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Ironically, this year in pop was defined by a pair of 2022 blockbusters: Taylor Swift’s Midnights and SZA’s SOS. Although the two Billboard 200-topping albums are starkly different in sound and tone, there is a lyrical through line of unflinching self-examination and sarcastic self-deprecation that courses through each. “Anti-Hero,” the lead single from Midnights that ruled the Billboard Hot 100, became one of Swift’s biggest chart hits thanks, in part, to its cheeky refrain: “It’s me, hi/I’m the problem, it’s me.” Likewise, SZA dominated the Hot 100 with her Grammy-nominated “Kill Bill,” in which she sings, “I’m so mature, I’m so mature/I’m so mature, I got me a therapist to tell me there’s other men.”
Olivia Rodrigo, a pop powerhouse who this year scored a Hot 100 No. 1 with “Vampire” and another top 10 with “Bad Idea, Right?,” built the entirety of her Grammy-nominated GUTS album around this concept. In “ballad of a homeschooled girl,” she croons, “Everything I do is tragic/Every guy I like is gay/The morning after, I panic/Oh, God, what did I say?!” Delivered with a tone that carefully swells from apathy to mania, Rodrigo’s lyrics are biting — but she’s the subject of her own takedown. Through revealing the social and romantic cues that still confuse her in spite of her superstar status, Rodrigo goes from inaccessible celebrity brand to virtual friend and confidante in just a few bars.
This sort of tongue-in-cheek accountability — which struck a particularly resonant chord in the context of the evolution of Swift’s public persona and perception — harks back to a pivotal album released a decade earlier. Lorde’s 2013 debut, Pure Heroine, was defined by its pointed pop songwriting, with couplets that bemoan the singer’s own shortcomings just as much as they deride and analyze the world around her. Ten years later, pop music in 2023 has proved that not only is this style of songwriting here to stay, but it has also become increasingly reflective of diversity and representation in popular media.
SZA’s brand of self-deprecation speaks more directly to Black women. When she sings, “I used to be special/But you made me hate me/Regret that I changed me/I hate that you made me/Just like you,” in “Special,” she’s speaking from a place that’s uncomfortable, embarrassing and valid — especially to Black women who must fight various compounding forms of misogynoir in their quest for love. She’s making emotional space that holds just as much weight as more positive anthems like Beyoncé’s “Brown Skin Girl.”
For as many pseudo-protest songs as summer 2020 produced, that period also intensified the already-brewing ramifications of a pandemic on the human psyche. “I think between people being on lockdown and dealing with all the hardships of the last few years, [they] have had much more time to turn inward and sometimes face their own demons,” says “Special” co-writer Rob Bisel. “I think having music that’s self-deprecating helps make that process of turning inward much less difficult and makes people feel less alone during these turbulent times.”
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Bisel also worked on Reneé Rapp’s standout debut, Snow Angel, which features several sarcasm-drenched pop tunes including “I Hate Boston” and “Poison Poison.” The former is a cheeky rebuttal of Beantown due to a no-good ex, while the latter is a fiery rumination on a friendship with a woman that went up in flames. As an out bisexual woman in pop, Rapp writes lyrics that capture the minds and attitudes of an audience rarely targeted — but often objectified — by top 40 radio. Troye Sivan’s Hot 100 hit “One of Your Girls” — which details the minefield that is being a gay man messing with romantic interests who have not previously been with other men — functions in a similar way for gay men. Even Barbie (by way of Ryan Gosling’s worldview-shattering viral hit, “I’m Just Ken”) and Paramore (with the sassy “Running Out of Time”) employed this trend of sardonic, intimately self-aware songwriting this year.
According to Alexander 23, who co-wrote “Poison Poison,” this style of songwriting is “here to stay because we just see too much of people now via social media to believe something too positive.” He adds, “I think people are hearing things that feel more conversational, more like the artist is someone [who] they actually know and [is] their friend.” Of course, this hasn’t completely pushed aside flashy, confidence-boosting pop jams — take Tate McRae’s “Greedy” and aliyahsinterlude’s “IT GIRL,” for example — but there’s no mistaking its dominance.
Both Bisel (Beck, Green Day) and Alexander (LCD Soundsystem) point to past generations of pop artists as evidence of this songwriting style’s legacy. “One of the most powerful things you can do as a songwriter is to share the feelings that everyone experiences but are too afraid to say out loud,” Bisel says. “A self-deprecating song in some ways is a vehicle for listeners to share their own burdens and to feel seen.”
With self-critical records from Lana Del Rey (“A&W”) and boygenius (“Not Strong Enough”) scoring key Grammy nods and tongue-in-cheek tracks from Swift and SZA dominating commercially, pop is staunchly in its sarcastic era. “I’m a big believer that trends in music are cyclical and constantly come back around,” Bisel says. “At the same time, honest music will never go out of style.”
This story originally appeared in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
On Aug. 10, the day before the 50th anniversary of DJ Kool Herc’s 1973 Bronx block party — considered the official birth of hip-hop — TIDAL hosted its first public event at its new high-rise offices near Manhattan’s Union Square. As part of the festivities, music consultant and writer ladidai conducted a panel featuring three artists at three different points in their careers: veteran Yonkers MC Styles P from The LOX, which headlined shows in Queens and The Bronx as part of the anniversary celebration; critically acclaimed Alabama rapper Flo Milli, who the following night would make a surprise appearance at the star-studded Hip-Hop 50 Live concert at Yankee Stadium; and rising Roc Nation signee Reuben Vincent, a North Carolina rapper. The panel focused on advice for developing artists about navigating the music industry and building career longevity.
“Artists have to look at themselves as entrepreneurs,” Styles told the crowd. Now in his third decade as a performer, he also owns a series of health-focused juice bars in New York. “If you think about the most successful people in hip-hop, they all have their hands in a few different pots. That’s just the way of the hustler.”
For TIDAL, events like these are a key component of a new strategy that, it hopes, will foster its own longevity. They are part of its revamped Rising program, which grew out of conversations with more than 100 artists and provides tools for creators that can streamline their business dealings so they can focus more on their art. This strategic focus on economic empowerment for artists derives from TIDAL’s new corporate owner, Block, the mobile payments company led by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey that was known as Square when it acquired the streaming platform in March 2021 for an initially announced $297 million — more than five times the $56 million that Jay-Z paid to acquire it in 2015.
Block changed the way small businesses operate through its Square credit card reader, Cash App, and financial service offerings that cater to small-business owners and entrepreneurs overlooked by major credit card companies. The services and solutions it offers have helped it achieve a market cap of $39.6 billion at press time.
Not surprisingly, TIDAL’s new owner sees independent artists in the same vein: self-funded, slim-margin businesses that lack the tools needed to succeed in their line of work.
The financial services that TIDAL intends to offer will begin rolling out in 2024, and when they do, TIDAL plans to introduce a pricing structure that, if it attracts enough artists, will create an income stream that is not dependent on streaming subscriptions. “If we help creators manage and grow their businesses, so will we,” a representative says.
More than ever, artists in the music business are piecing together a living through streams, merchandising, live shows, social media ads and synch placements — supplemented with side gigs and temp jobs — as the old world of big advances and steady album sales becomes a distant memory and the odds of standing out in a torrent of new music grow slimmer.
Every day, over 120,000 audio tracks are uploaded to streaming services, according to Luminate — a figure that has nearly tripled in the past five years — making it harder for artists to break through and build a fan base, much less earn and manage their money. It’s a disparate, complicated and often confusing business, especially for up-and-coming artists trying to get by without the support of a traditional label or the institutional know-how of an experienced management team.
“The vast majority of artists on a streaming platform cannot afford to live off their music, even though that’s the No. 1 goal for them,” TIDAL global head of product Agustina Sacerdote says. “It’s not to be famous, it’s not to have an entourage of 20 people. It’s just to be able to quit their side jobs.”
Global head of product Agustina Sacerdote
Those artists who have established a foothold “are cobbling together ways of handling payroll and invoices, paying their quarterly taxes and understanding what’s a write-off and what isn’t. That’s part of being a small-business owner,” says Matt Graham, managing partner for talent management company Range Media Partners. He adds that when a young artist does break through, “a lot of money comes fast, and without the appropriate mechanisms to allocate things properly and pay people on time, you can run into tax issues with the government; you can run into lawsuits with collaborators — it’s a really tricky business to navigate.”
That’s exacerbated by a lack of financial management resources for emerging artists, in part because there isn’t much money in it for those with the know-how to help. Many business managers, for example, won’t take on clients who bring in less than $500,000 a year.
TIDAL’s Rising program operates with these hurdles in mind and is “anchored around three pillars: educate, amplify and connect,” says Alex Mas, the platform’s marketing director and one of the first five employees hired after the company’s 2015 U.S. relaunch. That includes offering artists resources, webinars and workshops on, for instance, balancing release and tour budgets, the mechanics of synch licensing and marketing, and understanding how paid media such as Facebook directly relates to streaming numbers and ticket sales.
TIDAL’s artist relations team also works to connect emerging acts with label executives, potential managers, lawyers and booking agents, among other industry facilitators. “It’s helping artists become more self-sufficient so they can go off and succeed regardless of the platform,” Mas says.
Given TIDAL’s modest subscriber numbers — some 2.1 million subscribers globally as of mid-2020, according to a lawsuit filed the following year, compared with Spotify’s approximately 138 million, a number that has since grown to 220 million — the company’s CEO, Jesse Dorogusker, who has spent over a decade at Block and was instrumental in the development of the Square card reader, says the platform’s support of artists must extend beyond monetizing the streams that artists generate on its platform. The representative says TIDAL does not disclose subscriber numbers, but adds that “streaming will continue to have value” for its new owner. “We’re a music platform and remain excited by the opportunity to evolve our streaming services.”
“Even if we were one of the bigger services, just making [an artist’s] experience better on TIDAL is not enough,” says Dorogusker, a Liz Phair superfan and Silicon Valley veteran who, before joining Block, spent eight years developing iOS accessories for Apple. “You have to know all of your revenue, your data, your collaborators, your access to capital, all of your taxes — it can’t be platform-captive,” he explains. “How could you hope for artists to be fortunate enough to work solely on their art if they have no access to this information?”
This is decidedly new territory for TIDAL, which is still, in the minds of most consumers, associated with Jay-Z, a claim to superior audio quality and a creator-first ethos. (It was notably the first streaming service to introduce full writer credits for tracks and the ability to search by producer.) And though sources tell Billboard that the Roc Nation owner has been just as, if not more, involved in TIDAL’s business since the sale — “I would say his spirit is felt,” senior vp of artist and label relations Jason Kpana says — the company’s messaging must pivot as it changes course. Dozens of industry figures, managers and artists Billboard contacted for their thoughts on TIDAL 2.0 all said they were unaware of its new business strategy. Now, as the company attempts to transform itself from a consumer-centric to artist-focused platform, will anyone be listening?
TIDAL debuted in May 2015 at a star-studded and controversial press conference at the James A. Farley Post Office in Midtown Manhattan. Jay-Z had purchased Scandinavian streaming service Aspiro and brought together 15 of his celebrity-artist friends — including his wife, Beyoncé; Kanye West; Madonna; Jason Aldean; Alicia Keys; Arcade Fire; Coldplay’s Chris Martin; Rihanna; and deadmau5 (replete with his bulbous rodent helmet) — to announce what Keys called “the first-ever artist-owned global music and entertainment platform.” Each of the artist-owners were given a 3% share in the company, and TIDAL began implementing a plan that leaned on exclusive album releases, video premieres and high-quality audio to draw in subscribers who were, by then, used to getting music for free.
Artist investors Usher, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Madonna, deadmau5, Kanye West, Jay-Z and J. Cole (from left) at the TIDAL launch in New York in 2015.
Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images
Thus began a strategy aimed at disrupting what was quickly becoming the status quo for the music business. TIDAL’s 16 artist-owners were protesting the low royalty rates of ad-supported streaming services like then-burgeoning Spotify that paid fractions of a penny per stream and vowed to use their collective power to boost royalties for all. Their stated mission was interpreted by some as noble and others as a scheme by some of music’s 1 percenters to line their already brimming pockets.
Ultimately, giant conglomerates Apple, Google and Amazon entered the streaming space and, alongside Spotify, swallowed up market share, edging TIDAL increasingly toward the margins. Yet the staffers who worked in editorial, marketing and industry relations there carved out a niche that focused on rising artists and independent creators, highlighting their stories and creating video content, playlists and podcasts around their work. “It has absolutely always been a part of the fabric of the company to allow emerging artists to find a way to grow in their journey,” says Kpana, who has worked there since 2015.
It was a business philosophy that aligned with Block’s vision, and executives there say it was a reason they acquired the streaming platform. But the purchase wasn’t without friction. Block closed the deal on April 30, 2021, acquiring 86.8% of TIDAL for $223.1 million in cash and $10.1 million in stock. Shortly thereafter, the City of Coral Springs Police Officers’ Pension Plan (a Block shareholder) filed a lawsuit that challenged the acquisition. The complaint alleged that Block CEO Dorsey and the company’s board of directors had breached their fiduciary duties by acquiring a company that they alleged was failing financially.
The lawsuit laid bare some of TIDAL’s financial issues, including multimillion-dollar losses for 10 straight quarters; some $127 million in liabilities, largely in the form of unpaid streaming fees to record labels; and a $50 million loan that Jay-Z extended the company in 2020. Several of TIDAL’s licensing deals with labels and relationships with artists had expired or were not legally enforceable. Sources also told Billboard that the streaming service had been chronically late on royalty payments to labels, a situation Dorogusker says has been remedied. The complaint also contained a morsel of insider business gossip, alleging that the deal was first hatched while Dorsey was vacationing with Jay-Z in the Hamptons and later in Hawaii.
The lawsuit was dismissed in May, albeit with Delaware Court of Chancery Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick writing in her memorandum opinion that Block buying TIDAL was, “by all accounts, a terrible business decision.”
With that hurdle cleared, Jay-Z joined Block’s board of directors, and along with several of the original artist-owners, retained a small stake in TIDAL. (Each of those artist-owners either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment, and a representative for Jay-Z did not comment.)
Inside TIDAL’s new Manhattan office.
Julian Walter
McCormick’s assessment of the Block-TIDAL deal had merit. According to Goldman Sachs’ June 2023 Music in the Air report, the top six streaming services globally — Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Tencent Music and NetEase — accounted for 92.2% of the global streaming market, and by 2030, that number is predicted to climb to around 94%. And yet, the music streaming business model has yet to produce many profits for anyone, even a company as big and as synonymous with the space as Spotify, which reported a 2022 annual operating loss of 659 million euros (around $720 million) and recently slashed 17% of its work force, or some 1,500 jobs, in the pursuit of profits. (This week, Block also forced austerity measures on TIDAL, laying off some 40 people in an attempt to “right-size our team,” a spokesperson said.) Apple Music and Amazon Music are loss leaders for corporate behemoths with other profit-generators, Deezer is unprofitable, and SoundCloud shifted to distribution and other artist services in an attempt to capitalize on the troves of data it has collected through its streaming service, while also imposing layoffs in May.
Block’s plans for TIDAL, then, could not rely on a pure streaming play, and in a March 4, 2021, Twitter thread, Dorsey revealed his strategy. He wrote that the TIDAL deal was about making the economy “work for artists, similar to what Square has done for sellers.” He added, “We’ll work on entirely new listening experiences to bring fans closer together, simple integrations for merch sales, modern collaboration tools and new complementary revenue streams.”
