folk
Janis Ian: Breaking Silence — a career-spanning documentary about groundbreaking singer-songwriter Janis Ian, in theaters now – began with a simple, polite message to the artist’s official website.
“I said, ‘Hi, my name is Varda Bar-Kar, I’m a filmmaker and I’d like to make a film about you,’” the London-born director tells Billboard. “And I said ‘no,’” interjects Ian with a mischievous smile. “That was my kneejerk response.”
The film’s journey might have ended right there had it not been for Bar-Kar’s gentle persistence and a few helpful coincidences. Despite the dismissive greeting, the director kept in touch, sharing links to a few of her other documentaries, Big Voice and What Kind of Planet Are We On?; additional correspondence between the two revealed mutual acquaintances, similar experiences and a shared interest in Zen Buddhism.
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“I had just walked away from a potentially lucrative [movie] deal with another entity,” Ian says of her reticence to participate. “I firmly did not want a puff piece.” But after viewing a 20-minute proof of concept from Bar-Kar, the Grammy-winning singer of “At Seventeen” felt like she could trust the director with her time and story.
“I wanted something that reflected the times,” Ian says of her dream for the project — and Bar-Kar’s engrossing, informative documentary does that superbly. Watching the film, one gets as much of a sense of America’s complicated, shifting identity over the decades as one does Ian’s own life and personal evolution. We watch the turmoil of the Civil Rights era inspire Ian, a 14-year-old girl from a farm town in New Jersey, to write “Society’s Child,” a song about an interracial romance smothered by external prejudices. Then, we see how American audiences – with all their contradictions and confusions – reacted: Some hailed her as an astonishing, bold voice, pushing the single to No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1967; others hurled racial slurs at her during concerts, reducing the teenage singer to tears for daring to suggest love could go beyond racial boundaries.
That song wouldn’t be the last time that Ian – who publicly came out as a lesbian in 1993 – would find herself alternately celebrated and pilloried by audiences and industry players. Named after the album that came out when she did, the film uses Ian’s unusually insightful music, her memories and fresh interviews with Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, Lily Tomlin, Laurie Metcalf, Jean Smart, the late Brooks Arthur and others to tell the story of her impact and importance.
Ian and Bar-Kar sat down with Billboard one morning in Manhattan to discuss making the film, frustrations with music licensing, why the former’s performance on the first-ever episode of Saturday Night Live isn’t included in this doc and plenty more. Janis Ian: Breaking Silence is in select theaters now, and hits streaming on April 29.
As we see in the documentary, Janis, you were a guest on Leonard Bernstein’s TV program at the age of 14. I know he did the Young People’s Concerts series – were you aware of him and how big of a deal that was at the time?
Ian: It didn’t even occur to me. The Bernstein thing didn’t compute that it would be any big deal. My parents and grandparents were freaking out, but for me, I had to get my Spanish homework done. Felicia Bernstein [Leonard Bernstein’s wife] helped me with that homework. (My parents) had wanted the second-generation immigrant dream (for me). I was clearly musically talented, so they wanted me to be a classical pianist. But if you look at my hands, the only thing I could’ve played was Mozart or Bach. And I wasn’t interested: the minute I discovered boogie-woogie and rock n’ roll, that was it. Either that or (they wanted me to be) a doctor, and I had zero interest in being a doctor. When I said I was going to be a singer-songwriter, nobody was thrilled. They were supportive, but they weren’t thrilled. Bernstein was like, as someone says in the film, the mark of God. He was hellbent on convincing the old guard that believed the only real culture was European that America had its own culture. He fought that battle his entire life…. “Society’s Child” aligned with his whole community service: the concept of the artist as someone of service to the community.
In the film, you talk about starting out by imitating Odetta and Joan Baez and taking a moment to find your own voice. Even so, you found it fairly quickly. Do you have any advice for young artists who are already making music but still searching to lock in on their own voice?
Ian: I think my generation in some ways was much luckier than this one. Lyrics were not usually with albums, so you would sit down with the new whoever album and copy out the lyrics. Any artist knows that when you imitate and copy, it’s just like a computer – if you put garbage in, you get garbage out. So by copying Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, Odetta as a vocalist or people like Joan Baez and Billie Holiday, I was really putting the best into myself. I encourage people to imitate other people, because it lets you know what you’re not good at. But the next step for me was that I realized I was not hearing the voice on tape that I heard in my head. So I apprenticed at (a studio) when I lived in Philadelphia for nothing. I swept floors, I did patching and I learned about cables, and in return they would let me work with the second or third-tier assistant engineer for an hour a night. Working with a really good Neumann microphone watching the meter, I learned how to sing without a limiter, which gave me this vocal control. Even now with my vocal scarring, my (doctor) told me I still have better breath control than most people. It took three years to get the voice in my head to come out on tape. Now, for better or worse, you don’t have the gatekeepers. You don’t have the time you had – or were forced into – to create yourself, because ultimately artists end up creating themselves. It’s difficult when you can put out music every three months, because the temptation is to believe whatever you’ve done most recently is the best. And a year later you’re looking at it thinking, “Oh, my God.”
Varda, this film includes a lot of vintage clips and music – all of which effectively puts you into each era, but it must have been a beast to license.
Ian: (laughs)
Bar-Kar: Finding them was fun. It was like a treasure hunt. The film took a number of years, I did a lot of research. I even read a whole book about the summer camps (Ian attended as a kid).
Ian: The commie-pinko camps (laughs). I sent her everything that I had digitized.
Bar-Kar: I went through all of that. My daughter, Paloma Bennett, was the archive producer and she has an incredible capacity for taking in a lot of material. And there’s a lot of music in there as well. With regards to the licensing…
Ian: It was a nightmare. She’s never going to use music in a film again and I told her I’ll make it up to her: she can use anything I own.
Bar-Kay: (laughs) I stuck it through, though.
Ian: We started off with almost 50 songs, and I don’t own all of them.
Bar-Kar: It was fun to research, but the music licensing part was very difficult.
Janis, you sang “At Seventeen” on the first episode of SNL, which is not featured in the movie. Was that a licensing issue with the footage?
Ian: I think we decided it was irrelevant. It was a blip.
Bar-Kar: Actually, it turned out to be very fortuitous.
Right, all the SNL 50 celebrations and movies.
Ian: They did our publicity for us.
Bar-Kar: Fate is amazing sometimes. We already had the Johnny Carson performance of “At Seventeen.” It’s one of those things where if you have too much, it diminishes it, it doesn’t add to it. It was smushing too much together.
