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It was July 8, 2023, and the locals at the Oregon Country Fair were twirling.
Leah Chisholm had grown up attending the earthy music and arts festival with her parents and brother. Now she was onstage there, performing. The globally popular DJ-producer, better known as LP Giobbi, had recently performed at Coachella and would soon jet to Belgium to play dance megafestival Tomorrowland, but DJ’ing the fair — “my favorite place on the planet,” she says — meant more to her.
LP’s mother, father and other family and friends were in the front row, vibing to her blend of remixed Grateful Dead songs and house music, including tracks from the debut album she had released two months prior. The fair had hosted acts like the Dead, Bruce Hornsby and The Black Crowes in its more than 50-year history — but LP Giobbi was the first electronic artist to headline. This homecoming show could have been a peak moment. Instead, it was a wakeup call.
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“I just felt so exhausted, and that was such a sad thing for me,” she says. “It was like, ‘I got it. This is not how I want to live my life.’ ”
Just from scrolling her Instagram, it had been evident that since rising to electronic world prominence circa 2021, LP had been Doing a Lot. She was hopping across time zones for gigs at clubs, festivals and afterparties. She released her album Light Places in May 2023 and launched her label, Yes Yes Yes (named after the unofficial motto of the Oregon Country Fair), the following September. She founded the organization Femme House, which works to create opportunities for women and gender-expansive people, people of color and LGBTQ+ creatives in music through education, scholarships and more. She was (and still is) the global music director for W Hotels. Raised by Deadhead parents (Mike and Gayle, who’ve been to more than 100 shows since first seeing the band in 1973), LP launched her Dead House party series — where she puts her dance music spin on the jam band’s songs, including at official afterparties for acts like Dead & Company — and officially remixed Jerry Garcia’s 1972 debut solo album, Garcia, in January 2023.
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She was, as they say, killing it. And she was fried.
Ashley Osborn
“I had put so much pressure on myself,” LP says today on a sun-drenched September afternoon in Laguna Beach, Calif. She has been working on music here in a friend’s backyard studio, where we’re barefoot and curled up on the couch drinking purple smoothies. “It was like, ‘This is an opportunity most people never get. You have to give your all into everything you do.’ That took over as me being a workaholic.” Amid the “extreme highs and extreme lows” of what effectively became a never-ending workday, it was hard to really show up for her family, friends, fiancé or “for the music, really.”
It wasn’t unusual for LP’s tour manager to catch her crying on flights while she listened to the Dead’s wistful “Brokedown Palace” on her headphones, feeling both closer to and farther away from her family as Garcia sang, “Mama, mama, many worlds I’ve come/Since I first left home.” “He’d be like, ‘You OK?’ And I’d be like, ‘I’m just trying to process!’ ” she says, breaking into her generous and terrifically oversize laugh.
Figuring out how to grow and enjoy her success while also staying connected to where she came from is why her new album is called Dotr. Out Oct. 18 on Ninja Tune, the project is named for how she signed notes to her parents when she was a kid and didn’t yet know how to spell “daughter.” She tears up several times while talking about them. “They’re everything to me,” she says.
While LP produced Light Places amid the swirl of a rising career, she made her new album as the road “kind of swallowed me whole” during a period of tremendous grief. Three of the album’s 17 tracks are named for significant women in LP’s life who died while she was making it. Her fiancé’s mother, Patricia Lynn, whom LP knew for more than a decade, died in March 2023. Her piano teacher since childhood, Carolyn Horn, died the next month. Then Susan Milleman, a professional singer and close friend of LP’s mother, died the month after.
“I was in the studio trying to finish songs,” she says, “and I was just like, ‘I don’t give a fuck about anything right now.’ ”
But she worked through the pain. Amid house tracks featuring artists like Brittany Howard and Portugal. The Man, there’s Lynn wishing her a happy birthday in a sampled voice message. A sample of Milleman singing centers a track named for her, and “Carolyn” opens with a stunning piano solo that LP recorded when she realized Alzheimer’s was starting to noticeably affect her teacher.
