State Champ Radio Music News
Page: 52
Trending on Billboard
Orville Peck talks with host Tetris Kelly about his new EP ‘Appaloosa,’ starring in ‘Cabaret,’ his new role in the live-action ‘Street Fighter’ and more hot topics over lunch at Beachwood Cafe.
Orville Peck:
What’s up?
Tetris Kelly
What’s up? Good to see you man!
Good to see you, too! Thank you very much.
You’re doing it real big for some coffee today.
Oh yeah, just a little something, you know what I mean? You look great, too! I like the ostrich.
Listen, Beachwood Cafe, only for them. First of all, Orville, thanks for hanging out with us, because I feel like you’re busy as sh*t.
I’m the busiest man in the world right now.
You have so much going on.
No, but it’s nice. It’s good to, like, take a moment and hang so I’m happy to be here.
Well, listen, and I feel like I kind of doxed you a bit, maybe? You know, I’m putting your business out where you like to hang out.
I know, it’s true.
Beachwood Cafe, what is it about this place?
I mean, it’s, like, near to where I live, and I just like the vibe. They let me bring my dog in here. So, you know, she sits around and, like, you know, me and my partner come here for, like, dinner and things, so…
Lovely! It’s a little date night spot too.
It’s very nice. It’s very convenient. You know, Beachwood is, like, a really cool part of LA where it has this little community in the hills. So it’s, like, it’s kind of nice, yeah.
And then, I mean, did you know? Because I feel like, you know, Harry Styles as well, like, they have his lyrics on a cup. So, like, I’ve never been here, so I didn’t realize, I guess how legendary this place is.
Keep watching for more!
Trending on Billboard The 1985 Chicago Bears are shuffling into a new HBO documentary. HBO announced plans for The Shuffle doc on Thursday (Nov. 13), which will explore the Super Bowl XX champions’ iconic “Super Bowl Shuffle” rap song and memorable music video. Explore See latest videos, charts and news Set to premiere on Nov. […]
As he gears up to release his new EP Appaloosa on Friday (Nov. 14), country singer Orville Peck broke down the current phase of his career in the latest episode of Billboard‘s Takes Us Out.
Peck sat down with Billboard’s Tetris Kelly at Los Angeles’ Beachwood Café, where the pair chowed down on comfort food and took a look at the state of Peck’s career today. “[I’ve been] going back to my roots, in terms of just diving into the creativity and the artistry and the references that I grew up loving,” Peck says. “[Appaloosa]’s also got a very constant air through it in terms of lyrics, of just kind of being unconcerned with what things should sound like or look like. I’m really just making music for myself again.”
The singer, who spent the last few years rising through the ranks of country music and becoming a breakout star in his own right, says that his work with friends and former collaborators such as Noah Cyrus and Willie Nelson only further helped bolster his confidence about his own artistic output. But he points to one country superstar as his dream collaborator.
“I mean, I always say Dolly [Parton], I would love to work with Dolly,” he says. “I got Willie Nelson, he was really neck-and-neck with her, so she is the last one on my absolute bucket list that I would die to work with.”
As a disruptive force in the country space, and one who has often advocated for greater diversity and equity within the genre, Peck points out that he’s happy to see some progress finally being made for the genre he calls home. “I feel better about it. I think there’s a lot more people now feeling like they can make country music and not be within the sort of homogenized idea of what country ‘needs’ to be,” he says. “That’s amazing, not just for queer people, but for black people, for brown people, there’s a lot more artists who feel validated to be a part of that.”
But, he points out that country is “tricky” when it comes to progress, and says that the work is far from over. “There is some attachment to country with the culture of country,” he says. “In some ways we’re making a lot of progress, and then in some ways, that progress is making some people want to stand firm in their gatekeeping of country. It’s a constant conversation.”
He points to the recent rule change at the Recording Academy, dividing the previously existing best country album category into two separate lanes for “traditional” and “contemporary” country albums, as an example of his point.
“I actually think it makes sense, personally,” he says. “I think in the last 10-15 years, there has been more of a split between radio-pop country, which tends to be more about a certain type of culture than a sound. And then I think there’s the other side of country that is a more traditional, referenced type of country that’s more about the songwriting … that feels like it’s more open culturally to anyone who wants to express themselves in that.”
During the new interview, Peck also chats about his time playing the Emcee in Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club on Broadway, his favorite song off of his new album and the “diet illegal” activities he and his friends got into growing up. Watch the full episode of Takes Us Out above.
Trending on Billboard
Grab Pandy’s hand and hold on tight, because it’s almost time to jump into a new season of Gabby’s Dollhouse.
