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On Sunday (Sept. 8) day two, the second edition of the Arre Festival, taking place in Mexico City’s Curva 4 Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, became a platform for new artists in the regional Mexican music space, featuring corridos tumbados superstar Junior H as the headliner. Read day one recap here. Throughout the various stages of the […]
In its second edition on Saturday (Sept. 7), the Arre Festival transformed the Curva 4 Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, typically a race track, into a sprawling venue where legendary regional Mexican music groups like Los Tigres del Norte and Los Cardenales de Nuevo León captivated both young audiences and solo artists such as Xavi and Carolina Ross, among others. The event gathered 54,300 attendees on its first day, according to the promoter Ocesa.
It was a multi-generational party that honored sounds such as the popular corridos tumbados, norteño music, mariachi, sierreño, banda sinaloense, Tex-Mex, duraguense, corridos alterados and other regional Mexican music variations. They were all delivered by acts such as Banda Cuisillos, El Fantasma, Guardianes del Amor, El Komander, Tito Double P, Adriel Favela, Joss Favela, EME Malafe and Los Esquivel. Curva 4 became a huge dance floor, where up to three generations gathered to enjoy the music that has been around for over a century.
Birthday celebrations, surprise shows, tributes to the greats and the passing of the baton to the younger generations of musicians were some of the most significant moments that took place during the first day of the festival.
On day two, taking place on Sunday (Sept. 8), Junior H, La Única Internacional Sonora Santanera, Gerardo Ortiz, Banda Los Recoditos, Los Invasores de Nuevo Leon, K.Paz de la Sierra and the popular electronic duo from the border city of Tijuana, Nortec: Bostich + Fussible, and more, are expected to perform.
Here are five of our favorite performances from the first day of Arre Festival.
The Roar of Los Tigres del Norte
Musical worlds will collide at the 2024 Raised By Sound Fest in Memphis, Tenn., on Dec. 7. Billboard can reveal that the annual festival put on by Memphis radio station WYXR will feature an afterparty DJ’d by legendary rock duo The Black Keys – as well as performances from Memphis hip-hop pioneers Lil’ Noid and […]
Police are investigating the cause of death of a woman who was found unresponsive during the opening weekend of this year’s Burning Man gathering in the Arizona desert. According to the Reno Gazette Journal, the unnamed woman — whose age has also not yet been revealed — was found unresponsive at 11:29 a.m. on Sunday […]
What was meant to be a triumphant weekend for Reneé Rapp at two of England’s most legendary festivals instead turned into a waterlogged nightmare for the “Not My Fault” singer when torrential downpours and technical difficulties washed out her anticipated Reading and Leeds debuts. As often happens during the English summer festival season, the skies […]
A 26-year-old man has turned himself into police, saying he was responsible for the Solingen knife attack that left three dead and eight wounded at a festival marking the city’s 650th anniversary, German authorities announced Sunday (Aug. 25).
Duesseldorf police said in a joint statement with the prosecutor’s office that the man “stated that he was responsible for the attack.”
“This person’s involvement in the crime is currently being intensively investigated,” the statement said.
Federal prosecutors said they were investigating on suspicion of murder, attempted murder and membership in a foreign terrorist organization. The suspect, wearing handcuffs and leg shackles, was taken later Sunday from the police station in Solingen to make a first appearance before a judge at the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe.
The suspect is a Syrian citizen who had applied for asylum in Germany, police confirmed to The Associated Press. The dpa news agency reported, without citing a specific source, that his asylum claim had been denied and that he was to have been deported last year.
On Saturday (Aug. 24), the Islamic State militant group claimed responsibility for the attack, without providing evidence. The extremist group said on its news site that the attacker targeted Christians and that the perpetrator carried out the assaults Friday night “to avenge Muslims in Palestine and everywhere.”
The claim couldn’t be independently verified. Only a small number of claims on the site have turned out to be completely baseless, said Peter Neumann, professor of security studies at King’s College London. However “ISIS’ strategy for a number of years has been to claim attacks which are merely ‘inspired’, in other words, in which the link between organization and attacker is merely ideological.”
Friday’s attack plunged the city of Solingen into shock and grief. A city of about 160,000 residents near the bigger cities of Cologne and Duesseldorf, Solingen was holding a “Festival of Diversity” to celebrate its anniversary.