While making the music, a light bulb went off in LP’s head about her 20-hour workdays and infinite to-do lists. “Here I am promoting women and Femme House, and I was not tapped into any of my feminine energy,” she says. “It was all very like, masculine productivity ‘do do do’ energy that just got out of balance. With all these powerful women who passed away who I was honoring, it was just like, ‘Wake up.’ ”
Ashley Osborn
Through “a lot” of therapy, she made adjustments. While her tour schedule and general output are the same, now “I’m just doing it differently,” she says. “I’m not sending as many emails, and I’m not making as many DJ edits.” Plus, the hard work has paid off. “I’m waking up to the idea that I don’t have to prep seven hours for every gig because I’ve become a pretty good DJ,” she says. “I can go to dinner with the promoter and friends and family instead of working in my hotel room until the second I step onstage. My life is still pretty unbalanced, but in that unbalance, I’m finding balance.”
For her aptly titled Way Back Home Tour, she’ll play 21 shows across the United States from October through December. Nearly all of them will be performed in the round, which makes “a really big difference” in how she connects with the audience. The tour will take her through standard U.S. dance hubs like Los Angeles, Chicago and Brooklyn, but also places like Asheville, N.C., and her native Eugene, Ore.
These B-markets have become familiar terrain for LP through her Dead House sets, where she plays Dead tunes crossed with electronic music. These typically more rural, hippie-friendly cities, and the audiences who see her play in them, are more her speed. “Those are my people,” she says.
She means this more literally than most in the sprawling Dead tribe. Mike and Gayle raised her in Dead culture even before she was born, attending the Eugene show of the band’s legendary July 1987 tour with Bob Dylan, when Gayle was eight months pregnant with LP. “I made it all the way to the front of the stage because the crowd just opened a path to let me through, I was so huge,” recalls Gayle, who adds that her unborn daughter was “particularly active in the womb during the ‘Drums/Space’ segment” of the show. Deadhead culture later helped LP — who found her stage wardrobe of vintage Dead T-shirts stashed in the crawl space of her parents’ house — orient her career around the sense of community that is the core of not just the jam world, but the dance world, too. While her parents see themselves in the fans coming together to lose themselves on dancefloors at their daughter’s shows, they’ve also worked to understand her career — Gayle reading up on foundational house music figure Frankie Knuckles, even going to see where he used to play in Chicago. (Now 37, LP listened mostly to jam bands and jazz until her boyfriend, and now fiancé, introduced her to electronic music when they got together 12 years ago.)
But while LP fits elegantly into the long-standing crossover between jam and electronic music, these facets of her career are still different enough to warrant separate teams. WME represents her for her global DJ career, getting her gigs in Ibiza, across Europe and beyond, while she works with Ben Baruch of 11E1even Group — the management firm that also represents jam acts like Goose, The Disco Biscuits and Dead & Company bassist Oteil Burbridge — for Dead House. With Baruch, she has taken her Dead concept to the source, playing Dead & Company’s Playing in the Sand Festival as well as afterparties during its 2023 summer tour and following one of its 2024 shows at Sphere in Las Vegas.
It’s naturally all been a mind-bending thrill for her parents, whom LP introduced to the Dead’s Bob Weir at a show. Gayle thanked Weir “for all the years of joy you’ve given my family.” Weir looked her in the eye and put his hand on his heart. “The pleasure,” he responded, “is all mine.”
“There are moments where I can be like, ‘OK, I’m aware of how cool this is,’ ” LP says, “and that was one of them.”
Another making-it moment came in 2023, when Taylor Swift asked LP to remix her song “Cruel Summer.” When Swift tagged her in an Instagram post about the edit, LP gained 1,000 new followers in 10 minutes. But she was also concerned the project might affect how she was trying to position herself in the underground dance realm. “I’ve been working hard to get the respect of the CircoLocos of the world,” she says, referencing the revered techno party based at Ibiza club DC10. The day the Swift remix came out, she got her first CircoLoco offer — and the team there complimented her on the remix.
“It legitimized me to people who have no idea what dance music is,” she says. “But what I didn’t see coming is that the cool kids were also like, ‘Wow, congrats!’ ”
Ashley Osborn
Her grinding has also given her leverage and a platform. “It’s just so cool that the more I do or the bigger I get, I can use this power [for] the thing I care about most, which is empowering women in our industry.” She initially thought expanding Femme House, which she co-founded with artist management consultant Lauren A. Spalding in 2019, would be an uphill battle; instead, power players have been eager to get involved.
Spotify, Insomniac Events and New York promoter Jake Resnicow have been key Femme House supporters, with Insomniac working with LP on, among other projects, booking rising Femme House artists as openers for the promoter’s shows at the 2024 edition of the Amsterdam dance industry gathering ADE.
