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Three years ago, Rosa Linn was writing songs in her free time and dreaming of a career in music. But she never expected a performance at a local village festival in her native Armenia would be her ticket to stardom.
Her standout delivery of an original rock song, backed by her band of friends, floored talent scouts in the crowd from record label Nvak Collective. Soon after, the team invited her to attend the company’s upcoming songwriting camp for women. “We really recognize the fact that talent is equally distributed — but opportunity isn’t,” says Tamar Kaprelian, Nvak Collective co-founder and Rosa Linn’s manager since last July, when the rising singer-songwriter also signed to the label.
Kaprelian says that while Rosa Linn was more introverted than the other songwriters at the camp, her personality beamed through the lyrics she wrote independently after songwriting lessons. When Rosa Linn returned to class one day, she presented the first verse of a folksy pop song about hopelessly ruminating over a romantic interest. That early draft became “Snap,” the global crossover hit that has catapulted her career and led to her first Billboard No. 1.
Inspired by her “first real love” in 2017 during her time as an exchange student in the United States, Rosa Linn returned home to Armenia feeling hung up. “I wrote about my readjustment process and mental state,” the 22-year-old says. “It was a very hard period for me. It’s just about life, and I think that’s why people relate to it.” Adds Kaprelian: “She came in with those deep lyrics, and I was like, ‘There’s something special here.’ ”
Over the next two-and-a-half years Rosa Linn fleshed out the rest of the song ahead of its official release this March. She says that the final product is “very close” to the original demo, and includes vocals she cut in a hotel room, as well as her own guitar playing, “even though I’m not the greatest guitar player. That’s why the song has a vulnerable feeling. It’s honest and not perfect.”
Kaprelian sent the track to local radio stations, but was determined to get the song noticed on a larger level, eventually submitting it as an applicant to represent Armenia at the Eurovision Song Contest 2022. Rosa Linn was ultimately chosen for the televised music competition this May (besting a finalist entry submitted by one of her friends), where she performed “Snap” to 161 million people across Europe. She placed 20th.
“We really saw it as a steppingstone,” Kaprelian reflects. “When she didn’t rank well, we could have been like, ‘We tried. Let’s move on to another song.’ Instead, we decided to double down on ‘Snap’ and I know that it might not have seemed smart, but we really went hard in the TikTok strategy.”
Rosa Linn (left) and Tamar Kaprelian photographed on November 11, 2022 in Malibu, Calif.
Martha Galvan
Turns out it was the smartest thing they could have done. Rosa Linn began “experimenting” with different videos on the platform, including acoustic performances, remixes and POV-style clips showing the behind-the-scenes action at Eurovision. And after a fan-made, sped-up version of the track was uploaded to TikTok, “Snap” began to go viral.
More than one million videos were uploaded to the platform using the quicker, pitched-up version of “Snap,” with users showing everything from favorite recipes to sweet moments with their pets, as well as participating in a wholesome trend in which people highlighted the “color palette” of their hair, skin and eyes. Its popularity on TikTok pushed “Snap” up the Billboard charts, leading to its Billboard Hot 100 debut at No. 97 on the Sept. 3-dated chart. It has since reached a No. 82 high and spent seven weeks at No. 1 on Adult Alternative Airplay. “After [seeing the song do well], that’s when I knew it was real,” Rosa Linn says. “‘Snap’ gave me the best and most productive year of my life.”
It also led to a major-label deal with Columbia Records, which Rosa Linn signed in August. The label has already set the artist up with top songwriters and producers, including a recent session in Los Angeles with Diane Warren and Dan Wilson. In late October, she released her follow-up single “WDIA (Would Do It Again)” with fellow Eurovision star Duncan Laurence — and then capped the month with her late-night television debut on The Late Late Show with James Corden. Rosa Linn is now in the process of curating her sound to represent her artistry, with hopes of releasing a debut studio album. “I’m very picky,” she says, noting she has no timeline in mind for her full-length. “I wrote a lot of songs in the past three years, but none of them got released because [then] I would write another and it was better. This period is me growing as a songwriter and trying to improve.”
“I’m always going to stay personal and honest,” she continues. “My music is a representation of what I’ve gone through. Coming from Armenia and now living my dream is unbelievable.”
Rosa Linn photographed on November 11, 2022 in Malibu, Calif.
Martha Galvan
A version of this story will appear in the Dec. 10, 2022, issue of Billboard.
It’s ostensibly a big morning for Greg Kurstin. As we speak in the sunlit lounge of his Hollywood recording studio, the Grammy nominations are being announced — and as is often the case, the veteran producer’s name is connected with a few very big artists expected to make significant showings.
But if Kurstin is at all nervous, he doesn’t show it. Whether out of politeness or commitment to his “maybe boring” daily routine — drop his two kids at school, come back to the studio, make hits, get home in time for dinner — Kurstin, 53, neither tunes in to the broadcast nor checks his phone as the nominees are announced.
Instead, Kurstin has the same focus as always: the music that got him here. A lifelong pianist, he amalgamates his considerable abilities on a range of instruments, his love of jazz and his history as both a session musician and band member (Geggy Tah, The Bird and the Bee) into an improvisational accompanist’s approach to pop music. The artists who’ve called on him as producer — a wide range including Paul McCartney, Sia, Beck, Halsey, Foo Fighters and Maren Morris — look to Kurstin not for a distinct, signature sound, but for his ability to bring out the best within them.
The most famous of those collaborators, of course, is Adele. Since her 2015 album, 25, and its smash “Hello,” she and Kurstin have had a prolific creative relationship — one that continued in 2022 with 30. He co-wrote, produced or co-produced six of the 12 tracks on the album, which spent six weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. One of those was lead single “Easy on Me,” which tied “Hello” for Adele’s longest No. 1 run on the Billboard Hot 100 (10 weeks) and led Radio Songs for 15 weeks — her personal best and the sixth-longest in the chart’s history.
All of that went a long way toward making Kurstin Billboard’s top Hot 100 producer of 2022. And by the end of our conversation, the nine-time Grammy winner (including two for producer of the year, non-classical) will rack up another five nominations: best pop vocal album; song, record and album of the year (all for 30); and best country album (for Morris’ Humble Quest, which he produced). But here in the studio — emitting cool dad vibes in jeans and a T-shirt — he’s immersed in the 9-to-5 that produces that award-worthy work, insulated from much of the buzz it has generated.
“Sometimes I’ll do a song with an artist,” Kurstin says, “and I’ll be like, ‘I wonder if that song did well?’ And then you go see their show and it’s like, ‘Oh, these people know the song!’ ”
It seems like you have the luxury of choice, in terms of artists you agree to work with. Besides your track record of hits, what do you think they’re looking for from you?
I’d like to think that they’re coming to me because I want to support their vision and learn where they’re going musically and try to achieve that somehow, to bring out the best song they could possibly need at this point in their career. Everyone is different. A lot of people I work with are people I’ve worked with before, over and over, and so there’s a lot of history there, too.
You’ve said that artists come to you for the support you provide during the process, rather than for a particular sound.
