State Champ Radio Features
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On May 3, 2021, Rob Toma got the call he’d been waiting for. A staffer from the office of New York City’s then mayor Bill de Blasio was getting in touch to inform Toma that live events would be allowed to resume the next month, as the pandemic waned. Toma hung up, and for the next two weeks, barely slept.
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Instead he booked shows, putting 13 events on the calendar for when venues reopened to full capacity. Lineups included The Martinez Brothers, Michael Bibi, Sven Vath and Loco Dice playing in a cavernous (and also packed), Brooklyn warehouse — the venue format that’s defined Toma’s company, Teksupport, since he started throwing parties under the name back in 2010.
“Since [after the pandemic], we’ve been gaining a lot of real momentum,” Toma says, “and we really kind of just [kept] turning it up.” This year, Toma and his 20-person, Brooklyn-based team have put on 164 shows at venues including 99 Scott, Brooklyn Army Terminal, Brooklyn Navy Yard and various warehouses. In the four days surrounding New Year’s Eve, the company will produce six events. Talking to Billboard over Zoom, Toma is tired — “it’s come to a point now where it’s very, very intense … I just don’t sleep, actually” — but focused.
“10,000 is the new 5,000 and 5,000 is the new 2,000,” he says. “We’re doing like, 25,000 to 30,000 people a month now.”
Toma was born in Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood, the son of Egyptian immigrants. His first job was at his grandparents’ bagel shop. He was then a busboy at a catering hall run by his uncle. When the hall hosted a teen night, the lightbulb turned on. “‘What the hell is this?’” he recalls thinking. “Like, I could do this.”
He was right. Toma started hosting dry events for teens at the hall, then graduated to New York’s club scene, working his way through venues like the Chelsea mega-club Crobar. In 2010, he took his first trip to Ibiza (“I was like, ‘What the hell is this?’”) then traveled to Germany, where he had his mind blown at Time Warp, the fabled house and techno festival.
Energized by Time Warp’s musical offerings — “In America, it’s usually like nine EDM stages and a dubstep stage, this had all great artists” — he got in touch with the festival’s owner, Steffen Charles, to see about bringing the event across the Atlantic. As Toma recalls, Charles’ response was icy: “I’ll never do New York. America is not ready.”
It took a few years, but Toma convinced him otherwise, and in 2014 Time Warp made it’s U.S. debut in Brooklyn. The show was a logistical nightmare. Toma lost his license for the Brooklyn Armory days before the festival, having to relocate to another venue, The Shed. The event lost $400,000. Toma considered it a success.
“It was just kind of a dream,” he says. “I looked at it as, ‘This is not a loss, this is an investment.’”
The event helped Teksupport distinguish itself as the company that European brands could trust to introduce their shows to U.S. audiences. Toma and crew could draw the right crowd, book the right artists, pull the right permits and, particularly as an independent operator, provide an experience with “heart and soul,” and a staff that would do anything to pull off a party. (He recalls convincing a friend to let him use the warehouse of the friend’s family business, Utz Potato Chips, for a show, hauling seven tractor trailers worth of chips out, then back in when the event was over.)
In 2016, Ibiza born techno party CircoLoco made it’s U.S. debut in partnership with Teksupport. In 2022, the company presented techno legend Ricardo Villalobos’ first solo New York City show. Last month, the company brought Eric Prydz’s HOLO show to New York City for the first time since 2019. This past weekend, Teksupport hosted the first U.S. events from Dutch dance producer DGTL in New York City and Los Angeles. (Toma is a partner in Stranger Than, which puts on parties in L.A.) The company also books a litany of international producers who less-commonly play the city’s EDM-focused festivals and clubs. (Toma is also a partner of the Manhattan club Nebula, and the invite only Hearsay.)
With its efforts, Teksupport has both catalyzed and capitalized on house and techno’s surge in popularity in the U.S. in the wake of EDM. These so-called “underground” genres are now, by dance scene standard, anything but, with parties from Burning Man to Art Basel focused on the sounds. As they’ve bled into the world of fashion and video games, Teksupport has forged a presence in those realms as well. Toma says one of the most surreal moments of his career was being in a motion capture suit while filming his cameo for Grand Theft Auto V. (Teksupport works closely with GTA creator Rockstar Games, which has a partnership with CircoLoco that has resulted in appearances, radio stations and soundtrack contributions by producers including The Blessed Madonna and Moodymann.)
Despite the cultural cachet, Toma says Teksupport is still a family business, made up of many staffers who’ve been around since day one — along with his actual sister, brother and cousin. He and his business partner Mike Vitacco have been best friends since high school, with Toma handling promotion, marketing and bookings, while Vitacco handles licensing and operations. Given the company’s growth over 2023 in particular, Toma is planning to expand the company by bringing in new employees from locations around the world who are steeped in their respective scenes and fans of Teksupport. (He says this is preferable to “recycling people from other producers’ businesses in the space.”)
“You’re only as good as your last show,” he says. “So you’ve got to figure out how to keep it going. That’s my M.O.”
He’s also got another big event on the horizon. On January 3, after Teksupport’s back-to-back (to-back-to-back-to-back-to-back) New Year’s Eve shows, Toma and his two kids — daughter Celine is six and son Rob is 9 — are flying to the Caribbean for a two week vacation. Toma has a plan for how to finally relax.
“I’m just literally not bringing my phone,” he says.
“I forgot to wear the knee pads,” Karol G says ruefully. “I’m going to have scrapes.”
She beams. For a soaking wet pop star who has just been dragged through a shallow pool, Karol looks remarkably happy.
Moments before, a group of writhing, shirtless male dancers had lifted Karol, dressed in a white bikini and transparent baggy pants, high above the water as she performed a medley of songs from her unprecedented past year in music, including material from her chart-topping February album, Mañana Será Bonito; the edgier August follow-up, Mañana Será Bonito (Bichota Season); and a small teaser of her new single with Kali Uchis, “Labios Mordidos.” Her arms knifed back-and-forth through the pool in fierce synchronicity with her platoon of dancers — all water-drenched sexiness, but a punishing physical routine nonetheless. After Karol dries off, wrings out her pants and gets her glam touched up, she’ll do it all over again.
“I want it to be spectacular,” she says matter-of-factly of the roughly four-minute Billboard Latin Music Awards performance. To that end, she enlisted renowned choreographer Parris Goebel, whose work includes Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime show performance, to continue pushing her as a dancer. “Dance doesn’t come so easy to me,” Karol admits. “To do the things I do, I have to rehearse a lot.” Earlier this year, Goebel choreographed Karol’s MTV Video Music Awards performance.
“She understands what I want to express in my movements, and also, she gets something out of me that I’m still in the process of understanding,” Karol says. “I’ve learned a lot about myself this year. Even though it would seem I’ve arrived at a point where I could relax and let things run, life keeps showing me that I’ve still got a lot of things to do, a lot of things to give.”
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Twenty-four hours later, Karol is calm (and dry) in a quiet Los Angeles studio, talking with her usual expressiveness and candor in sentences punctuated by crescendos, accents and exclamations and augmented by enthusiastic gesticulations. In her many music videos, Karol usually presents one of two ways. There’s the bichota, or badass, sexy and powerful and not afraid to show it. And then there’s the smiling (or occasionally melancholy) girl next door who enjoys celebrating love and doesn’t shy from displays of vulnerability. In person, the young woman born Carolina García in Medellín, Colombia, is all those things, but she’s also warm, exuberant and disarmingly earnest, a demeanor that has remained intact through my many encounters with her over the years, even as her popularity has soared.
Her hair is pulled back in a tousled ponytail, its platinum color matching the short, clingy silk dress that shows off her sculpted physique. At 32 years old, Karol has worked hard to look like this. Earlier this year, her doctor prescribed an eating plan to alleviate a long-standing colon disorder; at the same time, after a lifetime of exercising, she upped her training regime to be able to perform for three hours in a stadium. “I wanted to be healthy, and I needed to do a ton of cardio for the shows. And my body began to change,” she says. “It was beautiful because I’d always been told certain changes took time, and it was true.”
You could say the same of Karol’s upward career trajectory. She just wrapped an extraordinary year in which she became the first Latina woman (and second artist ever) to top the Billboard 200 with an all-Spanish-language album (Mañana Será Bonito); the top female Latin artist on Billboard’s year-end charts (behind only Bad Bunny and Peso Pluma); and the winner of album of the year at November’s Latin Grammys, as well as urban album of the year — the first woman to win the latter.
Karol is also the first Latina (and still one of only a few women) to headline a global stadium tour and the highest-grossing Latin touring artist of the year by far. According to Billboard Boxscore, in 2023, she grossed $146.9 million from just 19 shows and sold 843,000 tickets through Nov. 19, almost doubling the $86.7 million the Latin runner-up, RBD, grossed from 18 shows in the same period.
Karol G photographed November 11, 2023 at The Powder Room Studio in Los Angeles. Balenciaga jacket, Intimissimi underwear, Replika Vintage shoes.
Vijat Mohindra
Beyond her accolades — or perhaps, more accurately, behind them — is Karol’s shrewd business sense. Her long-standing recording agreement with Universal Music Latino, which signed her to her first major deal in 2016, ended after Mañana Será Bonito came out in February. Instead of re-upping or accepting any of the “incredible” deals she says other labels offered, she launched her own Bichota Records, invested in its staff and infrastructure — much of it based in her native Colombia — and inked a distribution deal with Interscope that provides her with that company’s full, multinational support and staff but lets her keep her masters moving forward, including Bichota Season’s.
“We wanted to stay in the Universal family,” says Noah Assad, who has managed Karol since 2020, now through his Habibi Management. “They’re the ones who bet on her in the beginning, and we believe in longevity. No one knows an artist more than the infrastructure who had you in the beginning.”
Even so, he adds, “She was ready to build her own label, her own structure, her own team. She was already betting on herself without getting the gain. Independence is not just being independent; she had to build this whole infrastructure. Not every artist is made for independence, but knowing that she could [be] made it the right decision.”
Landing Karol, says Interscope executive vp Nir Seroussi, came from “a very practical conversation that I had with [manager and friend] Noah, asking, ‘What do you want?’ And he said, ‘She’s a boss. She wants to feel empowered, and she’s ambitious. She wants to have a seat at the table with the Billie Eilishes and the Olivia [Rodrigos] of the world.’ ”
Karol’s message to the label, Seroussi recalls, was clear: “I’ve come this far. I want more. I want to sit next to general-market artists because that’s how I feel: Latina but with an A-league fan base.”
But as she eyes mainstream global stardom, Karol is, as usual, prepared to be patient.
“It’s a fine line,” she notes. “In that rush to go global, music can lose its essence. So we’re going step by step. Yes, they’ve brought proposals [to the table], but I’m not in a rush. It would be amazing to fill stadiums in Asia, for example, but I truly feel happy and thankful with what I’m doing today. We’ll find the way.”
In an era of ever more rapid rises to stardom for Latin artists — witness Peso Pluma and, before him, Bad Bunny — Karol G’s ascent has been steady but slow, even laborious, and compounded by being a woman in a Latin world where female-led hits historically are scant. She started as a child pop act, competing on Colombia’s X Factor at 14, and didn’t hail from the barrio but from a solid middle-class family. When reggaetón descended on her native Medellín, she got hooked, but pursuing a career in the genre presented additional hurdles: She started recording and performing it at a time when men completely dominated the genre — as they still do — and she was considered an oddity, facing a highly skeptical industry: Aside from Ivy Queen a generation before, there weren’t any other women to measure her against.
But alongside her producer/co-writer Ovy on the Drums, Karol developed a sound — melodic, lyrically conversational, sparsely arranged and open to experimentation — that was very much geared toward women, touching on themes of empowerment and vulnerability with a genuinely personal point of view and embracing sexuality without being too overtly sexual. Stars like Nicky Jam and J Balvin endorsed her and recorded with her, and in 2016, Universal signed her.
“People got ‘married’ to Karol G,” says Raymond Acosta, head of talent management for Habibi, which also represents Bad Bunny, Eladio Carrión and Mora. “Her fans, even when they disagree with her, see her as a sister. For many of them, she’s not simply an artist. She’s family.”
A prolific, and by all accounts tireless recording artist, Karol built her fan base by being sincere on social media, by constantly releasing music and by maintaining a clear, consistent vision of who she was and what she wanted. Her debut album, 2017’s Unstoppable, released when she was 26, debuted at No. 2 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart, back when she had 3.5 million Instagram followers; today, she has 70 million.
Her first big hits were collaborations with men, beginning with “Ahora Me Llama” with Bad Bunny in 2017, which peaked at No. 10 on Hot Latin Songs. Her first No. 1 was 2018’s “Dame Tu Cosita,” alongside El Chombo and Pitbull. By then, Karol had been at Universal for three years without a massive hit of her own. All around her, reggaetoneros were scoring quick Hot Latin Songs No. 1s, even as she relentlessly released music; to date, she has logged 60 entries on the multimetric chart, the most for a Latin female artist.