Ian: And looking back now, people go, “Oh that was a landmark thing.” But then, it was very much not – nobody cared. The show didn’t have legs until the second episode when Paul Simon was on. But NBC has done a brilliant job of making a lot out of it.
Bar-Kar: It’s almost like a trilogy now: there’s the Bob Dylan film (A Complete Unknown), SNL 50 and now our film. They fill in the different gaps.
Ian: I thought the Queen film that came out before was one of the best biopics I’ve ever seen. That’s the only film I’ve ever seen where walking on stage in a huge amphitheater is actually accurate. Everybody thinks there’s all these people making a gangway for you, waving you on. No. There’s equipment flying past you, there’s people shoving you. They don’t care if you’re making 10 million dollars that night: they just don’t want you getting hit by the Anvil case.
Bruce Springsteen, Ed Sciaky, Billy Joel and Janis Ian in ‘JANIS IAN: BREAKING SILENCE.’
Peter Cunningham/Courtesy of Greenwich Entertainment.
In 2022, Janis, you had to cancel your farewell tour due to scarring on your vocal cords. In the film, you talk about feeling deprived of a sense of resolution that farewell tour may have provided. Does this film, in some sense, give you that resolution?
Ian: No, there’s really no resolution for it. It’s difficult to know how to respond because I don’t know how I feel about it still. I think if I had been in my forties or fifties, I might have tried some of the surgeries, even though 90% (odds) it would just come back worse. But having talked to specialists, I know I’m really lucky I retained anything. It is what it is. My ENT [ears, nose and throat] guy, who I really trust said, “Look, you had a 60-year career full tilt. You made, what, 25 albums, toured nine months a year? That’s an unbelievable amount of vocal use. And the instrument is just not made for that.” I’m really grateful. I think as an artist, you live with a monkey on your back, and the monkey keeps saying, “you’re not doing enough, why aren’t you better? Why aren’t you more? Why aren’t you perfect?” And there is no perfect. This last album I made (2022’s The Light at the End of the Line) was the first time in my entire life I felt I had actually lived up to my talent. So to live long enough, to do that as a writer and a singer, that’s a resolution in and of itself.
It must have helped with that album that you were able to take your time – unlike, as you talk about in the movie, your Aftertones album, which you felt rushed into releasing after “At Seventeen” hit big.
Ian: Yes, Aftertones, bane of my existence. And the fact that (The Light at the End of the Line) got nominated for a Grammy [for best folk album] – I wasn’t even politicking at all – was astonishing. That gave me my tenth nomination. If I look at it that way, it’s an amazing career. And it still is.
And unlike some singer-songwriters who are decidedly more the latter, you truly used your voice to its full power.
Bar-Kar: [to Ian] I love your singing voice.
Ian: I can get away with a half a verse, maybe, but I don’t know what would happen if I tried to sing a full song.
Your song “Stars” has been covered by a lot of artists, including Nina Simone, which is a huge compliment. Did you ever get to spend time with her?
Ian: Old friends. Some people are hard to be friends with. Nina was not easy to be friends with. But worth every second. At the Village Gate she did a 10-minute show, and somebody said to me, “Why do you keep coming to see her?” I said, “I learn more in 10 minutes than 10 hours from anybody else.” That’s how amazing she was. That was the same night she came backstage complaining she missed her mother so much, and my mom was backstage with me, so I blithely said, “Why don’t you come for lunch tomorrow?” My mother said (whispers) “shut up, shut up.” She said, “You got us into this, you’re doing the shopping and you’re hosting.” (Simone) showed up with James Baldwin and they both proceeded to get seriously potted. My ex-husband had to carry Nina to the cab.
Bar-Kar: I highly recommend her autobiography. There’s so much more to her story than what’s in the film.
Ian: It’s out of print right now, but Random House gave me my rights back two weeks ago.
Bar-Kar: Wait two months and buy it.
Ian: You can still download it or download the Grammy-winning audiobook (smiles). I know a lot about song licensing because of (singing and narrating my audiobook). … I just went through a thing. Sony has my admin right now — just because I really like the person in L.A., that’s the only reason (I’m with) Sony, it’s a corporation. The royal British something-or-other wanted to use a song of mine in a textbook. To me, that’s a great compliment. It’s been eight months and they haven’t been able to get an answer. It becomes a ridiculous nightmare. There are a lot of people at corporations who should have nothing to do with music.
Bar-Kar: I heard it used to be different, that it was people who loved music and now it’s more of a business.
Ian: Failed musicians would go into the music industry. And then the suits came in the early ‘80s, late ‘70s, that was the first generation of Harvard Business School graduates. That was why I left CBS in ’83. I looked around and I thought, “This is all lawyers.” And I don’t have a problem with lawyers, but I do have a problem when you start phasing out everybody who cares about music. They made it impossible for the remaining people. They’re so big but they’re so understaffed because they wasted so much money – all that coke that went up the executives’ noses, I think. They always said the singers did it, but it wasn’t the singers as much (as them). We could do an entire Billboard magazine about that.
Thirty-five years after Indigo Girls won a Grammy for best contemporary folk recording for their eponymous debut album, the duo received a lifetime achievement award at The International Folk Music Awards. The awards show took place at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel on Feb. 19, the first night of the 37th annual Folk Alliance International (FAI) Conference. YouTube livestreamed the show, which could also be viewed via NPR Music, WMOT.org and Folk Alley.
Indigo Girls, consisting of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, received a second Grammy nod 35 years ago – best new artist. They lost to a flashier duo, Milli Vanilli, whose award was later revoked on the grounds that they didn’t perform on their album, a charge never leveled against Indigo Girls.
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“It’s truly awesome to be considered among some of the people who’ve already won this prestigious award,” said Saliers in accepting the award. “We need folk music now more than ever. This Folk Alliance is a group that honors diversity, equity, inclusion and access for all. Folk music is the music of truth-telling. Amy and I are, especially in this time, particularly honored to accept this award.”
Bandmate Ray added, “Please stand up with us and make your voice be heard in these times. Gather together with other people. Raise your voice. Stand up strong. Day by day, song by song, we can make this world a better place.
Lifetime achievement awards were also granted to Lesley Riddle, the Black musician who gathered songs for the Carter Family with patriarch A.P. Carter, and Songlines, the magazine that covers global roots music and is celebrating its 25th anniversary.