I don’t think I necessarily have a sound or a particular style that’s recognizable. People have said to me, “I could tell you did that song,” and I’m like, “Really?” I just bring it all back to when I was just a side musician accompanist working with a singer. I would try to support what they’re doing and not be a distraction, but to bring out the best emotion by finding the right chords and the right arrangements. I translated that to production, in a way.
Adele’s songs in particular are so intensely personal. To what extent are you helping her unpack that emotion?
I’m definitely there to navigate that emotional terrain. I have to find the right sequence of chords or the beginning of a song that ignites something in her and whatever lyric she’s wanting to write that day. So, I will search. Sometimes it takes a long time; sometimes it happens immediately; sometimes it’s at the very end of the day. Usually, I’ll just improvise, trying to imagine where she wants to go.
Are there conversations happening as you work?
We don’t really discuss it… I get on the piano and then I’ll get a sense of, “Oh, she likes this little bit I’m playing right now,” so I’ll stay there. Sometimes I do that for an hour or two while she’s formulating lyrics, and I just know I don’t want to move; I don’t want to change anything, because if she’s writing, I feel like it’s going well. So I’ll stay where I am. It’s like a meditation. Also, it’s amazing how much she remembers — just a little seed we started like, a year ago, she’ll say, “What about that little thing we did?”
Is the pressure around a new Adele album something you have to try to tune out?
Yeah. I mean, it’s so hard for me to tune it out. It definitely stresses me out, in a very positive way. There’s excitement, but there’s also just the feeling of like, “I don’t want to be responsible for something not performing.” That’s just me. I probably would take it personally, which I shouldn’t, but a lot of us artists have issues where our self-worth is wrapped up in our performance. But I try to stay grounded and healthy and just know it’s out of my control… Grammy time brings up a lot of those feelings again, because the attention on the album starts coming back.
Despite your accomplishments, you keep a low profile. What’s your day-to-day life like?
My days are pretty normal. I mean, aside from that I work with these extraordinary artists. I take the kids to school, then go to the studio. I just focus on the thing I’m working on, try to do a good job with that, then try to get home by dinnertime. That’s pretty much my life, which is kind of unusual in my line of work. A lot of producers work on the opposite time frame. When I’m going to bed, they’re starting.
For me to be healthy, I have to have a schedule, a structure. The way my mind works, it will start to race, and if I work too late, then I have trouble sleeping and that messes up my next day. Artists are happy to adapt to working that schedule. I want to do a great song for them and send them on their way so they can have a life and go out at night to do whatever they want to do. I’m totally friends with a lot of artists I work with… but I don’t want to keep someone longer than they want to be there.
You mentioned the anticipation you feel around Grammy season. What is your relationship with the awards?
It’s a crazy experience to be invited or involved, and I know I won’t be invited forever. There will be a point where people will be like, “OK, you can go now.” (Laughs.)
Eventually they’ll show you out the back door.
Exactly. Like, “We’ve had enough of you.” While it’s happening, I’m just going for the ride. It feels very good for your work to be recognized. I don’t take it lightly when people are voting for stuff I’ve worked on. I have fun when I go, although it makes me nervous when I’m there, because I hate speaking in the microphone, but that’s also a good problem to have.
Where do you keep the nine Grammys you’ve already won?
They’re in the bedroom, kind of staring at me. If I’m in a bad mood, I can look up and be like, “Come on! Chin up.”
All that said, do you want to check and see if you’ve been nominated this year?
(Looks at phone.) OK, I got best pop vocal album, song of the year, album of the year, country album and record of the year. So there’s that!
This story will appear in the Dec. 10, 2022, issue of Billboard.
Musicals, whether onstage or onscreen, take time — lots of time — to develop. For Lin-Manuel Miranda, the story of 2022’s Encanto really began six years ago, on opening weekend for a different Disney animated musical, Moana. Miranda was a late addition to that film’s three-person musical team, and he had seen “how seriously and faithfully [Disney] took the responsibility of representing a culture we don’t see onscreen a lot” — in Moana’s case, that of the Polynesian islands — and “making sure that part of the world would be proud,” he recalls. So he told Tom MacDougall, then executive vp of music for Disney Animation and Pixar, “Listen, I know you guys have some Latin-themed things up your sleeve. If there’s going to be a Disney Latina princess, I’ve been training all my life!”
That opening weekend, MacDougall cryptically told Miranda: “You’ll be there from the beginning on the next one.” And with Encanto, he kept his word. “We don’t just go celebrity to celebrity for people to write these shows,” says MacDougall, now president of Walt Disney Music. “But there was a project being talked about that was going to happen in Latin America, and I said, ‘Hey, Lin wants to do this, we love him — what would a full Lin show look like start to finish?”
The answer: a historic hit. Miranda’s eight songs for the Encanto soundtrack all charted on the Billboard Hot 100, leading him to spend 15 weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100 Songwriters chart and to ultimately be named Billboard’s top Hot 100 songwriter of 2022. Much of that was thanks to the unlikely and explosive leader of the pack: the intricate, multicharacter showstopper “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” which spent five weeks at No. 1 and, according to Billboard’s GOAT methodology, is now the biggest Disney song of all time.
Of course, don’t tell that to the “Surface Pressure” hive, whose passion for strongwoman Luisa’s reggaetón-inflected solo pushed it to a No. 8 peak, or to the teary masses who sent the poetic “Dos Oruguitas” (sung entirely in Spanish by Sebastián Yatra) to No. 2 and No. 36 peaks, respectively, on Hot Latin Songs and the Hot 100. “It’s pretty unorthodox in terms of a musical,” MacDougall says of Encanto. “That ‘Bruno’ would become one of the most popular songs of all time, that all the songs would be in the top 100 — we would have never expected it.”
But if that sounds like the foundation for a new blueprint for Disney blockbusters, think again. Miranda, 42, insists there’s no formula for Encanto-level success, paraphrasing the late Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim: “Surprise is the thing you’re chasing. If you can bottle surprise, you can have a career in this business.”
You were in the throes of writing Encanto’s music in spring 2020. What was it like essentially putting this soundtrack together in lockdown?
In retrospect, I do think some of the lockdown seeps into the songwriting. There’s a reason “Surface Pressure” and “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” which were written in April and May of 2020, respectively, resonate in a different way. At the core of “Surface Pressure” is this question of, how do I keep my family safe — and who am I if I can’t? I think that’s a variation of what every parent felt then. And then “Bruno” — I was locked up with my in-laws. There is a subtext there of, “What are we allowed to talk about in front of your mother?” (Laughs.) My brother-in-law was living with us at the time — he works in real estate, and we barely saw him, he’d just work in his corner, he’d join us for dinner, he’d go back to his corner. When I showed him the rough storyboard and the song started, he was like, “Is this about me? Am I the uncle in the walls?” (Laughs.)
The level of input from the larger creative team is pretty high in the world of animation. How did that typically play out?
Our call was every Friday night at 9 p.m. my time, which meant I could tuck in my kids and then wake myself back up and do the call. I felt comfortable bringing in half songs — like, “Here’s the first two verses of ‘Bruno.’ Is this a good direction? Should I keep going?” I don’t think there’s one song in this where I was like, “This is it, it’s done.”
