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On a balmy recent August evening, Gustavo Dudamel strode onto the stage of the Hollywood Bowl wearing a huge golden gauntlet on his left hand.
He wouldn’t get to use it. Dudamel is dramatic, but he’s no comic book villain; he’s the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and he was there to conduct the orchestra for the world premiere of Marvel Studios’ Infinity Saga Concert Experience. So instead of wielding the power of assorted Infinity Stones to change the world, Dudamel accepted the “vibranium baton” presented to him by Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige (a reference to the fictional metal of the Marvel universe) and performed some magic of his own, conducting two-plus hours of raucous music from 25 different Marvel movies, backed by gigantic video screens with 3D projections, dancers, fireworks and thousands of screaming fans.
The whole thing looked more like a rock show than a symphony concert. Then again, Dudamel is the closest thing to a rock star the classical music world has.
After nearly two decades in Los Angeles, Dudamel hobnobs with the likes of Chris Martin and John Williams, is close friends with Frank Gehry (who designed the stunning Walt Disney Concert Hall, the L.A. Phil’s home that opened a little over 20 years ago) and counts Billie Eilish, Gwen Stefani, Ricky Martin and Carlos Vives among the dozens of pop world luminaries who’ve guested under his (non-vibranium) baton. He has won five Grammy Awards (including, this year, best orchestral performance for the L.A. Phil’s recording of composer Thomas Adès’ Dante) and placed nine albums at No. 1 on Billboard’s Traditional Classical Albums chart. His life is the subject of the documentary Viva Maestro! And, though never officially confirmed, he was clearly the inspiration behind the character of the free-thinking, mercurial Latin maestro played by Gael García Bernal in the Amazon Prime series Mozart in the Jungle, in which he had a small role as a stage manager.
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In the span of just two weeks from the end of August to mid-September, Dudamel conducted Strauss with the Vienna Philharmonic in Salzburg, Austria, and then flew to Los Angeles where, including the two Marvel shows, he led the L.A. Phil in nine concerts, conducting Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony and Beethoven’s Ninth; dances by living Puerto Rican composer Roberto Sierra; Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals and scenes from Bizet’s Carmen; plus two evenings of contemporary Latin music with Mexican pop/folk singer Natalia Lafourcade. It’s a staggering musical offering. All told, more than 100,000 people attended Dudamel’s nine summer concerts at the Hollywood Bowl with the L.A. Phil, which he will again conduct on Oct. 8 at the opening night of Carnegie Hall’s 2024-25 season in New York.
“He is unique in the classical music world because not only does he lead the orchestra and elevate the work of the L.A. Phil in terms of excellence, but he also connects the orchestra with different kinds of music, collaborating with artists [in other genres] with which we wouldn’t typically perform,” L.A. Phil president/CEO Kim Noltemy says. “The result is he brings orchestra music to so many different people. That is one unbelievably unique piece that makes Gustavo special.”
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For Dudamel, it’s part of a deep-rooted belief that music as an art, with purpose, supersedes specific forms and genres. “As an orchestral musician, you value the work of these pop artists, and likewise, pop acts have the opportunity to see that the academicism of the other side isn’t overwhelming, but rather, it’s the same thing in a different style,” he says. “Yes, there’s a fascinating technical complexity [to classical music]. But in the end, what matters is what you feel and what people perceive. We have to erase people’s fears regarding classical music. It may be intellectual in execution, but music’s power is spiritual.”
Not since Leonard Bernstein has a conductor done as much as Dudamel to make classical music accessible — or so thoroughly captured the public imagination. The two maestros share a not just persuasive but borderline evangelical approach to relentlessly promoting music as a “fundamental human right,” not just by broadening what qualifies as “classical” repertoire but also broadening the concept of the orchestra itself. Bernstein’s televised Young People’s Concerts were central to his efforts to expand classical music’s audience; Dudamel has worked to create youth orchestras worldwide. And then, of course, there’s the hair: Bernstein’s silky pompadour flung about wildly as he conducted, and while Dudamel’s signature curly brown mop is perhaps a little less springy than when he made his U.S. conducting debut with the L.A. Phil in 2005 and is now peppered with gray, it still pops and sways with the music.
It’s a visible reminder of the personal stamp he continues to leave in a world of relatively staid personalities, and undoubtedly a factor in his broad recognizability. Dudamel is one of the few faces in classical music known far beyond the space, no doubt one of many reasons the L.A. Phil will miss him when his last season as music and artistic director ends and he officially takes over the New York Philharmonic in its 2026-27 season as music and artistic director.
When he does, Dudamel will become the first Latino to helm the oldest symphony orchestra in the United States, joining a pantheon of giants that includes Arturo Toscanini, Gustav Mahler and Bernstein himself. Expectations for his arrival are so heightened, says N.Y. Phil executive advisor and interim CEO Deborah Borda, that even though Dudamel will not formally join for another season, “we saw a record surge in subscription sales, as patrons are concerned they won’t be able to secure tickets once he starts.”
For Dudamel, being the first Latino to lead the N.Y. Phil long term is a matter of “immense pride. But I feel it doesn’t have to do with a race or a culture,” he says. Historically, he notes, the great symphony orchestras in the United States and beyond have been led mostly by European men who not only represented the music they performed, but also the European migration to this country and Latin America.
Dudamel’s story is completely different. The real triumph “is about where I come from,” he says. “I don’t come from a traditional music conservatory. I come from El Sistema de Orquestas, a program where you grow up playing music with your friends.”
It’s the morning after he has conducted Carnival of the Animals and Carmen, and Dudamel has joined me for coffee in an empty Hollywood Bowl meeting room. He has traded the formal white dinner jacket of the Marvel show for offstage casual — track pants, short-sleeved T-shirt and sneakers — and his trademark mix of impish humor (accentuated by his still-boyish dimples) and deep thoughtfulness. Born and raised in Venezuela, Dudamel learned English as an adult, and though it’s grammatically perfect — albeit with a clipped, precise accent — he prefers his native Spanish, which he speaks very quickly (as most Venezuelans do) and with the erudite lingo of an intellectual, often citing the likes of Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno or Mexican writer Octavio Paz.
Today, we’re talking not just about his new appointment and the legacy he’ll leave behind in L.A. as he begins to build another in New York, but also the legacy he grew up with — one that still defines him.
At 43, Dudamel is almost as old as El Sistema Nacional de Orquestas y Coros Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela (The National System of Venezuelan Youth and Children’s Choruses and Orchestras). Known simply as El Sistema, it was founded in 1975 by musician-economist José Antonio Abreu, who held several government appointments and built El Sistema as part of the government structure, guaranteeing its existence and funding regardless of who was in power.
El Sistema was created more than 20 years before the Hugo Chávez regime, built on the premise that music education should be free and accessible to all children, everywhere in the country. For Abreu, who died in 2018, the power of music was transformative, spiritual and lasting, particularly in a developing country rife with poverty. What started with a first rehearsal attended by 11 children eventually grew to 443 schools (each called a “nucleus” in Sistema terminology) and 1,700 satellite centers that teach over 1 million children in Venezuela’s 24 states, according to El Sistema’s official webpage.
Abreu’s philosophy — famously, he said that “a child who plays an instrument with a teacher is no longer poor; he is a child on the rise” — is one Dudamel not only espouses but assumes as his identity. He’s still the music director of the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela and will tour Europe with it next year for El Sistema’s 50th anniversary. (The tour stops are connected to cities with which Dudamel has a personal history.) He has no plans to change his commitment to it. “I would give my life for the orchestra,” he states bluntly. “It gave me everything I’m living now, and that’s why I share it as much as I can.”
Gustavo Dudamel photographed September 3, 2024 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.
Joe Pugliese
But in the last few years, throughout Venezuela’s many political government crises and now, after the contested July reelection of President Nicolás Maduro — who has been in power since 2013 and whose latest reelection has been widely disclaimed both domestically and internationally as rigged — Dudamel has sometimes been criticized by other Venezuelans abroad for not speaking out more against the government.
Some critics have suggested that Maduro has used Venezuela’s youth orchestra to his political advantage. Renowned Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero has long called it a propaganda tool; when Dudamel conducted the ensemble at Carnegie Hall days after Maduro’s reelection, Human Rights Foundation parked a truck outside the venue displaying the message “Maduro Stole The Election” and asking Dudamel, “How long will you continue to serve as Maduro’s puppet and henchman?” The organization explained on social media that it wanted “to remind the world of Maduro’s fraud and to call out Dudamel for engaging in shameless propaganda and providing cover for the Venezuelan dictator.”
But, Dudamel points out, he has not been silent. He has written New York Times and Los Angeles Times op-eds calling for an end to repression in Venezuela and speaking against the government’s plans to rewrite the nation’s constitution. In 2017, after Venezuelan government forces killed a young violinist during a protest, Dudamel published an open letter, writing, “Nothing justifies bloodshed. We must stop ignoring the just cry of the people suffocated by an intolerable crisis. I urgently call on the President of the Republic and the national government to rectify and listen to the voice of the Venezuelan people.”
“I am one voice,” he says today. “People think if I speak out everything is going to change, but that’s not the case. There needs to be radical change, and that will take a lot of time.
“We live in a world of immediacy, where there’s always pressure to say something,” he adds when I ask why he hasn’t spoken out more in the wake of July’s contested election. “When do people actually reflect before speaking? You have to consider the entire situation. El Sistema de Orquestas represents all Venezuela, not just a part of it… El Sistema is focused on the neediest communities. That’s the truth. Isn’t that a way to change the country, far more than shouting? So you have to be prudent because you’re part of that. I’m not an individual speaking as an individual because that’s not how I grew up. I grew up in an orchestra.”