“There are so many people in positions of power who have come to me and been like, ‘How can we make our lineups more diverse? How can we release more diverse artists?’ What I’m learning is that people eat what they’re fed, and the industry is finally like, ‘Do we have a balanced meal on our plate?’ ”
Meanwhile, LP and her fiancé recently finished building a house in their home base of Austin. The space includes a studio and room to expand — because the album is called Dotr not only to honor her parents “but also because I want to call in my own daughter.”
With family so close to her heart, it makes sense that she wants to start one of her own. When it happens, she foresees “a time when I have to slow down even more.” But it’s OK, because as she has recently figured out, it’s less about doing the most than about being present for life as it happens.
“I’m not the best producer, the best piano player or the best DJ,” she says. “What my gift actually is is feeling good and whole in my body, finding my joy and being a reflection of that joy for other people so they can see it in themselves.”
When Hurricane Helene flooded the streets of Asheville, N.C., it forced the postponement of a Sept. 30 Gangstagrass show at The Orange Peel.
As a result, the band — a genre-busting hybrid of bluegrass and hip-hop — revised its itinerary and spent the previous night in Atlanta, creating a dinner menu of grilled salmon, beef, asparagus, mushrooms and sweet potatoes.
Despite the daunting weather and travel issues, the band was in a congenial mood. Just a week earlier, its new album, The Blackest Thing on the Menu, became its second project to reach No. 1 on Billboard’s Bluegrass Albums chart dated Sept. 28. The act’s previous No. 1, 2020’s No Time for Enemies, was the first atop the chart to feature two MCs. Neither No. 1 was originally on the career menu.
“It’s not like it was a goal from the start, or anything on the agenda,” founder Rench says. “Our aim is to make great music, put out our message and play awesome shows. Billboard charts aren’t really a part of that. It’s just kind of gravy on the mashed potatoes.”
The first Gangstagrass No. 1 occurred during the pandemic, and the members told themselves it was a fluky representation of their pent-up fan base’s support.
“Doing it again,” MC R-SON says now, “that’s extra special.”
So was the timing: It occurred as the International Bluegrass Music Association held its IBMA Awards and conference in Raleigh, N.C. Gangstagrass decidedly tests the boundaries of the genre. It fires up the traditional banjo and fiddle with unexpected beats and raps, fusing the sound of rural Kentucky with the music of urban New York.
On paper, the mixture probably shouldn’t work. But Gangstagrass is built on a belief that folks who ride tractors have more in common with people who ride the subway than might be expected. Bluegrass and hip-hop both represent working-class cultures, and both rely heavily on the music’s pulse, be it a rolling banjo or a syncopated drum machine.
“If you have poor folks anywhere, they’re telling their stories, and they’re building from that,” R-SON says. “It works better than people would ever have imagined, just because a lot of their existences are similar.”
Rench didn’t necessarily recognize that when he launched Gangstagrass as a studio experiment in 2006 from his home in Brooklyn. He made it available for free online, and the reaction quickly exceeded his expectations.
“It was getting downloaded so much, it was crashing the site, and so I could see that people really liked it,” Rench says. “I knew then that putting together a live band to actually do this, with instrumentalists, would take it in a much bigger direction.”
Adding to the plot, producers for the FX series Justified enlisted Gangstagrass for a theme song, “Long Hard Times To Come,” in 2010. The group’s diverse musical origins appealed to an eclectic audience, too, bringing together seemingly incompatible constituencies.
“We got little kids, middle schoolers, high schoolers, college kids, their parents, their parents’ parents, their parents’ parents’ parents,” MC Dolio the Sleuth says.
“We have New York hipsters, we have proud rednecks from Texas,” Rench adds. “It really is like kind of a little bit of everything.”
The fan base also includes some of the band’s professional peers. Dobro icon Jerry Douglas, who joined the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame on Sept. 26, appears on “The Only Way Out Is Through,” the lead track on The Blackest Thing on the Menu. Dan Tyminski, the lead singer on The Soggy Bottom Boys’ “Man of Constant Sorrow,” joined Gangstagrass to perform that song at the end of the IBMA’s 2022 convention.
“The best players and these bluegrass legends, they really get it,” Rench says. “The bluegrass purists that are skeptical [of] us really don’t have much to stand on when they see all their favorite bluegrass players backing us up.”