The deal perplexed industry observers. “If Square wants to create new ways to help musicians sell real goods and digital goods, it could just do that,” Vox tech writer Peter Kafka wrote at the time. “Instead, Square is paying [what was then reported] $300 million for a failed music service that doesn’t help it accomplish any of those goals.”
Nearly three years later, several music industry insiders echo Kafka’s point. Dorogusker’s response: “There are very few companies on the planet that have the rights to offer 100 million songs to music subscribers” and produces a valuable trove of data. Under his leadership, TIDAL plans to use that data, and the access it provides to artists and their teams, to create tools of economic empowerment that don’t readily exist in the music business.
In June, TIDAL unveiled its Artist Home portal, which lets users add their social media accounts to their artist pages, connect with TIDAL employees for support, allow members of their teams to access their profiles and generally manage their look on the platform. It’s essentially a stripped-down version of Spotify for Artists or any of the back-end profile portals that digital service providers currently offer creators. It was a modest move compared with its streaming rivals, but leadership contends an important step forward.
“It is the first concrete milestone toward our vision of establishing a direct relationship with artists and building products and services for them,” Sacerdote says. “We have been in the music business for a very long time, but we have never built specifically for an artist or even dealt directly with an artist.”
TIDAL has always had relationships with the artist community through its artist-owners, exclusives that were intended to build market momentum — interviews, artist-curated playlists, podcasts, and album rollouts for superstars like West, Prince, Rihanna, Beyoncé and Jay-Z — and live events like its annual TIDAL X concert series in Brooklyn and activations at Roc Nation’s Made in America Festival in Philadelphia. But those initiatives were largely designed to pull in fans. Artist Home is the first time TIDAL has worked with artists to build a toolkit on its platform for artists.
TIDAL Rising, which has run in various iterations since the service’s birth, was initially similar to programs like Apple’s Up Next, YouTube’s Foundry and Spotify’s RADAR. But last May, it was overhauled to dovetail with the platform’s artist-empowerment focus. Initially, some two dozen creators were chosen to enroll in the program, which provides resources like webinars and workshops on budgeting money for tours and rollouts, platforms like artist showcases and traditional marketing, instructionals on effective digital marketing and industry connections that would otherwise be out of reach. But crucially, artists in the program are also eligible to receive anywhere between $500 and $50,000 in direct funding, no strings attached.
“We are sitting down with these artists and figuring out where they are in their career, but we’re not defining what funding they get based on what they have coming up,” says Kpana, the artist relations lead. “Mostly, we’re looking at them to see where we think we can be of most assistance, and that’s how we’re deciding what we give them. We’re not deciding what they do with the money.”
Artist relations lead Jason Kpana
Travis Shinn
Billboard spoke to nearly all of the initial two dozen artists and their teams in the Rising program, and though TIDAL executives declined to get into the specifics of who qualifies for inclusion and funding, a number said they were invited after previously building relationships with the TIDAL team through playlisting or editorial. All said the money they received gave them more control over their careers.
This past summer, for example, Nashville-based singer-songwriter Gabe Lee got the chance to open for more seasoned folk artist Pony Bradshaw on four sold-out dates in Texas during a mid-August weekend; at the end of the trek, his take was $1,200, minus hotel stays (when he wasn’t able to crash with friends) and fuel costs. “In the end, Gabe probably lost money on that trip; it’s expensive to be on the road,” says Torrez Music Group’s Alex Torrez, who manages Lee and signed him to his record label. The grant from TIDAL narrowed those losses while expanding his audience by having him perform for more than 2,000 people across the four shows.
For folk-punk artist Sunny War, who used to tour solo but required a full band to perform her latest record live, the money she received enabled her to pay for extra musicians, which allowed her to play bigger shows, and to buy proper road cases for her gear when she travels. Latin pop/hip-hop artist Angie Rose used her funds to buy new studio equipment (a laptop, microphones and software) she can use to record music on her own. For Nigerian American rapper-producer Akinyemi, the money went toward mixing and mastering costs, as well as marketing materials for his next release. Vincent — who participated in the panel at TIDAL’s Hip-Hop 50 event — was able to pay a video crew to shoot his performance at J. Cole’s Dreamville festival; he used the content to promote an upcoming release. For a handful of other artists, the money went straight to recording costs; for half a dozen more, it covered rent and daily expenses.
The music business has traditionally worked through advances, which must ultimately be recouped. TIDAL’s monetary distributions are more like grants. “This feels more like a social-good project,” says Alex Rosen, head of U.S. streaming at Partisan Records, whose group Geese is in the program. “I think it’s an empowering program. It’s really refreshing to not see any true expectations on funding, and it gives a band that is starting to break out a lot of freedom to help make their art.”
TIDAL sees it as a research opportunity. “At a basic level, it’s just a better use of marketing dollars,” Dorogusker explains. “We could talk about how great TIDAL is, or we could invest in artists and let them talk about how great being a Rising artist is. It’s marketing and communications, and the learning we get out of it is incredibly valuable.”
CEO Jesse Dorogusker
It also aligns with the emerging view of the business from the perspective of young artists, who in many cases are loath to sign away ownership of their masters in a label deal when there are other potential pathways to success. “We really value equity and ownership, so the core mission for the [TIDAL Rising] program really aligns with how we want to move forward with our artists on both the label and management side,” says Celena Fields, vp of marketing at indie music company LVRN, whose artist, singer-songwriter-producer Alex Vaughn, is in the program. “They’re holding our hand every step of the way, and instilling these resources that are super critical in an artist’s career, especially early on. It’s not just giving you the money, but really providing that educational aspect as well.” Up-and-coming managers, who are beginning to learn the ropes, benefit from the educational aspects, too.
TIDAL says it has hundreds of artists signed up for Artist Home, has grown its Rising program to 106 artists and has distributed grants totaling $830,000. It recently rolled out its Collabs feature — making it easier for creators to work with others through the platform — and held an artist summit in October with musicians from the United States and Poland that focused on career planning, financial well-being and the basics of music law and touring. The services are free for now, and the representative says that a timetable has not been set for when TIDAL will begin charging for its services.
While TIDAL’s financial support for new artists may be the sexiest part of its new business strategy, helping demystify the business is just as crucial. “The education component is humongous,” says Nicholas Judd, co-founder and CEO of music-focused business management and financial services firm LeftBrain, about the biggest obstacles young artists face. He explains that “having a more informed client start with us, where they’ve been very active in learning about and managing their own finances, means that we can have higher-level conversations and provide even more value because we’re not getting them from zero to one; we’re getting them from one to 10.”
To that point, in October, Block purchased Hi-Fi, a financial services startup that tracks artist royalty income from a variety of different sources — publishing, streaming, performance rights, distribution — in one place. Hi-Fi came the closest, Dorogusker says, to the business model the new owners are in the process of creating. He adds the acquisition is still in the “early days” of being incorporated into TIDAL’s structure, but that it will go a long way toward helping “to build products that help artists manage their money.”
If TIDAL becomes a destination for independent artists looking to optimize and grow their businesses, the expectation is that the company’s future will no longer depend on the financially difficult business of running a streaming service. Businesses that employ Cash App pay processing fees of just under 3% per transaction, and TIDAL will eventually create a pricing structure for the services it will offer. The company says that pricing will vary, with some services being monetized and others incorporated into Artist Home for free. “There’s no one size fits all,” a spokesman says. “How we set pricing is informed by many variables.”
Whether TIDAL’s turn toward artists will resonate remains to be determined, but insiders say there is a new sense of purpose at the company.
“Two years ago, when we bought a music streaming service, we told a story about building scalable self-serve tools for software and financial services to make emerging artists successful, but we didn’t have it yet. It was philosophical,” Dorogusker says. “Now we’re into the tangible. One of the fundamental flaws of the music business is that you mortgage your whole future for that first opportunity. And not everything has to be that way. You can have access to your data. You can have a way to project how many T-shirts you should print for a tour. We thought we could pull a lot of that knowledge in and turn that into tools for artists. But it’s going to be in the act of showing it, not just telling it. This is the start of that.”
This story will appear in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
It’s a crisp November night outside Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, and inside, Rod Wave has a sold-out audience of 12,000 hanging on his every word. As the 25-year-old rapper-singer nears the end of performing “Come See Me,” one of several hits off his 2023 blockbuster, Nostalgia, he pauses and walks toward a ladder that’s part of his stage design. Screams of “Don’t do it, Rod!” commence. “You have so much to live for!” yells a teenage girl near me.
Undeterred by the cautionary cries, the burly locomotive of a man begins his ascent. As he climbs, a thunderous roar erupts and buries the shrieking voice next to me whose pleas go unanswered. Standing on the edge of the stage balcony 15 feet up, Rod surveys the crowd before plummeting onto a landing pad. The lights go out and the song comes to a screeching halt. Fans in the crowd play a quick round of “Where’s Rod?” to locate the Florida megastar — who soon reemerges, Superman-like, without a scratch on his teddy bear face.
Like everything Rod does, this wasn’t a stunt for clicks or social media fodder. It was much more profound than that: He has struggled in the past with depression and anxiety and has always been open about having had suicidal thoughts, especially in the song’s music video. “That was from a dream I had,” Rod explains of the stage fall days after the show. “When I come out, walk onstage and look at [the ladder], it’s really to show people, ‘Don’t get up and do that when you can do this. You don’t know where life can take you.’ I’m walking out to a whole arena full of people looking back up at me. Imagine [if] I would’ve [gone through with committing suicide]. I would’ve never made it to this part. There’s a whole meaning behind it — a bigger picture.”
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Since Rod entered the hip-hop scene with his debut album, Ghetto Gospel, in 2019, his penchant for soul-grabbing lyrics and entrancing hooks has made him a beloved figure. His breakthrough single, the album’s “Heart on Ice,” was as chilling as its title suggests. Rod’s gruff takes about backstabbers and broken friendships earned widespread praise, including from his heroes-turned-peers Lil Baby, 21 Savage and Lil Durk, who appeared on the song’s remix. “Heart on Ice” became Rod’s Billboard Hot 100 debut, peaking at No. 25 — the first of 70 entries on the chart he has accrued since.
While many of today’s biggest hip-hop acts like Travis Scott and Playboi Carti thrive on mosh-pit anthems, Rod has stuck to his roots as an unabashed lover, using music to express his heartbreak and inner turmoil. His ability to hopscotch among genres has become his hallmark and the secret to his success, and he hit a new artistic apex on Nostalgia, which debuted with 137,000 equivalent album units in September, according to Luminate — a career best. Whether he’s contemplating his road to fame on “Long Journey” or reimagining himself as a tragic literary hero on the love-drunk “Great Gatsby,” Rod’s versatility is always evident.
“Rod pioneered this lane of struggle rap, which, given his age, is pretty incredible,” says Todd Moscowitz, CEO of Rod’s label, Alamo Records. “He’s one of the great songwriters of his generation and channels emotion and vulnerability in a unique way that people relate to. He has half of the NFL in tears on Instagram when he drops a single.”
Since Ghetto Gospel, Rod’s subsequent three albums — 2021’s SoulFly, 2022’s Beautiful Mind and Nostalgia — have topped the Billboard 200, making him the third artist to nab at least three No. 1s on the chart since the start of 2021. The only others are Taylor Swift and Drake.
“Being compared to Taylor Swift, you can’t even wrap your head around that kind of sh-t,” Rod says. “I remember ninth grade, being on my school bus listening to ‘Blank Space.’ Being in these conversations, it don’t really hit you. I was just on the sidelines. Now I’m really in the game. I went from the nosebleeds to the franchise player of the team with three rings.”
Eric Ryan Anderson
Rod Wave’s first-ever performance was at a high school football teammate’s birthday party in 2015. At the time, the artist born Rodarius Green was a budding rapper from St. Petersburg, Fla., working at Krispy Kreme. He enjoyed listening to 2Pac, Kodak Black and Kanye West but also appreciated the soulful pop sensibilities of Adele and Ed Sheeran. That eclectic musical taste helped him find his voice — one that spoke to the harsh street realities he and his family survived.
Both his father and uncle served time in prison. Rod, too, had problems on the streets and was charged with armed robbery at 15. After spending several months in jail, his father looked to instill discipline in him. “I started playing football because I got in trouble, and my dad wanted me to do something better with my free time,” Rod explains. “So when I got out of jail, he put me in football. It was just a new thing for me. It’s a lot of discipline I learned then that I carry with me now.”
While Rod enjoyed the camaraderie that came from working in the trenches with teammates, his true passion was music. A singer without any vocal training, he would showcase his talents between classes at Lakeview High School, the hallways becoming his stage. Yet the confidence Rod exuded when he belted for his peers disappeared when it came to actually recording his music and uploading it online — until his classmate and former producer, Elijah Simmons, took matters into his own hands, recording a video of him singing in the hallway one day and posting it on Facebook.
Though Rod feared rejection, to his surprise, the video caught the attention of one of his football teammates, who later asked him at practice to perform at his birthday party. At the time, Rod didn’t have a car and wasn’t getting paid to perform — but the thought of doing so for the first time in front of his classmates, especially the girls, was motivation enough. “I walked to that motherf–ker. I was 17,” Rod remembers, chuckling. “You don’t really know if your stuff is good enough at the time. I didn’t want to think that I was one of them people who think they raw. I was [wondering] like, ‘Am I really good?’ ”
Eric Ryan Anderson
Rod soon went from booking birthday parties to hole-in-the-wall Florida clubs, and his stock began to rise — so much so that fans would recognize him when pulling up to the Krispy Kreme drive-thru. Shyness usually got the best of him; he shrugged off questions about his rapping alter ego when he was on the clock. Balancing high school, a growing rap career and a part-time job was a lot for a teenager, and after his father, Rodney “Fatz” Green, saw the focused hunger in his son, he wanted to lend his support. Green and Rod’s uncle Derek Lane forged Hit House Entertainment — Rod’s own label — to help him realize his rap dreams. With Lane designated as management, they leaned on Rod as their franchise player.
From December 2017 to December 2018, Rod released his acclaimed mixtape trilogy, Hunger Games, which featured songs like “Pain,” “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Heart 4 Sale” that portrayed the daily pain Rod endured. The music garnered millions of listens and eventually caught the attention of Alamo Records’ Moscowitz.
Founded in 2016, Alamo wasn’t initially a first-class destination for rap powerhouses. That changed when it signed Lil Durk and Rod two years later. (As part of its deal with Rod, Alamo established a partnership with Hit House.) Before signing with Alamo, Durk had spent five years at Def Jam and was looking for a change of scenery to help elevate his career. Rod and Durk soon became the twin giants of Alamo, evolving into Billboard chart-toppers and streaming goliaths who quickly came to define hip-hop in a new decade.
“The other day, I had to text Durk, ‘I’ve been listening to you since middle school.’ I was able to DM him and [watch it] land. He was just like, ‘You hard, too!’ I was just like, ‘I been listening to you. I f–k with you. I rock with you,’ ” Rod says with a child-like smile. “When you in the moment and you meet people face-to-face, it slips my mind because I have to be Rod Wave. F–k all that. I’m a fan. I’ve been listening to your sh-t.”
Durk isn’t the only star who has left Rod awestruck. Drake and Sheeran have praised his accomplishments, especially the latter. On Beautiful Mind, Rod interpolated Sheeran’s “U.N.I.” from his debut album for his song “Alone.” The track caught the attention of Sheeran, who first met Rod after WPWR (Power 105.1) New York radio host Charlamagne Tha God learned of the rapper’s adoration for the pop giant.