“I started in 2006, and now it’s 2023,” says Karol bluntly. “My first songs were 15, 16 years ago. You spend all that time working and thinking, ‘When is my time?’ People on social media always show the goal: the cars, the money, the luxury goods, and everyone at home is thinking, ‘Why doesn’t that happen to me?’ But it’s not that easy. Everything has a process. Yes, I sometimes had doubts, but if I didn’t do this, what was I going to do? I am music. Every time anything happens to me, I want to write a song. Everything for me is a song.”
Tiffany Brown catsuit and jacket, Retrofête x Keren Wolf earrings.
Vijat Mohindra
Finally, in fall 2019, she released the song: “Tusa,” a track about getting over heartbreak, which she wrote with Ovy on the Drums and Keityn and recorded with Nicki Minaj. It spent four weeks at No. 1 on Hot Latin Songs, underscoring Karol’s status as a Latin artist to contend with, who could collaborate with a top American rapper, while cementing her place as a woman who could relate to other women, tell their stories, voice their concerns, vent for them. (It also established the potent trifecta of Karol, Ovy and Keityn, which has since churned out a succession of chart-topping hits including the No. 1s “Provenza” and “TQG” with Shakira.)
“As a woman, she has always had a very clear notion of her identity and what she wants to tell fans, and she has taken that female power to the next level, making women feel like bichotas,” says Ovy, referring to the title of the global Karol hit that has become synonymous with female power. “She has always been very clear about what she wants to musically show the world, and as her producer from day one, I’ve always understood every move she makes. Anything she has in her mind, I turn into music.”
There is a definite line between stardom and superstardom, and for several years, Karol G inched ever closer to the latter, yet didn’t quite reach it. She played clubs, festivals, shows throughout Latin America, anything to be seen, but never had a proper routed headlining tour. Still, her second album, 2019’s Ocean, debuted at No. 2 on Top Latin Albums, and she became the top Latin female artist on Billboard’s year-end charts, a spot she has maintained ever since. She also toured the United States for the first time as a guest on Gloria Trevi’s 21-date Diosa de la Noche trek.
In 2021, she got her first Top Latin Albums No. 1 with her intensely personal KG0516 and launched her first headlining tour, playing theaters. The Bichota Tour — named after the single but by now synonymous with Karol herself — grossed $15.4 million, sold 214,000 tickets and opened Karol’s eyes to possibilities she hadn’t seriously considered. A major catalyst was the icy blue wigs — matching Karol’s hair color on the album cover and her cold, vulnerable state of mind — that fans took to wearing to the shows, an unprecedented display of fandom for a Latin artist.
“I think it was the way each person connected more closely with me,” Karol reflects. “It wasn’t just the blue wigs. I noticed [later] so many people changing their hair color in step with me. I thought it was extraordinary how a hair color can define a moment in your life.”
More importantly, “I realized that, thank God, this Karol G thing was a family and not a moment. I felt these people were there with me and would always be there, no matter what,” she says earnestly. Reading social media comments guided her. Fans who had seen her years before in a club now wanted to see her in a theater. “I began to understand there was a connection. When someone came and said, ‘I think you’re ready to do arenas,’ I thought, ‘Why not? If 3,000 people saw me in a theater, it means there are 12,000 more people who didn’t see me. Let’s go sell arenas.’ ”
Paumé Los Angeles bodysuit, Jimmy Choo shoes.
Vijat Mohindra
The ensuing $trip Love arena tour in 2022 grossed $72.2 million and sold 424,000 tickets. Which again made Karol and her team consider bigger venues — in this case, stadiums.
“It’s sort of mind-boggling to sit here in early November 2023 and think that in November 2021 she was starting her first headline tour of North America ever,” says UTA partner Jbeau Lewis, booking agent for Karol and Bad Bunny, among others. “The fact that she headlined predominantly theaters in 2021, then arenas in 2022, then jumped to stadiums in 2023 is unprecedented for any genre. I think it’s easy to talk about Karol as a leader in Latin music, but based on the success she has had, especially in this year, she should be spoken about in the same breath as Taylor or Beyoncé.”
A year ago, Karol and her team weren’t even contemplating a stadium tour. The plan was to finish the arena tour in 2022, release Mañana Será Bonito in February 2023 and take a break — as much for herself as for her fans, who had seen her tour two years in a row — save for three Puerto Rico stadium shows in early March.
Then, Mañana Será Bonito exploded. When Karol played the first of the three Puerto Rico dates, she included a handful of the album’s songs, accompanied by her guitarist. Fans clamored for more, and by the third date, she was performing the entire album — and fans were singing along to every word.
“At that point, I realized I had to be very, very aware of what was happening with this music,” she says. After playing three stadium dates where fans knew all her brand-new material, she felt the moment was ripe for her to hit the road again.
A Karol G concert is a bit of a spiritual experience, one that unites multiple generations of Latin women under a single roof. Grandmothers and children cry in unison; professional women let their hair down and wear different-colored wigs. And in a twist, men know the songs, too.
“The most beautiful thing about my shows is people arrive with the intention to heal,” Karol says. “Their intentions are so beautiful that when I go onstage and all that energy is directed toward me, I feel like a battery that’s recharging and filling up, and sometimes I cry a lot in my shows. I try not to, but my heart feels like it’s going to burst.”
Replika Vintage bra, BIG HORN eyewear, Paumé Los Angeles bracelets and earrings.
Vijat Mohindra
After her arena tour, Karol had been able to summon the same energy for her Puerto Rico stadium shows. Now the challenge was to extend that into a full stadium tour.
“The first step was sitting down and making the decision to do stadiums. This was the subject of a lot of discussion with my team. Someone said, ‘You’re going to play stadiums? Beyoncé plays stadiums. Taylor Swift plays stadiums. Are you ready for that?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not ready. But I will be.’ ”
Her team crunched numbers and came up with six safe markets. Those six dates quickly became nine when New York, Los Angeles and Miami sold out and second dates had to be added. From there, the tour mushroomed to 16 dates in 13 cities.
Less than the team being resistant to the tour, Lewis says, “It just wasn’t the plan. Generally speaking, when you go out and tour in stadiums, you need 18 months to a year to execute. We made the decision in March to go out on tour in August, with a very short runway. But all of the signals were there. There was such demand. Rolling immediately into second nights in Los Angeles, Miami and New York was incredible, and that gave the team confidence to say, ‘Let’s add more cities to this tour.’ Then doing things like her headlining Lollapalooza and coming back six weeks later in Chicago and selling 52,000 tickets in Soldier Field, that’s really unprecedented.”
For Karol, the crash course of preparing to play stadiums came with intense pressure: Not only would she be performing for crowds of 50,000 or more, she would be doing it during the same summer as the Renaissance and Eras tours. “Karol G couldn’t be the one who looked like she had no business doing it,” she says.
“It was an enormous personal challenge, from how I looked, to how I thought, to how I put it together,” she continues. “I didn’t feel I was ready until I saw the videos from the first two dates. I always judge myself horribly, and nothing is exactly how I want it. But in this tour, as a woman, I played the videos and said, ‘Wow, I love what I see.’ ”
Incorporating new music presented its own challenge. Soon after announcing the tour, Karol released Mañana Será Bonito: Bichota Season, a companion set that highlighted a completely different side of her: tougher, sexier, more experimental. To explain it, she wrote a book about the two versions of herself represented in the two albums and handed it to her tour designer. “I said, ‘This is my story. This is Carolina’s book, and I want her to be a siren.’ And they found the way to put it all into the show.”
While top Latin touring acts have long played stadium dates in Latin America, the notion of a conceptual tour is still relatively rare, and in the United States, only a few Latin artists have done multicity stadium tours. Karol benefited from the expertise of her team, including Assad and Lewis, which had already put together Bad Bunny’s two stadium tours, as well as the rock-solid family foundation that’s an intrinsic part of her business structure. In addition to Acosta, who handles her day-to-day at Habibi, since at least 2019, her sister, Jessica Giraldo, has also functioned as a “360,” overseeing all aspects of Karol’s career, including the growing Bichota Records and its staff; her Medellín office, Girl Power, which runs her merchandise business, among other projects; and her philanthropic Con Cora (“With Heart”) Foundation.
“Strategically, we have a great structure, and there are many, many people focused on massifying Karol’s vision,” says Giraldo, an attorney. “The big change Noah brought when he came on was globalizing the project. He opened the door to big mainstream festivals and big deals, for example. Raymond is his right hand in this project. And I’m the connection between the artist and everything else. I know Karol perfectly well; she’s my sister. But on the professional side, I’ve learned to understand her vision and execute it.”
Balenciaga jacket, Intimissimi underwear, Replika Vintage shoes.
Vijat Mohindra
While families and musical careers don’t always mesh, Karol’s has been an organic part of her structure from the very outset of her journey. Her father, a musician, fostered Karol’s ambitions, managed her until she signed with Universal and was the only person to join her onstage when she won the Latin Grammy for best new artist in 2018. Today, he isn’t part of her actual business, but he is part of her personal support network and, along with her mother, a constant presence at her shows and milestone moments, including this year’s Latin Grammys and Billboard Latin Music Awards, where he sat by her side.
“My family is everything to me,” Karol says. “[Fame] conditions real friendships and real relationships. Having my family — the most real and pure thing — around me makes me feel I’m not living in an ephemeral world where everything is transitory. Having them around me is also my way of thanking them for everything they did for me.”
That backbone will be essential come February, when Karol kicks off her 20-date Latin American stadium tour before an expected European run — all told, a seven-month trek, her longest time on the road yet. As ever, while on tour, she’ll link up with Ovy on the Drums and other writers for sessions to maintain a constant output of singles.
But at this point in her life, she’s ready to handle it all.
“If you ask me what I’m most proud of in the past year, it’s the independence we accomplished,” Assad says. “But I’m very proud of how hard she worked during the pandemic, going from the pandemic to theaters to arenas to stadiums. That all happened from 2020 to 2023, and that’s just amazing.”
Beyond music, Karol will make her acting debut on the Netflix scripted drama series Griselda alongside Sofía Vergara in January. And her Con Cora Foundation for women, launched this year, already has ongoing projects in sports, education and rehabilitation, including a program with the Houston Space Center to send Colombian teens to visit NASA.
“I’m bummed this era will end because definitely it’s the time I reaped what I sowed,” Karol says. “All these years working for something, and finally, that something is working for me. All these things I thought could happen, I trusted they would, and they did.”
When asked what comes next, Karol hesitates for a moment, as if wanting even more would seem too greedy for someone who already has so much.
“I’d love for my music to be heard everywhere, and, truthfully, I’d like my name to be heard all over the world,” she finally says. “Last year, we went to Santorini [Greece], to Kenya, to Dubai [United Arab Emirates], on holiday. And when people asked us where we were from and I said, ‘Colombia,’ the reaction always was, “Oh, Shakira, Shakira.’ ”
And then, in typical, demonstrative Karol G fashion, she holds up her arm to me. “See? I get goose bumps just thinking about it because that must be the ultimate. To have everyone in the world know your name.”
This story will appear in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
After Morgan Wallen wraps his sold-out Nov. 10 concert at Atlanta’s Truist Park with a crowd singalong to his 2019 No. 1 “Whiskey Glasses,” he enthusiastically roams the edge of the stage, crouching down, eager to get close to his ardent fans. As they thrust albums, cowboy boots and cardboard signs into his hands, the 40,000-seat stadium suddenly starts to feel more like a 200-capacity club.
Wallen has come prepared. He pulls out the appropriate black or silver Sharpie from his jeans pocket and yanks off the cap with his teeth, then autographs each item and poses for selfies. Even once the stadium lights have switched on and people have started to head toward the exits, Wallen is still hanging out. Finally, he starts to jog off, but then stops, turns around and runs back to autograph one more sign — the one that reads “You’re our entertainer of the year” — before leaving the stage for good.
The sign is a nod to Wallen’s prowess as an energetic, engaging performer — his Atlanta audience had no clue he was on antibiotics and was so concerned about a possible return of his spring vocal cord issues that he didn’t talk to anyone for hours before the 90-minute show, including postponing this interview. But it was also a reminder that, although he had lost entertainer of the year 48 hours earlier at the Country Music Association (CMA) Awards — and weathered a potentially career-ending scandal in 2021 — he remains tops with his millions of fans.
When time allows, the post-show autograph session is a nightly ritual. “I like looking them in the eyes,” a recovered Wallen says 10 days later over Zoom in his first major interview in two years. He’s dressed head to toe in gray camo, on his “lunch break” from hunting deer on the 1,700-acre farm outside Nashville he bought earlier this year with his booking agent and good friend, Austin Neal. He has scrubbed off his camo face paint: “I didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of you,” he says with a good-natured grin.
