Music

14 Apr 2023

Kenia OS & Gera MX, Juanes & More: Which Is Your Favorite New Latin Music Release? Vote!

This week, our New Music Latin roundup — a compilation of the best new Latin songs, albums and videos recommended by the Billboard Latin and Billboard Español editors each week — is powered by new music from Eladio Carrión, Boza, Farruko, Caloncho, and Nanpa Basico, to name a few. 

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Carrión teamed up with Anuel AA on “Triste Verano” (sad summer), one of the most highly anticipated team-ups of the música urbana game, where the two artists spit verses like two forsaken fellows who ain’t too proud to beg, against an invigorating interplay between Latin trap and reggaetón. For his first single of the year, Boza reeled in Dalex (who’s making a comeback in his own right) for “Volar” (fly), an infectious electronica beat helmed by Colombian hitmaker Sky Rompiendo with lyrics about falling hard for a girl and feeling the highest of emotions. And DJ Marshmello joined forces with Farruko on “Esta Vida” (this life), an EDM song with lyrics that convey a different message that reflects Farru’s newly found life path. 

Additionally, Billboard highlights other releases such as Esteman’s groovy, slowed-down pop ballad “Despertar,” Juanes’ romantic alternative rock “Ojalá,” Felipe Pelaéz’s first-ever ranchera “Magía,” Fito Paéz and Ángela Aguilar’s feel-good “Brillante Sobre El Mic,” and Kenia OS’ sultry “Rumores” with boyfriend and Mexican rapper Gera MX, among other new releases.

Listen to the full New Music Latin playlist here, and vote for your latest favorite music release below:

Get tickets to the first-ever #BBMujeresLatinas on May 6 in Miami: billboardmujeresenlamusica.com

14 Apr 2023

How Two Beach Country Anthems Brought Sun and Sand to Nashville 20 Years Ago

This week, Billboard is publishing a series of lists and articles celebrating the music of 20 years ago. Our 2003 Week concludes with a look at a turning point in country music, where two smash hits daydreaming about getting away from it all helped make the beach as essential a Nashville vista as the dusty plain or the open road.

On August 25, 2012, Kenny Chesney officially declared the sovereignty of No Shoes Nation during a show at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass. A banner was eventually hung among those honoring all the Patriots’ titles to commemorate Chesney’s initial acknowledgement, though the actual origins of his fanbase’s name are shrouded in mystery (it was mentioned explicitly at least as early as a June 2012 Billboard feature on the singer).

“No Shoes Nation is more than a state of mind,” Chesney explained in the press release for his 2017 album, Live in No Shoes Nation. “It’s the place we all come together for the music, the fun and each other.” 

Whether or not you accept the legal autonomy of his shoeless (or more often, flip-flopped) fans, the decades Chesney has spent entwining country music and a specific type of geographically hazy beach vacation have fundamentally changed the genre. The tipping point came just under 20 years ago, on August 16, 2003: the No. 1 song on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart was Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett‘s “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” and the No. 2 song on the chart was Kenny Chesney’s “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems.” Two weeks earlier, Uncle Kracker’s breezy cover of “Drift Away” (whose chorus is often misheard as “give me the Beach Boys“) reached No. 9 on the Hot 100.

America, or at least its country radio-listening contingent, needed a break — and it hasn’t put down its margaritas (or put on its shoes) since Chesney and Jackson spent one sweaty, sunburned summer compelling country listeners to trade back roads for sand bars. Etching a new country radio formula in stone and inspiring hundreds of imitators, they also ensured some of their songs’ questionable, touristic language and imagery stayed in the genre’s canon.

Before No Shoes Nation established its borders, of course, there was the little hamlet of Margaritaville. The early-’00s beach country renaissance arrived about a quarter-century after Buffett — having flopped pretty hard trying to ride the coattails of the Texas outlaws into Nashville — carved out what would become a billion-dollar niche romanticizing the then-untamed Key West waterfront. Buffett, having grown up on the less-scenic Gulf shores of Mobile, Alabama, had some claim to the island-time lifestyle that he would brand so effectively. 

His conversion experience, though, came courtesy of singer-songwriter Jerry Jeff Walker, who Buffett had met while trying to make it in Nashville. Walker, who lived in Miami at the time, led a down-on-his-luck Buffett around south Florida in typical vagabond fashion. Buffett fell in love with Key West, and told Walker to leave him there when he headed back to Miami. “I’d been a teenager on Bourbon Street in college, I knew New Orleans from childhood, and Key West just had that magic,” Buffett later told Texas Monthly. 

After “Margaritaville” hit No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1977 — marking the singer-songwriter’s first, and still biggest, solo hit — Buffett was more than content to lean all the way into the light subversion of his beach-bum persona. With it, he was able to top the Adult Contemporary Airplay chart and reach No. 13 on Hot Country Songs, expanding his audience outside of Nashville by translating hippie nonchalance into a mode that even good hard-working folks could understand: a beach vacation. 

There is an actual self-deprecating critique buried in “Margaritaville”: Buffett describes it as “wasting away,” after all, and a “lost” third verse observes tourists who “dream about weight loss” and “wish they could be their own boss” (tourists who sound a lot like most people listening to “Margaritaville”). But any reflection on what it might mean to actually escape the drudgery that makes frozen beverages so symbolic and seductive was clearly eclipsed by the fun of singing about margaritas. 

Having forged a new sunny, breezy bridge between country music and pop — one that would eventually be coined “gulf and western” — Jimmy Buffett more or less played for the Parrotheads and explored different Margaritaville-themed ventures for the next 20 years. He never came close to the pop ubiquity he found with “Margaritaville” — until 2003, that is, when his unlikely compatriot Alan Jackson wondered, “What would Jimmy Buffett do?”

Jackson, who made his name through the ’90s as the most agreeable kind of neo-traditional country singer-songwriter, isn’t the kind of artist one would typically associate with “beach country” — even post-“Somewhere.” But the Georgia native claimed Buffett as an influence prior to their most familiar collaboration — his 1992 signature song “Chattahoochee” is about frolicking around a body of water, after all. “I’ve always been a big Jimmy Buffett fan,” Jackson wrote in the liner notes for his 1999 album Under The Influence, which included his first collaboration with Buffett on a cover of “Margaritaville.” “I like his music and the fact that he does what he wants to do.” (Billboard called the cover “a bit jarring.”)

In spite of the surprise that greeted his “Margaritaville” cover, Jackson went looking for another good duet option for him and Buffett — and came up with the most successful single of his career with “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere.” “When I got the song it sounded like Buffett, so I called him up and asked him if he’d do it with me,” Jackson told the AP in 2003. “We cut the track in Nashville, then I flew to Key West and did the vocals [at Buffett’s Shrimp Boat Studio].” Buffett was not enormously invested in the song: he didn’t go to the video shoot (hence the live interlude), nor did he talk to the press at all about it as it skyrocketed up the charts — and it made no difference whatsoever. The song became not just one of the biggest of the year, spending eight weeks atop the country charts, but of the decade, a timeless drinking anthem that’s more about imagining a carefree beach vacation than actually getting to go on one.

