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Kesha is most definitely not ready to make nice. The “Only Love Can Save Us Now” singer detailed what she described as a scorched earth plan to shake up the music industry’s old guard in a new ELLE magazine profile in which she warned that anyone with “deep, dark secrets” better be ready for a reckoning.
“I don’t believe you can create if you’re not feeling safe,” she told the magazine in detailing a new digital platform she’s working on with help from people in the tech industry that she said will prioritize artist’s safety. “The old guard, they’re falling. The old way of doing everything with secrecy — there’s no future there. So, like, those of you with deep, dark secrets, you better f–king run.”
Her warning to those traditional gatekeepers pulls no punches: “The music industry should be f–king terrified of me,” she said. “Because I’m about to make some major moves and shift this s–t. I really want to dismantle it piece by piece and shine light into every corner. I hope my legacy is making sure it never happens to anybody ever again.”
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Kesha extracted herself from a contract with Dr. Luke following a 2023 settlement in her long-running civil lawsuit against the producer born Lukasz Gottwald over her claims of infliction of emotional distress, sexual harassment and assault; Luke denied the claims and reached a settlement with Kesha to dismiss his defamation suit against her last year, with both parties denying any misconduct.
She has since formed her own independent label, Kesha Records, which she said is the first big step in taking back her musical voice after signing with Luke in 2005 when she was 18. “I’m free and it feels good,” she said, noting that she has a reminder on her phone that reads “you’re free.” Kesha is now fully in charge of her music and free to work with any producers and writers she wants, a situation that led to the release of her recent single, the A.G. Cook (Charli XCX) and Zhone (Slayyyter)-produced “Joyride,” a bouncing, horn-spiked party record on which she sings, “Rev my engine til you make it purr/ Keep it kinky, but I come first/ Beep-beep b–ch, I’m outside/ Get in loser, for the joyride.”
Not for nothing, Kesha said “Joyride” was birthed both after the settlement of her Luke suit as well as in the wake of a break-up with someone she felt was “in it for the wrong reasons and was a bit of a starf–ker,” and whose loyalty she assessed in the most Kesha way possible. “I decided to test that theory and took one of my friends instead of him to Taylor Swift’s party. He came over the next day and broke up with me,” she said.
At this point she hasn’t come up with a title for the follow-up to her raw, 2023 fifth studio album, the not-to-subtly titled Gag Order, which marked her final release through RCA Records and Luke’s Kemosabe Records. The words that keep coming to mind as she ponders a name for it are also pointed and telling: freedom, safety, joy.
“This record is my little wild child,” she said, describing Gag Order as a way to give voice to her more painful emotions. “I was really vulnerable. Now I’m really trying to make way for the bad b–ch. I’m giving her the moment — because we need the space to have all the emotions safely. I capture the empowered emotions, so that I can listen back to it when I’m not feeling that way.”
Psyched to be “100 percent in control of everything now,” Kesha said her new music mogul era is allowing her to do all the things: “ideating the song, writing the song, singing the song, comping the song, coproducing the song, marketing the song, designing what I’m wearing for the song.”
As evidenced by the bubbly playful vibe of her recent social media posts, Kesha is leaning into the meaning of her name in Russian (“innocent joy”) because, as she said, “my soul needs this album. I need to reclaim my joy. Because I fought so f–king hard for it.”
She also loves the fact that her fortitude and defiant spirit have clearly helped empower a new generation of strident female pop stars who are embracing their authenticity. “I do have a sense of feeling protective of young women in music. I really hope my joy can stand for others to know that it’s available to them and to not give up,” she said of the singers she often DMs to offer herself up for advice or a kind sounding board. “I enjoy feeling my power, which hasn’t been available to me for a really long time, and I’d love to give that gift to others if I can.”
She specifically shouts out Chappell Roan and Reneé Rapp, referring to the latter as the “most genuinely cool, calm, unbothered, iconic pop girlie.” Kesha invited Rapp to perform with her in Brooklyn in Nov. 2023 and Rapp returned the favor at April’s Coachella Festival, where Kesha performed her Billboard Hot 100 topper “Tik Tok,” which pointedly featured a revised line dissing embattled hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, who was indicted on sex trafficking charges last month amid a dozen lawsuits alleging sexual assault and harassment; Diddy has denied the charges.
