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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.
Upon ending his 15-year career pitching for the Oakland A’s and San Francisco Giants, Zito followed in the musical footsteps of his parents, who both worked with Nat “King” Cole — his father as a conductor-arranger and his mother as a tour singer. Zito, whose country-folkish No Secrets EP hit No. 18 on Billboard‘s Heatseekers Albums charts in 2017, is now a producer-songwriter. The Cy Young Award winner and World Series champion spoke by phone from his Nashville studio.
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It’s legendarily difficult to make it on Music Row. How challenging has it been for you?
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The journey’s always a zigzag. My dream in music was always to be a writer-producer, even in my early baseball days, when I was able to hang out with some amazing producers in L.A. After I came to Nashville in 2015, [I] was a little more into the songwriting, which I view now as so necessary. Writing with a lot of great writers and published writers helped me so much in my role now as a producer.
When your album No Secrets charted in 2017, how did you celebrate?
It was a whirlwind, something we were doing to show more relevance here in the Nashville community, and maybe to some baseball fans who were going to continue to follow me on the music journey. It was honestly a surprise. My manager printed out a framed copy with a picture of the album. I have that in my studio now.
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During your baseball career, were you concentrating on writing songs?
No, I wrote chunks of songs. I wrote some complete songs. Like anyone who’s writing alone, you have a lot of ideas you don’t know how to finish. No one knows this: I actually had four songs I paid a friend of mine in L.A., who’s a great producer, to cut. It was when I was not pitching well at all for the Giants. [The producer] brought in some great [music] players, and it was all over the map — a bossa-nova song, a pop song, a country song. It was just me exploring. I wanted to release it — I even had the album artwork ready to go — but we realized it wasn’t such a good look getting paid $18 million [a year] to pitch and you’re sitting here trying to release music while you’re not doing your actual job.
What’s the best story your parents told you about working with Nat King Cole?
My father told me a story that blew my mind, which is the guy that wrote “Nature Boy.”
Eden Ahbez!
Eden Ahbez, dude! Come on! I’m sure some of the details were fuzzy. My father was Nat’s road conductor, so he was on the road a lot. They were at a venue somewhere and the tour manager, whoever it was, says, “There’s this guy, he wants to talk to you guys, he has a song to play.” They’re kind of curious, so they go out and there was a piano on stage. It was Eden Ahbez. At the time, I guess he was homeless, he had this song, and he said, “I’d love for you to cut it, Nat.” He gets on the piano and plays “Nature Boy” for them. It’s pretty mind-blowing to think that is how “Nature Boy” was born into this world, as far as the industry goes.
Who have you been producing in Nashville?
I have anywhere from two to three sessions a week. I’ll build the track through the day, we’ll get some vocals at the end of the day and I’ll have a nice demo, and then somebody wants to release something, they’ll come back, we’ll do a production deal, we’ll cut final vocals if we have to, add production. There’s an artist-development piece to it with the three artists I’m working with. Lexi Mackenzie, she’s like a country-pop girl, she’s incredible. It’s kind of a blank canvas.
How much do you miss baseball?
Ah, not at all, man. And I don’t mean any disrespect to it. But when I really sit down and watch a game or try to remember how it felt to be on the field — I have my World Series rings in the studio — I do start to miss it. My buddy sent me some TikTok of a pitcher for the A’s throwing 98 miles per hour in a bullpen, which is insane. I thought, “God, that must be so fun, to pump 98 with no adrenaline, just in a bullpen.” I have a complicated relationship with it. I tell myself I don’t miss it, but maybe I do. Maybe I’m trying to fill the gap by being so focused on music.
On the Friday before his Saturday Night Live debut, Noah Kahan is still nursing the wounds from an L he took at 30 Rock earlier in the week.
Kahan, the show’s next musical guest, was filming SNL’s obligatory midweek ads alongside cast member Sarah Sherman and host Emma Stone. “I always thought that I could be, like, a funny actor,” says the rising singer-songwriter — who is, indeed, pretty funny on social media. “Did not go down like that.” While Sherman and Stone easily bantered, the usually witty and loquacious Kahan stood stone-still, giving wooden readings of his couple of short lines.
“I was definitely super-nervous and just kind of like, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” recalls Kahan, 27, still in slight disbelief at his own frozenness. “I feel like I’m usually able to navigate through [moments like that] and make it look OK. But that one, I was like, ‘Man, I just got dominated by Emma Stone and Sarah Sherman.’ ”
It’s a minor loss worth noting — simply because Kahan has had so few over the last year-and-a-half. After an occasionally frustrating first seven years on a major label — he signed to Mercury Records/Republic Records in 2015, recording two albums in more of a folk–pop, James Bay-esque mold — Kahan finally struck pay dirt with 2022’s Stick Season, following both a sonic pivot to alt-folk and a thematic shift to more personal, geographically specific writing based on his experiences growing up in northern New England. The rousing title track went viral on TikTok that summer, and the album debuted at No. 14 on the Billboard 200 in October, Kahan’s first time making the chart.