Gangstagrass likely reflects larger cultural trends. Beyoncè’s Cowboy Carter debuted at No. 1 on Top Country Albums earlier this year. And Vice President Kamala Harris is the first female candidate of color to run for president on a major-party ticket. Polls and analysts suggest she has a good chance of winning. The Gangstagrass audience portends a possible future where people of disparate backgrounds can increasingly find commonality.
“We can see how crucial it will be for people to not be afraid of each other,” Rench says. “There’s a difference between being different and being divided, and if we can get them to not be divided and to be comfortable with each other and understand that they’re part of the same citizenship of the earth and of the country, that’s a huge step forward.”
That’s an ambitious goal, but one that’s delivered with a good helping of joy. The new album features a song, “Mother,” that explores economic disparities and a foreboding environmental outlook, but it’s followed by “Obligatory Braggadocio,” a comical self-celebration — “I got big wheels on my big truck” — over a rowdy Southern rock musical bed.
Even the album’s title is the result of an inside joke that stems from fiddler B.E. Farrow asking a waiter, “What’s the blackest thing on the menu?” When Rench suggested the title months later, the band broke into laughter, then grew quiet. The Blackest Thing on the Menu made a statement about the band.
“I kid you not,” Dolio says. “Two rainbows shot out from the sky, a double rainbow — double rainbow — right in front of us over New York City.”
It was a development as unlikely — and as hopeful — as the band itself.
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By now you surely have heard or read stories about how Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff are huge vinyl nerds. The Democratic presidential candidate and Second Gentleman have made a habit of popping into local record stores to pick up records in the midst of the harried campaign season. But on Howard Stern’s SiriusXM radio show on Tuesday (Oct. 8), Harris opened up a bit more about her musical obsessions, beginning the chat with a touching story about how she and Emhoff reacted to the news that Prince died back in April 2016.
Stern opened the special afternoon interview by playing his favorite Prince album — the 1989 Batman soundtrack — cueing up “Batdance” because he said he was aware Harris was a big fan of the late singer. Though Stern was adamant the Purple One’s 11th studio album — which sat at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart for six weeks — was his finest work, Harris adamantly, and politely, disagreed.
“No, 1999 I thought was spectacular, you can go back to his early days. Him on the guitar, there was just nothing like it,” said Harris, who also stopped by The View and The Late Show on Tuesday as part of an intensified media schedule in the final month of her still too-close-to-call race with convicted felon former President Donald Trump.
“Even you look at Bruno Mars today, who’s just been influenced by Prince,” she said, before sharing the anecdote about how she and Emhoff honored the “Purple Rain” star after they heard about his death from an accidental fentanyl overdose at age 57. “The night he passed Doug and I were in L.A. and actually just — he and I have very different musical tastes… [he’s into] Depeche Mode, that’s him, I grew up kind of hip-hop — but Prince is the one intersection where we both love and we just played Prince all night long. We dance, we sang his songs, that was our little tribute.”
The hour-long interview, the longest sit-down Harris has done since becoming the surprise, 11th-hour Democratic candidate following President Biden’s unprecedented decision to step down from running for a second term back in July, touched on a number of salient political topics as well. Harris said she was incensed at reports in a new book by legendary political reporter Bob Woodward that Trump sent hard-to-get COVID testing machines to his friend Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in the midst of the pandemic, adding that she thinks the twice impeached Trump is getting played by his autocratic friends.
“I grew up in the neighborhood,” Harris told Stern. “Some would say you’re getting punked if you stand in favor of somebody who’s an adversary over your friends on principles that we all agree on.” While she declined to say who she would put in her cabinet if elected on Nov. 5 when Stern predicted that it would likely include former Wyoming-congresswoman-turned-Trump-antagonist Republican Liz Cheney — who is voting for Harris, along with her father, former VP Dick Cheney — Harris said, “I gotta win, Howard. I gotta win. I gotta win. And listen, but the thing about Liz Cheney, let me just say, she’s remarkable.”
In addition to revealing her obsession with Formula One racing and Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton in particular, and calling Trump a “loser” several times, the friendly chat ended with Harris’ recollection of attending U2’s mind-bending opening run at Las Vegas’ Sphere.