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This was Dudamel’s mindset during his own first El Sistema experience. He started music lessons at a school in his native Barquisimeto, a quaint city of under 1 million people in northwestern Venezuela. This was the mid-’80s, still years before Chávez took power, but a decade into the existence of El Sistema, which by then was thriving.
“I was only 5 years old, but I remember it perfectly,” Dudamel recalls. “It was the home of Doña Doralisa de Medina. It was a tiny colonial house where Maestro Abreu studied as a child. Doralisa was no longer alive, but El Sistema was there. The house had a red gate with musical notes. I walked in down a passageway and then to a patio, and I heard Chopin on the piano, a trumpet, violins. I fell in love with that cacophony.”
El Sistema didn’t pluck Dudamel out of abject poverty. His father is a working salsa trombonist; his mother, a voice teacher. His uncle, a doctor, was also a gifted cuatro player who taught Dudamel how to play popular Venezuelan music: waltzes, tangos, boleros — what Dudamel calls his very essence.
Perhaps because music flowed through his family, Dudamel’s own studies were encouraged but never imposed. He started conducting by accident, when his youth orchestra’s conductor arrived late for rehearsal and Dudamel took the podium, almost as if it was a game.
While no one ever told him he would make it big, his talent would have been impossible to miss. Abreu took an early interest in him, becoming a mentor and moral compass. He’s still very much alive in Dudamel’s head — he constantly begins sentences with “El Maestro Abreu…” — as are his teachings: to think long term, to learn from mistakes, to see music as a social instrument. It was Abreu, after all, who urged Dudamel, then in his early 20s, to enter Germany’s prestigious Mahler Competition, for conducting works by the vaunted composer, in 2004. When he won, it changed his life, catapulting him from local star to global wunderkind.
Among the jurors was Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Finnish composer and current San Francisco Symphony music director who was, at the time, music director of the L.A. Phil. “I was deeply impressed by the talent of this guy, but also, I felt he was such a good guy,” Salonen recalls. “I told him I wanted to invite him to L.A.” As he got to know Dudamel, he continues, “I became so convinced about him being my favorite person to take over in L.A. and become my successor, taking [the orchestra] in a different direction but keeping his curiosity and openness.” A mere three years later, Salonen’s wishes came true: the L.A. Phil — where Deborah Borda was then executive director — appointed Dudamel music director, effective with the 2009-10 season.
Dudamel’s personable demeanor and charismatic conducting style immediately enchanted L.A. audiences and the ensemble’s players alike — he is, after all, affectionately known as “The Dude” to both cohorts. But from the jump, his mission went far beyond the podium. “I was very young, and evidently there was a human and artistic connection with the orchestra and the administration,” he says. “But my first order of business was creating El Sistema here. That’s how YOLA began.”
YOLA is Youth Orchestra Los Angeles, the L.A. Phil’s music education program, that Dudamel created in 2007. It currently serves close to 1,700 young musicians across five sites in the city, providing them free instruments, intensive music instruction (up to 18 hours per week), academic support and leadership training. The program has inspired hundreds of versions around the world; in the United States alone, El Sistema USA serves 140 member programs, 6,000 teaching artists and 25,000 students. Dudamel also launched a mentorship program for young conductors in 2009 and now brings four each season to assist the L.A. Phil’s guest conductors.
But education and training are just part of the equation to “create identity and have people see themselves reflected in the [L.A.] Philharmonic,” Dudamel says. “Right or wrong, cultural artistic institutions are seen as elitist for many, especially those who don’t have resources. The adventure was to make of the [L.A.] Philharmonic an institution people could identify with.”
Dudamel began doing this gradually by being more experimental in his programming, adding more pop and jazz guest artists, bringing Hollywood into the mix (he has famously played multiple concerts of John Williams’ music, with Williams in attendance) and opening up the repertoire to new works and unexpected juxtapositions. A ticket buyer who might not want to hear a world-premiere commission might be lured in by Beethoven; one allergic to the idea of Beethoven might reconsider after seeing an orchestra perform with Ricky Martin.
“For me, it wasn’t only about building a good orchestra,” Dudamel says. “That already existed. But now we have one of the top orchestras in the world, respected as much for its technical level as for its proud acceptance of the repertoire and the way they perform it. This wasn’t ‘Oh, Gustavo, come in and do whatever you want.’ It was figuring out how to build it.” Dudamel had the Hollywood Bowl, Disney Hall and the orchestra. “All the elements were there,” he continues. “We just had to get the best out of them. And there’s still a lot to do.”
Gustavo Dudamel photographed September 3, 2024 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.
Joe Pugliese
Dudamel conducted the L.A. Phil at the 2011 Latin Grammys and the 2019 Academy Awards. He led the orchestra alongside Billie Eilish and FINNEAS as part of the concert film experience Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles, released on Disney+. And he performed at the 2016 Super Bowl halftime show with members of YOLA, alongside Coldplay, Beyoncé and Bruno Mars.
“His authentic, warm connection with audiences really changes how people feel when watching a concert. Audiences are so excited to see him, and there’s a buzz around him,” Noltemy says, noting that pandemic era aside, attendance and audience diversity at the L.A. Phil have increased while the average age of concertgoers has decreased. “He’s certainly not the only conductor who has increased attendance and brought diversity, but he did so in L.A., a city that is so spread out. His concerts at Disney Hall tend to be sold out.”
Those results have occurred even as Dudamel has made a huge effort to foster contemporary composition (typically not an old-school orchestra subscriber’s favorite programming), commissioning music from composers around the world. During his tenure at the L.A. Phil, the orchestra has premiered “at least 300 new works” written specifically for the ensemble, he says, including many from Latin America.
“Latin American repertoire has to stop being [perceived as] exotic,” he says. “It’s not about ‘Wow, we’re playing Latin American music!’ No. It’s the fair thing to do. And the only way to include it in the repertoire is playing it but at the level it deserves, making it part of the regular repertoire of any orchestra.” Case in point: Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, a Dudamel mentee who was just named Carnegie Hall’s composer-in-residence for the coming season. In July, Platoon released her first full album of orchestral works, Revolución Diamantina (performed by the L.A. Phil and conducted by Dudamel), which is being submitted for Grammy consideration.
Just how much of his approach with the L.A. Phil Dudamel will be able to replicate in New York remains to be seen; as he says, he has yet to formally arrive and experience the orchestra. But in recent months, he has been working with both orchestras to forge a connection between the two.
In April, when Dudamel conducted the N.Y. Phil’s Spring Gala at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall, he featured rapper Common, former New York Yankee and classically trained guitarist Bernie Williams and student musicians from several New York music schools, performing a program that also included classical works by Villa-Lobos and Strauss, as well as a premiere commissioned by the N.Y. Phil and Bravo! Vail Music Festival.
It was the kind of bold, cross-genre programming that Dudamel delights in doing in L.A. and clearly wants to emphasize in New York. “It was something completely new and wonderful. For me, that’s the kind of thing that makes the music transcend beyond the sometimes strict academic and intellectual isolation that classical music represents,” he says. “We can develop a lot in terms of repertoire and go beyond Lincoln Center and connect more with the entire community.”
Gustavo Dudamel photographed September 3, 2024 at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.
Joe Pugliese
The N.Y. Phil, for example, is known for its massive annual free outdoor concert on the Great Lawn in Central Park, which is always attended by no less than 50,000, and it also performs in all five boroughs during its annual Concerts in the Parks. But the L.A. Phil has the Hollywood Bowl, an outdoor venue that seats 18,000 and is the orchestra’s home for the entire summer. It’s a big difference that Dudamel would like to somehow bridge.
He also joins the N.Y. Phil after the 2022 reopening of Geffen Hall following a $550 million renovation that drastically improved its acoustics. He says the new venue did not factor into his decision to go to New York, “but it was very important, especially for the orchestra. It’s been a plus to elevate the morale. Now the orchestra is in the process of building its sound with the ‘instrument’ [that is the new hall].” Optimism is also high following the Sept. 20 finalization of a new labor contract that ensured 30% raises for the orchestra’s musicians over the next three years, bringing their base salary to $205,000.
Dudamel is also taking the reins of an institution that lately has had its share of highly publicized troubles. After just one year on the job, N.Y. Phil CEO Gary Ginstling stepped down in July amid rising tensions with the orchestra’s board, according to a New York Times report. And the orchestra’s public image has been tarnished after reports earlier this year resurfaced a 2010 sexual misconduct charge made against two of its musicians. Although charges were never filed against the two men, the controversy led to the musicians being put on leave; they then sued the N.Y. Phil for doing so.
As Dudamel is not yet officially the N.Y. Phil’s music director (for the 2025-26 season, he is music director designate), he won’t comment on administrative matters other than to acknowledge that “those are problems that need to be resolved.” And although the administration of the orchestra ultimately is not his purview, “Obviously the morale of the orchestra is my responsibility, and you have to keep that morale high, taking the best decisions and advocating for justice for everyone,” he says. “That’s essential. We’re not isolated from what happens around us.”
Whatever may have occurred before his tenure begins, Dudamel is without a doubt joining an orchestra that respects him as a conductor, whose musicians have a history and rapport with him. “There was an undeniable spontaneous connection between our musicians and Gustavo, so much so that he was literally their only choice to be our next music director,” Borda says. “Selling tickets is important, but we believe this is best accomplished when you have the right artistic leader.”