But 2022 was just the warmup for the cold-weather singer-songwriter, whose sepia-toned ballads and stinging-throat stompers — as well as his breakout hit, named for the time of year in the Northeast when the trees go barren — have made him something of an unofficial ambassador for late autumn. Kahan’s crossover became undeniable in June with the release of his Stick Season deluxe edition, subtitled We’ll All Be Here Forever.
The reissue shot the album to No. 3 on the Billboard 200, largely on the strength of seven new tracks — one of which, the barnstorming, back-of-a-cop-car lament “Dial Drunk,” became his first Billboard Hot 100 hit, after an extensive tease on TikTok. That song went top 40 following the release of its remix featuring fellow Mercury/Republic star Post Malone — which also kick-started a run of new Stick Season remixes, with guests like Kacey Musgraves, Hozier and Gracie Abrams, who boosted their respective tracks onto the Hot 100 for the first time.
Noah Kahan photographed on December 1, 2023 in New York.
Wesley Mann
As Kahan talks to Billboard in December, he’s also ending 2023 with a number of notable firsts: his first Grammy Award nomination (for best new artist at the Feb. 4 ceremony), the announcement of his first major festival headlining gig (Atlanta’s Shaky Knees this May) and, of course, that SNL debut — which he had originally manifested in a 2021 tweet (“I wanna perform on SNL I don’t even care if it’s a off-brand version called Sunday Night Live”).
And in the end — even if his underwhelming teaser performance didn’t lead to any acting opportunities on his episode — his ripping performances of “Dial Drunk” and “Stick Season” still made for an overall win. Now, with winter on the horizon as we speak, the self-aware Kahan jokingly wonders if his appropriately dominant late-year run may be coming to its seasonal close.
“My time is ending, and we’re going into Bon Iver era now,” he says with a laugh. “He gets the baton.”
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Much like the trees’ gradual-then-sudden shedding of their autumn leaves, Stick Season’s takeover may seem — to anyone who wasn’t paying attention — like it came out of nowhere.
But Kahan had been growing his audience steadily, albeit slowly, for nearly a decade. It helped that he had the continued faith of Mercury/Republic, which longtime co-manager Drew Simmons says believed in Kahan’s talent from the first moment he auditioned for the label.
“He just played a couple of songs acoustic for them in their lounge space — and I remember [Republic founder and CEO] Monte Lipman popped in for a minute and was basically like, ‘Sign this kid tomorrow,’ ” Simmons recalls. “He said to Noah, ‘You have no idea how good you are.’ ”
Kahan’s first two albums, 2019’s Busyhead and 2021’s I Was / I Am, showed his talent and promise — particularly his ability to build worlds within a song and his ease with writing and performing shout-along choruses — but their brand of folk-pop aimed perhaps a little too squarely for a top 40 crossover bull’s-eye and suffered for their studiousness. But though both sets’ commercial performance was underwhelming, they allowed Kahan to develop his chops as a road warrior, gigging constantly around the country at midsize venues and developing a devoted following. “Noah’s story is one of proper artist development,” Simmons says. “He’s eight, nine years into his career, but those were really important years for his personal growth, his songwriting growth, his ability to own a live stage.”
Noah Kahan photographed on December 1, 2023 in New York.
Wesley Mann
But it was Kahan’s Cape Elizabeth EP, released between his first two albums in 2020 at the early height of the COVID-19 pandemic, that offered a blueprint for his later Stick Season success. He pulled back on the busy top 40 production and penned four of the EP’s five intimate tracks without co-writes — and while Cape Elizabeth made minimal mainstream impact, fans’ immediate connection to it showed that Kahan was on to something.
“The path he is on now started during the pandemic while he was home in Vermont and we were all trying to figure out what to do,” says Ben Adelson, executive vp/GM at Mercury. “He had written a lot of great folk songs that he wanted to self-record at home and that became Cape Elizabeth. We fully supported it, and that really helped set the stage for what has come.”
It also helped that around the same time, the mainstream winds were starting to blow back in Kahan’s direction. TikTok’s rise to prominence had provided the world a new, effective communal space for sharing music. And as the global pandemic forced everyone indoors (and inward), Kahan’s brand of introspective, reflective songwriting suddenly found an audience in listeners yearning for simpler times.
That shift could be seen in the slow-building success of organic-sounding, Americana-leaning country singer-songwriters like Tyler Childers and Zach Bryan, both of whom grew star-level followings in the last few years. And of course, no one forecast (or accelerated) the changing tides more than Taylor Swift, whose pair of rootsy 2020 surprise releases (folklore and evermore) put up equivalent numbers to her more pop-oriented releases and effectively raised the commercial ceiling for main-character alt-folk, a more Gen Z-friendly revival of the folk-pop boom of the early 2010s.