“Oh my God have you been to the Sphere?,” Harris excitedly asked Stern when he mentioned that she was spotted at one of the U2 shows there in January. “Let me just say basically everyone should go in with a clear head,” she laughed after Stern, who wore a three-piece black suit for the in-studio chat, said he was freaked out by the reports of the overwhelming visuals that he feared were “too much.”
“Like don’t be high,” Stern said. “Correct,” Harris responded with one of her signature belly laughs. “Because it’s a lot. Like there’s a lot of visual stimulation… I love U2 and actually it was a surprise for Doug.”
Watch Harris talk U2 and Sphere below.
The NBA is back! To celebrate the tip-off of the upcoming 2024-2025 season, basketball fans can join the fun at the annual NBA on TNT American Express Road Show. This year’s free and fan-focused event, which will take place on Oct. 22 at Boston’s TD Garden following the Celtics’ championship win, will feature a pregame […]
This Thanksgiving is about to get a whole lot more musical. Republic Records and Verve Records announced on Wednesday (Oct. 8) that Wicked: The Soundtrack, which accompanies the upcoming film, will be released on Nov. 22. Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news The soundtrack, which features music and […]
Charli XCX could not have planned it better if she tried. After more than 15 years of writing and producing hit songs, the “360” singer was so convinced that fans were not going to like her Brat album that she purposely pinched pennies on the now-iconic cover art in order to shift funds to photo shoots and other promotional efforts.
“Where the actual first idea of doing a text cover came from was to save money,” Charli told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe by way of explaining how the lime green blurry imagery came to be. “I was like, ‘This album is not going to appeal to a lot of people.’” Thinking it didn’t make sense to do an elaborate cover shoot, but instead maybe spend money elsewhere, Charli decided to make the cover as basic as possible, never thinking it would become so influential that fashion houses would cop the color and style for their collections.
“I was like, ‘I think I will do a press shoot and then maybe we just save on the album cover,’” she told Lowe, noting that her manager, creative director and friends all though the lower case cover text was “the stupidest idea ever,” begging her “no! Not the text cover!” Charli being Charli, that only made her more adamant about seeing her vision through, which began with her mocking up the idea on her phone.
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“This actually is really good. It actually feels like it very much embodies the word ‘brat’ to kind of not be there because that is sort of less of the norm, I suppose, for female artists,” she said. “That felt punchy. The pixilation makes it looks like it’s kind of been done in this rush… you didn’t get the proper hi-res file… I knew it would generate this conversation. I knew that a lot of people would be sort of frustrated or disappointed by it. And I think for me, it’s like I would rather have those conversations, which actually in some cases became quite explosive, than a picture where people are like, ‘She looks good.’”
As for the shade, Charli said she and her team went round-and-round on the proper tint, wanting to go for the one that the most people in her inner circle had “the most adverse reaction to.” For the record, manager Brandon Creed weighed in with, “this is really hard to look at,” which made Charli think that she’d definitely nailed the “perfect” shade.
When Lowe described how “obsessed” people have become with the brat visual aesthetic, to the point that some have said she “claimed a color,” the singer laughed. Charli said she was at home when she came up with the concept, thinking that she’d been pictured on the covers of all her albums up to that point — except for her 2016 EP Vroom Vroom. “Actually it kind of punctuates the pattering in quite a nice way, but also, like, handy because it’s going to be a lower spend,” she said. Plus, she’s really enjoyed watching her fans writing think pieces about the cover and the marketing of the project.
The left-field idea has clearly worked, as Charli’s album spawned “Brat Summer,” as well as catching the eye of presidential hopeful Vice President Kamala Harris, who also copped the aesthetic for her social media feeds after the singer proclaimed “kamala IS brat.” She will double-down on success on the upcoming Brat and It’s Completely Different but Also Still Brat (Oct. 11) which features remixes with Robyn, Yung Lean, Ariana Grande, Troye Sivan, Lorde, Tinashe, Billie Eilish and many more.
Check out Charli’s Lowe interview below.
Warning: This story contains mentions of suicide.
Lisa Marie Presley was so overcome with grief following the death of her son Benjamin Keough that she kept his body packed in dry ice in her home for two months. According to NBC, the shocking revelation is included in the new memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, which daughter, Daisy Jones & the Six star Riley Keough, completed after her mother’s death at 54 in January 2023.
“My mom had my brother in the house with us instead of keeping him at the morgue,” Keough wrote in the book. “They told us that if we could tend to the body, we could have him at home, so she kept him in our house for a while on dry ice.”
