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A little over halfway through her newest project, RuPaul’s Drag Race superstar Alaska Thunderfuck nurses a glass of whiskey while bemoaning the circumstances she finds herself in. “Could you imagine?” she shouts. “A musical about drag queens. Who would be dumb enough to buy a ticket to see that?”
If the audience at Manhattan’s New World Stages on a chilly Monday night in November is any indication, quite a few people. Drag: The Musical, which debuted its off-Broadway run back in late October, takes the well-trodden subject matter at its center and aims to create something new — and, refreshingly, something radically honest.
This latest iteration of the show — which she stars in and co-wrote with Tomas Costanza and Ashley Gordon — has been an adjustment for the Drag Race winner. “Doing eight shows a week is kind of unhinged, and it’s much more work than I am used to doing,” Alaska tells Billboard. “But I’m also grateful that, if I’m going to do eight shows a week, it’s this show and it’s these people.”
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On its surface, the two-hour rock musical tells the story of two competing drag bars — The Fish Tank and The Cat House — as they struggle to stay open amid financial pressures. But underneath that familiar exterior is a love letter to the art of drag, and a timely coming-of-age story about self-expression and authenticity in the face of societal rejection.
Along with a number of positive reviews, the show has received one very important co-sign from venerated queer idol Liza Minnelli. The legendary performer serves as a producer of the show, and introduces the audience to the story through a surprise voiceover at the very start of the performance. “I mean, that is an actual ICON, in all-capital letters. We couldn’t be more lucky and grateful to have her fairy dust sprinkled upon us,” Alaska says. “It doesn’t get old — every night I’m back stage and I’m in a furious quick change, but I am loudly saying the words along with her. I still cannot believe it.”
The show exists within an established tradition of musicals examining drag as an art form. Over the last few decades, shows like La Cage Aux Folles and Kinky Boots aimed to present drag to an audience that may have otherwise never seen it. Nick Adams, who stars in Drag as the Fish Tank’s glamorous proprietor Alexis Gillmore, originated the role of Felicia Jollygoodfellow in the 2011 Broadway production of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert — and yet he says Drag: The Musical stands out amongst its prior counterparts as a particularly honest look at the lives of drag queens.
“This show is very representative of drag in 2024, which means it’s not specific to one idea,” he explains. “It’s not just female illusion, it’s a lot more than that, and we really capture the essence of that in a way that [musicals] didn’t before. I think it challenges people to look at what the art form of drag is outside of those parameters.”
Alaska agrees, adding that the original intension behind the story was to take the tropes of past drag musicals and flip them on their head. “I did not want the main story to be about the straight people learning about drag culture, I want it to be about the drag queens and their lives,” she explains. “You’re on the drag queens’ turf, and it’s their world, and the straight guy is the one who is constantly confused and saying ‘what the f–k is going on here.’ It’s an inversion of that formula.”
Drag: The Musical has been in the works for nearly a decade — after beginning to write the show in 2016, Alaska, Costanza and Gordon brought their vision for this story to life with a 2022 concept album, featuring stars from the world of musical theater, stand-up comedy and drag itself. The trio fleshed out the show’s script and put on a limited run of the live show at The Bourbon Room in Los Angeles, before transferring the show to its current off-Broadway home.
As Alaska recalls, the evolution of the musical has been nothing short of transformational. “The only constant has been change. Every time we put the show up, we learned more about the structure, how to make it funnier and better,” she explains. “We were changing this right up to the debut, because you just want to fine-tune everything and get it to its peak form.”
Adams, who has been involved with the project since the 2022 album, remembers early performances at The Bourbon Room, and how the bar atmosphere provided its own set of pros and cons for the show. “There was a scene in the Bourbon Room show where I was laying over top of a bar and my character is at his lowest point,” he says. “And I look down, and this woman in the audience is just chowing down on some chicken wings and drinking her beer. It was just so unique.”
That sort of interaction underlined part of the show’s charm. Where other portrayals of drag focus on the glitz and glamour of the art form, Drag: The Musical leans heavily into the fact that drag, at its core, is messy. The show’s queens (portrayed by bonafide drag stars Jujubee, Jan Sport, Luxx Noir London and others) often find themselves cramped into closets that act as dressing rooms, while early showstopper “Drag Is Expensive” breaks down the financial reality of performing in custom-made costumes night after night.
“I always felt like in movies and in musicals that deal with drag, it’s always ‘look at how fabulous everything is,’” Alaska says. “We wanted you to be able to smell the f–king bar that these queens are working in. The floor is sticky, it’s all kind of a mess. That is the drag that I come from, where you’re in the kitchen and your mirror is propped up on the walk-in refrigerator.”
Yet despite the show’s many lighthearted moments, Drag: The Musical goes out of its way to touch on real issues facing the community it celebrates. Fish Tank queen Dixie Coxworth (played by Liisi LaFontaine) spends an entire song explaining the often-complicated politics of being an AFAB drag queen (“One of the Boys”). A particularly arch portrayal of real estate investor Rita LaRitz (J. Elaine Marcos) highlights the real-life urban gentrification of queer spaces. A secondary plot involving Alexis’ brother Tom (New Kids on the Block’s Joey McIntyre) lays out the pitfalls of straight privilege through multiple musical numbers.
“That’s a tricky thing with theater — sometimes, plotting can feel so on the nose like you’re trying to check every box, that it becomes a question of ‘what story are we actually telling now?’” Adams says. “But I think we do a delicate dance between being muppets and then all of a sudden being serious performers going, ‘This is a real problem.’”
Even with a multitude of issues touched on throughout the show, Drag never falls into the trap of feeling preachy or oversimplified, a fact Alaska credits to her work with Costanza and Gordon. “I’m a drag queen, Tomas is straight guy, and Ash is a straight woman who does drag and writes music for drag queens,” she explains. “We all brought our own perspective, we trusted each other immensely.”
Perhaps the show’s most impactful plotline comes in the form of 10-year-old Brendan (played by Yair Keydar and Remi Tuckman), who is utterly fascinated by drag, but doesn’t have the unequivocal support of his family to explore why that is. In the tear-jerking ballad “I’m Just Brendan,” the young man doesn’t come out or express dissatisfaction with his gender identity — he just likes what he likes and doesn’t understand why others have a problem with a boy playing dress up.
The song was written long before the conversation of children’s involvement at drag shows became a political cudgel for right-wing lawmakers, and Alaska says that the show hasn’t changed its Brendan plotline to reflect that reality. “When I’m loving drag the most is when I’m seeing it from a childlike place of expression. So, we wanted to touch on that and connect to that part of drag, because it’s often the best part of it,” she says. “This is just a young person who wants to express himself in a way that he’s not currently allowed to. That speaks to literally everybody who’s a human person.”
Even though the show doesn’t delve directly into the current political reality for drag performers, Adams can’t help but notice that something shifted after Donald Trump won the election in early November. “I felt the shift that Wednesday after Election Day,” he says. “The crowd was electric that night. People in the audience were placing more importance on the show than they did the Monday before. Queer art is even more important than it was a few weeks ago, and we’re now almost charged with more power.”
The production, meanwhile, shows very few signs of slowing down — tickets are currently still available through March, and a number of upcoming casting substitutions promise a longevity that often alludes other off-Broadway productions.
When it comes to the musical’s Broadway aspirations, Alaska simply shrugs. “I don’t know how all of that works, it’s not my world — I don’t understand what circumstances have to happen for a transfer to happen. But of course we’d love to make it to Broadway,” she says with a smirk. “Who has a Broadway theater we can borrow? I’m ready, I’m flexible, let’s do it.”
What is yacht rock? In the new HBO movie, Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, no one can agree on a definition.
For the comedian Fred Armisen, yacht rock is “a very relaxing feeling.” But for the writer Rob Tannenbaum, yacht rock is a space where singers “could declare not just your sensitivity but your torment at how sensitive you are, your sense of being ravaged by having feelings.” He calls this “fairly unique to yacht rock,” which would be true if soul music did not exist.
How about another, more specific, definition: “One way to know if you’re listening to yacht rock is [if you hear] the sound of Michael McDonald’s voice,” according to Alex Pappademas, author of Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors From the Songs of Steely Dan. Then again, David Pack, lead singer of the band Ambrosia, calls McDonald’s style “progressive R&B pop,” while Questlove describes yacht rock as “utility more than it is music.”
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This all begs the question: If yacht rock is such a vague label, what makes it worth using?