For season 12, hitting Netflix on Monday, Gabby’s stuffy BFF Pandy Paws (Logan Bailey) is singing a new song that reminds us why “It’s Good to Be a Gabby Cat,” and Billboard Family is exclusively premiering the tune and video below.
It’s the latest track from series composer and songwriter P.T. Walkley, the man behind the DreamWorks Animation show’s “Hey Gabby” theme song and countless other musical contributions (“Between all the songs and ditties, there must be at least 200 or more,” Walkley tells Billboard Family). So where did “It’s Good to Be a Gabby Cat” — which hits streaming on Friday — come from?
“The assignment on this Gabby tune was to look back through all their magical moments together that make it so ‘good, good, good’ to be a Gabby Cat,” Walkley tells Billboard. “The chorus hook came to me first, then the question was, ‘Well what makes it so good-good-good?’ So I thought back to moments of cruising through the ocean, riding horses through the old west, blasting through outer space, island hopping, playing games together, cooking together, and got as many of those memories as I could into a catchy little tune.”
Watch and listen below:
Pandy’s new song is featured in “Good to be a Gabby Cat Game Show!,” episode 5 of the five-episode new season. What makes this episode special is that the animated Gabby Cats join real-life Gabby (Laila Lockhart Kraner) in her bedroom instead of the Dollhouse for a Hollywood Squares-style game show.
It’s been a busy year for Gabby’s Dollhouse, with the six-episode season 11 premiering on Netflix back in February, followed by the Gabby’s Dollhouse Live! U.S. tour and Gabby’s Dollhouse: The Movie both arriving in September, as well as an immersive Gabby’s Dollhouse x CAMP experience that took fans inside the Dollhouse at CAMP stores in Los Angeles and Charlotte, North Carolina.
All five episodes of season 12 arrive Monday on Netflix.
Trending on Billboard At an otherwise joyful celebration of Wicked in Singapore for the second film’s Asian premiere on Thursday (Nov. 13), a scary moment took place when someone in the crowd charged at Ariana Grande and forced Cynthia Erivo to step in as her costar’s bodyguard. In videos of the incident captured at the […]
Trending on Billboard
One of the unfathomable tricks D’Angelo pulled off on his beloved trio of studio albums was somehow sounding simultaneously like a lost R&B classic from the 1960s as well as a soul sonic space signal from some distant, funky future.
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
If you couldn’t get enough of that silky retro-futurism on Brown Sugar (1995), Voodoo (2000) or Black Messiah (2014), The Roots’ Questlove has some good news for you. Speaking to The National News Desk outlet on the red carpet at last weekend’s 2025 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, the drummer, Oscar-winning documentarian and frequent D’Angelo collaborator teased that there’s more to come.
“You’ll see soon,” Quest said with a grin when asked if there were any unreleased tracks in the vault amid reports last year that the legendarily time-taking “Devil’s Pie” musician was slowly accumulating tracks for the long-awaited follow-up to the Grammy-winning Black Messiah. “It’s always the sound of yesterday, but for the future,” Quest added. “This record is no different.”
Though no additional information on the project was available at press time, in a 2024 chat with the Rolling Stone Music Now podcast, collaborator Raphael Saadiq reported that the enigmatic singer was “in a good space” at that time. “I talk to him a couple times. He’s excited. We don’t talk much, but when we do talk it’s crazy, like, ‘Oh, you gotta hear this!’ He’s like, ‘You gotta play bass. I’ve got this track. I’m telling you, you got to get on it. It got your name all over it,’” Saadiq said.
He added that at that time D’Angelo was working on “six pieces right now and he seems super excited. He’s in control of his own destiny at this point. He has a management team, but they can’t make him do anything that he don’t wanna do. He knows it’s on him now and I think that’s a different angle that he’s coming from.”
Among the songs Saadiq said they were working on was an old track from their early days when they formed a short-lived group with A Tribe Called Quest’s Q-Tip. “I think it’s going to be a record on D’Angelo’s new album when it comes out, a record that we all did together,” Saadiq said. “I’m playing bass, D’s playing, me and D is singing backgrounds. It’s funky as hell too. D is a bad boy. … It’s aged well. Good music ages well.”
As he was wont to do, D’Angelo went off-the-radar after releasing his last album more than a decade ago, popping up in 2018 to contribute the song “May I? Stand Unshaken” to the Red Dead Redemption 2 video game soundtrack. He also did a non-competition D’Angelo & Friends Verzuz set at the Apollo in 2021 that was pretty much a solo affair featuring collabs with Method Man & Redman, H.E.R. and The Vanguard backing band trumpet player Keyon Harrold.