Keough said that it was important for her mother — the only child of late rock legend Elvis Presley — to have proper time to say goodbye to her son, who died by suicide in 2020. “The same way she’d done with her dad. And I would go and sit there with him,” she said, noting that California doesn’t have any laws that mandate exactly when a body needs to be buried or disposed of. Keough used archival tapes of her mother’s memories to help finish the book.
“My house has a separate casitas bedroom, and I kept Ben Ben in there for two months,” according to Presley, who had begun working on the memoir before her death; Presley died of a small bowel obstruction caused by complications from prior weight loss surgery. “There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately. I found a very empathic funeral home owner,” Presley wrote. “I told her that having my dad in the house after he died was incredibly helpful because I could go and spend time with him and talk to him. She said, ‘We’ll bring Ben Ben [her nickname for her son] to you. You can have him there.’”
She added, “I think it would scare the living f—ing p-ss out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me.” Lisa Marie was nine-years-old when Elvis died in 1977.
The room where Benjamin’s body was reportedly kept at 55 degrees and Presley and Keough got tattoos that matched Benjamin’s from an artist who came to their home. When asked if they had any photos of the piece they wanted to replicate, Lisa Marie told him, “no, but I can show you,” referring to ink Benjamin had on his collarbone with Keough’s name and another on his hand with Presley’s name; the mother and daughter got Benjamin’s name tattooed on the matching parts of their bodies.
Even by the unusual rules that the Presley’s lived by, Keough said the tattoo incident was one of the most bizarre ones she’d experienced. “Lisa Marie Presley had just asked this poor man to look at the body of her dead son, which happened to be right next to us in the casitas. I’ve had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five,” she wrote.
Shortly after that, one of Keough’s brothers made it clear he didn’t want the body in the home anymore and Keough, channeling her late sibling, imagined how he might have observed the scene. “‘Guys,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘this is getting weird.’ Even my mom said that she could feel him talking to her, saying, ‘This is insane, Mom, what are you doing? What the f—!,’” Keough said.
According to People, the book details how the family held a funeral service for Benjamin in Malibu and Keough placed a pair of her yellow Nikes that her brother had always loved in the casket. In a previous interview with People prior to the book’s release, Keough revealed, “My mom physically died from the after effects of her surgery, but we all knew she died of a broken heart.”
Both Presley and her son are buried at Graceland, where Elvis is also interred.
Wagakki Band shocked fans earlier this year when it announced that the group will be going on hiatus indefinitely after Dec. 31, 2024. The eight-member band has forged out a singular space in J-pop music through its unique ensemble including traditional Japanese instruments and featuring the distinctive singing style of frontwoman Yuko Suzuhana. After a decade of enjoying brilliant success both in its home country and abroad, the group has summed up its career so far in a best-of collection, called ALL TIME BEST ALBUM THANKS – Yasou no Oto -.
Wagakki Band members Suzuhana, Beni Ninagawa (Tsugaru-shamisen), Kurona (wadaiko, Japanese drums), Machiya (guitar & vocals), and Wasabi (drums) sat down with Billboard Japan and spoke candidly about why they chose to take a break on their anniversary year, and the process of producing the 18-track greatest hits album that also includes re-recorded versions of familiar hits and two new songs.
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The announcement that the band would be taking a break indefinitely took me by surprise when it came out in January. Could you tell us how you came to that decision?
Yuko Suzuhana: We formed Wagakki Band and made our debut in less than a year and spent an extremely busy ten years since. But at the time we first got started, all the members each had their own bands or were doing solo work. Wagakki Band suddenly attracted a lot of attention, so we stopped everything else we’d been doing until then and poured everything into this project. We’d been discussing for over a year about how it might be a good idea to stop the band for the time being and focus on our individual activities.
Beni Ninagawa: We figured we’d do our best until the end of our tenth year, then after that, we needed some time to reflect on ourselves and further improve our skills. It’s a positive decision that will allow us to get together again after we’ve improved and make even better music.
Suzuhana: The band wasn’t going downhill, so the timing of the announcement might have come as a surprise for some, but we said the hiatus would be indefinite simply because we haven’t set a time limit. This news is being inaccurately reported, especially outside of Japan, that we’re disbanding and I’ve received many inquiries from overseas.