“The biggest artist in the world is writing very grounded folk music that tells stories,” recalls Kahan of Swift’s pivot. “And it allowed a huge new audience to find interest in that and to tap into that world. You know, some of these kids might not have been listening to music when Mumford & Sons, when Lumineers [were first around]. Taylor doing that brought that new generation to folk and folk-pop. And I definitely think that helped bring visibility, and some sort of significance, to what I was doing.”
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Nearly a decade since the commercial heyday of those strum-and-stomp hit-makers, they remained core influences on Kahan — “I never stopped f–king listening to Mumford & Sons,” he says — so when he decided to head in a new creative direction, alt-folk was a natural home for him. But while most of those groups tended to go lyrically broad with their arena-aimed anthems, Kahan narrowed his writing focus to his own experiences: growing up in Strafford, Vt., and Hanover, N.H., and the struggles with anxiety and depression he’s still navigating today.
“I like to think that storytelling is something that can always bring success, if you tell it in the right way and if you tell it with the right intention,” he says. “And so my intention behind this project actually was really pure — just to talk about New England and to talk about my childhood and my family. I wanted to examine those things, and I wanted to think about my hometown and think about my parents and think about my journey with mental illness — and I have a hard time doing that without writing songs.”
Unlike the previous generation of alt-folkies, Kahan is also, well, funny. His brand of humor is unmistakably influenced by his Jewish heritage on his father’s side — he refers to himself as “Jewish Capaldi” at live shows and says “sometimes I just feel like Larry David walking around” — and makes for a marked contrast from his avowedly straight-faced, chest-pounding antecedents, many of whom sang implicitly or explicitly about Christian themes.
“Growing up half Jewish and having this face on me… it has kind of been a big part of my identity,” he says, laughing. “I’m not going into a song, ‘Let’s get this one extra Jew-y.’ But I think it plays into the cultural aspect of [my music] — into the humor. And down to my diet. Like, I got the acid reflux stomach, just like my dad.”
Noah Kahan photographed on December 1, 2023 in New York.
Wesley Mann
Religion aside, Kahan’s mannerisms — the mile-a-minute speaking, the gently anxious energy, the self-deprecating and filter-free humor — should be familiar to anyone burdened with both an overachiever’s self-confidence and a late-bloomer’s insecurity. Ultimately, the biggest factor in Kahan’s leap to stardom might be the generation of terminally online, oversharing introverts that recognizes itself in his personality (both onstage and on social media) as well as in his lyrics. And that manifests at his shows, which are increasing in size — beyond festival headlining, Kahan will embark on his first amphitheater and arena tour this summer — without losing their immediacy and intensity, as crowds in the thousands now shout Kahan’s incredibly personal words back at him.
“No one else can tell my own story,” Kahan says. “And if people want to hear your story, then you’re in a really awesome position, because you hold the key to your own memories and people are interested in what those memories mean to you — and find connections to their own memories, to their own lives.”
While Kahan may have joked in December about passing the folk torch to Justin Vernon — the genre’s esteemed dead-of-winter representative — Stick Season actually has no end in sight. Kahan’s touring in support of the album will take him through Europe and Canada the next few months, before bringing him back to the United States this summer. Meanwhile, the remixes continue to roll out, most recently one with Sam Fender — maybe the closest thing to Kahan’s northeast England equivalent — on late-album highlight “Homesick.”
Most remarkably, the title track that kicked off this Kahan era a year-and-a-half ago is still growing on the Hot 100, recently hitting the top 20 for the first time, while the album it shares its name with snuck back into the Billboard 200’s top 10. Kahan also just announced a new Stick Season (Forever) reissue, due Feb. 9, which will include the entirety of his latest deluxe set, plus all of his previously released recent collaborations, two fresh ones and a new song, “Forever.” “We’ll All Be Here Forever” is starting to sound less like a lament and more like a premonition.
At a time when most albums struggle to maintain listener attention for a full month, let alone a year or longer, the extended impact of Stick Season is stunning — and Kahan and his team have savvily maximized its longevity, resulting in one of the biggest glow-ups a new artist has experienced this decade. He now counts superstars like Bryan and Olivia Rodrigo as both friends and peers; the latter covered “Stick Season” for BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge and even sent him flowers after his best new artist Grammy nod, an award she herself won two years earlier. (“It was so incredibly sweet… she’s just a star, and she’s so nice,” Kahan says.)
It’s reasonable to wonder, at this point, if there’s a Stick Season saturation point — both for fans and for Kahan himself. He played over 100 gigs in 2023, and at press time, already had almost 80 on the books through September, with more likely on the way. With the number of opportunities available to him increasing along with his popularity, it’s a potentially perilous time for an artist who has been open about his mental health struggles — particularly while on the road — and who has waited for his moment as long as Kahan has.
