they’re going to listen,” she reasons. “That is a cool thing about this title. I think it intrigues people, and I think it makes them want to listen because what other song have you ever heard called, ‘I Just Killed a Man’?”
In February, when Kaytranada’s stage manager, Tamir Schlanger, texted him to ask if he had a vision for his Coachella performance, the artist responded with screenshots of the giant metallic head from The Wiz, the 1978 musical film featuring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. He wondered: Could Schlanger replicate it, but with his own head?
Out of context, the images were menacing — the almighty wizard, spewing smoke and lasers — but funny, too; one featured Richard Pryor’s character, a failed politician from New Jersey named Herman Smith, peeping up sheepishly through the hole in The Wiz’s eye. All smoke and mirrors. Was the 30-year-old producer-DJ commenting on the steely facade of celebrity? Was the production meant to highlight the dichotomy between Louis Kevin Celestin, the shy kid born to Haitian immigrants who grew up in a quiet Montreal suburb, and the Grammy-winning musical wiz better known as Kaytranada?
“There really was no thought process at all, honestly,” Kaytranada admits about a month after his performance, emphasizing that the decision was purely aesthetic: He was just a fan of the movie and noticed his own physical resemblance to The Wiz’s face. “I just wanted to make something iconic,” he says.
Prior to his Coachella performance, there was little disputing Kaytranada’s accomplishments behind the scenes, where he had cultivated a reputation as a personally reserved but musically boisterous tastemaker. Over the course of two albums, 2016’s 99.9% and 2019’s Grammy-winning Bubba, he established himself as a go-to producer and deft collaborator, a singular artist able to adapt his sound to the strengths of everyone from hip-hop stars like Chance the Rapper to experimental R&B singers like Kelela while still maintaining his distinct style: a feel-good blend of dance, R&B, Afrobeats, disco and hip-hop. In the process, he also became one of the biggest gay Black artists in a genre of increasingly influential music founded by gay Black artists.
Kaytranada has jokingly called his music “Black tropical house” and “futuristic disco,” though today, speaking to Billboard, he describes it as “a new era of new jack swing.” And there is a definitive swing that distinguishes his production style, which borrows from elements of the Haitian dance genre compas, including the slightly off drum placements that imprint his otherwise sleek productions with a soulful, human touch. What has become known as the “Kaytranada sound” — a term he feels sometimes boxes him into the past — lies in the tension between the comfort of nostalgia and the excitement of the future, and has earned him collaborations with artists he aspired to be like growing up, like Pharrell Williams.
“He has a refreshing energy and approach to music,” Williams says. “And we’re all so blessed that dance music is at the center of what he does — which is, make us dance in color.”
Marni top, pants, and blazer.
Joelle Grace Taylor
Since he caught the internet’s attention with early SoundCloud remixes of Missy Elliott and TLC, along with a freewheeling, widely memed 2013 Boiler Room set filmed in Montreal that has amassed 19 million YouTube views (Top comment: “This party should have its own Wikipedia page”), Kaytranada’s vibrant dance music has captivated audiences across the world. But there was something different about the Kaytranada who DJ’d in front of a giant sculpture of his own head during a prime-time slot at Coachella’s massive Outdoor Theatre.
It wasn’t just that lasers shot out of that head as he danced playfully to hits spanning his discography or how he hyped up the crowd while premiering his remix of Beyoncé’s 2022 disco-funk banger, “CUFF IT.” Nor was it the guest appearances from Kali Uchis and Aminé the first weekend or H.E.R., Tinashe and Anderson .Paak the second — all Kaytranada collaborators whose relationships with the producer extend beyond the studio. Instead, it was the unmistakable confidence fueling his showmanship, which finally mirrored the assured and sprightly pulse of his music.
As someone who came up DJ’ing in Montreal’s experimental hip-hop scene, Kaytranada says he used to judge other DJs for “overdoing it” onstage. “I was like, ‘I want my ones and twos, and that’s it,’ ” he says. “I have the music, and I understand it. I just didn’t want to go extra.” Looking back on his reservations, “it was probably my confidence,” he admits, noting that having a stage manager like Schlanger who is able to bring his “random ideas” to life has also been a tremendous help. “I just didn’t think I deserved to go that far. But now that I have accepted myself, I’m like, ‘OK, I’ll perform with a big crowd. I’ll perform at a stadium.’ That kind of inspired me to do a larger-than-life show.”
“That show is really a visual representation of a decade of hard work,” says William Robillard Cole, Kaytranada’s manager since 2013. The Coachella set, he says, proved to be a “pivotal moment” in not only solidifying trust with the team at RCA, which Kaytranada signed to in 2018, but in establishing the artist as a “true major hard-ticket act,” noting that offers from bookers started pouring in almost immediately. “People are like, ‘Bring the head! Let’s do a tour with the head!’ ”
Robillard Cole attributes Kaytranada’s newfound confidence onstage in part to opening for The Weeknd on his 2022 After Hours Til Dawn stadium tour but also cites two pivotal things that happened long before: Kaytranada coming out publicly in 2016 and moving from Montreal to Los Angeles shortly after, where he has bounced among a series of long-term Airbnbs when he’s not on the road. “As he has gotten older and more comfortable with himself, he has really been able to develop a performance attitude,” says Robillard Cole. “Kay is an entertainer. It’s true to his soul. That dude loves to dance, he loves to entertain people, he loves to DJ, and to see the progression as a performer over the last few years, it has just been incredible to watch.”
Marni suit, Dries Van Noten top, Martine Ali jewelry. Dog Model: Angel Hernandez.
Joelle Grace Taylor
In 2023, that progression promises to continue as Kaytranada heads to Europe in June to support another leg of The Weeknd’s tour. Later this year, he plans to release his third album, though he says it’s too early to discuss particulars beyond the heavier influence of new wave and industrial. And in May, he released a breezy collaborative record with rapper Aminé called Kaytraminé (get it?) that evokes that first sip of a frozen piña colada. Aminé says they selected album guests such as Williams, Big Sean, Amaarae, Freddie Gibbs and Snoop Dogg out of “pure fandom” and connected with each organically, with texts and phone calls rather than working through A&R — a testament, he adds, to Kaytranada’s likability. (The producer says his collaborations are now 60% people who approach him and 40% him reaching out to artists.)
