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On Saturday Night Live’s May 18 season finale, Sabrina Carpenter appeared in a sketch as Daphne from Scooby-Doo, watching in horror as Jake Gyllenhaal’s Fred tore the face off James Austin Johnson’s villain. (The gag: Apple Face ID — Never Get Ripped Off Again!) The sketch was a prelude to Carpenter’s two theatrical performances as musical guest. First, she sang her then-new single, “Espresso,” which had debuted the month prior before her main-stage Coachella set and had already soared into the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 and Global 200; then a medley of her first two Pop Airplay top 10 singles, “Feather” (No. 1) and “Nonsense” (No. 10), both released in the preceding year-and-a-half.
Two days later, Justin Eshak and Imran Majid — the co-CEOs of her label, Island Records — gathered their staff at Island’s Manhattan headquarters to rewatch the episode. “She’s just a pro; it was an incredible moment,” Majid says later that afternoon of the 25-year-old singer, who first tasted fame as a Disney Channel actress in her early teens. “For a lot of artists, the idea of translating their performance to television is hard,” Eshak adds. “But because she has so much experience with it, it just felt so much more natural and comfortable for her.”
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At the time, the buzz from Carpenter’s SNL debut, coupled with the instant global success of “Espresso,” felt like a mountaintop. After the initial success of “Nonsense,” which reached No. 56 on the Hot 100 in February, “Feather” hit No. 21 and topped Pop Airplay in April. Then “Espresso” exploded, reaching No. 3 on the Hot 100 in June and spending two weeks at No. 1 on the Global 200.
But Carpenter’s momentum has only picked up since. In late June, “Please Please Please” debuted at No. 2 on the Global 200, simultaneously giving her the top two songs in the world. (She maintained that feat the following week, when “Espresso” and “Please Please Please” flipped spots atop the chart.) It also bowed at No. 2 on the Hot 100, making her the first soloist — and second act overall, joining The Beatles — to have her first two top three Hot 100 hits concurrently reach that territory with no other billed acts. The next week, it hit No. 1 on the Hot 100, Global 200 and Global Excl. U.S. charts.
It was the kind of setup that executives dream of: one song building on the next to keep scaling new heights. “We always felt ‘Please Please Please’ had this level of sophistication that really sets her up in a different lens; there’s a bit of Dolly Parton in that song,” Majid says. “But it feels like everything we hoped and dreamed the one-two punch would be.” Or, as Island vp of A&R Jackie Winkler puts it, “ ‘Nonsense’ walked so ‘Feather’ could jog, then ‘Espresso’ ran so that ‘Please Please Please’ could start a stampede.”
Imran Majid, Sabrina Carpenter and Justin Eshak attend Universal Music Group’s 2024 After Party presented by Coke Studios and Merz Aesthetics’ #SmartTox on Feb. 4, 2024 in Los Angeles.
Jordan Strauss
That stampede has set the stage perfectly for the Aug. 23 release of Carpenter’s album Short N’ Sweet and the launch of her North American arena tour in the fall, which sold out in every market within two weeks of its late-June announcement. But already, her success has been one of the biggest artist stories of the year so far, and a big feather in the caps of Eshak, 44, and Majid, 42, who took over the esteemed 65-year-old Island in January 2022 after jointly running the A&R department at Columbia Records for three years.
Carpenter is just one example of how the duo has revitalized Island. In mid-June, following her massive performance at New York’s Governors Ball festival, Chappell Roan’s September 2023 album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, reached the top 10 of the Billboard 200 in its 12th week on the chart — just the second time this decade that an album broke into the region for the second time after that long of a climb. And in the first week of July, Roan’s single “Good Luck, Babe!” — which became her first Hot 100 hit when it debuted on the chart in April and is not on Midwest Princess — hit No. 10 on the Hot 100 after its own 13-week climb.
Call it the summer of Island. While the likes of Carpenter, Roan, The Killers, Brittany Howard and Remi Wolf are dominating festival stages, their songs are setting new personal high-water marks on the charts. The buzz started building earlier this year: Howard’s first album for Island, What Now, arrived in February to critical praise; that same month, the biopic Bob Marley: One Love, about Island’s most famous artist and featuring James Norton as label founder Chris Blackwell, grossed over $179 million, according to Box Office Mojo. (Island was not involved in the making of the film but did release an album “inspired by” the movie alongside Tuff Gong Records, which featured artists like Kacey Musgraves, Wizkid and Leon Bridges covering Marley classics.) The Last Dinner Party, originally signed by Island U.K.’s Louis Bloom, released its debut album, Prelude to Ecstasy, and was named “Britain’s hottest new band” by The New York Times Magazine in March; in April, Hulu released a well-received documentary on Bon Jovi — which has spent its entire 40-year career as part of Island — before the band’s latest album, Forever, debuted at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 in June; and alt-pop powerhouse Wolf released her heralded sophomore album, Big Ideas, on July 12. The year ahead also promises new music from Carpenter and Roan, while Shawn Mendes, one of the label’s few reliable hit-makers over the past decade, is in the studio.
“Nowadays, everything’s about culture, and company culture, and the philosophy of how you’re doing things, and Island is definitely a label that’s wired differently,” says Nick Bobetsky, who manages Roan. “They’re not the ambulance chasers, they’re not the TikTok-moment chasers. They’re really committed to supporting their artists in a way that’s really true to those artists, and that is rare in today’s climate.”
Brittany Howard (left) and Justin Eshak at Brooklyn’s Electric Garden Studios in 2023.
Courtesy of Island Records
For Eshak and Majid, it’s validation of the culture that they’ve sought to build since taking over the Universal Music Group (UMG) subsidiary in 2022 — and a testament to the work they’ve done overhauling a label that had slipped down the pecking order as the marketplace evolved in recent years. While the Island Records they inherited — home to Marley, U2, Traffic, Grace Jones and Cat Stevens, among others through the years — may have been rich in history, its more recent track record had been spotty at best, disjointed at worst. Island finished 2021 with a current market share of 0.67%, a number that had fallen steadily over the previous five years, from 1.5% in 2018, according to Luminate.
“We weren’t walking in here inheriting hits. We had to rebuild a roster, which sounds easy but takes time, and no one really knew what the label proposition was,” Majid says. “So we had to go out there and project what that is at a very competitive time.”
But Island’s small roster and small staff allowed it to focus on developing talents like Carpenter and Roan — and to provide that raison d’être that the label had seemingly been missing. That has often meant leveraging the live side of each artist’s career to help catapult new records: The popularity of Carpenter’s “Nonsense,” for instance, was built through the fan response to the city-specific outros she added to each of her opening performances on Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour, while “Espresso” and “Please” were launched in tandem with her Coachella and Governors Ball performances. “It’s really difficult to break through as an artist anymore unless you have a holistic artist proposition,” Eshak explains.
The label built its strategy for Roan, too, on her live aesthetic; Eshak and Majid tell the story of seeing her perform for the first time at New York’s Bowery Ballroom and how the energy of the crowd struck them more than any of the metrics they had seen on socials or streaming. “The enthusiasm that existed in the crowd was just insane,” Eshak continues. “I remember thinking, ‘How do we tell the story about what happened in Bowery Ballroom to the rest of the world? Because if we can do that, then she’s going to break.’ ”
Imran Majid, Chappell Roan and Justin Eshak attend Universal Music Group’s 2024 After Party presented by Coke Studios and Merz Aesthetics’ #SmartTox on Feb. 4, 2024 in Los Angeles.
Jordan Strauss
The small-but-mighty ethos is a cue Eshak and Majid took from Blackwell, whom they visited at his Goldeneye resort on Jamaica’s north coast shortly after starting at Island. “When we took this job, we had such a reverence for Island and its history,” Eshak says. “Hearing Chris Blackwell talk about artists that historically worked on Island, they would weave their way through culture. The artists that are having success now are fan-driven, have unique artist propositions, and you just [have to] support them in the right way. This label has always stood for creativity and for artistry and for things that may not seem obvious but weave their way through culture.”
In some ways, no label is as beholden to, or in the thrall of, its founder as Island. Since being spun back off as a stand-alone label from the combined Island Def Jam in 2014, successive heads of the company have invoked Blackwell, who left in the late 1990s, when articulating their philosophies. “I wanted to go back to the idea of Chris Blackwell-era Island: an artist-driven label that was a major, but in an intimate manner,” then-president David Massey told Billboard in 2016 about his approach. In 2019, his successor, Darcus Beese, told Billboard, “How I run my business is literally how I think Chris would run his business.”
Eshak and Majid are similar, often invoking the spirits of Blackwell and the label itself — though with their own spin. “It’s not a throwback company by any means; it’s very progressive and market-focused,” Majid says. “But it’s also about curation. If we’re going to have success in this market and with a new generation of artists, you want artists that feel like they love being a part of the company, and you want people that want to work here. And that was kind of what Chris built at Island Records.”
“I’m so happy that Justin and Imran have continued to honor the heart and culture of the label,” Blackwell, 87, tells Billboard. “Looking back, I remember the rush of excitement when I discovered an act, signed them and saw their massive success. Well done, guys.”
Imran Majid, Chris Blackwell and Justin Eshak (from left) at Pebble Bar in Manhattan in 2022.
Kevin Condon
Eshak’s and Majid’s careers have often run parallel over the past 18 years. Both started at Universal Republic under Monte and Avery Lipman in the mid-2000s, when the company had just 23 employees and a small roster; Eshak then spent time at Mick Management before the two reunited in 2013 in Columbia’s A&R department, where they rose to co-heads of A&R. While they seem a study in contrasts — Majid, a New Jersey native, is more outgoing and gregarious; Eshak, from Houston, is more reserved and measured — they’re united by a shared passion and sense of purpose for their artists and their staff, the business and the music, as well as an awareness of their own complementary strengths.
Through their industry arcs, Eshak and Majid have seen the business from Republic’s then-scrappy-upstart vantage point, as well as through the legacy lens of Columbia, one of the oldest and most decorated labels in history. The current iteration of Island, with its immense, venerated catalog and relatively small staff, is something of a combination of the two. “The team at Island is our extended family,” says Janelle Lopez Genzink, Carpenter’s manager. “Every member of the team’s laser focus on delivering in each of their areas has helped us experience these monumental wins.”
But the progress toward this point has not been linear. The duo first needed to overhaul Island, even amid a broader restructuring by UMG. The first two years of Eshak and Majid’s tenure didn’t include much improvement in market share as they reshaped the roster, while UMG shifted Island into Republic Recording Company in early 2024, alongside Republic Records, Def Jam and Mercury, providing resources through its Corps team, with the Island chiefs now reporting to Monte Lipman. Yet despite the reshuffle — and maybe partially because of it and the groundwork laid in those early years — Island has more than doubled its current market share, from 0.62% at the end of 2023 to 1.3% through the end of June.
“Both Imran and Justin are top graduates of ‘Republic University’ from back in the day and have always exemplified the passion, drive and ambition to become leaders in this business,” Republic Recording Company founder and chairman Monte Lipman tells Billboard. “Avery and I couldn’t be more proud of their success in creating such an amazing culture for both artists and executives at Island Records.”