Though Roan drew attention for playing to what was described as the biggest daytime crowd in Lollapalooza history this summer, Kesha said she could sense the stress the “Hot To Go” singer was likely feeling during a moment many saw as a dream scenario.
“Kesha was so lovely to me after my Lollapalooza set,” Roan told the magazine. “Because with that huge of a crowd, maybe only five other people there understood what that’s like. Kesha came to talk to me after, and it felt like a big sister was helping me through it. Me and Reneé were crying because we felt like we were seen in a way we never had been before. Kesha has always stood up for women and what she believes in and that’s very inspiring.”
“I try not to listen to pop radio, ever,” Amy Allen proclaims as she scrolls through Spotify on her phone. The singer-songwriter is recapping her recent listening: She has been on a Vince Gill kick; she always has The Cardigans in rotation; she recently discovered Donna Summer’s 1974 single “Lady of the Night”; she’s a fan of indie star Adrianne Lenker of the band Big Thief. Allen goes for early-morning runs on the boardwalks of Venice Beach in Los Angeles near her home, and while she used to soundtrack them with a classic rock playlist, for the past six months she has been blasting ABBA’s greatest hits, starting each morning jogging to “Dancing Queen” and “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight).”
Allen has plenty of pop radio classics in her queue — but new pop is never in the mix. “It’s a very concerted effort I make to not do that, and to try to be influenced by things that I love and not what’s current,” Allen explains, “because what’s current now is not going to be current by the time anything I write comes out.”
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Whether she hears today’s biggest hits or not, Allen is now the one doing the influencing when it comes to the shape of current pop. After years of bouncing around the industry and absorbing sonic ideas, the 32-year-old from a small town in Maine has found her niche in studio sessions with superstars, braiding her appreciation of dense lyricism and 2000s bubblegum — “I’ve always loved a big pop chorus and I’ve always loved intricate storytelling,” she says — into an ability to create hits perfectly suited for the TikTok era, but likely to last long beyond it.
Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet, which spent three weeks atop the Billboard 200 following its August release, has been Allen’s highest-profile win as a co-writer to date, with three smash singles (“Espresso,” “Taste” and Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper “Please Please Please”) full of idiosyncratic one-liners that have helped augment Carpenter’s inventive wit and transform her into an arena headliner. Yet Allen’s studio résumé preceding that breakthrough — credits on songs by Olivia Rodrigo, Justin Timberlake, Jonas Brothers, Maren Morris, Koe Wetzel and Niall Horan over the past 18 months alone — underline her status as a collaborator who helps A-listers at all stages of their careers land the right level of emotional punch and unlock the viral-ready turns of phrase that will transform a song into not only a hit, but a cultural moment.
“She knows how to articulate feelings in a way that most writers would envy,” says Tate McRae, who tapped Allen for the majority of her 2023 album, Think Later, including its slippery rhythmic-pop hit “Greedy,” which peaked at No. 3 on the Hot 100. “I feel incredibly lucky to have written my last album with Amy, and I sincerely look forward to all that is to come together in the future.”
Joelle Grace Taylor
Two years after landing her first songwriter of the year, non-classical nomination at the Grammy Awards (she was one of the inaugural nominees for the relatively new honor), Allen seems like a shoo-in to get a nod for the 2025 ceremony — and potentially become the first woman to take home the prize — thanks to the whirlwind success of her past year. Yet her manager, Gabz Landman, points out that, even if Allen is now hitting critical mass, she was a force in the songwriting world years before she was nabbing headlines, now six years removed from co-writing her first Hot 100 No. 1, Halsey’s “Without Me,” and two years after winning an album of the year Grammy for contributing to Harry Styles’ Harry’s House.
