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Addison Rae hosted an exclusive, intimate album listening event at The Box in New York City on Thursday (June 5), giving fans a first listen to her self-titled debut, Addison, which officially arrived hours later. The event, hosted by Spotify, featured the live premiere of new songs, offering fans an opportunity to experience the music […]
The first part of the new Billy Joel documentary, Billy Joel: And So It Goes, premiered at the Tribeca Festival in New York on Wednesday and it featured a section about one of the most difficult periods in the 76-year-old singer’s life. According to People, the film co-directed by Susan Lacy and Jessica Levin delves into a dark incident early in Joel’s career when he attempted suicide two times after having an affair with a former bandmate’s wife.
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“Bill and I spent a lot of time together,” Elizabeth Weber says in the documentary about the affair she had with Joel when he was in his 20s and she was married to the singer’s best friend and Atila bandmate drummer Jon Small. She says in the film that the affair was a “slow build” until Small, who had a son with Weber, suspected something was going on and Joel fessed up to the affair, telling him, “I’m in love with your wife.”
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Joel — who did not attend the premiere after cancelling a summer run of shows due to a recent diagnosis of the brain condition normal pressure hydrocephalus — says in the film that he felt “very, very guilty about it. They had a child. I felt like a homewrecker. I was just in love with a woman and I got punched in the nose which I deserved. Jon was very upset. I was very upset.”
The brawl marked the end of Atila and the pair’s friendship, with Weber leaving Small — and later reconnecting with Joel, to whom she was married from 1973-1982 — and the singer spiraling into a dark period of drink and depression. “I had no place to live. I was sleeping in laundromats and I was depressed I think to the point of almost being psychotic,” Joel says in the film. “So I figured, ‘That’s it. I don’t want to live anymore.’ I was just in a lot of pain and it was sort of like why hang out, tomorrow is going to be just like today is and today sucks. So, I just thought I’d end it all.”
Joel’s sister, Judy Molinari, was a medical assistant at the time and she gave him some sleeping pills to help him get some rest. “But Billy decided that he was going to take all of them… he was in a coma for days and days and days,” she says: “I went to go see him in the hospital, and he was laying there white as a sheet. I thought that I’d killed him.”
The singer said he was “very selfish” at the time and recalled waking up in the hospital determined to end his life again. Molinari said her brother drank a bottle of the furniture cleaner Lemon Pledge, with Small driving him to the hospital after that attempt. “Even though our friendship was blowing up, John saved my life,” he says of his former bandmate.
“He never really said anything to me, the only practical answer I can give as to why Billy took it so hard was because he loved me that much and that it killed him to hurt me that much. Eventually I forgave him,” Small says in the movie. Joel later wrote the song “Tomorrow Is Today” for his 1971 Cold Spring Harbor album, in which he delves into his despondent feelings at the time. “Oh my I’m goin’ to the river/ Gonna take a ride and the lord will deliver me/ Made my bed, I’m gonna lie in it/ If you don’t come, sure gonna die in it,” he sings on the track.
At Wednesday’s premiere, Lacy shared a message with the audience from Joel in which she said “He will be back. Billy wishes he were here tonight, and he asked us to convey his greetings to you all. He said ‘getting old sucks, but it’s still preferable to getting cremated.’” Billy Joel: And So It Goes will stream on HBO in July.
If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or go to 988lifeline.org.
Take it from Sabrina Carpenter, dating can be like the Wild West — especially when so many eligible prospects turn out to be stupid, slow and useless. Or, in other words: a “Manchild.”
Following her new single’s release the day prior, the pop star dropped the hilarious music video for “Manchild” Friday morning (June 6). In the Vania Heymann and Gal Muggia-directed visual, Carpenter travels all over the American West by hitching rides with a diverse crop of men, whose only similarities are their propensities for odd modes of transportation and their inability to get the Grammy winner where she needs to go.