“Ed’s a phenomenal guy. That’s one of my favorite artists. He’s just real people,” Rod says. “When you looking at it from a fan point of view, they don’t even feel like real people. It’s like you know them, but they’re like figures in your mind. They don’t even feel reachable.”
The MGM National Harbor Hotel in Washington, D.C., holds special significance to Rod. It’s where he’s staying after performing at the city’s Capital One Arena the night before. It’s also where he first learned about the coronavirus. Rod was just seven dates into his first headlining tour when he played D.C. on March 9, 2020, and news about a national lockdown derailed his planned nationwide trek. “My dream got shut down just like that,” he remembers, still sounding dejected. “I always wanted to go on tour, travel America, see the cities and get paid to do it. When I first was able to do it, it got took away from me.”
The pandemic tested Rod’s patience. He landed a coveted performance slot on NPR’s Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts, but that paled in comparison with the venues he had been filling. Still, the thought of hitting the road and being with his fans again fueled him. Rod’s mission was clear: Get back on tour. But before he could do that, he had to fulfill a different calling: becoming a first-time father to his newborn twin girls.
“I [won’t] lie: [Fatherhood] made me softer. Back then, I could just move and feel nothing. Now I feel like they made me a little weaker,” he says while his kids hang out in the next room. “I can’t do that. I have to get home. I’ll be gone with my homeboys for three days or on the road for a week, and I’m just like, ‘We have to get a jet and fly the kids.’ ”
Eric Ryan Anderson
Instead of fatherhood being a hurdle, it motivated Rod, especially when touring resumed. In 2021, he came back stronger than ever, notching his first Billboard 200 No. 1 album with SoulFly and two top 20 Hot 100 hits in “Tombstone” and “Street Runner.” He realized his wish of returning to the road, but this time — with the help of powerhouse hip-hop festival promoter Rolling Loud, which in 2021 launched a national touring branch of its business with Rod as its first tour — he was playing amphitheaters, a step up from the clubs and theaters of his previous tour.
“We’ve witnessed his evolution from the start, and what sets him apart is his unwavering consistency,” Rolling Loud co-founder Matt Ziegler says. “His music consistently reaches a high standard, accompanied by impassioned performances that have become his trademark. As we observed his skyrocketing music consumption and the widespread acclaim for his shows, it inspired us to acquire his SoulFly tour, leading to the launch of our Rolling Loud Presents division.”
Ziegler’s Rolling Loud partner, Tariq Cherif, calls Rod’s success “truly unique; he diligently tours during key moments, aligning with new releases, and he remains authentically himself. His vulnerability, artistic authenticity and genuine connection with people set him apart. When we organized his tour, many doubted he could fill amphitheaters, but he defied expectations by selling out most dates.”
And Rod was already thinking bigger: He wanted arenas. Notching his second and third Billboard 200 No. 1s — Beautiful Mind in August 2022 and Nostalgia in September 2023 — helped him fulfill that dream. Seeing thousands of people of different ages and races singing his songs in a bonfire-like experience at his concerts excited Rod and his team. “His shows are like going to karaoke with 15,000 people,” Moscowitz says. “Everyone sings along and there’s a real sense of community.”
“What we figured out is where his core fans are and where they are going to support [him]. Then we’d mix the routing in to get to these places that make sense,” adds Beau Williams, Rod’s touring manager. “Even going through this, we found some diamonds in the rough in a lot of these cities that a lot of artists can’t go to the way he’s doing great numbers.” And with his zealous fans behind him, Rod’s goals continue to widen: His eyes are now set on stadium touring and Grammy Awards.
“This is the new chapter. People catching on slowly but surely,” Rod says. “That’s why I say in four or five years, we’ll probably be in stadiums selling 250,000 [tickets] the first week. That’s what I’m here for — Grammys and sh-t.”
This story will appear in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
“I forgot to wear the knee pads,” Karol G says ruefully. “I’m going to have scrapes.”
She beams. For a soaking wet pop star who has just been dragged through a shallow pool, Karol looks remarkably happy.
Moments before, a group of writhing, shirtless male dancers had lifted Karol, dressed in a white bikini and transparent baggy pants, high above the water as she performed a medley of songs from her unprecedented past year in music, including material from her chart-topping February album, Mañana Será Bonito; the edgier August follow-up, Mañana Será Bonito (Bichota Season); and a small teaser of her new single with Kali Uchis, “Labios Mordidos.” Her arms knifed back-and-forth through the pool in fierce synchronicity with her platoon of dancers — all water-drenched sexiness, but a punishing physical routine nonetheless. After Karol dries off, wrings out her pants and gets her glam touched up, she’ll do it all over again.
“I want it to be spectacular,” she says matter-of-factly of the roughly four-minute Billboard Latin Music Awards performance. To that end, she enlisted renowned choreographer Parris Goebel, whose work includes Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime show performance, to continue pushing her as a dancer. “Dance doesn’t come so easy to me,” Karol admits. “To do the things I do, I have to rehearse a lot.” Earlier this year, Goebel choreographed Karol’s MTV Video Music Awards performance.
“She understands what I want to express in my movements, and also, she gets something out of me that I’m still in the process of understanding,” Karol says. “I’ve learned a lot about myself this year. Even though it would seem I’ve arrived at a point where I could relax and let things run, life keeps showing me that I’ve still got a lot of things to do, a lot of things to give.”
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Twenty-four hours later, Karol is calm (and dry) in a quiet Los Angeles studio, talking with her usual expressiveness and candor in sentences punctuated by crescendos, accents and exclamations and augmented by enthusiastic gesticulations. In her many music videos, Karol usually presents one of two ways. There’s the bichota, or badass, sexy and powerful and not afraid to show it. And then there’s the smiling (or occasionally melancholy) girl next door who enjoys celebrating love and doesn’t shy from displays of vulnerability. In person, the young woman born Carolina García in Medellín, Colombia, is all those things, but she’s also warm, exuberant and disarmingly earnest, a demeanor that has remained intact through my many encounters with her over the years, even as her popularity has soared.
Her hair is pulled back in a tousled ponytail, its platinum color matching the short, clingy silk dress that shows off her sculpted physique. At 32 years old, Karol has worked hard to look like this. Earlier this year, her doctor prescribed an eating plan to alleviate a long-standing colon disorder; at the same time, after a lifetime of exercising, she upped her training regime to be able to perform for three hours in a stadium. “I wanted to be healthy, and I needed to do a ton of cardio for the shows. And my body began to change,” she says. “It was beautiful because I’d always been told certain changes took time, and it was true.”
You could say the same of Karol’s upward career trajectory. She just wrapped an extraordinary year in which she became the first Latina woman (and second artist ever) to top the Billboard 200 with an all-Spanish-language album (Mañana Será Bonito); the top female Latin artist on Billboard’s year-end charts (behind only Bad Bunny and Peso Pluma); and the winner of album of the year at November’s Latin Grammys, as well as urban album of the year — the first woman to win the latter.
Karol is also the first Latina (and still one of only a few women) to headline a global stadium tour and the highest-grossing Latin touring artist of the year by far. According to Billboard Boxscore, in 2023, she grossed $146.9 million from just 19 shows and sold 843,000 tickets through Nov. 19, almost doubling the $86.7 million the Latin runner-up, RBD, grossed from 18 shows in the same period.
Karol G photographed November 11, 2023 at The Powder Room Studio in Los Angeles. Balenciaga jacket, Intimissimi underwear, Replika Vintage shoes.
Vijat Mohindra
Beyond her accolades — or perhaps, more accurately, behind them — is Karol’s shrewd business sense. Her long-standing recording agreement with Universal Music Latino, which signed her to her first major deal in 2016, ended after Mañana Será Bonito came out in February. Instead of re-upping or accepting any of the “incredible” deals she says other labels offered, she launched her own Bichota Records, invested in its staff and infrastructure — much of it based in her native Colombia — and inked a distribution deal with Interscope that provides her with that company’s full, multinational support and staff but lets her keep her masters moving forward, including Bichota Season’s.
“We wanted to stay in the Universal family,” says Noah Assad, who has managed Karol since 2020, now through his Habibi Management. “They’re the ones who bet on her in the beginning, and we believe in longevity. No one knows an artist more than the infrastructure who had you in the beginning.”
Even so, he adds, “She was ready to build her own label, her own structure, her own team. She was already betting on herself without getting the gain. Independence is not just being independent; she had to build this whole infrastructure. Not every artist is made for independence, but knowing that she could [be] made it the right decision.”
Landing Karol, says Interscope executive vp Nir Seroussi, came from “a very practical conversation that I had with [manager and friend] Noah, asking, ‘What do you want?’ And he said, ‘She’s a boss. She wants to feel empowered, and she’s ambitious. She wants to have a seat at the table with the Billie Eilishes and the Olivia [Rodrigos] of the world.’ ”
Karol’s message to the label, Seroussi recalls, was clear: “I’ve come this far. I want more. I want to sit next to general-market artists because that’s how I feel: Latina but with an A-league fan base.”
But as she eyes mainstream global stardom, Karol is, as usual, prepared to be patient.
“It’s a fine line,” she notes. “In that rush to go global, music can lose its essence. So we’re going step by step. Yes, they’ve brought proposals [to the table], but I’m not in a rush. It would be amazing to fill stadiums in Asia, for example, but I truly feel happy and thankful with what I’m doing today. We’ll find the way.”
In an era of ever more rapid rises to stardom for Latin artists — witness Peso Pluma and, before him, Bad Bunny — Karol G’s ascent has been steady but slow, even laborious, and compounded by being a woman in a Latin world where female-led hits historically are scant. She started as a child pop act, competing on Colombia’s X Factor at 14, and didn’t hail from the barrio but from a solid middle-class family. When reggaetón descended on her native Medellín, she got hooked, but pursuing a career in the genre presented additional hurdles: She started recording and performing it at a time when men completely dominated the genre — as they still do — and she was considered an oddity, facing a highly skeptical industry: Aside from Ivy Queen a generation before, there weren’t any other women to measure her against.
But alongside her producer/co-writer Ovy on the Drums, Karol developed a sound — melodic, lyrically conversational, sparsely arranged and open to experimentation — that was very much geared toward women, touching on themes of empowerment and vulnerability with a genuinely personal point of view and embracing sexuality without being too overtly sexual. Stars like Nicky Jam and J Balvin endorsed her and recorded with her, and in 2016, Universal signed her.
“People got ‘married’ to Karol G,” says Raymond Acosta, head of talent management for Habibi, which also represents Bad Bunny, Eladio Carrión and Mora. “Her fans, even when they disagree with her, see her as a sister. For many of them, she’s not simply an artist. She’s family.”
A prolific, and by all accounts tireless recording artist, Karol built her fan base by being sincere on social media, by constantly releasing music and by maintaining a clear, consistent vision of who she was and what she wanted. Her debut album, 2017’s Unstoppable, released when she was 26, debuted at No. 2 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart, back when she had 3.5 million Instagram followers; today, she has 70 million.
Her first big hits were collaborations with men, beginning with “Ahora Me Llama” with Bad Bunny in 2017, which peaked at No. 10 on Hot Latin Songs. Her first No. 1 was 2018’s “Dame Tu Cosita,” alongside El Chombo and Pitbull. By then, Karol had been at Universal for three years without a massive hit of her own. All around her, reggaetoneros were scoring quick Hot Latin Songs No. 1s, even as she relentlessly released music; to date, she has logged 60 entries on the multimetric chart, the most for a Latin female artist.
“I started in 2006, and now it’s 2023,” says Karol bluntly. “My first songs were 15, 16 years ago. You spend all that time working and thinking, ‘When is my time?’ People on social media always show the goal: the cars, the money, the luxury goods, and everyone at home is thinking, ‘Why doesn’t that happen to me?’ But it’s not that easy. Everything has a process. Yes, I sometimes had doubts, but if I didn’t do this, what was I going to do? I am music. Every time anything happens to me, I want to write a song. Everything for me is a song.”
Tiffany Brown catsuit and jacket, Retrofête x Keren Wolf earrings.
Vijat Mohindra
Finally, in fall 2019, she released the song: “Tusa,” a track about getting over heartbreak, which she wrote with Ovy on the Drums and Keityn and recorded with Nicki Minaj. It spent four weeks at No. 1 on Hot Latin Songs, underscoring Karol’s status as a Latin artist to contend with, who could collaborate with a top American rapper, while cementing her place as a woman who could relate to other women, tell their stories, voice their concerns, vent for them. (It also established the potent trifecta of Karol, Ovy and Keityn, which has since churned out a succession of chart-topping hits including the No. 1s “Provenza” and “TQG” with Shakira.)
“As a woman, she has always had a very clear notion of her identity and what she wants to tell fans, and she has taken that female power to the next level, making women feel like bichotas,” says Ovy, referring to the title of the global Karol hit that has become synonymous with female power. “She has always been very clear about what she wants to musically show the world, and as her producer from day one, I’ve always understood every move she makes. Anything she has in her mind, I turn into music.”
There is a definite line between stardom and superstardom, and for several years, Karol G inched ever closer to the latter, yet didn’t quite reach it. She played clubs, festivals, shows throughout Latin America, anything to be seen, but never had a proper routed headlining tour. Still, her second album, 2019’s Ocean, debuted at No. 2 on Top Latin Albums, and she became the top Latin female artist on Billboard’s year-end charts, a spot she has maintained ever since. She also toured the United States for the first time as a guest on Gloria Trevi’s 21-date Diosa de la Noche trek.
In 2021, she got her first Top Latin Albums No. 1 with her intensely personal KG0516 and launched her first headlining tour, playing theaters. The Bichota Tour — named after the single but by now synonymous with Karol herself — grossed $15.4 million, sold 214,000 tickets and opened Karol’s eyes to possibilities she hadn’t seriously considered. A major catalyst was the icy blue wigs — matching Karol’s hair color on the album cover and her cold, vulnerable state of mind — that fans took to wearing to the shows, an unprecedented display of fandom for a Latin artist.
“I think it was the way each person connected more closely with me,” Karol reflects. “It wasn’t just the blue wigs. I noticed [later] so many people changing their hair color in step with me. I thought it was extraordinary how a hair color can define a moment in your life.”
More importantly, “I realized that, thank God, this Karol G thing was a family and not a moment. I felt these people were there with me and would always be there, no matter what,” she says earnestly. Reading social media comments guided her. Fans who had seen her years before in a club now wanted to see her in a theater. “I began to understand there was a connection. When someone came and said, ‘I think you’re ready to do arenas,’ I thought, ‘Why not? If 3,000 people saw me in a theater, it means there are 12,000 more people who didn’t see me. Let’s go sell arenas.’ ”
Paumé Los Angeles bodysuit, Jimmy Choo shoes.
Vijat Mohindra
The ensuing $trip Love arena tour in 2022 grossed $72.2 million and sold 424,000 tickets. Which again made Karol and her team consider bigger venues — in this case, stadiums.
“It’s sort of mind-boggling to sit here in early November 2023 and think that in November 2021 she was starting her first headline tour of North America ever,” says UTA partner Jbeau Lewis, booking agent for Karol and Bad Bunny, among others. “The fact that she headlined predominantly theaters in 2021, then arenas in 2022, then jumped to stadiums in 2023 is unprecedented for any genre. I think it’s easy to talk about Karol as a leader in Latin music, but based on the success she has had, especially in this year, she should be spoken about in the same breath as Taylor or Beyoncé.”