Dudamel is acutely aware of the expectations now surrounding him. “It’s a challenge, but life without challenge… it’s nothing!” he says with some relish. “But I’m not a savior here. I have nothing to save. What we have to do is build, and that’s not just up to me. We have a great team.” And after all, he’s Dudamel — and by now, he understands it comes with the territory.
“People want you to scream what they scream, but no. To me, change isn’t about screaming but about building things that last, as I learned from Maestro Abreu,” he says. “I sincerely believe artists should be symbols of unity … They must guarantee that cathartic, unifying space we all need — not just here or in Venezuela, but everywhere.”
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This fall, for example, Dudamel will lead the L.A. Phil in Mendelssohn’s music from A Midsummer’s Night Dream with his wife, Spanish actress María Valverde, providing narration — music by a German composer, written for the work of a British playwright who derived it from a Nordic story, now narrated in Spanish, conducted by a Venezuelan and performed by an American orchestra. Plus, the evening will feature the premiere of Ortiz’s new cello concerto.
“It’s the kind of thing you don’t even remark upon because it feels natural. But it’s a true reflection of diversity,” Dudamel says. “When you see all these elements come together, you realize, ‘Wow, this is powerful.’ ”
He speaks about this blend of so many seemingly disparate elements as if it’s destiny, or magic. But a moment like that — much like a career such as Dudamel’s — doesn’t occur by happenstance or without purpose.
“One thing about Gustavo I think needs to be said is that for someone who had a lot of success from very early on, he’s remarkable in that he never lost his center,” Salonen says. “He has never lost his ideals. He believes in music as a social cause, and he believes in music and the arts as a very central thing in keeping the fabric of society strong. And despite all the success and fame, he’s still the same guy I met all those years ago.”
This story appears in the Oct. 5, 2024, issue of Billboard.
After the breakthrough year she has had, Sabrina Carpenter is likely to contend in multiple categories when Grammy nominations are announced Nov. 8. Her latest studio project, Short n’ Sweet, is considered a shoo-in for a best pop vocal album nod and could potentially be up for album of the year. And she could even land a nomination for best new artist — despite Short n’ Sweet being her sixth full-length.
How can an artist who has released six albums be in the conversation for best new artist? Because, while the Grammys set a minimum number of releases an artist must have to qualify in this category (five singles/tracks or one album), there is no maximum. Instead, the Grammys’ rules and guidelines booklet says nominations for the honor hinge on when “the artist had attained a breakthrough or prominence” — and it delegates that determination to a screening committee.
So Carpenter’s potential nomination comes down to whether the screening committee thinks she had achieved prominence as of Sept. 15, 2023, the last day of the previous eligibility year. At that point, the highest she had ever climbed on the Billboard Hot 100 was a decidedly decaf No. 48, for “Skin” in February 2021. She performed on the MTV Video Music Awards’ preshow on Sept. 12, 2023. (This year, by contrast, her medley of three hits that had each reached the top three on the Hot 100 was a highlight of the main show.)
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Megan Moroney is another not-quite-so-new artist whom the screening committee will likely discuss at length. She had a No. 30 hit on the Hot 100 in May 2023 with “Tennessee Orange,” and her popularity has continued to build since: In May 2024, she won new female artist of the year at the Academy of Country Music Awards.
Other top contenders in the category this year, including Chappell Roan, Benson Boone, Shaboozey, Teddy Swims, Sexyy Red and Reneé Rapp, more clearly fit the best new artist criteria the Grammys outline.
The rules in this category have changed over the years as the Recording Academy has struggled to strike just the right balance: not too strict, not too lenient. In the past, the academy has sometimes disqualified artists for reasons that may now seem petty; take Whitney Houston, who had recorded a couple of duets prior to releasing her debut album and was therefore deemed ineligible, or singer-songwriter Richard Marx, who had contributed a song to a soundtrack. Other times, the academy has leaned too far in the other direction. Robert Goulet won in 1963, two years after he became a star in the Broadway musical Camelot. When Alessia Cara claimed the prize in 2018, it was nearly two years after her ballad “Here” hit the top five on the Hot 100.
Three past winners for best new artist — Crosby, Stills & Nash (who won in 1970), Jody Watley (1988) and Lauryn Hill (1999) — wouldn’t be eligible under today’s rules. David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Graham Nash were all already known for their work in previous groups, as were Watley (in Shalamar) and Hill (Fugees).
Perhaps the academy should have just named the award “best new or developing artist” or “best breakthrough artist” to skirt the issue of whether these talents were truly new, but given the marquee award’s notoriety, such a change is now unlikely. Voters are probably stuck with best new artist — along with the yearly debates over who should and shouldn’t qualify for it.
And if Carpenter isn’t just nominated but steps onto the stage on Grammy night to accept the award, well, it won’t be without precedent. In 2001, Shelby Lynne won the accolade — precisely six albums into her career.
This story appears in the Oct. 5, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Sitting in her childhood bedroom and noodling on her guitar in February 2024, 24-year-old Gigi Perez was thinking about the scope of her songwriting. She’d been ruminating for a while on the idea of a frantic kind of love, and how to connect it to her lyricism. “When that person is so constant in your life, it’s kind of like you fall into it, and you have nothing else to grasp on to,” she tells Billboard. “It came from that desperate place.”
All of a sudden, a line popped into her head: “Kiss me on the mouth and love me like a sailor.” As she kept strumming and writing out new lines to add to the chorus of her growing song, the singer-songwriter realized she wasn’t the only one listening. “My door happened to be open, and my little sister walks by and says, ‘Oh, Gigi, that’s really awesome,’ ” she recalls.
And as the idea has moved from work in progress to completed product, it’s clear that the world feels the same way. After Perez began teasing the track in earnest on her TikTok in the spring, users quickly latched onto the hook, clamoring to hear a full version. They finally got to hear it on July 26, when Perez unveiled “Sailor Song,” a stirring, emotionally raw ballad that sees Perez turning her feelings of longing into a sweeping, queer-coded love song. The song debuted on the Aug. 31-dated Billboard Hot 100 at No. 98, and it has since spent six weeks on the chart, reaching a No. 46 high on the list dated Sept. 28.
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For Perez, the sudden, rapid success of “Sailor Song” feels like a culmination of all the work she’s put into her independent career — and one that enabled her to accept a record deal with Island Records in September. “I feel truly ready for this,” she says. “And I know exactly what I’m looking for.”
Perez walks Billboard through the writing process of “Sailor Song,” explains why she learned how to produce her own work and breaks down what it means to have a queer love song making waves in modern pop culture.
When did you first start working on “Sailor Song”? What was the original idea that led you to making this?
A lot of the process for me is typically just having my guitar and freestyling, and that’s mostly how the songs come — I was in that progression of writing, and I just said, “Kiss me on the mouth and love me like a sailor.” So, I kept going; I had the chorus done that night.
It really just stayed as a chorus for a while, and the lyrics had changed. There were certain little words that changed the meaning of what [the song] was. Once I had written the verses, I pulled a melody from another song I had written and put that into this song. It really is one of those things where it was a puzzle putting it together, but there wasn’t much resistance. Other times, in order to get something like that, you have to really dig for it.
I love a song that is good at creating imagery without having to explicitly spell out the imagery — the use of the sailor as an image almost makes the song feel mythical in scale, which is really effective.
There’s something about this thought — and I don’t know if it’s because I grew up by the water and spent so much time in my childhood at the beach — that little by little, these beach and sea and water themes just kept appearing in my songs. It’s really sweet because I was thinking, “How do you compile the things that are on your heart and that you want to say in a way that makes sense?” It wasn’t until “Sailor Song” that I looked back and was like, “There’s been a whole path being laid subconsciously,” which is very cool.
I was struck by the fact that your voice sounds like it’s in the distance on this track — what did your setup look like when recording and producing “Sailor Song”?
I went into this chapter of my life [feeling] in my soul like I hit a point where I wasn’t collaborating with people because I wanted to, but because I relied on it. There was a lack of expression on the production side, [but] I think things ended up falling together perfectly. I moved back home, and in the same way I taught myself the guitar, I watched a bunch of YouTube videos and messaged the collaborators who I really admired to ask them questions about producing. It was a lot of throwing things at the wall and learning little things here and there. Like, how does EQ [equalization] really work? What is a compressor? I was allowed time to really experiment with production and recording. It makes me feel the same way that I felt when I was 17 — that’s something I keep coming back to: That first rush of recording, when I was just doing it with my high school band, and we were just uploading files on Spotify and SoundCloud.
As far as the recording and what happened, I use an SM7 [microphone], and I started doing this thing [while recording my voice] where I do three vocals and I pan [one] a little bit to the left, [one] a little bit to the right and one right in the middle. And then I threw in certain kinds of reverbs that give it a roomy kind of sound. I also have an amazing mixer, Matt Emonson, and he just takes it away from there. I just wanted something that felt really intimate and yet really big.
Once you started teasing this song on TikTok, it blew up and fans were itching to hear the full thing. What was that like for you to witness in real time?
I was really happy. I feel like I’d gotten to a certain point where I just started enjoying music again in a way that I truly felt like was honoring my happiness. That was the main principle that I felt through being independent and being able to work on music in a different way. And then when I saw that people were really enjoying it, I was like, “That’s so genuinely awesome.” It was a slow burn in terms of getting to where it’s gotten to now but to know that it was something that really pulled on people means everything to me.