People alerted police shortly after 9:30 p.m. local time Friday that a man had assaulted several people with a knife on the city’s central square, the Fronhof. The three people killed were two men aged 67 and 56 and a 56-year-old woman, authorities said. Police said the attacker appeared to have deliberately aimed for his victims’ throats.
The festival, which was due to have run through Sunday, was canceled as police looked for clues in the cordoned-off square. Instead, residents gathered to mourn the dead and injured, placing flowers and notes near the scene of the attack.
“Warum?” asked one sign placed amid candles and teddy bears. Why?
Among those asking themselves the question was 62-year-old Cord Boetther, a merchant fron Solingen.
“Why does something like this have to be done? It’s incomprehensible and it hurts,” Boetther said.
Officials had earlier said a 15-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion he knew about the planned attack and failed to inform authorities, but that he was not the attacker. Two female witnesses told police they overheard the boy and an unknown person before the attack speaking about intentions that corresponded to the bloodshed, officials said.
The attack comes amid debate over immigration ahead of regional elections next Sunday in Germany’s Saxony and Thueringia regions where anti-immigration parties such as the populist Alternative for Germany are expected to do well. In June, Chancellor Olaf Scholz vowed that the country would start deporting criminals from Afghanistan and Syria again after a knife attack by an Afghan immigrant left one police officer dead and four more people injured.
The IS militant group declared its caliphate in large parts of Iraq and Syria about a decade ago, but now holds no control over any land and has lost many prominent leaders. The group is mostly out of global news headlines.
Still, it continues to recruit members and claim responsibility for deadly attacks around the world, including lethal operations in Iran and Russia earlier this year that killed dozens of people. Its sleeper cells in Syria and Iraq still carry out attacks on government forces in both countries as well as U.S.-backed Syrian fighters.
They say if you can remember the original Woodstock Music and Art Fair from 1969, you probably weren’t there. But some of the musicians who played the festival beg to differ.
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Fifty-five years later, the performers’ memories are clear as mud — well, make that about mud, as most of them well recall the rain-soaked wallow that was Max Yasgur’s farm during those “Days of Peace & Music” from Aug. 15-18, 1969. Some of braver ones even slogged their way onto the grounds to experience Woodstock from their fans’ point of view. And they certainly remember being flown into the site by helicopter as well as the late-running performance schedule and a backstage area where most were warned not to consume anything that wasn’t in sealed bottles or packages — unless they wanted to be on another kind of trip than they one they’d taken to get there.
Ten Years After drummer Ric Lee has good reason to be clear in his recollections; not only is it a significant chapter in his 2019 memoir From Headstocks To Woodstock, but on Friday (Aug. 16) the group releases Woodstock 1969, its entire six-song performance from Sunday, Aug. 17, 1969 — including a rendition of Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Good Morning, Little Schoolgirl” that had to be restarted when Alvin Lee’s guitar was out of tune. It was a ferocious hour on stage for the British blues-rock band, and the epic version of “I’m Going Home” — immortalized in the Woodstock concert documentary that came out the following year — elevated the quartet’s fortunes during the ensuing decade.
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“Crikey, we played as well as we could under the circumstances, I think,” Lee, the younger brother of late Ten Years After guitarist Alvin Lee, tells Billboard. “And ‘I’m Going Home,’ you can see it in the movie. When we went to see it a year later at a cinema on Wilshire Boulevard…a lot of the other acts were there, and when ‘I’m Going Home’ played everybody in the theater gave us a standing ovation, which was incredible from our peers. Alvin and I talked about it a few times; we wondered what it would have bene like if, for example, ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’ had been used instead of ‘I’m Going Home’ — although it’s very different to speculate about those things.”
Lee says TYA was not aware of how significant Woodstock would be leading up to the festival. The group was on the road in the U.S. and was even resistant to adding it to the schedule, but its agent, the late Frank Barsalona, persisted. “Chris Wright, our manager, kept turning it down,” Lee says. “Frank kept saying, ‘You really ought to get on this. This is gonna be a big festival.’ He finally said, ‘Look, Janis (Joplin) has signed, Jefferson Airplane, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young are gonna do it and (Jimi) Hendrix is doing it, so you’d be crazy not to do it.’ Finally Chris caved in, and we did it.”