“I have a real scarcity mindset,” he says. “Who knows when this will come again? So you have to take advantage of every opportunity. I think that mindset makes sense in a lot of ways, but in some ways it hurts you. Sometimes I overextend and feel like I’m overpromising and not able to deliver when the moment actually comes.”
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To that end, Kahan and his team have focused on how to balance his drive and his overall well-being. “We are saying no to a lot more than we ever have in the past,” Simmons says. “But I think he wants to make the most of this. He wants to be around for a long time, and he wants to put the work in, and he’s not afraid of that. So he’s kind of applying the mentality he had from the first seven or eight years of his career… it’s a grind, and it’s a lot of travel, a lot of work. But he is up for it.”
When Kahan does finally leave Stick Season behind, he’ll do so with the kind of established rabid fan base and artistic freedom to make him the envy of nearly every current performer not named Taylor Swift or Beyoncé, and plenty of room still to grow. Still, Kahan is ambivalent about how much bigger he even wants to get. He cops to being “super-competitive” both creatively and commercially, but also recognizes that “the level of microscopic attention that that next level seems to bring” might not necessarily be the best thing for him.
“Some days I’m like, “Man… I want to play f–king Gillette [Stadium] next!’ And then sometimes I’m like, “Whew, let’s just go back and play [New York’s] Bowery Ballroom and, like, chill out and play a bunch of acoustic songs,” he says. “I have to fight back against the next ‘more more more’ thing sometimes. Because it never really brings you whatever you think you’re going to get from it. It never brings you the total satisfaction and, like, self-peace that you think it would.”
Ultimately, though, he’s satisfied with his hard-earned level of current success and somewhat Zen about what may follow — even accidentally echoing the subtitle of the latest Stick Season edition while explaining his mindset.
“I think it’s about being optimistic about the future, but also being realistic about what you’re going to feel when you get there. And realizing that if you feel good here — and we’re here forever — then we’d be OK.”
This story will appear in the Jan. 27, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Tommy Smothers, one half of the boundary-pushing comedy folk duo the Smothers Brothers, has died at age 86. His younger brother Dick Smothers, with whom he delivered eyebrow-raising political satire on network TV in the ‘60s, shared a statement on his brother’s Tuesday (Dec. 26) passing with The Hollywood Reporter and the National Comedy Center.
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According to the statement, Tommy Smothers died “peacefully… at home with his family” following a “recent battle with cancer.”
“Tom was not only the loving older brother that everyone would want in their life, he was a one-of-a-kind creative partner,” Dick Smothers said in the statement. “I am forever grateful to have spent a lifetime together with him, on and off stage, for over 60 years. Our relationship was like a good marriage – the longer we were together, the more we loved and respected one another. We were truly blessed.”
With Tommy on acoustic guitar and Dick on double bass, the duo performed satiric and farcical folk music with a socio-political bent beginning in the late ‘50s. By the early ‘60s, they were making regular appearances on various variety programs, from The Judy Garland Show to The Jack Paar Show.
The duo’s first album, The Smothers Brothers at the Purple Onion, was released in 1961 and followed by several popular comedy LPs: 1962’s The Two Sides of the Smothers Brothers, which hit No. 40 on the Billboard 200 the following year; 1963’s Curb Your Tongue, Knave!, their highest-charting album at No. 13 in 1964; and their final album, Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which reached No. 164 in 1968. The top 40 1966 album Mom Always Liked You Best! was titled after Tommy’s signature phrase, which was often delivered in the midst of staged feuds with his brother, who would play the smarter straight man to Tommy’s sillier, innocent persona. Mom Always Liked You Best! and 1963’s (Think Ethnic!) were both nominated for the best comedy performance Grammy.
Only one song from the group, “Jenny Brown,” hit the Billboard Hot 100, reaching No. 84 on Oct. 12, 1963.
Following a one-season sitcom from 1965-1966, The Smothers Brothers Show, the duo landed a network variety show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, which aired on CBS from 1967-1969. CBS hoped the show would bring in a younger, savvier audience during a decade marked by massive generational change but ended up getting more than it bargained for. Despite playing an unworldly, stammering goof on television, Tommy was the more liberal and politically driven of the two behind the scenes, pushing their comedy in a direction that gently skewered American culture, religion and the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Following complaints from viewers and sponsors, CBS censors and network execs clashed with the Smothers Brothers, but Tommy was steadfast in refusing to self-censor or kowtow. The show was canceled in April 1969 despite the Smothers Brothers having a contract through 1970; the duo filed a breach-of-contract suit against CBS, which they won in 1973 to the tune of $776,300.
In June, the same month the show’s final episode aired, it won an Emmy for outstanding writing achievement in comedy, variety or music for its platoon of writers, which included a young Steve Martin and the versatile writer/musician Mason Williams, who had had a No. 2 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968 with “Classical Gas.” In 1968, Pat Paulsen won an Emmy for special classification of individual achievements for his appearances on the show. He ran for president that year under the slogan “If nominated I will not run, and if elected I will not serve.”