Barreling down the highway on the back of a jet ski, in a shopping cart attached to a motorcycle and on the arm of a motorized recliner chair, Carpenter repeatedly rolls her eyes and sings, “Stupid, or is it slow/ Maybe it’s useless/ But there’s a cuter word for it, I know/ Manchild/ Why you always come a-running to me?/ F–k my life/ Won’t you let an innocent woman be?”
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“it’s exactly what i pictured in my head,” the Girl Meets World alum wrote of the video on Instagram shortly after it dropped. “no animals were harmed in the making but some men were.”
Released Thursday (June 5), “Manchild” marks Carpenter’s first piece of new music since the Short n’ Sweet deluxe album brought forth bonus tracks “15 Minutes,” “Couldn’t Make It Any Harder,” “Busy Woman” and “Bad Reviews.” The original LP arrived in August and spent four weeks atop the Billboard 200, marking the musician’s first-ever No. 1 album on the chart.
According to Carpenter, she penned the track with songwriter Amy Allen and producer Jack Antonoff shortly after finishing Short n’ Sweet. “it ended up being the best random tuesday of my life,” the “Espresso” artist wrote on Instagram Thursday. “this song became to me something I can look back on that will score the mental montage to the very confusing and fun young adult years of life.”
Carpenter is currently on a short break from her Short n’ Sweet Tour, which kicked off last fall with a North American leg in September. This spring, she traveled across Europe on a run of dates that will pick back up with two performances at London’s Hyde Park in July, followed by another round of shows in the United States and Canada.
Watch the “Manchild” music video above.
TikTok is a time machine. Hearing his songs on the app, Khalid finds himself in an earlier era.
Last February, the Billboard Hot 100-topping R&B and pop artist noticed one of his early hits was resurfacing. “Location” — which peaked at No. 16 in 2017 — was connecting with listeners all over again, who were singing along to the yearning lyrics about love in the digital age with a fresh perspective.
“It’s a whole new society, a whole new age of young adults who are experiencing this song,” Khalid says. “I lived it, and I performed it, but to see people who are now the age I was then listening to that song, it’s surreal, funny and nostalgic. It makes me live vicariously through that experience. I’m like, wow, there’s a reason why it resonates with them: because that was real.”
When he first wrote the song, Khalid was a teenager himself. A 17-year-old living in El Paso, Texas, he uploaded the track to SoundCloud without ever considering the impact the now-diamond-certified song might one day have on young lovelorn listeners a decade later.
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“Turning 27 this year came with a lot of reflection on life,” he says. “I started to look back at where I was when I was 17. To be able to be in my career for as long as I have, to still have an impact, even to see things going viral on TikTok — I feel like that version of me 10 years ago would be so proud and so happy. And if you had told him all of [what would happen in the next 10 years]?” he says with a chuckle. “He wouldn’t have had a clue.”
Now fully cemented as an in-demand collaborator, global arena artist and reliably charting hit-maker, Khalid is ready to rediscover the innocent version of himself that he was before he found success.
He wants to be the most open and honest version of himself — not necessarily the serious and emotional version Khalid spent years of his life pouring into 2024’s Sincere, but one that is able to relax because he has fully embraced his own identity.
“Not just my moody side, but the fun side,” he says. “The flirty side.”
Though Sincere was a deeply personal album, there was one part of himself Khalid hadn’t quite revealed yet.
In November 2024, Khalid was outed by an ex-boyfriend. Though it’s not how he wanted to share that part of his identity with his fans, with a simple rainbow emoji he confirmed that he is gay and “not ashamed of [his] sexuality.’”
He was never hiding anything, he says, just protecting that part of his privacy. Stepping back onstage and seeing the reaction from his fans reaffirmed his open and honest approach to music.
“I had a moment where I walked out and I looked into the crowd, and I’m singing these songs that — I was obviously gay when I wrote them, but the world may not have known,” he recounts. “Everybody is singing them the same way they were before I was outed! So [that shows me] none of my fans care about my sexual preferences. I think they care about our mutual respect for music.”
Blue Marble shirt, Bonnie & Clyde glasses.
Joelle Grace Taylor
He realized he didn’t have to keep finding ways to protect his privacy. It was a liberating experience, he says, seeing that very little had changed.