That meant flying to New York at “some daft time” after a show the previous night in St. Louis, then taking cars to the Holiday Inn, aka “Tranquility Base,” in nearby Goshen, N.Y., where the musicians were lodging. “Janis and her band were in the room, a bunch of other people,” says Lee, who was traveling with his first wife. “I had a carry-on bag with me, a rucksack; I put that down on the floor (in the lobby) and was gonna use that as a pillow and get some sleep, but then they said, ‘You’ve got to go to the site.’” TYA was pushed off its initial helicopter site by Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman, but the next one got the band to the site on time to watch Joe Cocker perform — and also to be warned “don’t eat anything that’s not been cooked ’cause we got hepatitis breaking out.” The musicians sheltered in trailers during the Sunday afternoon rainstorm that pushed TYA’s slot into the evening.
Despite the “Schoolgirl” snafu (the aborted attempt is also included on the Woodstock 1969 album), Lee says TYA was satisfied with its performance but was more than ready to get out of Bethel, N.Y. — which was an adventure in itself. Though the roads were blocked by cars abandoned by concert goers, Lee found a limousine driver who was ready to get out of Dodge, too. “We found a state trooper who was very helpful,” Lee recalls. “We said, ‘Can you find us a way out of here?’ ‘I can, but you’ve got to be very careful. You’re going to be driving between the tents, so you have to be careful not to hit the ropes — and there are people sleeping between the tents, so you’ve got to be careful not to run them over.’ So we did that and got out of there.”
The restaurant at Tranquility Base was closed, however, so the by-then famished band found a late-night diner down the road. “The waitress said, ‘What would you like?’ We said, ‘Everything!’” Lee says with a laugh. “So she went away and came back with food. Then we had to jump back in the limousines and leg it down to New York. When we got there they’d sold our rooms ’cause we were so late, so we managed to find another hotel that could put us up, then the next day we drove down to Baltimore to get back on our tour.”
It was a lot to go through, but like many of its Woodstock peers, TYA has no regrets about being part of the experience. “Especially when the film came out, we were suddenly on the world stage, and we started playing in Japan and all sorts of other places,” says Lee, who’s planning to publish an updated edition of his memoir. “Our U.K. and European audiences got larger. There was a definite shift that was the result of playing (at Woodstock).”
Seen, Felt, Touched, Healed
While The Who were already enjoying Stateside popularity when they brought the rock opera Tommy to Woodstock, Pete Townshend — who was also cajoled into accepting the gig — felt a boost from the festival and the film, too.
“I would have preferred not to have done it,” Townshend told us some years ago, “but it did actually cement our career in America. And then the film came out and it re-cemented it. Tommy was finished; it had sold maybe a million and a half copies. Woodstock put it back on the charts, and then the film came out and Tommy sold another four million copies. It was a huge part of our career, and I was very grateful we were there.”
But, Townshend added, “I can’t say I enjoyed it. It was chaos, wasn’t it? It was completely nuts. What was going on off the stage was just beyond comprehension — stretchers and dead bodies and people throwing up and people having bad trips. And all they could say was, ‘Isn’t this fantastic?! Isn’t this beautiful?!’ I thought the whole of America had gone mad at that moment.”
The Who frontman Roger Daltrey, meanwhile, remembers a scene that “was muddy, smell, but great to see old friends.” Fifty-five years later, however, he has a different perspective on what made Woodstock great.
‘”I’ve always felt that the stars of Woodstock were the audience, never the bands,” he explains. “It was the audience that created a wave that…To me it was the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War, even though casualty-wise it got worse. But it was start of making the government realize that you’re gonna have to get to grips with this, ’cause they’re gonna have a rebellion on their hands. It was the Woodstock audience that did not, not the bands.”
Souls Sacrificed
Carlos Santana echoes Daltrey’s feelings about Woodstock’s impact beyond the music. The band that bore his surname was one of the unquestioned highlights of the festival, with a fiery, reputation-making Saturday performance that preceded the release of its debut album by a week — and also translated well to film with a galvanizing rendition of “Soul Sacrifice.”