Chesney first publicly embraced Buffett a little earlier than Jackson, with the late 1998 release of his breakthrough hit “How Forever Feels.” The singer-songwriter, raised in a small town near Knoxville, had as solid of country music bona fides as anyone in Nashville. But they hadn’t helped him break away from the pack of nearly indistinguishable mid-’90s cowboy-hatted young men attempting to replicate Garth Brooks’ success. “How Forever Feels,” which spent six weeks atop the Hot Country Songs chart, was the reason people started to learn his name. 

The song, which was written by Wendell Mobley and Tony Mullins, has a decidedly country aesthetic — fiddle, pedal steel and all — and is about a decidedly country topic (marriage). But it opens with a little tribute to Buffett: “Big orange ball, sinkin’ in the water/ Toes in the sand, couldn’t get much hotter…Now I know how Jimmy Buffett feels.” That, along with a video shot on a picturesque St. Thomas beach in which Chesney alternates between his Brooksian black cowboy hat and a backwards baseball hat and sunglasses, was enough to cement his brand as “beach guy.” As “Forever” climbed the Billboard charts, Chesney added a cover of “Margaritaville” to his own set, and started tossing beach balls into the crowd when he played his single. (Earlier in 1998, Garth himself also scored a Buffett-influenced hit of his own, with the land-weary “Two Pina Coladas.”)

It didn’t really matter that “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy” and any number of other non-explicitly “beach” songs became hits for Chesney soon after — his fate was cast with his first mention of “oil tannin’ señoritas.” “Before I was just in a big bowl of guys,” Chesney told the AP in 2004. “You’ve got to find your avenue, your way to separate yourself. I think for the first time in my career I was able to pull myself out of that ditch and be known as more than just a country hat act who was singing the same old songs everybody else was singing.”

Seemingly disinterested in messing with success, Chesney and his team put out a greatest hits compilation in 2000 that featured the first of several iconic country-beach-kitsch album covers. Chesney, fully clothed in a black cowboy hat and white button-down shirt, is pictured emerging from the ocean — despite the fact that only one of the included songs even mentioned the beach (on the back, he was similarly submerged while wearing overalls). The album became his first to top the Country Albums chart, and has since gone platinum five times over.

Releasing No Shoes, No Shirt, No Problems in 2002, then, was almost like playing with house money for the Chesney camp. The album followed a now-familiar formula: a couple overtly beachy tunes, combined with a slew of more familiar country radio sounds (and a Bruce Springsteen cover, lest anyone question his range, or right to integrate rock elements into his performances at bigger and bigger venues). The cover featured Chesney in a black tank top and seemingly impractical cowboy hat on the sand, so that you knew his latitude and attitude before even listening to the album.

Surprisingly, the title track — Chesney’s most overtly island-themed tune to date (note the ukulele) — was No Problems‘ final single. “The islands,” Chesney intones during the video’s opening monologue. “They’re the one place where you can truly be as you are — where it doesn’t matter what you’ve done or how you make your life, you’re just there, with the sun, the sand, the sea, and the locals.” In place of Buffett’s hazy pairing of self-indulgence and deprecation, Chesney offers a manifesto. (Chesney had actually passed “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” which was originally offered to him by writers Don Rollins and Jim “Moose” Brown before Jackson snapped it up.)

Together, “Somewhere” and “No Problems” distill how Chesney and Jackson helped retool Buffett’s beachy bohemia into a core element of contemporary country music — how they translated its hippie dropout energy into something that fit easily within the world of Nashville’s moralized conservatism. 

“Beach bum” is not a lifestyle for either, but an escape from the unpleasant but necessary rigors of doing one’s job: “I’m gettin’ paid by the hour and older by the minute, my boss just pushed me over the limit,” Jackson sings, “I’d like to call him something; I think I’ll just call it a day.” In place of Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It,” we get an anthem for taking this job and swallowing it…in the form of a tasty frozen beverage. Chesney has been “working six days a week,” while Jackson hasn’t “had a day off now in over a year” — they’ve earned this indulgence, which could hardly be deemed anything close to “wastin’ away.”

The darker side of all three artists’ take on coastal escapes comes with a relentlessly casual attitude towards “locals,” as Chesney calls them in the aforementioned monologue, treating them like an unchanging, natural, impersonal force – akin to the sun, the sand and the sea. Most often, the beachy escapes imagined in “Somewhere,” “No Problems” and the dozens of copycats since are uninhabited except for sexy nameless “senoritas;” they have no issue, then, with somewhat hackneyed countrified takes on reggae and calypso. 

In these songs, there is a clear sense that the intended audience is people who view Mexico or Jamaica as a place to vacation, not as their home — and those listeners seem to feel entitled to those beaches and margaritas, regardless of the potential consequences of their perpetual visits for their inhabitants. Margaritaville resorts stretch throughout the Caribbean and Central America and press uncomfortably up against the residents of those actual countries where people live all year long.

Chesney released “When The Sun Goes Down,” a beachy duet with Uncle Kracker, in 2004 — the first of many attempts to follow up “No Problems.” Buffett would lean into his way-belated Nashville success the following year with an album of country collaborations called License to Chill, often quipping about getting his first country No. 1 and his first award (the CMA for Vocal Event of the Year) long after becoming a household name. “I was thinking of doing a record like this for a long time,” Buffett told the Boston Globe at the time. “It certainly has not gone unnoticed by me that I was either getting mentioned as an influence or was included in song lyrics by a lot of country singers.” 

“I think everybody’s a Jimmy Buffett wannabe,” Chesney said in an interview with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune in 2005. “Deep down, Jimmy was always a country artist. His songs had a country soul to them.” 

Now, it’s the rare country album that doesn’t have some sort of vacation-themed song or allusion to mix up the drinking tunes, whether it’s Dierks Bentley’s “Somewhere on a Beach,” Morgan Wallen’s “Sand In My Boots,” or Luke Combs going “deep sea señorita fishing down in Panama.” The Buffett aesthetic and ethos was, via Chesney and Jackson, turned into yet another familiar Music Row formula; a theme that allows for No Shoes Nation to treat a concert like a more affordable version of the kinds of vacations they’re singing along to songs about from the Sandbar (what Chesney tours call the pit). 

“You can call him a Kmart Buffett all you want, but give Chesney credit,” as Sean Daly put it in the St. Petersburg Times. “He’s coupled boat-drink dreams with blue-collar reality, a simple formula with staggering 21st century pull.”

While Jackson, ever a traditionalist, hasn’t done much with his beachy cred, Chesney has maintained all along that his ever-growing vacation anthem oeuvre is about more than just him keeping a good thing going. 

“The people who believe this is all an invention of clever marketing have missed the point,” he told Billboard in 2007. “Not that there hasn’t been some great marketing, but … we don’t put a check out there I can’t cash. When people talk about the tropical lifestyle, the beach, summer, friends, we absolutely put that out there…But we didn’t just pull it out of the air. That’s my life and how I live.” If the country charts of the past two decades are any indication, more and more country fans wish they could live that way too. 

14 Apr 2023

Calvin Harris Drops Hardwell Remix of ‘Miracle’ Ahead of His Coachella Performance

Calvin Harris, Ellie Goulding and Hardwell have collab’d for the very first time, with the latter producer’s new edit of Harris and Goulding’s “Miracle.”

The Dutch producer gives the trance throwback a characteristic big room treatment, taking the original’s heavy kick drum and adding about a thousand layers of synth, turning the anthem into a completely effective maximal mainstage banger.