Crys Matthews won the 2024 artist of the year award, her second IFMA. Susan Werner won the 2024 album of the year award for Halfway to Houston. Song of the year went to “$20 Bill (for George Floyd),” written by Tom Prasada-Rao and performed by Dan Navarro and Janiva Magness.
In accepting the award, Navarro said, “Over 100 of us recorded a version of that song in 2020, but because of the impact and the challenges of the pandemic, it never really had a proper release and we decided we would do something about that.”
The Clearwater Award is presented to a festival that prioritizes environmental stewardship and demonstrates public leadership in sustainable event production. This year’s award went to the River Roads Festival in Easthampton, Mass.
The Spirit of Folk Awards are presented to people and organizations actively involved in the promotion and preservation of folk music. Spirit of Folk Awards were presented to:
* Tom Power, Canadian musician and broadcaster, best known as the host of Q on CBC Radio One and a member of the folk band, The Dardanelles.
* Alice Randall, a trailblazer in folk and country music, whose songs have been recorded by such artists as Johnny Cash, and founder of production company Midsummer Music.
* Longtime Folk Alliance region Midwest pillar Annie Capps.
* Quebec’s Innu Nikamu festival, which has been committed to the promotion and preservation of Indigenous culture for more than 30 years.
In accepting her award, Randall said, “In My Black Country, I tell the story of climbing out of the hell of being raped by holding on to the sound of John Prine singing ‘Angel From Montgomery.’ I write about discovering the Joan Baez Ballad Book, a double album set of English, Irish and Scottish folk songs that became my stepping stones to joy after trauma. I owe my sanity to folk music. For the past 40 years I worked writing folk songs that I hoped would help people get to joy after trauma.
“In 2024 Oh Boy Records, John Prine’s label, put out the My Black Country album featuring some of the greatest folk singers and pickers of our time including Rhiannon Giddens and Leyla McCalla,” she continued. “On the new album, country charting songs were stripped of pop productions that erased Black characters and muted political intent. My songs were restored to their folk roots. My book My Black Country is about the Black folk, including Black folk musicians, who made country country. I accept this award in honor of ‘Traditional’ and my father who long ago asked me a question I will now ask you, ‘What you bet ‘Traditional’ was a Colored Gal?’”
Fellow Spirit of Folk Award recipient Power said, “This means an awful lot to me … As someone who cares a lot about the traditions of Newfoundland and Labrador, I stand on the shoulders of the giants of the folks who preserved the music long before me … I am so unbelievably proud to work for the CBC. … At a time both in Canada and in the United States and all over the world that public broadcasting is being brought into question — questions about defunding, questions of whether or not we should exist — I could never be prouder to be part of an organization that aims to tell the stories of Canadians to other Canadians.”
The People’s Voice Award, which is presented to an individual who unabashedly embraces social and political commentary in their creative work and public careers, was awarded to Gina Chavez.
OKAN, the women-led, Afro-Cuban roots and jazz duo, were honored with The Rising Tide Award. The Rising Tide Award celebrates emergent artists of any age who inspire others by embodying the values and ideals of the folk community through their creative work, community role, and public voice.
FAI members submitted recordings in the best-of-the-year categories (song, album, and artist). New recordings released between Oct. 1, 2023 and Sept. 30, 2024 were eligible.
Here are the nominations in the three “Best of 2024” categories, with winners marked, followed by a list of this year’s special award honorees.
Artist of the Year
Flamy GrantSarah JaroszKaïa KaterNick LoweWINNER: Crys MatthewsAllison Russell
Album of the Year
Sierra Ferrell, Trail of Flowers (Rounder Records)The Heart Collectors, The Space Between (Spins the Gold Records)Kaïa Kater, Strange Medicine (Free Dirt Records)Aoife O’Donovan, All My Friends (Yep Roc Records)Ordinary Elephant – Ordinary Elephant (Berkalin Records)WINNER: Susan Werner, Halfway to Houston (self-released)
Song of the Year
“Tenzin Sings with Nightingales,” written by Tenzin Choegyal, performed by Tenzin Choegyal and Michael Askill“How I Long for Peace,” written by Peggy Seeger, performed by Rhiannon Giddens, Crys Matthews, and the Resistance Revival Chorus“Woman Who Pays,” written and performed Connie KaldorWINNER: “$20 Bill (for George Floyd),” written by Tom Prasada-Rao, performed by Dan Navarro & Janiva Magness“Ukrainian Now,” written and performed by Tom Paxton & John McCutcheon“Love Letters,” written by Julian Taylor, Tyler James Ellis, performed by Julian Taylor
Lifetime Achievement Award – Living: Indigo Girls
Lifetime Achievement Award – Legacy: Lesley Riddle
Lifetime Achievement Award – Business: Songlines Magazine
People’s Voice: Gina Chavez
Rising Tide: OKAN
Clearwater Award: River Roads Festival (Easthampton, Mass.)
Spirit of Folk: Tom Power, Alice Randall, Annie Capps, Innu Nikamu festival
Folk Radio DJ Hall of Fame Inductees: Archie Fisher (BBC Scotland), Mary Sue Twohy (SIRIUS XM), Taylor Caffery (WRKF-FM, Baton Rouge, La.), Matthew Finch (posthumous, KUNM-FM, Albuquerque, N.M.), Chuck Wentworth (posthumous, WRIU-FM, Rhode Island)
01/30/2025
She played God on a British sitcom and remains a god for many singer-songwriters.
01/30/2025
Peter Yarrow, one third of the beloved 1960s folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary has died at 86. According to the New York Times, spokesperson Ken Sunshine said the singer and anti-Vietnam War activist died at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan following a four-year battle with bladder cancer.
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With his high tenor melding seamlessly with baritone Paul Stookey and contralto Mary Travers, Yarrow and this singing partners produced some of the most beloved songs of the 1960s, taking the lead on classics “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “The Great Mandala” and “Day Is Done,” all of which he wrote or co-wrote.
Perhaps the group’s most well-known track, “Puff the Magic Dragon,” was penned by Yarrow based on a poem by fellow Cornell grad and author Leonard Lipton about a magical dragon name Puff and his human friend, child Jackie Paper, who take off on adventures in the magical land of Honalee. Fans of the 1963 song — which was later turned into a beloved 1978 animated special and two follow-up sequels — were convinced that it was larded with secret drug references, tagging it as a trojan horse ditty about smoking weed, a claim both Lipton and Yarrow repeatedly denied.