Well, other members of the creative team do talk about “Bruno” as if you started playing it for them fully formed. What’s your side of that story?
I knew the vibe for it very quickly. This was a song that was my pitch: Can we please do a family gossip number? I knew it was just going to be like (Miranda plays the piano bassline.), which felt very Afro-Latino, rhythmic, spooky. The challenge was to get something simple yet [distinctive] enough that you could put a lot of different stories on top of it. It was really one long night of writing it.
You have a longtime friendship with Bobby Lopez [who, with wife Kristen Anderson-Lopez, wrote the music for Frozen, Frozen II and Coco]. Does someone like him provide a kind of creative support system when you’re working on a project like Encanto?
You learn quickly that there’s very few people you can talk to about this kind of gig. My friendship with Bobby goes beyond songwriting — we went to school together, he’s been a mentor to me my whole career. There was a moment when I was struggling with something in Mirabel’s song “Waiting on a Miracle,” and it was this really specific shop talk of like, “I think this is the right song for the right moment but it’s not doing this thing you’re so good at that I want it to do — it’s not lifting off at the end in the way I want it to.” So I sent it to Bobby and Kristen and they were like, “Give us a couple hours,” and they got on a Zoom with me and were like, “Go up a whole step not a half step, have her sing this note.” It was a very music theory mathematical thing and it made all the difference in the world. That’s the kind of thing you can only ask someone who’s been in this space before you and knows the lay of the land.
“Bruno” is now the biggest Disney song of all time. What are your personal top Disney songs of all time?
No. 1 is “Under the Sea.” I mean, it’s like Sebastian making the case for a way of life and presenting us with a world so much more beautiful than our own! I wanted to go f–king live under the sea! “Out There,” from Hunchback [of Notre Dame] — Stephen Schwartz wrote the lyrics. “Into the Unknown” from Frozen II, that song is outrageous in setup and execution. “When She Loved Me” by Randy Newman — Toy Story 2 is among my favorite movies of all time, full stop. That was really a big inspiration for “Dos Oruguitas.” And I agree with everyone on the internet about the entirety of Tarzan. You know that meme that’s like, “Phil Collins didn’t have to go that hard but he did.” (Miranda starts belting “Strangers Like Me.”) Well, he did, and we’re all the better for it. It should not go that hard! (Laughs.)
You’ve admitted that you didn’t think “Bruno” would become the big Encanto hit. Why do you think it did?
I didn’t think it was going to be a big song because group numbers never are — with the exception of “Summer [Nights]” from Grease. But I also think there’s something to the fact that music has stratified to a big extent, and TikTok is a big part of the reason this song was such a hit. Every verse and chorus of this is like a bite-sized TikTok number. I didn’t have TikTok when I wrote it, but you realize after the fact, “Oh, if Camilo’s your favorite guy, you can listen to that bit,” and each bit became its own kind of hit. It was amazing that sections of “Bruno” were becoming popular.
“Dos Oruguitas” soundtracks Encanto’s tearjerking montage. Was that always the plan?
I mean, that was the hope. Some of it is what it isn’t: It isn’t a moment of Abuela singing to Mirabel, because Abuela singing, “Your grandfather was shot” — that’s a trauma too deep to sing. I looked at the imagery in the film of the butterfly that leads them to the miracle, and I had the idea of these two caterpillars in love and the change that has to happen. You have to undergo metamorphosis and trauma to become who you are, and you have to trust that you’ll still be yourself on the other side of whatever hard things come your way. And once I had that, I wrote it pretty quickly — though the speed of my Spanish is not the speed of my English, so it took longer to find the right words.
Then there’s “Surface Pressure.” Were you aware of all the people rooting for it to surpass “Bruno” on the charts?
I love it. I mean, there’s not a lot of precedent for that tune. In my head I was trying to cross a really tough reggaetón song with like, “[The] Lovecats” by The Cure, the quietest vocals I can imagine on a pop song. I think we had the song before we cast the role, but the drawing of Luisa existed, so I knew she’d have a deeper voice, and I was like, “Please, please, please find me an alto.” And Jess Darrow has such a wonderful and distinctive voice. The character never doesn’t sound like herself, and I love that about it.
To me it’s the most recognizably Lin song in this movie. It just feels like what naturally comes out of you. Was it that organic for you to write?
I don’t know…what I sound like? Ask any composer, they don’t know what their moves are. But I guess that’s what I sound like! I think the internal rhyminess of the verses and choruses, for sure. It was an early one to try to write; I was feeling my way towards it in an organic way. The hardest one is always the “I Want” song. Mirabel’s was originally called “I’m More Than What I’m Not,” and it was very poppy. It was a bop! But it was just not right.
Is there one song that you wish found a wider audience?
I would be insane to complain about any of them. But I’ll tell you, my expectations were upended. My expectation was that “Colombia, Mi Encanto” would be the easiest song to pull out of the story — it’s just a love letter to Colombia, it namechecks towns, it’s Carlos Vives singing it — so I just thought, “Maybe at soccer stadiums they’ll play this!” [It peaked at No. 100 on the Hot 100.] To see the character-iest, most involved-in-the plot songs rise to the top was an amazing and welcome surprise.
Does Encanto’s chart success feel like a unicorn situation? Or can it serve as a model for how Disney thinks about animated musicals in the future?
Well, I think once you think you have a template, you’re dead meat. Look at the two songs that had the most success: what people embraced was what’s new. As long as Disney’s musicals can continue to push on the template of what a Disney musical can be, I think they’ll be a success. It’s when we get hip to it — “Oh, here comes the sidekick song” — that we feel like we’ve seen it before. I think the lesson is to find the musical moments we haven’t seen before, and that’s true of theater as well. I know I’m here because Howard Ashman was here, and he felt like musical theater had a lot to teach animated movies about how music and animation could coexist. Everything I’m doing builds on what he knew and practiced with Alan Menken during that golden era I was lucky enough to be a kid during. And our job is to continue to push that envelope.
There is a rumor that a demo exists of you singing all 10 “Bruno” parts. Will we ever hear it?
Uh, yes, it exists — I mean, there’s me demos of all of them. But I also know why you want it, you jerks! You want to make funny TikToks with my face on them, and I will not give you the satisfaction! So they will stay on my computer, thank you very much. You want to make your funny little memes! (Laughs.) I will not be here for your meme-ery.
This story will appear in the Dec. 10, 2022, issue of Billboard.
The Project
I Love You Jennifer B, out now on Rough Trade Records.
The Origin
Though they were both drawn to the Guildhall School of Music in London for its rare, genre-inclusive approach to music academics – teaching everything from electronic production to jazz piano – Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye were not the most likely duo at the school to form a band. Ellery arrived her first year at the school as a violinist with no experience writing songs, while Skye was busy scoring scenes in feature films. “But I think we were both looking for each other,” Ellery says wistfully, looking back on the time she still says is “definitely the most formative of my life.”