“She was an athlete growing up and still runs marathons, and I think a big part of her writing career is this incredible stamina,” says Landman, who’s also a vp of A&R at Warner Chappell Music. “Amy doesn’t quantify or feel proud of things based on chart metrics. She gets contacted by many people to collaborate, and it’s always about whether she’s inspired by [an opportunity] more than ‘What is this person’s standing in the music industry?’ ”
That outlook helps explain why, days after Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet gave Allen a dozen new Hot 100 writing credits, she independently released a self-titled solo album of her own: a 12-song set full of quiet arrangements and understated melodies that sound as far removed from top 40 as possible. The project is the opposite of an iron-hot cash grab — Allen says that some of its songs date back to six years ago, before her songwriting career took off, and they were too meaningful to leave unreleased.
“One of the reasons why I love Amy is because I really see the both-ness in her — she’s a songwriter and she’s a solo artist,” says Jack Antonoff, another studio whiz who also releases his own music with Bleachers. After Antonoff and Allen worked on four songs together for Short n’ Sweet, including “Please Please Please,” he invited her to open for Bleachers overseas during their summer tour. Allen will also support the band at Madison Square Garden on Oct. 4.
For Allen, her co-writing career and solo work represent two separate parts of her creativity and manifest through disparate processes. “When I’m writing with and for somebody else, I always start with the chorus — listening back to the great pop songs of the ’60s and ’70s through today, the chorus is the crux of the song,” she says. “When I’m writing by myself, I always start with the first verse and I just tell the story in a through line, start to finish. That helps me keep them separate, and it allows me to still keep falling in love with songwriting all the time.”
Joelle Grace Taylor
Allen didn’t know which musical role she wanted to play when she was growing up in Windham, Maine: Her first experience performing was in her older sister’s band, which needed a bassist and tapped Allen, even though she was 9 and had never played the instrument. After kicking around the music scene in nearby Portland as a teenager, Allen went to nursing school at Boston College (“As a mistake,” she quips) before transferring to Berklee College of Music, despite not knowing any theory or even how to read sheet music.
“I was literally failing all of my classes,” Allen recalls, “but I could at least skate by in some of the songwriter classes. The class that helped me the most was actually this poetry class, where we studied great lyricists and poets. Something in my brain clicked about lyric writing, the cadence of rhymes and lines — the little things that might make people roll their eyes and be like, ‘Oh, that’s so songwriter-y.’ ”
After graduating, Allen fronted the pop-rock group Amy & The Engine, playing around New York in the mid-2010s before the band broke up and she committed to sharpening her skills as a solo writer. In late 2017, Allen was packing up for a West Coast move, and in her final New York session, she presented songwriter Micah Premnath with a melodic concept that had been stuck in her head — which, after some lyrical workshopping, morphed into “Back to You,” a top 20 hit for Selena Gomez. Soon after Allen touched down in Los Angeles, she linked with producer-songwriter Louis Bell to help make “Without Me,” then contributed to Styles’ “Adore You,” which turned into his first Pop Airplay chart-topper as a solo artist.
Allen’s transition from fledgling writer to hit-maker may have been sudden, but she had been studying the greats for a while. She grew up admiring Carole King, John Prine, Dolly Parton and Tom Petty, while also analyzing Max Martin’s pristinely crafted hits for Britney Spears and Backstreet Boys. By the time she attended Berklee, Allen had started to identify her favorite studio minds and study their discographies. “I remember listening to my favorite pop songs, and Julia Michaels was behind all of them — it was like, ‘Who is this chick that is soundtracking my college years?’ ” she recalls with a laugh. Now Allen and Michaels share credits on five Short n’ Sweet tracks and sing background vocals together on the song “Coincidence.” (Allen also harmonizes with Carpenter on “Espresso.”)
Amy Allen photographed on August 20, 2024 in Los Angeles.
Joelle Grace Taylor
Like Michaels, Allen has developed a knack for taking straightforward lyrical phrases and contorting them until they stick in your cerebrum — think Carpenter declaring, “That’s that me, espresso,” or McRae exclaiming, “Obvious that you want me, but/I would want myself.” While Allen says she would probably have more 10-second hooks at the ready if she paid closer attention to TikTok, the majority of her biggest co-written choruses have resulted from actual conversations with artists — common ground discovered, then whittled down into universal refrains.