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The song was one of the group’s most successful on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at No. 2 on the tally in May 1963. Following Yarrow’s death and Travers’ passing in 2009 at age 72, Stookey, 87, is the group’s last living member.
“Our fearless dragon is tired and has entered the last chapter of his magnificent life. The world knows Peter Yarrow the iconic folk activist, but the human being behind the legend is every bit as generous, creative, passionate, playful, and wise as his lyrics suggest,” daughter Bethany Yarrow said in a statement according to the Associated Press.
Yarrow was born in Manhattan on May 31, 1938 and after starting his singing career as a student while pursuing a degree in psychology at Cornell University in the late 1950s. He moved back to the city to begin performing in New York’s burgeoning Greenwich Village folk scene after graduation. After a performance at the Newport Folk Festival, he met the event’s founder and famed music manager Albert Grossman, who shared his idea for putting together a vocal group in the vein of the Weavers, a harmony quartet from the 1940s and 50s that sang traditional folk and labor songs as well as children’s tunes and gospel; it originally featured beloved folk singer/songwriter Pete Seeger.
It was Dylan manager Grossman’s idea to put Yarrow and Travers together, with the latter later suggesting the addition of Stookey, who both had performed with on the folk scene. After signing to Warner Brothers Records, they debuted in 1962 with the song “Lemon Tree,” which peaked at No. 35 on the Hot 100. Quickly establishing their folk credentials, they followed up with the 1949 Seeger/Lee Hayes-penned protest anthem “If I Had a Hammer,” which won them two Grammy Awards in 1962 for best folk recording and best performance by a vocal group; they were also nominated for best new artist that year. They picked up two more Grammys the next year in the same categories for their cover of Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” and a fifth one in 1969 (best recording for children) for the Peter, Paul and Mommy LP, which peaked at No. 12 on the album chart.
Among their string of hits on the Billboard Hot 100 were their 1969 No. 1 cover of John Denver’s “Leavin’ on a Jet Plane,” as well as the No. 9 charting “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” and the No. 21 hit “Day Is Done.” They were also well-known for their charting covers of such Dylan classics as “Blowin’ in the Wind” (No. 2, 1963) and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” (No. 9, 1963), scoring a total of five top 10 albums on the Billboard 200 chart. Two of those albums, a self-titled collection from 1962 and 1963’s In the Wind, reached No. 1. (Those albums held the top two spots simultaneously, an extremely rare feat, on Nov. 2, 1963. In the Wind jumped from No. 12 to No. 1 in its second week. Peter, Paul And Mary slipped from No. 1 to No. 2 in its 80th week.)
In keeping with the tenor of the era, the group were also notable for their strong, progressive political stance in song (“The Cruel War,” “Day Is Done”) and in practice. They participated Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington in 1963, performing Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” (and “If I Had a Hammer”) on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, helping to cement that song’s place as a civil rights anthem.
In total, the group released nine albums during their initial run before breaking up in 1970. It was around that time that Yarrow was accused of taking “immoral and indecent liberties” with a 14-year old girl, Barbara Winter, after she and her older sister came to his hotel room for an autograph and he answered the door naked and forced her to perform a sex act on herself. The singer was indicted and sentenced to one to three years in prison, and ended up serving just three months. He later apologized for the incident and was granted a presidential pardon by Jimmy Carter in January 1981, just before the late president’s final day in office.
Yarrow was also an indefatigable anti-war protester, helping to organize the anti-Vietnam National Mobilization to End the War protest in 1969 in Washington that drew nearly 500,000 fellow anti-war activists, as well as 1978’s anti-nuclear benefit show Survival Sunday at the Hollywood Bowl, which featured appearances by Jackson Browne, Graham Nash and Gil Scott-Heron, among others. In 2000, he founded Operation Respect, a non-profit that aimed to tackle the mental health effects of school bullying.
In addition to his work with the trio, Yarrow released five solo albums, scoring a No. 100 hit on the singles chart with “Don’t Ever Take Away My Freedom” in 1972 and a No. 163 debut on the Billboard 200 album chart in 1972 for his debut solo LP, Peter. Following solo ventures by all three, the trio reunited several times over the ensuing years, including for a 1972 concert to support George McGovern’s failed presidential campaign, his 1978 Survival Sunday anti-nukes show and a summer reunion tour that same year.
By 1981 they were back together for good, performing and releasing five more albums before Travers’ death.
Check out some of Yarrow’s highlights below.

35 years after Indigo Girls won a Grammy for best contemporary folk recording for their eponymous debut album, the duo will receive a lifetime achievement award at The International Folk Music Awards. The awards show will take place in Montreal on Feb. 19, the first night of the Folk Alliance International (FAI) Conference.
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The duo, consisting of Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, received a second Grammy nod 35 years ago – best new artist. They lost to a flashier duo, Milli Vanilli, whose award was later revoked on the grounds that they didn’t perform on their album, a charge never leveled against Indigo Girls, who went on to receive five more nods for best contemporary folk recording.
Lifetime achievement awards will also be granted to Lesley Riddle, the African-American musician who gathered songs for the Carter Family with patriarch A.P. Carter and taught Mother Maybelle Carter guitar techniques; and Songlines magazine which is celebrating 25 years of covering global roots music.
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Flamy Grant, Sarah Jarosz, Kaïa Kater, Nick Lowe, Crys Matthews and Allison Russell are competing for artist of the year. Kater is also in the running for album of the year for Strange Medicine, which features guest spots by Allison Russell, Aoife O’Donovan, and Taj Mahal.
Two of the other album of the year nominees, Aoife O’Donovan’s All My Friends and Sierra Ferrell’s Trail of Flowers, are current Grammy nominees. All My Friends is nominated for best folk album; Trail of Flowers for best Americana album. All My Friends was inspired by the passage of the 19th amendment and the evolving landscape of women’s rights in America over the past century.
New recordings released between Oct. 1, 2023 and Sept. 30, 2024 were eligible in the best-of-the-year categories (song, album, and artist).
The People’s Voice Award, which is presented to an individual who unabashedly embraces social and political commentary in their creative work and public careers, will be presented to Gina Chavez.
OKAN, the women-led, Afro-Cuban roots and jazz duo, will be honored with The Rising Tide Award.
The Spirit of Folk Awards will be presented to: Tom Power, Canadian musician and broadcaster, best known as the host of *Q* on CBC Radio One and a member of the folk band, The Dardanelles; Alice Randall, a songwriter whose songs have been recorded by Johnny Cash (among others) and founder of production company Midsummer Music; longtime Folk Alliance Region Midwest pillar Annie Capps; and Quebec’s Innu Nikamu festival, which has exemplified commitment to the promotion and preservation of Indigenous culture for more than 30 years.