“Finding that freedom comes from knowing I can just be myself and still be embraced and appreciated,” he says. “That doesn’t change because the world finds out I’m gay. Because I don’t change because the world finds out I’m gay.”
Though artists express themselves through their music, the songs live their own lives. Once they’re out in the world, fans can project their own feelings and experiences onto them. In some ways, the music belongs to the listener as much as the artist.
After he came out, a fan pointed out that his 2022 song “Satellite” was already “an LGBTQ anthem.” In addition, “Better” has been used as a first dance at multiple weddings, and the 2017 song “Young Dumb & Broke” has become a staple at graduations. As listeners find meaning in the music, it takes on its own dimensions.
“When you’re an artist, you carry a responsibility,” Khalid says. “People will live to your music, people will die to your music, people will give birth, people will be reborn. There’s so much emotion involved in the exchange of music from artists to listeners.”
He uses “Young Dumb & Broke” as an example. The song’s universal experience of the feeling of invincibility of life in your teenage years has persisted from one generation to the next, which is something he would not have predicted.
“ ‘Young Dumb & Broke’ lasting as long as it has now would have never been anything I imagined, because when I made that song, I was so presently focused on being young, dumb and broke,” he says. “When I was singing that song at 19, I probably would have told you that I couldn’t wait to stop singing that song. Now, I love it.”
Khalid says he wants to inspire young Black men to be comfortable being open about their sexuality, but he doesn’t see the music as appealing to any specific kind of listener because of the identity of the person making it.
“Music is subjective,” he says. “If you place yourself in an experience, we can relate to people all across the board. It doesn’t matter if you’re gay, it doesn’t matter if you’re straight. We all have feelings and we all have emotions.”
Khalid is a major star of the streaming era. He has multiple songs in Spotify’s Billions Club (tracks with 1 billion streams), including “Location,” “Young Dumb & Broke” and “Lovely,” his collaboration with Billie Eilish. At his 2019 streaming peak, he spent some time as the most popular artist on the platform.
When he first started, though, those platforms were barely on his radar. Instead, he uploaded his first songs to SoundCloud, the streaming site where users once shared their own music and mixtapes — a popular platform for new musicians. There was very little thought to strategy or rollout.
“Naturally, that led to other apps like YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music and so on. But that’s where it all started,” he recalls. “I remember being on the phone with a friend, like, ‘I’m about to upload my song to the internet.’ It felt so carefree back then — just making songs with my friends and throwing them online. Nobody could have imagined what streaming would become today.”
Though he couldn’t have predicted it, Khalid was uniquely positioned for the streaming era. He’s often categorized as an R&B singer, but he has a genre fluidity that has landed him on a diverse number of Billboard charts: Adult Contemporary, Latin, Rock & Alternative, Rap, Dance. He has a song for every playlist.
As a child, Khalid’s parents were in the Army and he often found himself moving around. He spent six years living in Germany when he was young, then spent some of his formative teen years from eighth grade until just before his senior year in upstate New York, just 20 minutes from the Canadian border.
“Being a military kid, I was like a sponge, just soaking in all the cultures around me,” he recounts. “When I was in northern New York, I got introduced to American folk music, which became a big part of my foundation as an artist and really shaped my songwriting. Then living in Germany exposed me to pop music from a different perspective. And coming from the South, R&B is definitely at my core. So all these different shades of music come together to make who I am.”
PDF top, pants and shoes; Gentle Monster glasses, Magdelena necklace, Rolex watch.
Joelle Grace Taylor
He’d moved to El Paso by the time he released his breakout 2017 debut album, American Teen, but it was inspired by his experiences growing up both there and at Fort Drum, just outside of Watertown, N.Y. Like so many other teenagers growing up outside of a major city, he spent a lot of time bored or partying — and dabbling in music.
“A lot of the stories that ended up inspiring American Teen came from that time in my life,” he recalls. “It was cold and kind of bleak, with not a whole lot to do — but there were definitely a lot of parties. At the time, it was fun and wild. Looking back now as an adult, I’m like, ‘Why did you get yourself into some of those situations?’ But honestly, it was the perfect setting for teenage angst — just growing up, facing challenges and mentally taking notes.”