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The original and the edit will likely make appearances in Harris’ set Saturday (April 15) at Coachella. The producer is playing the festival’s main stage after the headlining performance by BLACKPINK. Harris’ show marks the Scottish producer’s first time playing the festival since 2014, when he performed a headlining set that featured an appearance by Rihanna.

“Miracle” is currently in its fourth week on Dance/Electronic Songs, where it’s currently sitting at No. 8. Earlier this week the song also hit No. 1 on the U.K. singles chart, climbing 3-1, for its first stint at the summit.

The track marks Harris’ third collaboration over the last decade. Together, they hit No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 in August of 2013 with “I Need Your Love.” Coming from Harris’ all time classic LP 18 Months, the song spent 25 weeks on the chart and served as a key track of the EDM era. 2014’s “Outside” — from Harris’ Motion — reached No. 29 on the Hot 100 and spent 20 weeks on the chart.

Goulding was (and indeed remains) one of the genre’s most crucial voices, appearing on tracks by Harris, Skrillex, Major Lazer, Seven Lions and a flurry of other genre stars.

14 Apr 2023

SZA’s ‘Kill Bill’ Slays All Competition, Reaches No. 1 on Pop Airplay Chart

SZA’s “Kill Bill” slices through all songs standing in its way to hit No. 1 on Billboard’s Pop Airplay chart (dated April 22).

The song, released on Top Dawg/RCA Records, becomes SZA’s second leader on the mainstream top 40-based radio ranking, and first in a lead role. She previously reigned as featured on Doja Cat’s “Kiss Me More,” for a week in July 2021.

The latest list reflects airplay, as monitored by Mediabase and provided to Billboard by Luminate, in the week ending April 13. Its new remix featuring Doja Cat arrived at midnight ET today (April 14) and will begin contributing to next week’s charts (dated April 29), with all versions of the song rolling up into one chart listing.

The song has spent eight weeks at its No. 2 high (SZA’s career best) on the all-genre, multi-metric Billboard Hot 100, through the most recently published April 15-dated chart. On the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs survey, which uses the same methodology, it added a 16th week at No. 1 on the April 15 tally – breaking the record for the longest reign for a song by a woman in a lead role in the ranking’s history.

“Kill Bill” is from SZA’s album SOS, which has topped the Billboard 200 chart for 10 weeks, starting upon its debut in December.

RCA originally targeted ballad “Nobody Gets Me” for pop radio, but as streaming surged for “Kill Bill,” the label decided to formally promote both simultaneously. “Nobody Gets Me” hit No. 18 on Pop Airplay in February.

As for the tongue-in-cheek murder plot (turned confession) storyline of “Kill Bill,” RCA has promoted two radio edits – one in which “I might kill” / “I just killed my ex” is simply omitted and one in which “kill” / “killed” are replaced by the swooshing sound of a knife.

Said Jon Zellner, iHeartMedia president of programming operations/digital music, in January, “While violent, [it] certainly is creating a buzz. Are there really people who would rather go to jail or hell than be alone?”

All charts dated April 22 will update on Billboard.com Tuesday, April 18.

14 Apr 2023

Friday Music Guide: New Music From SZA & Doja Cat, Post Malone, Metallica and More

Billboard’s Friday Music Guide serves as a handy guide to this Friday’s most essential releases — the key music that everyone will be talking about today, and that will be dominating playlists this weekend and beyond. 

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This week, SZA and Doja Cat craft a killer reunion, Post Malone is back with some pop chemistry, and Metallica are still riding the lightning. Check out all of this week’s picks below:

SZA feat. Doja Cat, “Kill Bill (Remix)” 

While SZA’s “Kill Bill” has been one of the defining smashes of the first half of 2023, the SOS single has done it while stuck outside of the Hot 100’s top spot — this week spending its eighth nonconsecutive week at No. 2 on the chart. Will this remix with her “Kiss Me More” pal Doja Cat give “Bill” the push it needs to No. 1? Regardless of chart effects, Doja’s inclusion on the track injects a new excitement: the superstar opens up the remix with detailed rap storytelling, documenting a violent run-in with her ex and his new girlfriend that makes SZA’s well-worn hook leap off the speakers once again and potentially serves as a prelude to the hip-hop album that Doja Cat has been hinting at for some time.

Post Malone, “Chemical” 

When “Circles” became one of the biggest hits of Post Malone’s career upon its 2019 release, the hip-hop superstar seemed to be gesturing at a new pop-rock template for his crossover singles. Last year’s Twelve Carat Toothache downplayed that transition a bit, but “Chemical,” Posty’s first new release of 2023, adamantly embraces that sonic tweak: this single is giddy pop euphoria, with a driving beat, sunny guitar strums and upper-register singing about a relationship finally collapsing. Although Post Malone has demonstrated an ability to straddle both sounds, “Chemical” sounds like a nod toward top 40 radio, and a surefire summer smash.

Metallica, 72 Seasons 

Metallica may take their time with studio albums these days — 72 Seasons arrives six-and-a-half years after 2016’s Hardwired… to Self-Destruct, which came eight years after 2008’s Death Magnetic — but whenever they return, they pummel longtime fans with riffs, hooks and kinetic energy. At 77 minutes, 72 Seasons presents its ideas over an extended period of time, but at a breakneck speed: Kirk Hammett’s technical skill works overtime on songs like “Lux Æterna” and “Shadows Follow,” while James Hetfield hasn’t lost a step across a four-decade career, conjuring personal pain and hoisting it up with classic thrash-god instincts. Metallica’s studio output may have slowed a bit, yet 72 Seasons showcases how vital they remain.

Ice Spice feat. Nicki Minaj, “Princess Diana (Remix)”

A key component of Ice Spice’s meteoric rise is her skill as a collaborator: from the top 10 smash “Boy’s a Liar Pt. 2” with PinkPantheress to “Gangsta Boo,” the Lil Tjay team-up that highlights her Like..? EP, the Bronx rapper knows exactly how to accentuate her own voice while making room for other types of artistry. The remix to “Princess Diana” not only slides a huge co-sign from Nicki Minaj into her back pocket, but seamlessly brings a larger-than-life personality into the world of a very good existing song — after Ice Spice’s slick cadence and internal rhymes glide across the beat, Minaj provides new highlights with quotable sneers like “She the princess, so f–k who you lames is?”

Dominic Fike, “Dancing in the Courthouse” 

After experiencing some run-ins with the law while growing up in Florida, Dominic Fike synthesizes his experiences and resulting emotions on “Dancing in the Courthouse” — part tongue-in-cheek riff on our modern legal system, part joyful return of a rising singer-songwriter, whose sophomore album is due out later this year on Columbia Records. “Dancing in the Courthouse” makes good use of both Fike’s subtle wordplay and pop sensibility, with each barbed line eventually coalescing into one of the most soaring refrains of his career thus far.

Marshmello & Farruko, “Esta Vida” 

One month after linking up with Colombian reggaeton star Manuel Turizo on the new single “El Merengue,” Marshmello continues his exploration of disparate Latin pop styles with “Esta Vida,” a summer-ready anthem co-starring Puerto Rican party-starter Farruko. “Esta Vida” clearly takes inspiration from the playbook Farruko used on the stadium-sized hit “Pepas” — the thousand-voiced effect returns on the chorus here — but both artists bring their A-game to the dance cut, with rubbery synth production backing Farruko’s smooth oscillation between rapping and singing.