Island’s artists appreciate that culture, too. Carpenter calls Eshak and Majid “collaborative and supportive partners” who “encourage an open dialogue, which is important to me.” “It’s very rare that the higher-ups trust the artist fully,” Roan adds. “It proves Justin and Imran’s method that trusting in the artist results in success and longevity — even outside of music.” And Jon Bon Jovi, whom Majid calls “our Bruce Springsteen,” says the two “truly care about their artists and are supportive and passionate in achieving a shared vision.”
“Certain things are always true: great artists, great artistry, great songs, artists with clear vision,” Eshak says. “But on the business side, it’s almost the opposite, where we’re in a business of constant change. You have to be willing to reinvent yourself and reteach yourself things all the time in this business. And I think, ultimately, the labels that are successful have that approach: They understand culture, they understand what actually moves the needle in the marketplace, and they’re constantly evolving.”
Island’s latest evolution is still developing, with several more emerging artists in the pipeline, Grammy hopes on the horizon and a new partnership with Virgin Music to sign regional Mexican star Carín León — the label’s first true foray into Latin music, which was announced in late June. But for the moment, Majid says, there’s a chance to simply take a breath, look around and appreciate how far they’ve come. “It’s two-and-a-half years of going seven days a week to just catch a break,” he says. “To have a moment like this that we don’t take for granted and we’re very sober about — it’s very fulfilling.”
This story will appear in the July 20, 2024, issue of Billboard.
“Now I swear this green is just everywhere,” Charli xcx jokes. The British pop star is sitting in a crisp leather seat within a black Mercedes-Benz van, a few minutes into the long journey across London from her home to Wembley Arena. Tonight, Charli will be making a surprise appearance at her friend, collaborator and soon-to-be tourmate Troye Sivan’s late-June concert there — but right now, she’s focused on the neon green hue of both the tissue box across the seat from her and my laptop case. Outside, I spot a car of the same color passing by, then a man in a neon green construction vest. Has this color always been so prominent, or are we only just now noticing it?
Everything about Charli’s sixth studio album, brat, released June 7 to massive critical acclaim and commercial success, started with its title and its cover: the now ubiquitous lime green square with “brat” printed on it in slightly blurred Arial font. Scrolling through her old texts later, Charli searches for the exact day when she came up with the cover art. “OK, found it,” she says finally, leaning in to share. “On March 16, 2022, I texted my friends, ‘I think it should just be one word on the album cover… Maybe it should be called brat.’ ” When she started writing the album’s music about six months later in Mexico City, she used the title as a jumping-off point for the attitude and brazenness she wanted each song to embody.
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Inspired by a 1990s neon rave flyer and the title credits to Gregg Araki’s 2007 comedy, Smiley Face, Charli, 31, calls the album art’s color “actually quite disgusting” and says she picked it because it “spark[s] a really interesting conversation about [desirability]… It had to be really unfriendly and uncool.” Its shocking shade (it’s Pantone 3570-C, by the way) and easily replicable format has spawned mass virality — even the LinkedIn business bros, far from her target audience, are heralding it as “genius marketing.”
It’s hard to overstate brat’s current chokehold on the culture at large. “Bestie got a parking ticket and it’s BRAT CODED,” one fan recently tweeted, along with a photo of a green-colored citation. Hangers, earrings, lice shampoo, T-shirts, laundry detergent, olive oil, traffic signs, some old lady, grocery store chain Publix — if any trace of that characteristic green is involved, it can, and will, be labeled “brat” and posted online. Major brands like Amazon, Duolingo, Google and Netflix have embraced the hype, making “brat” memes of their own. Vegan sausage company Field Roast even created ads with lime green packaging featuring the word “bratwurst” in Arial font.
It’s the type of craze any marketing guru would kill for — which is why it’s even more noteworthy that, according to Charli’s team, the brat-uration of the internet started naturally. In fact, Imogene Strauss, her longtime creative director, has a more old-fashioned explanation for the cover art: She and Charli felt it was “loud” enough to stand out in a record store.
“We did hundreds of versions of the cover,” Strauss explains. “We knew it was going to be green, but the conversations around the shade of green were weeks long… There’s so many versions that existed before the final. We analyzed every single element: where has this color been used before, what are its associations, who reacts to it and how.”
Dilara Findikoglu top and shorts, Givenchy heels, 866 Royal Mint jewelry.
Charlotte Hadden
As it caught on, Charli’s team rushed to create a “brat generator” for fans to more easily make their own art inspired by the cover. When Charli followed up the hit album three days after its release with a deluxe version — brat and it’s the same but there’s three more songs so it’s not, featuring… well, three more songs — her team built a second generator to mimic its black-and-white cover art. When a brat wall mural in Brooklyn announced the deluxe set’s release one painted letter at a time, Charli livestreamed it. As her marketing and digital guru, Terry O’Connor, puts it, a “big focus” of the campaign was about “making and creating real-life, in-person moments” that can then be captured digitally, like the phenomenon of fans posting selfies in front of the wall.
And this is just the tip of the brat cultural iceberg. The 15-track, 41-minute album’s lyrics include several lines that have already infiltrated the internet lexicon: “I’m so Julia” (a reference to actress Julia Fox), “You gon’ jump if A. G. made it” (a nod to brat executive producer A. G. Cook), “Bumpin’ that” (a refrain on brat’s opening and closing tracks) and “Let’s work it out on the remix” (a line from Lorde’s “Girl, so confusing” remix). The song “Apple,” which Charli admits almost didn’t even make the album, has spawned a TikTok choreography craze. The posts about the record are mutating and evolving so fast that Atlantic Records A&R executive Brandon Davis says, “We joke that someone from the team always needs to be on night watch. Someone always needs to be awake, watching the internet, so we can just pop up and go.”
But the internet-fluent project, its party-ready music and its discourse-dominating rollout belie its deep emotional core, which grapples with ego, womanhood and relationships. On the stripped-back “I might say something stupid,” Charli admits insecurity: “Guess I’m the mess and play the role.” With the bombastic “Von dutch,” she embraces arrogance: “It’s OK to just admit you’re jealous of me.” Then, on the strobing “Girl, so confusing,” she questions friendships: “Sometimes I think you might hate me.” On the intimate “I think about it all the time,” she wrestles with complex life choices: “Should I stop my birth control?/’Cause my career feels so small in the existential scheme of it all.” By the full-circle album closer, “365,” she’s ready to go out: “Should we do another key, should we do another line?”
Alexander McQueen coat and boots, 866 Royal Mint jewelry.
Charlotte Hadden
Overly analytical therapy-speak has infiltrated pop music lyricism, but listeners have latched onto the sincerity of Charli’s direct and “conversational” club music. Modern discourse has fixated on the meanings of girlhood and womanhood, but brat has effectively stripped away the sugar coating, laying bare the jealousy, messiness and confusion inherent to many female relationships, even if it often goes unspoken.
“I didn’t want any metaphors — like, at all,” Charli says, interrupted by the van’s abrupt stop and the driver laying on the horn. “I wanted this record to feel like I was having a conversation with the listener in a true way. I could say that to you in the back of a cab on the way to a club. Like tonight? I want to dance with A. G.,” she says.
With that creative conviction, Charli hasn’t just made the album she always wanted to: She has scored the biggest success of her career. But as Twiggy Rowley, a member of Charli’s management team since 2014, puts it, brat’s impact is an “intangible groundswell” as much as it is a quantifiable achievement. “She’s always operated three steps ahead. The only change is that people are now catching on.”
“It’s weird because I’ve been here before,” Charli says, peering out the window as the London streets whip past. She’s reflecting on the commercial success of brat, which debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, her highest position on the chart to date. “But last time, I was here in a very different way.”
About a decade ago, the Essex native born Charlotte Aitchison was poised to become the next big British pop star. After spending her teens cutting her teeth as a singer in the London rave scene, she signed with Atlantic/Asylum in the United Kingdom in 2009. In 2013, she hit No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 by way of her guest appearance on Icona Pop’s “I Love It,” and the following year, she topped the chart thanks to her feature on Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy.” Her own 2014 single, “Boom Clap,” propelled by its synch in the John Green teen drama The Fault in Our Stars, reached No. 8 on the Hot 100.
Known for her quick pen — she co-wrote hits for Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes (“Señorita”) and Selena Gomez (“Same Old Love”) — and signature smudged black liner and dark mane of unruly waves, Charli seemed destined to continue dominating the charts as both songwriter and artist. But she amassed cultural cachet as an artist far quicker than commercial successes. Charli’s Angels — her cultlike fandom primarily comprising queer kids and partiers (or queer kid partiers) — have lauded her as a pop innovator for years, one so cool that the mainstream just didn’t get it. Each successive album found her striking out in new sonic directions — what she now calls “pendulum swings”— from Sucker’s pop-rock to How I’m Feeling Now’s pandemic hyperpop to, most recently, 2022’s Crash, a pop princess concept album that she says is “what it would sound like if I sold out.”
While Charli maintained a somewhat steady stream of critical acclaim for her work during these years, sometimes even the critics did not understand. An infamous Pitchfork review panned her now widely celebrated Vroom Vroom EP — produced by one of Charli’s mentors, the pioneering late artist SOPHIE, and today considered a foundational text of the subgenre known as hyperpop — with a dismal 4.5 rating upon its February 2016 release. In 2019, the critic “publicly disavowed the nonsense I wrote about Vroom Vroom” in a tweet; when Pitchfork rescored several of its most controversial reviews in 2021, it bumped the EP to a 7.8.
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Charli is used to this. At a screening for her high-concept “360” music video — featuring a veritable parade of “It” girls from Chloë Sevigny to Fox — at Brain Dead Studios theater in West Hollywood, she proclaimed to the crowd: “It’s hard being ahead, you know?” But despite her impact, Charli also tends to critique her past work. Reflecting on some of her early songs during our car ride, she calls them “just not very potent” versions of who she is as an artist; she considers 2014’s Sucker, for instance, “an attempt at what Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour was able to do much better.”
“My vision wasn’t fully realized,” Charli explains. “I made decisions that maybe were suggested to me but that I actually didn’t fully believe in. I was 19 years old. Whilst I think a lot of the songs that I was doing then were good songs, I wouldn’t necessarily have listened to them if it was another artist releasing them. I think I knew that at the time, but I also think I knew that that was OK. At that time, I was writing for a lot of other people, and I wanted to be doing that. I knew I probably wouldn’t have been in those [writing rooms] had ‘Boom Clap’ and those songs not happened the way they happened.”
Despite Crash being Charli’s open bid for mainstream approval, it turned out her “no compromise” record brat would be far more successful commercially. (Crash debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 and fell off the chart after three weeks.) “Now every single move is considered in depth. I think about every element of my artistry so in depth that I feel truly potent now,” she explains, fixing her hair — which, after a few years of sporting a bob or various wigs, is back to its natural waved look, albeit with waist-long extensions.
“This is the most unabashedly, unapologetically Charli yet,” says Good World founder Brandon Creed, another member of her management team. “It is a paradigm shift for her and, in some ways, for the industry. This is a high-charting album, but it’s not being led by just one hit single. There’s a number of songs going at once.”