His mother was restationed to El Paso before his senior year of high school, and he decided to go with her. Lonely and separated from his friends, he began writing songs and uploading them online. At the time, Right Hand Co.’s Courtney Stewart was managing a number of producers when he was introduced to Khalid through mutual friends on Twitter and heard some of his SoundCloud demos.
“He didn’t know it at the time, but he was writing a generational album in American Teen,” Stewart says. “As soon as I heard that voice and those lyrics, I was like, ‘This is incredible.’ It was something I had never heard before. His tone, the youthfulness of the lyrics and just how it made me feel. So I got on a plane and went and met with him.” (Khalid’s management team now includes Stewart, Mame Diagne, Jordan Holly and Relvyn Lopez at Right Hand.)
Other artists and producers have heard the same thing in his music. His ability to adapt to different sounds and his breadth of universal experiences has made him an ideal collaborator for everyone from J Balvin to Marshmello to Logic to Halsey.
Growing up near the Canadian border may also have endeared him to artists from the country. He’s collaborated with a number of Canadian artists, including Majid Jordan, Tate McRae, Shawn Mendes, Alessia Cara and Justin Bieber. He’s also made a big impact in the country, with 40 songs charting on the Billboard Canadian Hot 100.
Khalid says he loves collaborating, which brings the best attributes of two sounds together. Having another voice in the room can also let him get out of his own head, he says, and recognize when a song is a hit.
Most importantly, he’s sure enough in his own voice that no matter the genre he’s working in or the artist he’s performing with, he’s still recognizably Khalid.
“I think not losing sight and just trusting my voice has led me to be in any sound comfortably because I get to pull up as myself,” he says. “When you feel yourself on a track, you can’t fake it. It’s real.”
Being rather private, Khalid worries he’s created an impression of himself as an introverted person. Now, he’s ready to bust that myth.
“I’m actually extremely extroverted,” he says. “I love to socialize, I love to hang out, I love to see new things and meet new people. I mean, my [2019] album was called Free Spirit, but I really do believe I am one. I made that album only to go into hiding afterward. I don’t feel like that’s very much freedom. But now, I feel like I do have my freedom.”
Embracing his full self has brought him back to the carefree headspace of his SoundCloud days — but with the experience and maturity of an established music career.
“I started off just having fun and when I gained a career, I started to take myself a little too seriously,” he admits. “I had my fair share of time to be serious. Now I don’t have a care in the world. I can just have fun.”
In a recently posted TikTok clip, Khalid is vibing to a snippet of an unreleased song on the streets of Manhattan. In a black hoodie and throwback raver pants and holding a black handbag, he dances along to a track that blends his signature mellow, wise-beyond-his-years vocals with a sound that evokes decadent early-2000s pop by Britney Spears or The Pussycat Dolls. Grinning ear to ear, he stops to take a quick photo with a fan. It takes only 15 seconds to see the comfort and excitement of his new chapter.
“My new era of music feels like I’m finally ready to be the artist I’ve always dreamt of being,” he says. “It goes back to the regressions of when I was a child — imagining myself and thinking, ‘I want to be this artist one day.’ Now I feel like I have the confidence to finally be that artist.”
Libertine shirt, ERL pants, Adidas shoes, Magdelena rings.
Charli xcx had a very special guest for her Primavera Sound set in Barcelona at the Parc del Fòrum on Thursday night (June 5). On opening night of the festival, Chappell Roan shocked the crowd when she showed up to expertly do the viral “Apple” dance during Charli’s set (watch the moment below). Chappell, wearing […]
Fifty years ago, in the Billboard issue dated June 7, 1975, Elton John did something no one had ever done before: He entered the Billboard 200 at No. 1. He achieved the feat with his ninth studio album, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy.