In announcing his candidacy on the Smothers Brothers’ show, Paulsen said, “Now I ask you: Will I solve our economic problems? Will I ease the causes of racial tension? Will I bring a peaceful end to Vietnam? Sure, why not?” Paulsen’s campaign slogans included “We’ve upped our standards, now up yours.”
Prior to its cancelation, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour boasted performances from edgier acts than what you’d find on most network variety shows. Aside from Cream, Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, Donovan, Ray Charles, Pete Seeger, Simon & Garfunkel, the show hosted a performance from The Who that ended with the band smashing their guitars (as per usual) and an explosives accident that sent a piece of metal into drummer Keith Moon’s arm and briefly set Pete Townshend’s hair on fire. Baez’s stint on the show was also notable: She saluted her then-imprisoned husband at the time, David Harris, who was jailed for refusing military service; CBS censors edited out Baez explaining the reason for his jail time.
The duo made a few other TV shows in the ’70s, which were less successful than their highly influential Comedy Hour, which is now celebrated as an essential piece of television and cultural history that paved the way for the arrival of the button-pushing, irreverent variety show Saturday Night Live in 1975. They appeared sparingly over the ensuing decades, popping up for a televised 1988 anniversary special and a 2009 episode of The Simpsons. The Smothers Brothers officially retired from touring in 2010, over a half century after their live debut.
Tom Smothers is survived by his children Bo and Riley Rose Smothers, grandson Phoenix, Marcy Carriker Smothers, sister-in-law Marie Smothers, and several nephews and a niece. His son Tom and sister Sherry Smothers preceded him in death.
Additional reporting by Paul Grein.
In late 1996, when John Denver and his band visited a Nashville studio to re-record signature hits like “Sunshine On My Shoulders” and “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” he was not exactly compatible with RCA Records, the label that helped the soft-spoken singer-songwriter sell 33 million albums over his career.
Two years earlier, in his autobiography, he’d called RCA “an organization of pure opportunists” and declared it “not only lacked interest in promoting my albums, they were no longer interested in releasing them.”
So he pulled a Taylor Swift — when 7-year-old Taylor probably had no idea what a master recording even was.
With regulars such as bassist Alan Deremo and the late guitarist Pete Huttlinger, Denver created new masters for the old songs, to be owned exclusively by his indie label, Windstar Records. He was considering releasing the tracks when he died at 53 in a plane crash in late 1997. After that, Windstar put them out as a limited-edition European album, but they never came out officially in the United States — until Friday (Nov. 17), when his estate releases The Last Recordings.
“It’s always a good time to release what we have,” says Amy Abrams, who co-manages Denver’s estate with Brian Schwartz of 7S Management in Denver. “John would have been 80 this year. We recently passed 25 years since he passed away. We want to make sure fans have access to those recordings.”
Abrams says Denver’s estate, which includes his children Zak Deutschendorf, Anna Kate Hutter and Jesse Belle Denver, has a “fine working relationship” these days with RCA and its parent company, Sony, which has put out box sets such as 2011’s 25-disc The RCA Albums Collection. (A Sony representative declined to comment, as did Denver’s children.)
But in 1996, the activist and singer-songwriter was angry with RCA, which, in Take Me Home: An Autobiography, he had accused of turning down his Perhaps Love album and pushing him to record an “ersatz” country album called Some Days Are Diamonds instead. He was relishing his time as an independent artist. “The mood was laid back,” recalls Chris Nole, who played piano and keyboards on the re-recording session. “It was always relaxed, because we didn’t have a record label or manager breathing down our necks. It was just making John happy.”
The 1996 sessions took less than a week to record, and “let me tell you, they went fast.” Nole adds: “John was not an overdub king, punching one word five or six times. We would get them in one or two takes.” Deremo says Denver’s band had worked out the new arrangements in concert over the previous few years, and basically played them live in the Nashville studio: “If there was any conversation about how to approach the songs, it was just that we would execute them the way we were playing them live at the time.”
The most striking thing about The Last Recordings is Denver’s voice — deeper and a touch more gravely than the one on his ’70s hits. “He lost a lot of the boyish quality that his voice had early on,” Deremo says. “It ripened into a really full, beautiful-sounding instrument.”
Denver returned to the studio in 1997 to make his final RCA album, All Aboard!, a collection of train-song covers that came out shortly before his death in October. The songs on The Last Recordings have since trickled out over the years, titled A Celebration of Life, among other things. “His motivation was likely to have creative control,” Abrams says. “He wanted to give his fans ‘John’s Version,’ with more lived experience and musical development behind it.”
Noah Kahan has had quite the year. Last October, the singer-songwriter released his third album Stick Season, a project that ushered in a sonic shift for the artist away from pop and into folk music — and set him on the fast-track to global acclaim.