“Production trends turn over and change every six months, in my opinion,” she says. “But I think a great song, if it’s stripped down to guitar and piano, melody and lyric — it doesn’t change a ton.”
With Carpenter — whom Allen started working with for her last album, 2022’s Emails I Can’t Send, contributing extra bite to tracks like “Vicious” and “Feather” — Allen has found a confidante and kindred spirit, unafraid to embrace a double entendre or, in the case of the “Please Please Please” chorus, a well-placed “motherf–ker.” Antonoff says that he, Allen and Carpenter knocked out three songs for Short n’ Sweet, including “Please Please Please,” in a single day together at New York’s Electric Lady Studios, often taking breaks to double over in laughter. “The depth of the d-ck jokes just goes on and on,” he says, “and then a song can happen randomly — that’s the magic of a studio space.”
Short n’ Sweet earned 1.2 million equivalent album units in just its first three weeks out, according to Luminate, with 11 of its 12 tracks reaching the Hot 100’s top 40. Allen says there are “so many reasons why I feel like I owe Sabrina my first-born child,” but the album’s commercial success isn’t the biggest one.
“Her musicality and personality blow me away every time that we work together,” she says of Carpenter, “but I’m also so grateful to her because I’ve never gotten to be part of every song on an album before. That’s so in line with what I grew up loving — digging in like that.”
Joelle Grace Taylor
Landman notes that one sign of Allen’s growth is her increased involvement in major pop projects beyond a co-write or two: Along with all of Short n’ Sweet, she contributed to six songs on Timberlake’s Everything I Thought It Was, six on Wetzel’s 9 Lives and eight on McRae’s Think Later. Landman chalks that up to two reasons: She picked the right collaborators, and, post-pandemic and post-Zoom sessions, in-person studio hangs have let her personality shine. “She’s had a great rapport with so many artists that have turned into friendships,” Landman says. “And I think that people have noted [that] if you’re winning with somebody, keep doing what you’re doing.”
Allen is heeding that advice as she continues picking up co-writing projects and supporting her self-titled solo debut. Releasing an album under her own name has made her realize that the paths can coexist after previously thinking it impossible. “The last year-and-a-half has made it crystal clear in my brain that I only live once, so why do I have to pick?” she says.
Allen likens the balancing act to the way that any songwriter must find a happy medium between working at a breakneck pace and accruing enough life experiences to have something to write about. Amid a whirlwind professional year, “in terms of taking time off, I’ve done that more this year than any other year in my life,” Allen says. “And I’ve been writing my favorite songs I’ve ever written.”
This story appears in the Oct. 5, 2024, issue of Billboard.
The back room of New York City’s Heaven Can Wait doesn’t usually have a name, but on a breezy September evening, it has become the “Chaos Room.”
Red streamers, moody lighting and torn-out pieces of notebook paper with the words “I’M YOUR GIRL” scrawled across them adorn the walls. And sitting on a small side table is a portable Studebaker CD player, with a set of instructions set to its side.
“‘I’m really excited to share this project with you all, hope you love it,’” Orla Gartland reads aloud, giggling to herself as she arrives at the final sentence. “‘Please don’t take the CDs.’ God, I hope they read that part.”
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Gartland has good reason to feel protective over the disc — on it is the entirety of her sophomore album, Everybody Needs a Hero (out Oct. 4 via New Friends). She’s invited an intimate group of her stateside fans to come listen to the project and watch her perform stripped-down versions of a few of its tracks. Before the cozy club’s doors even opened, the Irish singer-songwriter had already greeted some of the attendees queued up outside.
“They are so cute,” she says. “Someone made a badge of my face! I was like, ‘Oh my God, you really put that in your badge machine?’ I respect it.”‘
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It’s an auspicious moment for the 29-year-old: since sharing her first cover on YouTube back in the late 2000s, Gartland has spent the last decade-and-change steadily growing a dedicated online following. With a penchant for confessional lyrics speaking directly to the generational experience of growing up online, she’s developed a reputation for her DIY approach to crafting emotionally arresting pop songs.