14 Apr 2023

Timbaland Says ‘Fun’ Justin Timberlake Is Back on Upcoming ‘Bob-Your-Head’ Album

After flying his flannel and dipping into some country funk vibes on 2018’s Man of the Woods, Justin Timberlake is ready to dance, dance, dance on his next album. Longtime pal and producer Timbaland recently spoke to Variety about the just-wrapped sessions for JT’s sixth solo album.

Last week, Tim said he’d just left the studio where he and Timberlake were finishing things up and he said “everything sounds great. Now it’s really on him how he plans to wrap it up and how and when he envisions it to come out. With an artist of his caliber, everything has to be aligned, but it’s done and it’s coming.”

At press time a spokesperson for Timberlake had not returned Billboard‘s request for comment on the status of his next album.

The great news according to Timbaland is that the as-yet-untitled collection is a definitive return to “fun Justin.” The producer who has worked on some of JT’s most iconic tracks said the collection hearkens back to Justin’s beloved 2006 FutureSex/LoveSounds album, which featured the hits “SexyBack,” “My Love,” “What Goes Around… Comes Around” and “Summer Love.”

“But nothing too heavy, just giving you what you’d expect from us: not overthought, the lyrics are not so deep, it’s bob-your-head, dance-to-it music,” Timbaland said. “Music is a young sport, and you have to keep it fun — fun and young. We’ve both seen a lot of life, but you can’t overthink it because of that, you have to bring out the 13-year-old, 18-year-old again, you know? If not, you can get into the old-fogey stage real quick.[Laughs] That’s just the world we live in.”

He said the pair took them time on this one in order to make sure they were being “authentic and true to the art,” so when songs came up that were “too complicated” they picked tracks that were more along the lines of “‘FutureSex’ part two.”

As for the mixed response to Man of the Woods — which folded in folksy Americana vibes on songs such as the rural funk “Supplies” and country pop “Say Something” with country singer Chris Stapleton — Timbaland said the LP was part of a “statement” that JT wanted to make at the time. “When artists have a personal things that they want to do, I kind of back myself away. Because if I have a personal thing that I’m trying to get across, I have to at least try to get it out and deal with whatever happens from that point,” he said.

So as Justin’s friend, Tim said he tried to help make the best album they could together, teaming with another frequent sonic associate, Pharrell, to help execute the singer’s vision for the project. “I guess it’s kind of an autobiography album, ‘I’m from Memphis, I came from nothing, this is how I used to live my life in the South,’” he said of the album’s theme.

Understanding that without risk there is no reward, Tim said after Justin got what he needed to off his chest, “now were’ back to the essence.” At press time a title and release date for Timberlake’s sixth album have not been announced.

14 Apr 2023

Tanner Usrey Signs With Atlantic Records, Makes Label Debut With ‘Give It Some Time’

Atlantic Records has signed country singer-songwriter Tanner Usrey to its artist roster, with Usrey’s label debut single, “Give It Some Time,” releasing Friday (April 14).

Texas native Usrey was belting out Alan Jackson songs by age five, and counts artists including George Strait, the Rolling Stones and Tom Petty among his influences. Usrey quit his job as a skip tracer in 2019 and released his independent EP Medicine Man, with songs including “Beautiful Lies” earning millions of Spotify streams. In 2021, he followed with SÕL Sessions EP; a song from the project, “The Light,” soundtracked the finale of Yellowstone‘s fourth season.

“Give It Some Time,” was written by Usrey and producer Beau Bedford (Jonathan Tyler, The Texas Gentlemen).

“I started writing this song about a year and a half ago,” Usrey said via a statement. “It wasn’t one that came easy, by any means. I had the hook and a verse down when I went to start the record with Beau Bedford. And we finished the song in an hour and recorded it later that day. It’s an anthem about change, holding on to the person you love, and riding out the storm, because things will get better with time. This song means a lot to me, it’s one that I had to work at for a long time to write, and it’s our first single release with Atlantic, so I’m super excited about working together with this awesome team and seeing what we can accomplish together.”

“Tanner’s innate talent as a storyteller is evident in all of his music and we are incredibly excited to welcome him to the Atlantic family,” Ian Cripps, senior vp, A&R for Atlantic Records, added via a statement.

Last year, Usrey performed over 180 shows; in 2023, he is opening shows for artists including Elle King, Charles Wesley Godwin, and The Steel Woods.

14 Apr 2023

Where Are They Now? Catching Up With 2003 Stars Lumidee, The Ataris, Eamon & Electric Six

This week, Billboard is publishing a series of lists and articles celebrating the music of 20 years ago. Our 2003 Week continues here as we catch up with some old hitmaker friends we might not have heard from in a little bit — Lumidee, The Ataris, Eamon and Electric Six — to reminisce about old times, and see what they’ve been up to since we last spoke.

If the clap-clap-clap-clap beat of Nicki Minaj’s latest single “Red Ruby da Sleeze” gives you straight-up 2003 vibes, there’s good reason: the song leans heavily on a sampled hook and riddim from Lumidee’s breakout hit “Never Leave You (Uh Oooh, Uh Oooh).” No one was more surprised by the request from the Queen of Barbie Tingz than Lumidee herself.

“It was random! It was an email I got. They need a rushed approval,” the Harlem native explains. “I do get these emails a lot through my administrator. But I’m reading and I’m like, ‘Oh wait – Nicki Minaj?’ Obviously I’m excited! Like, who’s not a Nicki Minaj fan?” 

She adds, “I got even more excited because I have a 14-year-old daughter and she’s a Barb! She goes to war for Nicki Minaj. So I’m like, if this happens, you know all the cool points I’m gonna get?”

The solid-gold staying power of “Never Leave You” can be chalked up to the combined appeal of the then-18-year-old Lumidee’s sincere pledge of devotion in the lyrics, the song’s hypnotic “Uh-ohhh! Uh-ohhhh!” refrain and the early-2000s popularity of the Diwali Riddim employed on the track. It was one of three songs to utilize the very same dancehall beat and hit the Hot 100’s top 20 between the spring and summer of 2003. 

Here, Lumidee explains the humble origins of her evergreen smash that first dominated the airwaves two decades ago.

Who she is: Lumidee Cedeño, who was raised in New York City’s East Harlem neighborhood and dreamed of being a performer from an early age.

“I always was inspired by people like Mary J. Blige and Missy Elliott growing up,” the singer, who is of Puerto Rican descent, explains. “And Missy with her wordplay, the words were so simple and relatable, but then fun.”

“Never Leave You” sprung out of an entirely different track altogether: “I was a year into recording music with this DJ [Tedsmooth] from my neighborhood who worked a lot of clubs,” Lumidee recalls. “We had a record already called ‘Honestly’ and it was a little more slow-paced. It’s also on Almost Famous, my first album [which would be released later that year]. It got some club reaction, but it’s not a club kind of record. So in my mind I’m like, ‘Let’s do a remix’.”

Enter the Diwali Riddim: Jamaican dancehall producer Steven “Lenky” Marsden crafted the beat heard on  “Never Leave You,” the above-mentioned “Get Busy” by Sean Paul and Wayne Wonder’s “No Letting Go,” a No. 11 hit on the Billboard Hot 100. All three were released in 2003.