“There’s usually a few people every night where I’m just like, ‘God, that is like the happiest person in the world right now,’ and I always pick those,” he says. “I’m almost tearing up thinking about it. It’s just like, man, I mean a lot to this person, I can tell. I try to tell them, ‘Hey, I saw you up there. I saw you tonight.’ ”
Those fans helped make Wallen, 30, the biggest winner at this year’s Billboard Music Awards, which are based on year-end performance metrics on the Billboard charts. The Big Loud/Republic artist won 11 trophies, including top male artist, top Hot 100 artist and top country artist, as well as top Hot 100 song for “Last Night” and top Billboard 200 album for One Thing at a Time — the first time a male artist has captured the latter two in the same year since Usher in 2004. He dominates the country year-end charts, claiming the No. 1 spot on 12 of the genre’s 28 lists, including Hot Country Songs, where “Last Night” succeeds 2022’s year-end chart-topper, Wallen’s “Wasted on You.”
Wallen’s groundbreaking accomplishments transcend country, too. When “Last Night” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March, it became the first song by a solo male country artist to top the chart since Eddie Rabbitt’s “I Love a Rainy Night” in 1981. Once it reached the summit, “Last Night” spent 16 nonconsecutive weeks there, the most ever for a noncollaboration. (Wallen nixed the idea of releasing remixes to potentially propel the song past the 19-week record held by Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, says Big Loud partner/CEO Seth England, who heads Wallen’s label and co-manages him with K21’s Kathleen Flaherty. “Morgan loves the original version, and he had made it that far on his own music and accord,” he says.)
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When One Thing at a Time debuted at No. 1 in March, its predecessor, 2021’s Dangerous: The Double Album, logged its 110th nonconsecutive week in the Billboard 200’s top 10, second only to the Sound of Music soundtrack and the most by a solo artist since the chart began publishing weekly in 1956. One Thing at a Time has spent 16 nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, the most for any album since Adele’s 21 in 2011-12. And, after debuting at No. 1, the album logged the next 31 weeks in the top five.
As country music experiences its biggest surge in popularity since the Garth Brooks era three decades ago, Wallen (alongside Luke Combs) is the tip of the spear for the genre’s new generation, which includes Zach Bryan, Lainey Wilson, Jelly Roll, Bailey Zimmerman and Wallen’s frequent writing partner and close friend, HARDY. He has shifted country’s streaming calculus by releasing albums that contain more than 30 tracks and racking up tremendous consumption tallies: One Thing at a Time’s songs earned 498.3 million on-demand streams in its first week, the most ever for a country album, according to Luminate. Through the third quarter of 2023, country music’s on-demand audio and video streaming grew by 24% year over year — and Wallen accounted for 31% of that growth. Of all country music on-demand streams through the same period, 10% belonged to Wallen. For the first time since the 2013 launch of the year-end Streaming Songs Artists chart, a country act (Wallen) leads the list, and a country song (“Last Night”) is No. 1 on the year-end Streaming Songs chart.
He’s catching the eye of legendary country artists, who now study his methods. “This is a new generation that is streaming, which is something new to Dolly,” says Dolly Parton’s manager, Danny Nozell. “What Morgan is doing, I want to take and see how I can apply that to Dolly.” (To wit: Parton released the longest album of her career, the 30-track Rockstar, in November.)
Similarly, Luke Bryan, who calls his good friend Wallen a “world-class songwriter, singer and performer,” was also impressed by Wallen’s new-school methods. “His ability to relate to fans by way of introducing new songs by performing them on socials was truly a brilliant way to build his career,” he says.
“When I started doing this, I had no intentions or expectations of becoming that guy,” Wallen says of being the de facto leader of this new country movement. “But yeah, I’m definitely proud of it. Especially when people say to me that they never liked country music before and now it’s [their] favorite.”
Rye 51 shirt, PAIGE jeans, Tecovas boots.
Daniel Chaney
As massive as Wallen’s following is, in early 2021 and for quite some time afterward, it looked like he could lose it all after a neighbor gave TMZ video footage of him using a racial slur. But Wallen’s fans never abandoned him — in fact, they rallied around him.
Their fervor was, in some ways, a testament to how, in a sea of male country artists who often seem interchangeable, Wallen has always stood out — not only for his instantly recognizable raspy twang, but for the intimate tone of his songs, many of which he co-writes.
“There’s a level of conversation Morgan brings to a song that makes him such a strong writer; you immediately feel invested in the story,” says Miranda Lambert, who co-wrote One Thing at a Time’s “Thought You Should Know” with Wallen and Nicolle Galyon. In February, the song became his eighth No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart; he has already scored two more.
While he leans toward tried-and-true tropes — the cry-in-my-beer midtempo ballad, the playfully cocky you’re-going-to-wish-you-never-left-me tune — he often injects them with a vulnerability that’s the antithesis of last decade’s bro-country movement. And by infusing many of his traditional country melodies with rap cadences and beats and alt-rock guitars, Wallen has expanded his audience far beyond country’s typical listenership.
“I obviously have brought some of my own flavor into the space and everybody doesn’t necessarily like that, and I don’t care because I love it,” says Wallen, whose favorites range from indie-rockers The War on Drugs to country rebel Eric Church to rappers like Moneybagg Yo and the late Young Dolph. “I love being able to incorporate all the types of music that I like. If I had to sing one kind of song for two hours, I’d lose my mind.”
The first stadium show Wallen played was on May 31, 2018, as one of three supporting acts for Bryan at Toronto’s Rogers Centre. It was also the first stadium show he had ever attended. Bryan had heard Wallen’s 2017 hit “Up Down” and felt “it spoke to just the right audience, and I knew then I wanted Morgan on tour with me.”
“I remember going out there and it was like, ‘Gawwwwd!’ It just felt so massive,” Wallen says. Five years later, stadium stages feel like home. “We played in Austin [five days ago] in an arena. There were 12-13,000 people there, and it felt tiny,” he says. “Then we played the stadium in Houston [two days later], and it was like back to normal again.” He laughs as he catches himself, knowing there’s nothing normal about his life these days: “What? That’s not normal.”
Growing up in Sneedville in East Tennessee (2021 population: 1,315) and then outside of Knoxville, Tenn., where his family moved when he was in middle school, Wallen, the son of a public school teacher and a minister (his father is now a semitruck driver), had no money for luxuries like concerts. Any extra cash went to support his baseball career: He was a star pitcher and shortstop in high school before an arm injury his senior year took him off the diamond for good.
“When baseball ended, that was really tough because that’s all he was thinking about,” England says. “I think he probably transformed that into a new drive and [thought], ‘I’m going to have to really work hard at something else.’ ”
Now he’s filling the ballparks he dreamed of playing in as a kid. This year, the One Night at a Time tour played three nights at the Boston Red Sox’s Fenway Park and had double plays at venues including San Diego’s Petco Park and Atlanta’s Truist Park, the respective homes of baseball’s Padres and Braves. Through Nov. 18, the tour had grossed $300.4 million and sold 1.5 million tickets, making it the highest-grossing country tour ever reported to Billboard Boxscore.
“The charisma has always been there, but now [the show] is so tight,” says Neal, head of The Neal Agency and Wallen’s booking agent since 2017. (Neal launched his company in early 2022 following his departure from WME, several months after Wallen left the agency.) Wallen used to talk and fidget much more onstage. “We used to say he’d go on a soliloquy, but now he’s so dialed in. Plus, he can’t talk that much because he’s got so many songs that he’s got to play.”
LTIFONE sweater, Mister Freedom jacket, Nudie jeans.
Daniel Chaney
Still, in April, Wallen’s vocal load caught up with him. Minutes before he was to go onstage for a second sold-out night at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in Oxford, Miss., 45,000 fans learned he had lost his voice and couldn’t perform. After powering through a few more shows several days later, a visibly upset Wallen told his more than 6 million Instagram followers that doctors had ordered him to go on vocal rest for six weeks, resulting in the postponement of multiple shows.
Though Wallen says he isn’t “the type of person that really worries a lot,” the experience scared him, especially after some doctors told him his voice might be permanently altered. He was spooked “100%” by what happened in Oxford, England says. “During that stretch, he was having real trouble with his voice. It was rough.” But unlike in Oxford, when Wallen started having vocal issues the week of his Atlanta shows, he had doctors at Vanderbilt and his vocal coach — who taught him methods to make singing more sustainable and joined him in Atlanta — at his disposal.
The support system that has sprung up around him is a far cry from 2014, when Wallen was working as a landscaper in Knoxville and competed on The Voice. Back then, he could certainly move more freely, without the bodyguards he requires now.
“Everything has gotten so, so huge,” he says. “I don’t really go to the grocery store. I have to go through back doors to go to the doctor and all that kind of stuff. I still try to hold on to as much [normalcy] as possible. I like driving, so I try to drive as much as I can by myself.” Adjusting to fame has been tough at times for Wallen, and he’s not sure that he has. When old friends don’t invite him to events, it sometimes bothers him, even though he knows the disturbance his presence can cause. And he has found a second use for the camo gear. After hunting, he sometimes leaves on his cap, camo top and a little face paint, just enough so that he can “sneak around, just wherever I can go, maybe a Mexican restaurant.” Otherwise, he says, “I play my shows, I hang out with my son, [Indie, 3], and I hide pretty much. And I’m OK with that. I’m happy as hell with that.”
HARDY, who has toured with Wallen off and on since 2018, speaks more bluntly about the limitations fame has placed on his friend. “In the last couple of years, he handles himself so much differently out on the road. He protects himself from situations that might get him in hot water,” he says. “He doesn’t go out to bars. If there’s a good time to be had, we have it backstage where we’re safe and where f–king people aren’t videoing and trying to get a rise out of somebody. We will still have the same amount of fun, but we do it in an environment [without] the public eye on us anymore. It sucks that you can’t really do it that other way, but you just can’t when you get Morgan Wallen famous.”
If Morgan Wallen wasn’t already aware of how famous he was, he found out Feb. 2, 2021, when TMZ published that video of a drunk Wallen (on “hour 72 of a 72-hour bender,” he later said) casually using a racial slur as he told a friend to get another friend home safely. TMZ’s post included an apology from Wallen, but the reaction was swift and severe. Radio playlists pulled his music, his booking agency dropped him, awards shows deemed him ineligible, and his own label suspended him.
It wasn’t the first time Wallen’s behavior had raised flags. He was arrested for public intoxication and disorderly conduct in May 2020 after a disruption at Kid Rock’s Nashville bar, and five months later, Saturday Night Live revoked its invitation to perform after he violated the show’s COVID-19 safety protocols. (The show had him on two months later.) But Wallen says that the experience in 2021 truly showed him “just how much that people listen to me. I don’t think I realized that, at least not at that grand of a scale at the time,” he says, carefully weighing his words. “I [learned] how much my words matter.”
Now, nearly three years later, Wallen says, “That person is definitely not the same person I am now.” He doesn’t diminish the hurt his words caused or question the actions the industry took, but he admits to feeling anger that so few gave him the benefit of the doubt and rushed to brand him a full-blown racist.
“There’s no excuse. I’ve never made an excuse. I never will make an excuse,” Wallen says of using the slur. “I’ve talked to a lot of people, heard stories [about] things that I would have never thought about because I wasn’t the one going through it. And I think, for me, in my heart I was never that guy that people were portraying me to be, so there was a little bit of like, ‘Damn, I’m kind of actually mad about this a little bit because I know I shouldn’t have said this, but I’m really not that guy.’ I put myself in just such a sh-t spot, you know? Like, ‘You really messed up here, guy.’ If I was that guy, then I wouldn’t have cared. I wouldn’t have apologized. I wouldn’t have done any of that if I really was that guy that people were saying about me.”
“Any of that” included meeting with several Black leaders, including 300 Elektra Entertainment chairman/CEO Kevin Liles, Universal Music Group executive vp/chief people and inclusion officer Eric Hutcherson and Grammy-winning gospel artist Bebe Winans, as well as with the Black Music Action Coalition (BMAC) and other groups in an effort to educate himself; his process “to learn and try to be better” continues, he says.
“I think that moment was a cloud with a silver lining because I think it showed him he has a platform that can do good,” HARDY says. “He realized, ‘I’ve got to get my sh-t together.’ ”
One such platform is the Morgan Wallen Foundation (formerly the More Than My Hometown Foundation). By February 2022, Wallen and Big Loud (on behalf of Wallen from his royalties) had donated $500,000 to organizations including The National Museum of African American Music, Rock Against Racism and the BMAC. Three dollars from every concert ticket Wallen sells goes to the foundation, which primarily helps underserved communities through supporting music and sports youth programs, and has donated over $1 million in 2023, including $100,000 to the Atlanta Braves Foundation and $500,000 to Habitat for Humanity of Greater Nashville to help revitalize a baseball and softball complex.
Despite this philanthropic push, don’t expect Wallen to use his sizable platform to speak out on social or political issues. When asked if he plans to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024, he swiftly answers, “No,” before continuing: “That’s not where my head’s at. I’m not an expert. I just don’t know enough to try to guide people. I know what I know, and that’s music.”
Stitched custom shirt, jacket and pants; Tecovas boots.
Daniel Chaney
Following the incident, Wallen says he did a 30-day stint in rehab in San Diego, and he has since drastically changed his drinking habits on the road. “That used to be my warmup — to get half lit: ‘I’m going out there, and we’re going to go have fun.’ Now, that is not the way I approach it,” he says.