A year ago, Karol and her team weren’t even contemplating a stadium tour. The plan was to finish the arena tour in 2022, release Mañana Será Bonito in February 2023 and take a break — as much for herself as for her fans, who had seen her tour two years in a row — save for three Puerto Rico stadium shows in early March.
Then, Mañana Será Bonito exploded. When Karol played the first of the three Puerto Rico dates, she included a handful of the album’s songs, accompanied by her guitarist. Fans clamored for more, and by the third date, she was performing the entire album — and fans were singing along to every word.
“At that point, I realized I had to be very, very aware of what was happening with this music,” she says. After playing three stadium dates where fans knew all her brand-new material, she felt the moment was ripe for her to hit the road again.
A Karol G concert is a bit of a spiritual experience, one that unites multiple generations of Latin women under a single roof. Grandmothers and children cry in unison; professional women let their hair down and wear different-colored wigs. And in a twist, men know the songs, too.
“The most beautiful thing about my shows is people arrive with the intention to heal,” Karol says. “Their intentions are so beautiful that when I go onstage and all that energy is directed toward me, I feel like a battery that’s recharging and filling up, and sometimes I cry a lot in my shows. I try not to, but my heart feels like it’s going to burst.”
Replika Vintage bra, BIG HORN eyewear, Paumé Los Angeles bracelets and earrings.
Vijat Mohindra
After her arena tour, Karol had been able to summon the same energy for her Puerto Rico stadium shows. Now the challenge was to extend that into a full stadium tour.
“The first step was sitting down and making the decision to do stadiums. This was the subject of a lot of discussion with my team. Someone said, ‘You’re going to play stadiums? Beyoncé plays stadiums. Taylor Swift plays stadiums. Are you ready for that?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not ready. But I will be.’ ”
Her team crunched numbers and came up with six safe markets. Those six dates quickly became nine when New York, Los Angeles and Miami sold out and second dates had to be added. From there, the tour mushroomed to 16 dates in 13 cities.
Less than the team being resistant to the tour, Lewis says, “It just wasn’t the plan. Generally speaking, when you go out and tour in stadiums, you need 18 months to a year to execute. We made the decision in March to go out on tour in August, with a very short runway. But all of the signals were there. There was such demand. Rolling immediately into second nights in Los Angeles, Miami and New York was incredible, and that gave the team confidence to say, ‘Let’s add more cities to this tour.’ Then doing things like her headlining Lollapalooza and coming back six weeks later in Chicago and selling 52,000 tickets in Soldier Field, that’s really unprecedented.”
For Karol, the crash course of preparing to play stadiums came with intense pressure: Not only would she be performing for crowds of 50,000 or more, she would be doing it during the same summer as the Renaissance and Eras tours. “Karol G couldn’t be the one who looked like she had no business doing it,” she says.
“It was an enormous personal challenge, from how I looked, to how I thought, to how I put it together,” she continues. “I didn’t feel I was ready until I saw the videos from the first two dates. I always judge myself horribly, and nothing is exactly how I want it. But in this tour, as a woman, I played the videos and said, ‘Wow, I love what I see.’ ”
Incorporating new music presented its own challenge. Soon after announcing the tour, Karol released Mañana Será Bonito: Bichota Season, a companion set that highlighted a completely different side of her: tougher, sexier, more experimental. To explain it, she wrote a book about the two versions of herself represented in the two albums and handed it to her tour designer. “I said, ‘This is my story. This is Carolina’s book, and I want her to be a siren.’ And they found the way to put it all into the show.”
While top Latin touring acts have long played stadium dates in Latin America, the notion of a conceptual tour is still relatively rare, and in the United States, only a few Latin artists have done multicity stadium tours. Karol benefited from the expertise of her team, including Assad and Lewis, which had already put together Bad Bunny’s two stadium tours, as well as the rock-solid family foundation that’s an intrinsic part of her business structure. In addition to Acosta, who handles her day-to-day at Habibi, since at least 2019, her sister, Jessica Giraldo, has also functioned as a “360,” overseeing all aspects of Karol’s career, including the growing Bichota Records and its staff; her Medellín office, Girl Power, which runs her merchandise business, among other projects; and her philanthropic Con Cora (“With Heart”) Foundation.
“Strategically, we have a great structure, and there are many, many people focused on massifying Karol’s vision,” says Giraldo, an attorney. “The big change Noah brought when he came on was globalizing the project. He opened the door to big mainstream festivals and big deals, for example. Raymond is his right hand in this project. And I’m the connection between the artist and everything else. I know Karol perfectly well; she’s my sister. But on the professional side, I’ve learned to understand her vision and execute it.”
Balenciaga jacket, Intimissimi underwear, Replika Vintage shoes.
Vijat Mohindra
While families and musical careers don’t always mesh, Karol’s has been an organic part of her structure from the very outset of her journey. Her father, a musician, fostered Karol’s ambitions, managed her until she signed with Universal and was the only person to join her onstage when she won the Latin Grammy for best new artist in 2018. Today, he isn’t part of her actual business, but he is part of her personal support network and, along with her mother, a constant presence at her shows and milestone moments, including this year’s Latin Grammys and Billboard Latin Music Awards, where he sat by her side.
“My family is everything to me,” Karol says. “[Fame] conditions real friendships and real relationships. Having my family — the most real and pure thing — around me makes me feel I’m not living in an ephemeral world where everything is transitory. Having them around me is also my way of thanking them for everything they did for me.”
That backbone will be essential come February, when Karol kicks off her 20-date Latin American stadium tour before an expected European run — all told, a seven-month trek, her longest time on the road yet. As ever, while on tour, she’ll link up with Ovy on the Drums and other writers for sessions to maintain a constant output of singles.
But at this point in her life, she’s ready to handle it all.
“If you ask me what I’m most proud of in the past year, it’s the independence we accomplished,” Assad says. “But I’m very proud of how hard she worked during the pandemic, going from the pandemic to theaters to arenas to stadiums. That all happened from 2020 to 2023, and that’s just amazing.”
Beyond music, Karol will make her acting debut on the Netflix scripted drama series Griselda alongside Sofía Vergara in January. And her Con Cora Foundation for women, launched this year, already has ongoing projects in sports, education and rehabilitation, including a program with the Houston Space Center to send Colombian teens to visit NASA.
“I’m bummed this era will end because definitely it’s the time I reaped what I sowed,” Karol says. “All these years working for something, and finally, that something is working for me. All these things I thought could happen, I trusted they would, and they did.”
When asked what comes next, Karol hesitates for a moment, as if wanting even more would seem too greedy for someone who already has so much.
“I’d love for my music to be heard everywhere, and, truthfully, I’d like my name to be heard all over the world,” she finally says. “Last year, we went to Santorini [Greece], to Kenya, to Dubai [United Arab Emirates], on holiday. And when people asked us where we were from and I said, ‘Colombia,’ the reaction always was, “Oh, Shakira, Shakira.’ ”
And then, in typical, demonstrative Karol G fashion, she holds up her arm to me. “See? I get goose bumps just thinking about it because that must be the ultimate. To have everyone in the world know your name.”
This story will appear in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
After Morgan Wallen wraps his sold-out Nov. 10 concert at Atlanta’s Truist Park with a crowd singalong to his 2019 No. 1 “Whiskey Glasses,” he enthusiastically roams the edge of the stage, crouching down, eager to get close to his ardent fans. As they thrust albums, cowboy boots and cardboard signs into his hands, the 40,000-seat stadium suddenly starts to feel more like a 200-capacity club.
Wallen has come prepared. He pulls out the appropriate black or silver Sharpie from his jeans pocket and yanks off the cap with his teeth, then autographs each item and poses for selfies. Even once the stadium lights have switched on and people have started to head toward the exits, Wallen is still hanging out. Finally, he starts to jog off, but then stops, turns around and runs back to autograph one more sign — the one that reads “You’re our entertainer of the year” — before leaving the stage for good.
The sign is a nod to Wallen’s prowess as an energetic, engaging performer — his Atlanta audience had no clue he was on antibiotics and was so concerned about a possible return of his spring vocal cord issues that he didn’t talk to anyone for hours before the 90-minute show, including postponing this interview. But it was also a reminder that, although he had lost entertainer of the year 48 hours earlier at the Country Music Association (CMA) Awards — and weathered a potentially career-ending scandal in 2021 — he remains tops with his millions of fans.
When time allows, the post-show autograph session is a nightly ritual. “I like looking them in the eyes,” a recovered Wallen says 10 days later over Zoom in his first major interview in two years. He’s dressed head to toe in gray camo, on his “lunch break” from hunting deer on the 1,700-acre farm outside Nashville he bought earlier this year with his booking agent and good friend, Austin Neal. He has scrubbed off his camo face paint: “I didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of you,” he says with a good-natured grin.
“There’s usually a few people every night where I’m just like, ‘God, that is like the happiest person in the world right now,’ and I always pick those,” he says. “I’m almost tearing up thinking about it. It’s just like, man, I mean a lot to this person, I can tell. I try to tell them, ‘Hey, I saw you up there. I saw you tonight.’ ”
Those fans helped make Wallen, 30, the biggest winner at this year’s Billboard Music Awards, which are based on year-end performance metrics on the Billboard charts. The Big Loud/Republic artist won 11 trophies, including top male artist, top Hot 100 artist and top country artist, as well as top Hot 100 song for “Last Night” and top Billboard 200 album for One Thing at a Time — the first time a male artist has captured the latter two in the same year since Usher in 2004. He dominates the country year-end charts, claiming the No. 1 spot on 12 of the genre’s 28 lists, including Hot Country Songs, where “Last Night” succeeds 2022’s year-end chart-topper, Wallen’s “Wasted on You.”
Wallen’s groundbreaking accomplishments transcend country, too. When “Last Night” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March, it became the first song by a solo male country artist to top the chart since Eddie Rabbitt’s “I Love a Rainy Night” in 1981. Once it reached the summit, “Last Night” spent 16 nonconsecutive weeks there, the most ever for a noncollaboration. (Wallen nixed the idea of releasing remixes to potentially propel the song past the 19-week record held by Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, says Big Loud partner/CEO Seth England, who heads Wallen’s label and co-manages him with K21’s Kathleen Flaherty. “Morgan loves the original version, and he had made it that far on his own music and accord,” he says.)
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When One Thing at a Time debuted at No. 1 in March, its predecessor, 2021’s Dangerous: The Double Album, logged its 110th nonconsecutive week in the Billboard 200’s top 10, second only to the Sound of Music soundtrack and the most by a solo artist since the chart began publishing weekly in 1956. One Thing at a Time has spent 16 nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, the most for any album since Adele’s 21 in 2011-12. And, after debuting at No. 1, the album logged the next 31 weeks in the top five.
As country music experiences its biggest surge in popularity since the Garth Brooks era three decades ago, Wallen (alongside Luke Combs) is the tip of the spear for the genre’s new generation, which includes Zach Bryan, Lainey Wilson, Jelly Roll, Bailey Zimmerman and Wallen’s frequent writing partner and close friend, HARDY. He has shifted country’s streaming calculus by releasing albums that contain more than 30 tracks and racking up tremendous consumption tallies: One Thing at a Time’s songs earned 498.3 million on-demand streams in its first week, the most ever for a country album, according to Luminate. Through the third quarter of 2023, country music’s on-demand audio and video streaming grew by 24% year over year — and Wallen accounted for 31% of that growth. Of all country music on-demand streams through the same period, 10% belonged to Wallen. For the first time since the 2013 launch of the year-end Streaming Songs Artists chart, a country act (Wallen) leads the list, and a country song (“Last Night”) is No. 1 on the year-end Streaming Songs chart.
He’s catching the eye of legendary country artists, who now study his methods. “This is a new generation that is streaming, which is something new to Dolly,” says Dolly Parton’s manager, Danny Nozell. “What Morgan is doing, I want to take and see how I can apply that to Dolly.” (To wit: Parton released the longest album of her career, the 30-track Rockstar, in November.)
Similarly, Luke Bryan, who calls his good friend Wallen a “world-class songwriter, singer and performer,” was also impressed by Wallen’s new-school methods. “His ability to relate to fans by way of introducing new songs by performing them on socials was truly a brilliant way to build his career,” he says.
“When I started doing this, I had no intentions or expectations of becoming that guy,” Wallen says of being the de facto leader of this new country movement. “But yeah, I’m definitely proud of it. Especially when people say to me that they never liked country music before and now it’s [their] favorite.”
Rye 51 shirt, PAIGE jeans, Tecovas boots.
Daniel Chaney
As massive as Wallen’s following is, in early 2021 and for quite some time afterward, it looked like he could lose it all after a neighbor gave TMZ video footage of him using a racial slur. But Wallen’s fans never abandoned him — in fact, they rallied around him.
Their fervor was, in some ways, a testament to how, in a sea of male country artists who often seem interchangeable, Wallen has always stood out — not only for his instantly recognizable raspy twang, but for the intimate tone of his songs, many of which he co-writes.
“There’s a level of conversation Morgan brings to a song that makes him such a strong writer; you immediately feel invested in the story,” says Miranda Lambert, who co-wrote One Thing at a Time’s “Thought You Should Know” with Wallen and Nicolle Galyon. In February, the song became his eighth No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart; he has already scored two more.
While he leans toward tried-and-true tropes — the cry-in-my-beer midtempo ballad, the playfully cocky you’re-going-to-wish-you-never-left-me tune — he often injects them with a vulnerability that’s the antithesis of last decade’s bro-country movement. And by infusing many of his traditional country melodies with rap cadences and beats and alt-rock guitars, Wallen has expanded his audience far beyond country’s typical listenership.
“I obviously have brought some of my own flavor into the space and everybody doesn’t necessarily like that, and I don’t care because I love it,” says Wallen, whose favorites range from indie-rockers The War on Drugs to country rebel Eric Church to rappers like Moneybagg Yo and the late Young Dolph. “I love being able to incorporate all the types of music that I like. If I had to sing one kind of song for two hours, I’d lose my mind.”
The first stadium show Wallen played was on May 31, 2018, as one of three supporting acts for Bryan at Toronto’s Rogers Centre. It was also the first stadium show he had ever attended. Bryan had heard Wallen’s 2017 hit “Up Down” and felt “it spoke to just the right audience, and I knew then I wanted Morgan on tour with me.”
“I remember going out there and it was like, ‘Gawwwwd!’ It just felt so massive,” Wallen says. Five years later, stadium stages feel like home. “We played in Austin [five days ago] in an arena. There were 12-13,000 people there, and it felt tiny,” he says. “Then we played the stadium in Houston [two days later], and it was like back to normal again.” He laughs as he catches himself, knowing there’s nothing normal about his life these days: “What? That’s not normal.”
Growing up in Sneedville in East Tennessee (2021 population: 1,315) and then outside of Knoxville, Tenn., where his family moved when he was in middle school, Wallen, the son of a public school teacher and a minister (his father is now a semitruck driver), had no money for luxuries like concerts. Any extra cash went to support his baseball career: He was a star pitcher and shortstop in high school before an arm injury his senior year took him off the diamond for good.
“When baseball ended, that was really tough because that’s all he was thinking about,” England says. “I think he probably transformed that into a new drive and [thought], ‘I’m going to have to really work hard at something else.’ ”
Now he’s filling the ballparks he dreamed of playing in as a kid. This year, the One Night at a Time tour played three nights at the Boston Red Sox’s Fenway Park and had double plays at venues including San Diego’s Petco Park and Atlanta’s Truist Park, the respective homes of baseball’s Padres and Braves. Through Nov. 18, the tour had grossed $300.4 million and sold 1.5 million tickets, making it the highest-grossing country tour ever reported to Billboard Boxscore.