Charli xcx photographed July 4, 2024 at Loft Studios in London.
Charlotte Hadden
Still, Charli says, “I don’t really do this for the charts,” quickly couching her dismissal with a half-hearted “no offense.” On the brat track “Rewind” she does admit to contemplating it sometimes, singing, “I never used to think about Billboard/But now, I’ve started thinking about/Wondering about whether I think I deserve commercial success.”
“That line is actually referencing ‘Speed Drive’ [from the Barbie soundtrack],” Charli explains. “I wrote the song in 30 minutes. I didn’t think anything of [“Speed Drive”]… I feel like [soundtrack executive producer Mark Ronson] asked me a little late in the game. He was like, ‘We need something for the driving scene. Do you want to do it?’ And I was like ‘Yeah, sure, whatever.’ ”
When “Speed Drive” became her biggest hit in years, climbing to No. 73 on the Hot 100, she was in the middle of writing brat. “I wrote ‘Rewind’ as a reference to the feeling of ‘Wait, now I’m having this big moment with “Speed Drive.” F–k, that feels so random.’ ” Unfortunately, she says that due to the song’s interpolations of The Teddy Bears’ “Cobrastyle” and Toni Basil’s “Mickey,” “there are now like 25 writers listed on it or something, which really sucks for us… though I don’t really make much money from publishing anyway.” (Billboard estimates that Charli earns between $500,000 and $900,000 in publishing royalties from her artist catalog annually, depending on the nature of her publishing deal. This estimate includes both her publishing for her artist catalog and the songs she has written for others.)
Charli appears satisfied, if ambivalent, about her chart debut inroads with brat, but some of her Angels took offense on her behalf, particularly with her No. 2 debut in the United Kingdom. The same week that brat dropped, Taylor Swift — the rumored subject of brat track “Sympathy is a knife” — surprised fans with two new variants of The Tortured Poets Department. Both were specifically locked for only residents of the United Kingdom, where many believed Charli had a shot at No. 1. The Angels decried Swift’s move, accusing her of “blocking” Charli. In response to those rumors, Creed simply tells Billboard: “We stayed on our course, and we’re thrilled with the results of the album.”
At the 12,500-capacity Wembley Arena, Charli’s van is ushered through a back entrance. As she’s led down a long, low-ceiling hallway and hurried into her designated green room, her stiletto-heeled boots clack loudly on the concrete floor.
The hallway opens into the empty arena, where lighting techs are busily building the LED displays that will backdrop Sivan’s show a few hours later. Again, brat green is seemingly everywhere, from employee uniforms to venue signage; as it happens, it’s the color of the arena’s branding.
During the show, Sivan brings out Charli to perform their 2018 duet, “1999.” This fall, they’ll co-headline the Sweat Tour of U.S. arenas. After being friends for much of their careers and sharing Creed as a manager, Charli says that it finally “made sense” for them to tour together due to the “dance-leaning” nature of brat and Sivan’s latest album, last fall’s Something To Give Each Other. Largely citing seating charts on Ticketmaster, some outlets have reported low ticket sales for the tour, which was announced in mid-April, several weeks before brat’s release. But Jenna Adler, Charli’s agent at CAA, calls the rumor “fake news.”
“That’s just clickbait. It’s crazy,” she says. “My conviction is so strong about how well this tour is doing because I have the numbers and the numbers don’t lie.” (Adler declined to provide sales figures.) Charli also has four U.K. arena dates lined up for late 2024.
Patou top and skirt, Balenciaga boots.
Charlotte Hadden
Live performance has already been essential to brat’s rollout, starting with Charli’s immediately legendary Boiler Room DJ set in February, which broke the record for the highest number of RSVPs in the company’s history within hours of its announcement. Flanked by brat executive producer Cook; her fiancé and co-writer, The 1975’s George Daniel; and producer Easyfun, she played many of brat’s songs for the first time. But to keep fans on their toes, all the versions she played were remixes.
“The reason I love electronic music and clubs and DJs so much is that everything is endless. Everything can be repurposed, reimagined,” she says. “As a pop writer, I find that exciting. It was cool to use Boiler Room as a space to demonstrate that artists often make five different versions of a song and the song that is put out is not the only one.”
Playing with the idea of “inclusivity and exclusivity,” as she puts it, is a core theme of brat. “I like the marketing of pop music more than I am interested in actual pop music,” Charli says. “I think we’ve been living in this world now for a while where there’s this desire to appeal to the most people, to have the biggest smile and be the nicest person with the widest appeal. But desire is cultivated by being a little bit hard to reach, a little bit separate. That’s why people want to wait in a queue at f–king Supreme, you know what I mean?
“With brat, it was really interesting to just do things for the fan base and make that feel exclusive — but then once you’re in the club, it’s actually very inclusive,” she continues. “Actually, everyone can join the club. It’s just that everybody joins at slightly different times in slightly different ways — whether that be on my private Instagram posts, or the 400-person Boiler Room, or a random cinema screening of a new music video in L.A., or a text message from me.”
Alexander McQueen coat and boots.
Charlotte Hadden
Around brat’s release, Charli followed up her Boiler Room success with a brief underplay tour that stopped in London, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Held in far more intimate rooms than her upcoming arena tour, each became the hottest ticket in town. The show at New York’s Brooklyn Paramount in particular turned into an in-person reunion of Charli’s cast of characters mentioned, featured or alluded to on brat. (She says the album’s frequent name-checking also embodies that inclusivity-and-exclusivity concept: When you learn that “so Julia” refers to Fox, for example, it unlocks some of the meaning of “360.”) Fox attended that night, along with Cook; Daniel; The 1975’s Matty Healy; his fiancée, Gabbriette Bechtel; and the subject of “Girl, so confusing”: Lorde.
Like many of brat’s songs, figuring out the subject of “Girl, so confusing” isn’t difficult — which is why Charli reached out to Lorde ahead of its release. “I had to go through the process of telling her that this song is about her and her being OK with that first,” Charli explains. “I was trying to meet up with her for almost a year, and we kept having this weird, like, we were [going to], then we wouldn’t. It spoke to the narrative of the song itself. In the end, it didn’t work out. Then the day before the record came out, I left her a voice note. [Lorde] replied straight away and was like, ‘Oh, my God, I had no idea you felt this way. I’m so sorry.’ And then was like, ‘You know, maybe I should be on a version of the song.’ I didn’t even ask her. She brought it up.
“So much of this rollout was planned, but sometimes it was not,” she continues. “Lorde’s remix of ‘Girl, so confusing’ is a perfect example. That wasn’t planned. It took three days total.”
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Within a few days, Lorde cut her verse. She sent it off to Charli and then headed out to attend the Brooklyn Paramount show. Lorde tells Billboard her first reaction to the song was a “two-part thing of both deep empathy for my friend and this feeling of ‘Man, I’ve been misunderstood, and I really want to make it right.’ ”
“It’s funny,” Charli says. “When I was listening to [Lorde’s] verse for the first time, I was backstage at the show. My hair stylist also does her hair. He had also just done her hair for the show, too, so he was just with her, and then he came to me and was like, ‘I’m so happy you guys are good.’ ”
“When I was writing this verse, I was saying these things to her for the first time,” Lorde says. “There was such a rawness and an immediacy to what I was saying. I love that we truly did work it out on the remix. There’s something very brat about that, something very meta and modern. Only Charli could make that happen. She had opened up a channel between us, and it made me say things that I had never said. I was articulating things I’d never said or maybe even things I’ve never even heard said. This whole thing has been such a huge honor.”
A week after the Sivan show, Charli is at her London home, getting her hair and makeup done for her Billboard cover shoot. With an 8 a.m. call time for glam and plans to later attend a promotional event in Northern England until late into the night, it’s evident that brat’s omnipresence is not due to sheer luck or even just great songs: It’s also largely the result of a relentless schedule of marketing and promotion by Charli and her team.
Sam Pringle, another co-manager of Charli’s since 2014, credits her as the mastermind behind all of it. He says Charli sent the team “a 20-page PDF breaking down every element of brat in full” in January before everything kicked off. “I should have known then that this was going to be a campaign like no other.”
Since then, Charli admits she has had practically no downtime, especially not after the album release. She did have a couple of days of recovery after her late-night DJ set at the Glastonbury Festival the weekend before her Billboard shoot, but “that’s about it,” she says, shrugging. “I feel good, but I’m overwhelmed as well. But also, I just love the music that I’ve made so much, which is not always the case… Luckily, I want to be doing all of this.”
Charli xcx photographed July 4, 2024 at Loft Studios in London. Balenciaga top, skirt and boots.
Charlotte Hadden
Still, in the zenith of so-called “brat summer,” as fans say, Charli says she has more planned. The wall in Brooklyn that she used to tease out the deluxe release was recently taken down, which fans read as the end of the brat era. But Charli assuaged those fears on social media: “brat summer is only just beginning :).”
When asked if more remixes are yet to come, she answers, “Yes,” but coyly declines to offer details. She also says she’s planning to go to Poland for three weeks in August “to write a film there with…” Then she hesitates, catching herself before she gives too much away. “Well, I don’t really know if I should say because I also don’t know if we’re going to do it. We might actually just go to Poland and not do that, but that is the idea.”
She has never written a script before, but as a longtime cinephile, she’s excited to try. Why Poland? “Because it’s going to take place in Poland. We would write it and shoot it at the same time, kind of like making an album. One of the guys is the director — he works that way all the time.”
Long term, she’s less sure about where her musical career will go next. “I saw this tweet the other day that was like, ‘Does anyone think that this is Charli’s last album?’… Then I was like, ‘Actually, that could be cool if I didn’t really make music anymore after this,’ ” she admits. “I’m definitely thinking about it because I really want to act.” Then she pauses. “I don’t know. I’m just so deep in this, I can’t see outside of brat, but it’s funny. I kind of want to make a Lou Reed record, to be honest. That would definitely be a pretty big swing.”
And for that reason, it could be the perfect Charli move. The rest of the world might only just now be catching up to her, but “Charli’s been doing this,” as Lorde says. “She’s been Charli this whole time. She’s just put one foot in front of the other. Learned something from every project. Michelangelo apparently once said, ‘I’m just going to carve away all that is not David,’ and I feel that that’s what we are getting to witness in real time: Charli saying to herself, ‘I’m going to carve away all that is not Charli.’ It’s very, very big and special, powerful, fun, sick work that she does.”
This story will appear in the July 20, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Years before Myles Smith broke through with his anthemic single “Stargazing,” he followed his mother’s advice by focusing on his education — graduating from the University of Nottingham in 2019, launching his own company at 19 and making it profitable by 23.
“I [was] earning good money, but I [wasn’t] fulfilled within my heart,” Smith explains. “That, for me, was a moment of [realizing] that I can’t dedicate years of my life to doing something that I know I’m truly not completely invested in.” So he quit — and already, just two years later, the returns have trumped any apprehension.