“Woodstock is a spiritual frequency, a spiritual event,” says Santana, who’s used footage and sound from the film during his own shows for quite some time. “When you think of Jesus walking around on the mountain, passing out gluten-free bread and mercury-free fish — people made Woodstock sort of like that kind of event. It’s out of time. Woodstock was not a commercial, Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola event. It was three days of unity, harmony, oneness to bring awareness to equality, fairness and justice. The people at Woodstock, if you look at them, they’re hippies who believe in something different than the corrupt corporations of religions and politicians. We believed then and we believe now that peace is possible in our lifetime, on this planet. That’s why Woodstock is still relevant. We still need peace.”
Santana, who also performed at Woodstock ’94, recalls arriving at the site and seeing the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia “already playing his guitar on the hill, with this beautiful, blissful smile on his face.” As for the crowd, he remembers “an ocean of flesh and hair and teeth and arms and eyes. Woodstock was like a living ocean of people. Then you could just feel the sound, which had a different kind of reverberation when it bounced of the people and came back to you.”‘
Long Time Gone
The four members of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young were admittedly nervous when they finally took the stage at 3 a.m. Monday for only their second performance as a quartet — including both acoustic and electric sets. As David Crosby noted years ago, “Everybody we knew or cared about in the music industry was there. They were heroes to us — The Band and Hendrix and The Who…They were all standing behind us in a circle, like, ‘OK, you’re the new kids on the block. Show us.’” Stills, in fact, told the crowd that the group was “scared sh-tless.”
Graham Nash concurred more recently that, “Stephen was pretty nervous that night, but I thought we did well. I didn’t give a sh-t how many people were there; I had already been through that with the Hollies for six or seven years before I had ever met David or Stephen. My fondest memory was playing ‘Guinnevere’ with David, just his guitar and the two voices trying to reach however many thousands of people were there.” Another good memory, he adds, was that “the first thing we did was go to John Sebastian’s tent and get high on weed. (Woodstock) was a brilliant piece of work. It should not have happened as well as it did, and I think that (co-producer) Michael Lang really put his all into it and pulled it off. It was a wonderful idea, and it came off really well.”
Brotherly Love
Edgar Winter got to experience Woodstock “from both sides,” as a performer and a fan. The former was playing three songs with his older brother Johnny Winter and his band on Sunday at midnight, after The Band. But Winter, who had yet to release his first solo album and launch his band White Trash, also spent time in the field, checking out the other performers.
“I loved Hendrix,” Winter reports. “I loved Sly. I loved Richie Havens, Crosby, Stills & Nash. Janis, of course; we knew her from back home (in Texas). There was so much great music. It was just an amazing diversity of music; I enjoy festivals that are organized like that as opposed to the ones that say, ‘OK, we’re gonna get three blues guitar players.…’”
Winter also recalls that, “There was no real schedule. It was just organized confusion, like whoever they could find that was capable of getting on stage and doing a performance was next. That was crazy.”
Winter also credits his own time on the Woodstock stage as putting his career into motion in earnest. “Johnny was the guy who had the ambition and the drive, much more than me,” Winter says. “I had been more interested in jazz and classical, but he had decided he was gonna be a star at a very early age. After Woodstock, that indelible moment of being on stage in front of hundreds of thousands of people, this endless ease of humanity, that made me realize music can be so much more than just my personal world. It can reach out and transcend so many boundaries and bring people together. That’s when I thought about being an artist, writing songs and doing something in popular music, and the rest is history.”
BRISBANE, Australia — Bluesfest Byron Bay will wave bye-bye after its 2025 edition.
The event is an institution on the Australian festivals calendar, staging performances from the likes of Bob Dylan, BB King, Paul Simon, John Mayer, Mary J Blige, and Kendrick Lamar, plus homegrown stars Cold Chisel, Midnight Oil and Crowded House, across its 35-year history.
Its place and time is unique, presented each year over the Easter long weekend, the final fest of the warmer months, doing so from its home of Byron Bay, the picturesque beach town that sits on the most easterly point of Australia.
“To my Dear Bluesfest Family, and after more than 50 years in the music business, Bluesfest has been a labour of love, a celebration of music, community, and the resilient spirit of our fans,” writes Peter Noble, Bluesfest festival director.