“His master collaborator effect to me is because he’s so nonchalant about everything,” says Aminé, who met Kaytranada through SoundCloud in 2014 when he rapped over the producer’s early breakout, “At All.” “He’ll play the craziest beat and just be like, ‘Yeah, that was pretty cool.’ It’s so funny. I feel like a lot of artists go into sessions with producers who have big names or whatever, and the producers are really f–king intimidating sometimes. They’re like, ‘This is going to be a hit record, man! This is going to get you to the top!’ Corny sh-t that doesn’t really feel like yourself, and I think Kay is really good at giving artists room and just letting them flourish.”
His last album, Bubba, which showcased artists like Estelle, Masego and GoldLink, earned Kaytranada three nominations at the 2021 Grammys, including for best new artist, and a landmark pair of wins: best dance recording for “10%,” his funk-tinged, pay-me-now collaboration with Uchis, and the other for best dance/electronic album. The latter put Kaytranada in the record books as the first Black producer and first openly gay artist to win the category since it was created in 2004.
They’re notable distinctions, considering the foundational role gay Black men have played in dance music for the last 50 years. In places like Chicago, the birthplace of house, dance music was forged out of resistance, with underground clubs functioning as spaces of relative safety and freedom from the racist and homophobic status quo. While smaller clubs, festivals and labels across America center queer Black DJs, that history is rarely acknowledged at today’s typical major dance festivals, where straight white men overwhelmingly dominate lineups. As Chicago DJ Derrick Carter put it in 2014: “Something that started as gay Black/Latino club music is now sold, shuffled and packaged as having very little to do with either.”
“Being a queer artist, being from Canada and of Haitian descent — he’s an outsider in every respect,” explains Def Jam Records CEO Tunji Balogun, who says it was a “no-brainer” to sign Kaytranada to RCA when he was vp there. “But he’s still redefining what an electronic DJ is supposed to look and sound like.”
There’s a dexterity to Kaytranada’s interdisciplinary output that offers multiple points of entry into his work. “I always tell people Kay has three parts to his career: He’s a DJ, he’s a producer and he’s an artist,” says Robillard Cole. “Obviously, that’s not something that’s super common in the music business, and to run a career that has three parts, we’ve had to put in just as much work on the producer side as the DJ side and as much work on the artist side as the producer side. It’s all about strategic partnerships and relationships.”
Those different but connected roles have singularly situated Kaytranada in the dance world. He’s the rare artist who can release a hip-hop record on Friday, then DJ Electric Daisy Carnival on Saturday, as he did in May; someone who’s big enough to headline dance festivals but still eager to work with niche and emerging artists. “He’s either the biggest pop star in the underground or the best-kept secret in the pop world,” Balogun says. “He has dual citizenship. I think he’s becoming that go-to DJ that a pop star will call to freshen up a song, but he’s also still in the trap.”
When Balogun began following Kaytranada online after the latter released his sample-heavy 2013 mixtape, Kaytra Todo, on Jakarta Records, he at first didn’t even register him as a dance artist because he was “on some futuristic hip-hop sh-t. He definitely reminded me of a J Dilla descendant.” Today, he sees Kaytranada as a bridge, someone whose intersections connect music lovers across genres, cultures and generations, like introducing younger listeners to influences such as Madlib and J Dilla — legendary producers who themselves sat at the intersection of hip-hop and dance music and informed Kaytranada’s approach for Kaytraminé — or collaborators like Teedra Moses. (His remix of her 2004 song “Be Your Girl” has far surpassed the original in streams.)
While Kaytranada has intentionally operated “on the outer realm of the industry,” as Robillard Cole puts it, going forward, “the goal is to be the biggest dance artist in the world,” he says, “but [while] staying true to himself. Never compromising. It’s not a monetary goal for us. It’s more respect and critical acclaim than anything. I always tell people that cream rises to the top. It’s the same with good music.” He’s trying to help Kaytranada build a legacy, and paints the image of 25-year-olds flipping through a vinyl shop in the year 2080, geeking out over a Kaytranada record. “That’s what legacy is,” he says.
Marni top, pants, and blazer, Adieu shoes.
Joelle Grace Taylor
No matter his accolades, some professional moments still send Kaytranada spiraling into self-doubt — he’s a Virgo after all, and identifies with the sign’s perfectionist tendencies. But he has increasingly come to understand his value. When I ask him if the remix of “CUFF IT” he premiered at Coachella will ever be released, he shrugs. Parkwood Entertainment, he explains, approached his team about the remix and sent him the vocal stems, but he disagreed with the terms of the proposed contract. (Negotiations are still pending; Parkwood did not respond to requests for comment.) He looks visibly disappointed. He worked hard on the remix and knows it would mean a lot to release it, both to the culture — when Beyoncé’s 2022 album, Renaissance, deeply indebted to house and disco trailblazers, won the Grammy for best dance/electronic album, she thanked “the queer community for your love and for inventing the genre” in her acceptance speech — and to his own career. But he also seems resolute.
“I know my worth. I know they reached out to me to do the remix for a reason, and then to be treated back like I wasn’t all that, it’s kind of weird,” he says. “I’m going to keep it at that. I know my worth.”
A different remix jump-started Kaytranada’s career over 10 years ago: his high-octane club rework of Janet Jackson’s “If,” which sounded like the singer had fallen into a vortex. He worked on the song all night in his bedroom after attending a Flying Lotus show in Montreal, inspired by the producer’s ability to fuse electronic elements with hip-hop. Under the moniker Kaytradamus, he uploaded the remix to SoundCloud at 5 a.m. before passing out.
This was in 2012, when SoundCloud was an influential hub for experimental dance music, and Kaytranada woke up that afternoon to an avalanche of notifications. He recalls peering at his phone and thinking, “What the hell is this?” before going back to sleep, too frazzled to comprehend the attention.
Offers to DJ started trickling in, including an invitation from Robillard Cole to play in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he was a business student at Saint Mary’s University, in January 2013. (It was the first time Kaytranada flew on an airplane since immigrating to Canada from Haiti as a child.) “I just never heard music like his before — ever,” he says. “The way he puts synths together, his basslines; everything was slightly offbeat.” After the gig, Robillard Cole asked Kaytranada if he had a manager, promising that he could double his rate at the time to $300 a set. He started organizing Kaytranada’s first tour from his accounting class.
Because touring in America required visas, they went to Europe instead. Their budget was $7,000 Canadian, which meant sharing hotel rooms and traveling by bus. The venues were small; Robillard Cole recalls Kaytranada DJ’ing in a jerk chicken restaurant in Manchester, England. But the risks — which included Kaytranada and Robillard Cole eventually dropping out of high school and business school, respectively — paid off. The tour got Kaytranada in front of influential people in the music industry, which led to his 2014 signing with XL Records, the storied British label that has been home to Radiohead, M.I.A. and Arca.