As he speaks with Billboard from his Brighton home in late June, the 26-year-old singer-songwriter’s runaway hit “Stargazing” has reached a No. 41 high on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 7 on the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart, earning 61.2 million official on-demand U.S. streams through June 27, according to Luminate. He has also been announced as a supporting act for select dates on Imagine Dragons’ upcoming fall tour, and will jet to Australia and New Zealand in November for his own headlining trek, which has sold out shows across Europe and North America.
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Myles Smith photographed June 19, 2024 in Brighton, U.K.
Jennifer McCord
As a kid born to a Jamaican family in Luton, England, Smith consumed a wide-ranging selection of genres: Reggae was a mainstay, but between his mother’s love for Whitney Houston’s “Million Dollar Bill” and his siblings’ indoctrination of Destiny’s Child, Ne-Yo and Justin Timberlake, he listened to plenty of R&B. His vibrant working-class neighborhood also exposed him to hip-hop and grime, but it was the music of the 2010s that truly honed his songwriting skills. He credits the heartbreaking lyricism of Adele’s 21, Ed Sheeran’s +, Bryson Tiller’s Trapsoul and Mumford & Sons’ Babel as four foundational albums.
While he crafted his sound, he began uploading unfinished song snippets to TikTok, one of which caught the attention of Extended Play Group’s Eric Parker as he was scrolling through his For You page in fall 2022. “It was a very sad song [that] hit me in a place I don’t normally get hit on TikTok,” Parker says. He promptly reached out and started managing Smith that November.
The two worked to build his following by joining his originals with evocative covers of songs that mined Gen Z’s penchant for nostalgia, including The Neighbourhood’s “Sweater Weather.” “Covers [were] an opportunity to find an audience that I thought would match with the music I would eventually create,” he explains.
With a growing online fan base by 2023, Smith was independently releasing his own singles through Ditto Music, including early tracks like the thumping “My Home” and the witty wordplay fest “Solo” (his first U.K. chart hit). Once he surpassed four million monthly listeners on Spotify, Smith and Parker agreed it was time to look for a label deal. After meeting with scores of potential partners, Smith signed with RCA U.K. last January, in partnership with the U.S. label.
“[My] incredible A&R Jaryn [Valdry] made me cry my eyes out in a meeting because she saw me for who I was,” Smith says. “[RCA’s] whole philosophy being growth over a long period rather than a flash in the pan really aligned with me.”
Myles Smith photographed June 19, 2024 in Brighton, U.K.
Jennifer McCord
Two months later, Smith dropped his debut EP, You Promised a Lifetime. “Stargazing” — written in Malibu, Calif. shortly after signing his deal — wouldn’t arrive until May. Fueled by Fireball shots, nachos and tacos, he and co-writers Peter Fenn and Jesse Fink were “eight or nine songs in,” before Smith came up with a chorus melody so arresting that it sparked an immediate search for complementary chords. Most of the song was written in 15 minutes, with verse details finalized in the following weeks. And when the rest of his team heard it, they solidified his confidence in the looming hit.
“I get back to West Hollywood at two or three in the morning, and I play the day-of demo on the speakers in the [ceiling],” he recalls. “I remember my manager waking up on the sofa like, ‘What is this?’ Everyone in the house is running and jumping around. For my team — my harshest critics, after my mum — to give me that genuine reaction, I knew I was on to something.”
They soon launched a month-long rollout for the song, culminating in its release on May 10 to coincide with the start of his next touring leg. The first snippet he posted to TikTok on April 8 doubled down on the intimacy of his guitar-backed singer-songwriter style, and each subsequent teaser featured more members of his team lip-syncing and dancing along to the track.
“Being able to draw people into the context of the song really works,” Smith says. “I’m Myles Smith, but I’ve got a team, and they’re my best friends. There’s a strange culture of everything revolving around the artist. You think I could do this without everyone around me? No way.”
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The song’s radio campaign began across the pond, but Parker mentions that RCA wanted to make a stateside push immediately. “They were very proactive, [which] was a good sign that they believed in the song as much as we did.” Their hunch was right: “Stargazing” continues to build at radio, debuting on the Adult Alternative Airplay chart dated July 6 and reaching new peaks at Alternative Airplay and Rock & Alternative Airplay.
Amid his breakthrough, Smith sees himself as someone known for his full bodies of work. “I want to be an album artist,” he stresses. “There’s only so much you can say in an EP or single.” But even more importantly, he’s focused on setting an example for how the music industry intersects with the world’s larger systems of oppression.
“I don’t want to be used as a means of saying, ‘We’ve done enough,’” he says of his success in the singer-songwriter space as a Black man. “If anything, I want to be used as a question for why aren’t there more Myleses breaking through.”
Myles Smith photographed June 19, 2024 in Brighton, U.K.
Jennifer McCord
A version of this story will appear in the July 20, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Months into writing a new song with Chappell Roan in 2023, Dan Nigro hit a wall. The Grammy-winner songwriter-producer had tried just about everything he could think of with the bubbling under pop phenomenon — boosting the production, cleaning up the lyrics, adjusting the key — and yet the song still didn’t have that special X factor they were looking for.
“We kept on getting so frustrated,” Nigro tells Billboard. “We knew that something about it was really special, but we could not figure it out. Was it the key? Was it the verses that needed to feel more spunky?”
But once the duo found what they were looking for in the stratospheric chorus, the song transformed into Roan’s runaway hit, “Good Luck, Babe!” Since the song’s release in April, Roan (born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz) has become one of the most talked-about voices in mainstream pop music. The single marked her first entry on the Billboard Hot 100, debuting at No. 77, and has risen to No. 16 on the June 29-dated chart, with three of her other songs — “Red Wine Supernova,” “Hot to Go!” and “Pink Pony Club” — populating the lower half of the list. Meanwhile, her debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, reaches a career-high at No. 8 on the Billboard 200.
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It shouldn’t come as a surprise that a track co-penned by Nigro is finding such breakaway success. Over the last several years, the songwriter has cemented himself as one of the most sought-after writers in the business, helping write hits for pop artists including Olivia Rodrigo, Caroline Polachek, Conan Gray and others. But in working with Roan, Nigro says he’s found something especially exciting.
“When we made [her May 2020 single] ‘California,’ which was the second song we wrote together, I had this feeling like I was a part of something deeply special,” Nigro says. “It felt magical and deeply relatable … and really important, [because] she was making it so that it felt important.”
Nigro breaks down the “intense” process of writing “Good Luck, Babe!,” its runaway success over the last two months and why he knew early on that Chappell Roan was destined to be “a superstar.”
Tell me about the beginning of the process with “Good Luck, Babe!” — where did the original idea for the track come from, and when did you begin working on this?
Kayleigh, Justin [Tranter] and I actually started the idea in November of 2022. We wrote a scratch idea — it was just a verse and a chorus. The idea was originally called “Good Luck, Jane” — Kayleigh was really set on having it be a name.
It’s a song we wrestled with for a while. We laid down a demo, and the two of us felt like it wasn’t right. We knew something was special about the song, but we couldn’t tell what it was that we were getting wrong. So, we worked on it for a day, we put it away, and then a few months later, she came in for something else, and she was like, “What about that one song we wrote? I feel like there’s something there.”
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Kayleigh’s voice is crazy across all of her songs, but it feels like she is in rare form on “Good Luck, Babe!,” where she’s almost expressing the entirety of her vocal range on one song.
Absolutely. When we opened it back up, we really narrowed in on the chorus and decided that some of the words needed to be in full voice. And then all of a sudden, we listened back and went, “Okay! I think we’ve figured it out!” Once we finally got it, it was such a relief. That song was so intense, and it was definitely one of the hardest songs to get right.
Kayleigh and I are not the people who go in the studio and write a song in one day. We take our time with it, comb over the lyrics and then forget about it for a month and come back to listen with fresh ears. A lot of times when you’re working on a song, in the midst of working on it, you tend to get really excited about it, and then you look back later and go, “Oh, that wasn’t as good as we thought it was.” Luckily, Kayleigh is so good at having that insight and knowing [when] to take a step back and reflect on it. She’s so incredible at having that self-awareness. She’s also such an incredible singer — which is a great thing, but because she often sounds really good singing any song, figuring out the difference between something being really good and being amazing can be tricky.
I know Kayleigh has said this song was “a b-tch to write,” and that very much tracks with what you’re describing here.
For sure. Though, it’s funny: To me, it wasn’t actually that much of a b-tch to write. I feel like it was the production and the process that was really tough. Actually writing the song was quite fluid. I remember she came over one day, and I was like, “Well, now we need a bridge.” She wrote the bridge all on her own in like two minutes. She said, “Put the pre-chorus chords on,” I looped it, and she just got on the mic and went for it. I was trying to keep looping the chords more because she just kept singing, and I was like, “No, we have to go further!” It was amazing.
You mentioned that the original version of the song you wrote with Justin had really different verses lyrically — what would you say fundamentally changed between that first draft and the final version?
I don’t exactly remember what the verses were to begin with, just because it’s been so long since we wrote them. But I do remember that we wanted the words to feel more effortless. We wanted to make sure it had that casual, cool, laid-back feeling to it. The lyrics were a little bit more pointed, a little more cutting. We chilled it out, and then she was sitting on the couch at one point, and she said, “I just want to have a line in there about my arms reaching out of a sunroof.” It was so funny.
At what point in this process, if at all, did you think that “Good Luck, Babe!” was going to be a hit?
When a song is difficult to get right, especially from the production side of things, I become so self-conscious of it that I can never see it super clearly. Also, “Good Luck, Babe!” is so dramatic — I tend to keep my productions pretty minimal for the most part. But “Good Luck, Babe!” is such an epic production — there are like 100 string parts! When I’m adding that much production, I tend to feel like I’m doing too many things. So, I don’t think there was any point in that process where I was like, “Oh, this one’s going to be a hit.”
I remember she texted me the day the song came out, just being excited about the song. Then her manager texted me and said, “This one feels special, this feels different right now.” That is, to me, the crazy thing about being able to see the numbers in real time: You have absolutely no way of knowing, and then within 12 hours, people can tell you, “Oh yeah, audiences are really liking this one.”
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It seems clear that “Good Luck, Babe!” really cemented this cultural moment for Kayleigh: The song has climbed into the top 20 of the Hot 100, “Red Wine Supernova,” “Hot to Go!” and “Pink Pony Club” have all entered the Hot 100, and The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess continues to climb on the Billboard 200, reaching the top 10.
It is crazy to watch. This feels like … I don’t want to say “destiny,” that’s the wrong word to use. It all happened for a reason. This song was made during the making for Rise and Fall, and to me, it felt like it could have easily been on the record. I’d like to think that because it came out at a different time, it held a different meaning and it was a different vessel for the album. Whereas, if it came out with the album, then the record would not be what it’s doing right now.
Why do you think this moment is happening right now, rather than with the album’s release last September?
All I can say is, three or four days into meeting her, I was convinced she was a superstar. I was so enamored by the way she thought about music, and I could not believe I was a part of it, because it felt magical and also deeply relatable. When we made “Pink Pony Club,” that was the record where it felt like we were making something actively powerful. It was that sort of feeling where you get the sense that you’re making a song that people need. I’ve always felt that something like this was going to happen for her; the question was just when it would happen.