“The charisma has always been there, but now [the show] is so tight,” says Neal, head of The Neal Agency and Wallen’s booking agent since 2017. (Neal launched his company in early 2022 following his departure from WME, several months after Wallen left the agency.) Wallen used to talk and fidget much more onstage. “We used to say he’d go on a soliloquy, but now he’s so dialed in. Plus, he can’t talk that much because he’s got so many songs that he’s got to play.”
LTIFONE sweater, Mister Freedom jacket, Nudie jeans.
Daniel Chaney
Still, in April, Wallen’s vocal load caught up with him. Minutes before he was to go onstage for a second sold-out night at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in Oxford, Miss., 45,000 fans learned he had lost his voice and couldn’t perform. After powering through a few more shows several days later, a visibly upset Wallen told his more than 6 million Instagram followers that doctors had ordered him to go on vocal rest for six weeks, resulting in the postponement of multiple shows.
Though Wallen says he isn’t “the type of person that really worries a lot,” the experience scared him, especially after some doctors told him his voice might be permanently altered. He was spooked “100%” by what happened in Oxford, England says. “During that stretch, he was having real trouble with his voice. It was rough.” But unlike in Oxford, when Wallen started having vocal issues the week of his Atlanta shows, he had doctors at Vanderbilt and his vocal coach — who taught him methods to make singing more sustainable and joined him in Atlanta — at his disposal.
The support system that has sprung up around him is a far cry from 2014, when Wallen was working as a landscaper in Knoxville and competed on The Voice. Back then, he could certainly move more freely, without the bodyguards he requires now.
“Everything has gotten so, so huge,” he says. “I don’t really go to the grocery store. I have to go through back doors to go to the doctor and all that kind of stuff. I still try to hold on to as much [normalcy] as possible. I like driving, so I try to drive as much as I can by myself.” Adjusting to fame has been tough at times for Wallen, and he’s not sure that he has. When old friends don’t invite him to events, it sometimes bothers him, even though he knows the disturbance his presence can cause. And he has found a second use for the camo gear. After hunting, he sometimes leaves on his cap, camo top and a little face paint, just enough so that he can “sneak around, just wherever I can go, maybe a Mexican restaurant.” Otherwise, he says, “I play my shows, I hang out with my son, [Indie, 3], and I hide pretty much. And I’m OK with that. I’m happy as hell with that.”
HARDY, who has toured with Wallen off and on since 2018, speaks more bluntly about the limitations fame has placed on his friend. “In the last couple of years, he handles himself so much differently out on the road. He protects himself from situations that might get him in hot water,” he says. “He doesn’t go out to bars. If there’s a good time to be had, we have it backstage where we’re safe and where f–king people aren’t videoing and trying to get a rise out of somebody. We will still have the same amount of fun, but we do it in an environment [without] the public eye on us anymore. It sucks that you can’t really do it that other way, but you just can’t when you get Morgan Wallen famous.”
If Morgan Wallen wasn’t already aware of how famous he was, he found out Feb. 2, 2021, when TMZ published that video of a drunk Wallen (on “hour 72 of a 72-hour bender,” he later said) casually using a racial slur as he told a friend to get another friend home safely. TMZ’s post included an apology from Wallen, but the reaction was swift and severe. Radio playlists pulled his music, his booking agency dropped him, awards shows deemed him ineligible, and his own label suspended him.
It wasn’t the first time Wallen’s behavior had raised flags. He was arrested for public intoxication and disorderly conduct in May 2020 after a disruption at Kid Rock’s Nashville bar, and five months later, Saturday Night Live revoked its invitation to perform after he violated the show’s COVID-19 safety protocols. (The show had him on two months later.) But Wallen says that the experience in 2021 truly showed him “just how much that people listen to me. I don’t think I realized that, at least not at that grand of a scale at the time,” he says, carefully weighing his words. “I [learned] how much my words matter.”
Now, nearly three years later, Wallen says, “That person is definitely not the same person I am now.” He doesn’t diminish the hurt his words caused or question the actions the industry took, but he admits to feeling anger that so few gave him the benefit of the doubt and rushed to brand him a full-blown racist.
“There’s no excuse. I’ve never made an excuse. I never will make an excuse,” Wallen says of using the slur. “I’ve talked to a lot of people, heard stories [about] things that I would have never thought about because I wasn’t the one going through it. And I think, for me, in my heart I was never that guy that people were portraying me to be, so there was a little bit of like, ‘Damn, I’m kind of actually mad about this a little bit because I know I shouldn’t have said this, but I’m really not that guy.’ I put myself in just such a sh-t spot, you know? Like, ‘You really messed up here, guy.’ If I was that guy, then I wouldn’t have cared. I wouldn’t have apologized. I wouldn’t have done any of that if I really was that guy that people were saying about me.”
“Any of that” included meeting with several Black leaders, including 300 Elektra Entertainment chairman/CEO Kevin Liles, Universal Music Group executive vp/chief people and inclusion officer Eric Hutcherson and Grammy-winning gospel artist Bebe Winans, as well as with the Black Music Action Coalition (BMAC) and other groups in an effort to educate himself; his process “to learn and try to be better” continues, he says.
“I think that moment was a cloud with a silver lining because I think it showed him he has a platform that can do good,” HARDY says. “He realized, ‘I’ve got to get my sh-t together.’ ”
One such platform is the Morgan Wallen Foundation (formerly the More Than My Hometown Foundation). By February 2022, Wallen and Big Loud (on behalf of Wallen from his royalties) had donated $500,000 to organizations including The National Museum of African American Music, Rock Against Racism and the BMAC. Three dollars from every concert ticket Wallen sells goes to the foundation, which primarily helps underserved communities through supporting music and sports youth programs, and has donated over $1 million in 2023, including $100,000 to the Atlanta Braves Foundation and $500,000 to Habitat for Humanity of Greater Nashville to help revitalize a baseball and softball complex.
Despite this philanthropic push, don’t expect Wallen to use his sizable platform to speak out on social or political issues. When asked if he plans to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024, he swiftly answers, “No,” before continuing: “That’s not where my head’s at. I’m not an expert. I just don’t know enough to try to guide people. I know what I know, and that’s music.”
Stitched custom shirt, jacket and pants; Tecovas boots.
Daniel Chaney
Following the incident, Wallen says he did a 30-day stint in rehab in San Diego, and he has since drastically changed his drinking habits on the road. “That used to be my warmup — to get half lit: ‘I’m going out there, and we’re going to go have fun.’ Now, that is not the way I approach it,” he says.
Part of the change is just plain logical: playing massive stadium stages, “there’s a lot more ways you can fall than there is on a little one,” he says with a laugh. But his lifestyle changes (and the boost in his confidence level that has resulted) have also completely altered how he approaches performing. “I used to be scared to even think about what it would be like to play a show without drinking: ‘That sounds terrible. Why would I ever do that?’ And now I’m almost scared to wonder what it’d be like if I was drunk.” As far as drinking off tour, “I’m still figuring out my personal life,” he says. “I probably always will be.”
Despite the work he has done to make amends, there are still inroads to be made. While his fans fervently stood by him — sales of Dangerous soared 102% the week after the incident, and he headlined a 55-date arena and amphitheater tour in 2022 — not everyone was ready to move on.
Since the scandal, Wallen’s name is seldom heard when nominations or winners are announced at peer-voted awards shows. In November, he didn’t receive any Grammy nominations (though “Last Night,” which he didn’t write, is up for best country song), and Wallen, who won best new artist at the 2020 CMA Awards, went 0-3 at the CMAs this year. (Dangerous did win album of the year at the 2022 Academy of Country Music Awards.)
England acknowledges that “some people have no intention of forgiveness, but that’s also OK. Morgan realized that he has just got to control what he can control. He’s certainly not getting shut out in these awards because he’s a bad musician.”
Wallen shrugs off the snubs. The CMA losses “bothered me for like five minutes,” he admits. “And then I’m like, ‘Why am I mad? I’m about to go play for 80,000 people in Atlanta.’ ”
Daniel Chaney
And there are other recent victories to celebrate, like sharing the BMI Country Awards’ songwriter of the year honors with Combs on Nov. 7 — meaningful recognition for Wallen, who says he has heard criticism that he doesn’t write enough songs on his albums or relies too much on his co-writers. He has nothing but praise for the writers who contribute to his records but admits with a wry chuckle that the BMI Award was “validating … It’s kind of like maybe I do know a little bit about what I’m doing.”
Wallen has released collaborations with top country names including Eric Church, Chris Stapleton and Florida Georgia Line, as well as with Diplo and rapper Lil Durk. (Their “Broadway Girls” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart in 2022.) But he’s well aware that he hasn’t yet released a game-changing co-ed duet like Jason Aldean and Carrie Underwood’s “If I Didn’t Love You” or HARDY’s murder ballad “wait in the truck” with Lainey Wilson. However, he quickly adds, it’s not for lack of trying.
“I’ve reached out to a couple of people, and they’ve turned me down,” he says, declining to name names. “I just really want certain people, and I haven’t gotten the chance to do it yet. I’m going to keep trying to write songs for it or write with them.”
England says the timing hasn’t worked out, adding that Wallen sent a song for his next album to a noncountry artist as a possibility. “The answer was bittersweet,” he says. “It was, ‘Holy sh-t, this sounds like a global No. 1 record, but I just can’t do it right now.’ ”
Wallen says he “would love” to write with more women, but admits he frequently returns to his very successful “little squad” of collaborators “because I’ve just been slammed, and when I’m not on the road, I’m spending time with my son or hunting. I haven’t really wanted to branch out much just because I needed to keep myself sane.”
One new collaborator eager to work with Wallen: Post Malone. The artist, who is recording a country album, wrote with Wallen, ERNEST and Charlie Handsome, among others, when he was in town to perform with Wallen and HARDY at the CMA Awards. But Wallen confesses that Post Malone’s studio hours were hard for him. “[He] likes to write really, really late at night — and I can’t do that three nights in a row. I can do that one night,” he says with a laugh. “I can start about 5 p.m., but starting at 10 p.m. — that’s rough.”
A little while ago, when HARDY was at Wallen’s house, they headed out to his workshop. “Indie was in the bed. Morgan’s out here looking for an outlet to plug in a baby monitor. I was just like, ‘Man, that’s something I didn’t think I would see five years ago,’ ” HARDY says.
In Atlanta, the tow-headed Indie giggled in delight as he ran through the empty stadium concourse before showtime, pushing a toy dump truck and exuberantly honking the horn on a full-size forklift. “Anything about a vehicle or any part of it, that’s all he cares about,” Wallen later says, grinning broadly.
Wallen and Indie’s mother split before he was born and share joint custody. But Wallen says fatherhood happened for him at the right time. “It gives me something to focus on that’s not just all about myself because for a while, I had to be super selfish. I had to mostly focus on myself or [my career] wouldn’t work,” he says. But now, “it’s nice to really think about someone other than yourself and about what you’re passing down. He’s my favorite thing about life.”
And Wallen’s friends say fatherhood changed him. “Having a son really grew him up fast,” Neal says.
Becoming a dad made him look at life differently, Wallen says, including sparking an interest in expanding into businesses outside of music. In addition to buying real estate, he’s working with Plus Capital to find the right investments, including his recent affiliation as investor and brand ambassador with upstart Ryl Tea, which aligned with his desire to partner with health and wellness brands. “I like having a bunch of different things for me to focus on. [Otherwise], I’ll get bored,” he says. “I have a lot of opportunities, so I’ve been trying to take them.” Will one of those opportunities be, as is a rite of passage of sorts for so many country stars, opening a bar in Nashville? England says only: “It has been discussed. Stay tuned.”
But first, Wallen will spend much of 2024 carrying on with the One Night at a Time tour. In addition to continuing to make up this spring’s postponed dates and a headlining show at the Stagecoach festival, Wallen has added 10 more markets, many with multiple nights at stadiums, including three at Nashville’s Nissan Stadium.
Also potentially ahead: a full-blown international tour, perhaps in 2025. After starting 2023’s tour in Australia, Wallen ended the year with a Dec. 3 show at London’s O2 Arena that sold out in one hour. It was his first time in Europe, and Neal is exploring the best way to proceed globally. Wallen is up for the challenge: “I think it would be fun to go try to win people over again,” he says.
Next year, he’ll also return to the studio. Though more singles are coming from One Thing at a Time, Wallen is already writing and reviewing outside songs for his fourth album. Handsome, who co-produces Wallen’s music with Joey Moi, predicts the next one will be his biggest yet. “I’m expecting to see more songs that can go No. 1 at pop radio because I think people have seen that a country singer with a very Southern voice by himself without a feature can still have a No. 1 Billboard hit,” Handsome says. “Morgan’s leading the way for what country music is now and what it’s becoming.”
When England compares Wallen to another artist, it’s not a fellow young country superstar or a legend of the past, but another especially prolific and versatile performer affiliated with Republic: Drake. “Drake can do a hardcore R&B song, a trap rap song or a Caribbean-tinged beat global pop song,” England says. “I think Morgan is that in our genre. His voice is always going to be country even if he’s singing pop melodies, and the verses are likely to have some country imagery. But when it’s time to sing the big runs and melodies, the guy can do it. Even though he’s got a lot of older fans, he’s certainly got the young kids just wrapped around the sound right now. I don’t think that’s just a short-term thing. I think the guy’s got the ability to do that for decades to come.”
This story will appear in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
In 1978, Kate Bush became the first solo woman to reach No. 1 in the U.K. with a song she wrote, produced and performed entirely by herself with “Wuthering Heights.” Forty-five years later, in October, dance–pop artist Kenya Grace joined her as the second to pull off the feat with the quietly devastating “Strangers,” her major-label debut single.
“There wasn’t too much pressure on that song, to be honest,” Grace says. “I didn’t really have some mad goal in mind — I just wrote it one random night.”
For Grace, 25, that kind of writing experience is the result of skills she’s been honing her entire life: she began creating and performing songs for friends and family at age four, inspired by Norah Jones tracks that her mother would play around the house. By 16, the South Africa-born, Southampton-raised singer was frequenting drum’n’bass parties, baptizing herself in the energy of the U.K. dance music scene that would soon characterize the sound of her own music. “When I start writing something at 120 BPM, I’m like, ‘No, it’s way too slow,’” she quips.
She graduated from London’s Academy of Contemporary Music in 2019 — an institution she likens to a massive networking event — and spent the next few years building an audience on TikTok. Even from her initial videos, Grace displayed a deft understanding of how to present her music, including one clip in which she crafted a beat by using her music production controller to source sound waves from oranges.
The post caught the attention of Day One Music’s Nick Huggett and Nick Shymansky, who have signed and developed British music icons including Amy Winehouse and Adele. By November 2022, two months after she self-released the aptly titled “Oranges,” the two were managing Grace. “We’re seeing someone with a craft [who] knows how to sing and command an audience,” Shymansky says. “We’ve got someone that has earned their stripes and is ready to take on the world.”
They prioritized growing her fan base on an international level, and by July, the two helped her sign a deal with Major Recordings, an electronic dance music label launched by Warner Records. “We knew early on that more than half of her audience was in America; it’s not a coincidence the deal was signed there,” Shymansky says. “We had offers for shows in Los Angeles prior to ‘Strangers’ — that’s not typical for a British artist at such an early stage.”
Kenya Grace photographed on November 20, 2023 at SOUTH56 studio in London.