Part of the change is just plain logical: playing massive stadium stages, “there’s a lot more ways you can fall than there is on a little one,” he says with a laugh. But his lifestyle changes (and the boost in his confidence level that has resulted) have also completely altered how he approaches performing. “I used to be scared to even think about what it would be like to play a show without drinking: ‘That sounds terrible. Why would I ever do that?’ And now I’m almost scared to wonder what it’d be like if I was drunk.” As far as drinking off tour, “I’m still figuring out my personal life,” he says. “I probably always will be.”
Despite the work he has done to make amends, there are still inroads to be made. While his fans fervently stood by him — sales of Dangerous soared 102% the week after the incident, and he headlined a 55-date arena and amphitheater tour in 2022 — not everyone was ready to move on.
Since the scandal, Wallen’s name is seldom heard when nominations or winners are announced at peer-voted awards shows. In November, he didn’t receive any Grammy nominations (though “Last Night,” which he didn’t write, is up for best country song), and Wallen, who won best new artist at the 2020 CMA Awards, went 0-3 at the CMAs this year. (Dangerous did win album of the year at the 2022 Academy of Country Music Awards.)
England acknowledges that “some people have no intention of forgiveness, but that’s also OK. Morgan realized that he has just got to control what he can control. He’s certainly not getting shut out in these awards because he’s a bad musician.”
Wallen shrugs off the snubs. The CMA losses “bothered me for like five minutes,” he admits. “And then I’m like, ‘Why am I mad? I’m about to go play for 80,000 people in Atlanta.’ ”
Daniel Chaney
And there are other recent victories to celebrate, like sharing the BMI Country Awards’ songwriter of the year honors with Combs on Nov. 7 — meaningful recognition for Wallen, who says he has heard criticism that he doesn’t write enough songs on his albums or relies too much on his co-writers. He has nothing but praise for the writers who contribute to his records but admits with a wry chuckle that the BMI Award was “validating … It’s kind of like maybe I do know a little bit about what I’m doing.”
Wallen has released collaborations with top country names including Eric Church, Chris Stapleton and Florida Georgia Line, as well as with Diplo and rapper Lil Durk. (Their “Broadway Girls” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart in 2022.) But he’s well aware that he hasn’t yet released a game-changing co-ed duet like Jason Aldean and Carrie Underwood’s “If I Didn’t Love You” or HARDY’s murder ballad “wait in the truck” with Lainey Wilson. However, he quickly adds, it’s not for lack of trying.
“I’ve reached out to a couple of people, and they’ve turned me down,” he says, declining to name names. “I just really want certain people, and I haven’t gotten the chance to do it yet. I’m going to keep trying to write songs for it or write with them.”
England says the timing hasn’t worked out, adding that Wallen sent a song for his next album to a noncountry artist as a possibility. “The answer was bittersweet,” he says. “It was, ‘Holy sh-t, this sounds like a global No. 1 record, but I just can’t do it right now.’ ”
Wallen says he “would love” to write with more women, but admits he frequently returns to his very successful “little squad” of collaborators “because I’ve just been slammed, and when I’m not on the road, I’m spending time with my son or hunting. I haven’t really wanted to branch out much just because I needed to keep myself sane.”
One new collaborator eager to work with Wallen: Post Malone. The artist, who is recording a country album, wrote with Wallen, ERNEST and Charlie Handsome, among others, when he was in town to perform with Wallen and HARDY at the CMA Awards. But Wallen confesses that Post Malone’s studio hours were hard for him. “[He] likes to write really, really late at night — and I can’t do that three nights in a row. I can do that one night,” he says with a laugh. “I can start about 5 p.m., but starting at 10 p.m. — that’s rough.”
A little while ago, when HARDY was at Wallen’s house, they headed out to his workshop. “Indie was in the bed. Morgan’s out here looking for an outlet to plug in a baby monitor. I was just like, ‘Man, that’s something I didn’t think I would see five years ago,’ ” HARDY says.
In Atlanta, the tow-headed Indie giggled in delight as he ran through the empty stadium concourse before showtime, pushing a toy dump truck and exuberantly honking the horn on a full-size forklift. “Anything about a vehicle or any part of it, that’s all he cares about,” Wallen later says, grinning broadly.
Wallen and Indie’s mother split before he was born and share joint custody. But Wallen says fatherhood happened for him at the right time. “It gives me something to focus on that’s not just all about myself because for a while, I had to be super selfish. I had to mostly focus on myself or [my career] wouldn’t work,” he says. But now, “it’s nice to really think about someone other than yourself and about what you’re passing down. He’s my favorite thing about life.”
And Wallen’s friends say fatherhood changed him. “Having a son really grew him up fast,” Neal says.
Becoming a dad made him look at life differently, Wallen says, including sparking an interest in expanding into businesses outside of music. In addition to buying real estate, he’s working with Plus Capital to find the right investments, including his recent affiliation as investor and brand ambassador with upstart Ryl Tea, which aligned with his desire to partner with health and wellness brands. “I like having a bunch of different things for me to focus on. [Otherwise], I’ll get bored,” he says. “I have a lot of opportunities, so I’ve been trying to take them.” Will one of those opportunities be, as is a rite of passage of sorts for so many country stars, opening a bar in Nashville? England says only: “It has been discussed. Stay tuned.”
But first, Wallen will spend much of 2024 carrying on with the One Night at a Time tour. In addition to continuing to make up this spring’s postponed dates and a headlining show at the Stagecoach festival, Wallen has added 10 more markets, many with multiple nights at stadiums, including three at Nashville’s Nissan Stadium.
Also potentially ahead: a full-blown international tour, perhaps in 2025. After starting 2023’s tour in Australia, Wallen ended the year with a Dec. 3 show at London’s O2 Arena that sold out in one hour. It was his first time in Europe, and Neal is exploring the best way to proceed globally. Wallen is up for the challenge: “I think it would be fun to go try to win people over again,” he says.
Next year, he’ll also return to the studio. Though more singles are coming from One Thing at a Time, Wallen is already writing and reviewing outside songs for his fourth album. Handsome, who co-produces Wallen’s music with Joey Moi, predicts the next one will be his biggest yet. “I’m expecting to see more songs that can go No. 1 at pop radio because I think people have seen that a country singer with a very Southern voice by himself without a feature can still have a No. 1 Billboard hit,” Handsome says. “Morgan’s leading the way for what country music is now and what it’s becoming.”
When England compares Wallen to another artist, it’s not a fellow young country superstar or a legend of the past, but another especially prolific and versatile performer affiliated with Republic: Drake. “Drake can do a hardcore R&B song, a trap rap song or a Caribbean-tinged beat global pop song,” England says. “I think Morgan is that in our genre. His voice is always going to be country even if he’s singing pop melodies, and the verses are likely to have some country imagery. But when it’s time to sing the big runs and melodies, the guy can do it. Even though he’s got a lot of older fans, he’s certainly got the young kids just wrapped around the sound right now. I don’t think that’s just a short-term thing. I think the guy’s got the ability to do that for decades to come.”
This story will appear in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
In 1978, Kate Bush became the first solo woman to reach No. 1 in the U.K. with a song she wrote, produced and performed entirely by herself with “Wuthering Heights.” Forty-five years later, in October, dance–pop artist Kenya Grace joined her as the second to pull off the feat with the quietly devastating “Strangers,” her major-label debut single.
“There wasn’t too much pressure on that song, to be honest,” Grace says. “I didn’t really have some mad goal in mind — I just wrote it one random night.”
For Grace, 25, that kind of writing experience is the result of skills she’s been honing her entire life: she began creating and performing songs for friends and family at age four, inspired by Norah Jones tracks that her mother would play around the house. By 16, the South Africa-born, Southampton-raised singer was frequenting drum’n’bass parties, baptizing herself in the energy of the U.K. dance music scene that would soon characterize the sound of her own music. “When I start writing something at 120 BPM, I’m like, ‘No, it’s way too slow,’” she quips.
She graduated from London’s Academy of Contemporary Music in 2019 — an institution she likens to a massive networking event — and spent the next few years building an audience on TikTok. Even from her initial videos, Grace displayed a deft understanding of how to present her music, including one clip in which she crafted a beat by using her music production controller to source sound waves from oranges.
The post caught the attention of Day One Music’s Nick Huggett and Nick Shymansky, who have signed and developed British music icons including Amy Winehouse and Adele. By November 2022, two months after she self-released the aptly titled “Oranges,” the two were managing Grace. “We’re seeing someone with a craft [who] knows how to sing and command an audience,” Shymansky says. “We’ve got someone that has earned their stripes and is ready to take on the world.”
They prioritized growing her fan base on an international level, and by July, the two helped her sign a deal with Major Recordings, an electronic dance music label launched by Warner Records. “We knew early on that more than half of her audience was in America; it’s not a coincidence the deal was signed there,” Shymansky says. “We had offers for shows in Los Angeles prior to ‘Strangers’ — that’s not typical for a British artist at such an early stage.”
Kenya Grace photographed on November 20, 2023 at SOUTH56 studio in London.
Bex Day
The partnership quickly paid huge dividends in “Strangers” — though a different song nearly took its spot. “I signed my deal about two weeks before I posted [a snippet of] ‘Strangers’ online,” Grace recalls. “The month before that, we were lining up a different song,” which ultimately became its follow-up single, “Only In My Mind.”
Nonetheless, when a teaser of “Strangers” connected with listeners on a musical and lyrical level, the label pivoted, with Grace still meticulously poring over the song’s final mix. “I was rewriting the lyrics to make it rhyme,” she says. “I’m always really funny and picky about vocal production. I spend the longest on the vocals.”
Sonically, the song is steeped in drum’n’bass and aligns with the current U.K. dance music revival in the U.S. led by artists like Fred Again.. and PinkPantheress. The song’s vulnerable lyrical bent (“And then one random night when everything changes/You won’t reply and we’ll go back to strangers”) plays to Gen Z’s penchant for unflinchingly honest pop songwriting.
Though Grace admits feeling pressure ahead of its release, “Strangers” officially arrived through Warner Records/Major Recordings on Sept. 1. By the end of the month, it became her first entry on the Hot 100 (since reaching a No. 52 high). The track has also climbed to No. 1 in the U.K.; reached the top 5 on the Billboard Global 200; and spent five weeks atop Hot Dance/Electronic Songs, marking the first time in the ranking’s decade-long history that a track solely written, produced and sung by a woman has reached the summit.
Says Huggett: “We had no expectations other than, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if this did better than the last release, which was really nowhere near there?’ That was the benchmark. Every time we put out some music, we want to improve on it incrementally.”
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While social media helped buoy “Strangers,” the resources of a traditional label drove the song at radio and helped place it on editorial playlists on digital service providers. The song has earned 773.7 million on-demand streams through Nov. 23, according to Luminate. “The label used this explosive moment to make sure there’s a proper campaign globally,” says Huggett. “We’ve been blown away with how brilliantly the label has worked the record with their understanding of the complexity of radio and traditional media.”
In October, Grace released the trance-driven “Only In My Mind,” and three weeks later, followed it with a “sad acoustic version” of “Strangers” as the song continues to chart. At the top of December, she detailed a biting take on modern love with “Paris” and, come 2024, she expects to release her “dark, moody [and] dance-inspired” debut album.
In the meantime, she’s on her first tour, with stops in London, New York and Los Angeles — though Shymansky has his sights set on even brighter lights: a Las Vegas residency 10 years from now. “There’s a long road to get there, but we think she has the goods to do that,” he says. “That’s gotta be the ambition.”
From left: Nick Huggett, Kenya Grace and Nicholas Shymansky photographed on November 20, 2023 at SOUTH56 studio in London.
Bex Day
A version of this story will appear in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
The scene at the Chipotle on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley at first looked much like any other Friday evening. Six good-looking guys in their early 20s sat around a table eating burritos, laughing and ribbing one another. They had landed at LAX that morning after a 16-hour flight, but despite their jet lag, the vibe was lively.
Then an emergency alert lit up one of their cellphones. Seconds later, a warning buzzed on another device. And then another, and another, and another, and yet one more. It was Oct. 6 — already Oct. 7 on the other side of the world in Israel — and the moment things got very real for as1one, the first-ever boy band comprising Israeli and Palestinian musicians.
The guys had arrived in Los Angeles from Tel Aviv, Israel, to lay down tracks for their forthcoming debut album — a trek made following months of visa coordination and more than a year since the group officially formed, after first being conceived in the United States years prior. The team behind as1one, led by longtime music executives Ken Levitan and James Diener, envisioned a Middle Eastern version of BTS, and in the effort to create it, Israeli and Palestinian casting directors had held auditions in major cities and tiny villages throughout Israel in 2021. (Auditions could not be held in the West Bank or Gaza due to logistical challenges.) A thousand young men auditioned; the six who were glued to their phones at the Sherman Oaks Chipotle had made it in.