“I didn’t really like the beat they built around [‘Honestly’] at first,” Lumidee explains. “So one day I’m in the studio and this Diwali riddim is hot at the moment. So the guy I’m signed to is like, ‘We gotta jump on this.’  [I was] having problems in my relationship. I wasn’t in the mood to write, but I was like, ‘Never Leave You’ would go to this [beat] on the remix. My producer places it on there and it’s a little bit off. He tweaks the beat a little bit and it kind of just sat in there. We both were like, ‘I think it works!’ That’s literally how it happened.”

The relationship that inspired the lyrics: “It was a guy I met in my neighborhood, just walking by. We had some friends in common. We hung out a few times, but he kind of just disappeared. I didn’t have an ego, but I had pride and I wasn’t going to call him if he wasn’t going to call me. We ran into each other again and we were together [from there]. So ‘Never Leave You’ was pretty much about the back-and-forth between us. It really was a genuine love song.”

She continues, “I wanna say my whole first album and the second album were based on this guy. I have two kids from this guy! It’s weird what time will do. Now it’s 20 years later and the relationship is over, but it’s not sad. When things end it feels weird, but it’s always a new chapter. Every lesson comes with a little bit of pain, a little bit of struggle.”

The first time she heard “Never Leave You” on the radio: “I was in a car with [DJ Tedsmooth],” she recalls. “I had a couple of records that they would play on mix shows. I had a few moments like that. But this one was different because the first time it played, it was like, “OK. Cool. Then it played again and the reaction from the DJs was like, ‘If you don’t have this song in your back pocket right now, you’re crazy!’ It was in clubs and then people started calling the radio and requesting it.”

Her big break: With “Never Leave You” growing organically out of club and radio play, major labels came knocking. Lumidee eventually signed with Universal Records. Being a teenager at the time, however, she admits that she was green as far as how the business side of the industry worked. And when it came down to it, she only had two weeks to cobble together her first LP, Almost Famous.

“Pretty much, the album was just the first songs I’d ever written and recorded. We really didn’t do anything new for it,” she explains. “At this time, ‘Never Leave You’ is already blowing up everywhere. I’m doing two or three shows every weekend and things are taking off. All these record labels are calling, and I’m just going wherever they lead me, because I had no clue how the record business worked. I was signed to this DJ [Tedsmooth] and I was just being guided. I went wherever he took me and that’s what it was.

“People are like, ‘Why would you do that?’” she continues. “They don’t have a clue unless they’re in it. And you’re so excited as an artist, and it’s that thing of — you don’t wanna lose this as an opportunity. It’s now or never. So you wind up signing things maybe you should read over. But I have to say, even with all of that, it still has been such a tremendous blessing. I haven’t had to do anything but music since. Even with the not-so-great deal, I still got mine in there and it’s great.”

What happened next: Free from her deal with Universal Records after Almost Famous, Lumidee found herself in high demand outside of the States as a featured vocalist.

“The best thing that happened for me after [my first album] was going overseas, doing these shows and working with other artists,” she says. “I just kept getting a lot of bookings. I signed with a German label the second time around. We did this record, ‘Sientelo’. It was a reggaetón track with Sir Speedy and it was a No. 1 record in France. It was actually with another Puerto Rican artist, but it was a No. 1 record in France. The randomness of it all! Then we did the FIFA World Cup song [“Dance!” with Fatman Scoop] in 2006.”

Lumidee put out her second LP Unexpected in 2007 and followed it up over the next few years with mixtape releases.

Her recent output: Lumidee stayed productive during the pandemic and dropped her third album, 1013, in 2021. It’s a melodic set, lush with smooth, synth-heavy cuts that find the 38-year-old singer exploring musical territory outside of the R&B genre, thanks to a new collaborator.

“I got with this producer [Ibra-Heem] and was just using him as an engineer. I didn’t realize he was a good producer until one day he [said], ‘Let me play you something’,” Lumidee recalls. “So the first record we did was a Christmas record called ‘Slay Ride’. I’d had the song written, but nobody could get the beat right. So I did it with him and he just locked right in with it. We just kept working. We called [the album] 1013 because we were both born on October 13th. We’re both Libras.” 

The singer makes sure to point out that she’s exactly where she wants to be, creatively. “This is the type of music, to be honest, that I listen to; that I vibe to on my own. Even though it’s still very much me, Lumidee, it’s a little more grown and a little more evolved.”

Enter Nicki Minaj: After receiving the request to sample “Never Leave You” from Minaj’s camp, Lumidee wasn’t sure when “Red Ruby Da Sleeze” would actually arrive. 

“Obviously it has to go through a lot of different approvals, and I’m waiting to hear back,” she says. “Then I got a random call at 3:00 in the morning from a friend of mine, and he’s like, “Listen, b–ch — you need to go online right now! Nicki Minaj just posted this!” It was a visual of her doing the record. I was like, “Oh, shit! This is really happening.” I definitely woke up my daughter at three in the morning like, look at this! She’s like, ‘Oh my god — this is so good for me! I mean, it’s good for you. But it’s also good for me!’”

On her 20-year journey since “Never Leave You”: “I gotta say, I feel lucky. I feel blessed. But I’ve definitely been through some s–t,” Lumidee laughs. “And no one has made it easy for me in this business. But I’ve noticed that if you stick to your guns and you keep going, you start seeing the blessings. I went through a lot of shit with this record, you know, and a lot of beatdowns. But at the same time, people loved it and I feel like the people that loved it — they’re still out here. It’s still surviving through them.”

Up next: Lumidee is scheduled to perform in Las Vegas on May 6 during Usher’s Lovers & Music festival. 

The pandemic not only sidelined punk rockers the Ataris from performing for a long stretch; frontman Kristopher Roe found himself hospitalized with COVID-19 in 2020.

““I got it in March 2020 for five weeks and then I got it again in July 2020 for five weeks, just by being in the same room as my now-ex-wife for 15 minutes,” Roe notes as he discusses his band’s 2003 major label breakthrough album, So Long, Astoria. ”She works as a doctor, and it was just one of those things where she was around sick people a lot.”

A few days later, however, Roe is happily on the phone describing “a warm-up show” he and the current lineup of The Ataris performed near Eureka, Oregon in early March. It was his first time on stage in nearly a half-decade. “Overall, for not having played together in the same room since 2019 and just jumping right on stage, it was really good,” he says.

A few weeks later, the 2003 lineup of The Ataris reunited to commemorate the two decades that have now passed since So Long, Astoria with live performances of the full album at Los Angeles’ Wiltern theater (on April 7) and House of Blues in Anaheim, California (April 8). Ahead of those, Roe discusses the Gold-certified LP and unexpected success of the band’s cover of “The Boys Of Summer” 20 years ago.  

Who they are: The Ataris, a band formed in Anderson, Indiana by Kristopher Roe during his teenage years in the mid-1990s. “I would record all my own music in my bedroom in the small town of Anderson, Indiana, where I grew up,” the singer and guitarist recalls. “We’re talking about from age 13 to about age 17 or 18.”

How they first got signed: “I would go to shows around the midwest, but specifically at Bogart’s in Cincinnati, Ohio,” Roe explains. “I remember it was Friday the 13th of September in 1996. I went to a show with my friend. It was The Queers, The Vandals, the The. Mr. T Experience — old Lookout Records bands.”  

Roe’s friend chatted up a roadie that evening who informed them that Joe Escalante and Warren Fitzgerald, of California punk outfit The Vandals, were forming their own label called Kung Fu Records. “I always had my demo tape with me and I would give it to bands that I would see,” Roe says. Some time later, he received a letter from Kung Fu, who subsequently flew the young musician to California.