Bex Day
The partnership quickly paid huge dividends in “Strangers” — though a different song nearly took its spot. “I signed my deal about two weeks before I posted [a snippet of] ‘Strangers’ online,” Grace recalls. “The month before that, we were lining up a different song,” which ultimately became its follow-up single, “Only In My Mind.”
Nonetheless, when a teaser of “Strangers” connected with listeners on a musical and lyrical level, the label pivoted, with Grace still meticulously poring over the song’s final mix. “I was rewriting the lyrics to make it rhyme,” she says. “I’m always really funny and picky about vocal production. I spend the longest on the vocals.”
Sonically, the song is steeped in drum’n’bass and aligns with the current U.K. dance music revival in the U.S. led by artists like Fred Again.. and PinkPantheress. The song’s vulnerable lyrical bent (“And then one random night when everything changes/You won’t reply and we’ll go back to strangers”) plays to Gen Z’s penchant for unflinchingly honest pop songwriting.
Though Grace admits feeling pressure ahead of its release, “Strangers” officially arrived through Warner Records/Major Recordings on Sept. 1. By the end of the month, it became her first entry on the Hot 100 (since reaching a No. 52 high). The track has also climbed to No. 1 in the U.K.; reached the top 5 on the Billboard Global 200; and spent five weeks atop Hot Dance/Electronic Songs, marking the first time in the ranking’s decade-long history that a track solely written, produced and sung by a woman has reached the summit.
Says Huggett: “We had no expectations other than, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if this did better than the last release, which was really nowhere near there?’ That was the benchmark. Every time we put out some music, we want to improve on it incrementally.”
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While social media helped buoy “Strangers,” the resources of a traditional label drove the song at radio and helped place it on editorial playlists on digital service providers. The song has earned 773.7 million on-demand streams through Nov. 23, according to Luminate. “The label used this explosive moment to make sure there’s a proper campaign globally,” says Huggett. “We’ve been blown away with how brilliantly the label has worked the record with their understanding of the complexity of radio and traditional media.”
In October, Grace released the trance-driven “Only In My Mind,” and three weeks later, followed it with a “sad acoustic version” of “Strangers” as the song continues to chart. At the top of December, she detailed a biting take on modern love with “Paris” and, come 2024, she expects to release her “dark, moody [and] dance-inspired” debut album.
In the meantime, she’s on her first tour, with stops in London, New York and Los Angeles — though Shymansky has his sights set on even brighter lights: a Las Vegas residency 10 years from now. “There’s a long road to get there, but we think she has the goods to do that,” he says. “That’s gotta be the ambition.”
From left: Nick Huggett, Kenya Grace and Nicholas Shymansky photographed on November 20, 2023 at SOUTH56 studio in London.
Bex Day
A version of this story will appear in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
In 2020, Jessie Murph began regularly posting covers to YouTube and TikTok. They quickly gained a following, and ever since she’s been scoring one win after the next. She parlayed her early success with covers of Ariana Grande, Fleetwood Mac, Post Malone and others into a label deal with Columbia Records the following year. By the end of 2021, “Always Been You” — the lead single from her debut mixtape — became her first hit on the Billboard Hot 100.
Since then, the 19-year-old singer-songwriter has tallied three more entries on the chart: “Pray”; her Diplo and Polo G collaboration, “Heartbroken”; and most recently “Wild Ones” with Jelly Roll. The latest has already become her biggest hit to date, reaching a No. 42 high in six weeks on the ranking.
Over an inescapable country-driven groove, Murph and Jelly Roll romanticize risk-taking, rule-breaking daredevils with an affinity for fast cars and lifting their middle fingers high in the air. “Say you wanna get dangerous/ Now you’re speaking my language,” Murph sings.
The two musicians share a connection in more ways than one. Both are Nashville-area natives — though Murph’s family moved to Alabama when she was a child, she recently moved back to the Music City — and have continued to explore different genres throughout their careers, including country, hip-hop, pop and rock. For Jelly Roll (real name: Jason DeFord), “Need a Favor” and “Son of a Sinner” have been genre-fluid mainstays over the past year and have helped fuel a best new artist Grammy nomination and a win as new artist of the year at the recent CMA Awards.
“I think something that’s so special about him is he’s so always just so grateful,” Murph says of Jelly Roll. “You can tell he’s such a gratitude-based person and it’s beautiful. Jelly Roll has just been so positive and every time I’m around him I leave feeling so happy.”
How did this song come together?
It was such a long process. I feel like I made it months before it came out, and I never planned on having a feature on it. I was just going to put it out. But [at the] last minute, Jelly heard it and he was like, “I have a verse for this,” and I’m a huge fan of him. I went to one of his shows and sang a cover of “Simple Man” with him. Then I guess he heard “Wild Ones” and I was like, “Oh my God, please be on this.”
What inspired the song?
I’ve always been attracted to crazy things or chaos. That’s where the song came from. I don’t normally write fun songs, so it’s one of my first songs like that — really cool and different. I had been in a session all day and we had gotten nothing. In the last 30 minutes, I remember Gitty [producer/co-writer Jeff Gitelman] played this guitar lick and we ended up writing it super fast.
Once you were in the studio, were there any big changes made to the song?
We might’ve sped it up during the process to make it a little bit more groovy. But I really wanted country elements for this song — that was the palette I wanted to stay with. Stylistically, especially lately, I’ve been a little bit country leaning. I’m really inspired by country music, and I feel like it has found its way into my sound.
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How did you first hear Jelly Roll’s music?
My older brother is really into country [music], so he listens to a lot of that kind of stuff. I feel like we were just in the car and he had it on. I was like, “Whoa, this is insane.” But the craziest thing was seeing Jelly live. I was just blown away.
It feels like country music is everywhere this year, in different variations. Genres keep melding together in different ways. What is your take on that?
I think it’s beautiful. That has always been my thing as an artist: I don’t ever want to have a genre because I feel that boxes you in. As you get older and grow as a person, you listen to different types of music, and I think it’s beautiful when those things mix and intertwine. It creates a whole new vibe that people haven’t even heard. But I agree, country is exploding right now.
Who else would you want to collaborate with?
My dream collaboration is Lil Baby. I’ve always wanted to [make a song with him], and it’s going to happen at some point. I’m manifesting it. I’ve been obsessed with his music since I can remember. He’s just such a real person. I feel like he sings about real sh-t. I love his melodies, his flows.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Nov. 18, 2023, issue of Billboard.
The scene at the Chipotle on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley at first looked much like any other Friday evening. Six good-looking guys in their early 20s sat around a table eating burritos, laughing and ribbing one another. They had landed at LAX that morning after a 16-hour flight, but despite their jet lag, the vibe was lively.
Then an emergency alert lit up one of their cellphones. Seconds later, a warning buzzed on another device. And then another, and another, and another, and yet one more. It was Oct. 6 — already Oct. 7 on the other side of the world in Israel — and the moment things got very real for as1one, the first-ever boy band comprising Israeli and Palestinian musicians.
The guys had arrived in Los Angeles from Tel Aviv, Israel, to lay down tracks for their forthcoming debut album — a trek made following months of visa coordination and more than a year since the group officially formed, after first being conceived in the United States years prior. The team behind as1one, led by longtime music executives Ken Levitan and James Diener, envisioned a Middle Eastern version of BTS, and in the effort to create it, Israeli and Palestinian casting directors had held auditions in major cities and tiny villages throughout Israel in 2021. (Auditions could not be held in the West Bank or Gaza due to logistical challenges.) A thousand young men auditioned; the six who were glued to their phones at the Sherman Oaks Chipotle had made it in.
There’s Sadik Dogosh, a 20-year-old Palestinian Bedouin Muslim from Rahat, Israel, with a piercing gaze and an acting background. Neta Rozenblat, a Jewish Israeli who’s 22 but looks younger, grew up in Tel Aviv, where he studied computer science before getting into singing, which led to a 2021 performance on the Israeli version of The X Factor. Hailing from Haifa, Palestinian Christian Aseel Farah, 22, is the group’s rapper and its self-proclaimed introvert. Twenty-three-year-old Jewish Israeli Nadav Philips grew up near Tel Aviv, idolizes Mariah Carey and used to perform as a wedding singer. Niv Lin, 22, is a Jewish Israeli from a desert town in southern Israel and played professional basketball before shifting to singing. (He also performed on The X Factor.) And Ohad Attia, also 22 and a Jewish Israeli, grew up in Tel Aviv singing and playing the guitar, a skill he flexes beautifully in the group.
On the surface, the six young men check all the usual boy group boxes: They strike the requisite balance between dreamy and adorable and sing ballads and bangers with heart-melting harmonies about girls, love and “dancing like the whole world is watching,” as one of their songs proclaims. But while each knew they were signing up for a boundary-pushing endeavor simply by joining a group composed of Palestinians and Israelis, they couldn’t have predicted that their message of unity would be so intensely tested before they had even released any music.
When the guys went to sleep at their L.A. rental house on the night of Oct. 6, they weren’t yet sure what to make of the alerts. They had all grown up accustomed to intermittent rocket warnings that often passed without incident. But by morning, it was clear what was happening back at home had little precedent: Hamas operatives had killed about 1,200 people throughout southern Israel in coordinated attacks on villages, kibbutzes and at a music festival. (“Niv lives not far from where that rave was, so he undoubtedly would have been there,” Diener says, adding that the woman Lin had just started dating, along with other friends, was killed in the attack.) Their scheduled sightseeing tour of L.A. was canceled. Instead, the guys spent the day frantically calling and texting with friends and family back home.
As news of the Oct. 7 attacks spread, as1one was given the option to fly back to Israel as soon as possible. But after talking among themselves, they decided to stay. “In the beginning, we really felt bad that we couldn’t do anything, that we couldn’t help our families and friends in Israel,” Attia says. “But then when you think about it, you really realize we’re on a mission and that we can be helpful. We can show the world.”
Ohad Attia
Austin Hargrave
The next day, as1one went to its scheduled studio session and met with songwriter-producers Jenna Andrews and Stephen Kirk, who together have credits on mega-hits like BTS’ “Butter” and “Permission To Dance.” Andrews and Kirk had already joined as1one for writing sessions in Israel, and that familiarity helped the duo channel the group’s intense emotions into music as the horrific news from Israel continued.
“The toughest moments were during the sessions,” Rozenblat says. “I was told about two friends that were killed, Niv was told about friends of his that were killed — a lot of us found out about really awful stuff during that session, not to mention that now there’s a whole war going on.”
But by the end of the session, they had a new song. Two-and-a-half weeks later, in a sun-drenched conference room in Century City, they play it for me through a beat-up Bluetooth speaker.
“What if we just stopped the world/Hold the phone/Faced the hurt/Take me home/We’re not built for this/We’re built for more/Forget the score/Show me what it’s like when we stop the world,” the sextet sings over a pulsing beat. It’s the kind of anthem that’s vocally reminiscent of the Backstreet Boys’ heyday and thematically evocative of — depending on how you’re listening — either a tumultuous romance or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“How crazy is it to get hugs from Palestinian friends when my Israeli friends died?” Lin says. “That’s our story.”
Sadik Dogosh
Austin Hargrave
As1one wasn’t necessarily intended to function as a singing six-man answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Seeing how K-pop and Latin music became global forces over the past few years, Levitan and Diener wanted to form a group from outside the Western world that they could build into a superstar act. They had experience with this caliber of artist: Levitan helped develop Kings of Leon, managed Bon Jovi and, as co-founder and president of Nashville-based Vector Management, has worked with Kesha, The B-52s, The Fray and more. Diener launched A&M Octone Records, where he developed acts including Maroon 5, and after the label sold its 50% share to Interscope Geffen A&M, he co-founded the music publishing and management firm Freesolo Entertainment.
Together they looked to Israel, a place, Diener says, where “we felt that what they have to say musically hadn’t really been given a shot on the world stage.” The pair weren’t seeking to create a group made up of Israelis and Palestinians — only to, as Levitan says, “leave no stone unturned” in their search for the country’s very best talent. They began traveling to Israel in late 2021, first to find the Israeli and Palestinian casting directors and consultants who could get them access to local music schools, conservatories and recording studios where they would scout talent. (They’ve been back to the country every two months since the first trip.) Ami Nir, an A&R executive at Universal Music Group in Israel, became their partner in the project and was crucial in creating connections.
Aseel Farah
Austin Hargrave
Even before meeting any prospective singers, the pair — who refer to themselves as the group’s founders and producers — encountered plenty of challenges: raising investment money, working in a foreign market (and during a global pandemic) and, above all, the historic tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. During one meeting, a potential Palestinian talent scout was so opposed to the idea of a mixed band that she flicked her cigarette ashes at Levitan and Diener.
“We were really working from negative one, not even at zero,” Levitan says of the meeting. “She was very pessimistic.” But as the two explained their history in the business and their vision for the group, the scout uncrossed her arms and listened — and, shortly thereafter, joined the team. Such unlikely changes of heart happened again and again at meetings throughout the country. “I think people felt our sincerity,” Diener says. “They didn’t feel like this was in any way a gimmick or a pretext.”
As Diener explains, assembling a group from this part of the world inherently meant being “confronted by the question of, ‘Are you willing to put together a group that may be mixed?’ ” He and Levitan agreed that they were — but that it would require choosing “the right guys who could handle and appreciate that mix of talent within the band,” Diener says.
As they narrowed down the talent pool during auditions, Levitan and Diener met with families of potential members, selling parents, siblings and extended relatives on the idea, often through translators, and many times while sitting around the family’s kitchen table after a meal.
Nadav Philips
Austin Hargrave
By this point, they had also enlisted a documentary crew to film the process; cameras were put in place after people close to Levitan and Diener suggested what they were doing “might just be historic,” Diener recalls. Ultimately, the local Israeli team was replaced with a crew from Paramount+, which has since shot hundreds of hours of footage for a forthcoming five-episode docuseries produced by James Carroll (Waco: American Apocalypse, Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer). “It’s in no way a reality series,” Levitan says. “This is something much more thoughtful and cinematic.”
The cameras were rolling during the final phase of the audition process: a May 2022 boy band boot camp in Neve Shalom, an Israeli village founded in 1969 by Israeli Jews and Arabs to demonstrate that the two groups could live together in peace. Here, the guys played instruments, posed for photo shoots, showed off their dexterity with social media and sang together. “You’d be singing to yourself, then someone standing on the other side of the road would be doing a harmony with you,” Attia recalls.
A psychologist was on site as well, not only to ensure potential members were mentally prepared for the demanding work schedule ahead, but also to weigh in on whether they would fit well within the unique mixed-group dynamic. “There were [guys] we really wanted to work with,” Diener says, “but as their community and parents became more aware of what this was going to look like, they couldn’t endorse it in the same way they’d endorsed the audition process, so we lost a few really good prospects.” (Levitan adds that these prospects wouldn’t have necessarily made it into the group.)
A year-and-a-half after starting the scouting process, Levitan and Diener had settled on the right six guys — it was just by circumstance that four were Jewish Israelis and two Palestinian.
When Levitan and Diener Zoomed Dogosh to tell him he had been accepted, the camera crew caught him jumping around so enthusiastically that his microphone broke. “Getting accepted in the band, it was like a fever dream,” says Rozenblat, who had been tracking 25,000 steps a day while pacing around his house waiting for the news.