The deal let Kaytranada expand his clout in Europe, which at the time was more receptive to his music. (The United States is currently his biggest market.) It also helped connect him with bigger collaborators for his debut album, 99.9%, which features artists like Vic Mensa, AlunaGeorge and Craig David. “It was a super-big blessing to be signed with XL back then,” says Robillard Cole, “and we just did it as a one-off, which to this day is one of the best decisions [we’ve] ever made because it allowed us to come over to America and sign with RCA Records next and really grow commercially.”
Dries Van Noten suit, Ferragamo shoes, Acne Studios eyewear.
Joelle Grace Taylor
Kaytranada came out in The Fader in 2016, shortly before the release of 99.9%. To his surprise, he found that as his career started to grow, so did his unhappiness, and he recalls thinking, “I’ve got to come out, or I’m going to go crazy.” “At the time, it was just to confirm to myself and to my brain and to the world that I am indeed gay, because I was gay all my life but I definitely suppressed it,” he says. “Growing up with a lot of kids who are just like, ‘Being gay is hell naw.’ In Haiti, hell naw. You cannot be gay.”
Though his anxiety spiked pre-publication, “his whole mentality and energy changed as soon as that article came out,” says his brother, rapper Lou Phelps. “Like he felt more free. He would be less reserved, less shy with the family.”
Though his success has played an important part in realigning mainstream dance music with its gay Black roots, Kaytranada doesn’t necessarily frame his impact in those terms. He recalls learning about dance music’s history in his early 20s through Maestro, the 2003 documentary about DJ culture featuring luminaries like Frankie Knuckles and Larry Levan, and thinking, “Duh — because [house music] sounded very Black,” he says. At the same time, it helped him to better trace his influences; as someone who grew up feeling like “a little weird Black dude” for listening obsessively to acts like Justice and Daft Punk, Kaytranada came to realize that those French electronic artists were themselves borrowing from Black musical genres.
Although he was bullied at his mostly white high school for being small, Black and quiet, kids also regarded him as a tastemaker, someone they approached in the hallways about what they should be listening to — which included everything from Kenyan rock to Linkin Park and the Black Eyed Peas. “I always thought I knew music better than anybody at my school,” he says.
When I ask Kaytranada if he thinks people who come to his shows or participate in dance culture should know about the music’s history, he seems ambivalent. “If you’re into house music, you definitely need to get educated,” he says. “But if you just love the music, that’s cool, too. I don’t really judge when it comes to that.” It’s the kind of noncommittal answer that he tends to give for questions about identity in general, a reticence that suggests he would rather let his work speak for itself. Later, when I ask if he has been able to find gay community in Los Angeles since coming out, he says, “Yes,” then pauses haltingly before acknowledging that he sometimes feels overlooked by the gay community at large for not “proving” that he’s gay enough.
“I thought it was going to be fun,” he says. “[But] it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re not the gay man I thought you was going to be. Oh, your taste is not like my taste. You need to be more gay.’ And that would affect me — but not anymore, because I know I’m really unique at this point. I’m just onto different things.”
Kaytranada photographed on May 11, 2023 at Garibaldina Society in Los Angeles. Commission tank and polo top, Amiri shoes, Martine Ali jewelry, FRED eyewear.
Joelle Grace Taylor
It’s a charge he still seems sensitive about — not being as visibly queer as some other artists — though he insists he’s just being himself, the role model he felt he needed before he came out. Growing up as a hip-hop head, he recalls listening to Mobb Deep’s homophobic lyrics and questioning how he could ever be accepted in the industry. (It might be one reason he always listened to the beats of his favorite rap songs before he delved into the lyrics: “I was always looking at the credits,” he says.)
“Like, how are you going to accept a gay producer?” he recalls thinking. “That was not seen at the time. It seemed impossible.” Mainstream representations of gay men sent him into an identity crisis. “I couldn’t relate to that. I just couldn’t, and I was like, ‘I cannot be gay,’ because I was not into those things,” he says. “That was really a confusing period of my life.”
He points to Frank Ocean coming out on Tumblr in 2012 as a significant turning point in his own self-acceptance. “It kind of made things more possible,” he says, particularly in the world of R&B and hip-hop. And he knows, at this point, that he has become that person for others, too. “When I came out, a lot of musicians secretly came out to me, saying, ‘The [Fader] article moved me.’ And I was like, ‘Word.’ ”
In person, Kaytranada expresses himself with an ease that’s neither flashy nor restrained. Sitting outside of a restaurant on Melrose Avenue, he’s soft-spoken and reserved, burying his hands in his brown Martine Rose track jacket. But over the course of a couple of hours, he grows looser and more expressive, calling the finger sandwiches he orders “cute” (they are cute) and making casual reference to his boyfriend, a photographer he visited Universal Studios with the day before. (Kaytranada’s still a little shaken up from riding Revenge of the Mummy.) They were friends for a year before they started dating in January, and though he’s trying to implement lessons he learned from his last relationship, namely about boundaries, he says they’re together all the time.
At Billboard’s cover shoot the next day, he lies on the floor in a bright orange crop top, balancing against a fallen chair before ending up on his back in the yogic plow pose, his legs flipped over his head. (He started working out two years ago with the help of a trainer and considers himself a “gym rat” now.) Later, he struts out of the dressing room wearing a black suit with a pink wrap around his waist, steps up onto a table and poses like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, his right pointer finger directed skyward. He breaks into a grin as the camera flashes.
Kaytranada’s hands are studded with rings, including the two he bought the night before he won two Grammys. He’s still kicking himself for not superstitiously buying another one before this year’s ceremony, when he was nominated for best dance/electronic recording for “Intimidated,” his silky-smooth collaboration with H.E.R. (He lost — to Beyoncé.) “I bought chains instead,” he says. “I ended up f–king up.”
Kaytranada photographed on May 11, 2023 at Garibaldina Society in Los Angeles.
Joelle Grace Taylor
Recognition from the Recording Academy, he explains, was never the goal. “My idols, the people I looked up to, they never really had Grammys, so it was whatever. But being nominated, it’s a whole different thing. It kind of alters what you’re aiming for.” Now, he says, he’s “trying to make Grammy-winning albums.”
He gave his two trophies to his mother. They are on display in his childhood home, on top of the piano he grew up playing. The awards feel symbolic, not only of his success as an artist, but as a son. Dropping out of high school was a sore spot for his mother, who didn’t see how music could be a viable career. “When I won a Grammy, it really felt like I graduated or something. Like, I have something that means a lot,” he says. “Your name is in history forever.”