The fact that she’s so phenomenal live means people are finally able to see in real time how good she is. That then becomes this word-of-mouth thing, and it’s wonderful to see her have such old school success. I’ve told so many people, “This is the way things used to be — you would have to see the artist live, and you see them be good at what they do and then spread the word.” She’s so good at what she does that the system is working again! It really is that simple.
That’s an important point — while a lot has happened in the last two months, this wasn’t “overnight” success. Chappell had been steadily growing before “Good Luck, Babe!” blew up.
I totally agree, it’s not “overnight” success in any way — even since the record came out nine months ago, every single day, the numbers were steadily going up by like a percentage each week. It just took so long to get to the point where enough people were talking about it every day for it to become exponential.
You’ve had a lot of success working with pop stars like Olivia Rodrigo, Conan Gray and Caroline Polacheck — is there anything about working with Chappell that feels different than your other collaborators? Or what things feel similar in the way you work with all of those artists?
If I’m being honest, I always feel weird when asked to compare people. I think the important thing is that she’s incredibly articulate about what she wants out of a song, and we have a great relationship when it comes to creating music. We’re writing songs together, but we’re also producing them together, and she’s in the room for a bunch of it. There’s a really good language between us when it comes to making music. I can understand what she’s looking for, and if I’m not getting something right when I’m producing, she can step in. She’s so good at explaining exactly what she wants, and it makes for a really good flow in our working relationship.
A version of this story originally appeared in the June 22, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Grammy award-nominated singer-songwriter Tayla Parx has always been country. Hailing from Dallas, the 30-year-old multihyphenate became just the fourth Black woman in history to write a Country Airplay No. 1 with Dan + Shay’s “Glad You Exist” (2021), and a few months ago, Parx moved to Nashville.
There, she has been developing a sustainable ranch while prepping her forthcoming third album, Many Moons, Many Suns (out on her TaylaMade Records), which explores the unexpected end of her engagement and combines country, rock, house, soul and contemporary pop. “I’m buying goats, sheep and cows,” she says of her new home. “I’m already excited about the songs that I’ll create just being here.”
Below, Parx previews her new album and reflects on queer pop stardom.
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What’s the first thing you did when you woke up today?
The first thing I did when I woke up today was load a tractor. I got a tractor to live in and my friend just dropped it off. I’ve been working on my little ranch.
What drew you to Nashville?
I started to come down here last year, but maybe three or four months ago, I officially was [here] full time. I’m still in Los Angeles once or twice a week, but this is my home.
What was a key moment on the journey to your new album?
Being able to take four years, I finally was like, “I feel new again.” [We] go through these feelings of breaking down and building up and breaking down your new version of yourself … I’m in that moment now. [That’s] when it’s the right time for me to create, or finish, the album.
Last year you co-wrote on Troye Sivan’s “Got Me Started” and Janelle Monáe’s “Water Slide.” Did you carry any inspiration from those sessions into your own?
We have a problem in the songwriting world where you’ll see a queer artist and they have only straight writers on the project, and that’s a bit weird. Or we see a woman artist and they only have straight men as writers, and that’s also a bit weird. I’m not saying we can’t have that perspective, because I’ve written for a lot of different people and I haven’t experienced their version of life. However, it’s always important to have at least somebody be a part of the project that can see you in a very different way — and maybe that’s because they’re queer. So I’ve been choosing to write with a lot of artists [with whom] I can write from that perspective. I’ve been a lot more selective these days.
“Era” has heavy ballroom energy, as does “10s.” How did examining your relationship affect your influences while recording?
We have that ballroom energy, New Orleans energy, all the things that I’ve experienced in my life that are such a huge part of queer culture. With “10s,” I played a lot with pulling from my community, the different sounds that inspire us and make us move. I really wanted to go to the extreme. A lot of the music that is the most groundbreaking is ballroom. We’ve been forced to be out of the boundary, or seen as that, for so long that it was like, “F–k it. Well, I might as well be the best version of me — and do me to the max.”
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When you were coming up, who were the songwriters that made you feel most seen?
I feel like I’m just now having an opportunity in the past few years to have artists that actually make me feel seen. Around 2015, I was listening to Marika Hackman’s “Boyfriend,” and it’s a queer song and I had never heard something lyrically like [that.] That’s not to say that there [aren’t] any queer artists that have been out there being very forward, I’m just saying what spoke to me. Being born in ‘93 and a teenager in the 2000s, it’s a very different thing.
If you had to pick three essential tracks from the new record, what would they be?
I would say, “Standing Up to the Wind,” “Gentlewoman” and “I Don’t Talk About Texas.”
Beyond the album, what are your plans for the rest of the year?
We are getting back on the road. I’m super excited because it’s been a minute since I’ve been on the road. I went from consistently touring to taking a break and really allowing the music to come. We got some crazy sustainable and biodegradable merch coming, which is really cool. And more behind the scenes of the process — I’m making sure that everything within the TaylaMade world reflects [my] values.
A version of this story originally appeared in the June 22, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Fly Me to the Moon,” “This Land Is Your Land,” “We Shall Overcome,” “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” “Space Oddity” — the list reads like the top titles in a major music company’s catalog.
But it’s actually a list of just a few of the copyrights in the catalog of the quiet independent publishing giant TRO Essex Music Group. Founded in 1949 by Howie Richmond, a former press agent for the day’s biggest stars like Frank Sinatra, Glenn Miller and Gene Krupa who went on to become a pioneering music publisher (and co-founder of the Songwriters Hall of Fame), today’s TRO Essex started under the name Cromwell Inc. and quickly grew into a collection of 22 publishing companies under The Richmond Organization (TRO) umbrella. It became a titan of indie publishing, particularly in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, finding success in jazz with Bill Evans and Alec Wilder, folk with Pete Seeger, Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie, and rock with Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Marc Bolan of T. Rex, The Who and Pete Townshend.
At 75, TRO Essex is still going strong, managing its formidable catalog of publishing and recorded-music interests through its international offices in Hamburg, Germany; London; Paris; and elsewhere. After a few decades of taking on more of a catalog management role, TRO Essex is returning to frontline signings, using proceeds from past evergreens to fund new development.
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“For our 75th anniversary, we started to think about ways we could celebrate our past and move into our next chapter,” says Kathryn “Kathy” Ostien, COO of global music operations. “So we restructured and brought in a whole new A&R team. In 2023, we signed 26 new writers to the publishing catalog. We then launched a new record label called Shamus Records at the end of the year to manage their masters.”
This includes betting on albums arriving this year by newcomers of all genres, including alt-pop talent Sam Louis, indie pop artist Casii Stephan and jazz producer Matt Stevens.
The company is also rolling out the latest album installment in its series Evergreens Reimagined, under Shamus, enlisting its new talent to cover older hits. “It’s an exciting time,” Ostien says. “We are building fast on top of our already incredible base, but we are ready for the future, too.”
Kathryn Ostien
Sabrina Asch Photography
You look after such a rich back catalog, which you administer in-house. What is your strongest income stream?
I feel like it changes every five years, mostly because of the technology that we’ve seen. Obviously, it used to be CDs, tapes, LPs. Mechanicals were everything. Performance has always been strong, too. Overall, I think mechanicals have always remained very steady. Our most iconic catalogs continue to do well with mechanicals as well as synchronization.
When I first came to TRO Essex [in 2000], the synch market wasn’t much of anything. We were outsourcing it. Now it’s a huge amount of what we are doing — talking to the studios in Los Angeles, New York. Any type of synch is important for us — commercials, films, TV shows. The Hollywood strikes did not help last year.
Has synchronization risen now that the strikes are over?
We have definitely seen some nice pickup in the past few months.
Do certain genres in your catalog fare better for synch than others? I’ve heard rock is particularly of interest for synch.
I don’t know that I see it that way. There was a period in the early 2000s where rock was really, really desirable for commercials. Every ad agency wanted a Pete Townshend song. It ebbs and flows and all comes from the studios — sometimes they want hard rock, sometimes they want a standard. It depends. During COVID, we did really well with synch, ironically because we have a lot of wartime peace songs, hopeful songs. Everybody wanted that. It did well with commercials and productions during that time.
Your catalog includes some of America’s most essential protest anthems, and the last five years or so have seen the rise of several social movements. Do you look after those songs with particular care?
We do have a lot of protest songs. It’s interesting, especially with the political climate that we’ve had in the past several years. One of the things we take a lot of pride in is protecting those songs and making sure that they’re being used in the way that they were originally written — you always want to stay true to that. You want to keep songs like “This Land Is Your Land” within the time and [context] it was important. We also represent “We Shall Overcome,” which is very iconic. That song in particular is curated the most heavily because it’s so special to [the Civil Rights] movement.
How has the popularity of sampling, interpolating and more influenced your catalog in the last few decades?
Sampling really started taking off with hip-hop and rap in the late ’90s, and then it really took off in the mid-2000s. It has been great for our back catalog, though, to have new copyrights established on top of songs. A great example is how Joe Cocker’s “Woman to Woman” became 2Pac’s “California Love.” We work with a lot of hip-hop and rap managers to use some of these iconic songs and bring them to life.
The catalog market has been red hot for the last five or so years. Does TRO Essex ever try to acquire more catalogs?
We don’t do acquisitions — we’ve never needed to. We want to grow our company by following our own history, which was always based on discovering new, incredible songs that don’t have a home and seeing what we can do with them.
Was there a period where you completely stopped signing frontline acts? Or was it just a slowdown up until the founding of Shamus Records?
I don’t know if I would say it fully stopped, but [it slowed in] the ’80s to ’90s. This is a large catalog to manage independently. We’re trying now to restart that signing process.
Is there a particular identity you’re trying to build with the Shamus signees?
It’s still so new, and our team here is still so new. Mostly, we’re just trying to do what [founder] Howie [Richmond] did — find songs and acts that we like and see what we can do with them. I don’t know if we really have a brand in mind with our roster, but we were thinking that we wanted to bring some newer sounds to the catalog.
What is one of the most important things you can offer to an act looking to sign to Shamus Records/TRO Essex?
It’s an interesting time right now because metadata is everything. We feel that metadata management takes away from the creativity that writers and artists might have if they didn’t have to sit there and go through all these different portals to try to get their money. That’s something we excel at.
Having accurate and complete metadata — like the names of all the songwriters, the performing rights organizations and publishers they use — is important to keep track of as a publishing administrator. Do you think it is more important than ever to manage metadata closely to ensure you and your talent are paid?
Yes, exactly. We had to bring in new staff just to handle the metadata management. This is true for all publishers. It has been an incredible thing, what happened with [the Music Modernization Act] and the creation of the [Mechanical Licensing Collective]. The MLC has built this portal that so easily allows you to go match and claim royalties for your songs. It has really made it so much easier. There was nothing there before. It has made it much more universal and cleaner.
Doing administration in-house with the caliber of the catalog TRO Essex holds must be a lot of work. How do you keep up with it as an independent player?
It is one of the hard things about remaining independent because as the revenue increases, the administration costs increase as well, if you’re doing it correctly.
I’m sure anyone would be interested in buying or administering this catalog for TRO Essex. Why was it important to make sure that you are always independent, always doing your own administration despite the challenges that come with it?