One of the things in life that I’ve struggled with — and part of why I decided that I wanted to be an artist — is the feeling of loneliness that comes with the lie that no one understands you. I think about the artists that changed my life in that way, and one of the first gay projects that I had that with was Troye Sivan’s [2015 debut album] Blue Neighbourhood. That changed my life. I couldn’t even imagine that somebody could be there for me during a time when I couldn’t express or understand what I was feeling. I didn’t grow up in a space where that was something that existed, and if it did, it was very taboo. It’s so beautiful now that there’s so much media that really highlights the gay and queer experience. Kids need that. Actually, people in general, not just children. There are still people all around this world [who] live in an online world and escape through music. It’s very special to me that, in any capacity, I could be a part of that.
To that point, it feels like queer messaging in music is having a genuine moment this year where songs that are about queerness are hitting the charts in a major way. What is your reaction to that level of visibility in the mainstream?
I think we’re only scratching the surface right now. Representation is so, so important. It’s the thing that gives people the courage and the ability to dream that you can do whatever. You, as a person, can take up space. I think there’s an identity part of it, and then there’s just the actual human part of it, and those two things are very important to me. Every queer artist is going to share their story and their identity differently. I’m only one person, and my message is only going to connect [with] and reach the people that it’s meant to. That’s why I think it opens up the bridge [for other artists], and I’m really excited to see everything that’s happening in queer music.
You recently signed to Island Records — what has the transition from independent artist to being signed at a major looked like for you so far?
I feel so blessed. It’s been such a weirdly spiritual experience, in terms of things happening behind the scenes. It feels like this thing is really guided. I didn’t know a year ago that any of this would happen, and I think I had a very clear vision where I said, “I’m going to stay independent, and this is the way I’m going to do it.” The fact that that has changed [means] I’m so grateful for all of the experiences that I’ve had over the last few months to lead me to this moment. They’re going to be an amazing home.
A version of this story appears in the Sept. 28, 2024, issue of Billboard.
“I try not to listen to pop radio, ever,” Amy Allen proclaims as she scrolls through Spotify on her phone. The singer-songwriter is recapping her recent listening: She has been on a Vince Gill kick; she always has The Cardigans in rotation; she recently discovered Donna Summer’s 1974 single “Lady of the Night”; she’s a fan of indie star Adrianne Lenker of the band Big Thief. Allen goes for early-morning runs on the boardwalks of Venice Beach in Los Angeles near her home, and while she used to soundtrack them with a classic rock playlist, for the past six months she has been blasting ABBA’s greatest hits, starting each morning jogging to “Dancing Queen” and “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight).”
Allen has plenty of pop radio classics in her queue — but new pop is never in the mix. “It’s a very concerted effort I make to not do that, and to try to be influenced by things that I love and not what’s current,” Allen explains, “because what’s current now is not going to be current by the time anything I write comes out.”
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Whether she hears today’s biggest hits or not, Allen is now the one doing the influencing when it comes to the shape of current pop. After years of bouncing around the industry and absorbing sonic ideas, the 32-year-old from a small town in Maine has found her niche in studio sessions with superstars, braiding her appreciation of dense lyricism and 2000s bubblegum — “I’ve always loved a big pop chorus and I’ve always loved intricate storytelling,” she says — into an ability to create hits perfectly suited for the TikTok era, but likely to last long beyond it.
Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet, which spent three weeks atop the Billboard 200 following its August release, has been Allen’s highest-profile win as a co-writer to date, with three smash singles (“Espresso,” “Taste” and Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper “Please Please Please”) full of idiosyncratic one-liners that have helped augment Carpenter’s inventive wit and transform her into an arena headliner. Yet Allen’s studio résumé preceding that breakthrough — credits on songs by Olivia Rodrigo, Justin Timberlake, Jonas Brothers, Maren Morris, Koe Wetzel and Niall Horan over the past 18 months alone — underline her status as a collaborator who helps A-listers at all stages of their careers land the right level of emotional punch and unlock the viral-ready turns of phrase that will transform a song into not only a hit, but a cultural moment.
“She knows how to articulate feelings in a way that most writers would envy,” says Tate McRae, who tapped Allen for the majority of her 2023 album, Think Later, including its slippery rhythmic-pop hit “Greedy,” which peaked at No. 3 on the Hot 100. “I feel incredibly lucky to have written my last album with Amy, and I sincerely look forward to all that is to come together in the future.”
Joelle Grace Taylor
Two years after landing her first songwriter of the year, non-classical nomination at the Grammy Awards (she was one of the inaugural nominees for the relatively new honor), Allen seems like a shoo-in to get a nod for the 2025 ceremony — and potentially become the first woman to take home the prize — thanks to the whirlwind success of her past year. Yet her manager, Gabz Landman, points out that, even if Allen is now hitting critical mass, she was a force in the songwriting world years before she was nabbing headlines, now six years removed from co-writing her first Hot 100 No. 1, Halsey’s “Without Me,” and two years after winning an album of the year Grammy for contributing to Harry Styles’ Harry’s House.
“She was an athlete growing up and still runs marathons, and I think a big part of her writing career is this incredible stamina,” says Landman, who’s also a vp of A&R at Warner Chappell Music. “Amy doesn’t quantify or feel proud of things based on chart metrics. She gets contacted by many people to collaborate, and it’s always about whether she’s inspired by [an opportunity] more than ‘What is this person’s standing in the music industry?’ ”
That outlook helps explain why, days after Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet gave Allen a dozen new Hot 100 writing credits, she independently released a self-titled solo album of her own: a 12-song set full of quiet arrangements and understated melodies that sound as far removed from top 40 as possible. The project is the opposite of an iron-hot cash grab — Allen says that some of its songs date back to six years ago, before her songwriting career took off, and they were too meaningful to leave unreleased.
“One of the reasons why I love Amy is because I really see the both-ness in her — she’s a songwriter and she’s a solo artist,” says Jack Antonoff, another studio whiz who also releases his own music with Bleachers. After Antonoff and Allen worked on four songs together for Short n’ Sweet, including “Please Please Please,” he invited her to open for Bleachers overseas during their summer tour. Allen will also support the band at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 4.
For Allen, her co-writing career and solo work represent two separate parts of her creativity and manifest through disparate processes. “When I’m writing with and for somebody else, I always start with the chorus — listening back to the great pop songs of the ’60s and ’70s through today, the chorus is the crux of the song,” she says. “When I’m writing by myself, I always start with the first verse and I just tell the story in a through line, start to finish. That helps me keep them separate, and it allows me to still keep falling in love with songwriting all the time.”
Joelle Grace Taylor
Allen didn’t know which musical role she wanted to play when she was growing up in Windham, Maine: Her first experience performing was in her older sister’s band, which needed a bassist and tapped Allen, even though she was 9 and had never played the instrument. After kicking around the music scene in nearby Portland as a teenager, Allen went to nursing school at Boston College (“As a mistake,” she quips) before transferring to Berklee College of Music, despite not knowing any theory or even how to read sheet music.
“I was literally failing all of my classes,” Allen recalls, “but I could at least skate by in some of the songwriter classes. The class that helped me the most was actually this poetry class, where we studied great lyricists and poets. Something in my brain clicked about lyric writing, the cadence of rhymes and lines — the little things that might make people roll their eyes and be like, ‘Oh, that’s so songwriter-y.’ ”
After graduating, Allen fronted the pop-rock group Amy & The Engine, playing around New York in the mid-2010s before the band broke up and she committed to sharpening her skills as a solo writer. In late 2017, Allen was packing up for a West Coast move, and in her final New York session, she presented songwriter Micah Premnath with a melodic concept that had been stuck in her head — which, after some lyrical workshopping, morphed into “Back to You,” a top 20 hit for Selena Gomez. Soon after Allen touched down in Los Angeles, she linked with producer-songwriter Louis Bell to help make “Without Me,” then contributed to Styles’ “Adore You,” which turned into his first Pop Airplay chart-topper as a solo artist.
Allen’s transition from fledgling writer to hit-maker may have been sudden, but she had been studying the greats for a while. She grew up admiring Carole King, John Prine, Dolly Parton and Tom Petty, while also analyzing Max Martin’s pristinely crafted hits for Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys. By the time she attended Berklee, Allen had started to identify her favorite studio minds and study their discographies. “I remember listening to my favorite pop songs, and Julia Michaels was behind all of them — it was like, ‘Who is this chick that is soundtracking my college years?’ ” she recalls with a laugh. Now Allen and Michaels share credits on five Short n’ Sweet tracks and sing background vocals together on the song “Coincidence.” (Allen also harmonizes with Carpenter on “Espresso.”)
Amy Allen photographed on August 20, 2024 in Los Angeles.
Joelle Grace Taylor
Like Michaels, Allen has developed a knack for taking straightforward lyrical phrases and contorting them until they stick in your cerebrum — think Carpenter declaring, “That’s that me, espresso,” or McRae exclaiming, “Obvious that you want me, but/I would want myself.” While Allen says she would probably have more 10-second hooks at the ready if she paid closer attention to TikTok, the majority of her biggest co-written choruses have resulted from actual conversations with artists — common ground discovered, then whittled down into universal refrains.
“Production trends turn over and change every six months, in my opinion,” she says. “But I think a great song, if it’s stripped down to guitar and piano, melody and lyric — it doesn’t change a ton.”