In the beginning, when his parents failed to understand what he did, Kaytranada would show them a documentary about The Neptunes to help demonstrate. But “they understood the Grammys — we had a compilation Grammy CD,” he says, grinning. There was no explanation needed.
“I just want to be remembered as one of the greats in terms of producing, not only dance and electronic but also just production in general,” Kaytranada says. He has his wish list of artists he would still love to work with, but says his dream collaboration would be to produce an entire album for a pop star looking to rebrand his or her sound, similar to how Timbaland reoriented Justin Timberlake’s style when he produced 2006’s FutureSex/LoveSounds. He throws out Justin Bieber’s name as an example. “It’s a matter of longevity, too — and, you know, just happiness. Like, as long as you’re comfortable and you’re happy with your life, that’s a form of success — but don’t forget the money part.”
I ask him if he’s happy, and his voice goes up an octave. “Yes, I’m happy!” he says somewhat apprehensively, as if to acknowledge the corniness of the question, or maybe its impossibility, before dropping back down to his normal register. “I’m saying that looking away, but naw, I’m really happy.” He laughs, then tries one more time: “I’m definitely the happiest I’ve been.”
This story will appear in the June 10, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Maren Morris downs a shot of tequila with a wince. “I love that we’re taking shots and then saying, ‘OK, so let’s talk about Ron DeSantis,’ ” Morris says with a chuckle.
The four drag luminaries she’s toasting with today — Eureka O’Hara, Landon Cider, Sasha Colby and Symone — grimace through their own post-shot puckers at the mention of the Florida governor’s (and now, presidential hopeful’s) name. It’s an otherwise cheerful weekday in Los Angeles: Pop jams ranging from ABBA to Doja Cat play in the background as the quintet gabs gleefully about everything from Three’s Company to O’Hara’s adorable dachshund puppy, Princess Pink, who makes occasional appearances nearby.
But the shadow of the world outside can’t stay beyond this room for long. The mention of DeSantis — who recently signed a batch of anti-LGBTQ+ bills into law that collectively amount to a full attack on the civil rights of queer and trans people in Florida — is just one reminder that in 2023 alone, over 450 bills targeting LGBTQ+ rights have been introduced by right-wing politicians into state legislatures across the country, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. That’s more than double the amount of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation introduced in the same legislative session in 2022.
The five assembled today frequently, and fervently, use their respective individual platforms to speak against such attacks on the LGBTQ+ community. O’Hara, Cider, Colby and Symone are alums (and, in a few cases, winners) of some of TV’s most beloved drag reality shows, like RuPaul’s Drag Race and The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula. Morris, who’s moderating today’s discussion, has made a name for herself not only as one of country music’s brightest stars, but as an outspoken advocate — both onstage and off — for queer and trans people, calling out their mistreatment in the music industry and beyond.
The legislation leveled against those communities spans a wide range of issues — censoring discussions of gender and sexuality in public schools, banning best-practice medical care for transgender youth (and in some instances for adults, too), eliminating nondiscrimination protections for the LGBTQ+ community. And another type of legislation has quickly captured national attention: so-called “drag bans.” In March, Tennessee became the first state to pass a bill into law prohibiting “adult cabaret” performances (the definition of which includes “male or female impersonators”) in public or in the presence of minors.
“It’s just now becoming public knowledge how horrible it is there,” says O’Hara, who grew up in Tennessee, her voice quivering. “It’s scary to be trans today and to be a drag queen.” Colby puts it simply: “It’s about controlling queer kids.”
After the state’s ban sparked a legal battle with Memphis-based theater company Friends of George’s, a federal judge temporarily blocked the law. Then, on June 2, U.S. District Judge Thomas Parker ruled that the law violates performers’ First Amendment rights and deemed it unconstitutional. The ruling prevents the law from taking effect in Tennessee’s Shelby County and creates potential for further legal challenges elsewhere in the state. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti has already said that he plans to appeal the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
“This ruling is a turning point, and we will not go back,” said GLAAD president/CEO Sarah Kate Ellis in a statement. “Every anti-LGBTQ elected official is on notice that these baseless laws will not stand and that our constitutional freedom of speech and expression protects everyone and propels our culture forward.”
But LGBTQ+ advocates in Tennessee point out that, overturned or not, the law’s initial passage still accomplished one goal: creating a culture of confusion and fear surrounding self-expression in the state. Due to the intentional vagueness of the law, its enforcement would come down to individual interpretation, sparking hypothetical questions like, “If Harry Styles comes and does a concert at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville and has on a frilly shirt or a skirt or a dress…” posits Morris. “What do we do then? In a place like Tennessee, it’s obviously really meant to fearmonger.”
Maren Morris in drag as Willie Nelson photographed on May 9, 2023 in Los Angeles. Hair by Laura Polko at PRTNRS. Makeup by Diane Buzzetta at Blended Strategy. Drag Makeup Consulting by Landon Cider. Manicure by Queenie Nguyen at Nailing Hollywood. Styling by Dani Michelle at The Only Agency. Vintage shirt and bolo tie, Our Legacy jeans, Nick Fouquet hat.
Munachi Osegbu
At least 15 other states, including Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina and Texas, are either considering or have already passed legislation similar to Tennessee’s drag ban — and that’s creating an impending sense of dread that keeps the drag stars and Morris fired up. “If you don’t want to go to a drag show, don’t go to a drag show. If you don’t want to have your kids at a drag show, don’t take your kids to a drag show. But don’t put that on us!” Symone exclaims. Cider nods in agreement. “The only part of ‘grooming’ that I’m doing,” he says, “is grooming kids to find joy in their authentic selves.”
Maren Morris: How have you been coming to terms with the number of anti-LGBTQ+ bills passing through the state legislatures around the country? I live in Tennessee, and I feel like that’s unfortunately at the forefront for a lot of them.
Symone: I don’t think I’ve come to terms with it; I think I’ve just realized that I am in a rage about it. Growing up, it wasn’t like it is now, and it’s frustrating to see all this hate, this vitriol for people who just spread love and only want to be seen and accepted. I cannot believe in 2023 we’re here. Especially after doing the respective [TV] shows that we’ve done and being embraced over all these years, for it to feel like such a backlash is insane to me. I won’t come to terms with it because we deserve everything that you think that we don’t deserve.
Morris: Have you seen it affect your own bookings or your friends’ bookings?