J.D. Ryznar and Steve Huey helped coin this imprecise term in their 2005 mockumentary series Yacht Rock, long after the music it attempted to brand was out of style. Each episode traced the activities of goofy, fictionalized versions of McDonald, his contemporaries, and his collaborators — Hall & Oates love to dunk on “smooth music,” while Kenny Loggins’ character says pompous things like, “when a friend is drowning in a sea of sadness, you don’t just toss them a life vest, you swim one over to them.”
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As the yacht rock label caught on, it gave a set of younger listeners a way to explore and maybe embrace — even if ironically — music that had become a kind of cultural shorthand for uncool, the target of mainstream jibes in Family Guy and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. “For a long time, I thought Steely Dan, man, that’s just music for dorks and weirdos,” the critic Amanda Petrusich says in A Dockumentary. “You come to it jokingly,” Pappademas adds, discussing yacht rock. “But then you suddenly find yourself appreciating it sincerely.”
As yacht rock DJ nights and streaming playlists proliferated, this elevated the artists most closely associated with the style, helping to extend their careers. “I fully expected to be totally forgotten by the end of the 1980s,” McDonald says in A Dockumentary. Instead, the film shows him and Loggins collaborating with the bass virtuoso Thundercat in 2017 and performing at Coachella — one of the world’s most prominent stages.
That said: While the yacht rock label gave some artists a boost, it actually masks the lineage of the music it purports to describe. It serves as camouflage, rather than providing clarity.
Most notably, the term obscures the sizable debt that these records owe to contemporaneous Black music. Many of the tracks associated with the style are steeped in the language of 1970s R&B, conversant with Marvin Gaye‘s intricate, tortured funk, immaculate Quincy Jones productions, and the airy, wrenching ballads Earth, Wind & Fire and the Isley Brothers scattered like birdseed across the second half of the Seventies.
The dialog was facilitated by session musicians who moved easily between worlds. Chuck Rainey played bass with Steely Dan but also appeared on Gaye’s I Want You and Cheryl Lynn’s Cheryl Lynn. Greg Phillinganes handled keyboards for McDonald and Leo Sayer as well as Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder. Horn player and arranger Jerry Hey hopped from Boz Scaggs and Michael Franks to Teena Marie and Janet Jackson.
A Dockumentary nods to yacht rock’s lineage. “Yacht rock is associated with white groups and white songwriters and producers, but I know more Black yacht rock than I do traditional yacht rock,” Questlove says, pointing to Al Jarreau, the Pointer Sisters’ “Slow Hand,” and George Benson’s “Turn Your Love Around.” That music doesn’t get much play in the typical yacht rock conversation, though — or in A Dockumentary.
What does it mean that one of the strands of white music that was most in touch with the Black music of the 1970s was reclaimed largely as a joke, even if it’s an affectionate one? Armisen believes that “there’s nothing greater, in a way, for any genre to be joked about, because it means that it’s relevant.”
This may be a sensible perspective for a comedian. It’s not surprising, though, that the subjects of the wisecracks don’t always feel the same way. “At first, I felt a little insulted, like we were being made fun of,” says Loggins. “But I began to see that it was also a kind of ass-backwards way to honor us.”
Unlike Loggins, Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen hasn’t reached this stage of acceptance. When the documentary’s director asked him about yacht rock, Fagen cursed at him and hung up the phone, an exchange that was recorded and included in the film. Steely Dan’s longtime producer Gary Katz expressed a similar disinterest in the yacht rock label — albeit using less-colorful language — this summer during an interview with the music manager Scott Barkham in Brooklyn Bridge Park.
It’s not unusual for artists to express hostility towards genre terms. In fact, they are constantly saying they don’t want to be “pigeonholed” or “put in a box.” When the critic Kelefa Sanneh published Major Labels, a book-length defense of musical genre, in 2021, he wrote that artists “hate being labeled. And they think more about the rules they break than about the ones they follow.”
There is certainly a case to be made against the whole idea of summing up a large body of art in a word or two. The result is, all too often, genre descriptors that are either all-encompassingly vague or simply inaccurate. Some labels, however, are at least fairly neutral — “post-punk,” “house music.” Some, on the other hand, have negative connotations, if they’re not downright sneering at the songs they claim to describe: Take “bro country” or “PBR&B.”
As A Dockumentary makes clear, “yacht rock” still reliably elicits chuckles. But even if that humor helped these musicians gain younger followers, it often runs contrary to the tone and themes of their songs. “The term emerged from what was essentially a comedy show,” which had “a really big impact on the way that the music is now ironically appreciated,” Petrusich points out. However, “the records that [these artists] were making were entirely sincere.”
Can those records — and the artists behind them — ever be taken seriously if they’re still being laughed at? Loggins is a surprisingly versatile songwriter with a sinuous delivery and a knack for unpredictable funk. McDonald’s voice stood out even during a time when commanding voices were ubiquitous; songs like “You Belong to Me” and “I Keep Forgettin’ (Every Time You’re Near)” are essential contributions to the soul canon. But when these acts are lumped into yacht rock, they are relegated to the minor leagues, stuck as purveyors of slick chill-out music for the aging and affluent.
“I’ve made peace with ‘yacht rock,’ but for the first few years, I just hated it,” Pack says in A Dockumentary. “I’m like, ‘Why did they pick our generation to make all of our music into a big joke?’”
The Detroit Lions got a win on Thanksgiving Day – and so did Shaboozey, who was the halftime act for the first of the National Football League’s three games on Thursday.
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The seven-minute performance featured a medley of three tracks from the six-time Grammy Award nominated country singer-rapper’s latest album, Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going – “Last of My Kind,” “Highway” and, of course, “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” currently tied for the longest-running No. 1 song on the Billboard 100 at 19 weeks.
Shaboozey, sporting a Lions varsity jacket for the occasion, was accompanied by his touring band as well as a 10 local onstage dancers choreographed by Fatima Robinson, with the Lions cheerleaders on the field in front of the stage and a crowd of 500 fan volunteers behind it.
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“Our goal is to be able to bring artists and music that we feel are going to resonate with a broad audience, with families, and also try to be as culturally relevant as possible – I don’t know if that applies to any artist more right now than Shaboozey,” Seth Dudowsky, the NFL’s head of music, told Billboard after the performance on Thursday.
He said the league began considering at its Thanksgiving halftime artists near the start of the current season and chose Shaboozey around mid-September. “With the NFL of course we want to work with the biggest artists and…artists who are on the rise. So, really, this was just the perfect timing and the perfect artist.”
Shaboozey was followed on Thursday by Lainey Wilson during halftime of the Dallas Cowboys-New York Giants game in Arlington, Texas – with a surprise duet with Jelly Roll – while Lindsey Stirling did the honors for the Green Bay Packers’ home game against the Miami Dolphins at night. Millions, of course, saw Shaboozey’s segment – well-received by the crowd despite echoey sound in portions of the stadium – on CBS as they were watching the NFC conference-leading Lions hang on for a 23-20 victory over the Chicago Bears. But there was plenty viewers didn’t get to see – but Billboard did thanks to being on the spot on Detroit’s Ford Field…
Not Finally Over
The show didn’t stop when the music did on Thursday. Instead Shaboozey came off the stage and beelined for the Lions’ sideline, where he slapped hands and posed for selfies with fans along the front row – at one point hoisting himself up to get even more up close and personal. He spent a fair few minutes with the crowd and continued as he went through the team tunnel, greeting a group of U.S. Marines who served as the pre-game color guard, as well as stagehands, and posing for more selfies with fans seated in the stadium’s premium Tunnel Club.
Bruce Rodgers, the halftime show’s production designer, was not surprised by the unscripted “encore.” “Having met him, I’m not surprised at all,” Rodgers, whose Salem, Conn.-based Tribe, Inc. is preparing for its 19th Super Bowl in February, told Billboard. “He’s just a really cool dude. When you get an artist like this who’s so quickly elevated in their musical career, they still remember how to be regular folks and they want to connect.”
Rodgers added that Shaboozey was “so excited” about the halftime engagement, and also “so nervous. You could tell he was just overly excited but also super nervous, but he just kept working and working, and of course when you get in a room with 60,000 people (64,275, according to the Lions) and you’re an artist like that, it just turns on what you need.”
Raising The Bar
Rodgers and Tribe were brought in by the Lions to elevate the halftime show – a gig that was even more challenging, in some ways, than the Super Bowl.
“I’ve learned how to get a show on the field in under seven minutes and off the field in under six – that’s what we have to do for Super Bowl,” Rodgers said. “Here I have to get it on in five and a half and off in four, so it’s even more intense. And we have one tunnel here, and that’s the same tunnel the athletes have to use. So there’s a lot of coordination.”