With Carpenter — whom Allen started working with for her last album, 2022’s Emails I Can’t Send, contributing extra bite to tracks like “Vicious” and “Feather” — Allen has found a confidante and kindred spirit, unafraid to embrace a double entendre or, in the case of the “Please Please Please” chorus, a well-placed “motherf–ker.” Antonoff says that he, Allen and Carpenter knocked out three songs for Short n’ Sweet, including “Please Please Please,” in a single day together at New York’s Electric Lady Studios, often taking breaks to double over in laughter. “The depth of the d-ck jokes just goes on and on,” he says, “and then a song can happen randomly — that’s the magic of a studio space.”
Short n’ Sweet earned 1.2 million equivalent album units in just its first three weeks out, according to Luminate, with 11 of its 12 tracks reaching the Hot 100’s top 40. Allen says there are “so many reasons why I feel like I owe Sabrina my first-born child,” but the album’s commercial success isn’t the biggest one.
“Her musicality and personality blow me away every time that we work together,” she says of Carpenter, “but I’m also so grateful to her because I’ve never gotten to be part of every song on an album before. That’s so in line with what I grew up loving — digging in like that.”
Joelle Grace Taylor
Landman notes that one sign of Allen’s growth is her increased involvement in major pop projects beyond a co-write or two: Along with all of Short n’ Sweet, she contributed to six songs on Timberlake’s Everything I Thought It Was, six on Wetzel’s 9 Lives and eight on McRae’s Think Later. Landman chalks that up to two reasons: She picked the right collaborators, and, post-pandemic and post-Zoom sessions, in-person studio hangs have let her personality shine. “She’s had a great rapport with so many artists that have turned into friendships,” Landman says. “And I think that people have noted [that] if you’re winning with somebody, keep doing what you’re doing.”
Allen is heeding that advice as she continues picking up co-writing projects and supporting her self-titled solo debut. Releasing an album under her own name has made her realize that the paths can coexist after previously thinking it impossible. “The last year-and-a-half has made it crystal clear in my brain that I only live once, so why do I have to pick?” she says.
Allen likens the balancing act to the way that any songwriter must find a happy medium between working at a breakneck pace and accruing enough life experiences to have something to write about. Amid a whirlwind professional year, “in terms of taking time off, I’ve done that more this year than any other year in my life,” Allen says. “And I’ve been writing my favorite songs I’ve ever written.”
This story appears in the Oct. 5, 2024, issue of Billboard.
How do you think my life has been these past few months?” Shaboozey asks with a wry smile.
The 29-year-old multihyphenate artist — one of 2024’s biggest breakout acts — has twisted my question and flipped it back on me, his measured poker face masking the tornado of emotions he’s feeling. There’s no hiding that he’s tired; we’re speaking the day after September’s MTV Video Music Awards, where he snagged two nods (including best new artist), and its star-studded afterparty, where he mingled with the likes of Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter. Some hours later, he went to Brooklyn for his Billboard cover shoot, soundtracked by Zach Bryan and Chris Stapleton. Now we’re grabbing lunch in a hotel restaurant, where Shaboozey has finally settled down with a half-dozen Prince Edward Island oysters and some fries.
The VMAs were just the latest marquee moment in a year full of the kind of highlights most artists dream of achieving over their entire careers. A year in which his appearances on Beyoncé’s culture-shifting Cowboy Carter (on “Spaghettii” and “Sweet * Honey * Buckiin’ ”) were just the beginning of his string of feats. A year when Shaboozey went from a supporting stint on a Jessie Murph tour to his own headlining North American tour. A year when his own “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” notched a historic 12 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. And a year that could still get even bigger if “A Bar Song” gets likely-looking Grammy nominations for record and song of the year; or if the album it’s on, the Billboard chart-topping Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going, gets album of the year and best country album nods; or if Shaboozey himself contends for best new artist.
At his core, Shaboozey (or Boozey, to his friends) exudes the calm cool of a rebel who always knew his outside-the-lines plan would lead him to glory. Still, America’s favorite new cowboy admits that he doesn’t always “feel prepared for this stuff. You just kind of get thrown in it.”
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With “A Bar Song” — which has racked up over 771 million official on-demand U.S. streams, according to Luminate — Shaboozey became the first bona fide Black outlaw country star, a status he has been working toward achieving for a decade. The son of Nigerian immigrants, the artist born Collins Obinna Chibueze grew up just outside Woodbridge, Va., the second of four children. Though he spent two years at boarding school in Nigeria, Shaboozey spent most of his childhood in Virginia, including his high school years, when his football coach’s misspelling of his surname evolved into his nickname and now-stage name.
“It could be a little confusing at times,” he says of growing up Nigerian American in Woodbridge, a Washington, D.C., exurb that was markedly more rural in his youth than it is today. “Hearing your name [mispronounced] during attendance was always a thing; you felt like you had to make it easier for everyone else to understand.” Most Black children of immigrants know such experiences (microaggressions, really) well, and some are also familiar with another phenomenon that marked Shaboozey’s childhood: the endless words of support from parents who understood the importance of reminding their children of their power in a society actively trying to strip them of it. “If I’m going to do anything,” Shaboozey — whose surname means “God is king” in Igbo — pledges today, “I’m going to make sure I’m damn good at it.”
Vintage t-shirt, Wales Bonner pants.
Eric Ryan Anderson
Growing up in Virginia — the home of all-time greats like Patsy Cline and Missy Elliott — also meant that Shaboozey was always aware of the intersections between diverse music genres and styles. But first and foremost, he rooted himself in his father’s playlists, where he encountered country legends Don Williams and Kenny Rogers. As a kid, “outside of MTV and BET, I wasn’t getting the specific names of the artists my parents played around the house and spoke about,” Shaboozey says. “It was all just music to me.”
He didn’t just latch on to the music his father played — he was also enamored with the aesthetic of his pop’s old photos. “Every time I saw a picture of him, he was always in Wranglers. He always gave ‘young country guy,’ ” Shaboozey recalls. From Wrestlemania to Westerns, American culture and its archetypes are exported to, and emulated in, nearly every corner of the globe. Still, most media about cowboys disproportionately features white men, which can feel incongruous to those who feel connected to cowboy culture’s actually multicultural history — and it’s for those people whom Shaboozey wanted to create a unique soundtrack.
At 19, Shaboozey moved to Los Angeles — his first time truly living beyond Virginia — with the goal of writing scripts, making movies and recording music. Shortly after, in 2014, he scored his first quasi-viral moment with his piano-trap banger “Jeff Gordon.” (Shaboozey is a big NASCAR fan.) Around that time, he was also delving into the catalogs of rock icons like AC/DC and The Rolling Stones, indoctrinating himself into the school of Prince and studying the folk roots of Bob Dylan and John Prine.
“In that [period of] discovery, I found country music to be the thing that resonated with me in a really strong way,” he says. “Me being from Virginia, me loving the style and the way of life and the things they talked about. It all seemed very peaceful. It seemed like I could be real.” Even more importantly, Shaboozey began to realize that Lil Wayne and Rogers could be complementary, not opposing, influences. Finally, he understood: “This is who I am.”
When Shaboozey first tried to launch a country album, the project bricked. Two years before the release of his 2018 debut album, Lady Wrangler, he had joined forces with writer-producer Nevin Sastry for Wrangler — which remains shelved to this day.
Shaboozey and Sastry met in 2016, and their connection was so strong and immediate that within a month, Shaboozey moved into Sastry’s apartment. Before completing the “more rap-adjacent” Lady Wrangler, Shaboozey decided to put Wrangler to the side because “something in my head told me, ‘The world ain’t ready for this,’ ” he says. In a sense, he was right. Lady Wrangler (released on Republic Records) arrived in the aftermath of “Daddy Lessons,” Beyoncé’s first country music foray that was rejected by the Recording Academy’s country music committee for the 2017 Grammys and that she performed with The Chicks at the 50th annual Country Music Association (CMA) Awards, one of the most controversial moments in the event’s history; and a few months before Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus rewrote the rules of country, pop and hip-hop with 2019’s “Old Town Road.”
“The rap we looked at on TV was always glamorized,” Shaboozey recalls. “That wasn’t the reality for everybody. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t write music in that world. I found country music could teach people that the little things in life are where the value is. Just having a working truck that you can take your girl in to ride to a cliff and watch the sunset is enough.”
RRL leather jacket, Huey Lewis denim jacket, Wales Bonner pants and shoes.
Eric Ryan Anderson
Sastry and Shaboozey have now collaborated on all three of the star’s full-length projects, but it was 2017’s “Winning Streak,” a woozy trap fantasia gilded in Western aesthetics, that helped Shaboozey land a deal with Republic and release Lady Wrangler. The label dropped Shaboozey following that album’s release (Shaboozey is tight-lipped as to why; Republic did not respond to a request for comment by press time), and soon after, the coronavirus pandemic changed the path of his life. In 2020, Shaboozey met Abas Pauti while playing basketball with mutual friends; after the two got to know each other, Pauti immediately offered to move across the country once Shaboozey told him that Virginia was the place he “needs to be in order to be the artist he wants to be” — a display of commitment that inspired the then-budding star to make Pauti his manager.
They remained in L.A., and by the following year, Shaboozey signed to indie label EMPIRE — which had previously worked with Black country artists like Billboard chart-topper Kane Brown — after a successful pitch from Eric Hurt, vp of A&R publishing, Nashville, at the company. “We understood what he was trying to do and we loved it, but obviously, it wasn’t anything that was out at the moment,” EMPIRE president Tina Davis says of her first impression of Shaboozey and his music. “It’s a feeling you get when artists on a [certain] level come into your presence. It’s kind of like the air goes out of the room. His presence was so full and prominent, I knew he was going to go somewhere.”