Inspired by the emerging experimentalist pop scene at the school, Ellery tried to write songs on her own, setting down her trusty violin in favor of a piano or guitar. After penning her first one, Ellery took it to Skye to produce, given her admiration for his soundtrack work and their shared love of James Blake, Four Tet and of Annie Mac’s BBC 1 radio show. “I’ve never really enjoyed playing by myself, so it just made a lot of sense to work together,” Ellery explains. “He was looking for a band, I was looking for a band, so the two just kept going after the first song.”
Soon, the duo was self-releasing their music, which ultimately sounded as jarring as the name they assumed to do it: Jockstrap. When asked why they chose the moniker, Skye just shrugs. “We like heavy metal names.”
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The Sound
Made up of Ellery’s soul-baring songwriting and Skye’s bombastic electronic production, Jockstrap’s I Love You Jennifer B is a commanding front-to-back listen, and is already beloved by tastemakers like Jamie xx and Populous. At times, I Love You Jennifer B is longing, and at other times frenetic, but that’s what makes it brilliant: it is committed to subverting expectations at every turn.
Skye says it was always a conscious choice to put together a full project’s worth of songs, but Ellery also says, “We weren’t writing for cohesion.”
The Breakthrough
When releasing their first songs, Jockstrap took inspiration – knowingly or unknowingly – from Skye’s early-Uni roots, scoring scenes in his dorm room. The duo paired their music with visuals they created themselves; sure, saving the money as a then-independent band was helpful, but making music videos from scratch was also a way to illustrate a bigger artistic vision.
“We had this sort of plan of how we should self-release,” says Ellery of their first songs. The band put out homemade videos as well as linked up with a local magazine to premiere them. “We were just so driven and determined to make it a real thing,” says Ellery. “I think we did it the correct way, because our team just kind of came to us after.” The music videos and songs led to their record deal with Rough Trade Records, two EPs and finally, their debut album.
The Piece of Studio Equipment Jockstrap Cannot Live Without
Skye: “My PSP vintage warmer.”
Ellery: “My trusty old Audio Technica headphones that are dirt cheap.”
The Artist They Believe Deserves More Attention
Skye: “MT Hadley”
The Takeaway That They Hope Fans Have When They Hear the Album
Ellery: “We truly hope that there’s a banger in there for everyone. That at least one song screams at them.”
The Advice Every Indie Artist Needs to Hear
Ellery: “Take control and make your own music video. Try to get your own premieres in magazines, don’t wait on others to do it.”
The Thing That Needs to Change in the Music Industry
Ellery: “More women. Less misogyny.”
Forever No. 1 is a Billboard series that pays special tribute to the recently deceased artists who achieved the highest honor our charts have to offer — a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single — by taking an extended look back at the chart-topping songs that made them part of this exclusive club. Here, we remember the late Irene Cara with an extended look at her lone Hot 100-topper: the era-straddling soundtrack classic “Flashdance…What a Feeling.”
Flashdance didn’t invent movie/music synergy, but it perfected the formula for the MTV generation. MTV, after all, wasn’t even two years old when Flashdance premiered in the spring of 1983.
Footloose, Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, Dirty Dancing and other mega-successful music-driven movies of the 1980s all owe a debt to Flashdance, an unexpectedly huge movie with no established stars and a fairly thin – but as it turned out, very relatable – plot. The film told the story of Alex Owens, a young woman who works as a welder and dreams of becoming a ballerina, but first must overcome her fear of auditioning before a panel of judges.
Irene Cara’s propulsive “Flashdance…What a Feeling” was released in March 1983 to build anticipation for the film, which was released on April 15. The song was just right for both the movie and the moment – a time when Black pop music was reaching new commercial heights thanks to Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Prince and many more star artists.
The film debuted at No. 2 at the box-office in its opening week, and spent the next three weeks at No. 1. Cara’s single reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in late May, the soundtrack album topped the Billboard 200 for two weeks starting June 25 – and a second song from the soundtrack, Michael Sembello’s “Maniac,” topped the Hot 100 for two weeks in September. That is what you call a movie/music grand-slam.
Cara, who died on Friday (Nov. 25) at age 63, had enjoyed a comparable success three years earlier, when she introduced the rousing title song from Fame. That smash reached No. 4 on the Hot 100 in September 1980. But she didn’t co-write that song – Michael Gore and Dean Pitchford did, winning the Oscar for best original song for their efforts. As a co-writer of “Flashdance…What a Feeling,” Cara shared in her second film smash’s Oscar glory.
Disco don Giorgio Moroder composed the melody for “Flashdance…What a Feeling” and produced Cara’s single. The instrumental backdrop has echoes of Moroder’s electronic film score work. But it’s warmer and more triumphant-sounding than Midnight Express, for which Moroder won an Oscar in 1979, or say, Donna Summer’s 1977 smash “I Feel Love,” which Moroder co-produced with his long-time creative partner, Pete Bellotte.
Cara co-wrote the lyric with Keith Forsey, Moroder’s frequent session drummer and a future star writer/producer in his own right, with No. 1 Hot 100 hits for Simple Minds and Billy Idol in the back half of the ’80s to his credit. Cara’s warm vocal conveys yearning and humanity, which offsets the occasional chilliness of the synthesized backdrop.
Jerry Bruckheimer, who co-produced Flashdance with his late partner Don Simpson, contacted Moroder in 1982 to see if he would be interested in composing the music for Flashdance. The two had previously teamed on 1980’s American Gigolo, which spawned Blondie’s “Call Me,” also a No. 1 hit on the Hot 100.
Cara had been somewhat reluctant to work with Moroder because she didn’t want to trigger comparisons to Moroder’s star client, Summer. “Giorgio approached me right after ‘Fame,’” she told me in an interview for Billboard that ran in the March 10, 1984 issue. “The only reason I didn’t go with him at the time was all the comparisons. But with ‘Flashdance […What a Feeling],’” we were thrown together by Paramount.”
Cara and Forsey were shown the last scene of the film, in which Alex auditions at the Pittsburgh Conservatory of Dance and Repertory, so they could get a sense of what the lyrics should be. They both felt that the dancer’s ambition to succeed would work as a metaphor for anyone hoping to achieve any dream.
“Flashdance…What a Feeling” wasn’t the first or last motivational anthem to reach No. 1, but it’s one of the best. The lyric “Take your passion and make it happen” is excellent career and life advice. Also, the line “in a world made of steel, made of stone” is an apt nod to the day job of Jennifer Beals’ welder character.
Moroder felt that the oft-repeated lyric “what a feeling” was right for the story but tried to persuade Cara and Forsey to incorporate the title of the film into the lyrics. The word “flashdance” never appears in the song – it’s a tough word to rhyme – but the words “flash” and “dance” do appear separately. It was only after the song was completed with the intended title “What a Feeling” that the word “Flashdance…” was tacked onto the title, for its promotional value.
The song wound up being used over the climactic scene Forsey and Cara had previewed, as well as during the opening credits. “Flashdance…What a Feeling” is what we hear as a young woman rides her bike through the streets of Pittsburgh just after sunrise, and as she starts her shift at the steel mill.
Cara had a good, well, “feeling” about the song. “I knew when we were recording it that we had something special with the song,” she said in an interview for BBC Radio 2’s Electric Dreams: The Giorgio Moroder Story. “Some things you just feel, you know? You can’t really dissect it or analyze it. It’s a spiritual thing that you sense, and I did sense that I had something special with this song.”