There’s Sadik Dogosh, a 20-year-old Palestinian Bedouin Muslim from Rahat, Israel, with a piercing gaze and an acting background. Neta Rozenblat, a Jewish Israeli who’s 22 but looks younger, grew up in Tel Aviv, where he studied computer science before getting into singing, which led to a 2021 performance on the Israeli version of The X Factor. Hailing from Haifa, Palestinian Christian Aseel Farah, 22, is the group’s rapper and its self-proclaimed introvert. Twenty-three-year-old Jewish Israeli Nadav Philips grew up near Tel Aviv, idolizes Mariah Carey and used to perform as a wedding singer. Niv Lin, 22, is a Jewish Israeli from a desert town in southern Israel and played professional basketball before shifting to singing. (He also performed on The X Factor.) And Ohad Attia, also 22 and a Jewish Israeli, grew up in Tel Aviv singing and playing the guitar, a skill he flexes beautifully in the group.
On the surface, the six young men check all the usual boy group boxes: They strike the requisite balance between dreamy and adorable and sing ballads and bangers with heart-melting harmonies about girls, love and “dancing like the whole world is watching,” as one of their songs proclaims. But while each knew they were signing up for a boundary-pushing endeavor simply by joining a group composed of Palestinians and Israelis, they couldn’t have predicted that their message of unity would be so intensely tested before they had even released any music.
When the guys went to sleep at their L.A. rental house on the night of Oct. 6, they weren’t yet sure what to make of the alerts. They had all grown up accustomed to intermittent rocket warnings that often passed without incident. But by morning, it was clear what was happening back at home had little precedent: Hamas operatives had killed about 1,200 people throughout southern Israel in coordinated attacks on villages, kibbutzes and at a music festival. (“Niv lives not far from where that rave was, so he undoubtedly would have been there,” Diener says, adding that the woman Lin had just started dating, along with other friends, was killed in the attack.) Their scheduled sightseeing tour of L.A. was canceled. Instead, the guys spent the day frantically calling and texting with friends and family back home.
As news of the Oct. 7 attacks spread, as1one was given the option to fly back to Israel as soon as possible. But after talking among themselves, they decided to stay. “In the beginning, we really felt bad that we couldn’t do anything, that we couldn’t help our families and friends in Israel,” Attia says. “But then when you think about it, you really realize we’re on a mission and that we can be helpful. We can show the world.”
Ohad Attia
Austin Hargrave
The next day, as1one went to its scheduled studio session and met with songwriter-producers Jenna Andrews and Stephen Kirk, who together have credits on mega-hits like BTS’ “Butter” and “Permission To Dance.” Andrews and Kirk had already joined as1one for writing sessions in Israel, and that familiarity helped the duo channel the group’s intense emotions into music as the horrific news from Israel continued.
“The toughest moments were during the sessions,” Rozenblat says. “I was told about two friends that were killed, Niv was told about friends of his that were killed — a lot of us found out about really awful stuff during that session, not to mention that now there’s a whole war going on.”
But by the end of the session, they had a new song. Two-and-a-half weeks later, in a sun-drenched conference room in Century City, they play it for me through a beat-up Bluetooth speaker.
“What if we just stopped the world/Hold the phone/Faced the hurt/Take me home/We’re not built for this/We’re built for more/Forget the score/Show me what it’s like when we stop the world,” the sextet sings over a pulsing beat. It’s the kind of anthem that’s vocally reminiscent of the Backstreet Boys’ heyday and thematically evocative of — depending on how you’re listening — either a tumultuous romance or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“How crazy is it to get hugs from Palestinian friends when my Israeli friends died?” Lin says. “That’s our story.”
Sadik Dogosh
Austin Hargrave
As1one wasn’t necessarily intended to function as a singing six-man answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Seeing how K-pop and Latin music became global forces over the past few years, Levitan and Diener wanted to form a group from outside the Western world that they could build into a superstar act. They had experience with this caliber of artist: Levitan helped develop Kings of Leon, managed Bon Jovi and, as co-founder and president of Nashville-based Vector Management, has worked with Kesha, The B-52s, The Fray and more. Diener launched A&M Octone Records, where he developed acts including Maroon 5, and after the label sold its 50% share to Interscope Geffen A&M, he co-founded the music publishing and management firm Freesolo Entertainment.
Together they looked to Israel, a place, Diener says, where “we felt that what they have to say musically hadn’t really been given a shot on the world stage.” The pair weren’t seeking to create a group made up of Israelis and Palestinians — only to, as Levitan says, “leave no stone unturned” in their search for the country’s very best talent. They began traveling to Israel in late 2021, first to find the Israeli and Palestinian casting directors and consultants who could get them access to local music schools, conservatories and recording studios where they would scout talent. (They’ve been back to the country every two months since the first trip.) Ami Nir, an A&R executive at Universal Music Group in Israel, became their partner in the project and was crucial in creating connections.
Aseel Farah
Austin Hargrave
Even before meeting any prospective singers, the pair — who refer to themselves as the group’s founders and producers — encountered plenty of challenges: raising investment money, working in a foreign market (and during a global pandemic) and, above all, the historic tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. During one meeting, a potential Palestinian talent scout was so opposed to the idea of a mixed band that she flicked her cigarette ashes at Levitan and Diener.
“We were really working from negative one, not even at zero,” Levitan says of the meeting. “She was very pessimistic.” But as the two explained their history in the business and their vision for the group, the scout uncrossed her arms and listened — and, shortly thereafter, joined the team. Such unlikely changes of heart happened again and again at meetings throughout the country. “I think people felt our sincerity,” Diener says. “They didn’t feel like this was in any way a gimmick or a pretext.”
As Diener explains, assembling a group from this part of the world inherently meant being “confronted by the question of, ‘Are you willing to put together a group that may be mixed?’ ” He and Levitan agreed that they were — but that it would require choosing “the right guys who could handle and appreciate that mix of talent within the band,” Diener says.
As they narrowed down the talent pool during auditions, Levitan and Diener met with families of potential members, selling parents, siblings and extended relatives on the idea, often through translators, and many times while sitting around the family’s kitchen table after a meal.
Nadav Philips
Austin Hargrave
By this point, they had also enlisted a documentary crew to film the process; cameras were put in place after people close to Levitan and Diener suggested what they were doing “might just be historic,” Diener recalls. Ultimately, the local Israeli team was replaced with a crew from Paramount+, which has since shot hundreds of hours of footage for a forthcoming five-episode docuseries produced by James Carroll (Waco: American Apocalypse, Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer). “It’s in no way a reality series,” Levitan says. “This is something much more thoughtful and cinematic.”
The cameras were rolling during the final phase of the audition process: a May 2022 boy band boot camp in Neve Shalom, an Israeli village founded in 1969 by Israeli Jews and Arabs to demonstrate that the two groups could live together in peace. Here, the guys played instruments, posed for photo shoots, showed off their dexterity with social media and sang together. “You’d be singing to yourself, then someone standing on the other side of the road would be doing a harmony with you,” Attia recalls.
A psychologist was on site as well, not only to ensure potential members were mentally prepared for the demanding work schedule ahead, but also to weigh in on whether they would fit well within the unique mixed-group dynamic. “There were [guys] we really wanted to work with,” Diener says, “but as their community and parents became more aware of what this was going to look like, they couldn’t endorse it in the same way they’d endorsed the audition process, so we lost a few really good prospects.” (Levitan adds that these prospects wouldn’t have necessarily made it into the group.)
A year-and-a-half after starting the scouting process, Levitan and Diener had settled on the right six guys — it was just by circumstance that four were Jewish Israelis and two Palestinian.
When Levitan and Diener Zoomed Dogosh to tell him he had been accepted, the camera crew caught him jumping around so enthusiastically that his microphone broke. “Getting accepted in the band, it was like a fever dream,” says Rozenblat, who had been tracking 25,000 steps a day while pacing around his house waiting for the news.
Neta Rozenblat
Austin Hargrave
Recording started shortly thereafter, with the guys intermittently traveling from their respective homes to a Tel Aviv studio. Philips and Lin say they had never spoken with a Palestinian person until joining as1one — a name that the guys chose from a few options that the team had come up with and that is pronounced “as one.” Over time, camaraderie grew, and by the time they gave their first live performance at a private event for TikTok Israel eight months after their inception, they were looking, sounding, moving and working the room like a band. (Levitan and Diener often use the words “brotherhood” and “unity” when describing the group’s bond.)
The bonding process ramped up in August, when as1one traveled to London to record at Abbey Road Studios with Nile Rodgers, who plays guitar on one of the songs written by Andrews and Kirk. (The session came together after Diener sent Rodgers the group’s cover of Rodgers’ Daft Punk collaboration, “Get Lucky.”) After they wrapped, Rodgers gave his guitar to as1one guitarist Attia, who says he was “literally shaking” and immediately FaceTimed his mother to tell her. (Overjoyed for her son, she cried.)
On Oct. 5, as1one boarded a flight for what was meant to be a monthlong trip to L.A. The scheduling turned out to be prescient: The team had considered flying the guys out a few days later — which, had it happened, would have put the project on perpetual hold amid a war that to date has killed around 1,200 Israelis (and claimed an estimated 240 hostages) and more than 11,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to reports from Gaza’s Health Ministry (an agency that, as The New York Times has reported, “is part of the Hamas government in Gaza but employs civil servants who predate Hamas’ control of the territory”).
While their families remain in the increasingly precarious situation abroad, as1one is in L.A. indefinitely, living in a rented house in Sherman Oaks with Andrew Berkowitz (the group’s executive in charge of talent who was involved in casting and has more than 30 years’ experience in artist promotion at labels including RCA and Arista) and traveling to various local studios making music. “Our policy with them is whatever they need, including if they need to go home, we will make that happen,” Diener says. “There’s a lot of people keeping their eyes on them.”
The group has recorded seven songs in the four weeks since its arrival, with collaborators including Andrews, Kirk, Danja (Nelly Furtado’s “Say It Right,” Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack,” Britney Spears’ “Gimme More”), Justin Tranter (a go-to co-writer for Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Maroon 5 and Imagine Dragons) and Y2K (Doja Cat’s “Attention”).
Niv Lin
Austin Hargrave
The songs as1one performs for me live in this conference room include a stirring ballad with lyrics fashioned in boilerplate boy band parlance (“I wouldn’t be me without you!”), rendered in gorgeous six-part harmony and delivered with passion. (They close their eyes a lot while singing.) When the guys launch into a peppier, sexier jam about being hot-blooded animals on the dancefloor, it’s easy enough to imagine a stadium full of fans screaming along. The songs are clever and well-constructed, and the melodies stay in my head long after the meeting is over.
The guys, along with Levitan and Diener, are quick to clarify that they’re less a “boy band” and more a “male pop group,” given that they play instruments (Attia is on acoustic and electric guitar, keyboard and drums; Lin plays keys and acoustic guitar; Philips plays keyboard; Rozenblat plays keyboard and acoustic guitar; Farah is on percussion; and Dogosh is learning piano) and don’t plan on performing choreography. And Levitan and Diener expect that the group’s story will attract a wider-than-usual fan base for an act of this kind. Still, as the duo sees it, their core fan base will likely be — in the high-pitched squealing tradition of groups like *NSYNC and Backstreet Boys — what Levitan calls “a very, very excited and active female audience.”
It’s not yet clear when the first as1one single will be released, and the group hasn’t yet announced a label signing. (Levitan and Diener say they can’t disclose details on label negotiations beyond that “there’s real interest in the band.”) They’re backed by a 30-person team and 15 lawyers representing each member individually and collectively across trademarks, music, film and general counsel, and repped by WME, where they also have film and TV representation. That documentary crew lives with them, still capturing their every move — from jam sessions at the house (where there is a “No harmonicas after 11 p.m.” policy) to the much darker and more complex moments of their recent history.
All this infrastructure is being forged with a singular vision: to make as1one the biggest musical group in the world. “I mean, seriously,” Levitan says. “That’s our goal.”
The stakes for as1one were always high, but they’ve of course become significantly higher over the last six weeks. Eight of the group’s friends and family members have been killed in the conflict. It would be overwhelming for anyone, and certainly must be for the six young men now living 7,500 miles from their home, where a brutal war is being fought. But whether through coaching or genuine belief, the guys present a silver-lining attitude.
“There’s no way to describe how bad you feel,” Philips says. “Your first instinct is to go back and be with your friends and family. Then a few days later, you realize there’s no better service to the world than what we’re doing, and it just gives us a bigger purpose.”
“We don’t want to be political,” adds rapper Farah. “We just want to be humanitarian.”
From left: Sadik Dogosh, Ohad Attia, Niv Lin, Nadav Philips, Aseel Farah and Neta Rozenblat of as1one.
Austin Hargrave
They also don’t want to be inextricably linked to the conflict that, like it or not, has defined their formation. “One of the things we’ve told them,” Levitan says, “especially with everything going on now, [is that these events] can be an influence [on the music] but just can’t be directly related, because [the music] has got to be broad enough where everybody can relate to it.”
Right now, though, the inherent message of an Israeli-Palestinian group named as1one may give the act a greater meaning than Diener and Levitan could have ever imagined, regardless of what the guys are singing about. Conversations now aren’t just about being the biggest band in the world, but about the Nobel Peace Prize.