After the 2025 fest, “as much as it pains me to say this, it’s time to close this chapter,” he continues.” Next year’s festival is “definitely” happening, “but it will be our last.”
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Bluesfest is one of the most-popular, and longest-running, multi-day shows of its kind in Australia. Its organizers boast a swag of domestic and international awards, including multiple Helpmann and Pollstar trophies.
History apparently means little in a marketplace where the cost-of-living crisis, changing ticket-buying behavior and a slew of factors are crushing the widerfestivals business.
No brand is immune.
This year alone has seen a remarkable lineup of casualties, including Splendour In The Grass, Groovin The Moo, Spilt Milk, Caloundra Music Festival, Harvest Rock and others.
During its heyday, Bluesfest averaged 85,000 attendees. That figure swelled to 102,000 in 2022, when live music returned from the lockdown years. The most recent show, however, counted fewer than 65,000 attendees.
When Bluesfest collected the best festival award at Variety Australia’s Live Biz Breakfast in June, Noble, speaking from the podium, delivered a rallying cry for festival organizers in these particularly tough times.
“We’ve really got to be as one as an industry. We need to speak to government,” he remarked. “We need to say this is the time you support our industry because we are facing an extinction event and that event can be looked at during the times of COVID, government delivered a lot of funding… come on government. Give us a hand up, we don’t want a handout. We can get through this because our industry is worth it.”
The final edition of Bluesfest will be a four-day event, from April 17 to 20, 2025, on the 300-acre Byron Events Farm, about 7 miles north of Byron Bay.
The first artist announcement for Bluesfest 2025 will be made next week. “This final edition is not just the end of an era,” reads a statement, “it’s a celebration of everything that Bluesfest has stood for over the past 35 plus years – music, community, and unforgettable experiences.”
Sabrina Carpenter brought out a special guest to perform a Nancy Sinatra classic at Outside Lands 2024. During her headlining set at the San Francisco festival on Saturday (Aug. 10), the 25-year-old pop star welcomed Kacey Musgraves for a surprise performance of Sinatra’s 1966 hit “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.” “She won’t come out […]
In 2017, Yungblud met the world with a riotous show at The Water Rats, a dingy club in London’s Kings Cross area that also hosted Bob Dylan’s first live performance in the U.K. — as well as the first ever by Irish group The Pogues.
They went on to even bigger things and this weekend Yungblud will, too. On Aug. 11, the Doncaster-born artist will host the inaugural Bludfest, a 30,000 capacity, one-day event at Milton Keynes Bowl, England. Previous performers at the venue include Queen, Green Day, Metallica, Foo Fighters and Michael Jackson.
The 27-year-old – real name Dominic Harrison – will be joined by a diverse bill including his recent collaborator Lil Yachty, Soft Play (fka Slaves), Jazmin Bean, Lola Young and feature a slot by The Damned; the headline performance will mark his first full U.K. live show in over a year. Harrison released his most recent LP, Yungblud, in 2022, which charted at No. 1 in the U.K. and landed at No. 45 on the Billboard 200.
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Across two stages and alongside fairground attractions, an art exhibition and a nod to the beloved Camden boozer The Hawley Arms, Bludfest is an all-encompassing proposition. “I’ve said from the start that it cannot be a gig wrapped in a festival, it needs to be a whole world,” he tells Billboard. “When I spoke with the team it became clear that it was important that part was nailed.”
Disillusioned with the state of the live music industry, Harrison has also been vocal about keeping ticket prices affordable for his young, passionate fanbase. He joins British artists like Paul Heaton and Tom Grennan in trying to buck industry trends for rising entry costs for fans amidst an uncertain and costly landscape for touring artists. An entry ticket for the event is capped at £49.50, though he has partnered with AEG to ensure a sound and slick production on the night.
A week out from the big night, Harrison tells Billboard about why the ticket market inspired Bludfest, advice from the Osbournes and his new label moves for album number four.
Why did now feel like the right time for Bludfest?
It’s something I’ve wanted to do for ages and this was the first opportunity in between tours and albums to do something on this scale. I wanted to build a physical space where the fans can all come together and realize how far this community has come. It needed to be a statement piece as a lot of critics don’t take me or the fans seriously, so I’m like “well, look what we can do.”