Bruckheimer also immediately sensed the song’s potential. On the Special Collector’s Edition DVD release of Flashdance (2010), Bruckheimer said, “When you first heard it, you said, ‘It’s a hit.’ It’s one of those things you just heard, and you just couldn’t get it out of your head. And it just got us all so excited. We kept playing it over and over and never got tired of it. To this day, I’m not tired of that song.”
As Cara had fretted all along, “Flashdance” drew comparisons to Summer’s hits of the era – and not just because of Moroder’s involvement. The song’s balladic opening, which segued into a rousing dance section, echoed a formula Summer and Moroder had perfected on hits like “Last Dance.” That Thank God It’s Friday highlight had won the Oscar five years earlier.
But while “Flashdance…What a Feeling” is very much in Summer’s wheelhouse, Cara sang it with an approachability and conviction that made it her own. She takes the listener on a journey from timidity and fear (“First, when there’s nothing/ But a slow-glowing dream”) to joy and abandon (“Pictures come alive/ You can dance right through your life”).
Even snarky critics were (mostly) won over by the single. Writing for Rolling Stone in 1984, Don Shewey called it “1983’s cheapest thrill… a patently ludicrous ode to instant gratification that Cara’s youthfully urgent, desperately soulful vocal rendered transcendent.”
“Flashdance…What a Feeling” was the second-highest new entry on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending April 2, 1983. Only Duran Duran’s “Rio,” first released in 1982, got off to a faster start that week. “Flashdance” reached No. 1 in its ninth week, dethroning David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance,” and stayed on top for six consecutive weeks – until it was in turn booted by The Police’s “Every Breath You Take.” “Flashdance…What a Feeling” was the longest-running No. 1 hit of 1983 by a female artist. It also was the only 1983 single to log 14 weeks in the top 10.
At the end of the year — and this is almost too perfect — Cara’s single and the film achieved identical rankings on key year-end charts. On Billboard’s year-end Hot 100 singles chart for 1983, “Flashdance…What a Feeling” ranked No. 3 behind “Every Breath You Take” and Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” On boxofficemojo.com’s accounting of the top-grossing films of 1983, Flashdance ranked No. 3 behind Return of the Jedi and a 1982 holdover, Tootsie.
When the 26th Annual Grammy nominations were announced, Cara received four nods – record of the year and best pop vocal performance, female, both for “Flashdance…What a Feeling” and album of the year and best album of original score written for a motion picture or a television special, both for Flashdance.
At the Grammy telecast on Feb. 28, 1984 – the highest-rated Grammys in history, in large part because the red-hot Jackson was expected to sweep (and did) – Cara won the female pop vocal award and shared in the award for original score. She also performed “Flashdance” as the final performance of the night.
The female pop vocal category was highlighted on the show, with performances from all five of the nominees – Cara, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Tyler, Sheena Easton and – you guessed it – Summer. Cara seemed genuinely shocked when Bob Seger and Christine McVie announced her as the winner. “Are you sure?,” she charmingly asked, before saying, “Um, I can’t believe this.”
Five weeks later, on April 9, 1984, Cara performed “Flashdance…What a Feeling” on the Oscars. She was accompanied by 44 boys and girls from the National Dance Institute. The number was sensationally staged, and was interrupted by applause six times.
When Flashdance star Beals and Matthew Broderick announced “Flashdance…What a Feeling” as the winner, Cara became only the second person of color to win an Oscar for best original song – following Isaac Hayes for his 1971 classic “Theme From Shaft” – and the first woman of color to do so.
In her acceptance speech, Cara graciously saluted a legendary lyricist/composer team that was also nominated with two songs from Yentl. “Just to be nominated with the likes of Alan and Marilyn Bergman and Michel Legrand is an honor enough.”
In the wake of “Flashdance,” Cara landed just one more top 10 hit on the Hot 100. “Breakdance,” which Cara and Moroder co-wrote to capitalize on the breakdancing phenomenon, reached No. 8 in June 1984.
It’s hard to know why Cara didn’t sustain as a successful recording artist. Her two tentpole smashes were so ubiquitous they may have simply been too hard to follow. Summer dominated the dance/pop space in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s to the degree that it was hard for anyone else to step out of her shadow. Also, 1983-84 saw the emergence of a new MTV class of visuals-forward pop artists, including Madonna, Jackson, Prince, Cyndi Lauper and Culture Club. That may have left Cara, whose two big hits had visuals defined more by their movies than her own star power, trailing a little behind.
In the interview she did with me the week after winning two Grammys, she cited sexism in the music industry as a source of frustration, even then, at the pinnacle of her career.
“It’s very hard being female in this business,” she said. “They don’t want to know that you can play an instrument, which I do, or that you can write. They want you to look pretty and sing, and I’m not about just being a chick singer.
“That’s why I have tremendous respect for Donna [Summer] and Barbra [Streisand],” she continued, “and the women who are out there trying to have some control over their own careers.”
Cara saw the frequent comparisons to Summer – who was also 63 when she died in 2012 – as rooted in sexism. “A lot of people like to rival other female artists,” she said. “I listen to the radio and I hear one song after another by all the male artists and I can’t tell one voice from the next, but no one says anything about that.”
Whatever career frustrations and roadblocks Cara encountered, her talent and charisma at her peak — as seen in her recordings and those award show performances — are forever there for all to hear and see. She took her passion and made it happen.
Daniel Vangarde has lived a fascinating life. He’s lived at least three of them, in fact.
His first act was as a producer, A&R and all-around catalyst for some of the most popular European disco and funk acts of the 1970s and ’80s, shifting millions of copies. Since the late 2000s he’s been residing and working in a Brazilian village of 750 people, teaching English, computer literacy, vocational skills and a range of artistic expression.
Somewhere in the middle he gave birth to a son, Thomas Bangalter, who also made some decent records himself.
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Vangarde (born Bangalter) helped guide the early movements of Daft Punk, at a time when the pre-Homework duo had magic in their fingertips but hadn’t yet mastered the close control of image and narrative which forged their mystique. Vangarde doled out critical advice to Thomas, Guy-Manuel and a coterie of close friends in the ’90s Parisian scene, instilling in them the requisite knowledge to play the industry game on their own terms and better enabling them to sculpt their consequential destiny.
Then followed a high-profile battle with France’s publishing and rights society, SACEM, over both restrictive practices for modern artists and historical aberrations for post-World War II remuneration to Jewish musicians. Sufficiently content with both his own success and the imprint he left on the next generation, Vangarde retreated into silence, only fleetingly emerging when required (including a trip to the 2014 Grammy Awards, where he watched his son clean up). There were no plans to issue communiqués with the music ecosystem — until now.
Following a deal with powerhouse French label Because Music, the vaults of Vangarde’s Zagora Records have been busted open. The resultant compilation, Daniel Vanguarde: The Vaults of Zagora Records Mastermind (1971-1984), out Nov. 25 on Because Music, should re-situate him in a lineage of discotheque-pleasers with a taste for suave, symphonic and Star Wars-influenced material that bristles with joie de vivre. The comp is surprisingly tight for an era which left no excess untested; it’s not a stretch to say, from the colorway of his suit down to his perm, the Daniel Vangarde peering out from the cover might just have been the model for Disco Stu.