The album debuted at No. 14 on the Billboard 200; In June, Kahan released its deluxe edition, Stick Season (We’ll All Be Here Forever), which shot the album up to a No. 3 peak on the chart. The deluxe also topped a handful of genre-based charts, including Top Rock Albums, Top Alternative Albums and Americana/Folk Albums.
“It’s been an unbelievable year-and-a-half now … a whirlwind of attention and wonderful outpouring of love from fans,” says Kahan. He recalls making Stick Season through the pandemic, saying, “There was a feeling in the studio of like, ‘Woah, this is something special.’ I felt so creatively in control … and I think, at the time, I couldn’t see that as a sign of success or relatability, it just felt so right for me that I was fine with whatever happened.”
In July, Kahan delivered yet another gift to fans with his Post Malone collaboration on standout single “Dial Drunk.” And while Kahan says he didn’t get a chance to play beer pong with the champ (“I got to watch him play, there was a big line … I was a little starstruck”) he says their first meeting was “exactly what I wanted an experience with Post Malone to be; he was sitting crossed-legged, drinking Bud Lights [and] smoking cigarettes.”
The pair bonded over their love of the comedy Walk Hard and Kahan confirms “the hang is not over.” As he says, “I would love to get in the room and write music with him [together from scratch]. What I love about [him] is he is so untethered by genre…I would love to make some weird shit.”
Looking ahead, Kahan has already completed his two biggest goals: be verified on Instagram and have a Wikipedia page. Still, he has one other major project in the works. His nonprofit the Busyhead Project, which he founded with his managers in May and is named after his 2019 debut album Busyhead, is on track to raise $1 million for mental health organizations across country and in Canada. “That is definitely a goal,” he says.
Watch the full Billboard News interview above.
Gordon Lightfoot, who died on May 1, and John Prine, who died in 2020, are among the artists in the Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame’s (FARHOF) inaugural class of inductees. The first induction ceremony for recipients and their families will take place in April 2024. Living and deceased artists, songwriters, record executives, managers and concert promoters tied to elevating folk, Americana and roots music were all eligible.
The inaugural class of 29 was selected by a designated nomination committee that includes industry experts as well as FARHOF’s board of directors. The class consists of 10 solo living artists, 11 solo legacy artists (all of whom are deceased, though the rules don’t stipulate that), four groups or duos, three non-performers and one recipient of the Paul Robeson Artist/Activist Award.
“When we created the Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame, identifying the inaugural class and those after was going to be a big part of our initiative with focus on preserving these important genres and the history they created,” Joe Spaulding, president and CEO of the Boch Center and founder of FARHOF, said in a statement. “The diverse inaugural class reflects activism and social justice that shaped our world today, and we look forward to inducting these national treasures into the Folk Americana Roots Hall of Fame.”
The Weavers were inducted, while two members of that legendary group were also honored on their own. Pete Seeger, who left the group in 1957 and died in 2014, was inducted as a solo legacy artist. Frank Hamilton, who joined the group after Seeger’s departure and remained with it until it disbanded in 1964, received the Paul Robeson Artist/Activist Award. Hamilton is still living at 89.
The Folk America Roots Hall of Fame, which launched in 2019, is a cultural and education initiative of the Boch Center, which is located inside the Wang Theatre in Boston. For updates, information about tours and upcoming events and exhibits, visit the website at FARHOF.org.
Here are the 29 inductees in the inaugural class, by category.
Solo Living Artist
A contemporary performer whose initial impact on the genre was at least 25 years prior to the year of induction.
Joni Mitchell
Bob Dylan
Joan Baez
Mavis Staples
Willie Nelson
Emmylou Harris
James Taylor
Taj Mahal
Bonnie Raitt
Ramblin’ Jack Elliot
Solo Legacy Artist
A performer whose initial impact on the genre was at least 45 years prior to the year of induction.
Odetta
Pete Seeger
Woody Guthrie
Lead Belly
Richie Havens
Josh White
Oscar Brand
Johnny Cash
John Prine
Jean Ritchie
Gordon Lightfoot
Duo or Group of Musicians
Duos or groups whose initial impact on the genre was at least 25 years prior to the year of induction.
Peter, Paul & Mary
The Band
The Byrds
The Weavers
Non-Performer
This category includes supporting musicians, songwriters, managers, publishers, historians and producers.
Albert Grossman (former manager to many musicians in the folk music scene)
George Wein (jazz promoter, pianist and producer as well as founder of Newport Jazz Festival and co-founder of the Newport Folk Festival. Also instrumental in the founding of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.)
Betsy Siggins (founding member of the Club 47 venue now Passin in Boston; assisted in creating the Festival of American Folklife and founder of the New England Folk Music Archives/Folk New England.)
Paul Robeson Artist/Activist Award
Non-performing industry professionals who have had a major influence on the social justice that has impacted culture.