Rodgers and company made a trek to Detroit in early November to scope out the venue and presented a selection of designs for Shaboozey and his team to choose from. The Tribe gang – Rodgers and eight production supervisors who regularly work with him on the Super Bowl – then trained a crew of 400 local stagehands and 15 local supervisors on the operation. “You start and you’re doing it in 20 minutes, and by the second day of rehearsal you’re down to five minutes,” Rodgers says of the stage, which was broken up into 10 sections and stored on the stadium’s sidelines, discreetly hidden by large square pads. “There’s a certain way to build these things in front of crowds like this. We’ve just learned techniques, and how to train folks.”
Thursday’s performance was preceded by two days of rehearsals, including having the 500 fans come in the previous afternoon. On game day things went without a hitch, with the separate sections rolled into the tunnel and packed up by the time the game finished.
Getting a Kick Out of It
While Shaboozey was on stage the Lions and Bears’ placekickers and punters came onto the field for their usual second half preparations. The Lions’ Jack Fox even did his warm-up shimmy in time to “A Bar Song (Tipsy).”
…And All The Trimmings
Shaboozey wasn’t the only big star inside Ford Field on Thursday.
Detroit resident and Lions regular Eminem was in the house, shown on the video screens during the second quarter while his “Lose Yourself” was playing over the PA. James Hetfield of Metallica – one of Lions head coach Dan Campbell’s favorite bands – was not there in person but delivered a taped prompt to fire up the crowd during the second half.
Longtime Detroiter and “old school Lions fan” Tim Allen was also at the game, visiting the sideline pre-game with his wife Jane Hajduk – a big Shaboozey fan. “We were up in Leland (Michigan) all summer, and every time ‘A Bar Song (Tipsy)’ came on they’re all dancing. She loves it.” Hajduk quickly noted, however, that “we’re huge football fans, and Shaboozey is a bonus.”
Allen is preparing for the Jan. 8 premiere of his new ABC sitcom, “Shifting Gears,” about a widower suddenly living with his estranged daughter and her teenaged children. “At my age, I know exactly what I like to do,” Allen says. “I can’t believe they found a subject I liked. I always wonder what Tom Brady said in Tampa Bay when they go, ‘Here’s the offense we’re looking at’…and he says, ‘What I need is two slot receivers that are intermittent’…At some point the jockey’s gonna have to ride the horse. But I’m excited about it.”
Fellow actor and singer-songwriter Jeff Daniels was around pre-game as well, performing a song about the Lions – “The Curse of Bobby Layne” – during the pre-game show. Daniels, who previously wrote a song called “Silver and Honolulu Blue” about the Lions’ “decades of darkness,” is hoping to record the new track for release in the near future.
“If I do the song right, maybe they’ll ask me some day” to perform for Thanksgiving halftime, quipped Daniels, whose new independent film “Reykjavik,” about U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1986 nuclear summit in Iceland, is due out next year. Daniels headed to his home in Chelsea, Mich., to watch Thursday’s game but explained that the Thanksgiving game “is as traditional as turkey for Lions fans. It’s just been in our lives since the beginning of time – or the NFL. It’s a great day – especially if we win, which we haven’t done for a long time now, even with this team. So we’re hoping today’s different.
The Lions’ victory was, in fact, the first time since 2016 that the team won the annual holiday matchup.
Chicago threw a 55th anniversary party a year ago in Atlantic City, with a little help from some friends. And the new Live at 55 gives fans a chance to be part of the celebration.
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Billed to Chicago & Friends, Live at 55 (out Friday, Nov. 22 via Mercury Studios) captures the epic 31-song performance — filmed over two nights before 10,000 fans at Ocean Casino Resort — on a variety of video and audio formats. At both shows the current incarnation of the band was joined by guest vocalists (Chris Daughtry, Robin Thicke, Judith Hill, VoicePlay) and guitarists (Steve Vai, Christone “Kingfish” Ingram) as well as pedal steel virtuoso Robert Randolph. The brassy group’s five and a half decades of hits are well-represented, and there’s no question the additional personnel injected a little more octane into the shows.
“It was interesting because we usually don’t have guest artists, much less seven of them,” trumpeter Lee Loughnane, one of three founding members (along with keyboardist Robert Lamm and trombonist James Pankow) still active in Chicago, tells Billboard. “The variety and the different flavors of their styles was quite different than what we’ve done before; it was very interesting to see and hear how they blended their expertise with what we’ve done for decades, so it was pretty cool that it all came together.
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“It took a lot of work to put it all together, but we were gonna do whatever it took to make the show as good as it can be.”
Loughnane is hard-pressed to identify specific favorite moments, but he notes that Vai, who’s currently touring with the King Crimson tribute band Beat, “was really well-prepared,” while Daughtry “was so good it was like a shoe-in, ‘This is gonna work great!’ kind of thing.”
Vai, who played on the rarely performed “South California Purples” and “Poem 58” as well as the all-cast finale “25 or 6 to 4,” adds that, “The songs gave me a nostalgic hernia. I was a teenager in the 70s and their music was all over the radio. I loved it, and it introduced me to the insanely great guitar playing of Terry Kath…I approached the songs with the idea of honoring his powerful energy, explorative nature and visceral approach.
“What was most surprising for me about the gig was how well it sounded in my inner ear monitors. Those horns were bright, stunningly in tune and tight. It was an honor and a real pleasure.”
Kingfish, who joined Chicago for parts of the “Ballet For a Girl in Buchannon” suite (including “Make Me Smile” and “Colour My World”), was not particularly familiar with Chicago before the concerts but says he was still “well aware of their catalog and the way they melded rock and jazz” and welcomed the opportunity to immerse himself a bit.
“It was a really cool time,” he recalls. “The band was so easy to work with. I not only met, but got to spend time with a lot of great musicians whose music I enjoy.”
Live at 55 was directed by Brian Lockwood and produced by Academy Award winner Barry Summers. It was screened in North American movie theaters during April.
The shows celebrated the anniversary of Chicago’s debut Chicago Transit Authority album (the group changed its name shortly thereafter), which turned 55 on April 28 of this year. The two-LP set was on the Billboard 200 for 171 weeks, setting a new record at the time, was certified double-platinum and entered the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2014, for its 45th anniversary. Chicago also won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist in its wake.
“It feels like one long tour — that’s pretty much it,” Loughnane says of the passage of time. “You and I talking now, you mention when it started, the first album, and it’s like ‘Sssssssssshop!, here we are!’ Almost instantaneous. A lot of the stuff could not possibly have happened the way it did — but it did. We’re living it, y’know?”
Since then Chicago has released 25 more studio albums and scored 29 Top 20 hits. It was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015 and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020. It’s survived through commercial ebbs and flows, while guitarist Terry Kath accidentally shot himself in 1978 and bassist Peter Cetera left, acrimoniously, in 1985. Saxophonist Walt Parazaider, meanwhile, retired in 2017 due to health reasons.
“The faces have changed; that’s to be expected after this much time,” Lamm notes. “This is our life’s work, and we still love doing it. Every time somebody leaves we find somebody new and it keeps going…because we still want to play this (music).”
Loughnane adds that, “It’s a testimony to the music, and the players that come in are not only great players unto themselves but it’s obvious that they have listened to our music and enjoyed it as they were growing up. And as we have brought people in they’ve brought their own conception of how they want it to sound. I’ve just enjoyed each guy who has come in and helped us further career.
“The big bands, the Count Basies and Duke Ellingtons, they went until they dropped,” Loughnane explains. “They kept working until they couldn’t and passed on to the next life, if there is such a thing, and there are still versions of those bands out there playing their music. They never stopped. That definitely made an impression on us.”
Chicago toured during the summer with Earth, Wind & Fire and also played at the Venetian Resort Las Vegas, where it’s been the longest-running residency in the venue’s history, selling more than 80,000 tickets during the past seven years. Chicago will be back there for another nine dates starting Feb. 28. During September it dipped into its archives for the live set Chicago at John F. Kennedy Center For the Performing Arts, Washington D.C. (9/16/1971).
And new music may be coming soon according to Loughnane, following up 2022’s Chicago XXXVIII: Born For This Moment.
“Right now music’s just being written,” the trumpeter says. “There aren’t any plans for anything brand new at this point, but I’ve got stuff I’ve been working on, and I’m gonna go home and go into the studio and see what I’ve come up with. There’s always music going on. We all write. We’re all still creative. We can always do an album; it’s just a matter of the circumstance and the timing and all the other aspects of putting an album together. But the ability is always there.”
In just two months, MEOVV has leaped onto the K-pop scene by showcasing a promising range and bold artistry set to claw out a legacy all their own.