Neta Rozenblat
Austin Hargrave
Recording started shortly thereafter, with the guys intermittently traveling from their respective homes to a Tel Aviv studio. Philips and Lin say they had never spoken with a Palestinian person until joining as1one — a name that the guys chose from a few options that the team had come up with and that is pronounced “as one.” Over time, camaraderie grew, and by the time they gave their first live performance at a private event for TikTok Israel eight months after their inception, they were looking, sounding, moving and working the room like a band. (Levitan and Diener often use the words “brotherhood” and “unity” when describing the group’s bond.)
The bonding process ramped up in August, when as1one traveled to London to record at Abbey Road Studios with Nile Rodgers, who plays guitar on one of the songs written by Andrews and Kirk. (The session came together after Diener sent Rodgers the group’s cover of Rodgers’ Daft Punk collaboration, “Get Lucky.”) After they wrapped, Rodgers gave his guitar to as1one guitarist Attia, who says he was “literally shaking” and immediately FaceTimed his mother to tell her. (Overjoyed for her son, she cried.)
On Oct. 5, as1one boarded a flight for what was meant to be a monthlong trip to L.A. The scheduling turned out to be prescient: The team had considered flying the guys out a few days later — which, had it happened, would have put the project on perpetual hold amid a war that to date has killed around 1,200 Israelis (and claimed an estimated 240 hostages) and more than 11,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to reports from Gaza’s Health Ministry (an agency that, as The New York Times has reported, “is part of the Hamas government in Gaza but employs civil servants who predate Hamas’ control of the territory”).
While their families remain in the increasingly precarious situation abroad, as1one is in L.A. indefinitely, living in a rented house in Sherman Oaks with Andrew Berkowitz (the group’s executive in charge of talent who was involved in casting and has more than 30 years’ experience in artist promotion at labels including RCA and Arista) and traveling to various local studios making music. “Our policy with them is whatever they need, including if they need to go home, we will make that happen,” Diener says. “There’s a lot of people keeping their eyes on them.”
The group has recorded seven songs in the four weeks since its arrival, with collaborators including Andrews, Kirk, Danja (Nelly Furtado’s “Say It Right,” Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack,” Britney Spears’ “Gimme More”), Justin Tranter (a go-to co-writer for Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Maroon 5 and Imagine Dragons) and Y2K (Doja Cat’s “Attention”).
Niv Lin
Austin Hargrave
The songs as1one performs for me live in this conference room include a stirring ballad with lyrics fashioned in boilerplate boy band parlance (“I wouldn’t be me without you!”), rendered in gorgeous six-part harmony and delivered with passion. (They close their eyes a lot while singing.) When the guys launch into a peppier, sexier jam about being hot-blooded animals on the dancefloor, it’s easy enough to imagine a stadium full of fans screaming along. The songs are clever and well-constructed, and the melodies stay in my head long after the meeting is over.
The guys, along with Levitan and Diener, are quick to clarify that they’re less a “boy band” and more a “male pop group,” given that they play instruments (Attia is on acoustic and electric guitar, keyboard and drums; Lin plays keys and acoustic guitar; Philips plays keyboard; Rozenblat plays keyboard and acoustic guitar; Farah is on percussion; and Dogosh is learning piano) and don’t plan on performing choreography. And Levitan and Diener expect that the group’s story will attract a wider-than-usual fan base for an act of this kind. Still, as the duo sees it, their core fan base will likely be — in the high-pitched squealing tradition of groups like *NSYNC and Backstreet Boys — what Levitan calls “a very, very excited and active female audience.”
It’s not yet clear when the first as1one single will be released, and the group hasn’t yet announced a label signing. (Levitan and Diener say they can’t disclose details on label negotiations beyond that “there’s real interest in the band.”) They’re backed by a 30-person team and 15 lawyers representing each member individually and collectively across trademarks, music, film and general counsel, and repped by WME, where they also have film and TV representation. That documentary crew lives with them, still capturing their every move — from jam sessions at the house (where there is a “No harmonicas after 11 p.m.” policy) to the much darker and more complex moments of their recent history.
All this infrastructure is being forged with a singular vision: to make as1one the biggest musical group in the world. “I mean, seriously,” Levitan says. “That’s our goal.”
The stakes for as1one were always high, but they’ve of course become significantly higher over the last six weeks. Eight of the group’s friends and family members have been killed in the conflict. It would be overwhelming for anyone, and certainly must be for the six young men now living 7,500 miles from their home, where a brutal war is being fought. But whether through coaching or genuine belief, the guys present a silver-lining attitude.
“There’s no way to describe how bad you feel,” Philips says. “Your first instinct is to go back and be with your friends and family. Then a few days later, you realize there’s no better service to the world than what we’re doing, and it just gives us a bigger purpose.”
“We don’t want to be political,” adds rapper Farah. “We just want to be humanitarian.”
From left: Sadik Dogosh, Ohad Attia, Niv Lin, Nadav Philips, Aseel Farah and Neta Rozenblat of as1one.
Austin Hargrave
They also don’t want to be inextricably linked to the conflict that, like it or not, has defined their formation. “One of the things we’ve told them,” Levitan says, “especially with everything going on now, [is that these events] can be an influence [on the music] but just can’t be directly related, because [the music] has got to be broad enough where everybody can relate to it.”
Right now, though, the inherent message of an Israeli-Palestinian group named as1one may give the act a greater meaning than Diener and Levitan could have ever imagined, regardless of what the guys are singing about. Conversations now aren’t just about being the biggest band in the world, but about the Nobel Peace Prize.
“You may say it’s a pie-in-the-sky kind of goal,” says Levitan. “But what this has become is that important.”
This story originally appeared in the Nov. 18, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Barbie is likely to be well represented when the Academy Award shortlists are revealed Dec. 21. At least two (and maybe even three) songs from the box-office juggernaut could be in contention for best original song (though only two from a film can be nominated, according to a 2008 rule change).
Diane Warren and Alan Menken are each looking to score their 15th best original song nominations, a benchmark that only five songwriters have reached. If John Williams and the late Robbie Robertson are nominated for best original score, each could make history.
“I’m Just Ken”Mark Ronson, Andrew WyattBarbie, Warner Bros.
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Ronson and Wyatt won in this category five years ago for co-writing “Shallow” from A Star Is Born. “I’m Just Ken,” sung by Ryan Gosling, provided one of the funniest sequences in Barbie. Ronson and Wyatt could have a second Barbie song on the shortlist — the bubbly “Dance the Night,” which they co-wrote with Dua Lipa and Caroline Ailin.
“What Was I Made For?”Billie Eilish, FINNEASBarbie, Warner Bros.
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The siblings won in this category two years ago for their title song to the James Bond film No Time To Die. They’re likely to be nominated for this tender ballad, which Barbie director Greta Gerwig has described as her movie’s “heart” song. Barbie is vying to become the first film with two best original song nominees since La La Land seven years ago.
“Keep It Movin’”Halle Bailey, Denisia Andrews, Brittany Coney, Morten RistorpThe Color Purple, Warner Bros.
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Bailey (as young Nettie) and Phylicia Pearl Mpasi (as young Celie) sing this song onscreen in this new iteration of The Color Purple. “Miss Celie’s Blues (Sister),” from the original 1985 film, was nominated in this category. Quincy Jones, who co-wrote that song with Rod Temperton and Lionel Richie, served as a producer of both films.
“Out Alpha the Alpha”Marius de Vries, Josh Sharp, Aaron Jackson, Karl Saint LucyDicks: The Musical, A24
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Megan Thee Stallion sings this ribald song onscreen in Dicks: The Musical, which is based on an off-Broadway show with an even more risqué title, F–king Identical Twins. The rap star is also in the cast, along with another famous Megan (Mullally), as well as Bowen Yang and Nathan Lane. Megan Thee Stallion took part in an all-star performance of “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” on the Oscar telecast two years ago.
“The Fire Inside”Diane WarrenFlamin’ Hot, Hulu/Searchlight Pictures
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Warren has been nominated in this category the last six years in a row. If she makes it again this year, she’ll have the longest consecutive streak of best original song nods since Sammy Cahn was nominated eight years running (1954-61). The indefatigable Warren has a second song in play, “Gonna Be You” from 80 for Brady.
“High Life”Gary Clark, John CarneyFlora and Son, Apple
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In addition to co-writing this song, Carney wrote and directed the film. Two of Carney’s previous films, Once and Begin Again, yielded best original song nominees (and a winner in the case of Once). Clark, a Scottish musician-songwriter, was the frontman of 1980s pop band Danny Wilson. Eve Hewson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Orén Kinlan and Jack Reynor sing “High Life” onscreen in Flora and Son.
“Can’t Catch Me Now”Dan Nigro, Olivia RodrigoThe Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, Lionsgate
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The Hunger Games franchise has yet to receive an Oscar nod in any category, but the red-hot Rodrigo is at the point in her career that the music branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is likely to pay notice. She and Nigro have received two Grammy nods for song of the year, for “drivers license” and “Vampire.” Will the moody and atmospheric “Can’t Catch Me Now” find favor here?
“For the First Time”Alan Menken, Lin-Manuel MirandaThe Little Mermaid, Disney
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Menken is an EGOT winner, and Miranda will be one as soon as he wins an Oscar. Menken won his first of four Oscars in this category for “Under the Sea” from the original 1989 iteration of The Little Mermaid. Halle Bailey sings “For the First Time” onscreen in the film. Two other Menken-Miranda songs from the film, “Wild Uncharted Waters” and “The Scuttlebutt,” are also in play.
“Find a Way”Linda PerryNyad, Netflix
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This would be the first Oscar nod for Perry, a two-time Grammy nominee for song of the year. Annette Bening and Jodie Foster star in the film, which tells the story of Diana Nyad who, at age 64, undertook a 110-mile swim from Cuba to Florida. Perry named her song after the title of Nyad’s book, on which the movie is based.
“Road to Freedom”Lenny KravitzRustin, Netflix
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Kravitz, a four-time Grammy winner for best male rock vocal performance, could score his first Oscar nod for this song from a biopic about Bayard Rustin, a lesser-known but crucial figure in the civil rights struggle. The film’s director, George C. Wolfe, helmed the 2020 movie Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which received five Oscar nods.
“Addicted to Romance”Patti Scialfa, Bruce SpringsteenShe Came to Me, Vertical Entertainment
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Springsteen won an Oscar in 1994 for “Streets of Philadelphia” and was nominated again two years later for “Dead Man Walkin’.” This would be his first nomination with a collaborator — his wife, Scialfa. The original score was composed by The National’s Bryce Dessner. Peter Dinklage and Marisa Tomei star in the film.
“Am I Dreaming”A$AP Rocky, Metro Boomin, Michael Dean, Peter Lee Johnson, Roisee, ScriptpluggSpider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Sony Pictures
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Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse won an Oscar for best animated feature film five years ago, though its biggest hit, “Sunflower” by Post Malone and Swae Lee, missed out on a best original song nod. Metro Boomin curated the soundtrack to this film, which reached No. 5 on the Billboard 200 in June. A$AP Rocky’s partner, Rihanna, was nominated in this category last year.
“Peaches”Jack Black, Aaron Horvath, Michael Jelenic, Eric Osmond, John SpikerThe Super Mario Bros. Movie, Illumination/Nintendo/Universal
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This was the year’s second-biggest hit at the box office, behind Barbie. In addition to co-writing and performing the song, Black was in the animated film’s voice cast as Bowser. This would be the first Oscar nomination for Black, who won a Grammy for best metal performance nine years ago for a track he recorded with Tenacious D for a Ronnie James Dio tribute album.
“Better Place”Amy Allen, Shellback, Justin TimberlakeTrolls Band Together, DreamWorks Animation
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Animated characters portraying *NSYNC perform this song onscreen in the movie. Timberlake was nominated in this category seven years ago for co-writing “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” for the first Trolls film. He and the other members of *NSYNC are in the voice cast, along with Anna Kendrick, Kid Cudi, Troye Sivan, Camila Cabello and Anderson .Paak, among others.
“This Wish”Julia Michaels, Benjamin Rice, JP SaxeWish, Disney
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Michaels and Saxe received a Grammy nod for song of the year three years ago for their collaboration “If the World Was Ending.” It was Michaels’ second nod in that category; her first was for co-writing her breakthrough hit, “Issues.” Ariana DeBose, an Oscar winner for the West Side Story remake, sings “This Wish.” She’s also in the voice cast, along with Chris Pine and Victor Garber.
American Fiction (Orion Pictures/Amazon MGM)Laura Karpman
Karpman could be headed for her first Oscar nod for her score to this satirical film that was written and directed by Cord Jefferson (in his feature directorial debut). The film stars Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae and Sterling K. Brown. Karpman won a Primetime Emmy three years ago for scoring The Discovery Channel’s Why We Hate.
Barbie (Warner Bros.)Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt
Ronson and Wyatt, who executive-produced the hit soundtrack album — and were involved in writing and producing several of its tracks — could be headed for their first nod in this category. Wyatt has co-written songs for several Ronson albums. In 2012, the two musicians collaborated on a ballet score for The Royal Ballet of London.
Elemental (Pixar)Thomas Newman
If Newman is nominated, this would be his 15th nod in the category, a total so far achieved by only eight composers in Oscar history. Unlike them, though, he has yet to win. Newman is the youngest son of the late Alfred Newman, who amassed 41 nominations in this category, winning a record nine times.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Disney)John Williams
This would be Williams’ record-extending 49th nod in a scoring category and his fourth for a film in the Indiana Jones franchise. In total, it would be Williams’ 54th Oscar nomination (the other five are for best original song), which would pull him closer to Walt Disney’s all-time record of 59 for an individual.
The Killer (Netflix)Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross
This would be the fourth nod in this category for Reznor and Ross following The Social Network, Mank and Soul (a collaboration with Jon Batiste). David Fincher, who directed The Social Network and Mank, also directed The Killer. Reznor and Ross won for both The Social Network and Soul. Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton star in The Killer.
Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple)Robbie Robertson
This was the 12th and last Martin Scorsese film that Robertson worked on. Robertson, who died in June at age 80, would become the first composer to be nominated in this category posthumously since Bernard Herrmann was cited in 1976 for both Obsession and Taxi Driver. Two other Scorsese regulars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, star in the film.
Nyad (Netflix)Alexandre Desplat
This would be Desplat’s 12th nomination in this category, all since 2006. That’s more than anyone else has accumulated in that period. The French composer has won twice, for The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Shape of Water. This would be Desplat’s first nod in the 2020s, following three in the 2000s and eight in the 2010s.
Oppenheimer (Universal Pictures)Ludwig Göransson
The Swedish composer won in this category five years ago for scoring Black Panther. He was nominated for an Oscar last year for co-writing a song for the sequel. Oppenheimer was the year’s fifth-biggest box-office hit, a strong showing for a three-hour adult drama. The Christopher Nolan film was based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Clockwise: Elemental, Killers of the Flower Moon, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Oppenheimer.
Disney/Pixar; Melinda Sue Gordon; Sony Pictures.
Origin (Neon)Kris Bowers
Origin is the fifth feature film directed by Ava DuVernay. Her 2014 historical drama, Selma, yielded the Oscar-winning song “Glory” by Common and John Legend. Bowers was nominated for documentary (short subject) three years ago for co-directing A Concerto Is a Conversation, which centered on his conversations with his jazz pianist grandfather. This would be his first nod in a scoring category.
Past Lives (A24)Christopher Bear & Daniel Rossen
Past Lives was written and directed by Celine Song in her feature directorial debut. The film, which stars Greta Lee, Teo Yoo and John Magaro, follows the relationship between two childhood friends over 24 years. Bear and Rossen are members of veteran indie rock band Grizzly Bear, which has landed two top 10 albums on the Billboard 200.