Frank Hamilton – (American folk musician, member of The Weavers and co-founder of Old Town School of Folk Music)
During the week of the winter solstice last December, Allison Russell stood in a large circle of “goddesses,” chanting and singing together to conjure communal joy out of thin air. Drums, guitars and strings joined her and her circle of “chosen sisters” as they celebrated “being back in our bodies.”
If that sounds more like a new-age spiritual exercise than a recording session, Russell will be the first one to tell you that two things can be true at the same time. “It ended up being very witchy and woo-woo and wonderful,” she tells Billboard. “We just got to be so present and say ‘F–k oppressors telling us we’re not gorgeous and perfect as we are.’”
That sentiment was the leading ethos behind the creation of The Returner, Russell’s spellbinding sophomore LP (out Friday, Sept. 8 via Fantasy Records). The folk star wanted to create an album that didn’t look back on the pain of the past — she had already done that on her outstanding 2021 debut album Outside Child — but rather firmly planted itself in the present and called for a much-needed celebration. Or, as she more poetically puts it, The Returner is about “stealing joy from the teeth of turmoil.”
To accomplish that goal, Russell ventured outside of the world of Americana music that made her one of the fastest-rising folk stars of the last few years. Taking a “rhythm-first” approach to creating the new sound, the singer-songwriter and Dim Star — the production duo of Russell’s partner JT Nero and Drew Lindsay — employed elements of funk, rock, disco and pop to further bolster her folk roots and give The Returner a fresh new sound.
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Russell says that this approach came about in part because she spent the last few years getting to tour internationally for the first time. “We toured in a lot of places where English isn’t the first language,” she said. “We realized that there’s a transcendence that comes when you allow yourself to feel music with your whole body. A lot of the demos started with us hearing the polyrhythmic layers of groove within some of the things that JT [Nero] and I were writing. That informs melody, that informs even the syllables, the words that are chosen.”
After spending three months working with Dim Star to create demos that achieved something close to the sound they were looking for, Russell recounts being contacted by her label in late 2022 and told that, in order to release an album in 2023, they would need her master by the end of the year thanks to ongoing delays in vinyl production.
Where most artists would panic, Russell felt relief — booking six days at L.A.’s Henson Recording Studios (a space “presided over by my hero, Kermit the Frog,” Russell quips), the multi-hyphenate embraced the do-or-die nature of the sessions. “We recorded Outside Child in four days, so we were like, ‘Oh, we have six whole days in the studio? That’s great,’” she recalls. “It actually felt magical — Joni [Mitchell] recorded Blue there, Joni recorded Court and Spark there, Carole King recorded Tapestry there, Tina Turner and Cyndi Lauper blew everything off the top of ‘We Are the World’ there. There were all of these good ghosts in the walls.”
In order to bring the expansive new sound of The Returner to life, Russell brought together a 16-person band of women to the week-long studio session. Featuring artists like SistaStrings, Joy Clark, Elenna Canlas, Elizabeth Pupo-Walker and a dozen others, the group became the engine through which Russell and Dim Star engineered their creative vision.
“The magic of this circle is that everybody is such a high-level, multifaceted artist; everybody’s a lead singer, everybody’s a writer, everybody’s a composer, everybody’s a multi-instrumentalist,” she said. “So when we go in the studio, it’s with this level of trust — and because of that, the album ends up being a musical conversation in real time with these brilliant artists that I feel so privileged to be working with.”
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Throughout her conversation with Billboard, Russell refers to the femme-focused troupe as the “Rainbow Coalition,” a name she also interchangeably uses for the community of artists she surrounds herself with and her fans. While the name may evoke a sense of LGBTQ-centric idealism that Russell shares with those she accepts as her chosen family, the singer points to the term’s long history for context.
Before the name was adopted into a larger cultural context, the original Rainbow Coalition was formed in 1969 Chicago by Fred Hampton, the deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party. Hampton helped bring together the Young Patriots (made up of poor Southern whites), the Young Lords (made up of Puerto Rican migrants) and street gangs throughout the city to work together towards social change.
While the original coalition fell apart after Hampton’s assassination in December 1969, Russell says that the core organizing principle of the original Rainbow Coalition remains a cornerstone of her own worldview today. “Any of us, globally, who are interested in the business of harm reduction, and of pushing for equality versus inequality — that’s the Rainbow Coalition,” she says. “There’s so few places where we can gather people from all different kinds of beliefs, histories, ethnicities and heritages in joyful assembly — but we have that in playing and listening to live music together.”
It certainly helps Russell’s righteous cause that she finds herself in storied company — in the years since she began working as a solo artist, the Montreal-born artist has become a contemporary of superstars like Brandi Carlile, Annie Lennox, Chaka Khan, and even Joni Mitchell, who brought her onstage earlier this year for her Joni Jam concert at The Gorge.
“Community is vital [in the music industry], both in terms of sharing resources and also just artistically,” Russell offers. “Getting to be a part of that event, where we were all there in service of Joni and in reverence and celebration of our elder was the most inspiring, transcendent, beautiful thing to get to witness and to be a part of.”