Sasha Colby: Right now, being in gigs with the other season 15 [Drag Race] girls, I feel like in our group chats we’re all very much on high alert and asking our friends, like Aura [Mayari] who’s in Tennessee, “How is it?” I think everyone’s just being very cautious.
Drag is so popular right now [because] it’s hitting a nerve with people, both good and bad. The bad is that they see how good we’re doing and how happy we’re making people and how out of the matrix we are. Kids are coming! It’s not grooming, it’s just making space for them to be themselves.
Landon Cider: When we were hiding and forced to create secret spaces, we found community. We were bonding and forging these relationships in this underground culture. Now that it’s celebrated in the mainstream, it backfired. It’s thrown in our face. We didn’t force it to be mainstream! They did!
Colby: We weren’t allowed in cis spaces. We weren’t allowed to be anything but outcasts. And then we share it with the world, and they just want to colonize our thoughts as well as everything else.
Symone: I think it does scare them because of the kids. The kids are seeing us, and they grow up saying, “Well, why would I need to be anything other than this?” That is scary for people who are not of this generation and who grew up a different way.
Sasha Colby photographed on May 9, 2023 in Los Angeles. Hair by Jazlyn Simons. Makeup by James Michael Perez. Michael Ngo custom bodysuit, gloves, and boots.
Munachi Osegbu
Morris: There is not a “one size fits all” conveyor belt of parenting; everyone has a different thing. Saying that this is all “adult” — some drag is, absolutely! But I’ve seen the Mrs. Doubtfire reference made a lot, where it’s hilarious if it’s a cis [straight] male in drag. Then it’s OK for the kids to see, but God forbid you see someone truly expressing themselves, entertaining and just being free.
Eureka O’Hara: It’s OK if it’s a joke. But we take this seriously — this gives us inspiration and life. I come from East Tennessee, and I went through all of this times 10 living there. It makes me so mad — I have a trans Black sister who just moved in with me a few months ago, and she’s finally doing OK after 19 years of being abused. And that’s what this is.
You all know it’s not about drag. Let’s be real. These [are] scare tactics, and it just gets me so emotional. It’s about how we express ourselves, and it’s about the youth — because we have the queerest youth we’ve ever had right now. And that’s what they’re mad about. These kids are learning about who they are before they’re 18, 25, 30 years old and still have to deal with abuse like this.
Colby: The whole thing with being trans is they sexualize us. It’s funny when it’s a joke, but as soon as they sexualize us, then they’re going to want to control, like how they do with cisgender women, how they do with kids.
Cider: They’re projecting their own hatred and fear of their own community and their own small “safe” spaces.
Morris: What’s that saying? “Every threat from them is an actual admission.”
Colby: Exactly. It’s always them showing their cards.
Symone: I also just want to put out there that people may think now that it’s just the drag queens, it’s just trans people. But if they can do it to them, then they can do it to anybody else. Don’t think that just because they’re attacking us right now that y’all are going to be somehow exempt from it. We’re just the easiest targets. Just look at history.
That’s another thing that I cannot stand — the misinformation. Know what you’re speaking about, know what you’re saying before you speak. You don’t have to like a trans person. But don’t say things that you don’t know anything about. Educate yourself. Don’t put your stuff on somebody else. What did Madonna say? “Don’t hang your sh-t on me.”
Cider: Don’t push your legislature to take control and tell other people what they can or cannot do [with their bodies]. Usually, it is religious reasons why they’re doing all of this because their beliefs are binary. When we have this particular religious control, they want to put fearmongering into what has been celebrated because they don’t understand it.
Eureka O’Hara photographed on May 9, 2023 in Los Angeles. Hair by Jaymes Mansfield. Makeup by Loris Volkle. Marco Marco custom dress.
Munachi Osegbu
Morris: The fact is, they don’t have solutions for actual problems — this is their niche thing that they get to go off on. I’m from Texas, I live in Tennessee, and I do love the community I have there, but these bills almost incentivize us to turn on one another. They’re rewarding us to turn each other in, which feels kind of like a Nazi Germany thing where we turn on our own communities.
Colby: And they call it “patriotism.”
Morris: With drag being more popular than ever right now, how do you think it ultimately influences pop culture?
Colby: We used to be a mirror — like in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, we would mirror pop culture. Now we get to be pop culture. We are who celebrities, designers, artists want to work with or are inspired by.
O’Hara: Obviously, there’s so much bad that comes from the hatred and the discrimination. But to have it be publicly talked about and having these discussions — like, how many celebrities have stood up for drag lately?
Cider: It’s interesting because it’s kind of the flip for me. As a drag king, I don’t see myself and my version of my art form celebrated the way that the art of drag queens is. So it’s bittersweet because I see my sisters being catapulted into this stardom, and I’m so excited and happy for all of them. But when are we going to understand that kings have been around for just as long, if not longer, in some cultures? Sexism and misogyny take over a lot, and that’s why trans women have been hidden in secret, too; it’s that same misogyny, the same sexism.
I am not trans, but when I see my trans siblings getting attacked… If you attack one of us, you attack all of us. And it’s the same when I see my siblings being celebrated — you celebrate one of us, you celebrate all of us. So I’m celebrating them, but I’m still waiting for us to be recognized and fully embraced. We see masculinity celebrated on the runway on RuPaul’s Drag Race all the time — in the Snatch Game or Victoria [Scone] and Mo Heart doing these very masculine looks — but we still don’t see kings.
O’Hara: You talked about the sexism and misogyny — it’s also the heteronormative culture of “Men are men, women are women,” and seeing a drag king is probably even harder for them to see.
Colby: Because they don’t know how to sexualize and objectify you.
O’Hara: Tea!
Morris: Piggybacking on that, these bills are so vague in their language that it’s intentionally hard to know where the line is between what is drag and what is not, and it’s obviously really meant to eradicate the existence of trans people. I mean, even a lot of these [male] country artists wear tighter jeans than I do.
Colby: And have bigger highlights! But that’s the thing: All the beauty in country music is always so good.
Landon Cider photographed on May 9, 2023 in Los Angeles. Hair by Wigs By Vanity. Makeup by Landon Cider. Fontasia L’Amour suit, ORTTU shirt.
Munachi Osegbu
Morris: It’s elevated, right? Dolly Parton famously said that if she wasn’t Dolly, she would be a drag queen. Especially when I’m going into glam for an event, I’m looking at a lot of y’all’s photos. Like, talk about culture and impact — it affects me, too! I want to sit and be beat for the gods! Even that language — I just said something that was totally born out of this community. I exist in this space of country music, where you don’t have to do much to be seen as a brave voice, unfortunately.