Rustin (Netflix)Branford Marsalis
This would be the first Oscar nomination for jazz saxophonist Marsalis, who is a three-time Grammy winner. Marsalis received a Primetime Emmy nod two years ago for outstanding music composition for a documentary series or special for Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre, which aired on the HISTORY Channel.
Saltburn (Amazon/MGM)Anthony Willis
This would be the Australian composer’s first Oscar nod after building a reputation with his scores for How To Train Your Dragon: Homecoming (2019), Promising Young Woman (2020) and M3GAN (2022). Saltburn is the second film to be written, directed and co-produced by Emerald Fennell following Promising Young Woman. Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi and Rosamund Pike star in the psychological thriller.
Society of the Snow (Netflix)Michael Giacchino
This would be Giacchino’s third nomination in this category following Ratatouille (2007) and Up (2009). He won for the latter. Society of the Snow is a 2023 survival thriller about a 1972 flight disaster in Argentina’s Andes Mountains. The cast comprises Uruguayan and Argentine actors, most of whom are newcomers to the craft. The film is scheduled to be released in theaters on Dec. 15.
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Sony Pictures)Daniel Pemberton
The English composer has yet to be nominated in this category. His only Oscar nod is for co-writing “Hear My Voice” from The Trial of the Chicago 7, a best original song nominee three years ago. This film is a sequel to 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which Pemberton also scored.
The Zone of Interest (A24)Mica Levi
The English composer was nominated in this category seven years ago for Jackie. The Zone of Interest, based on a Martin Amis novel, revolves around Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife and their plans to build a dream life next to the concentration camp. The film, which was written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, is set to be released in the United States on Dec. 15.
Additional reporting by Melinda Newman.
This story will appear in the Nov. 18, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Tate McRae was recently scrolling TikTok when an old interview she did at 16 came across the screen. “I was the most awkward person ever, and I was like, ‘There’s no chance that this is the same person,’ ” she says with a grimace. “You evolve so much, and not only am I seeing it, but I’m documenting it in my music in real time.”
Now 20 and living in Los Angeles, the native of Calgary, Alberta (which she calls “the Texas of Canada”), has spent much of her life thus far on screens — both her own, while navigating TikTok like a promotional pro, and others, whether on network TV or YouTube. As a teen, McRae placed third on the 2016 season of So You Think You Can Dance and soon after, in fall 2017, launched the weekly YouTube series Create With Tate, which she used to share new choreography and music covers. She thought she would go on to become a backup dancer, but she felt equally drawn to songwriting, covering her bedroom walls with lyrics, quotes and poems that her mother has since painted over in a shade she describes as “serial killer white.”
Tate McRae will perform at the 2023 Billboard Music Awards on Nov. 19. Watch on BBMAs.watch, @BBMAs and @billboard socials.
One of the first videos she posted was a song that proved she wasn’t destined to be anyone’s backup — and could very much hold pop’s center stage on her own. The lovelorn piano ballad “One Day” (which McRae wrote herself) gained traction online, and by early 2018, she and her parents were flying to New York for label meetings (accompanied by McRae’s dance manager at the time); just a year later, it was announced that she had signed a record deal with RCA and a management deal with Hard 8 Working Group. As her high school graduation in Calgary neared, McRae was splitting her time between midterms and awards shows.
“She was so young then, obviously, but so determined and really in some ways sort of moved like a competitive athlete, which makes a lot of sense, given her dance background,” RCA COO John Fleckenstein says. “But still, even at that age, she was so clear on where she wanted to go and what was important to her.”
And while those in McRae’s inner circle agree she has always wanted to steer her own ship — and has proved more than capable — she says that it took her until now to learn how to sail full speed ahead and in only one direction: her own. When she got her start in the industry, she was straddling two different worlds. “Now a lot of my time revolves around music in some way: thinking about music, playing music, driving and listening to music,” McRae says. “It’s all one world.” But merging the two didn’t happen without some friction.
Vintage Junya Watanabe top, MM6 Maison Margiela jeans.
By 2020, McRae was well positioned for a major year, with a proper team assembled. Then came the pandemic; still, she stuck with the plan, releasing what became her breakout hit, “You Broke Me First,” that April despite being homebound — unable to promote it or fully enjoy its success. Like “One Day,” “You Broke Me First” is a tender, midtempo pop song, and together they contributed to McRae’s early classification as a “sad pop” songwriter, drawing comparisons as Canada’s answer to Billie Eilish. But “You Broke Me First” has a bit more bite than its predecessor. It took off on TikTok within a month, ultimately peaking at No. 17 on the Billboard Hot 100, and performances at the MTV European Music Awards and on Jimmy Kimmel Live! followed — all as McRae prepared to graduate and move to Los Angeles.
McRae recalls spending a month in the city in April 2021, renting a house with her parents to “test it out,” during which they read Donald S. Passman’s industry bible, All You Need To Know About the Music Business. “We read this book together because we were like, ‘What are we walking into right now?’ ” At the end of their stay, McRae got her own apartment and has lived solo since. Though she admits she spends lots of time “inside on my couch,” she has found comfort and community in “a really awesome girl group” and fellow artist friends (like pal Olivia Rodrigo, whose “bad idea right?” video includes a McRae cameo) “because we’re private in our personal lives, but then our innermost, darkest, most intense fears are the things we’re putting on display, which is so weird.”
In the following years, McRae released music at a steady pace, including two EPs (All the Things I Never Said and Too Young To Be Sad) and a string of collaborations with artists such as Troye Sivan and Regard (“You”) and Khalid (“Working”), both of which became Hot 100 hits. Her 2022 debut album, I Used To Think I Could Fly, debuted at No. 13 on the Billboard 200 and yielded two more Hot 100 entries while also supporting her headlining tour of clubs and small theaters. All of which should have been cause for celebration — but what McRae remembers most is feeling lost.
“[That] album was a very big internal battle for me. I was so confused with who I was as a person,” she says. “I remember releasing it when I was still on tour, and it felt so overwhelming. I was just like, ‘Oh, wow. I just released my first album. It’s here, it’s happening. I am now an artist.’ And I think as much as it was a relief, I also was just like, ‘Is this right?’ ”
Ottolinger dress, Brandon Hurtado Sandler ring.
As she put together the album, McRae had felt like she “was working with every producer on the planet” and struggled with her “people-pleasing” tendencies while trying to make everyone involved happy. “It took a lot of time after that to be like, ‘OK, let me not look at any other person for a really long time and just figure out who the f–k I am and what I want to do with my life for real.’ ”
By the end of 2022, McRae knew something had to change. She trusted her gut. “I had to figure out who [in the industry] was actually on my side and who wasn’t … so a lot was shifting behind the scenes.” The biggest shift came when she signed a new management deal with Full Stop’s Tom Skoglund, Jeffrey Azoff and Tommy Bruce (all of whom also manage Harry Styles), along with Sali Kharazi and Ali Saunders.
“I was lost in the whirlwind of it all, and it got to a point where I was like, ‘I don’t feel like I’m being respected as a young woman, and I don’t think I’m being heard in the ways that I want to be,’ ” she says. “What I take a lot of pride in is being a genuine, good person. I’m always going to give out that energy, and if the people who are representing you and on your team aren’t reciprocating that, that’s just not the type of people you want on your side. I was just feeling like I was stuck in a spot I had been in for like, five years, and I was like, ‘I feel like I’m going crazy.’ ”
At such a time, she was thankful for her young artist and producer friends, whom she says were “so transparent with me on how things [looked] from the outside.” And now, she couldn’t be more grateful for her new management team and the relationship they’ve built — and the many successes they have already shared. “They look at me and they don’t question me making decisions,” she says. “I want to be a businesswoman. I’m 20 now and I’m still young, but I know what I want.”
Tate McRae photographed on October 31, 2023 in Los Angeles. Masha Popova top, Givenchy skirt, pants and shoes.
Simultaneously, McRae’s creative process shifted as she finally found a consistent co-writing crew in Ryan Tedder, Amy Allen and Jasper Harris. She says the way they made her forthcoming second album, Think Later (out Dec. 8 on RCA), was how she always imagined her idols made albums, with a sense of togetherness. “My last album wasn’t like that at all … I was getting songs from 10 different people and being like, ‘OK, here’s an album.’ And this time it was written by the same core group of people,” she says. “That’s what made the process so fun for me, because it actually felt like a project that I was working on.”
Already, the new process is yielding results. Sultry lead single “Greedy” has become McRae’s highest-charting hit to date, peaking at No. 11 on the Hot 100, driven by 104.2 million on-demand streams, according to Luminate, and its usage in 1.3 million TikTok videos. But arguably, its biggest accomplishment has been reintroducing McRae to the masses — as an artist who, this time, knows exactly who she is.
While McRae says fans shouldn’t expect the entire album to sound like “Greedy,” she thinks the song represents a stylistic through line of “straight pop. It’s also pretty savage.” She credits the shift to her alter ego, Tatiana, McRae’s tour persona whom she describes as “ballsy, so loud and obnoxious.”
Vassia Kostara suit, Givenchy shoes.
In the studio, “I was like, ‘I don’t really give a f–k. I just want to say what I want to say and I want to be 20 years old,’ ” she says. “Sometimes you just want to go out and have a good time and just live life and be present and follow your intuition and not think too hard about it — and I just didn’t feel like thinking too hard about a lot of these songs. I don’t think people are going to expect me to say the stuff that I’m saying.”
In other words, as Fleckenstein puts it: “Some of these records, you’re going to stop in your tracks and go, ‘I didn’t realize she could do that.’ ”
When we talk in early November, McRae tells me her last few weeks have felt like “a bit of a dream.” “Greedy” blasted off; she announced her second album along with a world tour, during which she’ll play her first hometown show and end at Madison Square Garden; and she started prepping for her Saturday Night Live musical guest debut. But, perhaps most impressively, she got her collaborator Tedder to work on a Sunday.
“She’s the first artist to get me to [do that] in close to 10 years!” exclaims Tedder, who executive-produced Think Later. “I don’t care how much I love you, who you are, how many Grammys or how high the stakes are, I don’t work on weekends. Weekends and late-night rap sessions are two things I’ve officially graduated from. But she got me to do it because the song was that good.”
Ottolinger dress, Cult Gaia shoes.
The song came together in one weekend — and after she had technically finished her album. The two had started working at 10 a.m., going through sequences and punching vocals, with the goal of wrapping by 7 p.m. About an hour in, McRae revealed she felt that one box had yet to be checked, sonically speaking, on the album. “We had already sent the tracklist to the label, and at 6 p.m., we walked out with a song completely written, recorded, vocaled and produced,” Tedder says. “It’s the fastest, craziest Hail Mary of my entire life.” The next day, a Sunday, they listened with what he calls “tomorrow ears” and finished the track with enough time for it to make it on Think Later.
McRae and Tedder first met over a Zoom session in 2020, after being connected by mutual friend and songwriter-producer J Kash. As they both recently recalled to each other, they wrote a “trash” song that day and didn’t work together again until late last year, on Tiësto’s thumping dance-pop track “10:35” (on which McRae features). It was clear to Tedder then that McRae had “started to definitively put up guideposts.”
That became even more apparent during their first session together late last year for Think Later, when they wrote one of Tedder’s favorite songs on the album. “That session started with her walking in, opening up a playlist that she made that had 21 to 22 songs on it, and [saying], ‘These are the songs that shaped [me]. I want to figure out the through line and attempt to beat some of these,’ ” he recalls. “She had words and phrases and endless amounts of topics and real-life stories to write from, and that just doesn’t happen. I can count on one hand the artists I’ve worked with in 20 years that have pulled that on day one. And it was the most refreshing thing in the world. Otherwise, you’re playing pin the tail on the donkey in the dark.” (As further proof, he adds that McRae’s mix notes are so detailed “you’d think Quincy Jones wrote them.”)
That session led to many more with the same tight-knit team — just how McRae had always envisioned making an album — including the one for “Greedy.” Earlier this year, Tedder had posted on Instagram a few early-2000s songs he was revisiting, including some by Nelly Furtado, to which McRae replied that she had been listening to the same material. “There was a discussion like, ‘Would it work now?’ ” Tedder says. “I said, ‘One hundred percent it will.’ I’m just old enough where I know cycles, and this cycle is going to happen.”
Vassia Kostara suit, Givenchy shoes.
McRae calls “Greedy” a “wild pass” on which they tried a totally new sound and beat — and just as Tedder predicted, it worked big time. She remembers debuting the single during her Philadelphia tour stop: “No one knew it was coming, and I remember feeling it that first night, like, ‘Holy sh-t, what’s going to happen with this song?’ ”
And while fans may not have known when to expect the song, they knew something was coming thanks to McRae’s TikTok, where she boasts 5.5 million followers (the most of her social media accounts) and had been teasing the song in a series of clips. (Within days of finishing her last song created with Tedder, she had already started teasing that on the app, too.)
“She is not scared or shy about playing music for fans and talking about what she’s doing, and she is driving that conversation every step of the way,” Fleckenstein says. “It’s not a record label ta-da! that you’re seeing around her where there’s some orchestrated marketing promotional shtick. This is about her making something, delivering it to her fans and saying, ‘This is what I care about, and I hope you do, too.’ And then we, as her partners and label, are making it as big as we can possibly make it.”
Tedder says he always tells McRae that, when it comes to social media savvy, “you’re the female [Lil] Nas [X] and he’s the male Tate,” adding that, “Understanding that the world lives on the internet and understanding what people want to hear, how they want to hear it and how they want it to be presented, that is its own art form now that I didn’t have to contend with when I started. I played a gig last night and was with Kygo and The Chainsmokers, and [The Chainsmokers’] Alex [Pall] and Drew [Taggart] cornered me to talk about Tate, and Drew said, ‘Man, I’ve been watching what’s going on with that song. She gets the internet.’ ”
Which is why McRae was well aware that the “Greedy” music video — in which she heats up an ice rink with her impressive dance moves, which she worked on with choreographer-to-the-stars Sean Bankhead — would land so well. “I’m really particular with my taste, and that hasn’t always translated through what the internet has seen of me, even with what I’m wearing and how I’m performing and the choreography,” she says. “I’m so proud of [the “Greedy” video] because I got to actually be a dancer and make a video that I was like, ‘This is sick. I want to show my friends.’ I never ever used to feel that way.”
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Now she’s thinking of how to translate this previously untapped swagger to the stage. On her most recent tour, which wrapped in October, McRae wanted to push herself as a vocalist rather than relying on her dance background to carry the show. And yet, those roots are what so many in McRae’s inner circle call her “magic.” As Tedder says, “She can outdance any pop star and it’s something she rarely flexes — and she flexed in [the “Greedy”] video.”
“The truth is, she is winning because she is singular,” Fleckenstein adds. “And particularly in a pop landscape — which is often a fickle and very difficult place to be successful — you need to be that good.”
And no one understands that better than McRae herself. When she names the artists she most admires, they’re a reflection of her own ambition — and many are former dancers who translated that foundation into global pop superstardom. “When I look at my favorite icons or videos or performances, it’s always the biggest pop stars, so I think that’s always a goal,” she says. “I think what defines a pop star is how iconic [they are]: Madonna, Britney [Spears], Christina [Aguilera]; they would put on these shows and blow everybody away and make timeless art. And that’s what I want to do: make timeless art and timeless performances — and strive to keep on doing that.”
This story will appear in the Nov. 18, 2023, issue of Billboard.