After the release of debut Ataris album Anywhere but Here in 1997, Roe added band members Marco Peña on guitar, Mike Davenport on bass and Chris Knapp on drums. John Collura eventually replaced Peña, and that lineup would six years later record So Long, Astoria. “We just went out and toured. You know, we got in the van and did it like the bands that we loved, DIY-style. We would just do the weekend thing and play every place we could.”

From an indie to a major: Sensing that The Vandals and Kung Fu had “kind of given up” on his band, Roe convinced the label to let The Ataris record an EP to be released by Fat Wreck Chords. The song “San Dimas” was included on a free mail-order compilation by the rival indie label. “That was the first gateway to The Ataris for most people,” Roe points out.

He adds, “We had a three-record contract with Kung Fu and we were still kind of hampered by the fact that the label always suffered good distribution. We would be on tour and people would be like, ‘Man, we can’t find your records’. So people would mail-order them.”

After cultivating notable buzz from years of touring, other labels, including Columbia Records, began to talk to wine and dine Roe.

“I asked my friend Glen Phillips, who was in the band Toad the Wet Sprocket, what his experience was like on Columbia,” Roe recalls. “He was like, ‘Dude, I gotta tell you, for a label that just took what we did and nurtured it and let us do our thing, they were great’. There were definitely labels that were throwing bigger money around, but I really wanted to just go to a label that would let us continue to do what we did and let me have full creative control to do my thing.”

Covering “The Boys Of Summer”: Though first So Long, Astoria single “In This Diary” brought the band alt-rock radio success, it would be The Ataris’ cover of Don Henley classic “The Boys Of Summer” that launched them into the mainstream.

“I recorded that song because it was a tribute to my grandmother. I would go down to Florida to visit my dad’s mom and dad when my parents got divorced. So my mom saw me to the gate and put me on a plane, and then my grandmother met me at the other side. It was really rainy, so I couldn’t get out and do the things you do as a kid. I was stuck inside my grandparents’ little trailer park home in Largo, Florida. My grandmother, being the great woman she was, said, ‘Let me take you out to the local department store. You can pick out one record and listen to it while you’re here’.”

Roe’s album of choice that day was Don Henley’s Building the Perfect Beast. He recalls, “I’d always tape songs off the radio with my little jambox and I loved the melancholy of [“The Boys Of Summer”]. When my grandmother passed away in 2001 I just thought, ‘Man, I really wanna cover that song as a tribute to her’.”

The single that almost was: “My Reply” was originally intended to be the second single released off So Long, Astoria.

“It was a real personal song about a girl who had written us a letter and had been in and out of the hospital,” Roe explains. “We had this treatment written for the video and everything, and one of the heads of radio at Columbia had gotten wind of some shake-ups starting to happen at the label. He thought, well, [‘The Boys Of Summer’] is already gonna be a hit, because it was a hit before. So he thought he took that song to radio behind our back. We were like, ‘Can they do that?’ We were green to that. Of course they can!”

How he views “The Boys Of Summer” now: “It’s a great song. The rest is history, and I’m honored that people related to it and liked our version of it. [Los Angeles station] KROQ still plays it to this day. It’s surreal. I think it was the only thing in my career I had no say in, but I’ve learned to embrace it. You can’t fuck with the writing team of Don Henley and Mike Campbell.”

What happened next: Roe and his bandmates pushed to evolve their sound for their 2007 follow-up, Welcome the Night. “We just wanted to continue doing what we felt was our next organic step,” he says. “There were a lot more effects pedals. We were incorporating a lot more of those big, atmospheric echo-y kind of breakdowns in the instrumental parts of the songs. Jawbreaker always did that in their songs.”

Unfortunately, the band’s creative process collided with Columbia, and every other record label fighting an uphill battle against illegal downloading at the time. “We were recording Welcome the Night, and we started to see more and more of our crew at Sony being let go or going to other jobs,” Roe says. “That was the time where they were trying to figure out new ways to get people to continue to buy CDs. But we had this really amazing thing happen where we talked to the head of Sony and they ended up letting us go.”

The Ataris moved over to U.K. label Sanctuary for the release of Welcome the Night, but the band experienced déjà vu. “The same thing happened to them about six months after the album was out,” Roe explains. “We toured, but the album never really got a chance. Sanctuary folded and decided they were only going to do back catalogs because putting out new records wasn’t lucrative for them anymore.”

The Ataris now: For the next 10 years, Roe steadily remained on the road with a newer lineup of The Ataris.

“Pre-pandemic, I would go out for two or three months at a time,” he says. “As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to balance that out. The good news is I’ve always maintained friendships with everyone, and that’s why we were able to come back around for the 20th anniversary of So Long, Astoria. I feel like that album was really the first time I was able to be aware of what my strong points were as a songwriter. I feel like I was able to really dig a lot deeper and write these descriptive stories. I’m proud that I was able to make this time capsule of this period of my life.”

When Eamon’s expletive-riddled debut single “F–k It (I Don’t Want You Back)” dropped on the masses like one giant F bomb in late 2003, one thing was apparent: You did not want to be the one to do the 20-year-old Staten Islander dirty in a relationship. In just under four minutes, smooth crooner drops the king of all four-letter words no less than 21 times during the crass breakup ballad.

“The label had me go with the angle that I was heartbroken. But the truth is, I was a smart-ass kid who was always into shock value for entertainment purposes,” Eamon, now 39, admits. “And also, I was a dirty dog as a kid with the girls. I was always on the other side of heartbreak — the kind of guy that I pray the Lord keeps far away from my daughters! Anyway, I flipped the script and wrote it from the heartbroken perspective. So technically it’s not a true story.”

Finding a direct avenue to distribute his music wasn’t an easy road for Eamon in 2003. He recalls, “As far as labels, every single one — and we went to tons of them — told us the same thing: ‘We love the songs, but this music has no shot at radio. It’s impossible’.”

In the end, all it took to turn the tide was for one influential New York DJ to give the song a spin on air.

Who he is: Eamon Doyle, purveyor of tunes in the genre of Ho-wop — aka “doo-wop, ‘60s and ‘70s soul and hip hop.”

His early influences: “Frankie Lymon & The Teenagers were by far my biggest inspiration,” he says. “I can go on and on about various ’50’s doo-wop acts and ’60s soul acts that influenced me so much. Especially since I was just coming out of singing lead with my father’s doo-wop group [The Elations] and performing alongside many of the legendary ’50s and ’60s groups. I recorded much of my first album when I was 16 and 17. My first single was written and recorded when I was 16, but didn’t get my record deal until I was 19. The oldies and hip hop heavily shaped me as an artist in my teen years.”

But doo-wop wasn’t the only genre that caught the singer’s ear while growing up. “Being a proud Staten Islander, I was heavily influenced by Wu-Tang,” Eamon notes.

On the use of explicit language in lyrics to his early songs: “As an Italian-Irish teenager in Staten Island, I was just writing how we communicated,” says Eamon. “I will say, though, I was telling my producer Milk [Dee] at the time that it was crazy he had so much faith in [‘F–k It (I Don’t Want You Back)’]. I believed it wouldn’t hit like he thought it would because of the language. I didn’t have the vision that him and Mark [Passey, who co-wrote the song] had.”