Listening to this greatest hits album, I was touched by how it traces the history of your past ten years in a very dramatic way.
Machiya: We didn’t want to make a best-of album that just lined up our famous hits. Since it’s the tenth anniversary of our debut, we decided to re-record some of our early releases and make the collection into a retrospective of the ten years we’ve spent with our fans. It’s a pretty conceptual structure that allows you to trace our history by listening to the songs in release order.
Ninagawa: What’s more, the earlier songs that we re-recorded have a completely different sound quality compared to the original recordings, so that’s something for our fans to enjoy.
Wasabi: In particular, the original version of “Rokuchounen to Ichiya Monogatari” sounds quite light. There are parts where we should have made more solid, but it’s a fast-paced song and we weren’t able to express that at the time. But thanks to the things we’ve cultivated over the past decade, we’ve finally been able to give it shape, and I think you can feel the weight of our ten years in the sound.
After listening to the re-recorded version, I was struck by the magnitude of the wadaiko’s presence.
Kurona: Rock music can be made with just a guitar, bass and drums, so traditional Japanese instruments aren’t really necessary. But in this band, they can’t just be discreetly included; they have to become indispensable and the sounds should be there because they’re necessary. There were no precedents before Wagakki Band and we’re still the only ones that do this… We’re still in the process of trial and error.
The tracks “Rokuchounen to Ichiya Monogatari (Re-Recording)” and “Senbonzakura (Re-Recording)” were released digitally ahead of the album. My phrases and calls haven’t changed at all since (the original), but maybe because the way we recorded has changed, I’ve had people tell me that they think I’ve added more wadaiko phrases and calls. In that sense, I feel that my trials and the results of how to make Japanese instruments sound richer, including the significance of my own presence, are expressed in these re-recorded versions.
“GIFT” is a positive up-tempo new song credited to Yuko.
Suzuhana: I imagined what I’d be like, what kind of melody I’d like to be singing at the end of our tenth anniversary before the break. I came up with a positive, bright melody and tempo in a day or so, and wrote it on the piano. I named it “Gift” because this band was a gift to me. My life changed completely thanks to this band, and of course I hope that the music we eight members created will also be a gift to our fans. So this song is about how the existence of Wagakki Band has changed all of our lives for the better.
Ninagawa: Everything we want to convey is packed into this song, isn’t it?
Machiya: If you listen to this song after reading this interview, you might be able to see that our hiatus is a bit different from what those who interpreted it as a negative move thought it would be.
The other new song, “Yasou Emaki,” is credited to Wagakki Band.
Machiya: What’s different about this best-of album from previous ones is that we asked our fans which songs they wanted included. We made the selection based mainly on the top answers from the survey, but those songs are to be expected, right? Among the top 100, there were lots of tracks in the midrange that didn’t make the cut. We wanted to meet the expectations of our fans who voted for such songs, so we started working on this new track with the idea of mashing them up as much as possible. I was the one who did all the actual work, but we made it together in that it samples phrases that we all made, so we put it out under the name Wagakki Band for the first time.
I’ve forgotten how many I ended up using, but I took samples of over 80 songs. I exported all the melodies and chords in the same key, and then spent about two weeks extracting the words from them.
You’ll be touring from November to December with this album and wrapping up your decade of music for the time being. Can your fans expect the tour to be a joyful celebration?
Kurona: We know that our fans have bought tickets with some sadness and feeling of loss about our break in the corner of their minds, so we want to make sure that the shows will outlast those feelings for as long as possible. We want people who were feeling down to go home with a brighter outlook, saying things like, “I had a great time” and “I’m glad I came today.” To that end, we’ll put on an even cooler show than ever before.
“ALL TIME BEST ALBUM THANKS – Yasou no Oto -” is streaming now https://wgb.lnk.to/thanks_digital. Click here for information on tickets to “WAGAKKIBAND Japan Tour 2024 THANKS-YASO NO OTO-” Tokyo show on Dec. 10 for overseas residents https://wagakkiband.com/contents/857663.
—This interview by Tomokazu Nishibiro first appeared on Billboard Japan
Coldplay’s Moon Music has stormed to the top of the U.K. Albums Chart upon its release, becoming the fastest-selling album of the year by a British act, U.K. Official Charts can confirm.
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In just 72 hours, the band’s latest album has already sold over 160,000 chart units, setting Coldplay on course for their 10th consecutive No. 1 studio album, as per the latest Chart blast.