The album dislodged Earth, Wind & Fire’s That’s the Way of the World, which had spent the three previous weeks at No. 1. It was potent enough to hold Wings’ Venus and Mars – the band’s follow-up to its classic album Band on the Run – to the No. 2 spot for four consecutive weeks before Wings finally moved up to No. 1 for one week.
In the nearly two decades between the introduction of the Billboard 200 in March 1956 and Captain Fantastic’s history-making accomplishment, the highest any album had entered the Billboard 200 was No. 2. Van Cliburn’s Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto No. 1 debuted in the runner-up spot in the issue dated Aug. 4, 1958 (which, coincidentally, was the same week the Hot 100 debuted, with Ricky Nelson’s “Poor Little Fool” as the inaugural leader).
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How was a classical album able to get off to such a fast start? Cliburn had achieved global fame when he won the inaugural International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958 near the height of the Cold War. A cover story in TIME (May 19, 1958) proclaimed him “The Texan Who Conquered Russia.” His album topped the Billboard 200 for seven weeks, won a Grammy for best classical performance – instrumentalist and received an album of the year nod.
Since the Cliburn album was a little far afield, let’s go deeper. The highest that a contemporary pop or rock album had debuted prior to Captain Fantastic was No. 3. That was the debut position for The Beatles’ Hey Jude (March 21, 1970) and a pair of Led Zeppelin albums: Led Zeppelin III (Oct. 24, 1970) and Physical Graffiti (March 15, 1975). Three more contemporary pop or rock albums had debuted in the top five prior to Captain Fantastic: the Woodstock soundtrack (No. 4, June 6, 1970), George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass (No. 5, Dec. 19, 1970) and Elton’s previous studio album Caribou (No. 5, July 6, 1974).
Captain Fantastic was Elton’s sixth No. 1 album in less than three years. His 1972 album Honky Chateau reached No. 1 in its fifth chart week. A pair of 1973 albums – Don’t Shoot Me I’m Only the Piano Player and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road – both reached No. 1 in their fourth weeks. A pair of 1974 albums – Caribou and Greatest Hits – both reached the top spot in their second weeks. Elton was steadily getting hotter year-by-year, as you can see.
Captain Fantastic’s debut at No. 1 received considerable media attention and contributed to Elton’s status as the Greatest Pop Star of the Year – years before Billboard officially recognized such a thing.
In calendar year 1975, Elton had three No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 (one a carryover from 1974) and three No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 (plus an uncredited, but prominent, featured role on a fourth – Neil Sedaka’s “Bad Blood”); had a cameo as The Pinball Wizard in the hit movie adaptation of The Who’s Tommy; made the cover of TIME (the inevitable cover line: “Rock’s Captain Fantastic”); and became the first artist since The Beatles to play a concert (two, actually) at Dodger Stadium.
Since Elton’s through-the-roof 1975, we’ve seen such artists as the Bee Gees (1978), Michael Jackson (1983-84) and Taylor Swift (2023-24) experience this same “how-much-hotter-can-they-get” phenomenon.
Captain Fantastic was a loosely autobiographical concept album about the struggles that John (Captain Fantastic) and his longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin (the Brown Dirt Cowboy) experienced in the early years of their careers in London from 1967 to 1969, leading up to John’s eventual breakthrough in 1970.
Captain Fantastic spent its first six weeks at No. 1 before yielding the top spot to Wings’ Venus and Mars and then Eagles’ One of These Nights (which had five weeks on top). In late August, Captain Fantastic returned for a seventh week at No. 1. Only two other John albums ever logged seven or more weeks at No. 1: Goodbye Yellow Brick Road (eight weeks on top in 1973) and Greatest Hits (10 weeks on top in 1974-75).
Captain Fantastic received two Grammy nominations: album of the year (John’s third in that category, following Elton John and Caribou) and best pop vocal performance, male. He lost both awards to Paul Simon for Still Crazy After All These Years. (Fun Fact: Simon had also won album of the year, in tandem with Art Garfunkel, for Bridge Over Troubled Water five years earlier, when the Elton John album was nominated.) Gus Dudgeon, who produced John’s album, received a Grammy nod for producer of the year, non-classical. (He lost to Arif Mardin.)