His big break: While Eamon was between the ages of 16 and 19, his team trotted the singer’s music out to dozens of labels, including Jive Records, who he eventually signed with. But Jive wasn’t ready to bite at first.

“Their reaction was, ‘The music is great, but we can’t see the vision of how this is gonna work’,” Eamon explains. “So, the CEO of the production company I was signed to, Nat Robinson of First Priority Music, had a relationship that went back a long time with Troi Torain, also known as Star from The Star & Buckwild Morning Show on [New York City station] Hot 97 at the time.”

Initially, Robinson played Torain the clean version of Eamon’s song — “for radio purposes” — but got a pass.  

“But before Nat left the meeting, Star looked at the CD demo and asked, ‘What’s the dirty version sound like?’” says Eamon. “He proceeded to play it in the meeting and flipped out. He went and did his own edit, which consisted of loud beeps over the expletives, and told Nat he’d break it the next morning. The next day rolled around and the request line was so out of control that he played it eight times. Almost every label that turned us down called us and wanted to talk about a deal. The rest is history.”

Eamon’s grandmother was beside him when he first heard the song on the radio: “My parents were at work, so I was downstairs with my grandmother in her apartment – which is so sentimental because I just lost her a couple days ago,” the singer reminisces. “[She was] my second mom. Star introduces the record with an incredible introduction, as only Star could do – and the chills, the goosebumps and of course the hollering was heard through the whole block. Like I said, he played it seven more times in a four-hour radio program! So it was a feeling of ecstasy because I knew we had something special on our hands.”

“F–k It (I Don’t Want You Back)” was so special, in fact, that it hit No. 1 in over a dozen countries, including the UK, Australia, Germany, France, Italy and Sweden. Stateside, the song peaked at No. 16 on the Billboard Hot 100 and helped propel Gold-certified parent album I Don’t Want You Back to No. 7 on the Billboard 200.

He got an “F.U.R.B.” response: On the heels of the global success of “Fuck It (I Don’t Want You Back)”, fellow Staten Island singer Nicole Francine Aiello, aka Frankee, claimed to be the cheating ex-girlfriend Eamon lyrically admonished on his hit song. In 2004, she released sound-alike answer single “F.U.R.B. (F U Right Back)”, which proved to be just as packed with colorful language. It played out like a poetic pop soap opera. However, Eamon insists he had no idea who Frankee was.

“I’ve never even met the girl,” the singer says. “It’s funny, because I thought the song was really amusing when I first heard it. But then the whole ordeal got really annoying … So many interviews had the question, ‘What is it like to have your ex make a rebuttal song?’ That was frustrating, because I wanted to talk about music instead of a lie that had no foundation in truth whatsoever. It is what it is, though. I made money off of it, because it’s no different than Weird Al re-doing a song.”

Frankee started a trend: “There were rebuttals from all around the world,” Eamon recalls. “So many different countries had girls putting out rebuttal songs saying that they were my ex. The best by far though was a girl from Philly. I got to speak to her once and she was good people. I wish I could find the song, because it was the best rebuttal out of all of them.”

What happened next: Eamon found that his sophomore LP, Love & Pain, didn’t receive the same push as its predecessor. “At the time, I was extremely disappointed,” he explains, adding that it “kind of sucked that they put ‘F–k It’ as a bonus song on the CD release, when that was just extremely successful only 18 months ago. They never even released the album in America. There’s so many layers to what happened there, though.”

Eamon also found himself in an extremely dark space in his personal life. “At that point I was self-destructing because I was so empty,” he says. “I believe the Lord let me destroy myself with isolation and addiction for that period of my life and the next four years that followed. It truly brought me to my knees four years later. I just [barely] got by handling success as a 19 year old. I don’t know what would’ve happened if it happened again a couple years later for the Love & Pain album. I might not be here today.”

He turned his life and his music around: After locking himself in a hotel for a year to “cut off the world,” Eamon was at peace with a decision to quit music in 2011. Then he was offered a deal with an independent label. It proved to be another setback “because of [a contractual situation].”.

“It didn’t end well, because of situations I won’t get into. It kept me stagnant for a few more years,” says Eamon. “Finally in 2017, I dug back into that time in that hotel room and a multitude of other experiences, and released my first album in 10 years, Golden Rail Motel.”

That LP, as well as its 2022 follow-up, No Matter The Season, saw Eamon return to the doo-wop music that inspired him at a young age. “These albums are my proudest work, my best work by far in my opinion and the happiest I’ve ever been with making music,” he says. “It’s truly me. If something were to happen to me, heaven forbid, I would want people to be able to go back to [No Matter The Season] and experience what my soul was screaming out. My goal in the new chapter of my career is, every time I record something, I impact you in ways you didn’t think was possible.”

What’s next: Eamon has recorded a Christmas album that he says will see a release in the fourth quarter of this year. “It’s an incredibly special record that my late grandmother had been pushing me to do for years. It hurts that she won’t see it come out, but I’m grateful I got to play it for her and she heard what she inspired me to do. Other than that, I’m always recording. I’m putting together songs little by little in hopes to make the greatest album that I’ll ever make in my career. The genesis of it is off to an amazing start.”

Detroit rockers Electric Six shook the disco’s rafters with their debut single “Danger! High Voltage” and, in the process, landed at the lofty heights of No. 2 in the U.K. Blocking them from crowning the chart in early January 2003: Girls Aloud, the wildly successful ‘00s pop act who were enjoying the tail-end of a four-week reign with their own first outing, “The Sound of the Underground.”

“I know it wasn’t close. I think they had like triple the sales,” Electric Six frontman Dick Valentine recalls. “But to debut at No. 2 like that, I’ll take it.”

To be fair, Girls Aloud had the strength of a full season’s exposure on U.K. TV series Popstars: The Rivals behind them. But Valentine and his bandmates had their own secret weapon in tow on their first major release: uncredited vocals by fellow Michigan native Jack White, who often rubbed elbows with the members of Electric Six in their respective late-1990s salad days in Detroit’s now defunct Gold Dollar Bar.

“Our guitar player had the idea to call in Jack to do a call and response kind of thing. It was before [the White Stripes] had blown up,” Valentine laughs. “I really, really doubt, had they already gotten big, he would have done it.”

Following “Danger! High Voltage,” Electric Six’s comedic punk romp “Gay Bar” became yet another top five smash in the U.K. and further fueled the band’s cult following in the U.S., though the band never found major chart success in their home country. Below, Valentine looks back on the year that put his band on the global map.

Who they are: Dick Valentine (real name: Tyler Spencer) initially formed Electric Six with gents from his former high school, including Cory Martin (drums), Anthony Selph (lead guitar), Joe Frezza (rhythm guitar) and Steve Nawara (bass). Since 2003, the band has undergone several lineup changes, with Valentine remaining the sole constant member.

“The band started when I was 24 in 1996,” he explains. “I graduated from the University of Michigan and moved back to Detroit, kind of aimless. I had a copywriter job at an ad agency. Doing the band was more of an escape for me. I didn’t realize at the time that I lived in a city with such a vibrant rock scene.”

The band’s original name: The Wildbunch. Alas, a collective of British DJs had staked their claim on the name by the time Valentine and his bandmates signed a deal with indie label XL Recordings. 