I’m not the right one to speak about why we never sold, but the motivation was just never there for us. We’re proud of what we do. We’re strong. We’re financially very healthy. We don’t think anybody else knows these copyrights as well as us, and we’re good at what we do.
There are several emerging revenue streams in music, particularly in social media licensing. TikTok has made headlines this year for its strained negotiations with Universal Music Group. Are these sources of income good moneymakers for your catalog?
I haven’t seen that [TikTok payments] make a huge [boost] to us financially, but every way you can get a catalog out there is important, especially with a vintage catalog. It’s a new way to introduce it. We just need to be paid appropriately. We follow the guidance of the [National Music Publishers’ Association].
Another emerging area of the music business is artificial intelligence, which could provide risks and benefits to catalog holders. Some are even using AI to market catalogs. Do you have any estates interested in leaning into AI for this purpose?
There’s so much more to understand about AI. At this point, I don’t believe it affects us as greatly as it would probably some of the current recording artists, mostly because of the copying of the voices and likenesses. For us, our copyrights are much more secure bedrocks. It’ll be interesting to see how AI develops and what that true impact is on copyright. We haven’t had anyone really concerned from an estate or writer perspective. As I said earlier, though, every five years it seems there’s a sea change. We’re watching it.
Given that you have such a strong back catalog, it would be easy to say, “That’s it.” You’re just going to keep doing the administration and not push forward into signing new acts. Frontline is so risky. Why was it important to continue to sign new talent?
It’s a lot of work managing a catalog like this, and it presents different, evolving challenges around the world, so for a long time that’s what we did. However, looking at the 75th anniversary, we decided we wanted to breathe new life into it. We wanted to create these new covers, explore a new sound and see what we could do to reinvigorate it. While we were at it, we just thought, “OK, let’s see what else we can sign.” It’s an exciting time to celebrate this incredible history of the past 75 years and then look at the next 75 years with so much hope and excitement.
This story originally appeared in the June 22, 2024, issue of Billboard.
For a brief shining moment in the 1960s, Black trans soul singer Jackie Shane seemed to be turning into a star. That is, until she inexplicably vanished.
“This is a woman who disappeared off the face of the earth for 45 years and nobody knew if she was alive or dead,” says Michael Mabbott, co-director of the forthcoming documentary Any Other Way: The Jackie Shane Story. “As a filmmaker, that’s an intriguing thing in itself.”
The simultaneously sad and triumphant tale of a groundbreaker before her time is the crux of the film. Co-directed by Mabbott along with Lucah Rosenberg-Lee and co-produced by Elliot Page, it brushes away the dust and traces Shane’s stunning rise as a trans singer during an inhospitable period. The result of her quest is a long-overdue reclamation of Shane’s musical legacy. “This theme of erasure was such a guiding light for working on this project,” says Rosenberg-Lee, who is Black and trans himself. “I recognize how much of our history is lost.”
Shane, a native of the American South before moving to Toronto to escape the suffocating effects of Jim Crow, subsequently made waves with a song that inspired the film’s name, the breezy horn- and drum-fueled “Any Other Way.” Along with landing on Billboard’s Bubbling Under Hot 100 chart, it became a hit in Canada in 1962. And yet, despite Shane’s fleeting fame, Mabbott hadn’t heard of the performer until about a decade ago when he came across a bootleg of Jackie Shane Live! When he discovered she had been missing since 1971, his interest was further piqued.
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“It was staggering that she was from my hometown [of Toronto] and I didn’t know who she was,” Mabbott says. After Numero Group reissued her music in 2017 (a compilation of her career later won a Grammy Award for best historical album), it was revealed she was indeed still alive. From there, Mabbott attempted to get in touch — to no avail — before discovering she was living as a recluse in Nashville. Shane eschewed the music industry for myriad reasons, from caring for the woman she regarded as her mother to avoiding the discrimination that had plagued her career from the start.
“Our first phone call lasted four hours,” says Mabbott, who recalls how Shane had an endless supply of vivid memories from her too-brief career — and was ready for a second chapter. “We spoke every week for over a year,” helping the two form a close bond. “She eventually said, ‘Let’s work on this documentary.’ ”
Courtesy of Banger Films and the NFB
Unfortunately, as plans were coalescing, Shane died in her sleep in February 2019. “Her death was all the more tragic because she was ready to come back,” Mabbott says. “She felt the timing of this was important to her and that her message had to be heard now more than ever.”
With that, the filmmakers tackled her journey with added vigor to piece together the puzzle of a remarkable life. Luckily, Shane had scrupulously preserved the artifacts of her career, from acetate recordings to homemade jewelry. Mabbott, who worked with Shane’s long-lost family and a music anthropologist to excavate her legacy, calls the treasure trove she left behind “a documentarian’s dream.”
The final product, which premiered at South by Southwest in March, tells a story the filmmakers hope will spur audiences to both reflect and feel inspired. As Rosenberg-Lee explains, “To have people watch the movie, feel connected to it and see that, ‘Wow, people like this have been around for a long time doing their thing…’ It’s very gratifying for sure.”
This story originally appeared in the June 22, 2024, issue of Billboard.
On a recent trip back to London, rising pop-rock artist Towa Bird visited the house she lived in during university — it’s where she started producing, writing songs and posting videos online — and felt a rare moment of pride upon returning there. “Standing back in that house, it sort of hit me: ‘I have come a long way,’ ” says Bird, 25. “Even though I don’t necessarily let myself believe that, I have.”
Bird’s career has been growing gradually since 2021, when she scored a major-label deal with Interscope and moved from London to Los Angeles. She gained recognition as the towering guitarist who could shred in Olivia Rodrigo’s 2022 Disney+ special, driving home 2 u. In 2023, she scored an opening slot on Reneé Rapp’s Snow Hard Feelings Tour and, in October, released breakout single “Drain Me!,” an electrifying alternative-rock hit about lust that appears on her debut album, American Hero, out June 28.
Growing up in Hong Kong and later London, the half-Filipino, half-English artist was raised on alternative and classic rock, identifying most with guitarists (her idols include Jimi Hendrix and Prince). “Hearing the way that guitarists would manipulate the instrument, making it sound just as strong and present as the lead vocal, I was attracted to that,” Bird says. By 12, she was learning how to play on her father’s old guitar, “which I think had like three strings on it,” she recalls. “But I definitely tried to make it functional.”
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Two years later, Bird formed her first band, The Glass Onions, and started performing at local Hong Kong dives. Yet, despite her early strides, Bird assures she wanted to be everything but a full-time artist — namely because she never felt empowered or allowed to be one at all. “I don’t think anyone in my family thought that [this] would be the case — including myself,” she says. “I thought it’d be a cute hobby.”
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She went on to attend Goldsmiths, University of London, but dropped out in 2020 just before the pandemic. Shortly after to pass the time, Bird started uploading videos of herself shredding over other artists’ songs on TikTok and soon “fell into” writing, producing and playing guitar for more emerging acts. Never feeling like she had “permission” — mostly from herself — to be an artist, Bird preferred working outside of the limelight. But what she didn’t expect was that through those sessions — many of which were done on Zoom late at night in London with artists in L.A. — she felt the authority she had always sought. “Just being in the scene and being seen was good,” she says.
Around the same time, Bird met music managers Jacob Epstein and Zack Morgenroth (of Lighthouse Management, whose clients include Rodrigo) “through the internet,” as she says, and signed with the pair. She figured a publishing deal would follow, but despite being “too scared to sing,” Epstein and Morgenroth were simultaneously setting up label meetings for Bird as an artist. The interest she received piqued her own, saying the encouragement and support from major labels “gave me a little kick up the ass” to focus on her own music. In 2021, she signed an artist deal with Interscope and moved to L.A.
Bird has since emerged as an urgent voice in rock music, whether through her singing or shredding. And most often, it’s both. She believes that in the last few years, there has been a groundswell of interest in live instruments again, especially among her generation. She credits the resurgence in part to her pal Rodrigo. “Olivia really opened doors for me,” Bird says, referring to the Disney+ special that earned her early praise and press. “It was really cool of her to see a young female artist and be like, ‘I want to highlight you.’ ”
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Last year, Bird had another peer (and labelmate) give her a boost when Rapp enlisted her to play guitar on “Tummy Hurts,” off Rapp’s debut album, Snow Angel. She then brought Bird on her 2023 tour, which allowed the singer-guitarist to meet her fans in person for the first time — and to spend time with singer-songwriter-producer Alexander 23, a fellow Rapp tourmate and friend of Bird’s whom she worked with on American Hero.
Across the album’s 13 tracks, Bird reflects on a range of relatable 20-something woes: raging over how expensive life is and the lacking U.S. health care system on “B.I.L.L.S.”; adjusting to life in L.A. and a career in music on “This Isn’t Me”; and feeling fearful about falling in love with a friend on “Sorry Sorry.”
“I was never like, ‘Oh, I’m going to write a gay song today,’ ” she says of her approach to writing. “It was just like, ‘I want to write a good song about love or sex,’ or whatever I was feeling. It’s funny how [my music has] been labeled as queer music or whatever people decide to label it as, but for me, I think it’s just good music — maybe.”
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True to form, Bird struggles to celebrate the victories she has had so far. She can’t even say the word “success” without using air quotes. She insists she’s trying to get better at acknowledging her wins along the way — which now include a slate of summer festival gigs — and already has an idea of how to celebrate her album’s release. “I’ll sit and listen to the full thing, front to back. And then probably cry and get aggressively drunk,” she says with a laugh.
But in spite of feeling “sh-t scared” about its release, Bird recognizes its importance. While she never felt like she had permission to land exactly where she has, with American Hero, she gives that runway to anyone who listens. “It’s something that I clearly still continue to lack,” Bird says. “I mean, what young woman will tell you that that [support is] something they received growing up? Probably none. Especially in this industry. So if I can help in any sort of way, even inadvertently, then that’s great.”
This story will appear in the June 22, 2024, issue of Billboard.
You won’t see Ty Dolla $ign’s name in the production credits for Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.” But without him, the song that this spring put an exclamation point on Lamar’s long-simmering beef with Drake — a jovial but menacing track primarily produced by Mustard, built around a pulsating set of strings — might very well not exist.
Long before Mustard became the top purveyor of Cali bounce, he was a friend and student of Ty’s. They both rolled with a crew called Pu$haz Ink that included artists across disciplines — rappers, singers, graffiti artists, producers and even a few gangsters for good measure. As part of the group’s in-house production squad, Ty would host the crew at his home while he cooked up beats for them. And while he toiled away, the young DJ Mustard steadily documented everything he saw, clocking Ty’s every move to see just how the magic was made. One night, the crew was having a party at a house in Los Angeles’ Baldwin Hills neighborhood when Mustard played the song “Scotty” by Atlanta snap group D4L; Ty still remembers how everyone went crazy and started dancing. He was blown away by the beat’s simplicity, which reminded him of the jerk music then growing in popularity in California.