The five-member girl group is the first-ever launched by THEBLACKLABEL, the agency founded by legendary producer Teddy with over 25 years in crafting K-pop classics by the likes of BIGBANG, 2NE1, PSY and BLACKPINK, that now houses top talent like Rosé, Taeyang, Jeon Somi and more. The excitement around MEOVV’s debut translated into a record deal with Columbia Records, millions of views on the group’s intriguing, fashion-forward teaser visuals, and bold debut single “MEOW” roaring onto Billboard’s World Digital Song Sales chart at No. 10 in September.
Despite the ultra-polished visuals and Teddy’s guiding hand, MEOVV balances raw confidence and relatability as seen in their two new singles: the energetic anthem “BODY” and emotionally charged “TOXIC.” The songs establish the five-piece’s immense range of potential, effortlessly transitioning from a fierce, pump-up track to a throbbing, electro-pop midtempo with universal emotional resonance.
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MEOVV members Sooin, Gawon, Anna, Narin and Ella’s impressive multilingual abilities — able to communicate in English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Spanish — are matched by an undeniable warmth and relatability. Speaking with Billboard from Seoul during an evening Zoom call, the members spoke mostly in English but flowed seamlessly between languages, exuding a genuine camaraderie that belied their relatively short time as a group. Even with just months under their belts as a team, the group spoke about the pride they had in their music (especially as “TOXIC” was co-written by Gawon and Narin) and hoping to be a place of comfort for fans (emphasizing how they want to be relatable and authentic).
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As MEOVV continue to prowl forward on their journey together, get to know the K-Pop Rookie of the Month for November 2024 as they share details about how they formed, advice from BLACKPINK, their inner cats and more.
MEOVV just debuted in September with two new singles in November. How have these past couple of weeks and months been for you?
GAWON: Wow. Super hectic, but very exciting.
ELLA: Where we came out with our debut only about a month ago, we got to see a lot about how we kind of are on stage in front of people so it was really a good learning period of time to see what we could do better, what we could maybe work on or keep doing. It was like a good time to learn and grow. And now we’re ready for our next release.
Can you tell us how MEOVV formed and what it was like when the five of you came together?
NARIN: We all come from different backgrounds and have lived very different lives. So when we first met at THEBLACKLABEL, we were like complete strangers. But I think we also had that strong connection to each other since we all love music — we have a strong, shared passion for music, shared vision, common interests and everything. I think it was very natural for us to connect to each other and really become a team.
GAWON: Yeah, I think that just brought us together. And then one day we just found ourselves recording “MEOW,” filming videos, preparing, and rehearsing. SOOIN unnie and I knew each other from a few years back and then we reunited at THEBLACKLABEL and it was like, “Oh my God, what the heck, you’re here!”
NARIN: And I think when we first started recording our first debut song, “MEOW,” we all have so different voices and it’s very unique, but when recording, it was all just like becoming one song.
GAWON: And I think we started to feel like, “Oh, this makes so much sense.” Like, when we were also in the studio, we just sonically made sense. At that time, we didn’t really like, know each other on a deeper, deeper level so I think through those kind of processes and preparing for our debut, we got to know each other and we bonded over that. I think it just felt right. Yeah, it felt right.
You are the first group from THEBLACKLABEL, millions of people have viewed just your trailer teasers, the “MEOW” music video earned over 30 million views. Did you feel pressure to live up to any expectations?
ELLA: I think there definitely was times of pressure, but I think it was mostly, like, excitement — we were excited to finally put out music now. But when there were moments of pressure, I think we channeled it well into working hard.
GAWON: Yeah and when there were moments of pressure, it was mostly just excitement. Like, “Yeah! We’re gonna debut! Yeah!” I think we were able to turn that into motivation and just fuel for the fire that we had while preparing to be out in the world.
MEOVV is the newest girl group produced by Teddy, a legendary producer. Were you Teddy fans or fans of any of the artists he worked with in the past?
SOOIN: We were all definitely fans.
GAWON: I came from the States, but I was still surrounded by his music growing up. It’s just everywhere.
NARIN: And his music is just so iconic.
GAWON: With the legacy that he created in music, we’re just so excited to be able to continue that as MEOVV. I love everyone and everyone he worked with — even 1TYM!
K-pop fans may have knew ELLA’s background and being close with the BLACKPINK members. How did you get to know them?
ELLA: It just came naturally because when I first came to THEBLACKLABEL, I met them when I was really young, just one time in the studio when they were working. Then while we were preparing for our debut, we got a lot of tips and advice from them so they’re really supportive. It’s kind of crazy thinking like, “Oh, I met them kind of doing what we’re doing now.”
GAWON: It really puts things into perspective. They’re so sweet and give such such great advice.
ELLA: They’ve been doing this for so long — it’s like, what better person to get advice from than them? They know it best.
In September, “MEOW” debuted at No. 10 on the World Digital Song Sales chart. Did you see the news?
NARIN: I definitely remember the moment when GAWON unnie found it out and then she told us — I think we were in the elevator, yeah —
GAWON: I was just scrolling and I was like, “Huh? What?”
ELLA: We didn’t believe her at first!
NARIN: We said, “What do you mean Billboard? What do you mean?” And then we all started cheering.
ALL: Yay, Billboard! [Cheering and laughing]
Let’s discuss the new singles “TOXIC” and “BODY.” What do these songs mean to MEOVV?
GAWON: Well these two new releases are very different from “MEOW.” The two songs are very contrasting to each other. But at the same time, they’re able to simultaneously compliment each other in a way where it just balances everything out.
NARIN: “TOXIC” is very emotional and very honest; it’s more vulnerable. We’re also more emotionally attached to this one because we wrote the lyrics. It’s been a minute since we wrote, but GAWON and I were in the studio and they just put on a random song, which was just the beat and maybe melodies for the chorus on “TOXIC.”
GAWON: Yeah, melodies for the chorus and a theme of “toxic.” This song is about being toxic and then, um, he [Teddy] left us in the studio. He was like, “Oh, I have to go do something. You guys do whatever you want with it. Have fun.” [Laughs]
NARIN: I love how the emotions that we had while writing lyrics are now for everyone to share with us.
GAWON: It shines in the music video too, it’s just a lot of shared emotions. It’s kind of like a full circle moment. We love “TOXIC.”
Would it be safe to say “TOXIC” is everyone’s favorite single over “BODY”?
NARIN: Oh, that’s very tricky because “BODY” feels like one of our members now — it’s like our friend. It’s always there in the practice room…
ELLA: It’s always there…
GAWON: …in the car. It’s this kind of energy that we just hold with us everywhere we go. Especially moments before stage, we’re like, “Let’s go, let’s go!”
How was shooting the music videos?
GAWON: Oh my god, it’s so special…both videos for each of the songs hold a very special place in our heart because It was very natural; it was very pure. Like us in our purest forms [for “TOXIC”].
ELLA: It wasn’t even like a music video shoot. It was just like, “Oh, it was like a hangout moment” and they were just capturing the moment. And then with “BODY” it’s just like, we just had so much fun; we just had so much fun having a party. We were bonding after that.
ANNA: There was a scene [in “TOXIC”] where we were just like running around the street, just playing like little girls, Everyone was watching us. Actually. It wasn’t like a set, It was just [outside] on the street and when the light green, It was like, “Let’s just go!” and then we started running, jumping, lying down. It was really nice.
ELLA: It wasn’t a [traditional music video] set, we were outside and when recording started, it was like, “Let’s just go!” and we started running, jumping, lying down.
What messages do you want to share with “TOXIC” and “BODY”?
NARIN: They’re both about our raw emotions and our authenticity.
GAWON: They’re very honest so I feel like people could look forward to that and we hope that a lot of people can resonate with both songs in these different aspects of being confident but also at the same time being able to be more vulnerable about your true emotions and your experiences.
ELLA: I hope that when people watch the music video, they’re entertained by watching us and our sort of vulnerability and emotion, but they are also like they also can kind of find that with themselves.
GAWON: Yeah, I hope they see themselves in us.
As a fun question about your concept, I’d love to know what kind of cat your members identify with one another.
ELLA: Starting with GAWON unnie, she’s such a big cat — like a leopard.
SOOIN: Or a cheetah! She has long legs too, she’s big and tall.
ELLA: And she likes cheetah print so it’s your vibe.
NARIN: And Anna Jang?
ELLA: She’s like a kitten!
NARIN: You’re like a little, white English Shorthair; that’s what you are!
ELLA: But it has to be a baby,
SOOIN: A small, shy baby, kitten.