The Clearwater Award is presented to a festival that prioritizes environmental stewardship and demonstrates public leadership in sustainable event production. This year’s award will go to the River Roads Festival in Easthampton, MA.
The Awards take place on the first night of FAI’s 37th annual conference, which takes place February 19-23, 2025. The conference will be held at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel, site of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s famous 1969 Bed-In for Peace. All conference attendees will have access to attend the IFMAs.
Here are the nominations in the three “Best of 2024” categories plus this year’s special award winners.
Artist of the Year
Flamy GrantSarah JaroszKaïa KaterNick LoweCrys MatthewsAllison Russell
Album of the Year
Sierra Ferrell, Trail of Flowers (Rounder Records)The Heart Collectors, The Space Between (Spins the Gold Records)Kaïa Kater, Strange Medicine (Free Dirt Records)Aoife O’Donovan, All My Friends (Yep Roc Records)Ordinary Elephant – Ordinary Elephant (Berkalin Records)Susan Werner, Halfway to Houston (self-released)
Song of the Year
“Tenzin Sings with Nightingales,” written by Tenzin Choegyal, performed by Tenzin Choegyal and Michael Askill“How I Long for Peace,” written by Abena Koomson-Davis, Peggy Seeger, Rhiannon Giddens, performed by Rhiannon Giddens, Crys Matthews, and the Resistance Revival Chorus“Woman Who Pays,” written and performed Connie Kaldor“$20 Bill (for George Floyd),” written by Tom Prasada-Rao, performed by Dan Navarro & Janiva Magness“Ukrainian Now,” written and performed by Tom Paxton & John McCutcheon“Love Letters,” written by Julian Taylor, Tyler James Ellis, performed by Julian Taylor
Lifetime Achievement Award – Living: Indigo Girls
Lifetime Achievement Award – Legacy: Leslie Riddle
Lifetime Achievement Award – Business: Songlines Magazine
People’s Voice: Gina Chavez
Rising Tide: OKAN
Clearwater Award: River Roads Festival (Easthampton, Mass.)
Spirit of Folk: Tom Powers, Alice Randall, Annie Capps, Innu Nikamu festival
Folk Radio DJ Hall of Fame Inductees: Archie Fisher (BBC Scotland), Mary Sue Twohy (SIRIUS XM), Taylor Caffrey (WRKF-FM, Baton Rouge, La.), Matthew Finch (posthumous, KUNM-FM, Albuquerque, N.M.), Chuck Wentworth (posthumous, WRIU-FM, Rhode Island)
When Katie Gavin announced that she would be releasing a solo project, she expected the backlash to be worse. Seated in the living room of her grandmother’s house on a September afternoon, the 31-year-old singer chuckles nervously as she looks back at the announcement. “I thought they might get mad at me,” she says of her fans.
As one-third of the self-described “greatest band in the world” MUNA, it makes sense that Gavin would be nervous. Over the course of the last decade, she and her friends Naomi McPherson and Josette Maskin have built the kind of impassioned fan base that most indie acts only dream of. Between sold out shows at iconic venues like Los Angeles’ Greek Theater and headlining slots at beloved alt-rock festival All Things Go, MUNA has grown to fit the legend its members created around it — meaning any perceived threat to its existence could be met with vocal opposition.
With the benefit of hindsight, Gavin says that fear is a nice problem to have. “It’s a good thing, ultimately, to have a project where people are invested in what you’re going to create next,” she says.
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That anger from her fans never quite materialized — in fact, they overwhelmingly expressed enthusiasm for What a Relief, Gavin’s debut solo LP due out Friday (Oct. 25) via Saddest Factory. Described by Gavin as “Lilith Fair-core,” the album is interested less the genres of its songs, and more in their emotional lyrics — tracks charting the cyclical concept of motherhood (“The Baton”), emotionally inauthentic romance (“Sanitized”) and the grief of losing a pet (“Sweet Abby Girl”) all bear Gavin’s stamp of remarkably poetic-yet-lucid songwriting.
As MUNA’s in-house lyricist, Gavin found herself in 2019 with a backlog of what she refers to as “MUNA castoffs” — songs she wrote and presented to her bandmates, but that ultimately didn’t fit within the trio’s creative vision for themselves. “There is a tonal difference that speaks to the scale of things — MUNA has become so ambitious, so the songs have to be scalable to a certain size,” she explains. “A lot of these songs feel like they live in a much smaller world.”
But when she shared a selection of those songs with her friends Eric Radloff (known on-stage as Okudaxij) and Scott Heiner (MUNA’s original drummer), they both told her how much they loved them. “They were the first fans of this solo project,” she says. “I wasn’t really thinking about doing anything with them until that started happening, where I started to realize, ‘Oh, there’s enough of these songs that it’s become something else.’”
Radloff invited Gavin to play a “secret set” at a February 2020 show of his, allowing her the space to learn “what it would feel like to play these songs as just me,” she recalls. By the time she was done, she knew that she had something special. When COVID-19 shut the world down the following month, Gavin got to work with Radloff and Heiner arranging the songs for a potential solo release.
The spirit of sharing songs she wrote with her friends suffuses the finished product of What a Relief, making the case for Gavin as one of the most talented songwriters working today. It’s a strong case to be made — outside of writing all of MUNA’s songs, Gavin has garnered a number of co-writes with artists like Maren Morris and The Japanese House, which she says has only contributed to a “shift in my confidence” that allowed her solo LP to exist.
“One of the things that’s interesting about co-writing is, if I’m in a room with someone else, I naturally attune more to what they want. I can lose my own sense of what I want,” she says. “I have had to both develop that and try to practice that, while also simultaneously accept who I am and be honest about it when I’m working so that I can navigate and find a way that works for me. It’s kind of about self-advocacy.”
Part of that practice means knowing when she is not the best fit for a job — when it came to fine tuning the sound of her album, Gavin says that she offered her input, but gave producer Tony Berg and his team of engineers and mixers like Will Maclellan the space they needed to make What a Relief soar. “I wish that this wasn’t true, but my instinct was to say that I am a pillow princess in the studio — I don’t care what microphone we use, I just want to be able to tell you if I like it!” she exclaims. “I think part of getting older and developing as a creative is understanding delegation, and not trying to be in control of something if that’s not your passion.”