There’s still much of that homemade spirit present on Everybody Needs a Hero — Gartland is listed as a writer and co-producer on each of the album’s 12 tracks. But the LP trades in the quieter sensibilities of a young woman singing acoustic songs in her bedroom for bold, bombastic pieces of production. Blaring guitars and clashing drums are paired, and piercing synths turn up the volume on Gartland’s alt-pop, making for a dynamic project exploring the inherent chaos of romance.
“When I was younger, I dealt with a lot of imposter syndrome, where [I] felt inferior in certain spaces. This time, I was willing to take up more space, willing to commit to things, whether it was a guitar tone or a vocal,” she explains. “I was ready to push myself, and be a bit more indulgent; now I just love the drama more and apologize less.”
Where her critically acclaimed debut album Woman on the Internet leaned into softer, more detached songs about the trials and tribulations of twenty-something life, Gartland aimed to make the entirety of her second album revolve around one of her last long-term relationships, tracking all of its complexity in a single LP. As she explains, “I wanted the good, the bad and the very ugly.”
With that approach came an understanding of what Gartland felt was missing in a lot of pop music: nuance. “I think some pop music has a tendency to dumb things down, to be honest. It’s either ‘I love you,’ or ‘I want to break up with you,’ or ‘I’m so much better without you,’” she says. “My experience is so much more mushy and conflicted than that, and I’m much more interested in that as an idea. All of these feelings can co-exist, they do not cancel each other out.”
Throughout the 12-song LP, Gartland deftly handles themes of baggage (“Late to the Party”), self-doubt (“Backseat Driver”), manic decision-making (“Three Words Away”), being the messy one in the relationship (“Little Chaos”) and much more. When constructing the tracklist, she says that she thought about the “seasons” of a relationship, from the “reluctance and excitement” of spring, all the way through to the “humbling moments of embracing the darkness” in winter.
That thematic approach marks a pointed departure from Gartland’s past work. Starting in 2009, Gartland — then a 14-year-old living Drumcondra, a Northern suburb of Dublin — started posting cover songs to YouTube. Armed with only with a guitar, a camera and her distinct voice, Gartland covered everyone from Natalie Imbruglia and Fleetwood Mac to Lorde and Charli XCX before graduating to releases of her original songs.
Where most people look back on their earliest days on the internet with utter embarrassment, Gartland feels a sense of pride. Sure, there are some old videos that make her cringe (“I really thought everyone needed to hear my Nelly Furtado cover,” she winces), but she acknowledges that her time spent as a self-described “YouTube girlie” molded her into the artist she is now.
“At one point I really resented the YouTube stigma — I was worried that I wasn’t going to be taken seriously,” she says. “But I realized that, at least with putting music online, you are the master of your own destiny. It’s not like going on The Voice or American Idol; those shows are great for the right kinds of artists, but you have so little autonomy in how you are presented. I feel very grateful, even more so in hindsight, that it’s been a slow, steady marathon, not a sprint. I feel so lucky to have been in control.”
Moving to London at age 18, Gartland began to pursue her artistry professionally in what she lovingly refers to as the “garage years” of her career. “If you think about the trope of a band practicing in their garage, that’s what that was,” she says. “You get to have your garage years before you get to play your first live show. But when you grow up on YouTube, your garage years are online and readily available for everyone to see, which can be weird!”
During that time, Gartland met and befriended Lauren Aquilina, a fellow artist with a YouTube following looking to find a career in the music business. Aquilina would go on to live with Gartland for five years while breaking into the music industry as a sought-after songwriter, working with artists including Demi Lovato, Rina Sawayama, LE SSERAFIM, TOMORROW X TOGETHER and others.
Despite their shared aspirations, Gartland says that before she began working on Everybody Needs a Hero, she never wrote with her former roommate. “I have never been more nervous to ask anyone to write a song with me, because the closeness can make it harder,” she says. “It actually turned out to be just the most effortless thing in the world — you skip the whole ‘getting acquainted’ phase, where this person just knows your humor, they know the chords that you like. You get to feel very heard.”