ANNA: I agree with that. [Laughs]
NARIN: I feel like SOOIN needs blue eyes, because she loves blue, she’s obsessed with blue…
SOOIN: I love blue. [Shows blue accessories, notebook and blue phone case]
ELLA: So, a Siamese cat with blue eyes.
SOOIN: I like it.
ELLA: And for NARIN, I think you’re not a regular cat but from The Aristocats animation, what’s the one with the pink bow’s name? Marie from The Aristocats, yeah.
GAWON: She is so Marie.
NARIN: Thanks, I like that.
GAWON: You know what you are, ELLA? You are Puss in Boots — like a tabby cat.
NARIN: With the smirk.
ELLA: Yeah, I like the orange ones — that’s my personality too. I like it.
Thank you for the very satisfying answers across the board. To wrap up, looking at MEOVV overall, what are your goals and dreams as a group?
ELLA: I just hope that people will get inspired listening to our music and maybe discover more about themselves and their emotions.
GAWON: Being able to connect with more people through our music, I just want people to feel something when they see us. Whatever emotion that may be, just to share experiences and feelings together. In terms of goals, I think we just want to establish MEOVV further and just create our identity and while also keeping our own individuality.
What else should we look forward to, or do you want to share with fans now?
SOOIN: We have so many songs that we’re working on and we picked the best out of the best for this release. So, it’s just only a bit of what they’re about to show to the world. We hope that people are looking forward to us in the future!
ANNA: This time, our songs are really good so I want to show a better performance while preparing for it. In the future, I hope I can show it to the fans around the world soon.
GAWON: One last thing I would like to say is that we’ll just thank you for your continued support — all the fans and everyone who is tuning into our music.
From the moment she could crawl, Maeta was immersed in music. Spinning her father’s CDs on the living room floor wasn’t just a hobby—it was an obsession. “I’d sit there every day, pick a random CD, and just listen,” she recalls with a sheepish smile, hinting at her young age. But in that childhood ritual, a lifelong passion ignited. At seven, Leona Lewis’ “Bleeding Love” left a lasting mark, solidifying her path. “I thought I was the best singer in the world at seven—I was so trash,” she laughs, reflecting on her early confidence.
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Growing up in Indianapolis, a city she fondly calls “a breeding ground for dreamers,” Maeta was fueled by an unwavering determination. Despite limited access to a vibrant music scene, her imagination thrived. School choirs and after-school projects became her first taste of songwriting and recording. “It was bad,” she admits, “but it was the closest thing to the music industry in Indiana.” Even when her dreams felt unattainable, Maeta never wavered and her passion to be a musician was her compass.
Her journey into music wasn’t just about discovery—it was about persistence and vision. At 18, she left Indiana for Los Angeles, diving headfirst into the industry. “I spent four months in the studio, working with so many producers, every single day,” she says. It was overwhelming but formative, helping her find her sound. Even now, she remains fluid, saying, “I just did a dance project, but I’m about to go back into my R&B ballad bag. It’s fun to not always know where you’re headed.”
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Her creative process is as unpredictable as her musical direction. “Sometimes I cry, sitting in the dark for hours. Other days, I’m in a good mood,” she explains. For Maeta, the studio is a sacred space. “I like the lights off. I don’t even like to see my engineer half the time. I want to be in my little cave,” she says, describing the intimacy and solitude she needs to create.
But the path hasn’t been without its challenges. Maeta speaks candidly about the power dynamics in the industry, especially with men. “I’ve dealt with men in power trying to take advantage… that’s been happening since I was 13,” she says. Yet, she’s found a team that supports her fully. “I love my team so much… they’ve been so loyal. I wouldn’t want anyone else.”
Her journey is a testament to imagination, grit, and the unwavering pursuit of dreams. “Imagination is everything… but you need the determination to make it happen. I’ve wanted to give up so many times, but you just have to come back to it,” she admits, highlighting the resilience that has carried her through the highs and lows of her career. It’s this blend of vision and persistence that defines not only her artistry but also her personal growth. Now, her music carries a profound depth rooted in lived experience and emotional truth. “I don’t even like songs unless I feel something,” she reflects, emphasizing how her creative process has evolved. “I used to sing whatever I was told. Now, it has to mean something to me.”
This evolution mirrors her alignment with Honda’s ethos of determination, resilience, and the power of dreams. Much like Honda’s commitment to turning bold ideas into reality, she embodies the spirit of pushing forward despite challenges, finding purpose in the journey, and crafting something meaningful along the way. It’s this shared sense of vision and perseverance that makes her a natural fit for this year’s Honda Stage, a platform dedicated to highlighting artists who reflect these ideals through their stories and their music. Her performance becomes a celebration of not just her talent, but the grit and heart that have defined her journey.
Her latest song, “Back,” performed exclusively for Billboard and Honda Stage, delves into self-sabotage, an emotional vulnerability she openly shares. “It’s about when you’re your own worst enemy, especially in love. You overthink, hate yourself, and take it out on the person trying to love you,” she confides. It’s this raw honesty that resonates deeply with her audience.
Her music, much like her creative process, is a blend of spontaneity and intent, where every song carries “little pieces of me.” Maeta remains a chameleon, who finds joy in experimentation but is determined to leave an unmistakable stamp on her music. “You’re not gonna hear my song and not know it’s me.” For Maeta, collaboration isn’t just a part of her career—it’s the lifeblood of her artistry, keeping her inspired and pushing her creativity to new levels. “Artists and musicians are crazy. Creatives are just so inspiring… every time I work with somebody new, there’s just something weird about them that I love.”
Her music is a reflection of her journey, a symphony of personal growth, and the collective wisdom of her many influences. And despite the inevitable pressures of the industry, Maeta remains steadfast in asserting her artistic vision. “You can always tell when an artist is just a puppet,” she reflects, highlighting her commitment to authenticity over conforming to trends. For her, music is not just a career; it’s a lasting legacy. “I’ve been existential since I was a kid,” she confesses. “I want my music to outlive me.”
In the end, Maeta’s story is one of embracing life’s unpredictability. “Just relax. Let life happen and let it flow,” she advises her younger self—and herself today. It’s a sentiment that beautifully encapsulates her journey: a balance of vision, vulnerability, and relentless pursuit of her dreams.
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About Honda Stage:
Honda Stage is a music platform that builds on the brand’s deep foundation of bringing unique experiences to fans while celebrating determined artists and their journeys of music discovery. Honda Stage offers exclusive, behind-the-scenes music content and inspirational stories from on-the-rise and fan-favorite artists, giving music fans access to the moments they love while celebrating the creativity and drive it takes to make it big.
In November 2019, Michael Kiwanuka released his third album Kiwanuka at what felt like the edge of the world; the decade was coming to a close, and the pandemic that sent the globe into lockdown was just months away. He sings of such a place on the LP’s highlight “Solid Ground,” ruminating on how “it feels to be on your own” away from all the noise and bluster, imagining himself standing at the precipice of “where there’ll be no one around.” It was a moment and message that proved prescient.
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Kiwanuka was, by design, the singer-songwriter’s magnum opus. The record charted at No. 2 on the U.K.’s Official Album Charts and The Guardian named it “one of the greatest albums of the decade” right at the buzzer. It soon landed a Grammy nomination for best rock album, and won the prestigious Mercury Prize in the U.K.. How does one follow up an album with such acclaim?
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You don’t, Kiwanuka tells Billboard in the offices of Universal Music in London, where he is signed to Polydor Records: “All I knew is that I wanted to do something different, so that it was harder to compare. It was a good impetus to choose another direction creatively without losing who I am.”
That switch-up is his fourth album Small Changes, released Nov. 22. The London-born, Southampton-based artist retains his signature sound, blending sweet soulful grooves and melodies with elements of psych music and funk, but pares things back a touch.
He deliberately focused on making his vocals more of a presence, something he had been reluctant to do over his decade-long career. Hear it on “Rest of Me,” where his rich voice sits atop a lolling bassline and shuffling beats; in the past, additional production flushes would have guided the listener’s ears elsewhere, but here his voice stands central to the success of the song.
“I’ve got this obsession now with the idea that if a busker can play the song, and it sounds good going through a really sh-tty amp and their voice is through a bad mic,” he says. “If the song and the lyrics still move you, you’ve done the hardest thing.”
Michael Kiwanuka
Marco Grey
Kiwanuka signed to Polydor in 2011 and a year later won BBC’s Sound of… poll, a new music-focused list which has also been won by Adele, Haim, Sam Smith and PinkPantheress. He released his debut Home Again in 2012, and then topped the U.K. Albums Chart with 2016’s sophomore LP Love & Hate. His song “Cold Little Heart” appeared on the latter, and was selected by HBO to be the opening theme to hit TV drama Big Little Lies, starring Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman. The song now sits at over 307 million streams on Spotify.