The next morning, still inspired, Ty started making some new beats. One of his production partners, Chordz, gave him a record to sample that Ty slowed down and pitched perfectly to accentuate the 808s, hi-hat, a snare and a piano sound. The beat became “Toot It & Boot It,” the 2010 debut single for Ty’s Pu$haz Ink peer, the rapper YG — and Ty’s first hit record. But, more importantly, the beat laid the foundation for what became the de facto sound of the West Coast for the next decade, one that Mustard perfected and made his own.
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“Mustard [was] always in my ear like, ‘Yo, you got to stop, the sh-t is done, the sh-t is done, stop adding all that sh-t,’ ” Ty remembers today. “I guess it was irritating him so bad that he was like, ‘I’m finna do my own beats. Give me some sounds,’ ” he adds with a laugh. So he did. “The same sounds he’s using, I gave him years ago.”
Ty’s easygoing nature can mask his intense work ethic and deep musical knowledge. But that combination has helped him endure and soar in this industry for more than a decade. In addition to a solo career that has redefined the sound of R&B, he has worked with an astounding number of artists across genres, from 21 Savage to Fifth Harmony to Charli XCX to Post Malone.
“To me, he is someone who is such an ambidextrous player,” says Julie Greenwald, chair/CEO of Atlantic Music Group, where Ty is signed to Atlantic Records. “You could put him in any room, any studio environment, and the guy will always rise to the occasion of making great music. He’s so comfortable in his own skin and with what kind of contributor he is. Ty is that guy who makes great music on his own and makes great music with whoever you put him with.”
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That comfort is why Ty didn’t think twice about helping Mustard find his sound. “Mustard brought it to a whole ’nother level,” he says today over Zoom from his house in L.A. At 42, Ty still looks like the baby-faced crooner who first appeared back in 2010. His hair is longer, of course, and he’s a bit heftier, but he still loves blowing trees. As he’s talking, he preps a pile of spliffs to take with him as he runs errands; you get the feeling that Ty’s checklist before leaving the crib is, “Keys, phone, wallet, spliff.” “I tell people when it comes to music, people have already played every single line — there’s just different ways you can do it,” he says. “Mustard just brought it to a whole ’nother level. I’m super proud of what he’s doing, and we’re just setting it up for the next generation.”
These days, the artist born Tyrone William Griffin Jr. has a lot to be proud of. It has taken him a while, but 20 years after starting his first musical group, the R&B duo Ty & Kory, Ty has finally attained the one accolade that had thus far eluded him: a No. 1 as lead artist on the Billboard Hot 100. Earlier this year, his collaborative album with Ye, Vultures 1, topped the Billboard 200, and one of its songs, the uproarious “Carnival,” rose to the Hot 100’s top spot. It was a feat many believed wouldn’t or couldn’t happen — not because either artist lacked the ability to make a No. 1 album or single today (before 2024, Ye already had 10 Billboard 200 No. 1s and four Hot 100 chart-toppers to his name), but because, well, no one really understood why or how the project was happening in the first place.
By 2022, Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West) had ostracized himself from nearly every industry of the many he had participated in, following a ceaseless series of offensive remarks and actions, both in person and on social media. He lost his lucrative sneaker deal with adidas after he made inappropriate sexual comments to employees and following a series of antisemitic remarks he made publicly. He lost his longtime deal with Def Jam Records and Universal Music Group, and high fashion brands like Balenciaga, which Ye once helped find success in the hip-hop world, cut ties with him. The usual Ye redemption cycle — which has historically involved him doing something public and widely considered offensive, then releasing a remarkable piece of art that makes much of the public all but forget the offense — would not work this time. Despite making a public apology on Instagram for his harmful antisemitic comments, it seemed as if Ye had finally crossed the Rubicon and become radioactive.
So when news broke last fall that Ye and Ty were dropping an album together, many fans were perplexed. But the pair’s alignment made sense in multiple ways. The two had worked together many times before: Ty wrote and lent vocals to songs on 2016’s The Life of Pablo (“Real Friends” and “Fade”) and produced and sang on its 2018 follow-up, Ye. Historically, Ye has relied on someone else to help him bring a project across the finish line — Rick Rubin famously helped him assemble what became Yeezus in 2013, and most recently, Mike Dean has been his go-to homestretch guy. On Big Boy’s Neighborhood, a popular L.A.-based radio morning show, Ye explained why Ty was that essential player for Vultures 1. “Mike Dean was the kind of person that you can hand him something and he’ll hand you a finished product back. That’s how Ty is,” he said. “You can give him something, even a murmur, and he’ll bring it back with the words, he can fix all the notes on it, he can bring in the drums, the music.” Today, Ty agrees with his collaborator’s assessment. “I remember Thundercat’s dad [drummer Ron Bruner Sr.] telling me one time that he used to teach his son to be a master of one thing instead of trying to do all the things,” he says. “But what I feel like I was the master at was completing songs — whatever [their] f–king genre.”
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As for the why of Vultures 1 — why Ty, a low-key, affable guy who seemingly gets along with everyone, would align himself with someone as caustic as Ye — as Ty sees it, the answer is pretty simple.
“Ye is the best artist of this generation, besides me, and I don’t give a f–k about what people were talking about. I know my n—. He’s one of the best people I’ve ever met,” he says. Ty also shrugs off the notion that he might have feared the album would perform poorly because everyone else thought Ye’s musical career was over. “Just with my analysis of how it goes with him, he goes all the way to the top. And something may happen and he’ll say [something people find offensive] — and then people [get] right back, you know. Because this sh-t is undeniable.”
The “how” of Vultures 1 is a bit more complicated.
Coming off his 2023 single “Motion,” a Chris Brown-featuring track heavily inspired by South African amapiano music, Ty wanted his next album to reflect the sounds he has loved while traveling. When Ty ran into Ye at a club in Tokyo in the spring of 2023, he was just starting work on the project, and he asked Ye to executive-produce. Ye agreed, and the two started working on music together the very next day. Ye’s involvement moved the music away from the Black diasporic and house and club influences that Ty was experimenting with — and marked the genesis of Vultures 1.
Ty already had a bunch of songs in the can that he says he started right where we’re sitting a few weeks before our Zoom, in his studio in downtown Hollywood. He has had this space for just about a year, and a remodeling is ongoing; the only signs that a major hit-maker owns the spot are the vintage cars parked in the back in various states of restoration and the collection of rare synths and keyboards usually housed in the main studio.
Despite its current appearance, this is where Ty feels most at home creating. The freedom he has here led to the experimentation that yielded “Burn” — probably the warmest, most soulful track on Vultures 1. “The ‘Burn’ that I brought [Ye] was a completely different song. It had a whole different beat. A whole different direction,” Ty remembers. “He took it, loved it, stripped it down, redid the beat, and we got ‘Burn’ — and it’s the second-biggest streaming song on Vultures.”
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That’s pretty much how the entire album went: Ty would bring Ye a track, and the two would then deconstruct it and build it back up — a laborious, time-intensive undertaking, especially amid the globe-trotting the two did while making the project. Largely at Ye’s behest, Vultures 1 was recorded in Las Vegas, Miami, Los Angeles, Japan, Italy, Saudi Arabia and Dubai, United Arab Emirates. In trademark Ye fashion — he famously recorded Watch the Throne with Jay-Z between European castles and the Mercer hotel in New York — the duo set up in wildly varying locales at each stop.
“Japan was hotel rooms, Italy was hotel rooms. Then we got Sting to let us use his [Italian] villa,” Ty says. “At first we were just recording in the living room, recording by the pool, setting up recording equipment out there, and then we found out that there’s an actual recording studio there,” he adds with a laugh. In Dubai, Ye and Ty took over an empty building in a hotel complex and built a bunch of makeshift studios throughout it. That’s where they made “Do it,” the YG and Nipsey Hussle-featuring track that sounds like a baroque strip club anthem. “It’s a very expensive album, I will say that,” Ty admits. “It would make for a crazy documentary.” (Ty has footage of some of the songs being made, but probably not enough for a movie, he allows.)
The Ye and Ty world tour of sorts was, Ty says now, nothing new for him: “I’ve always done that. All of my songs; all of my albums — traveling everywhere, laptop, mic, speakers. I’ve done music that way ever since you could make music that way.” But he got his start much more traditionally. Born in South Central L.A., Ty was raised in a musical home. His father, Tyrone Griffin Sr., was a session musician who played all over L.A., sitting in with acts ranging from rap royalty (2Pac and Snoop Dogg) to R&B rising stars (Immature) and the legendary funk band Lakeside (best known for the 1981 hit “Fantastic Voyage,” sampled by Coolio on his track of the same name).
Griffin Sr. and Ty’s mother, a real estate agent, separated when Ty was young, and he stayed with his mom while his older brother went to live with his dad — but Sr. left a lasting impression on Jr., who had started fiddling with his dad’s instruments before he could talk and later amassed his own collection at his mom’s place. (Today, Ty can play a multitude of instruments by ear, including the drums, keyboard and guitar.) When Ty started making beats as a 12-year-old, he would use two cassette tapes to make his own loops. Realizing that method’s inefficiency, Griffin Sr. bought his son his first MPC and set him on his way.
Listening to the ambrosial blend of ’90s R&B, G-Funk and rap that constitutes Ty’s solo catalog today, it’s easy to hear his musical DNA and the complementary influences of his funk musician dad and the gangsta rap that dominated the airwaves of his youth. Both powered Ty’s fresh vision for what popular Black music could be.
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In the early 2000s, Ty worked to fine-tune that vision — and the world got its first glimpse of what he had in mind with Free TC, his 2015 debut studio album dedicated to his incarcerated brother, Jabreal Muhammad. (The project’s title references Muhammad, nicknamed Big TC, who has been serving a life sentence since 2004 for a murder he says he didn’t commit.) At the time, most fans knew Ty from “Toot It & Boot It” and his Beach House mixtapes and EP, which birthed his first top 40 hit, “Paranoid.”
Those songs were good and catchy but belied Ty’s true musical dexterity, revealed more wholly on Free TC. Thanks to his songwriting and production résumé by that point, Ty was able to call on a stunning list of heavy-hitter guest stars for his debut — Lamar, Ye, Future, Brandy, Wiz Khalifa and Babyface, among many others. Combining classic R&B melodies and styles with modern rap energy, he melded the two worlds in a way few had successfully done before. Think Future, if he could sing traditionally well, produce and play instruments, and you start to scratch the surface of Ty’s capabilities.
“[When we signed Ty in 2012] R&B was in kind of an uncool space. He was, like, bringing it into the future with his songwriting, with his production, with his melodies, the way he was approaching songs,” recalls former Atlantic A&R executive Shawn Barron, who signed Ty to the label after hearing some of his early music. “It was just all so new. And I feel like really he’s the forefather of the R&B that we hear today.”
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In person, Ty is usually humble. When prodded about his influence over modern R&B, he impishly acknowledges some similarities between what he has done and the R&B currently dominating the charts. But when it comes to his love of the genre, he’s unabashed.