Orla Gartland
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As Gartland began releasing a string of singles and EPs in the mid-2010s, she decided to start a Patreon for her fans, creating a curated community where experimentation was encouraged. For the last seven years, Gartland has been releasing one demo per month to her loyal subscribers, a move she says proved to be the most beneficial collaboration of her career.
“Sometimes [the feedback from fans] is like, ‘This is great,’ and other times it’s like, ‘The second verse could be better,’” she explains. “I’m up for their critiques, because those are the people that I want to come to shows. I want them to feel like they’re a part of the process.”
While the development of an engaged fan community has been crucial to the rising singer-songwriter’s success, Gartland admits that audience growth was something she rarely found herself strategizing about. What sets her fandom apart, she says, is the importance she places on the people who already follow her.
“I have a strong sense of what the people who already listen to my music want. I care about them the most,” she explains. “If I manage to catch some passing traffic and it grows a little bit, then great. But I think my response is to listen to the audience I have.”
Gartland experienced the highs of finding viral success in 2022, when her song “Why Am I Like This?” received a prominent sync on the first season of Netflix’s Heartstopper, soundtracking an episode-closing scene in which main character Nick (Kit Connor) begins to question his sexuality. The song quickly picked up steam online, earning Gartland her first entry on a Billboard chart when the track peaked at No. 4 on the Top TV Songs chart in April 2022.
But Gartland still flinches at the idea of the immediate, viral fame that apps like TikTok can occasionally provide to artists. “I’ve had a couple friends who had big surges of attention in one way or another, and it seems like that can be really hard,” she says.
Though the singer has a steady presence on the app, she says that she tries to keep the social media facets of her job at an arm’s length. “You cannot be an independent artist and be above doing a few TikToks,” she says with a sigh. “Even though I grew up online to a degree, some of it feels like work. Some of it I really have to motivate myself to do. But, I see [TikTok] as a useful tool more than anything else.”
As she considers the role of TikTok in the modern music business, Gartland mimes a U-shape in front of her face. “I see the whole album cycle as a horseshoe. The bits that I love are at the top,” she says, pointing to the upper prongs of the invisible arc. “That’s writing, recording and being in the studio on one side, and then touring at the end once everyone’s heard it.” Her fingers then follow the horseshoe down to its lowest curve. “It’s everything in between that feels difficult — filming myself miming a song I’ve listened to one million times can get very annoying.”
After spending 2023 working with her friends Dodie, Greta Isaac and Martin Luke Brown in the glam-pop supergroup FIZZ, Gartland had a renewed taste for the dramatic. Working in a band proved to be an important learning experience for Gartland, and a welcome break from the pure ego of a solo career.
“With my own music, there’s this very direct ownership to it all. You have nothing to hide behind, and you’re thinking about yourself a lot, which feels very odd,” she explains. “There was something really fun about FIZZ — the goal was literally to just have fun and be theatrical, be camp. There was almost a cockiness to it that feels so much easier. The otherness of it made it much easier to lean in.”
While she reached one end of the horseshoe with FIZZ in 2023 — the group played multiple festivals and embarked on a 7-date U.K. tour — Gartland found herself at the other end in her solo career. Teaming up with Aquilina, her longtime co-producer Tom Stafford and FIZZ co-producer Peter Miles, Gartland began to craft her sophomore opus.
On the album’s closing, cathartic title track, Gartland arrives at something of a thesis statement. Over loud, fuzzy guitars, Gartland narrates a story of trying and failing to look brave in front of her ex, finally crumbling and asking for support as they navigate their breakup. “Honey, I don’t have much time/ My parachute has come untied/ I need you to hold me/ Stroke my hair and tell me it’ll be alright,” Gartland sings on the emotionally raw chorus.
“I’d been thinking a lot about superheroes at the time — not in the Marvel sense, but in the sense that I observe in myself and in a lot of my female friends this want to do it all,” she explains of the song. “This wanting to be a great friend to everyone, and to be good with your family, and thriving in your career and everything else. I liked the idea of the self-appointed hero; this slightly manic girl trying to do it all, and saving everyone but herself.”