D’angelo, who died on Oct. 14 following a battle with cancer, also teamed up with Jay-Z for “I Want You Forever” for the soundtrack to the movie The Book of Clarence.
Trending on Billboard
Lady Gaga‘s Grammy-nominated LP Mayhem has been lauded by critics as a return to form for the pop superstar. But according to Mother Monster, the album wouldn’t have seen the light of day if it weren’t for the very different critical response her third studio album received.
In a new Rolling Stone cover story, Gaga revealed that the criticism she received for Artpop — and her subsequent turn away from pop music that resulted in the albums Cheek to Cheek and Joanne — provided a direct source of inspiration for Mayhem. “Mayhem as a piece of music, I never would’ve made it without the 10 years of experience that I had,” she said. “What would Mayhem sound like if I hadn’t become a jazz singer? What would it have sounded like if I hadn’t made Artpop?”
Reflecting on her experimental 2013 album, which became a fan-favorite in the years since its release, Gaga called the resounding critical panning of the project “very impactful” on the rest of her career. “Like, much more impactful than any other criticism for any artwork. That was the first time that I ever had major criticism about a piece of work that I’d made,” she said.
Gaga described Artpop as her “EDM opus,” and said that the album’s confrontational tone was created because she was being treated as a “business” rather than an artist at the time. “People don’t like it if I say, ‘I won’t dress the way you want me to dress. I won’t have the hair you want me to have, and I’m going to not make pop music the way that you want me to make it. ‘Cause you want everything to sound like ‘Bad Romance,’ and I’m never doing that again.’”
As for the sexist undertones of that criticism, Gaga pointed out that when male artists make new choices in their music, they are heralded as “radical thinkers discovering new territory,” while female artists are mocked. “I was sort of heralded as, like, over,” she said.
After a decade of detours, including multiple film roles in A Star Is Born, House of Gucci and Joker: Folie a Deux, Gaga said she and her co-producers on Mayhem — Andrew Watt and her fiancé Michael Polansky — knew that diving back into pop music meant she had to address that part of her career head on.
“One of the things I’m most grateful for is gaining all my artistic faculties back to make this record,” she said. “I had to dig very, very deep, and I had to change a lot of my life and recenter around what I needed as a human being.”
Trending on Billboard
Speakers were widely attuned to Taylor Swift when her third studio LP, Speak Now, debuted at No. 1 on the all-genre Billboard 200 chart and Top Country Albums dated Nov. 13, 2010.
The set followed 2008’s Fearless as the second of six Swift albums that have started atop both lists.
Speak Now’s release was heavily publicized, as Swift made performances at New York’s Kennedy Airport, on ABC’s Dancing With the Stars and on Los Angeles’ Hollywood Boulevard as she shot an NBC special, Taylor Swift – Speak Now.
Five Speak Now singles reached the top five on the Hot Country Songs chart: “Mine” (No. 2 peak, November 2010), “Back to December” (No. 3, March 2011), “Mean” (No. 2, June 2011) and two No. 1s, which led for one week each: “Sparks Fly” (November 2011) and “Ours” (March 2012), the latter from a Target-exclusive CD version of the album.
On the Billboard Hot 100, four Speak Now songs hit the top 10, including the title track, with “Mine” charting the highest (No. 3).
Amplifying Speak Now’s legacy, Dan + Shay’s new cover of “Back to December” debuted at No. 4 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart dated Nov. 1.
Speak Now logged 13 weeks at No. 1 on Top Country Albums. Meanwhile, the re-recording, Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), led for two weeks in 2023.
In addition to Swift’s six albums that have topped both the country and all-genre album lists, her self-titled debut dominated Top Country Albums for 24 weeks beginning in August 2007 and her EP Beautiful Eyes went No. 1 on the chart for a week in August 2008.
Nine more of Swift’s titles have led the Billboard 200 but not Top Country Albums, including The Life of a Showgirl, currently ruling (on the Nov. 15-dated survey) for a fifth week. Her 15 Billboard 200 No. 1s are the most among soloists and second overall only to the Beatles’ 19.
Trending on Billboard
Got a fussy little one? A relaxing new album of Ariana Grande hits transformed into soothing lullabies will make sure there’s no tears left to cry.
As Billboard can exclusively announce on Thursday (Nov. 13), Rockabye Baby! is gearing up to drop an LP of soft, sleepy-time versions of some of the pop star’s biggest hits, from “One Last Time” to “Dangerous Woman” and “Positions.” And ahead of the full-length’s release on Nov. 21, the company has shared a snippet of its take on eight-week Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper “7 Rings,” complete with an adorable animation.