It was at this time that Kiwanuka formed a formidable relationship. It came with super-producer Danger Mouse, one half of pop group Gnarls Barkley, and London-based producer Inflo, the mastermind behind mysterious project Sault, which Kiwanuka has briefly performed as part of. The triumvirate have since worked together on what Kiwanuka is calling a “trilogy” of records, across Love & Hate, Kiwanuka and Small Changes.
“In 20 years time, this will still be the most poignant creative relationship that I’ll ever have,” Kiwanuka says. He feels that the trio all met each other “right at the time when we needed it.” Danger Mouse – whose production credits include Adele’s 25, Gorillaz’ Demon Days and U2’s Songs of Innocence – found a “passion for producing records again,” and was drawn to Kiwanuka and Inflo as “two young Black guys trying to prove ourselves” in the music industry. “I had this double-whammy of my mind being opened by two different people at the same time, in different ways.”
The comfortability and confidence in that relationship has enabled Kiwanuka to make his most authentic record, and usher in a stylish new era. Small Changes’ accompanying visuals are arresting in their simplicity: the video for single “Lowdown” makes six minutes out of a lone bike rider at dusk. During his performance at Glastonbury Festival in June, Kiwanuka paid homage to his upbringing by wearing a Kanzu robe, a traditional outfit in Uganda where his parents emigrated from prior to his birth.
Kiwanuka has spoken before about his feeling of “imposter syndrome,” but that the shifting sands that the music industry is built upon now provide artists with opportunities. “They’re [major labels] nowhere near as powerful as they once were when I was starting out, running the shop and telling people what to do. It felt like everything they said was gospel. It affected how you made music, or at least affected your confidence.”
Kiwanuka points to Irish rock band Fontaines D.C. and rising U.S. guitarist and producer Mk.gee as examples of artists who have pushed past the noise to release strikingly original LPs in recent months.
“The volatile relationship of the industry has actually made it artist-friendly, because no-one knows what to do,” he says. “So they let you create and let you make records and experiment because they don’t know what to say… which is fantastic!”
Kiwanuka
Marco Grey
Building confidence in his creative output and vocals has been a journey that has been hard-won. He credits the move away from London as giving him additional conviction in his capabilities: “You hear your own voice a bit louder, but you have to have a bit more conviction because you have no choice. You don’t have as much to compare it to.”
What would he tell his younger self, the one eager to please the public, his label and to meet his own personal standards? “There’s strength in your voice. People always try to tell you but you don’t hear it,” he says. “You’re always accepting advice from other people so you always think the validation is going to come from outside, and then one day you realize it’s not.”
He adds, “I was always trying to sound like my favorite singers, or [thinking] that [my vocals] weren’t good enough. But now I think I just want to sound like me.”
As Billboard speaks to British dance duo Maribou State, who are readying to release their third album Hallucinating Love, an epiphany strikes the pair. Liam Ivory reminds his longtime friend and bandmate Chris Davids, that we’re speaking on the year anniversary of the day that Davids had life-changing brain surgery.
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In late 2021, Davids began suffering from debilitating headaches and was often struck down with crippling pain. He was eventually diagnosed with a chiari malformation which, he explains, is when the lower part of the brain herniates into the spinal canal putting pressure on the brainstem and spinal fluid. The American Association of Neurological Surgeons estimate it impacts less than 1 in 1000 people. It is an injury that is perhaps not well suited for someone who needs to be locked to the intricacy of music production, or peering into a laptop screen trying to piece the whole song together.
“It had a profound effect on the music,” Davids tells Billboard of the LP, which was written and recorded as they worked their way through multiple challenges on the personal front. “A lot of the music was shaped around the theme of struggle, and creating to remove yourself from a difficult period and projecting into something that’s brighter and more hopeful.”
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Hallucinating Love arrives after a particularly torrid period since their last LP, 2018’s Kingdoms in Colour. That record, which included a collaboration with Khruangbin, landed at No.25 on the U.K. Official Albums Charts and its songs collectively boast over 271 million streams on Spotify. The tour ended with a sold-out show at London’s O2 Academy Brixton (5,000 capacity) and saw growing headline gigs in North America and mainland Europe.
Maribou State
Rory Dewar
The pair got their start in 2011 releasing their Habitat EP on Fat Cat Records, and would later release singles and EPs on Fatboy Slim’s Southern Fried label. They later signed to beloved London-based dance label Ninja Tune, home to releases by Bonobo, Barry Can’t Swim and Peggy Gou, and released their debut album Portraits in 2015, which stars “Midas,” a single was certified Silver by the BPI and sits at 152 million streams on Spotify. Elsewhere they’ve remixed records by Lana Del Rey and Radiohead during their decade-long career.
When Maribou State’s last tour concluded in late 2019 and the world went into lockdown soon after, the problems began. The pair had lived a high-octane life on the road, hopping from city to city, partying, neglecting themselves but putting on bigger and better shows. The confines of being at home impacted their wellbeing and pulled into focus mental health challenges that had been pushed to one side. Davids was battling insomnia and was coming to terms with an ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder), while Ivory was living with increased anxiety.
Even so, their star grew on social media and streaming despite a period of inactivity; next year, they’ll headline three shows at London’s 10,000-capacity Alexandra Palace, and take in prestigious North American venues including New York City’s Terminal 5 and Toronto’s History.
Hallucinating Love (released Jan. 31, 2025) has emerged as their most thematic and sonically cohesive record to date. Their sound, which fuses psych-rock, funk, retro-soul and banging beats, is warmer, looser and more attention-grabbing than anything before. “Other Side” with key collaborator Walker is as direct a pop moment they’ve ever had, while “Peace Talk” has the feel of an undiscovered cult classic, such is the majesty of the swelling string refrain.
As they release their new single “Dance On The World,” the pair tell us about their difficult period, the pressure of being on the road and staying loyal to their collaborators.
It’s been a six-year gap between the release of your last two studio albums. When you finished touring Kingdoms In Colour, were you anticipating a break like this?
Liam: It took us by surprise. Historically we have taken quite a while to write albums compared to other artists, but through a number of things happening in the world and in our lives personally it just took a hell of a lot longer than we anticipated. There were times where it felt like it was never going to happen.
A lot has happened between lockdown, medical issues and focusing on your mental health. How do you look back on the experience in totality?
Chris: With mixed feelings to be honest. It was a really important process for us to go through, personally and creatively. We learned a lot about ourselves in that time. We’re grateful that we were in a position where we were able to press pause for a minute during the writing process, and to look after ourselves and not just push through and break ourselves when doing it.
Liam: We’re also lucky to be able to say that things are in a good place for us now. It’s easier to look back with rose-tinted glasses on as we managed to find a way through that period which we might not be able to do if we were still struggling. It’s nice to be able to box that off.
The adjustment from being on the road to being back home was clearly difficult…
Liam: When we were touring we weren’t looking after ourselves very well and we were partying quite a lot. So transitioning back to normal life either way would have been difficult, but we landed right at the start of the pandemic. We went from touring on a super high-octane lifestyle to being shut at home.
We were quite separate at that point, too. I’d just moved in with my partner and friend; Chris was back home with his family. We came back together when things eased up and started working together and then it became a very supporting relationship.
Chris, can you share more details on what you’ve had to go through?
Chris: In 2021, I started getting these chronic debilitating headaches. We were staying over at the studio one time, and I remember I woke up one morning and when I stood up I was bent over in pain. I got an MRI scan and a few months later I got diagnosed with a chiari malformation.
That was a shock. We’d been going really hard to make this record but we were both not really in the right place to be doing that. We weren’t feeling super creative and we were doing it for the sake of doing it rather than because we wanted to. Getting that diagnosis gave me a reason to take a break, so we both had a good few months out at that point.
I was trying to plough through and I’m someone who doesn’t like to admit defeat. In reality, it’s something I should have just got sorted and then came back. But it’s hard to push aside something that you love doing.
Liam, It must have been hard to see your friend go through that?
Liam: Yeah, the thing with Chris is that he’s so bloody stoic so he would just push on. We’d be in sessions and then he’d keel over in pain and just say ‘give me a minute’ and then shrug it off. I didn’t know what to do as it didn’t feel like we should be carrying on… but he was up for it and there was a deadline looming. Some additional insight into how little Chris will admit defeat: when he was in hospital, he was commenting on the artwork, replying to emails like a week or two after surgery. Just crazy.
How did this period inform the music you ended up writing for Hallucinating Love?