While the project spans a wide variety of genres, Gavin acknowledges that much of the record settles somewhere within the range of folk music, in the vein of her heroes like Joni Mitchell, the Indigo Girls and Tracy Chapman. Violins, mandolins and guitars pepper the album’s various backdrops, as Gavin sings directly to the human condition of looking to change. As she says: “I’m gonna fiddle.”
One of the album’s most beloved singles, “Inconsolable,” even dips into bluegrass, featuring the vocals of Sean and Sara Watkins of string-band Nickel Creek. But Gavin reveals that, had it not been for her friend and label boss Phoebe Bridgers, the song may not have existed in its current form.
“We had kind of done this, like, Ben Folds, Regina Spektor-esque piano version of it, and it just wasn’t hitting the same way. We only had a few days left in the studio, and Phoebe was like, ‘I liked it when it was bluegrass,’” she says. Once they had the Sean and Sara in the room, the song finally clicked. “We ended up recording the song in about 10 minutes, I think we did a total of two takes.”
The song doesn’t come as a complete shift for fans of MUNA — on 2022’s affirming anthem “Kind of Girl,” the pop trio leaned into the stylings of country ballads to better convey the emotional heart of the song. But Gavin explains that there is a potent lyrical difference between a song like “Kind of Girl” and one like “Inconsolable.” “It sounds weird — I think there is this difference between singing ‘work in the garden’ (on ‘Kind of Girl’) and singing ‘baby lizards’ (on ‘Inconsolable’),” she quips.
Early in the process of creating her album, Gavin went to McPherson and Maskin, telling them that she wanted to release the LP as a solo project. Despite some jokes shared on an episode of their podcast Gayotic (“What was the reason you wanted to do this without Naomi and I?” Maskin pointedly asked), both of Gavin’s bandmates supported the idea, with Maskin even playing a series of backing instruments on the final version of the album.
“I’m so grateful that they’ve been super, super supportive,” Gavin beams. “The only thing that they’ve ever expressed concern about is my own workaholism, because this just means that I took on a second job — they would both check in, like, ‘Cool, are you okay?’”
The individual band members’ work ethic, though, is what has helped MUNA become a cult favorite in pop spaces. With the trio’s oft-cited status as the leading “queer heroes” of pop music, Gavin has noticed the outsized rise of queer artists over the last year, with pop stars like Chappell Roan, Reneé Rapp and others breaking through to mainstream audiences in a way that once felt impossible.
“It makes me really emotional, I see these young people that are coming up as actual superheroes,” Gavin says. The singer is hesitant to take too much credit for the current state of queerness in pop music (“There’s a loud voice in my head saying, ‘This would have happened regardless, b—h,’” she laughs). But she eventually admits that she is watching, in real time, as she and her two best friends at least help in making lasting change.
“If you keep your head down and work and believe that what you’re doing with your friends is cool, you can eventually, in ten years, shift f–king culture,” she says. “It’s wild how far your impact can go if you’re consistently trying to ground [yourself] in the world that you want to be in.”
But there are aspects of the current ascent of LGBTQ+ artists that Gavin is wary about — especially when it comes to how non-straight and non-cisgender identities are already being viewed as trends for the music industry to capitalize on.
“That’s how the current stage of capitalism that we are in functions,” she says with a sigh. “Every time the structure realizes that it can profit off of a new identity, there is a choice presented to people of that identity — do I want to assimilate and take on those privileges?”
Gavin validates many artists’ choice to accept those benefits — after all, “everyone’s in such desperate financial situations that it makes sense.” But she makes it clear, when it comes to both MUNA and her solo career, that she’s more interested in building a sustainable future for herself and artists like her.
“There are so many people that I see as siblings in my community who are not safe in this moment, and I want to be with them. I don’t want to be with the straights,” she says. “So we’re going to continue pushing the envelope and making it clear that we’re not happy to be ‘part of the club.’”
Singer-songwriter GOAT Joni Mitchell took over the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on Saturday (Oct. 19) for the first of two “Joni Jam” concerts.
Despite the size of the open-air, highway-adjacent venue, a crowd of 17,000 worshipful fans was gifted with a show that felt like an intimate, inviting look into life for Mitchell at 80: shooting the breeze with friends and admirers from the comfort of a plush (yet appropriately regal) chair, sipping pinot grigio by the mellow lamplight and singing a song (or 25) when the spirit takes her.
Cozy at that may sound, getting to this warm hug of a victory lap has been a hard-fought victory for Mitchell — a brain aneurysm in 2015 left her unable to speak or walk, and she had to watch videos of herself playing guitar to relearn her own songs. But the Canadian artist, who suffered from polio as a child, is no stranger to uphill battles, and after years of keeping out of the public eye following her health crisis, the Grammy-winning Rock & Roll Hall of Famer stunned the world in 2022 by making an unannounced return to the stage at the Newport Folk Festival.
A proper headlining gig followed in June 2023 at The Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington, and her soul-scraping turn at the 2024 Grammys allowed an even wider audience to experience the depth and gravitas Mitchell is still capable of bringing to a performance.
Joining her at each of those gigs was Brandi Carlile, an avowed acolyte whom Mitchell has described as “my ambassador.” Naturally, Carlile joined Mitchell onstage Saturday at the Bowl, too, radiating joy and nervous excitement as she sang with her hero and served as the de facto emcee/hype woman for the evening. Carlile even revealed that the Joni Jams – when held in Mitchell’s real-life living room “five or six years ago” – helped Mitchell heal following the aneurysm. It started out with friends and musicians singing Mitchell’s own material to her as she recovered, an experience Carlile said was “terrifying”; before too long, Mitchell began harmonizing and taking a verse or two from the comfort of her couch. Now, she’s regained enough vocal control to command an audience of thousands.
“Joni is about to destroy us right now,” Carlile said with a Cheshire Cat grin before Mitchell sang the Blue standout “A Case of You” in a resonant, husky tone. That statement could easily have been inserted into any number of between-song moments, given how frequently folks could be spotted wiping away tears to the icon’s lyrically incisive meditations on love, pain and our brief lives on a rock circling a giant ball of gas.
“I’m honored to have her as a friend because she brought me out of retirement,” Mitchell said of Carlile during the show, laughing.