Having undertaken the grand sum of zero English-language interviews for 75 years, Vangarde made himself available to Billboard from the deep Bahian forests for an extremely rare and rather charming conversation about it all.
One thing that’s clear across your life is a fascination with culture and society outside of your own. You produced artists from the French Antilles and the West Indies, kickstarted a cossack dance craze in the late ’60s, and latterly founded an NGO. Where does this curiosity stem from?
I always liked traveling: I spent 10 summers of my adolescence in Costa Brava [Spain], visited Swinging London, and in 1966 hitchhiked from New York down to Mexico in order to visit the Tarahumara. Life felt like an adventure.
In 1971, I happened upon Guadeloupe and loved it — the people, the place, and the local rhythmic music, biguine, which I took back to work on in Paris. Throughout trips to Kathmandu, Bali and Malaysia in the ’70s, my love for African, Arabian, South American and other music outside the French or Anglo-Saxon tradition kept growing.
What were your dreams for the world back then?
Ah, that is easy. I was curious about the globe and completely against war. I was politically active from a young age. I was arrested during the student revolution in ’68 and spent three nights in a jail cell without light. That was very frightening. They say there were no deaths but I am certain this is untrue, there was great violence. For years afterward I had to cross the street whenever I saw a policeman, you know?
You had post-traumatic stress?
Yes, yes, it was this: it was post-traumatic stress. But I stayed against nuclear factories, against the Algerian War and successfully avoided my own military service. I did not change my point of view that mass consumption is a dead-end of civilization. In 1968, we had spiritual belief in a more open future. Today we have realism about our present moment, and that is what it is.
When you were 25, you and longtime collaborator Jean Kluger came up with Yamasuki, a faux-Japanese project whose only release is still pored over by record collectors and DJs like Four Tet. Why did you decide to jump into the deep end with such a specific concept?
After the success of “Casatschok,” I was mostly considered a choreographer. Shows about kung fu were beginning to sweep through television, so Kluger and I thought about creating a Japanese dance, which we called Yamasuki, but the great sound of the music caught on more. We really got into a Japanese mindset: I bought an English-to-Japanese phrasebook, we learned phonetic pronunciation and taught a children’s choir lyrics in Japanese. We even hired a karate master to deliver a shout of death [kiai] — except he had no sense of rhythm, so I would stand in the studio, cueing him when to shout… and trembling on the other side of the mic.
As disco became popular globally, and you had French artists like Cerrone winning Grammy Awards for Best New Artist, was there any competition or jealousy? Or did you regard them as your peers?
Peers, totally. There was no competition at all. If there was any competition, in fact, it was with American and English production. I never used a mastering studio; I would be there at the Phillips factory, watching the acetate get pressed, making sure the sound was impeccable. Cerrone, he was not a friend, but we would see each other at the discotheques when taking our new records to the DJ for promotion. The same applies for Jacques Morali {the disco producer responsible for the Village People] — at this time, for the French to have success away from home was a great feeling.
Some of the records you worked on were massive. “D.I.S.C.O.” was the third biggest-seller of 1980 in Germany and the fifth in the UK; the Gibson Brothers sold millions of copies; you’ve been sampled and covered by Erykah Badu, Bananarama, Roger Sanchez — it’s a legacy of success by any other name. Did that come as a surprise to you?
I will say that when I started to make songs, I wanted to write to The Beatles and tell them that there should be five members. [Laughs] I was this certain that I could bring something to them. I imagine that maybe everybody that records hopes that his music will be understood and appreciated by the public. But even if I was expecting success, I recognize it’s a great privilege to live your life off of music.
Daniel Vangarde With The Gibson Brothers
Courtesy of Daniel Vangarde
What was your relationship to fame throughout all this?
I only did one LP as a frontman, which had the privilege of being banned on radio and television. The lyrics concerned how France is the third biggest producer of bombs and mines. Of course, that’s a state secret, so the record was buried, and I was never a frontman again. But that’s alright: I was an author, composer and producer; an artisan. I sought no fame, no show business. A reporter asked me recently: “So you live your life in the shadows?” And I said, “No! I live in the light, normally, like you do.”
Interest in the Zagora reissue is however fun to me, because I was not fashionable at all. I produced La Compagnie Créole, a very big band in the ’80s, and we could sell out three nights at L’Olympia but I could never once get a journalist to come see the show. That’s just how it was then. If it’s not chanson, it’s not serious. In France, popular music is suspicious.
By the time your career wound down around 1990, was the love for music still present? Was it a creative rupture or a decision to be with your family?
Truthfully, I was not producing music that excited me, and I thought it unwise to carry on. When making a hit my hands would become wet while mixing, and a physical sensation would overtake my belly. So if I was not feeling anything, why would anyone else? Also, there was a new generation doing dance music, and of course this was very close for me.
Yes, on that note… perhaps no one in the last 10 years has done more to kickstart the revival of disco and analog production than your son, Thomas. Why do you think that era has swept back into the public consciousness?
I can see why. Nothing replaces rhythm. Songs that you can dance to, with a melody you can sing — not rap, not techno, not even Daft Punk can compete with this human response to a good feeling. There are different chapels today: you have country radio, rap radio, rock radio, but the old repertoire has maintained.
What aggregates the masses are famous hits, and disco was the last of this kind of music. When they decided that disco was over and they started to burn the records [1979’s infamous bonfire of hate, Disco Demolition], I thought it was a joke, because I never thought happy, dancing music could possibly fade. And when disco came back, I realized it hadn’t faded after all.
Your know-how helped ground not only a young Daft Punk, but also their peers Phoenix and Air, all of whom credit your advice with allowing them to navigate the music biz and retain creative freedom.
I think all artists should have this freedom. I helped Thomas, Guy-Man and their friends as much as I could to allow them to release without barriers. They were only 20 years old and the industry could have squeezed them — a normal contract generates interference between your work and the time it’s released. I made an introduction to my English lawyer, who is still [Daft Punk’s] lawyer today, and advised them not to let the author’s rights society in France authorize their music for film or publicity. My input was to help create a good environment that allowed them to produce freely.
Daniel Vangarde
Courtesy of Daniel Vangarde
Do you think the industry is a better place for young artists now than it was in the ’90s, or the ’70s? Or is it contingent on who you are?
That’s difficult to say. I think the music industry is in a terrible situation, not because of the internet, but because record companies and publishers didn’t know how to use the internet. When I helped Thomas set up Daft Club [a groundbreaking hub for digital downloads and fan service, released in tandem with 2001’s Discovery] even then, many considered the internet science fiction for geeks. And what was the result?
They should have contracted the hackers! The best guy from Napster should have been contracted by record companies to organize a new paid system. At a time when people paid $10-20 for an LP, of course they would have accepted paying $1 instead. But the industry did nothing, music became like free air, and once the value collapsed to zero for many years, it was hard to come back from this.