Symone: And that’s why it’s so important for you to be here, because country music — and I’ll also add in rap and hip-hop here — those genres need people to come out and say something more than any other [genre] because those are the ones that are the most heteronormative.
Colby: And they have a lot of people’s ears in America. They are two of the most listened-to genres in the country.
Symone: For you to be here and say those things is so important — we need all our divas. We need you to love us now.
Morris: Are there any specific examples of good, helpful allyship that you’ve seen from artists in the last few years?
Cider: Aside from you, I look at somebody like Lizzo and the show she did in Nashville recently [with drag performers].
Symone: Yes, completely. If you’re going to Tennessee this summer for touring, get the girls up there. Get some kings up there, too!
Colby: The local girls, too, because the local performers are the ones in danger here, especially in these small towns with a lot of drag. I’ve noticed that a lot of small Southern towns have these safe spaces for queer people, and they are the ones who are going to feel the impact of all this legislation first. We get to be the face and the voice and try to do our best, but it’s these small towns that we really have to be concerned about.
Symone photographed on May 9, 2023 in Los Angeles. Hair by Gigi Goode. Makeup by RYLIE. Marko Monroe custom dress.
Munachi Osegbu
Morris: For anyone who may be reading this, what can people do to help?
Symone: Vote. That’s first and foremost.
O’Hara: Go to these organizations that work with lobbyists to watch out for the progression of these bills. Because it’s not just at a state and national level that we’re being harmed. It’s the small community governments, it’s the city governments, it’s these local places. We have organizations like ACLU and places of that nature, every state has those lobbyists — the Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition would be a great one for anyone to donate to. Of course you have to vote, but we scream that all day every day. It’s not just about voting for the president.
A lot of times, I think the most important thing is to take care of the people around you who aren’t being looked after. Talk to the quiet queer kids that look scared, that aren’t being social. Go befriend the people that don’t look happy. Stop being mean girls, and that goes for gay people, too. Step up and be there for each other, for someone other than yourself and the people who make you feel cool.
Cider: Be an active ally when it matters. If you’ve shared a smile, a laugh, a memory with a queer person, don’t let that memory hide in the closet. Take that memory where it counts — to your pulpits, to your family reunions, to the locker rooms, to the places where you know you’re going to get sh-t on for speaking out for us. That’s where it matters the most because maybe it’ll open some eyes.
Colby: I always tell my cis-het friends who have children, “You don’t have to go to every protest and stand on your soapbox. What you do have control over is the kids you created. All you can do is leave this world a little better than you left it. Make those kids allies.”
Morris: Is there anything y’all want to ask me?
Cider: You’re using your platform beautifully already, and we appreciate you, we thank you for everything. But it’s also not a hard thing to do, to be an ally and to use your platform in the way that you do. How would you encourage your peers to do the same?
Morris: I have heard the term “Shut up and sing” more times than I can count — that’s always the cutesy little threat that they like to make. So I would say to my peers who are artists and to record-label heads, publishers, songwriters: I don’t think any of us got into this art form to be an activist, but that’s ultimately thrust upon you to exist in this space and to feel like you can sleep at night. You’re going to lose fans along the way — that is just part and parcel of being public-facing. But there is a lane that you’re widening; I see it year over year at my shows, the crowd feels so diverse and so safe. I know everyone likes money, but is it worth your biography saying that you never picked a side because both sides pay money to buy a T-shirt?
This story will appear in the June 10, 2023, issue of Billboard.
I grew up being a huge country music fan, especially of people like The Chicks. Watching their career spiral in such a ridiculous, unfair way was always in my mind — it doesn’t leave your brain once you witness these idols of yours being so unfairly criticized and their careers, at least at the time, ending just for exercising their rights. There is this pressure to stay silent in country music, I think, because of what happened to The Chicks. Artists just look at it like, “It’s good for business to shut the f–k up.” And that just never really sat well with me.
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I think that’s why I’ve become a little bit of a rebellious adolescent in country. In some ways, there’s good in that; you want things to be better, you want everyone to be on the same page, you want everyone to be equally treated. There’s this passion there. But there’s also that sort of insanity and delusion of thinking you can do it all yourself. It’s ridiculous and kind of an almost white savior complex way of thinking: “I’m going to change it all from the inside — me, myself and I.” I’ve had to really take a step back and realize how to not center myself in this conversation every f–king time.
There’s always going to be this nugget of ego in all of us, but I think particularly for someone that looks like me, the education of the last few years has been to shut up and listen to those who are living these horrors every day. I’m shutting up to listen to people that are smarter than me. I am not some torch-carrying savior of country music.
I have not been pulled from the radio — at least not as a reaction to my actions. I’ve certainly lost fans along the way. But I think that’s sort of like spring cleaning. I don’t want to make three albums and go away forever; this is it for me. I don’t love anything else as much as I love performing and writing songs. So, with the effects of the “punishment phase” of speaking out, I couldn’t give a sh-t because I’m going to be doing this for the long haul. You lose some people along the way, but you solidify those that you had from the get-go.
The way the country music industry has treated LGBTQ people has been awful — there’s been almost no representation. There are people like Ty Herndon, who wasn’t able to come out until he was basically not in the industry anymore. But there is progress being made: T.J. Osborne, one of my closest friends, came out a couple years ago, and there’s such support behind him because it’s like, “Yeah, it doesn’t matter.”
In my career, I have been pretty clear with my values and putting my money where my mouth is, and over time, I’ve achieved a larger audience. So to anyone who’s a juggernaut of the industry or to new artists just trying to break right into this: I have worked bit by bit to build my business to where it is. When you speak out or you show up to a rally, you’re going to gain fans and you’re going to lose fans. Even if it’s for a piece of legislation that’s going to affect people’s bodily autonomy, or their way of making a living, or who they can marry, it is going to be political to the other side. You’re going to lose some people, but you’ll also gain some that never looked in your direction before. On a moral level, as a fan, wouldn’t it be so nice to know that you’re paying for a ticket or a T-shirt of somebody that isn’t a sh–ty person? Being inclusive is good for business because you open yourself up to the world.
When I was a guest judge on Drag Race, I did feel like I just wanted to speak from my heart and apologize [for country music’s treatment of the LGBTQ community] as an artist that comes from the genre. I felt like country music in some ways gets overlooked in that community because they rightfully assume it’s not a welcoming community. No “sorry” is going to undo the decades of harm that the country music industry has done to LGBTQ people in terms of representation. I was trying to say that there’s a lot of good people in this genre, and I hope that you don’t write it off forever because of what some artists said on their stage.