You’ve strived to keep ticket prices down to a reasonable amount at £49.50 ($63). Where did that desire come from?
I was in the U.S. last summer and it was the first time playing amphitheaters – our biggest venues in America yet – and it was the first time I experienced tiered seating and experiences. The floor and upper seats were totally full and there was this bullsh-t area in the middle, about 500 seats that were empty and I had no control over the price of them. There were kids outside of the venue who said they had to listen to the concert from outside because they couldn’t afford to come in. It hurt me when I heard that.
The global ticket market doesn’t understand people’s real lives. £250 for a ticket is making me sick. There’s a tour that just went on sale – which I won’t name – and I’m like “Are you f–king joking with me?” It makes me really angry.
There’s concern that young people in particular are being priced out of gigs by their favorite artists…
A lot of artists aren’t as in control of their career as you would think, or don’t pay as much attention to anything other than the art – which is fine and works for some artists, but that’s not me. The only explanation for where I am now, really, is my relationship to my fans. I wanted to make something feasible in a world where music has become a thing of privilege.
Looking at what The Cure’s Robert Smith did with Ticketmaster last year was so inspiring [Ticketmaster refunded what Smith called “unduly high” fees on tickets for the band’s U.S. arena tour in 2023.] That’s an artist at his stage of his career where they’re playing for original fans, but also for new, young fans and he’s still thinking about those people coming through. I don’t want my shows to only be full of people who can afford it.
How has the industry responded to you trying to do something different and less centered around profits?
I’m getting pushback from “the boardroom.” It’s so easy for artists to sit in the pub and say “f–k the label, promoters and corporate system” and do nothing about it. I got some heat from people because Bludfest is co-promoted by AEG but for me, the way to change the corporate system is not by betting angry but going and changing it from within. Most people on the ground floor at these labels or promoters just love music passionately as the fans do.
By taking something into my own control, I can get an insight into something I never would have come across and get an idea on costs and challenge them on why we’re charging a higher amount than what we need to. We’ve already got plans to take Bludfest to Paris or Prague; Japan, Australia and America all want it, it’s gone amazingly well. We have such a strong core fanbase in all of these places and we could really unite a bit of a scene around it.
You’re not the first to have the idea. Lollapalooza started as an outlet for Jane’s Addiction frontman Perry Farrell and your collaborator Ozzy Osbourne [star of the music video for Yungblud’s “The Funeral”] hosted Ozzfest for decades. Have you reached out for advice?
Sharon [Osbourne, Ozzy’s wife and longtime manager] has been so helpful to me. I said to her that I don’t feel like people don’t take me seriously, and she replied “we’ve felt that our whole f–king lives, that’s why we started Ozzfest.” She gave such positive feedback and advice to look after the people because they keep us here. They’ve been so amazing as a family to me.
You’ve got an eclectic mix of artists on the bill from U.S. rappers like Lil Yachty to punk legends The Damned. How did you decide who would be right for Bludfest?
I didn’t want it to be a genre-focused festival. I wanted to think about artists in their own lane and doing their own thing from across the whole scene, so I hit up Lola [Young] who I think is amazing, Jazmin [Bean] who is in their own world, The Damned for the icon slot. I asked about Placebo but they couldn’t make it so maybe we’ll get them next year. I was speaking to Robert Smith, The Smashing Pumpkins and just all my contacts for suggestions, and they all love the idea.
I wanted it to be young, emerging artists. I didn’t want to call up Tyler [Joseph] of Twenty One Pilots, or Oli [Sykes] from Bring Me The Horizon, I wanted it to feel like it is the first year and have a bit of bite and punkiness.
You’ve just moved labels to Island (U.K.) and Capitol (U.S.) for your upcoming record. How is work coming along?
My next album is a rock opera… it’s mental! It’s a new phase in my life and these labels are so classic, and this new album feels like it belongs on prestigious labels like that. The last few months have been a lot more creatively fruitful and inspiring. I really had a choice about staying in the comfort zone or do I want to go to different places and experiment.
In the past I was stuck on the treadmill – to the point that even some of my previous albums felt rushed – or taking external ideas that would damage the art because I was trying to satisfy someone else’s idea for what Yungblud is and not what’s in my gut. But now I feel more excited than ever.