“You may say it’s a pie-in-the-sky kind of goal,” says Levitan. “But what this has become is that important.”
This story originally appeared in the Nov. 18, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Tiga‘s Turbo Recordings has delivered fresh, inventive music reflecting the darkly alluring world of techno for 25 years, which is a pretty long time.
Today (Nov. 17), the Montreal-based producer and the label are celebrating this quarter century of existence with a 25-track compilation album, composed of music by a globe-spanning collection of artists including Seth Troxler, Spanish producer Adrian Marth, Chilean-German artist Matias Aguayo, Germany-based Biesmans and a 2manyDJs edit of Tiga’s own “Woke.” There’s also a flurry of other productions that exist in a place that’s simultaneously tough, cerebral and transcendent.
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In other words, the compilation is made for the club, which has been the producer’s home away from home since he started releasing music in the late ’90s. Over time, Tiga has become a hero of the electronic realm with smart, consistent releases that hit emotional buttons without ever veering into cheesiness.
The Turbo 25 project comes amid new work from Tiga’s LMZ project, a collaboration with Hudson Mohawke that’s delivered resonant collaborations with Channel Tres and most recently, Jesse Boykins III. Here, Tiga reflects on the compilation, 25 years of Turbo, and how — while he’s occasionally considered throwing in the towel on the label — he’s “never considered quitting” music.
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1. Where are you in the world right now, and what’s the setting like?
Amsterdam. I’ve been staring out my window like a house cat. Looks very alive.
2. What is the first album or piece of music you bought for yourself, and what was the medium?
With my own money: the first Duran Duran album. On cassette, bootleg Indian edition, at a hotel lobby giftshop in Bombay. 1981 or 82.
3. What did your parents do for a living when you were a kid, and what do or did they think of what you do for a living now?
My mother was a full-time mom, she took very good care of me and was always there for me. My dad was a stock trader. They were both extremely supportive from step one, even when I dropped out of school at 18. They knew their son, and knew how serious and passionate I was, and they supported me completely with zero judgment.
4. What’s the first non-gear thing you bought for yourself when you started making money as an artist?
Good question. A pair of Yamamoto boots.
5. If you had to recommend one album for someone looking to get into electronic music, what would you give them?
Aphex Twin, Selected Ambient Works.
6. What’s the last song you listened to?
Leonard Cohen, “It’s Torn.”
7. You spent the early years of your life in Goa, India. What are your strongest memories of that time? Did it set you up to be a producer?
I don’t think it set me up as a producer, but as a person I got used to being around wild people and got used to the idea it was okay to be different and strange. I also grew up around a lot of hippies and weirdos, so I always wanted to work hard to end up “successful.”
8. Goa trance, love it or leave it?
When it’s done well, I like it. But what I really love is just good trance that happens to be played in Goa.
9. How were the 25 tracks on the compilation collected and selected? What was the criteria for what made it on? Is there anyone you’re particularly excited about having on the compilation?
It was a collection of our existing family of artists and new artists that we have had an eye on. We sent out invite letters to everybody and then just had some back and forth with them. It is always quite informal. I was very happy to work with Matias Aguayo, because he’s one of my favorites and he delivered something really special.
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10. What does this compilation say about the past/present/future of Turbo?
That we still do what we do.
11. The compilation’s album’s fine print that it was “made possible in part by the Government of Canada.” What did the Canadian government bestow upon the album?
We get some grant money for certain projects from the Canadian arts endowment. They support Canadian artists. Its tax money well spent.
12. Does Turbo have a brick-and-mortar headquarters? If so, paint us a picture of that space. If not, what’s your fantasy HQ?
We had a gorgeous office from about 2012 to 2018. It had a studio, a giant wall of fame with every single physical release mounted in order. We closed it pre-pandemic, and now it’s all laptops and remote control. But it’s my plan to open a new HQ in the next few years, on a mountain top in the countryside.
13. Twenty-five years is a respectable amount of time for any artistic endeavor. Was there ever a time in your career when you considered quitting? Do you see yourself making music and traveling the world in perpetuity?
I never considered quitting personally. Never. I obviously go in and out of the love affair with travel and touring, but generally it’s still an almost unbeatable occupation. As for the label: Yes. There were a few times over the years when I almost threw in the towel.
14. If you could time travel to any era of dance music, to when would you go and why?
I would have liked to go to a few legit early acid house parties: early 80’s Ibiza, late ’80s U.K. I also would have loved to have been to some serious Belgian industrial/new beat clubs at inception. I would love to have been at a club like the Hacienda the first time Blue Monday played.
15. In the sprawling ecosystem of dance music, what niche does Turbo fill?
I like to think we make dignified bangers.
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16. Dance music is obviously intended to make people… dance, but are there any dance songs that reliably make you cry?
I don’t think I’ve ever actually shed a tear to a dance song. There are a few Aphex tracks like “Polynomial/C” and “Every Day” that make me very emotional, but not actual tears.
17. What’s the proudest moment of your career thus far?
I was proud of the first time I did a live show, in Berlin, in 2015. Singing in front of an audience, etc. Also, my first real shows in Berlin back in 2001.jamb
18. What’s the best business decision you’ve ever made?
Never having a boss.
19. Who’s been your greatest mentor, and what’s the best advice they gave you?
I don’t really have a mentor, and I would love to have one. It’s healthy. But my dad told me when I was about one, “Just find something you love to do, and do it.” And that was great advice.
20. One piece of advice you’d give to your younger self?
Get paid in Bitcoin for a few years, 2015-2016, and be generous with the people around you.
Tate McRae was recently scrolling TikTok when an old interview she did at 16 came across the screen. “I was the most awkward person ever, and I was like, ‘There’s no chance that this is the same person,’ ” she says with a grimace. “You evolve so much, and not only am I seeing it, but I’m documenting it in my music in real time.”
Now 20 and living in Los Angeles, the native of Calgary, Alberta (which she calls “the Texas of Canada”), has spent much of her life thus far on screens — both her own, while navigating TikTok like a promotional pro, and others, whether on network TV or YouTube. As a teen, McRae placed third on the 2016 season of So You Think You Can Dance and soon after, in fall 2017, launched the weekly YouTube series Create With Tate, which she used to share new choreography and music covers. She thought she would go on to become a backup dancer, but she felt equally drawn to songwriting, covering her bedroom walls with lyrics, quotes and poems that her mother has since painted over in a shade she describes as “serial killer white.”
Tate McRae will perform at the 2023 Billboard Music Awards on Nov. 19. Watch on BBMAs.watch, @BBMAs and @billboard socials.
One of the first videos she posted was a song that proved she wasn’t destined to be anyone’s backup — and could very much hold pop’s center stage on her own. The lovelorn piano ballad “One Day” (which McRae wrote herself) gained traction online, and by early 2018, she and her parents were flying to New York for label meetings (accompanied by McRae’s dance manager at the time); just a year later, it was announced that she had signed a record deal with RCA and a management deal with Hard 8 Working Group. As her high school graduation in Calgary neared, McRae was splitting her time between midterms and awards shows.
“She was so young then, obviously, but so determined and really in some ways sort of moved like a competitive athlete, which makes a lot of sense, given her dance background,” RCA COO John Fleckenstein says. “But still, even at that age, she was so clear on where she wanted to go and what was important to her.”
And while those in McRae’s inner circle agree she has always wanted to steer her own ship — and has proved more than capable — she says that it took her until now to learn how to sail full speed ahead and in only one direction: her own. When she got her start in the industry, she was straddling two different worlds. “Now a lot of my time revolves around music in some way: thinking about music, playing music, driving and listening to music,” McRae says. “It’s all one world.” But merging the two didn’t happen without some friction.
Vintage Junya Watanabe top, MM6 Maison Margiela jeans.
By 2020, McRae was well positioned for a major year, with a proper team assembled. Then came the pandemic; still, she stuck with the plan, releasing what became her breakout hit, “You Broke Me First,” that April despite being homebound — unable to promote it or fully enjoy its success. Like “One Day,” “You Broke Me First” is a tender, midtempo pop song, and together they contributed to McRae’s early classification as a “sad pop” songwriter, drawing comparisons as Canada’s answer to Billie Eilish. But “You Broke Me First” has a bit more bite than its predecessor. It took off on TikTok within a month, ultimately peaking at No. 17 on the Billboard Hot 100, and performances at the MTV European Music Awards and on Jimmy Kimmel Live! followed — all as McRae prepared to graduate and move to Los Angeles.
McRae recalls spending a month in the city in April 2021, renting a house with her parents to “test it out,” during which they read Donald S. Passman’s industry bible, All You Need To Know About the Music Business. “We read this book together because we were like, ‘What are we walking into right now?’ ” At the end of their stay, McRae got her own apartment and has lived solo since. Though she admits she spends lots of time “inside on my couch,” she has found comfort and community in “a really awesome girl group” and fellow artist friends (like pal Olivia Rodrigo, whose “bad idea right?” video includes a McRae cameo) “because we’re private in our personal lives, but then our innermost, darkest, most intense fears are the things we’re putting on display, which is so weird.”
In the following years, McRae released music at a steady pace, including two EPs (All the Things I Never Said and Too Young To Be Sad) and a string of collaborations with artists such as Troye Sivan and Regard (“You”) and Khalid (“Working”), both of which became Hot 100 hits. Her 2022 debut album, I Used To Think I Could Fly, debuted at No. 13 on the Billboard 200 and yielded two more Hot 100 entries while also supporting her headlining tour of clubs and small theaters. All of which should have been cause for celebration — but what McRae remembers most is feeling lost.
“[That] album was a very big internal battle for me. I was so confused with who I was as a person,” she says. “I remember releasing it when I was still on tour, and it felt so overwhelming. I was just like, ‘Oh, wow. I just released my first album. It’s here, it’s happening. I am now an artist.’ And I think as much as it was a relief, I also was just like, ‘Is this right?’ ”
Ottolinger dress, Brandon Hurtado Sandler ring.
As she put together the album, McRae had felt like she “was working with every producer on the planet” and struggled with her “people-pleasing” tendencies while trying to make everyone involved happy. “It took a lot of time after that to be like, ‘OK, let me not look at any other person for a really long time and just figure out who the f–k I am and what I want to do with my life for real.’ ”
By the end of 2022, McRae knew something had to change. She trusted her gut. “I had to figure out who [in the industry] was actually on my side and who wasn’t … so a lot was shifting behind the scenes.” The biggest shift came when she signed a new management deal with Full Stop’s Tom Skoglund, Jeffrey Azoff and Tommy Bruce (all of whom also manage Harry Styles), along with Sali Kharazi and Ali Saunders.
“I was lost in the whirlwind of it all, and it got to a point where I was like, ‘I don’t feel like I’m being respected as a young woman, and I don’t think I’m being heard in the ways that I want to be,’ ” she says. “What I take a lot of pride in is being a genuine, good person. I’m always going to give out that energy, and if the people who are representing you and on your team aren’t reciprocating that, that’s just not the type of people you want on your side. I was just feeling like I was stuck in a spot I had been in for like, five years, and I was like, ‘I feel like I’m going crazy.’ ”
At such a time, she was thankful for her young artist and producer friends, whom she says were “so transparent with me on how things [looked] from the outside.” And now, she couldn’t be more grateful for her new management team and the relationship they’ve built — and the many successes they have already shared. “They look at me and they don’t question me making decisions,” she says. “I want to be a businesswoman. I’m 20 now and I’m still young, but I know what I want.”
Tate McRae photographed on October 31, 2023 in Los Angeles. Masha Popova top, Givenchy skirt, pants and shoes.
Simultaneously, McRae’s creative process shifted as she finally found a consistent co-writing crew in Ryan Tedder, Amy Allen and Jasper Harris. She says the way they made her forthcoming second album, Think Later (out Dec. 8 on RCA), was how she always imagined her idols made albums, with a sense of togetherness. “My last album wasn’t like that at all … I was getting songs from 10 different people and being like, ‘OK, here’s an album.’ And this time it was written by the same core group of people,” she says. “That’s what made the process so fun for me, because it actually felt like a project that I was working on.”
Already, the new process is yielding results. Sultry lead single “Greedy” has become McRae’s highest-charting hit to date, peaking at No. 11 on the Hot 100, driven by 104.2 million on-demand streams, according to Luminate, and its usage in 1.3 million TikTok videos. But arguably, its biggest accomplishment has been reintroducing McRae to the masses — as an artist who, this time, knows exactly who she is.
While McRae says fans shouldn’t expect the entire album to sound like “Greedy,” she thinks the song represents a stylistic through line of “straight pop. It’s also pretty savage.” She credits the shift to her alter ego, Tatiana, McRae’s tour persona whom she describes as “ballsy, so loud and obnoxious.”
Vassia Kostara suit, Givenchy shoes.
In the studio, “I was like, ‘I don’t really give a f–k. I just want to say what I want to say and I want to be 20 years old,’ ” she says. “Sometimes you just want to go out and have a good time and just live life and be present and follow your intuition and not think too hard about it — and I just didn’t feel like thinking too hard about a lot of these songs. I don’t think people are going to expect me to say the stuff that I’m saying.”