We live really close to the Covenant School [where a mass shooting took place in March], and that feeling of being swallowed by this grief, as a mother, has been really tough. My heart is just broken every day, having to pass the entrance of that school. But weirdly, I have never felt more connected to this town than in the last two months. When I went to one of the protests after the shooting, I saw mothers that I’ve had wine and disagreements with, and everyone was so emotionally raw at that moment. It’s awful that it took something so horrible to make that happen, but something in me switched, and I felt like, “I’m really lucky to live here right now.” Community like that is happening on the battlegrounds of these protests. It all comes back to the community that you’ve got to go out and build for yourself. It’s not going to come to you.
And there really is no community like here in Nashville. I’ve heard other songwriters from other places say they’ve been to L.A., they’ve been to New York, they’ve done writing trips abroad, but there’s just something different about Nashville. My heart is country music, and it’s writing songs that are stories, and it’s the collaboration of Nashville writing. It’s a lot harder to try and start over in some other way. I’ve just decided that you have to till the soil you’re on. Don’t get into the greener pastures complex.
For myself, I’m getting out of the sort of game of being the hall monitor of country music, even if I’m probably setting myself up for failure. Everything I’ve done has not been in vain; I’ve been so bowled over by the acceptance and positivity from the LGBTQ community. But I feel like I cannot look at the bad apples anymore. I’m done giving into what they want, which is attention. I think the whole “When they go low, we go high” thing is applicable here. Sometimes I fall into that trap of saying, “No, beat them at their own game. Sink to their level because they don’t operate on the high road.” There’s absolutely truth to that, and sometimes, yeah, you need to ruffle some feathers and not do this whole “Kumbaya” hand-holding thing. But clapping back on Twitter and expecting a different result doesn’t work for me anymore. I’m going to look to where the people are helping and just Mister Rogers this b-tch. —AS TOLD TO STEPHEN DAW
This story will appear in the June 10, 2023, issue of Billboard.
David Kushner realized he might have a hit on his hands in March, when he performed “Daylight” to a packed London venue while opening for Dean Lewis. He’d been teasing the then-unreleased single on TikTok and Instagram for weeks, and “everybody knew the words,” he tells Billboard. Fan recordings of Kushner performing the song in concert only fed into the hype: “There’s one video [on TikTok] with like 30 million views and 7 million likes.”
Riding a wave of social media-fueled anticipation, “Daylight” arrived through Virgin Music on Apr. 14 and quickly became Kushner’s commercial breakthrough, debuting at No. 48 on the Billboard Hot 100 on the chart dated April 29 as well as cracking the top 10 of the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. chart. Characterized by Kushner’s bellowing vocals and a haunting piano melody, the song’s lyrics deal with the self-destructive potential of fulfilling the less savory end of one’s desires: “There’s darkness in the distance/From the way that I’ve been livin’,” he sings. “But I know I can’t resist it.”
Kushner, 22, grew up in the Chicago suburb of Barrington, the youngest of five musical siblings, with four sisters that played piano and a brother who played in a prominent local band. Though he always enjoyed singing and took guitar lessons in the fourth grade, it wasn’t until he finished high school — and realized that college didn’t interest him — that he decided to pursue music as a career. He began taking vocal lessons and learning the guitar again, but he initially struggled to find his voice.
In September 2020, after co-writing with a high school friend and recording with producers he met through social media, he self-distributed a crop of “way more poppy” tracks sung in a higher vocal range — a far cry from the baritone he’s become known for since. In fact, it was only when a vocal coach encouraged him to experiment with a lower range that he found his artistic footing. “I entered a new creative dimension in a way,” says Kushner, who has since removed those earlier songs from streaming services. “It felt like I stepped from one world into another.”
David Kushner photographed May 10, 2023 at Cricket Ranch in Los Angeles.
Austin Hargrave
His new singing style was promptly validated: Kushner partnered with Virgin Music in December 2021 after a meeting with President Jacqueline Saturn and other executives, who suggested that a distributor, rather than a traditional label, was the best route, given his TikTok following. He then released his 2022 EP, Footprints I Found, through the company, with lead single “Miserable Man” performed in that self-described “lower octave.” The austere, acoustic guitar-driven ballad reached No. 23 on Billboard‘s Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart.
Soon after, Kushner met his manager, Altar MGMT’s Brent Shows, through an artist friend he met on TikTok and previously wrote with in Los Angeles, where he moved earlier this year. Kushner originally hired Shows — who also owned a video production company — to create content for his social channels. Before long, Shows was managing Kushner on a part-time basis before making it his full-time gig last fall.
“I was in the room when ‘Daylight’ was written and watched the entire process from the first melody that was sung to the last submission to [Virgin],” says Shows of working with Kushner. “Just seeing that whole process, you realize the talent the kid has.”
From left: Brent Shows and David Kushner photographed May 10, 2023 at Cricket Ranch in Los Angeles.
Austin Hargrave
Kushner began writing the hit this January while taking a break from a session for another, as-of-yet unreleased track. “I first sang [the melody] in my falsetto voice … it was just a vomit vocal that came out,” he says. After writing the chorus (“Oh, I love it and I hate it at the same time/You and I drink the poison from the same vine”), he went home and played it for his girlfriend, who was instantly “stoked,” he says. He finished writing the song on his landlord’s piano, then recorded a rough demo at home.
Kushner started teasing the “Daylight” chorus online later that month. “It took off a little bit, not anything crazy,” he says. It wasn’t until he began tagging Hozier in his social media posts about the song — encouraged, in part, by comparisons from fans — that it started to go viral. “Fans were blowing up all my videos because they were agreeing with me,” he says. “They were like…’We need this to happen.’”
Though Hozier declined a collaboration, Shows reached out to another key player in the Irish singer-songwriter’s rise: Rob Kirwan, who produced Hozier’s breakthrough 2014 self-titled album. After hearing the “Daylight” demo, Kirwan agreed to produce it, not yet aware of the song’s TikTok virality. “Rob truly just liked the song, and wanted to be a part of the project,” says Shows.
Despite an initial release date slated for May 5, the momentum surrounding the song prompted Kushner to push for an earlier release — and Shows, trusting Kushner’s instincts, moved the release up to Apr. 14. Its music video arrived the same day, and has since garnered more than 26 million YouTube views.