Just one single was released from Captain Fantastic: “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.” Despite its length and somber tone, the song reached No. 4 on the Hot 100, a reflection of Elton’s popularity at the time. Clocking in at 6:45, “Someone Saved” was the longest song to crack the top five on the Hot 100 since The Temptations’ symphonic soul smash “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” (6:53), a No. 1 hit in December 1972.
Of course, even though just one single was released from Captain Fantastic, Elton was blanketing pop radio at the time. The week Captain Fantastic debuted, John’s previous single, the marvelous, disco-accented “Philadelphia Freedom,” rebounded to No. 10 on the Hot 100, having reached No. 1 in April. And though it was never released as a single, John’s rendition of “Pinball Wizard” from the Tommy soundtrack was played on many pop radio stations with the frequency of a hit single.
The Billboard staff included three songs from Captain Fantastic on its 2022 list of the 75 Best Elton John Songs, timed to coincide with the star’s 75th birthday. “Tower of Babel” ranked No. 73, “Curtains” was No. 29, and “Someone Saved” was way up at No. 3, with Billboard‘s Melinda Newman saying of the latter song, “The song has more drama than a made-for-Lifetime movie, including allusions to John’s first suicide attempt in 1968. With a heavy, slow, and instantly unforgettable piano-pounding melody that matches the theatrical storytelling … ‘Someone’ is like slowly walking through molasses in the best possible way, Sugar Bear.”
In November 1975, just five months after Captain Fantastic became the first album to debut at No. 1, Elton’s follow-up album, Rock of the Westies, became the second. Unlike Captain Fantastic, Rock was led by a highly commercial single, the zesty funk-reggae smash “Island Girl,” which topped the Hot 100 for three weeks.
In October 1976, Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life became the third album to debut at No. 1. No other albums debuted in the top spot for a little more than a decade, until Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band’s Live/1975-85 achieved the feat in November 1986. The following year, Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson started on top with their hit-laden albums Whitney and Bad, respectively.
In May 1991, Billboard began compiling the Billboard 200 based on actual units sold. As a result, No. 1 debuts became much more common. Between June and December 1991, seven albums entered the chart at No. 1 – slightly more than the six albums that had achieved the feat over the previous 16 years. (Since December 2014, the chart has ranked titles by equivalent album units, incorporating streaming and sales, with albums continuing to regularly soar in at No. 1.)
In 2006, John recorded a sequel of sorts to Captain Fantastic. That album, The Captain & the Kid, reached No. 18 on the Billboard 200.
Two songs from Captain Fantastic were featured on the 2018 tribute album, Revamp: Reimagining the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin. Mumford and Sons covered “Someone Saved My Life Tonight.” Coldplay took on “We All Fall in Love Sometimes.” That album reached No. 13 on the Billboard 200.
KATSEYE says it’s going to be a “Gnarly” Summer, especially with Ice Spice on the new remix that dropped Friday (June 6). “Oh my god, this song’s so lit,” KATSEYE quoted the song’s lyrics on Instagram underneath the remix’s gnarly cover art featuring an anonymous hand ready to cut into a double decker sandwich. The […]
Mariah Carey isn’t playing it safe on new single “Type Dangerous,” which ushered in a new musical era for the vocalist Thursday (June 5). Featuring the superstar singing over a swaggering, percussion-heavy beat, the track showcases Mimi channeling her sultriest, most confident self. “Looking for the dangerous type,” she croons. “I like them dangerous/ That’s […]
Addison Rae’s rise to main pop girl is equal parts master class and modern spectacle. Having started on TikTok, becoming one of the platform’s top users known for choreographing brief dances to catchy hits, Rae always had her sights set on a bigger stage — literally. In the past year, she’s performed onstage with Charli […]
Sabrina Carpenter‘s new song “Manchild” is here, kicking off what could very well be another summer of dominance for the pop star. Following the success of hits such as “Espresso,” “Please Please Please” and “Taste” on the charts last year, the pop star returned Thursday night (June 5) with a track that pokes fun at […]