The full track list features a total of 13 songs spanning Grande’s seven studio albums, as well as her evergreen Christmas smash “Santa Tell Me” and signature Wicked number “Popular.” The project’s album cover shows the Rockabye Baby! bear wearing a fuzzy bunny mask inspired by Grande’s Dangerous Woman era.
Rockabye Baby! Lullaby Renditions of Ariana Grande
Courtesy
The two-time Grammy winner is the latest musician to have her work transformed into a Rockabye Baby! album. Some of the company’s past compilations include tributes to The Beatles, Bad Bunny, Queen, Taylor Swift, Snoop Dogg, Coldplay, Beyoncé, Journey, BTS and Marvin Gaye.
Though the genre is primarily geared toward little ones as they wind down for bedtime, Rockabye Baby! promises in a statement that its Grande compilation is perfect for “former theatre kids, pop diva parents, Boca Raton grandparents, future dangerous women and everyone in between.”
The tribute comes at an exciting time in Grande’s career, as the R.E.M. Beauty founder is currently gearing up for the worldwide premiere of Wicked: For Good, in which she stars as Glinda opposite Cynthia Erivo’s Elphaba. Grande also recently wrapped filming on another screen project: Focker-in-Law.
Next year, the vocalist will embark on her first tour in six years, supporting 2024 Billboard 200 No. 1 album Eternal Sunshine — one song from which, the Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single “We Can’t Be Friends (Wait for Your Love),” will appear on the Grande-inspired Rockabye Baby! LP.
Check out the Rockabye Baby! version of “7 Rings” below.
Rockabye Baby! Lullaby Renditions of Ariana Grande track list:
7 ringsthank u, nextOne Last TimeInto YouPopularLove Me HarderSanta Tell Meno tears left to cryGod is a womanbreak up with your girlfriend, i’m boredDangerous WomanPositionswe can’t be friends (wait for your love)
Trending on Billboard
Taylor Swift is giving fans a peek behind the curtain of her upcoming Eras Tour docuseries, which itself is a peek behind the curtain of the biggest tour of all time.
On Thursday (Nov. 13) — exactly one month before the pop star’s 36th birthday — Swift unveiled the full trailer for The End of an Era, a six-part look at how she executed her global Eras Tour coming to Disney+ next month. In the two-and-a-half minute clip, we see the mechanics of how she pulled off everything from her surprise entrance on stage (by rolling up in a faux custodial cart) to how she traveled underneath her unbelievably long catwalk (on a speedy moving platform that launched her back and forth between numbers).
“I’m very aware of mysterious forces at play that I will never have any control of,” Swift says at the beginning. “This show created a bonding experience for, like, 70,000 people all at once. There’s something very special about that.”
The trailer also shows many of the countless people who also played a big role in the two-year trek, which ran throughout 2023 and 2024 and generated a record-shattering $2,077,618,725 in grosses. One of them, of course, is Swift’s now-fiancé professional football player Travis Kelce, who we see on the road with the 14-time Grammy winner both in person and in spirit. In a couple of scenes, Swift cheers him on while watching Kelce’s Kansas City Chiefs’ games on TV, and in another, her mom, Andrea, says of her future son-in-law, “He brings a lot of happiness.”
In a different scene, Travis crouches beneath the stage and greets Swift with a booming “Tay Tay!” before the pair ride off together on the moving platform. Sharing the trailer on her Instagram, the singer wrote, “Honestly can’t think of a better way to celebrate my (almost) birthday than to relive the Eras Tour with you! This time we’re going backstage.”
The full trailer comes exactly one month after Swift first shared a shorter teaser for the Eras doc, and about one month ahead of the project’s Dec. 12 premiere on Disney+. It is expected to give Swifties the most in-depth look at the trek yet, though the historic run was also documented in an Eras Tour concert film in 2023.
Also in the new trailer, Swift rehearses how she’s going to surprise her crowds with various surprise guests, including Sabrina Carpenter — with whom she maps out how she plans to call her on the phone from on stage — and Ed Sheeran, who practices guitar next to his longtime friend and collaborator on a couch. The pair were just a few of the several guests Swift shared the stage with at different points in the tour, along with Jack Antonoff, Aaron Dessner and Gracie Abrams.
With a glint in her eye, Swift says at one point in the trailer, “I love having a good secret.”
Watch the full Eras Tour docuseries trailer above.