Shows says they’re now focused on breaking the song at radio, with promo tours scheduled for the U.S. and Europe. There have also been talks about putting out an acoustic version, while discussions are progressing with some “pretty large names” for dance remixes of the song, says Shows.
Soon, Kushner will play a few sold-out headlining shows in the U.S. and U.K., followed by an opening slot for Lewis Capaldi, an artist that Kushner says has influenced him in more ways than one. “He’s been such an inspiration [to] my songwriting.” But he looks to the chart-topper on a more personal level too: “I also have tic disorder,” he adds — a diagnosis of Tourette Syndrome, which Capaldi has long addressed, including in a recent Netflix documentary. “A lot of people don’t know [that] about me, but I want to be more open about it.” Kushner says it first started with a vocal tic when he was a child and has since “progressed” — though when he’s focused on music, whether during the recording process or playing a show, his symptoms nearly disappear.
Fans can expect continued openness from Kushner on his debut album — on which he’s collaborating with several producers and songwriters, including Kirwan — that he hopes to release later this year. Both Kushner and Shows are content with remaining independent for the moment: “We just love the team that we have… and [Virgin] operates as a full services label for David,” says Shows.
“This is just the beginning. This is the floor,” he continues. “A ceiling? You can’t even see it.”
David Kushner photographed May 10, 2023 at Cricket Ranch in Los Angeles.
Austin Hargrave
A version of this story originally appeared in the June 3, 2023, issue of Billboard.
At the start of 2022, Yahritza y Su Esencia emerged as the buzzy regional Mexican music act every label wanted to sign. In a matter of months, the Washington state-based Martinez sibling trio went from a local band that sang at family parties to the future of regional Mexican with its sad, catchy sierreño songs, powered by Yahritza’s emotional vocals, Mando’s requinto and Jairo’s bajoloche.
By March 2022, after signing a deal with independent label Lumbre Music, Yahritza y Su Esencia released their official debut single, “Soy el Único.” It entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 20 and made Yahritza the youngest Latin performer to debut on the chart at just 15 years old. The act subsequently notched its first No. 1 on Regional Mexican Albums with its Obsessed EP, scored a Latin Grammy Award nod for best new artist and, by November, signed with Columbia Records in a partnership with Lumbre Music and Sony Music Latin. A worldwide deal with SESAC Latina soon followed.
All the while, Yahritza’s 25-year-old big brother, Mando — who had been living stateside as an undocumented person — and his team were working behind the scenes to sort out his immigration status in the United States. In need of an O-1 visa, Mando had to go to Mexico City and follow protocols to prove his eligibility. After spending most of his life living with his parents (who are originally from Michoacán, Mexico) and four siblings in Washington’s agricultural region of Yakima Valley, he was suddenly alone in an unfamiliar city, waiting for approval.
“It was a sacrifice, especially when I’m one of the main components of the band,” says Mando, who returned to the United States in April shortly after getting approved for a special visa reserved for individuals with extraordinary ability and achievement in their field. “We had to learn to record separately, something we had never done. It has always been all of us together in a studio.”
“I would write my music and wouldn’t know who to share it with,” says Yahritza, now 16. “He was a call away, but it wasn’t the same.” Adds 18-year-old Jairo: “We couldn’t do the things we used to do, which was practicing every day. That changed everything for us.”
The band members — managed by their oldest sister, Adriana Martinez — were influenced by their father and uncles’ own musical act, which Mando joined as a kid. Yahritza and Jairo later learned how to play instruments and would upload covers on TikTok, including their viral take on Ivan Cornejo’s “Está Dañada.” Yahritza then began writing her own songs — the first being the emotionally charged heartbreak track “Soy el Único,” which ultimately led to the formation of Yahritza y Su Esencia.
Ramón Ruiz, CEO of Lumbre Music, signed the trio soon after discovering the group last year on TikTok. He says his team’s top priority was to not let Mando’s visa application affect the band. “We were always working on what’s coming next,” he says. “It was hard because Mando is a big part of the production and Yahritza and Jairo depend a lot on Mando. I would try to help however I could, but they needed their big brother. He’s their role model; they look up to him so much.”
From left: Mando, Yahritza and Jario Martinez of Yahritza y Su Esencia
David Cabrera
Mando’s status remained uncertain for nearly seven months. “I would remind [my siblings] that we needed to take things one day at a time,” Adriana says. “We’ve always believed God’s timing is perfect, so it was important to never lose faith and remember nothing can break the bond we have as a family, not even being separated.”
Now, with the O-1 secured, Mando is able to record and promote music in the United States, which Yahritza y Su Esencia have remained consistent with — as Yahritza and Jairo often traveled to Mexico to record. In the past few months alone, the act released “Inseparables” (with Cornejo), “Cambiaste,” “Nuestra Canción,” “No Se Puede Decir Adiós” and “Frágil” — a norteña, cumbia-tinged collaboration with Grupo Frontera produced by hit-maker Edgar Barrera.
“Regardless of the situation, we had to be releasing music for our fans,” says Mando. “We’d jump on FaceTime a lot, and that’s how we would make the song’s arrangements.” Yahritza would write in her room and then send music to Mando for his feedback. But when it came to recording the harmonies, she had to call him directly. “I needed him to show me because I still don’t know how to do that,” she says. “He would help me when he was home.”
“Them being together is what makes this so special,” says Julian Swirsky, senior vp of A&R at Columbia Records. “It was always about getting Mando home first and foremost, but the group was fired up. We had a Zoom call on New Year’s Eve to talk about new music because they wanted to get set up for the new year.”
From left: Yahritza, Mando and Jario Martinez of Yahritza y Su Esencia
David Cabrera
The first thing Mando did once his visa was approved at the end of April was travel home to Washington, where he surprised his parents at a family gathering by popping up behind them as they were taking a photo. “My mom yelled when she saw me and started to touch my face to see if I was real,” Mando says. “That’s when it hit me.”
With a new album in the works and a long-awaited U.S. tour slated for the second half of the year, Yahritza y Su Esencia are finally poised to reach their full potential — just when Mexican music continues to grow exponentially, with the act helping usher in a new era for the legacy genre. In May, “Frágil” cracked the Hot 100. And on the Billboard Global 200, it is among a handful of regional Mexican songs that are surging, as the genre now makes up nearly 10% of the entire chart.
“What happened to us had to happen,” says Jairo, “and it changed us.” Adds Yahritza: “Before, we would fight and disagree on small things. We shouldn’t even be caring about that; all we should care about is that we’re back together.”
This story originally appeared in the June 3, 2023, issue of Billboard.