“We were forced to huddle and come up with a new name pretty quickly,” says Valentine. “We had like two months to get it done and we were bickering back and forth. Electric Six — somebody said it. Nobody knew what it meant, but nobody threatened to quit. It was so neutral and so harmless. And it doesn’t mean anything. It didn’t offend anybody and that’s why we kept it.”

Their big break: “It was really easy for us to get gigs around [Detroit] and it took off pretty quickly, locally. That said, we kind of struggled to get out of Detroit,” notes Valentine. “We never really toured – we didn’t really have the money or the means or anybody putting our stuff out to make that happen. Then five or six years later, the White Stripes happened and we were totally in the right place at the right time. And not just us; pretty much every other band in Detroit got looked at or got signed.”

The initial spark of “Danger! High Voltage”: Despite their local success and the cadre of promising songs in their set like “Gay Bar,” Valentine briefly split from his bandmates. He explains, “I took a job out in Los Angeles for about a year. We took a hiatus. I came back around Y2K and we wrote ‘High Voltage’. We had a riff that had been lying around and I just put the words to it.”

Along comes Jack White: “Fire in the disco! Fire in the Taco Bell!” thunders Dick Valentine in the opening lyrics of “Danger! High Voltage.” The next three minutes of the dance-rock jam wind up being a musical duologue between the Electric Six frontman and one “John S. O’Leary,” aka Jack White. 

“He came in and had a good time doing it,” Valentine says. “He didn’t wanna sing anything about Taco Bell at the time. He didn’t want to be affiliated with anything corporate. But he came in and did the song and that was that. I don’t know if it was the fact that he was on it or if it was that it had that sound that everyone was looking for, but it obviously became the lead single.”

Devo helped the band whip together another hit…sort of: For follow-up single “Gay Bar,” the innuendo-crammed video saw Valentine playing a multitude of writhing Abraham Lincolns in various states of undress. And the lyrics, by his own account, were a breeze to write.

“The repetitive guitar riff, I’d had for a while. We were at our local bar one night and the song ‘Girl U Want’ by Devo came on the jukebox. I’m drunk and it’s loud and people are talking. I couldn’t really hear the lyrics that well. I thought [Devo singer Mark] Mothersbaugh was saying ‘It’s just a girl, just a girl in a gay bar!’ But it’s actually ‘girl you want’. I misheard the lyric, so I was like, I’ll write a song about a girl at a gay bar. It’s not a very complicated piece of songwriting. It wrote itself in about a minute.”

What happened next: Electric Six moved from indie label XL to Warner Bros. for their 2005 sophomore LP Señor Smoke. Valentine recalls, “That was a situation where the guy who signed us left the company shortly after. We got left in limbo. There was a lot of, ‘We want another ‘Gay Bar’.’ And there wasn’t another ‘Gay Bar’ on that record. We had songs like ‘Jimmy Carter’, and they’d be like, ‘No, no, no — you can’t be a serious band. You have to be a funny band’.” 

Eventually the band found a home on another indie, Metropolis Records, where they remain signed to this day.”We’ve put out like 14 records [with Metropolis] and it’s just been a lot easier to turn in whatever record we want and go out on tour, sell them at the merch table and be more of a touring band.”

Twenty years later, Valentine and the current lineup of Electric Six have steadily remained on the road. “Other than Covid, the only time I had a sizable break was between Fire and Señor Smoke,” says Valentine. “It was different then because the thought was like, ‘You’re gonna write more hits. You’re gonna go in and you’re gonna duplicate what you just did’. Then that didn’t work out on the second album. We became much more of a DIY band, just home-recording, and that’s really worked for us. We’ve kind of built up a cult following that way. That was a weird time because it was the last time there was pressure to write a hit — which we’ve never had since then. And it feels great.”

Coming up: Electric Six will tour in Canada and the UK in June and July. “Then I don’t think we go out in the States again until like September or October,” Valentine says. “And our new record Turquoise comes out on Metropolis in September.”

14 Apr 2023

Future Unveils New Cannabis Line ‘Evol’: Exclusive

Future’s empire looks to grow stronger as he expands into the cannabis business.

Today (April 14), Billboard exclusively reports that the “Wait For U” rapper will partner with global branding and licensing company Carma HoldCo to launch “Evol” — his upcoming line of THC, CBD, and Delta 8/9 products. It will be available next month in California. 

“As an artist, I strive to enlighten the world with different perspectives and experiences, whether through my lyrics, live performances, or other creative endeavors,” Future tells Billboard. “With Carma HoldCo, I can apply that creativity to build a new cannabis lifestyle brand that resonates within my community and delivers a high-quality product to my fans and a much wider audience.”

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“Future is one of this generation’s most prolific, influential artists,” says Carma HoldCo chairman Chad Bronstein. “His drive, creativity, and vision, in partnership with Carma HoldCo, will create experiences that will inspire consumers and further establish us as the new global leader in branding and licensing.”

Along with being behind Future’s “Evol,” Carma is behind Mike Tyson’s “TYSON 2.0” and Ric Flair’s “Ric Flair Drip.” Carma HoldCo’s products span 75,000 retailers across 40 states and 17 countries. 

Future recently concluded his One Big Party Tour, which featured Don Toliver, G Herbo, Mariah The Scientist, and Dess Dior. Ahead of the Minnesota tour stop, Future canceled the tour’s final two stops for undisclosed reasons. “It breaks my heart that I will no longer be connecting with my fans in Kansas City and Minneapolis. I look forward to reconnecting with each of you at another time. Thank you for all your love and support through the years,” he said in a statement to Billboard. 

14 Apr 2023

5 Seconds of Summer Rock Out With ‘Feeling Of Falling Upwards’ Live LP: Stream It Now

A glance at the chart history for 5 Seconds of Summer is like peering into the record books for a champion athlete, at their very prime.

The Sydney-formed pop-rock outfit landed three consecutive No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200 chart – with their self-titled debut LP from 2014, Sounds Good Feels Good in 2016 and Youngblood from 2018. It’s a feat that made 5SOS the first Australian act to bag three crowns on the Billboard 200, and it extended their record as the only band to top the Billboard 200 with their first three studio albums.

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The streak ended when CALM went to No. 2 in the U.S. in 2020, though it debuted at No. 1 in the U.K., for 5SOS’s second leader there. Then, 5SOS dropped in 2022, giving the band a third U.K. crown, a No. 2 peak in the U.S. and the lads’ fifth No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales. On Australia’s ARIA Chart, they’ve gone a perfect five-for-five.

If you’re the type to keep score, that’s a lot of action.

Luke Hemmings, Calum Hood, Michael Clifford and Ashton Irwin will hope to add another notch on the charts with The Feeling of Falling Upwards – Live from The Royal Albert Hall, which rolled out at midnight.

Clocking in at nearly 70 minutes, and 17 tracks, 5SOS’s latest collection was recorded at the iconic Royal Albert Hall in London, a venue the chaps busked outside of when they first moved to the U.K., with the ambition to write their debut album. How things have changed.

The live performance captures reimagined versions of songs from across their catalog, accompanied by a 12-piece string orchestra and a 12-strong gospel choir.

The Royal Hall set is the band’s second live LP in a decade, following 2014’s LiveSOS.

The 5SOS live experience doesn’t end there. South America dates on the 2023 trek The 5 Seconds of Summer Show kick off July 20 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with North America set to follow from early August.

Stream 5SOS’s The Feeling of Falling Upwards – Live from The Royal Albert Hall below.