In other words, as Fleckenstein puts it: “Some of these records, you’re going to stop in your tracks and go, ‘I didn’t realize she could do that.’ ”
When we talk in early November, McRae tells me her last few weeks have felt like “a bit of a dream.” “Greedy” blasted off; she announced her second album along with a world tour, during which she’ll play her first hometown show and end at Madison Square Garden; and she started prepping for her Saturday Night Live musical guest debut. But, perhaps most impressively, she got her collaborator Tedder to work on a Sunday.
“She’s the first artist to get me to [do that] in close to 10 years!” exclaims Tedder, who executive-produced Think Later. “I don’t care how much I love you, who you are, how many Grammys or how high the stakes are, I don’t work on weekends. Weekends and late-night rap sessions are two things I’ve officially graduated from. But she got me to do it because the song was that good.”
Ottolinger dress, Cult Gaia shoes.
The song came together in one weekend — and after she had technically finished her album. The two had started working at 10 a.m., going through sequences and punching vocals, with the goal of wrapping by 7 p.m. About an hour in, McRae revealed she felt that one box had yet to be checked, sonically speaking, on the album. “We had already sent the tracklist to the label, and at 6 p.m., we walked out with a song completely written, recorded, vocaled and produced,” Tedder says. “It’s the fastest, craziest Hail Mary of my entire life.” The next day, a Sunday, they listened with what he calls “tomorrow ears” and finished the track with enough time for it to make it on Think Later.
McRae and Tedder first met over a Zoom session in 2020, after being connected by mutual friend and songwriter-producer J Kash. As they both recently recalled to each other, they wrote a “trash” song that day and didn’t work together again until late last year, on Tiësto’s thumping dance-pop track “10:35” (on which McRae features). It was clear to Tedder then that McRae had “started to definitively put up guideposts.”
That became even more apparent during their first session together late last year for Think Later, when they wrote one of Tedder’s favorite songs on the album. “That session started with her walking in, opening up a playlist that she made that had 21 to 22 songs on it, and [saying], ‘These are the songs that shaped [me]. I want to figure out the through line and attempt to beat some of these,’ ” he recalls. “She had words and phrases and endless amounts of topics and real-life stories to write from, and that just doesn’t happen. I can count on one hand the artists I’ve worked with in 20 years that have pulled that on day one. And it was the most refreshing thing in the world. Otherwise, you’re playing pin the tail on the donkey in the dark.” (As further proof, he adds that McRae’s mix notes are so detailed “you’d think Quincy Jones wrote them.”)
That session led to many more with the same tight-knit team — just how McRae had always envisioned making an album — including the one for “Greedy.” Earlier this year, Tedder had posted on Instagram a few early-2000s songs he was revisiting, including some by Nelly Furtado, to which McRae replied that she had been listening to the same material. “There was a discussion like, ‘Would it work now?’ ” Tedder says. “I said, ‘One hundred percent it will.’ I’m just old enough where I know cycles, and this cycle is going to happen.”
Vassia Kostara suit, Givenchy shoes.
McRae calls “Greedy” a “wild pass” on which they tried a totally new sound and beat — and just as Tedder predicted, it worked big time. She remembers debuting the single during her Philadelphia tour stop: “No one knew it was coming, and I remember feeling it that first night, like, ‘Holy sh-t, what’s going to happen with this song?’ ”
And while fans may not have known when to expect the song, they knew something was coming thanks to McRae’s TikTok, where she boasts 5.5 million followers (the most of her social media accounts) and had been teasing the song in a series of clips. (Within days of finishing her last song created with Tedder, she had already started teasing that on the app, too.)
“She is not scared or shy about playing music for fans and talking about what she’s doing, and she is driving that conversation every step of the way,” Fleckenstein says. “It’s not a record label ta-da! that you’re seeing around her where there’s some orchestrated marketing promotional shtick. This is about her making something, delivering it to her fans and saying, ‘This is what I care about, and I hope you do, too.’ And then we, as her partners and label, are making it as big as we can possibly make it.”
Tedder says he always tells McRae that, when it comes to social media savvy, “you’re the female [Lil] Nas [X] and he’s the male Tate,” adding that, “Understanding that the world lives on the internet and understanding what people want to hear, how they want to hear it and how they want it to be presented, that is its own art form now that I didn’t have to contend with when I started. I played a gig last night and was with Kygo and The Chainsmokers, and [The Chainsmokers’] Alex [Pall] and Drew [Taggart] cornered me to talk about Tate, and Drew said, ‘Man, I’ve been watching what’s going on with that song. She gets the internet.’ ”
Which is why McRae was well aware that the “Greedy” music video — in which she heats up an ice rink with her impressive dance moves, which she worked on with choreographer-to-the-stars Sean Bankhead — would land so well. “I’m really particular with my taste, and that hasn’t always translated through what the internet has seen of me, even with what I’m wearing and how I’m performing and the choreography,” she says. “I’m so proud of [the “Greedy” video] because I got to actually be a dancer and make a video that I was like, ‘This is sick. I want to show my friends.’ I never ever used to feel that way.”
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Now she’s thinking of how to translate this previously untapped swagger to the stage. On her most recent tour, which wrapped in October, McRae wanted to push herself as a vocalist rather than relying on her dance background to carry the show. And yet, those roots are what so many in McRae’s inner circle call her “magic.” As Tedder says, “She can outdance any pop star and it’s something she rarely flexes — and she flexed in [the “Greedy”] video.”
“The truth is, she is winning because she is singular,” Fleckenstein adds. “And particularly in a pop landscape — which is often a fickle and very difficult place to be successful — you need to be that good.”
And no one understands that better than McRae herself. When she names the artists she most admires, they’re a reflection of her own ambition — and many are former dancers who translated that foundation into global pop superstardom. “When I look at my favorite icons or videos or performances, it’s always the biggest pop stars, so I think that’s always a goal,” she says. “I think what defines a pop star is how iconic [they are]: Madonna, Britney [Spears], Christina [Aguilera]; they would put on these shows and blow everybody away and make timeless art. And that’s what I want to do: make timeless art and timeless performances — and strive to keep on doing that.”
This story will appear in the Nov. 18, 2023, issue of Billboard.
At the height of the pandemic, singer-songwriter Laufey spent her free time outside of classes at the Berklee College of Music taking hours-long meetings with industry executives. With only two self-released singles out at the time, the modern jazz artist was already fielding emails from managers, labels and publishers interested in signing her — but for Laufey (pronounced Lay-vay), the conversations were about understanding the inner workings of the music business.
“I had a second education talking to so many people,” she says. “I would take meetings on my own and say, ‘I’m not signing anything, but tell me everything you know about the music industry.’”
Three years later, Laufey has taken that information and built a team to help bring her pop-infused style of jazz to the top of her genre. In September, her second album, Bewitched, reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Jazz Albums and Traditional Jazz Albums charts, fueled by the success of catchy bossa nova-inspired lead single “From The Start.” Her prior releases have subsequently soared up the rankings, prominently stamping the 24-year-old’s name across charts otherwise filled with legacy acts including Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Miles Davis. Thanks to her confident and dreamy voice and social media savvy, she’s now crossing into the mainstream as one of the biggest jazz stars of the streaming era. And following a year in which fellow jazz artist Samara Joy won best new artist, appetite for the genre seems at its hungriest in decades.
Long before she dedicated herself to learning the industry, Laufey understood life as a musician. Her maternal grandparents were both professors of music in China, and her mother is a classical violinist. (She has appeared on a few of her daughter’s songs, such as the titular track from 2022 debut album, Everything I Know About Love). Born in Reykjavík, Laufey began playing piano at four years old, picked up cello at eight, and started singing jazz a few years after that, all while moving between Iceland and Washington, D.C., and spending her summers at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. “My mom could tell that I had a natural inclination for music,” Laufey says.
While studying as a cello student at Berklee, Laufey knew she wanted to mix her jazz and classical background with her own contemporary voice. As she grew into her own at school in Boston, she gained confidence and began writing her own songs. She recorded her first track, “Street By Street,” on the last day before campus shut down due to COVID-19 restrictions. A few weeks later, she uploaded it on DistroKid. “It got some attention,” she remembers. “I started growing a social media following online and it all snowballed from there.”
Laufey photographed October 29, 2023 at The Wilbur in Boston.
She continued to hone her songwriting skills amid her virtual college experience, challenging herself to pick up her guitar, create catchy hooks and pen “cheeky” lyrics every time a Zoom class ended (“Listening to you harp on ’bout some new soulmate/ ‘She’s so perfect,’ blah, blah, blah,” she sings on “From The Start”). She began posting videos of her singing jazz standards by Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and more on Instagram and TikTok. The clips quickly became a refuge for people seeking levity during the pandemic. “I was freaking out,” she acknowledges. “I was like, ‘OK. I have a duty to fulfill.’ It was such good practice for me.”
Later in 2020, her social media success led to inquiries from top music executives. Following months of meetings, she signed a global recording deal with AWAL and added a manager in Max Gredinger from Foundations Artist Management. “I saw her building this insane online audience on her own and thought, ‘We could build on that,’” says Gredinger. He acknowledges that there wasn’t much precedent for breaking jazz artists into the mainstream today — but if anything, he notes, they used it to their advantage.
“I hear a lot of artists talk about other artists like, ‘What’s the blueprint?’ Laufey doesn’t really do that. Of course, there are artists that are massively inspiring to her. Norah Jones, Adele, Chet Baker, all the jazz greats [and] a lot of classical composers. But she always knew that what she was doing was one of one and something that hadn’t been done before.”
Max Gredinger and Laufey photographed October 29, 2023 at The Wilbur in Boston.
Without a definitive outline to follow, Laufey primarily focused on further developing her social media presence, specifically on Instagram and TikTok. In addition to teasing music and responding to fans’ comments and DMs, she livestreamed weekly sessions of her performing lullabies. “If you gave me all the money in the world, I don’t think I could come up with a better social strategy than Laufey,” Gredinger says.
Following the August 2022 release Everything I Know About Love, she toured 250-to-500 capacity rooms in the U.S. — a crucial component to Laufey’s development, stresses Gredinger, and a way for her to build buzz amid her growing fan base. By the middle of 2023, she was ready to start the rollout of her follow-up album, beginning with her biggest hit to date, “From The Start.” After writing the entirety of the song in half an hour, she released the charmingly upbeat song last May, and it immediately took off on TikTok, though she initially brushed aside the numbers.
“Sometimes you put a song on TikTok and it does well because it’s visually stimulating or it has a hooky lyric, but it won’t go past that,” Laufey says. However, once it eclipsed a million streams in a 24-hour period and tripled her previous record, she knew that she had something special.
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Laufey continued to grow momentum with new singles throughout the summer — and expanded her team as well, signing a global publishing deal with Warner Chappell Music in August. The following month, Bewitched arrived through AWAL and has since spent eight weeks atop both Jazz Albums and Traditional Jazz Albums. Following its first tracking week, “From The Start” also hit No. 1 on the Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart. Through Nov. 2, the song has 3.5 million official on-demand streams, according to Luminate.
Amid her current 30-date sold-out North American tour, Laufey earned her first chart entry on Hot Alternative Songs and Hot Rock & Alternative Songs with her seductive beabadoobee team-up, “A Night To Remember.” On Friday (Nov. 10), she’ll drop two holiday tracks: Her rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and an original titled “Better Than Snow,” both with jazz-pop icon Norah Jones. And as she continues to carve her own path and expand her audience across genres, Laufey is more confident in her future than ever before.
“When I started out, people were always asking me, ‘Who do you want to be like?’” Laufey reflects. “I had no idea what to say. I still have no clue what to say. The difference is, now I don’t need to. I’m just going to keep making the music I want and hope that it reaches as many ears as possible.”
Laufey photographed October 29, 2023 at The Wilbur in Boston.
A version of this story will appear in the Nov. 18, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Last winter in Boise, Idaho, East Forest was considering making a new album.
He’d just released Headwaters — recorded live in one evening in a remote region of Utah for a group of friends — and was ready to make something in the studio. A singer interested in collaborating with him had reached out on Instagram, and East Forest contemplated how they could work together. In the meantime, she just showed up in Boise one day.
“She came to town and got a hotel and came to the studio, and I was like, ‘OK. I guess I’ll start writing some songs.’”
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Wanting the new album to incorporate more drums and bass than his previous studio LP, 2022’s Still Possible, he needed an ace drummer. “Boise’s not much of an industry town, so I was like, ‘Man, I don’t know where I’m gonna find the drummer I need.’”
But again, he didn’t have to look further than his own neighborhood. Attending a jazz show one night in Boise, he realized the drummer was Jens Kuross, a singer/songwriter who’s toured with Bonobo, performs with electronic-psych band The Acid, and had just moved back to his native Boise from L.A.
“I was like, ‘Would you like come to a studio?’ And it turned out he lived two blocks away.”