Standing at around 6 feet 4 with broad shoulders and lengthy wicks, Shaboozey is a dark-skinned Black man who wears his racial identity with pride. He’s a magnetic presence in any room he enters, though not in a domineering way. But his often stoic face can conceal the “manic, creative energy,” as Sastry puts it, that lies behind it — which he harnessed to finesse his sound and style going into his second and third albums.
On Cowboys Live Forever, Shaboozey joined forces with rising producer Sean Cook (one of the talents behind Paul Russell’s “Lil Boo Thang”), with whom he wrote three songs in three days. “In the studio, he likes to ride on music,” explains Cook, who later co-produced “A Bar Song.” “Sometimes he’ll get on the mic and I’ll loop the guitar, and he’ll freestyle melodies and conceptualize lyrics. Other times, he’ll sit in the booth and write the song as he goes; on the newest album, he actually brought in some guitar ideas himself.” With Cowboys Live Forever, Shaboozey intensified his country bent and enhanced his narrative-driven, cinematic soundscapes that straddle hip-hop and Americana-steeped country.
That genre-agnostic approach culminated with “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” 2024’s longest-running Hot 100 No. 1. Written and recorded in November 2023, near the end of the Where I’ve Been sessions, “A Bar Song” — which interpolates J-Kwon’s 2004 smash, “Tipsy,” and was borne out of Shaboozey’s desire to flip an aughts song — didn’t even need a final mix for those who heard it to recognize it as a hit. Pauti, who was in the studio the night Shaboozey recorded the song, immediately texted Jared Cotter, a Range Music partner who joined Team Shaboozey as co-manager in 2022: “We got one.”
For her part, EMPIRE’s Davis was so instantly enthralled by the track that she shifted her attention from getting the album to the finish line to clearing the “Tipsy” interpolation. J-Kwon, whose “Tipsy” reached No. 2 on the Hot 100, was so thrilled with Shaboozey’s country flip of his track that “he was listening to the record for three weeks straight, not clearing it because he thought the song was already out,” as Shaboozey tells it with a glimmer of childlike glee in his eye. Once J-Kwon eventually cleared the track, it primed the path for “A Bar Song” to become the first song by a Black man to simultaneously top Hot Country Songs and Country Airplay — and the longest-running No. 1 debut country single since Carrie Underwood’s “Jesus, Take the Wheel” in 2006.
Although “A Bar Song” dropped after Shaboozey’s dual appearances on Beyoncé’s historic Cowboy Carter, the whistling track was instrumental in helping him secure those coveted features. When Shaboozey performed the then-unreleased song at Range Showcase Night at Winston House in Venice, Calif., in early 2024, the crowd loved it so much that he played it again. According to Cotter and Pauti, in that crowd was one of Beyoncé’s A&R executives, Ricky Lawson, who instantly knew Shaboozey would be perfect for the record Beyoncé was then working on. Shaboozey says he was initially invited only to write on Cowboy Carter; then, Beyoncé asked him to record some verses, one of which included his freestyled outro on “Spaghettii” (with Linda Martell, which peaked at No. 31 on the Hot 100), and he appeared as well on “Sweet * Honey * Buckiin’ ” (No. 61).
The “Beyoncé bump,” as Cotter calls it, spurred Shaboozey’s team to advance the release date of “A Bar Song” a couple of weeks to April 12. “In this world of virality and quick hits, we wanted to be closer [to Cowboy Carter’s release] and be able to capitalize [on the exposure] with what we thought was a hit,” Cotter says. Early in its gargantuan run, “A Bar Song” usurped Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ’Em” atop Hot Country Songs, making the collaborators the first Black artists to earn back-to-back No. 1s in the chart’s nearly 70-year history.
“It just feels great to see a true talent like Shaboozey win,” a representative from Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment tells Billboard. “He has a clear sense of the artist he always was, and now the world knows it. To see him dominate the country space is a win for all those Black artists who have been authentically honing their craft for a long time now.”
Gucci sweater, Helmut Lang archive top, Levi’s jeans, Birkenstock shoes.
Eric Ryan Anderson
As “A Bar Song” came to dominate the summer, it continued to help Shaboozey notch major milestones. When he played the BET Awards for the first time in June, J-Kwon joined him for a whimsical, saloon-set mashup of “A Bar Song” and “Tipsy.”
“Traditionally, I feel like country music wasn’t really accepted in that space as much,” says Shaboozey, who became just the second Black male solo country artist to play the BET Awards (after Brown in 2020). “I even felt — whether that’s my own insecurity or [self-judgment] — ‘Is this thing really connecting with people?’ as I’m performing the song. That’s my biggest fear… when I’m feeling out of place in this space. But that’s what I want to do with my music: be disruptive and show people that music is progressing.”
Shaboozey and J-Kwon’s performance was well-received — including by rappers such as Skilla Baby, French Montana and Quavo, all of whom gave him words of support at the show or hit him up in the days following. “I love hip-hop; I’m a part of their community, too,” Shaboozey reiterates — and he’s right.
Shaboozey is as country as he is hip-hop, as evidenced by the featured artists he tapped for Where I’ve Been. While Texas country-rocker Paul Cauthen helps bring the house down on “Last of My Kind” — ESPN’s new Atlantic Coast Conference college football anthem — Dallas rapper BigXthaPlug appears on the fiery hip-hop party track “Drink Don’t Need No Mix.” But while Shaboozey could promote songs from this album that don’t cater to country audiences, he doesn’t currently plan to. “Shaboozey is a country artist — that’s what he’s passionate about,” Cotter stresses. “What we’re seeing across all genres is artists don’t need to be in one box. Shaboozey is the first one that’s genuinely both in hip-hop and country music; he can rap as well as he can sing. We’re definitely going to promote that because it’s who he is. It’s not a new thing that we’re trying.”
“[Shaboozey] is a little bit of everything,” Davis adds. “That’s what separates him from everyone else. I think Taylor Swift shows that you don’t have to stick with one genre — you can try them all and push them all.”
Vintage t-shirt, Huey Lewis denim jacket, Wales Bonner pants and shoes.
Eric Ryan Anderson
But Nashville and its leading industry players have not been so uniformly open-minded regarding Shaboozey’s generally genreless approach, or his appearance. “They kept wondering if other songs were country on his album or if it was just going to be one song and then all of a sudden, he’s a street thug,” Davis recalls. “I think it’s both [his sound and appearance]. Obviously, if you looked at him walking by and he didn’t have a belt buckle and cowboy boots, you’d swear he was doing something different. I think it’s just the stereotype of what people see, but having those conversations and sharing the whole album made things a little bit easier.” While Shaboozey is acutely aware that he’s “definitely a new artist in [the country] space,” he says he now feels embraced by Nashville — and vows that his “next project is going to be even more country, even more dialed in.”
And Shaboozey has made inroads with the country establishment, including at a pair of country music awards shows. He scored 12 nods at the People’s Choice Country Awards and two nominations — new artist and single of the year — at the CMA Awards. At the latter ceremony, Shaboozey is just one of three Black performers to be nominated, alongside Michael Trotter Jr. and Tanya Trotter of The War and Treaty. “There’s a weight that comes with it,” Shaboozey acknowledges, adding that Michael personally called to congratulate him — and also to recognize that “Man, it’s just us.” (Significantly, Beyoncé and Cowboy Carter didn’t receive any CMA nominations. “All I know is that she made a great body of work and I know she’s proud of that,” Shaboozey says of the snubs.)
The crossover success of “A Bar Song” has conjured comparisons to “Old Town Road,” another country-rap joint that ruffled more than a few feathers back in 2019 — and Shaboozey has found kinship with Lil Nas X. “That’s the homie,” says Shaboozey, who connected with Lil Nas at the previous night’s VMAs. “We haven’t had deep conversations, but I can tell what’s happening to me now is probably very similar to what he experienced.”
For Shaboozey, the VMAs were a “fishbowl” experience, where he was aware of outsiders looking at Lil Nas and him, waiting for the two to interact and acknowledge how their stories intersect. “It’s like everyone is like, ‘Do they know?’ ” he quips. And while the VMAs are technically genre-agnostic, Shaboozey did feel a bit of a disconnect with the audience. “Love the VMAs, but sometimes it felt like they weren’t there for me, to be honest,” he says with a droll chuckle, noting how some audience members seemed almost embarrassed to cheer for him after screaming for more top 40-facing pop stars. “But there were more Black folks and people working the event that were showing me love, and that’s what it’s about.”
Givenchy sweater, Helmut Lang archive top, Object From Nothing jeans, Birkenstock shoes, Cartier, Sydney Evan, and Spinelli Kilcollin jewelry.
Eric Ryan Anderson
He knows, however, that these awards shows are all a prelude to February’s Grammys. In addition to best new artist and record and song of the year for “A Bar Song,” Shaboozey will likely contend for best country song and best country solo performance. Should he take home a trophy in the country field, he would become just the fifth Black act to do so, joining Charley Pride, The Pointer Sisters, Aaron Neville and Darius Rucker, who tells Billboard, “We’re fortunate to have Shaboozey in country music.” Shaboozey’s team confirms that it will submit Where I’m From and its songs in the country field, and the campaign includes stops at “the right looks,” according to Pauti, including The Late Show With Stephen Colbert (where he recently performed his new single, “Highway”), a sit-down interview with Gayle King, an intimate L.A. showcase and meeting Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
“I think it’s something for me to bring home to everybody,” Shaboozey muses about his potential first Grammy wins. “This is the peak of the mountain as far as recognition comes. This is a long-standing ceremony, it’s history and tradition, and hopefully we’re able to take it home. That childhood fear of never winning anything is still there. It would mean the world to win one of these things, but if not, the year we had was crazy. If not now, it’ll come. We in the club now.”