After being welcomed with open arms by artists like Carlile and Mitchell into the industry, Russell is now laser-focused on doing her part to leave the world a better place than she found it. One way she intends to do that is by fighting back against the ongoing wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation sweeping through the U.S., targeting healthcare and privacy rights for the transgender community, as well as First Amendment rights for drag performers.
Even broaching the subject of anti-LGBTQ legislation immediately prompts Russell’s indignant fury. “It is domestic legislative terrorism,” she says, her friendly smile dropping into a grimace. “It’s so serious, and we sleepwalk through it at our peril, right? This is some Third Reich s–t, and we cannot allow it to continue; we must fight back. And that’s what I’m talking about when it comes to the Rainbow Coalition — it’s all of us who stand at any intersections of the margin, anyone who loves us, and anyone who stands with us.”
Russell, believing in the power of live music to bring people together, decided to channel her anger into action. Teaming up with Jason Isbell and number of LGBTQ non-profit organizations in Tennessee, Russell co-organized Love Rising, the star-studded benefit concert that took place just weeks after the state passed laws banning gender-affirming care for minors and banning drag shows in public spaces. Featuring performances from superstars like Maren Morris, Sheryl Crow, the Brothers Osborne, Hozier and plenty more, the event was a runaway success — especially considering they raised over $500,000 for LGBTQ charities in the area.
Looking at all the artists who came out to support Love Rising — especially many of the straight artists who chose to speak up for the LGBTQ community — gives Russell a sense of hope for the future. “It’s exactly what we need,” she says. “It’s people like Hayley [Williams] taking a red eye flight to come back from opening for Taylor Swift, because she said she’d rather die than not be there to support the trans and drag community in Tennessee. These incredible allies are so important.”
But the work is far from over — Russell says she plans to use her upcoming tour for The Returner as on opportunity to work with organizations like the Human Rights Campaign and Headcount to register concert-goers to vote in the 2024 election and learn more about the attacks against the LGBTQ community. “It’s all hands on deck,” she resolves.
She’s also not taking her eyes off the music industry at large — amid the rising tide of harmful rhetoric, Russell says that a number of fellow artists in the industry have remained “deafeningly silent” on the topic, specifically in the mainstream country space. Russell doesn’t name anyone in particular, in part because she doesn’t want to add to “the algorithm of problematic artists,” but also because, as she says, she’s not trying to rehabilitate the “empathy deficit” she sees in the genre.
“I’m not interested in fixing the toxic white supremacy and masculinity of the mainstream. I think it’s a waste of energy,” she says. “I’m much more interested in building the beloved community of people that are ready to show up and do this work together, that believe in equality. The others will come along eventually.”
In large part, that is the message of The Returner — it takes a village to make deep, meaningful change in the world around you, and Russell is ready to build that village from the ground up.
This fall, Irish singer-songwriter Hozier is hitting the road for a full U.S. tour — his first outing post-pandemic. Following a handful of warmup dates at smaller venues stateside and overseas, his Unreal Unearth tour (in support of his long-awaited third album, of the same name, released Aug. 18) will bring him and his new backing […]
Barack Obama may not be the president anymore, but he’ll always be the commander-in-chief of summer music recommendations.
The former POTUS shared his annual summer playlist Thursday (July 20), with everyone from Ice Spice to Leonard Cohen making the 2023 roundup. “Like I do every year, here are some songs I’ve been listening to this summer — a mix of old and new,” Obama tweeted. “Look forward to hearing what I’ve missed.”
Among the songs featured: SZA’s “Snooze,” J Hus and Drake’s “Who Told You,” Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro’s “Vampiros,” Ice Spice and Nicki Minaj’s “Princess Diana” and Janelle Monáe’s spicy ode to threesomes, “Only Have Eyes 42.” Obama also included a taste of country with Luke Combs’ chart-topping take on Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” along with a splash of indie rock via Phoebe Bridgers, Lucy Dacus and Julien Baker’s Boygenius single “Not Strong Enough.”
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Classics from Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Otis Redding and Ella Fitzgerald also made the cut.
The A Promised Land author is no novice when it comes to curating seasonal song recommendations, spending the past few years treating followers to at least two playlists — one in the summer and one at the end of each year — every year. At the end of 2022, Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé, Rema, Lizzo, Ari Lennox, Omar Appollo and more were honored with Obama’s stamp of approval.
Last summer, Obama was bumping to Harry Styles, Lil Yachty, Maggie Rogers, Burna Boy, Wet Leg, Jack White and Maren Morris, amongst others.
See Obama’s full 2023 summer playlist below:
Like I do every year, here are some songs I’ve been listening to this summer — a mix of old and new. Look forward to hearing what I’ve missed. pic.twitter.com/H2Do2iaD1p— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) July 20, 2023