With the pieces coming together, East Forest — born Trevor Oswalt — settled down in the studio with his collaborators. The music that emerged over time was, like most everything East Forest has produced during his 15-plus-year career, emotive, cerebral and often lush, fusing live instruments and electronics with musings about life and death and what it all means. Themes of the new songs reflected the uncertainty and anxiety of the time in which we currently exist, and also the idea that while humanity is in what often feels like a freefall, something new might be emerging as well.
East Forest thus called the album Music for the Deck of the Titanic, a nod to the string quartet that played as the ship went down and the beauty of that act. The singer who’d shown up in Boise, Senegalese vocalist Marieme, appears on three tracks. Duncan Trussell muses about music and aliens on the nine-minute “So What?” Techno producer ANNA delivers a sunrise-at-Burning Man vibe on “Currents.” The album cover is a portrait of East Forest standing with a peacock in the driveway at Diplo‘s house. Released via Bright Antenna Music last week, East Forest and Marieme will perform selections from the album tonight (Nov. 7) at Pico Union Project in Los Angeles.
East Forest’s career arc always been somewhat out of the box, with his heady, spiritually-leaning productions infused with the wisdom of teachers like Ram Dass (with whom East Forest collaborated with on his 2019 album, Ram Dass) and often made for psychedelic experiences. In 2019, he released Music For Mushrooms: A Soundtrack For the Psychedelic Practitioner, a five-hour album designed to accompany a psilocybin trip. He recently received a letter from a man, who in the midst of a bad mushroom trip, remembered that the album existed, managed to put it on, and felt his experience shift into something much more uplifting.
As electronic music, and culture in general, becomes increasingly receptive to psychedelics and the consciousness-centric thinking that often comes in tandem, the box seems to be reconfiguring to be more in line with East Forest’s output. Here, he talks about his new album, being a circle in a square-shaped industry, and the advice he gave to Aaron Rodgers.
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How have you seen psychedelics affect the electronic music community in over the last five or 10 years?
I guess I’ve seen a few more friends and artists getting into the space, but it’s just a few. I’m thinking of when Jon Hopkins and I crossed paths and, and then we did a track together, then that became part of an album he then decided to call Music For Psychedelic Therapy. I thought that was a big deal. Because it was so forthright, just like when I was doing Music For Mushrooms. You’re telling people what this is for.
And something about yourself that’s perhaps vulnerable.
Absolutely. Even though it’s more mainstream, there’s a lot of judgment around it still. For better or worse, when I started doing this project it was overtly purpose-driven and spiritual. That was not like, cool. I still get pushback on that from agents, industry people, not getting representation, because they’re like, “well, everything’s there on paper, the demand or whatever.” But then they’re like, “yeah, but I don’t know.” It’s the vulnerability thing I guess… That’s a thing that bothers me, because people put [my work] in a category where it’s yoga music or something. But if you took away the definitions, I work really hard on the music to stand on its own. You don’t have to know anything about [where it’s coming from.] It’s like any music; you click with it, or you don’t.
The music industry isn’t necessarily the most vulnerable place.
No! That’s what I’m saying. In lot of ways, I’m like a circle going into a square. And every time I try to fit into that and knock on the front door, it’s usually been difficult. Every time I’m doing it on my own, it’s worked way better.
Are you are you trying to be more traditional, in that industry way?
You have to use certain apparatus of the music industry at a certain level, because in many respects there’s no other way. It’s incredibly extractive, which is what all artists deal with. I think I read that the average artist makes 12% of every dollar. It’s just hard. So in some ways, doing things on your own can be easier, because you can control more of those aspects. So we’ve been trying to produce a lot of our own shows. I did a tour last fall where people lie down, it’s called a Ceremony Concert tour, and it was awesome. But the economics were really hard. I mean our expenses were like, $300,000 for 15 shows.
That’s a lot.
It’s very difficult when you’re not selling alcohol. Some venues won’t even work with you, because that’s how they make their money. I’m not anti-alcohol, it’s just a different kind of show. It’s hard to find partners out there that are cool with that.
Right. You can’t sell mushrooms at the bar.
Not yet. [laughs]
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As your new album was coming together, did you feel like there were themes presenting themselves? It doesn’t sound like you knew what it was going to be when you started.
It’s true. Sometimes I feel like this is the Titanic, and I’m playing music for it. But then I also started to realize that something’s dying. And I felt like well, maybe I’m more like a death doula. But something’s being born too. Same thing [with the string quartet playing] on the Titanic — it was a way of assuaging fears, and there’s beauty to that, but it’s also helping with grieving. But it’s also a celebration about something new emerging that perhaps will be over generations. I do feel like we’re in a very poignant time, where this is like, going to get harder, and so it’s a lot about inner fortitude and grieving. Those are the themes. On all the songs it’s either a mixture of hope, of something emerging, or letting go of something and the sort of in betweens of that.
What do you see emerging?
Well, it’s of course speculation. It’s sort of like, what’s emerging in our hearts, or anyone’s heart. We get wrapped up as the protagonists of our own stories, so we get very hyper focused on our story, but I have a feeling that my story is probably similar to a lot of stories. We’re all having the same story in our own language. It just seems like it’s about letting go of old ways and allowing something new to come through that’s a lot less about control and maybe growth in the economy of scale, and more about how like, petting a cat is just as important as going to Mars. My heart tells me that’s true, but the world says that’s absurd.
I just very much believe that the change we need in the world always happens from the inside out, always has, always will. So it’s more about people working away from this information sickness and distraction, and learning the very basics about “Who am I?” and taking a few breaths and learning what they know already? It’s surprising how much we’ve forgotten, and how much noise is going on.
That’s interesting term, information sickness. How would you define it?
The economy of attention is what drives the world. So it’s also a recognition that your attention is very, very valuable and powerful. That’s not like hippie mojo, it’s about like, “how many seconds can we keep you on the platform, even if we kill the entire world doing it for the shareholders for the stock to go up.” We’ve used the best minds in the world to do that at any cost. Early AI, that’s a whole other side of it. But we’re manipulating our own selves, for the sake of the dollar that way. We’re hacking our minds that way. So it’s very much about clearing away the noise.
How?
You can only do that through elements of choice — you choose to do it, and it’s very simple and there’s many myriad ways to do it. But it is up to the individual. So this is actually not a victim story as much as an empowering story of, you can do this, but you have to decide, and you have to chart your own path. And it is hard, but it’s not complicated. So I think music is a very powerful way to latch on to very easily with your attention and let it take you into emotional places and [foster] self discovery.
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I understand you advised Aaron Rodgers on his darkness retreat before he did it last February. How did that happen?
He knows some people I know, Aubrey, Marcus and a few people, so it was kind of a couple of degrees away. I did that same darkness retreat in January, which was really powerful for me. When I came out, it was in the news, like “Aaron Rodgers is going on a darkness retreat!” And I was like, “there’s only one. It’s got to be the same place.” I didn’t have his number or anything.
I didn’t know how to get in touch with him, and I wasn’t really that concerned about it, but I remembered he’d liked a tweet of mine years ago. I don’t even use Twitter, but I fired up Twitter. It was like “@AaronRodgers I just came back from there if you want to talk.” Two minutes later, he wrote me. It was like, 11 at night. We were talking on Twitter. And I was like, “Look, man, here’s my phone number. Let’s talk tomorrow.”
Then we FaceTimed for an hour and a half and just talked. It was the same place so, I gave him tips and we talked about the process and doing some stuff where he’s interested in bringing psychedelic therapy into the sports world.
Right.
I’m not that interested in just doing things for the [psychedelic community.] I’m very interested in how you build bridges. I thought, well that could be an interesting place to work. So we started talking about doing something together, ceremonies and projects, but that was months ago, and now he’s not retiring and back at work. [Editors note: this interview was completed before Aaron Rodgers suffered a torn achilles tendon during his opening game with the New York Jets during week one of the 2023 NFL season.]
What was the darkness retreat like?
You’re in a [fairly small] room, and it’s somewhat underground, so it’s totally quiet. It’s 30 minutes in the back country, outside Ashland, Oregon. There’s no cell service, no power, no outlets or anything. There’s a bathroom with no door, and a bed and then a little table that they can pass food through the wall without light. And a yoga mat…. You’re just left with you.
I found myself to be incredibly emotional at times. And all this stuff just starts coming up. All these memories about certain things, like, “man, I don’t want to deal with that. I don’t want to think about that.” But it just keeps coming up, and I’m just crying. When I knew Aaron was going there and people were slagging him, I was like, “you try it.” It’s actually amazingly honorable. If you want to make decisions, this is the richest way to really sit with something.
Is there anything you’d like to say?
I don’t want to sound ungrateful, because I’m not. I’m super grateful. And I don’t want to sound like I’m just complaining about things in the industry. That’s not it at all. It’s more that I’m amazed. I’ll play songs that are really not different than what I played 15 years ago at my friend’s farm for my 20 friends on mushrooms. I never ever thought that that would somehow translate into anything that could be commercialized or performed in a theater. I thought that was impossible.
Whether you know him as Green Velvet, as Cajmere, as one half of Get Real or as one of his other aliases, the fact is that Curtis Jones’ productions are as vital now as they was when he started making house music back in the early ’90s.
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The Chicago-born artist scored dance world hits early in his career, with Cajmere’s “Percolator” and “Brighter Days” — both released in 1992 — becoming club staples (and in the former’s case, also a jock jam essential.) Both of those songs were also played during Beyoncé‘s 2023 tour behind Renaissance, an album Green Velvet contributed to the as the co-producer of “COZY.” His hefty catalog includes collaborations with a spectrum-spanning collection of dance artists including Chris Lake, Patrick Topping, Flosstradamus, Walker & Royce and many more.
Jones’ most recent release is “The Greatest Thing Alive,” a characteristically funky collaboration with Mark Knight and James Hurr released via Knight’s longstanding label, Toolroom. The last two months of the year will find him playing gigs in the U.K., Mexico, Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Arizona.
But before all that, we found him at home in Chicago. Here, Green Velvet talks about how Beyoncé helped deliver one of the proudest moments of his career, his respect for Prince and why – after so much success — he doesn’t yet feel like a legend.
1. Where are you in the world right now, and what’s the setting like?
Right now I’m home in Chicago working in my studio, and the setting is peaceful and inspiring.
2. What is the first album or piece of music you bought for yourself, and what was the medium?
This is very difficult for me to answer, because with my father being a DJ and working in my aunt’s record store I grew up around music. My favorite album, however, was Parliament’s Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome.
3. What did your parents do for a living when you were a kid, and what do or did they think of what you do for a living now?
My father was an electrical engineer, an entrepreneur and DJ. My mother was a dietitian. My father passed away more than 10 years ago. He was very proud of what I was doing. My mother still wants me to go back to school to get a PhD so we will have a doctor in the family.
4. What’s the first non-gear thing you bought for yourself when you started making money as an artist?
A tacky, used, stick-shift red sports car.
5. If you had to recommend one album for someone looking to get into dance/electronic music, what would you give them?
Prince’s 1999. The man was a genius, and he knew how to bring synthesizers to life.
6. What’s the last song you listened to?
My upcoming release with DJ E-Clyps and Dajae, ”Hot N Spicy.”
7. The word “legend” is associated with your name. Do you feel legendary?
No, I don’t feel legendary, because my best work is yet to come.
8. Your latest track is “The Greatest Thing Alive.” What, for you, are the greatest things alive?
Babies, puppies and people with love in their hearts.
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9. The song is also very much about feeling yourself. In what moments do you feel like the greatest thing alive?
When I am helping others.
10. You’ve been doing this for more than three decades. What’s the key to your longevity?
God blessing me with creativity and wisdom to make music that continues to resonate with fans, young and old.
11. And in those 30 years you’ve obviously seen the dance world change a lot. How does this moment compare to 10 or 20 or 30 years ago?
Now it is pop culture, where in the past it was underground.
12. You’ve talked before about your religious conversion after having your drink spiked with GhB roughly 20 years ago. How do your faith and your career intersect?
I have always been religious, and a lot of my music reflects that. After by the grace of God I survived my drink being spiked, it made my faith even stronger.
13. What’s the best city in the world for dance music currently? Why?
The music is really global now and one of the results of the pandemic — especially with the internet and streaming — is people have learned to have a good time no matter where they are in the world.
14. The most exciting thing happening in dance music currently is _____?
The return of oversized clothes.
15. The most annoying thing happening in dance music currently is _____?
People having their cell phones stolen at music events.
16. Do you have guilty pleasure music?
My guilty music pleasure is listening to classical music.
17. What’s been the proudest moment of your career thus far?
There are actually two. Hearing “Percolator” on the radio in 1992 and having Beyoncé play “Percolator” and “Brighter Days” during her Renaissance Tour.
18. What’s the best business decision you’ve ever made?
Leaving graduate school at the UC Berkeley Department of Chemical Engineering for music.
19. Who was your greatest mentor, and what was the best advice they gave you?
My music career has been influenced by many people and experiences, but unfortunately, I didn’t have a mentor.
20. One piece of advice you’d give to your younger self?
Get your own drinks and never leave it unattended!!!