“The Grammys are always going to matter to me,” says EMPIRE founder Ghazi, whose commitment to a genreless future brought him out to Nashville years before he crossed paths with Shaboozey. “From being a 14-year-old making my first records to now being a seasoned executive, I never lost sight of that journey, and the Grammys never [lose their] luster.”
As Shaboozey picks at his final few French fries, I take in the man sitting across the table from me, who, though he’s currently relaxed in the booth of a Brooklyn eatery, has more than a little of a classic gunslinger’s gleam in his eyes. When he picks up his final oyster, it feels nothing short of poetic. A few years ago, it would have been borderline unimaginable to see someone like him at the zenith of country music, yet here he is — reshaping signifiers of so-called authenticity and injecting them with the street-smart swagger of the contemporary hip-hop gangster. A distinctly 21st-century manifestation of the spirit of Marty Robbins, channeled through a voice and persona equally steeped in Stanley Kubrick, Garth Brooks and Juvenile, Shaboozey is a lone star — a true outlaw who has effectively rewritten the rules of a land that’s actually his to reclaim.
And like any genuine outlaw, he never breaks eye contact while making plain his message: “I’m just making music I love,” Shaboozey says. “It’s cool being recognized, but I’m making music for a group of people that are usually underrepresented. I’m going to keep doing that. It’s good to be that guy — those are the people who are remembered.”
This story appears in the Oct. 5, 2024, issue of Billboard.
At the end of 2022, pop singer-songwriter Mark Ambor felt lost in his music career. Despite recently signing a record deal and releasing his debut EP, Hello World, something didn’t feel right.
“I fell into this routine of teasing a song, [and] if it did well, putting it out, but I was feeling like I wasn’t saying anything I really mean,” he remembers. “I wasn’t digging deep or singing about things important to me.”
To clear his mind, Ambor, 26, embarked on a months-long international backpacking trip with his then-girlfriend — and returned feeling grounded with a whole new wave of inspiration for songs. He quickly wrote the whimsical, acoustic “Good to Be” and now refers to it as the first time he was musically “genuine and fully expressing myself.”
Just a few months later, he struck gold: While playing guitar in his bedroom, he wrote the lyrics, “You and me belong together/Like cold iced tea and warmer weather,” which would become the instantly catchy hook to the cozy, uplifting “Belong Together,” his ultimate breakthrough and first Billboard Hot 100 hit.
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Meredith Jenks
Ambor grew up with a musical background in Pleasantville, N.Y., playing the piano from a young age at his parents’ request. Though the skill took a backseat in high school, he rekindled his love for the instrument as he approached graduation, trading the classical pieces he previously learned for modern-day pop songs. He proceeded to pen his first song that summer, as he grappled with the emotions of having to leave his small hometown to attend Fairfield University in Connecticut. “I didn’t want to leave home,” he says, “and I tried to write a song to get those feelings out.”
He then returned to work that night as a barback and casually sent the song to his parents in a group chat. “My mom was like, ‘Dad and I love this song. Who’s the artist?’ ” he recalls with a laugh. “I was like, ‘Mom, what do you mean?’ It’s me!”
Ambor self-released a few songs while obtaining a marketing degree in college, and upon his graduation in 2020, decided to take six months to completely immerse himself in chasing his dreams as a musician before considering a different job. “COVID happened after I said that,” he recalls. “I got to spend time working on music at home.”
Thanks to a suggestion from a friend, he joined TikTok later that year. He steadily began to grow a following with his cool guy next door vibe: People gravitated not only toward his big smile and curly brown hair, but to his voice and disarming demeanor as well. He soon began posting covers — including breathtaking renditions of Coldplay’s “Yellow” and Billie Eilish’s “Happier Than Ever” — as well as a few originals, and ultimately caught the attention of then-independent manager Kyle Thomson, who admits he’s a “sucker” for a great voice over a piano melody and asked Ambor to send a few demos.
“It was so early on in both of our careers,” says Thomson. “I was excited to dive into something that I felt was going to be a fun project to build.” By the end of 2020, Ambor had signed a management deal with Thomson.
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Like Ambor, Thomson knew that some of his artist’s early work wasn’t playing to the singer-songwriter’s strengths. “At the beginning, he told me he wanted to make early 2000s festival, opera-rock music, like Passion Pit or Grouplove,” he says. “I was like, ‘That doesn’t make sense for what I think your qualities are. Why would you take your natural, raspy voice and distort it with synths?’ What he meant [initially] was that he wanted to make music that made him feel the same way that those bands made people feel.”
But after hearing “Belong Together” for the first time, Thomson knew that Ambor had succeeded in his mission. On the heels of his release of “Good to Be” in October 2023 — and its growing popularity on a global scale — Ambor began to tease the forthcoming new track in late December. And following a few months of building hype on TikTok, “Belong Together” arrived on streaming services on Feb. 16.
Ambor continued to stoke the fire well after its release, posting many videos on the platform of him walking the streets of major European cities while on tour and singing its dialed-up final chorus, several of which have compiled more than 10 million views each. Per Thomson, user-generated content and influencer marketing was crucial in making “Belong Together” “as big as humanly possible.”
By May 11, the single debuted at No. 87 on the Hot 100. It later reached a No. 74 high — and has spent 21 weeks and counting on the ranking. It has also reached Nos. 24 and 20 peaks on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. and Pop Airplay charts, respectively. “Belong Together” has earned 141.6 million official on-demand U.S. streams and 610.2 million official on-demand global streams through Sept. 26, according to Luminate.
“It has been really surreal to write something that is so heartfelt and authentic to myself and then feel it resonate around the world the way it has,” Ambor reflects. “The way a song can mean something to a fan that’s different than my own experience, but it’s their own story that they’ve attached to a song of mine … that part blows my mind.”
Meredith Jenks
In August, Ambor’s debut album, Rockwood, arrived through Hundred Days/Virgin Music Group, despite some hesitation from the rest of his team to put out a full project too quickly. (Ambor notes the success of “Belong Together” helped in convincing them otherwise.) He split with the label soon after its release, and while he doesn’t divulge much on specifics, he emphasizes trusting his gut while continuing to grow his career.
“I think people sometimes get too caught in the industry of it all,” he says. “Maybe I’ll sign to a major; maybe I’ll stay independent forever. What really matters is putting out good music and meeting and talking to the fans.”
“He has the best work ethic of anyone I’ve ever met,” adds Thomson. “Mark thinks that he can be Taylor Swift, and I’m not going to stop him.”
A version of this story appears in the Oct. 5, 2024, issue of Billboard.
While Karol G, Bad Bunny and Peso Pluma dominate the charts — and elevate Colombia, Puerto Rico and Mexico’s music scenes, respectively, to the world stage — a new wave of artists across other Latin American countries is also seeking, and earning, the spotlight.
Earlier this year, Chilean artists scored their first No. 1 Billboard hit since 1991 when newcomers FloyyMenor and Cris MJ’s viral reggaetón hit, “Gata Only,” spent 14 consecutive weeks atop the Hot Latin Songs chart — a feat that would have seemed impossible for the country’s thriving local urban movement just five years ago.
The new generation of Chilean artists has broken out in part thanks to star-studded linkups: Pablo Chill-E on Bad Bunny’s “Hablamos Mañana” (alongside Duki) in 2020; Paloma Mami on Ricky Martin’s “Que Rico Fuera” in 2021; and Cris MJ enlisting Karol G and Ryan Castro for his “Una Noche en Medellín (Remix)” in 2023. All of those tracks made major inroads on Billboard’s Latin charts.
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“We believe a lot in the Chilean market, as it’s experiencing an extraordinary exploitation of music that’s still very young,” says Emilio Morales, managing director of Rimas Publishing, which this year expanded its services to the country through a strategic agreement with Chilean-based label Wild Company, providing A&R services, artist development and more. “Our interest in signing Chilean artists is not just to sign them. We are looking for new horizons for them and for them to be consumed outside of Chile. We want to boost their music to European and international markets.”
Argentina’s music scene has also stretched beyond the country’s borders. Among the speakers during this year’s Latin Music Week, María Becerra recently recorded with Paris Hilton and Enrique Iglesias, and Luck Ra, an emerging act from Córdoba, teamed with Chayanne for a revamped version of his 2003 hit “Un Siglo Sin Ti,” which peaked at No. 15 on the Tropical Airplay chart in September, Luck Ra’s first entry ever on the chart.
“I love collaborating with artists from abroad,” the Argentine newcomer says. “I feel that everyone in their country grows up with different music, everyone has different rhythms in their blood, but the fact that people from different ages and countries listen to you is the most beautiful thing.”
As Chayanne puts it, the song is proof that collaborations across the Latin world help all the artists involved: “The song’s rhythm, so close to Caribbean beats, once again demonstrates the deep brotherhood of all Latinos, reflected in our cultural expressions, especially in music.”
During Latin Music Week, Morales will appear on the “Role of Music Publishers in Cross-Cultural Collaborations” panel, Luck Ra on Billboard Argentina’s “Entre Amigos” panel and Becerra in a conversation with Thalia on mental health.