It marks the biggest first-week sales in the U.K. for a British act since Adele’s 30 in 2021, which debuted with 261,000 chart units. If Coldplay maintains this momentum, they might edge closer to Taylor Swift’s record, which claimed the fastest-selling album of 2024 with The Tortured Poets Department, which moved 270,000 chart units in its first week.
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It marks the biggest first-week sales in the U.K. for a British act since Adele’s 30 in 2021, which debuted with 261,000 chart units. If Coldplay maintains this momentum, they might edge closer to Taylor Swift’s record, who claimed the fastest-selling album of 2024 with The Tortured Poets Department.
Public Service Broadcasting are eyeing their third Top 10 album with The Last Flight, which is currently at No. 2, while The Smile — an offshoot of Radiohead — follows closely with their latest effort Cutouts at No. 3. James Bay’s Changes All The Time is also expected to land in the Top 5.
The 1975’s Being Funny In A Foreign Language is projected for a re-entry into the Top 10 at No. 6, driven by the release of an exclusive liquid-filled vinyl.
Alison Moyet is on track for her first Top 10 album in over a decade with Key, marking a triumphant return for the singer-songwriter.
In the lower half of the Top 10, Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II (No. 8) and Jake Bugg’s A Modern Day Distraction (No. 10) are set for strong debuts.
Further down the chart, FINNEAS could score his first Top 40 album with For Cryin’ Out Loud!, predicted to debut at No. 20. Caribou’s Honey is on track to become the Canadian producer’s third Top 40 album, while indie favorite Orla Gartland is set to land her second Top 40 album with Everybody Needs A Hero (No. 25).
Elsewhere, former Black Midi frontman Geordie Greep’s debut solo album The New Sound is on course for a Top 40 debut (No. 31), and Leon Bridges’ Leon follows closely behind at No. 34.
Stay tuned as Coldplay’s Moon Music battles to cement its place as the year’s biggest release in the U.K., with Friday’s final chart reveal set to determine if they’ll match or surpass Swift’s 2024 milestone.
Shirley Manson, the iconic frontwoman of Garbage, has given fans a hopeful update as she recovers from surgery following the band’s decision to cancel all remaining 2024 tour dates.
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On Oct. 7, Manson took to social media, sharing a photo of herself in a hospital bed with the simple caption, “She lives.”
In another follow-up post, the iconic singer expressed her gratitude to those supporting her during her recovery and reflected on the challenges she’s faced over the past few months.
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“I’m choosing to remind myself, as I lie here trying to recover from major surgery, that there are still beautiful things in the world. Animals, flowers, oceans, trees. I’m so grateful to all the people who have gone out of their way to love on me, take care of me, check in on me. I cling on to their kindness and their thoughtfulness and their care,” she said.
“Mostly, I have spent the week in bed. Mostly, I have been doomscrolling. As you can imagine, like everyone else, I’m trying really hard not to lose my mind,” she shared.
Manson also used the post to call for peace amidst the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, writing, “We are all living in the same world. We all deserve a life of peace and happiness. No one will convince me otherwise. Where you have inequality and injustice there will be suffering.”
The update comes after Garbage announced in August that all remaining tour dates for 2024 would be canceled due to an injury Manson sustained during the band’s European performances.
On Aug. 7, Manson shared more details about the toll the injury had taken, revealing that she had returned from the tour “an absolute hot mess.”
In her post, she explained, “So broken that my poor husband had to push me through Heathrow and LAX airports in a wheelchair. I also had a dose of laryngitis and a massive cold sore on my lip.”
Fans were understandably concerned about her vocal health, but Manson reassured them in a follow-up post that everything was under control.
“I was freaking out that I had somehow managed to damage my vocal cords on top of everything else, but yesterday I was scoped and everything is as it should be,” she shared, offering a glimpse of her vocal cords for good measure.
Though she hasn’t gone into detail about the surgery, things seem to be looking up. Garbage is gearing up for their 2025 South American tour, where they’ll be joined by L7 for shows across Bogotá, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo, starting in March.
On top of that, Garbage fans can look forward to a special Record Store Day Black Friday release on Nov. 29. The band is dropping copy/paste, a collection of covers they’ve performed as an homage to luminaries such as David Bowie, Ramones, Patti Smith, U2, Big Star, Siouxsie and the Banshees and more.