Thanks to a backing band that included Blake Mills, Robin Pecknold, Jacob Collier, Lucius, Annie Lennox, Marcus Mumford, Jon Batiste, Allison Russell, Wendy & Lisa, Rita Wilson, Celisse and more, Mitchell’s remarkable songs were treated more like jazz compositions than pop songs, stretched out and contracted depending on the lead vocal, embellished with curious flourishes in some moments then pointedly unadorned the next. Even if the Bowl got a little chilly toward the end of the evening, the warm tapestry of Mitchell’s music kept spirits warm.
Here are some of the highlights from an unforgettable evening.
‘Hejira’ Highlights
There’s a question Joy Oladokun often finds herself asking when thinking about her career: “If Nina Simone had the internet, what would she do with that?” she ponders. “Like, what sort of Mavis Staples-meets-Azealia Banks tweets would we have gotten from her?”
The High Priestess of Soul is far from the only artist the folk–pop artists finds herself ruminating on: throughout her conversation with Billboard, Oladokun drops names ranging from Big Mama Thornton to Paul McCartney to Big Freedia. But the artists she often finds herself thinking about, she says, are the ones whose names she doesn’t know.
“I think a lot of my music comes from a place of knowing that not all Black queer people got to live this long or get this far,” she explains. “It feels like I’m fighting with both the idea of progress, the reality of progress and the cost of it.”
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A career’s worth of those feelings come roaring out on Oladokun’s stunning new album Observations From a Crowded Room (out today via Amigo Records). Written and produced by Oladokun in the 15 months since her 2023 LP Proof of Life, the new record sees the singer-songwriter wrestling with her current place in the music industry and the world at large. Employing electronic flourishes to accentuate her pointed songwriting, Oladokun examines why it seems that social advancement in the music industry is always two steps forward, one step back.
The idea for the record started after a whirlwind of touring in 2023 — after running through the summer festival circuit and performing as an opening act for John Mayer and Noah Kahan’s tours, Oladokun found herself at the end of a grueling schedule, sitting by a river with her guitar somewhere in Oregon.
“I was on mushrooms,” she giggles. “I was having an emotionally hard time, then. And when the shrooms hit, I saw this moose — and right there, I just wrote the first song on the album.”
That song, “Letter From a Blackbird,” provides the central argument for the album within its first minute. “These days I sure regret how much of me that I have given/ I feel my patience running out, I hear the water sing to me,” she sings, accompanied only by a vocoder chorus of her own vocals. “Blackbird: what did you think you’d run into out here in the wild?”
Throughout the record, Oladokun contends with managing the expectations of her community (the hip hop-infused”Hollywood”), examining the history of marginalized artists (the pop-leaning “Strong Ones”) and her own desire for recognition from the industry (the fiery folk ballad “Flowers”). Punctuating those songs are brief “observations,” interludes scattered around the project that see Joy speaking directly to her audience and telling them, point blank, how she’s feeling.
While she’s become known in industry circles for her tell-all lyricism, Oladokun acknowledges that Observations is something entirely different that her past albums. “In a sort of unhinged way, Proof of Life was a democracy, and this was more of a dictatorship,” she says. “When you’re working with [other songwriters], sometimes you have to sacrifice a feeling or pull a punch just to get something through. The benefit of making this alone was just that, for 40 minutes, I could just be unfiltered. I’ll give you the choruses and hooks you can hold on to, but I also want to be as honest as possible.”
While Oladokun serves as the sole songwriter and producer on the vast majority of the album’s records, a few other songwriters appear in the liner notes — including Maren Morris (“No Country”), Brian Brown (“Hollywood”), Edwin Bocage and Theresa Terry (“Strong Ones”). As she puts it, Observations wouldn’t have been possible had she not made early connections with songwriters throughout her growing career.
“This album is the fruit of so many lessons learned, and people like Dan Wilson and Ian Fitchuk or Mike Elizando, or even like contemporary great songwriters like INK,” she says. “These were people who took time to really pour into me, and said, ‘Here’s what’s great about what you do, and here’s how we can elevate it.’”
The songs where Oladokun gets the most raw see the singer calling out Nashville, and the industry system therein that she says failed her. “Letter” opens with the thought that, if she drowned in a river, the city wouldn’t cry for her, but rather “breathe sighs of relief.” Penultimate track “I’d Miss the Birds” sees Oladokun calling out the town by name, decrying its willful ignorance of her and people like her, while “Proud Boys and their women” continue to thrive.
In the year since she wrote those songs, Oladokun’s feelings on Nashville have only calcified. “Put it in ink, Nashville should be ashamed of itself. I’ll say it as long as they don’t gun me down; this town is so full of s–t,” she says, staring directly into her Zoom camera. “It’s not even because Nazis can walk around freely — that’s a problem, but Nazis are gathering all over the states. My genuine issue is the people who only want to do enough to appear good, but will never lift a finger to actually help.”
In the eight years she’s spent living in the country music capital of the world, Oladokun says she’s watched firsthand as artists and executives praise the “progress” that the city has made socially while Black queer artists like her continue to be ignored. “I am the Ghost of Christmas f–king Past for this city. I am where I am at in my career in spite of this city. In spite the utter lack of support,” she says. “For all the f–king country girls in glitter shorts dancing around with drag queens, how many of them have offered me features or responded to even one of my f–king DMs?”
As she goes on, Oladokun catches herself and clarifies her point. “I want to separate the part of it that can seem personal, the part where it’s just, ‘Oh, people aren’t paying attention or being fair to me,’” she explains, addressing Nashville directly. “I’m not the only Black and gay talent in your city. I am one of a huge, growing faction of artists in your backyard who you don’t support, because you know what it will cost you.”
Her desire to take a breath and zoom out also happens during Observations. On the stirring soul anthem “No Country,” Oladokun looks to the various genocides occurring throughout the world — in an Instagram post, the singer named Palestine, Congo, Sudan and Nigeria as direct inspirations — and yearns for a moral imperative to protect people from harm our increasingly fractured world.
On an album that deals so much with her own personal struggles, Oladokun felt it was important to put her grievances into a larger context. “My job just isn’t that important. Like, my job is hard — but everyone’s job is hard,” she says. “It’s important for me to remember, because I as a human being never want to let this job stop me from being the best version of myself. I can’t let my tunnel vision of what my day-to-day is like distract from what I think the purpose of sharing my music is, which is to give people something to listen to in a weird world.”
That’s also, in part, why Oladokun never tries to offer big-picture answers to the problems she presents on Observations. Not only does she not have all the answers, but she points out that we all have to agree on what the problems are before we can talk about solutions. “It’s so important to name things, and I think a lot of the problems we have as a society comes from our refusal to name things,” she says. “The goal of this record was never to give an answer, but to say, ‘Ow. This hurts.’”