This story appears in the Sept. 28, 2024, issue of Billboard.
When today’s reggaetón stars refer to the genre’s OGs, names like Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, Wisin and Yandel always come up. During Latin Music Week, Yandel will star on his own panel, which, like his upcoming album (out Oct. 10 on Warner Music Latin), is titled Elyte and will feature new and legendary reggaetón names across 19 tracks.
At 47 years old — and now on his 11th solo set — Yandel is not only comfortable in his role as a solo act, but also as a leader and mentor to a new generation and a bridge between reggaetón’s past and future.
What does being a reggaetón OG mean to you?
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I feel blessed to be here and still be relevant. It’s any artist’s dream. I’m a real OG, a real musical gangster. I know how to traffic my music and lead my business. It’s been 25 years of killing it. I’m someone who respects new generations and collaborates with new artists. I think that’s what keeps me relevant.
How do you see reggaetón today versus 20 years ago?
The evolution of reggaetón has been a complex process, both musically and culturally. Reggaetón came up in the ’90s as a mix of reggae in Spanish, dancehall and hip-hop. In its beginnings, it was cruder, born from the parties and experiences in the streets of Puerto Rico. It has adapted, and in recent years it has integrated other genres like pop, trap, electronica and smoother rhythms like pop and ballads, which have allowed it to be more versatile and accessible to a global audience. It’s gone from being a marginalized genre to dominating global charts.
What’s your role in the genre today?
I’ll continue to explore different sounds, but keep faithful to reggaetón while incorporating trap, pop and dembow. On Elyte, I’ll display a versatility that maybe wasn’t there last year. And I’ll continue to grow on the business side, continue to be relevant and a bridge between classic and modern reggaetón. You know, keep being a legend. Captain Yandel.
This story appears in the Sept. 28, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Two decades ago, while hip-hop maintained its cultural dominance, reggaetón began to carve out a niche in the global music scene, and Fat Joe — deeply connected to his Puerto Rican and Cuban heritage and known for his unmistakable New York swagger — bridged the two genres. As both have evolved, so has he: His involvement in Don Omar’s 2005 “Reggaetón Latino (Chosen Few Remix),” alongside N.O.R.E. and LDA, marked a pivotal moment in bringing reggaetón and rap closer together.
Since then, he has consistently fused Latin influences with hip-hop, from his 2019 salsa-infused track “Yes” with Cardi B and Anuel AA (which samples Héctor Lavoe and Willie Colón’s “Aguanile”) to the more recent single “Paradise” with Anitta and DJ Khaled. Fat Joe spoke with Billboard ahead of his conversation with N.O.R.E. during Latin Music Week about the intersection of hip-hop and reggaetón.
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How has your Latin heritage influenced your music?
Man, I just love making music for everybody. But every time we can tap the Latino market — because I’m Puerto Rican and Cuban, my wife’s Colombian — we do it for everybody. And you know, nobody knows how to celebrate like Latinos. It’s about time we teamed up with Anitta from Brazil and then DJ Khaled [with “Paradise,” which premiered at the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards] and make a Latino national anthem.
Since “Reggaetón Latino,” how have you seen the relationship between these two styles evolve?
I’m just proud of reggaetón and everywhere [those artists have] gone because when we started out, they were the little guys. Now they’re killing the whole game — Don Omar, Tego Calderón, Daddy Yankee, Wisin & Yandel, all the guys who pioneered the game and brought it over to America and then the world.
In your view, how have hip-hop and reggaetón supported or influenced each other’s wider cultural acceptance over the years?
Hip-hop is the blueprint. It’s the foundation of everything. Reggaetón came after and just took it to another level in the Latino space and the global space. Even people who aren’t Latinos love reggaetón, but hip-hop is always the blueprint. It started everything when you talk about the flow, the music, the fashion… It just runs neck and neck.
This story appears in the Sept. 28, 2024, issue of Billboard.
If Latin music exploded in 2023, it consolidated in 2024. According to Luminate’s 2024 Midyear Music Report, it is now the fastest-growing core genre in the United States, and Spanish is the second-most-consumed language in music both stateside and globally, behind only English.
This year, Billboard Latin Music Week celebrates it 35th anniversary Oct. 14-18 at the Fillmore Miami Beach, with a wide range of acts from around the world that reflects the genre’s versatility both musically and as a business. The festivities will include the Billboard Latin Music Awards (airing on Telemundo on Oct. 20) — plus these highlights. (For a full schedule of events, go to billboardlatinmusicweek.com.)
“From Viral Hits to Billboard Charts: The Power of Content Creators”
Content creators have become increasingly prominent in raising awareness of Latin music and artists — and now, many of them are signing recording deals of their own. In the past six months, Mexican influencers Yeri Mua and Domelipa signed with Sony Music, and Mario Bautista, another Mexican influencer, signed to Warner. At Latin Music Week, Mexican TikTok powerhouse Kunno — who has close ties to many Latin music stars and has also dabbled in music — will moderate a conversation between Mua, Domelipa and Bautista, along with internet personality Sophia Talamas and Venezuelan comedian Marko.
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“Making the Hit Live with Grupo Frontera”
Grupo Frontera
Eric Rojas
For a fourth consecutive Latin Music Week, this groundbreaking session will host artists as they develop a hit in real time. This year’s panel features the norteño band that has earned more than 20 No. 1s on the Billboard charts since 2022, as its six members showcase their knack for adapting songs from other genres into their personal style. Two previous tracks created at Latin Music Week have been commercially released: Blessd and Ovy on the Drums’ “Billboard” and Pedro Capó and Carín León’s “Existo.”
“From Clubs to Stadiums”
Feid
Christopher Polk for Billboard
An unprecedented number of Latin acts, including Bad Bunny, Karol G, Grupo Firme and Feid, have toured stadiums in the past year. But their road to massive ticket sales began with their ground-up development: For instance, Colombian star Feid’s remarkable run culminated in July with his first-ever stadium concert at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium. Feid joins his manager, Luis Villamizar, and Hans Schafer, Live Nation senior vp of global touring, in a frank conversation about how to build a touring career that sells out major venues globally.
“The Winning Combo of Sports and Music”
Anitta
Pedro Vilela/Getty Images
Latin artists are developing closer ties than ever to the sports world, with ventures ranging from team ownership (Anuel AA, Ozuna, Bad Bunny, Marc Anthony) to sports-related gigs like Anitta’s recent halftime performance at the first NFL game in Brazil. This summer, Copa América, the soccer tournament that was played in the United States and featured steady cross-promotion between athletes and musicians, demonstrated the sport’s close ties with Latin acts — which will be the focus of a conversation between music stars and soccer stars Igor Lichnovsky and Leonardo Campana, moderated by Latin sports manager-agent Daniella Durán.
“The New Latin Music Business”
Latin artists, distributors and labels are becoming increasingly innovative in their deal-making, crafting everything from catalog deals to one-offs. Rancho Humilde, the label founded by entrepreneur Jimmy Humilde, has been a trailblazer in this regard, joining forces with different majors and distributors, and also making new label deals with its own artists. Humilde leads a conversation with Txema Rosique, vp of A&R for Sony Music U.S. Latin; Cris Falcão, managing director of artist and label strategy/GM of Latin for Virgin Music Group; and producer Atella, who is head of music for Zumba and leads the newly launched ZML Records.
“The Legacies Panel”
Chiquis Rivera
Alexander Tamargo/TELEMUNDO/Getty Images
Tradition runs deep in regional Mexican music, with many of its current top stars carrying on the musical legacies of famous parents and even grandparents. This once-in-a-lifetime panel will for the first time unite Chiquis Rivera, daughter of late banda legend Jenni Rivera; Camila Fernández, who is following in the mariachi tradition of her father, Alejandro, and grandfather Vicente Fernández; Lupita Infante, upholding the legacy of the iconic ranchera singer and actor Pedro Infante; and Majo Aguilar, representing the golden age of Mexican cinema through her musical heritage from grandparents Antonio Aguilar and Flor Silvestre. Sponsored by Smirnoff Ice, the discussion will delve into their individual and familial contributions to their rich cultural traditions.
“The Sony Music Publishing Icon Q&A With JOP (Jesús Ortiz Paz)”
The mainstay Latin Music Week Q&A this year spotlights the leader of Fuerza Regida and founder of Street Mob Records. Introduced by Jorge Mejia, president/CEO of Sony Music Publishing Latin, and moderated by Leila Cobo, Billboard’s chief content officer of Latin/Español, this session will provide deep insights into the band’s industry achievements and the expansion of its record label. Fuerza Regida became the first Latin band ever to top Billboard’s 2023 year-end Top Artists — Duo/Group list, and the act continues to innovate, introducing a blend of Jersey club and corridos (dubbed “Jersey corridos”) on the group’s 2024 eighth studio album, Pero No Te Enamores.
“The Icon Q&A With Gloria Estefan”
Gloria Estefan
Jesus Cordero
Fresh from receiving the Legend award at the 2024 Billboard Latin Women in Music celebration, the Cuban American superstar will sit for an intimate conversation about her four-decade career. Estefan — who rose to fame in the 1980s as lead vocalist for Miami Sound Machine, alongside her husband, Emilio, and changed pop music forever by infusing English-language pop with Latin flavor, while singing en español as well — became the first female Latin artist to be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2023. The Broadway musical telling her life story, On Your Feet!, is being adapted into a feature film.
This story appears in the Sept. 28, 2024, issue of Billboard.