Liam: When we write we usually hire an Air BnB, take our studio and some collaborators and hash it out until we have the ideas. Those trips are peppered throughout the period that we recorded the album in. Looking back, one or two of those trips were really difficult; none of us were in a good headspace at all, really low mental health, really struggling. Ironically the songs that came from those sessions are some of the most hopeful and uplifting, but they’re really specific to a moment and you can put yourself back into that time.
You’ve mentioned that “Blackoak” is a bit of a love letter to the British dance scene. How did that manifest itself?
Chris: Over the years mine and Liam’s tastes have been very broad. We were into lots of different things and Liam was into loads of hardcore, metal and punk, but the one thing we always aligned on was dance music and artists like Prodigy, Aphex Twin and some British scenes like happy hardcore. We went to [Warwickshire dance festival] Global Gathering, to [London club] Fabric and then also saw Daft Punk live together. Over the years we’ve made club-influenced music but influenced by more contemporary stuff like future garage, but “Blackoak” felt like more of a homage to what we listened to growing up.”
There’s also familiar collaborators like Holly Walker, but new names too with Andreya Triana. It must be nice to have developed a consistent community around yourself?
Liam: We’re not ones for setting up random sessions with people and seeing how it goes. We need to have a relationship with them first. The way we write music is quite a long arduous process for us, and you need to be around people you really connect with.
Chris: The whole connection thing is so important. Because we’ve tried lots of sessions with other vocalists and nine times out of 10, it doesn’t work. We had a collaboration with Khruangbin on the last album and I’m so glad we got it to work in the end, but it was lots of sessions we had to do over a long period of time. Like Liam said, there’s something to feeling comfortable and once we’ve established a friendship, things can be so much more fluid.
Holly takes the lead on a number of tracks, and you’ve worked together on several songs now. What is that bond like?
Chris: We just clicked with Holly. She’s incredibly funny, really intelligent and an amazing lyricist. We wrote a couple of songs that got put on the first record, and we struck up a good writing relationship from there. And it’s definitely not been a totally easy relationship over the years, there’s been a lot of push and pull and quite strong creative forces on both sides, but I think that’s what has created such great music between us.
You mentioned touring taking its toll last time. How are you feeling about getting back out on the road?
Liam: One thing we navigate is being several years older and being in very different places in our lives and trying to protect a quality of life. Although we’ve not been out touring yet, there’s a lot of conversations about what it’s going to be like and how we’re going to get through it. It’s going to be a very different affair to when we were out last time in 2019.
And you want to create as great a show as you can, right?
Chris: There’s such high expectations of what a show should look like in terms of production and everything that’s put on both on stage and behind the scenes. Not just musically. It’s also more of a challenge to create content because labels want so much more from the gigs, so there is that pressure that touring costs a lot more but also you need to spend a lot more to meet the standard. You can’t just do an Oasis and go out and stare at your shoes and a couple of lights in the background.
Liam: We’re also so fortunate that the fanbase feels more tangible than it ever has. We’ve been lucky that over the years, even when we’ve taken a break, it’s just grown and gone from strength to strength in parallel while we were struggling personally. It’s made us even more committed.
Between the triumphant, box office-topping Bob Marley biopic and the long-awaited release of dancehall legend Vybz Kartel, Jamaica has had a lot to celebrate in 2024. This year also marks the ten-year anniversary of Where We Come From – the landmark 2014 debut studio album from Popcaan, one of the most important dancehall artists of the past decade and half.
Following early Stateside crossover success with heaters like “Only Man She Want,” “The System” and “Unruly Rave,” Popcaan released Where We Come From via Mixpak Records, the Brooklyn-based indie label founded by record producer Dre Skull. Upon release, Where We Come From became the first of Popcaan’s five consecutive projects to reach the top three on Reggae Albums. According to Luminate, Popcaan has moved over one million career album equivalent units, with Where We Come From accounting for 130,000 of those units.
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To commemorate ten years of Popcaan’s debut, Mixpak has released a new deluxe edition featuring three previously unreleased songs: “Beat the Struggle,” “Don’t Finesse Me” and an acoustic version of the set’s title track.
“Part of me wonders why the hell they weren’t a part of the original album,” Dre Skull tells Billboard. “It’s exciting to dust off some songs from that era and share more about what was happening in the studio and in Popcaan’s head at the time.”
As executive producer of Where We Come From, Dre Skull developed an incredibly intimate partnership with Popcaan. The two dancehall maestros first crossed paths in 2010 during the recording sessions for Kartel’s Kingston Story, the first full-length release for Mixpak. Though they met before “Clarks,” a globe-conquering collaboration between Popcaan and Kartel, dropped, Dre Skull instantly recognized Popcaan’s “natural star power.” By the end of 2011, he signed Popcaan to a three-single deal that yielded “The System,” a song that combined the politically conscious lyricism of roots reggae with the bombastic tempos of dancehall, laying the groundwork for an album that would usher dancehall into a new era.
Around the time Popcaan signed that initial deal, Kartel, his mentor since he joined Gaza Music Empire in 2008, was arrested for cannabis possession. That charge would trigger a decade’s worth of legal ordeals, including a life imprisonment sentence for a murder charge that would take until 2024 to overturn. With his mentor imprisoned, there was an opportunity for Popcaan to assume the leading role Kartel had occupied for years – but this time with a twist that prioritized emotional vulnerability and melodic delivery over brash braggadocio. Dre Skull started conversing with Popcaan’s team about a larger album deal around the end of 2012; though he encouraged them to pursue deals with majors should they be offered, his work with Kartel and on Kingston Story earned the trust of both Popcaan and his team, setting the stage for the first of two Mixpak-backed Popcaan LPs.
Contrary to America’s most dominant genres, dancehall’s affinity for the album as an artistic statement is relatively recent; dancehall albums are often compilations of an artist’s hottest songs from the past few years. “As a fan, I love that, but the press was not giving their full attention to pure singles,” Dre Skull says. “You’re going to be hard pressed to get on the cover of The Fader with just the hottest single. I’m not saying it’s never happened, but it’s rare.” Kartel did end up landing the cover of The Fader for Kingston Story, as well as a print feature in the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times. Those PR wins provided a blueprint for Popcaan’s Where We Come From rollout – and foolproof confirmation that a fully realized LP was the best way to formally introduce and break Popcaan in America outside of hubs of Caribbean immigrants like New York City.
Ten years later, Where We Come From still stands as a stunning amalgamation of mid-2010s dancehall and the boisterous dance-pop that dominated top 40 at the time. “Everything Nice,” the album’s lead single – which was originally recorded on a completely different beat, according to Popcaan — slyly combines elements of dancehall’s sunny synths and drums with the languid emo-rap vocal stylings that were beginning to creep into mainstream hip-hop at the time.
There’s also “Waiting So Long,” a pop-dancehall fantasia that casts Popcaan as the conductor of a kaleidoscopic orchestra of syncopated handclaps, stirring strings, ethereal chimes and tinny synths that keep the track in lock-stop with the electro-pop of the times. Those EDM-adjacent flourishes also pop up on “Addicted,” a song tucked away in the album’s back half that flaunts Popcaan’s knack for catchy pop melodies that don’t betray the roughest edges of standard dancehall delivery.
“There’s so much subtlety. Because of his mastery with melody, his songs can be catchy in different ways,” says Dre Skull, who produced five of the album’s 13 tracks. “For a certain subset of songs, my view was the riddim should almost contrast with that.
Where We Come From was impressive upon its debut – and remains so – because of how deftly Popcaan balances the record’s party moments with its stints of introspection on tracks like “Give Thanks,” “Where We Come From” and cinematic album opener, “Hold On.” After impressing Dre Skull with his grasp on weightier topics like violence, poverty, remorse and guilt, the Brooklyn producer “had a feeling the melody and the chords on ‘Hold On’ would resonate” with Popcaan. And they did. “Everything we still get the minimal/ Society still treat we like criminals/ But one day we’ll be free at last/ Jamaica,” he croons at the end of the song’s first verse.
“At the time of creating Where We Come From, I said exactly what I wanted to say and sang about how I was feeling,” Popcaan tells Billboard. “I just wanted to touch people’s hearts while being real. I always try to motivate the yutes who are still in the struggle to never give up, and in doing that through music you expose some vulnerability.”
For Dre Skull, “Hold On” felt like a “mission statement.” “Some of those songs are like hymns,” he muses. “He’s giving music to help anyone get through their hardest day or week. At the same time, he’s singing hymns that are based on things going on in his life. I have come to see that he’s writing those for himself, and they serve a purpose internally.”