In the ’70s, the artistic directors of a record company or programmers of a radio station held all the control. So I didn’t think it was good then. But I can’t say it’s better today either. It’s difficult for true talent to break through or generate wealth in the same fashion as before.
As you’ve never given interviews, your working practice from that era is lost. I mean — Bangalter now rings with a uniqueness and star quality, so why did you use Vangarde as your professional surname?
I wanted to allow future Thomas to use Bangalter! No, I chose a pen name in case I had success; I did not wish to book a hotel or restaurant and be recognized. Why Vangarde? Originally I had prepared Morane, the name of a small French plane in the early 1900s. But on the day of registration with SACEM, this was already taken, so I was given one minute to change. I quickly thought of another plane called the Vanguard, and this stuck by complete accident.
You’ve been distant from your own catalog for so long. Why now?
I’m afraid it’s not very romantic. I have known Emmanuel [de Buretel, kingpin of French electronic music] since he was 25. When Because Music showed interest in buying Zagora Records and releasing some old tracks, I trusted them, and said, “You’ll be the owner of the catalog, so if you want to, yes.” As I have never done photos or interviews, I did not expect interest at all. I could even not remember some of their choices, so I had to go on YouTube and listen back as I was certain these were not my songs! To see any reaction has been a huge shock. Because made a very good decision.
So you never considered what you’d like your legacy to be?
I think I will not die. I have songs that I did 50 years ago that are still popular. If people are happy when they hear the songs and go to dance, or go to see the bands still touring, they do not die. This is the answer of my legacy.
And are you satisfied?
Yes, I’m very happy. I have the privilege to do what I want, and a good personal life… in the shadows. [Laughs] I have a good relationship with Thomas and now I have two grandchildren. One is 20 years old and the other is 14 — I love them. I go on being free and having my health. What more can I ask for?
Doechii wears her Tampa crown proudly as the self-dubbed “swamp princess.” Since her viral debut with “Yucky Blucky Fruitcake” in 2020 prior to her signing with TDE, the Floridian has continued to create music following no clear rules. “Stressed,” her latest buzzworthy release, is a dual R&B and rap anthem, showcasing Doechii’s dynamic approach. The song incorporates a push and pull relationship with keeping her anxiety and vices at bay, backed by jazz nodes and a myriad of percussions.
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To honor her home, Honda and Billboard recreated the Tampa native’s swampland origins as the immersive set for the song’s official visual out today, directed by Omar Jones. “’Stressed’ is basically me divorcing all my bad habits,” says Doechii, “like alcohol abuse, drug abuse, and just like negative poor behaviors that I recently have quit, which is great.”
The repetition of “I must” in the chorus oddly creates a soothing melodic flow for the anxiety-ridden lyrics. “I must be lost in my regrets/ I must be down; I must be stressed…It must be so much more to life/ If I had diamonds and baguettes.” Parting from her woes, the song’s tempo picks up halfway, with the adlib “we coming for you,” reassuring Deochii’s confidence. Supported by two foreground dancers and an all-female live band, the marsh heiress continues to deliver a dominating performance beneath a canopy of suspended furniture and overgrown greenery.
When she raps, her cutthroat punch lines remind listeners that Doechii is ‘that’ girl. The versatile MC spits “Sabotagin’ me ’til I’m forced to rip the mask off/ This lobotomy is just a reflection of the last lost/ This body is in remembrance of the last lot.” Despite odds stacked against her, the rising superstar demonstrates her dominance.
As the latest release from a fiery year of anthems and EPs, fans can expect more new music and a potential album soon. “You can definitely expect an album and I don’t even know when,” she hints, “but it’ll be an amazing body of work – one of the greatest albums of all time.”
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In early September, a 23-second clip posted to Twitter teased that Kelela’s five-year break from music was soon coming to an end — and sent fans into a frenzy. The clip comprised several fan tweets begging for her comeback; one, plucked from the opening sequence of the animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender, characterized it best: “When the world needed her most… she vanished.”
After debuting in 2013 with her mixtape Cut 4 Me, the elusive, genre-bending singer upped the ante every two years, releasing her Hallucinogen EP in 2015 and then her critically acclaimed debut album, Take Me Apart, in 2017. Yet as the concurrent crises of the coronavirus pandemic and the resurgent Black Lives Matter movement took hold in 2020, Kelela says, “I think the uprising kind of led me into a place of wanting to rethink this whole f–king thing and, quite frankly, wanting to create a more liberatory model for myself.”
The 39-year-old Ethiopian-American artist born Kelela Mizanekristos has always been openly critical of the music business, calling out colorism and other issues in interviews. But what was happening in the world helped her feel more galvanized to free herself from business relationships that she felt didn’t advocate strongly enough for her artistry. In 2020, she wrote letters to the various people and companies she had business with explaining her needs, and based upon their responses — or lack thereof, from some — she cut ties, including with Sony Music Publishing. (The company responded the same day, a source says.) “Because we had an uprising, Black people now have more permission to be like, ‘I don’t like that,’ ” she says. “I am a darker-skinned, Black femme who makes left-of-center R&B/electronic music. I need to work with people who get it.”
Kelela’s music is uniquely situated between electronic dance and alternative R&B, with the music of her childhood in Washington, D.C. — ’90s R&B, soul, jazz and world, like Ethiopia’s Mahmoud Ahmed and South Africa’s Miriam Makeba — serving as key influences. She became a fixture within the rave community for the way in which she paired retro R&B vocals with futuristic club beats — and kicked it up a notch when she recruited Black queer musicians like Kaytranada and Ahya Simone to warp her lead vocals on a Take Me Apart remix album in 2018.
Kelela photographed on November 3, 2022 at Rein Studios in Brooklyn.
Jai Lennard
Throughout her career, Kelela has felt she has had to straddle two audiences: Black fans who are mesmerized by her lush R&B vocals and white fans who are entranced by her club production, thus becoming “a point of discovery for both,” she says. “That’s how I was always thinking about it.” With her long-awaited second full-length, Raven — due Feb. 10, 2023, on her longtime independent label home, Warp Records — she plans to “service the people who are there in the front row and have always been there,” says Kelela. “Queer Black people.”
On Raven, Kelela offers poignant reflections about not allowing herself to be swallowed up in her sorrow but rather celebrating her self-renewal and relishing in her resilience. “As a person who has always felt outside, there’s a deep catharsis in finding an entire social network of people who are also on the outside and making a group based off that marginalization,” she says. “When I service my immediate community, I service myself. Before, I was taking that for granted. I would be like, ‘Those people are going to always be there no matter what I do.’ And I think that’s anti-Black, or there’s some internalized sh-t there that I don’t like, and that’s not serving me, that doesn’t help me.”
She explains, while reading aloud from Wikipedia, that ravens “often act as psychopomps” known to mediate between two worlds, an idea she feels speaks to her own music. On Raven — made of self-recorded demos she later engineered herself along with different producers around the world — the moments where her vocals aren’t present can be the most powerful. In their absence, a specific blend of sensual pop-R&B balladry with atmospheric drum’n’bass beats comes into focus. Being Black is not a monolithic experience, and Kelela’s music cannot be consumed that way either. “My pursuit is to get you introduced to club music and then be able to enjoy it when there’s not a vocal guiding you every time,” she says. “You can see that I let go more.”