When Oladokun began writing Observations From a Crowded Room, she was considering quitting the music business altogether. When asked where she’s at with that internal conversation today, she shrugs. “My relationship with my job right now … there’s sort of an agnostic quality to it,” she explains. “I believe my career has a future, but it’s so rarely demonstrated in front of me of what it’s like for someone like me to do so. This is the beginning of a conversation — it’s me saying, ‘This is what it’s been like.’ And it’s a little bit up to other people to say, ‘That is what it’s like.’ I can’t be the only one trying to change the culture.”
A wry smile appears on her face: “Ask me again in a year.”
Willie Nelson may have recently turned 91 years old, but he’s not slowing down yet. The country superstar dropped his 75th and latest studio album, The Border, on Friday, May 31 via Legacy Recordings. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news The collection is the latest in Nelson’s […]

Michael Marcagi came to an agreement of sorts with his manager in late 2023. The folk-pop singer-songwriter had just finished a recording session in Woodstock, N.Y., and emerged with three songs he felt captured the signature sound he’d been crafting, inspired by Bruce Springsteen as well as artists like Jim Croce and John Prine.
Marcagi was eager to release one song as a single before the end of the year, while his manager, Alex Brahl, was hoping he would ramp up his presence on TikTok — and advocated for a regular quota of posts to increase exposure. “Five times a week, that was our ultimate deal,” recalls Brahl. “We were coming from zero, more or less.”
The two studied how other artists used the platform to their advantage, and within weeks, Marcagi released his solo debut single, the simmering, acoustic guitar-led “The Other Side,” and had developed a following on the platform. By January, that fandom helped power his breakout hit and follow-up single, the jangly and more uptempo “Scared To Start.”
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The following month, “Scared To Start” scored the artist his first Billboard Hot 100 entry, reaching a new No. 54 high on this week’s chart. The song — which appears on Marcagi’s debut EP American Romance — also entered the top 10 on Hot Alternative Songs and Hot Rock Songs charts and marked Marcagi’s return to Adult Alternative Airplay, which he previously graced in 2020 and 2021 with his former folk-rock band The Heavy Hours.
“I knew in the back of my head that I wanted to eventually write singer-songwriter music that was narrative-driven and just talk about what I felt, what I wanted to sing about,” says Marcagi, who mentions that The Heavy Hours amicably parted ways a few years ago. However, the role of frontman primed him for his solo career — particularly amid his viral takeoff. “I needed those couple years of playing shows and getting notches in my belt and learning the ropes,” he continues. “The music industry is weird. It’s a hard, kind of a lonely, intimidating place to be sometimes. I needed the time to get used to it.”
Kate Sweeney
Growing up in Cincinnati, Marcagi was drawn to the production of “simple folk songs and acoustic guitars,” while his midwestern upbringing inspired his lyrics. “I write a lot of songs from that feeling of being from a flyover state,” he says. (His brother and day-to-day manager, Andrew Marcagi, adds that their “blue collar roots, without a doubt, have shaped Michael’s lyrics and songwriting style.”)
Marcagi is well aware that folk-pop is enjoying a mainstream resurgence, propelled in part by new labelmate Zach Bryan as well as Noah Kahan, the latter of whom Marcagi is a major fan. “I think it’s so awesome he’s playing for stadiums of people that are screaming about Vermont,” he laughs. “This style of music is working right now and I’m super grateful that people connected with [‘Scared To Start’]. It has been this wild little rocket ship the past couple months.”
Brahl can trace the song’s takeoff all back to one particular TikTok clip in which Marcagi is playing guitar in a field of dead grass over the “Scared To Start” lyric “let’s lay in the dead grass, stare at the stars.” As Brahl recalls, after uploading the teaser on December 19, the team went out to lunch — and when they came back, the clip had 10,000 views. “I remember talking to Michael and being like, ‘What if we wake up tomorrow and it has 50,000?’,” he says. “It had 100,000, and it was this completely organic thing that just kept going and going.”
Kate Sweeney
In the days before the holiday break, Brahl sent the clip around to a handful of labels, and by Christmas Eve, Marcagi and his team selected Warner Records as his label home. He signed his deal the first week of January, and the following week, “Scared To Start” was released as his next single from American Romance, which arrived in early February. “One of the reasons we were so excited about Warner is that over the holidays we were getting on the phone with the digital team and planning. We were moving very, very quickly,” says Brahl. “We had momentum and I’ve seen it too many times where people don’t take advantage of that. We wanted to.”
“We were aggressive out of the gate in attacking the areas we knew would adopt the song with open arms,” says Will Morrow, Warner’s vp of viral marketing and digital development. Plus, as senior vp of digital marketing, Dalia Ganz, adds, the digital teams at Warner were quick to “leverage our deep relationship with TikTok to get increased visibility for the song on the platform,” noting that they are now focused on driving virality for “Scared To Start” across other shortform platforms like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.
With the hit’s success, Warner has another win and developing star on its roster, joining the likes of Teddy Swims and Benson Boone, who have each enjoyed top 5 Hot 100 hits in 2024. “Warner has emerged as a leader in the championing of this new generation of singer-songwriters and the return of guitars in pop music, and we identified Michael as a standout in that space,” says Warner CEO Aaron Bay-Schuck. “He had a collection of songs we loved and felt he really understood how to authentically market and promote himself online.” (Yet, Marcagi is the first to admit “TikTok is a weird, Wild West for me still.”)
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Recently, Marcagi returned to the same Woodstock studio to work on his debut full-length before heading out on tour. He’s currently abroad — with dates in the U.K., Ireland, Germany and elsewhere — and in May will kick off his 23-date U.S. trek in Denver. “It’s been very much like, ‘Quick, go!,’ but still mostly organic,” says Brahl, noting there has yet to be a major TV campaign or concerted radio push, nor any particular challenge TikTok users can opt into.
Even so, Marcagi’s friends send him a photo whenever “Scared To Start” does play on the radio — which he says is perhaps the most surreal part so far. “I remember driving my dad’s car and hearing Mumford and Sons and The Lumineers on the radio when I was in high school,” he recalls. “It’s a weird full circle moment to be like, ‘I can’t believe that out of all of the artists that are putting music out, they’re choosing to play my song.’ It’s really, really wild.”
Kate Sweeney
A version of this story will appear in the April 27, 2024, issue of Billboard.