Notably, Where We Come From houses just one collaboration, the Pusha T-assisted “Hustle.” Popcaan and Pusha previously worked together on 2013’s “Blocka,” and the Virginia Beach rapper was the only artist he reached out to while making the album. “Sometimes it might make good business sense or a be a good look [to have big-name features on an album] – but this was a very important building block in Popcaan’s career. We wanted it to be a reflection of who he was,” notes Dre Skull.
Arriving on June 10, 2014, Where We Come From materialized at the same time the music industry was on the precipice of a culture-shifting transition to streaming as the dominant form of consumption. Billboard started incorporating YouTube data into its chart rankings the year before Where We Came From dropped – but Dre Skull was already familiar with just how important the video-sharing app was to the dancehall ecosystem. He remembers a digital scene dating back to 2009, where kids in Brooklyn would run YouTube channels like music blogs, uploading the year’s hottest dancehall singles to their tens of thousands of followers. “Dancehall artists and their managers were paying those teenagers to upload their music, because they wanted to be part of that stream of consumption,” he recalls. “It was a similar thing to rap’s mixtape era, where there was all this unmonetized and uncheckable consumption happening. Those artists weren’t getting money off those streams, but they were getting show bookings.”
Following the strategy they employed with Kartel’s Kingston Story – Dre Skull notes they were an early adopter of uploading lyric videos for every song on an album – Mixpak capitalized on Popcaan’s YouTube pull with complete uploads of his early radio interviews, “Unruly Clash Wednesdays” series (a weekly showcase for burgeoning deejays to battle-test their skills in front of live, participatory audience) and commercials compiling the album’s rave reviews. Though streaming would truly explode by the time Popcaan’s sophomore effort, 2018’s Forever, rolled around, the inroads he made on those platforms with Where We Come From set the stage for streaming juggernauts like 2020’s Drake and Partynextdoor-assisted “Twist & Turn.”
In the ten years since he dropped his debut album, Popcaan has morphed into one of the most recognizable dancehall stars of the 21st century, working with everyone from Chris Brown to Burna Boy. To date, he’s earned over 1.7 billion official on-demand U.S. streams – a testament to his remarkable ability to sustain crossover success.
“Popcaan showed how to be a successful artist in this new era,” proclaims Dre Skull. “He’s proven to be a very strong operator who knows how to follow his own vision for his career instead of another person’s template. With [Where We Come From], he showed other dancehall artists that albums are important and reminded them that they’re a very good way to push your career to career to new levels. More people are putting out proper albums as an artistic statement and not just a compilation of previously released singles. And musically, he also showed that you can make a serious album and not go chasing hits but still end up with some.”
As dancehall figures out where the genre is headed next, other stars looking to emulate Popcaan’s success would do well to revisit Where We Come From and its pivotal rollout. Though his focus is currently on celebrating the 10-year anniversary of his debut, Popcaan has new music on the way with Dre Skull. Now signed to Drake’s OVO Sound label, Popcaan and Mixpak formally parted ways in 2020, but their work together continues to inform the future of both Popcaan’s career and dancehall as a whole.
“We made a classic,” exclaims Popcaan. “A timeless and boundary-breaking album that still resonates today. 10 years later and still going strong!”
Just as the The Waitresses‘ “Christmas Wrapping” captured the melancholy and romance of spending the holidays alone — making it a holiday-playlist perennial, Cat Cohen has recorded, Overdressed, an album of 10 original songs that mines the comedy of single life today, including the kind of sloppy end-of-year merrymaking that lives on in nightmares and brunch conversations.
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While Overdressed, which drops on Nov. 15, is not strictly a holiday album, it does take the stuffing out of office Christmas parties and the boorish behavior that takes place at them in songs such as “Plus One,” “Time of Year” and the inevitable self-help delusions accompany new year’s resolutions in “Just Bought a Journal” and “Blame It on the Moon.”
“I’ve been doing cabaret songs in my standup act for a really long time, and I’ve always wanted to do poppier versions of them — fancier, fun tracks,” Cohen says. “The holidays seemed like a good way to get into that celebratory mood. I had a bunch of songs that fit within the holiday theme somewhat and thought, this is a fun little idea.”
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That said, Cohen’s idea of fun, as expressed on Overdressed, would have made Bing Crosby drop his pipe. After “four to six glasses of wine” at an office holiday party, the star of “plus one” gets pretty granular recounting the time she had sex on a boat. And in the future Instagram-generation anthem, “Can You Send Me That?,” she ends up going home from the club with a foot fetishist in a fedora. “Thankfully no one took any pics,” she sings.
Before anyone thinks the characters in Overdressed have set women back decades, Cohen throws herself into “Time of Year,” a song that would fit on the soundtrack of Black Christmas — pick your version — or any other Christmas-themed feminist slasher movie.
“When you wake up in that hole wondering how you got so low, know it’s you touched my lower back at a party four years ago,” Cohen sings. “And when I see your friends, cuz it’s that time of year when the boys will close down the bar, I’ll let them know with my eyes, there will be no surprise. If you touch me, I’ll destroy your life.” (Spoiler alert: the guy in the hole doesn’t make it.)
On the eve of Overdressed‘s release, Cohen spoke to Billboard about the inspirations behind the music, many of which came from personal experience.
Why record a comedic holiday-themed album?
Comedically, the holidays are a great thing to mine for jokes.
Were any of the songs on Overdressed inspired by your actual experiences?
Unfortunately, they all are.
Okay.
The story of the guy asking to see my feet at the club. That’s true. The story of the sex-on-a-boat situation as mentioned in “Plus One.” I’ll heighten things in my act or change details, but I’m always pulling from real life, for better or for worse.
I was going to ask you if you really had sex on a boat and was sand involved?
Sure. Give it a go. Try it out. I want to encourage all my listeners to try it out. You know how the floor of a boat is always wet and sandy. Something must have gotten lost in the mix.
Office parties are always great fodder for comedy. Is “Plus One” based on any particular experience?
I wrote that song pre-pandemic. I often see pictures of these totally lavish parties these companies would throw. I was like, “Wait, just because I don’t have an office job doesn’t mean I should be left out.” Big parties are coming back, so this is my formal plea to be invited to yours. I want a seafood tower, I want a DJ, I want specialty cocktails.
Songs such as “Blame It on the Moon ” and “Just Bought a Journal” seem to be more about the contemporary tropes we buy into that we — usually mistakenly — think are going to be a path to self-improvement.
Totally. I’m just fascinated by how we’re all obsessed with bettering ourselves. I make fun of all this stuff but only because I’m doing it as well. I have paid so much money to astrologers, healers, psychics — because I’m obsessed by it. The same with the journal. Especially on New Year’s Day, you’re like, “Wow, I think this journal is going to change my entire life.” So I thought that would be a relatable point for people.
And then you stop journaling before January ends.
Exactly. A few years ago I bought one of those five-year journals where every day, you’re supposed to write a sentence. It stopped like the 18th of January.
Did an astrologer actually ask you to dip your nipple in…
Yes, yes. This is a while ago. We were talking about drinking. I was like, “I think I’ve been drinking too much.” What should I do? She was like, “You should have some sparkling water. Drink sparkling water. Play around, feel it. I don’t know, put your nipple in it.” I was like, “Wait, did I just hear you right?”
Good lord. The album spans a few different genres of music. It starts out with kind of a disco feel, and there’s a bit of Prince-y funk. But you’re also doing some sort of cocktail music. Are those genres your touchstones?
Before I went to the studio, I was listening to a lot of ’90s Spice Girls. Beyond that, when I’m writing a comedy song, it’s like, “h, if you’re talking about some grotesque thing, maybe we’ll make it a love ballad.” Juxtaposition is always interesting to me. The genre I use is just to comment on the message of the song, and what joke I’m going for. That’s why it spans so many different little bits.
Are you going to be touring at all behind this release?
This album is like, half old songs that have already been in my specials and half new. I think I’m going to wait until I write my next hour of comedy to go on tour. I just finished a tour at the end of the summer. So, I’m going to start fresh in the new year, and then hopefully, incorporate some of these newer songs in my next show. I’ll probably not be touring for a few months.
You were in the current season of Only Murders in the Building. What character did you play?
I play one of the Brothers sisters.
You did? Looking at the photos from this album release, I did not make the connection.
I hope I’m a transformative actor, so I appreciate that. Especially living in New York, Only Murders in the Building was a dream gig — working my comedic heroes on a show that everyone watches. I’m waiting for the next big gig, so I’m manifesting, obviously — a massive role for the new year, this interview.
And seeing an astrologer about it as well.
Always, always.
Cat Cohen
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