“I love R&B. You see outside [the studio], I got my 1964 Chevy Impala on chrome spokes. When I’m in that I’m listening to old R&B — you know, love songs and that vibe that just fits the car because it’s the time,” he says, putting his spliff down to indicate how much he means what he says. He’s just as fulsome when it comes to giving props to R&B’s newer stars. “I love SZA. Chris Brown is a legend — he’s like, The One. I love Bryson Tiller and what he just dropped. Brent [Faiyaz] is hard. There’s so many people I can name… Coco Jones, as far as like, the new ones coming out. Yeah, she’s killing it. Tyla. There’s a lot of dope R&B right now.”
He trails off a bit and then blurts out one more name: “Leon Thomas!” A 30-year-old, New York-raised singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist, Thomas earned a modicum of fame as a kid actor on Nickelodeon’s Victorious. A former member of the Rascals songwriting and producing crew, Thomas went on to write and produce for Babyface, Drake and Ye. But his biggest placement came in 2022 when he co-wrote SZA’s “Snooze,” the song that would win him his first Grammy. And if it’s up to Ty, Thomas will become a household name soon: He’s the first signee to Ty’s label, EZMNY Records.
“When he took a liking to my music, one thing I noticed is that he always respected what I did as a live musician and never really wanted to change me into something quote unquote more palatable. He really respected who I was truly as a human being and as an artist,” Thomas says. “We’re doing our best to garner the best numbers we can get. But I love the fact that he’s investing in someone like myself who’s really focused on doing my best to make art and to stay true to being a musician.”
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Making the music that inspires the next generation of R&B artists is one thing; taking charge of the career of one of that generation’s most promising artists is another entirely, especially for someone like Ty who has made a career out of following his own creative north star and rarely having to make tough compromises. But Barron, Ty’s partner in EZMNY, believes he’s actually the perfect person to lead a label. The two started EZMNY in 2022 as a place to showcase what they consider to be real music. “I just want to find the best artists on the planet,” Ty explains. “To me, it’s like, ‘OK, popularity is one thing, all that sh-t that a lot of people look for, how many streams did they do? How many followers do they have?’ [But] I wasn’t worried about that. Because I know that’s not what it takes. That’s one thing to figure out. But you got to be good in order to last now.”
“Ty’s a great artist, and I feel like he knows certain things that it took for him to get where he needed to be on certain things that I don’t even know,” Barron says. “I feel like he takes those thoughts and actions [on the artist side] and he brings them over to being a label executive. And he’s very artist-friendly. He’s able to describe and break down things that may be confusing to some people because he has been through it already.”
As he launched his own label and traveled the globe making an album with one of the most famous/infamous artists on the planet, Ty was also confronting personal news that seems to still surprise him: His 19-year-old daughter, Jailynn, aspires to follow in her father’s footsteps and make music, too. “She came to me the other day, and was like, ‘Dad, I want to record one record.’ I’m like, ‘What you want to do, rap or sing?’ She’s like, ‘I want to sing on my art.’ So she just made one song. It’s hard. And she’s going to keep on going.” He jokes that Ye’s oldest daughter, North, must have inspired Jailynn after North’s fan-favorite verse on Vultures 1’s “Back to Me.” “I’m like, ‘Wow, I really never heard you sing before.’ [Jailynn] really just never sung in front of me,” he recalls. “And she told me she didn’t want to do music. She was playing basketball.”
His own solo project — the one he intended to focus on when that first fateful meeting with Ye happened in Japan — will have to wait: Now he has a trilogy to finish. Today, in his main studio room, he plays music, some of which he says is from Vultures 2. As Ty tells it, the album is almost done and could be released any day now. (The album art features a masked Ty holding a portrait of his incarcerated brother, Muhammad.) As with Vultures 1, his label may well be among the last to find out, which Greenwald says isn’t a problem: “He has earned that right with us. When he calls to say, ‘I made a project, it’s coming out,’ we always say, ‘Listen, this is your name and we got you.’ ”
When asked about the rumors that he and Ye will circumvent streaming platforms and sell the album directly to fans, Ty replies, “Why not? Switch it up. He’s always got something up his sleeve. I always got some[thing] up my sleeve.” To Ty, the album’s distribution comes second to the music. He’ll let Ye worry about the marketing and distribution. His focus, as he works with an artist he believes has unlimited creative potential, is to get the rest of this trilogy out into the world — just like he has always done.
“We got all the songs. Basically, it’s just like, ‘How can we get it there? How can we go bigger than the first album?’ ” Ty says, clearly amped. He won’t say it explicitly, but it’s within reason that, as we’re speaking, he’s trying to piece together the puzzle that will become Vultures 2. After all, that’s why Ye — and everyone else — loves working with Ty. He can do anything and everything. But unless the album makes fans move and adds something new to music — something that has never been attempted before — then to him, it’s not done. “Certain people will probably expect you to just do the same exact sound,” he says. “But that sound’s already out.”
This story will appear in the June 22, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Koe Wetzel may be one of 2024’s bigger breakout artists, but he’s certainly no rookie. The 31-year-old country-rock singer-songwriter has been releasing albums for nearly a decade, with a big sound that’s rooted in country but also mixes in plenty of alternative rock and Americana. His gritty (and sometimes uncomfortably personal) lyrics have helped him grow a sizable core audience. In 2022, he first made his presence felt on the Billboard charts with the anthemic “Creeps,” which reached the top 30 on Hot Country Songs and the top 15 on Hot Rock & Alternative Songs.
Now, Wetzel has reached the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time with a song that integrates a new genre to his usual mix. “We kinda wanted it to have a little R&B feel,” he says of the soulful “Sweet Dreams,” which entered the Hot 100 at No. 47 on the chart dated June 1. “We had talked about just computer drums on it, off a beatpad. I said, ‘I think it would be really cool if we just set up a smaller kit, and tightened up the snare drum a little bit, and give it that pad sound.’ I think it really set the mood for that song a little bit more, to give it that R&B feel.”
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“Sweet Dreams” is Wetzel’s long-awaited first taste of Hot 100 success, but it likely won’t be his only for very long — “High Road,” a new duet with country and pop hitmaker Jessie Murph released a few weeks after, is expected to follow it onto next week’s Hot 100 (dated June 22). Both are set to be included on the ascendant country-rocker’s upcoming album 9 Lives, due for a July 19 release on Columbia, which will be followed by the Damn Near Normal World Tour, taking Wetzel all over the U.S. and then through Europe this late summer and autumn.
Below, Wetzel talks with Billboard about his breakout chart hit, the factors that led to his recent crossover success and the unexpected cover song he has planned for this album cycle.
How did “Sweet Dreams” first come together?
We were in the studio writing — actually, a different song — and it was going nowhere. So we stepped back, like, “Do we want to go a different direction?” I wrote in my notes, probably two weeks prior, “It’s hard to have sweet dreams when I’m such a nightmare.” And we had a guitar lick that we had put together a couple days before on the road while touring. We went in and the song pretty much wrote itself. It came out quick and easy.
When you say “We,” who were the other primary players on the song?
It was Gabe [Simon, co-writer/producer], and then it was [co-writer] Amy Allen — she had a huge influence on it. She does a lot more pop music, and it’s something that I’m not really used to, working with somebody that’s in the pop world. My guitar player Josh Serrato, coming up with the melody for it, and the lick on it. Man, it turned out really good.
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“Sweet Dreams” has many lyrical similarities to your last single before this one, “Damn Near Normal,” including themes of sleeplessness and self-medication. Were those songs either inspired by the same moment or come together at the same time?
Yeah, the mood was in the same realm — we wrote those songs probably 24 hours apart from each other. So we were still in that mood, kind of the same air of the song.
Is there anything you feel comfortable sharing about the personal meaning behind those songs?
Yeah, absolutely. A lot of my songs come from personal experiences, past relationships or [whatever]. This song wasn’t about a certain personal relationship, or a past relationship. It was just kind of multiple relationships — and then bouncing it off people who had had similar problems with relationships and then making it all come together.
When you heard the final product of the song for the first time, did you feel like, “This is going to be a song that takes me to a new level?”
I mean, we knew it was good. We didn’t really have a plan for it. It was so much different than the rest of the record, different from anything I’d done before. So I was excited to have that kind of sidestep genre from the country-rock stuff that I’m normally used to. When we first heard it for the first time, we were like, “Man, this is cool, this is a different sound for us.” We didn’t expect the people to dig into it the way that they did, but we’re glad that they did.
You’ve been building momentum step by step with your audience, getting a bigger foothold on streaming. Do you feel like this song having the immediate results that it has is more a matter of it being a different feel sonically than your other stuff, or is it just good timing?
I think the timing is just great right now, because like you said, with “Damn Near Normal” and the other songs that we teased, people were getting behind [everything] because I feel like it’s something that they’ve expected from me for a while. The last five albums have kind of had the same similar sound. So this is me kind of getting away from that and trying a new sound. I never wanted to have the exact same sound all the time. I think that the way that these songs are going in a different direction, and people having the response that they are — especially after what I’ve put out the last five records — it’s awesome.
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You talked about teasing new music. Is that something that comes natural for you, that sort of TikTok promotional aspect of it? Is that fun for you, or is it just, “This is the business, this is how we gotta get this stuff done”?
Yeah, for me, it’s not really [that fun]. This is the first time we’ve actually teased the whole record. But I mean, in this world today, with social media and the way TikTok and all that stuff’s working, man, it’s so vital to do it. It helps out so much. Times are changing, and it’s really cool to see.
The week after “Sweet Dreams” debuted, the biggest debut on the Hot 100 was “Pink Skies” by Zach Bryan. You guys aren’t necessarily doing the same thing, but do you feel like his success opened up more opportunities for guys working in your lane of alt-country, country-rock, whatever you want to call it?
Yeah, absolutely. Zach Bryan is, like you said, opening up a whole new world to country music, or whatever genre you want to call it. Because [listeners] go look at “Pink Skies,” they go look at “Something in the Orange,” whatever Zach’s done. And it sets them up for other artists that are in that kinda same sound. So all he’s doing is bringing more people into our world — it’s incredible for all of us.
Do you have any more plans for “Sweet Dreams” now that it’s out? Anything to keep it in the spotlight given its success?
No, I think we’ll let it have its own time. Especially when the record comes out, it’ll make a little bit more sense. It’s one of those songs that kind of rounds out the whole sound of the record. So I think we’ll just let it have its own day in the sun — and that’s why we put it out as a single. We didn’t want it to get overlooked in the record.
Anything fans can look forward to on the album or tour that they wouldn’t be expecting, or maybe wouldn’t be obvious from what you’ve done already?
We did an XXXTENTACION cover of “Depression & Obsession.” It’s going to be on the deluxe, after the record comes out. He was one of my favorite underground rap artists, and I always like to throw something kinda left field into my records. I put my own spin to it, and I’m really excited for people to hear it.
“Sweet Dreams” is a pretty well-traveled song title from music history. Do you have a favorite “Sweet Dreams” from the past, whether it’s Eurythmics or Patsy Cline or Beyoncé?
Ah, man. Any that come to mind, no, [not] right now. I thought I was the only one that thought of “Sweet Dreams”! And then, like you said, a lot of people were like, “Well, there’s this song, and that song…” I was like, “Sh-t. Maybe I’m not as smart as I thought I was.”
A version of this story originally appeared in the June 8, 2024, issue of Billboard.