Kelela photographed on November 3, 2022 at Rein Studios in Brooklyn.
Jai Lennard
Beyoncé shared in that mission with her latest album, Renaissance, a dance collection with a diva house lead single, “Break My Soul,” which became the artist’s first solo No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 14 years. The release ushered legions of Black people worldwide onto the dancefloor; Kelela believes it also provided newcomers a “reference point” to her music, which they might have overlooked even just a few years ago. “I’m so happy someone like B would help Black people own this music that has been obscured and not perceived as Black,” she says.
Ahead, Kelela confirms she’ll release a Raven remix set because, like last time, it allows her to not stress about the album version of each track. And she knows her community will always be ready for more. “Queer Black people have the range — and no one else has been having the range.”
Kelela photographed on November 3, 2022 at Rein Studios in Brooklyn.
Jai Lennard
This story will appear in the Nov. 19, 2022, issue of Billboard.
Sam Hollander could never be accused of being an overnight sensation. As the songwriter/producer details humorously and candidly in his memoir 21-Hit Wonder: Flopping My Way to the Top of the Charts, publishing Dec. 6 through BenBella/Matt Holt Books, his path to the top has been a rocky one as full of set backs as success.
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Despite his humility, Hollander has become a top-tier songwriter, penning songs for Panic! at the Disco, One Direction, Kety Perry, Train, Fitz and the Tantrums, blink-182 and Ringo Starr, among others. In this edited excerpt, Hollander writes about his biggest hit so far, Panic! at the Disco’s “High Hopes.” He had co-written four songs for the band’s previous album, 2016’s Death of a Bachelor, and after initially not hearing back on songs he sent over for the follow-up, 2018’s Pray for the Wicked (a phrase Hollander came up with) he got the word to go write in person with Panic’s lead singer Brendon Urie. 21-Hit Wonder is available for pre-order through Amazon.
Over the next few weeks, me, Brendon and [producer] Jake [Sinclair] banged out eight songs. I can’t recall ever being so creatively dialed in. I just had a hunch that we were on some next level s–t. When the tunes made their way to label and management, everyone seemed pretty joyous across the board. I could sense a real buzz on the record, but there was still one massive puzzle piece missing. [Crush Management’s] JD and Evan [who managed the band] were holding on to an incredible hook and track that had been written in a hot tub — yes, a hot tub — at a “writing camp” in Colorado a couple of years previous by the über-talented Ilsey Juber, Jonas Jeberg, Cook Classics, and Tayla Parx. I can’t overstate how epic this chorus was. The first time I heard it, I was covered in goose bumps. I believe all involved originally envisioned it as the perfect hip-hop feature, which it easily could’ve been, but every single rap A&R had passed on it.
It was called “High Hopes.”
A writing camp is a small congregation of topliners and producers who spend a week fraternizing in some semi- exotic locale while attempting to craft songs for a specific artist. Publishers and labels typically kick in for these things.
So as the clock continued to tick on the record, and still feeling that it was desperately in need of a monster of a tune, the team brilliantly pulled a pre-chorus/bridge from a short-lived Brendon idea, fused it with the hot tub hook, and the foundation of “High Hopes” began to form. Nowadays, this sort of Frankenstein cut/paste thing happens on the regular, but in most cases, it rings kinda false to me. On this one, however, they completely nailed it.
It just needed verses. There were no verse words or melody. Just a long, lengthy instrumental section. I couldn’t fathom why they wouldn’t let me have a whack at it. I was totally convinced I could deliver, as I’d now written eight songs in a row with these cats for the record, but it was always radio silence when I inquired, so I let it be.
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It was the day before [my son] Joey’s twelfth birthday, and I was lying on my back porch when I finally got the go-ahead to give the verses a shot. The album was set to master within a week! I slapped my head- phones on, shut my eyes, and blasted the track on loop. I knew my job was pretty pivotal on this joint. Beyond the time sensitivity, I had to be the glue to bring this thing home. There was zero room for error.
I decided to frame it in a narrative. This meant threading the most delicate of needles — to keep it aspirational, but not preachy or contrived. The words came flooding from head to hands instantaneously. In totality, the verses took a solid thirty minutes to write, tops. The first was a conversation with my late mother. The second was a dialogue with my soon-to-be twelve-year-old. I guess in my head, the sum of the parts was the passing of the generational torch. I hoped it would drip of that ’70s lyrical optimism that I loved as a kid. Most importantly, I could see Brendon absolutely exploding on a whole other level, if he did his thing on the track. It felt like fire.
An hour later, I drove over to Jake’s house on the Silver Lake Reservoir and sang it to those cats. Evan really responded to it, which was an awesome indicator. That night, Brendon dug further into the melody and totally elevated it. Shit was a wrap.
Two months later, “Say Amen (Saturday Night)” was released as a set-up single. Unexpectedly to me, at least, it did some damage and eventually topped [Billboard‘s Alternative Airplay] chart. The Pray for the Wicked album dropped later that spring and, like Death of a Bachelor, it also debuted in the top spot. Brendon threw a party at his house to celebrate. Honestly, I was just thrilled that I made the guest list. Brendon was/is an absolutely delightful kid, but I’d be lying if I ever claimed that I was a part of his inner circle. No matter how much time I’ve spent with this legend, I still feel like somewhat of a gatecrasher.
I’m not sure anyone in the room that night knew what was in store, but Pray for the Wicked just exploded. More importantly, though, the buzz grew for “High Hopes.” People seemed to love this tune. TV shows, movies, commercials. The song was even the campaign anthem of 2020 Democratic Party presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, who played it on loop at his rallies and speeches. His staff and campaign volunteers created a goofy dance to the song and it went viral (truthfully, this was not some Debbie Allen in Fame–style shit). It was also jacked by Democratic candidates Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, and Julián Castro. Even then-president Donald Trump swiped it, blasting it at a June 2020 reelection rally. Like “HandClap,” it entered the zeitgeist, but on a substantially louder level.
In time, the song would reach [No. 1 on the Pop, Alternative and Adult Contemporary Airplay charts] , breaking a decade-plus record with its reign atop Billboard’s Adult Pop Songs radio chart, and ruling the Hot Rock Songs Chart for an unprecedented seventy-six weeks. Now, over one billion streams later, it’s hands down the biggest song of my career. It’s hard to express how in debt I am to Brendon Urie and Crush. They really gifted me the greatest year of my musical life. At the height of the “High Hopes” hysteria, the aforementioned blink-182’s “Blame It on My Youth” was a hit at Alternative as well. That was immediately followed by the release of “Hey Look Ma, I Made It,” which caught the “High Hopes” tailwind and completely smashed across formats as well. That tune ended up being my 21st Top 40 hit. I should’ve been basking in that most exhilarating of moments, but deep down inside, I couldn’t help but feel like this stretch of success was just another fleeting cycle. Like any other neurotic creator, I’ve always viewed the glass as half full and rapidly cracking. In that way, I guess I’m sort of my own self-defeating prophecy. It doesn’t matter what you achieve in this business; you can never escape the dragging self-doubt.