As an artist who spent much of her creative life showing others what “doing it yourself” can look like, Gartland acknowledges that the “self-appointed hero” can easily serve as a stand-in for herself. But as she looks ahead in her career, the singer says she’s not interested in becoming pop music’s new champion, especially if that means signing to a major label. Thanks to the work of artists like Taylor Swift, Gartland says she doesn’t feel the pressure to sign anywhere offering her anything less than ideal terms.
“I think in a post-Taylor’s Version world, the signal-boosting of what it actually means to own your own masters, what it means to be locked into a record contract, to be shelved — all of this jargon is out there now, and it’s really good for artists,” she says. “You’re seeing it happen now with RAYE, where there are all of these artists who are really proudly independent and thriving, and I’m just really happy to see it.”
That same concept, she says, applies to the trajectory of Gartland’s future career aspirations. “I would much rather have a slow rise at a glacial, snail’s pace, as long as it’s heading in the right direction and it’s sticking around,” she offers. “If I can do it on my own terms, then that’s f–king excellent.”
Fat Joe’s commitment to healthcare price transparency is unwavering. With 32 days until the presidential election, the Bronx native is launching a PSA calling on elected officials to stop the price gouging and “robbing all of us.”
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The 54-year-old is looking to bring the power back to the people and is putting pressure on those in office. Teaming up with unions, workers and employers, Fat Joe’s healthcare price transparency PSA went live on Thursday (Oct. 3).
“To every elected official and politician in America, the people stand united,desperate for you to listen,” he says in the spot. “If you’re not advocating for prices and transparency in healthcare, you’re compromising every single American across this country.”
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Joe continues: “Because when we can’t see prices, hospitals, insurers, and their middlemen charge us whatever they want. Our very own healthcare system is robbing all of us. We just need the prices. That’s how our economy works!”
With more than 100 million Americans mired in medical debt, the “Lean Back” rapper hopes to see political leaders take a more honest approach when it comes to crafting a more affordable health care system.
“If you want to do right by workers, employers, and unions, then you’ve gotta to do right by the people they represent and the families who depend upon them,” Joe, 54, (born Joseph Cartagena) demands. “And we gotta hear it. Prices now! Power to the Patients.”
Fat Joe’s latest PSA is part of an ongoing advocacy campaign with Power to the Patients looking to garner even more momentum toward significant legislative change for Americans. Before leaving office in 2021, President Donald Trump’s executive order went into effect requiring hospitals to make prices of health services publicly available.
President Joe Biden followed-up with an executive order of his own in 2023 demanding that the Department of Health and Human Services enforce it. However, a nonprofit called Patient Rights Advocate discovered that most American hospitals are refusing to comply with the rules outlined.
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Three decades after its original run on the Billboard Hot 100, Alphaville’s “Forever Young” is No. 1 on a Billboard chart, reigning over the TikTok Billboard Top 50 tally dated Oct. 5.
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The TikTok Billboard Top 50 is a weekly ranking of the most popular songs on TikTok in the United States based on creations, video views and user engagement. The latest chart reflects activity from Sept. 23-29. Activity on TikTok is not included in Billboard charts except for the TikTok Billboard Top 50.
“Forever Young” sported its original Hot 100 run over a three-week period in spring 1985, during which it peaked at No. 93. It returned to the ranking in 1988-89 following a re-release, rising as high as No. 65 in December 1988. 2024 marks the song’s 40-year anniversary, as it was released on Alphaville’s self-titled debut album in September 1984.
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Alphaville has reigned on a Billboard chart once before; “Big in Japan” topped Dance Club Songs for two weeks in 1984.
“Forever Young” ties Jordan Adetunji’s “Kehlani” for the longest amount of weeks between TikTok Billboard Top 50 debut and first week at No. 1 since the list’s September 2023 inception. It reigns in its 10th week on the survey after initially debuting on the Aug. 3 ranking. It had reached a new peak of No. 2 on the Sept. 28 chart.
The song is used in a variety of ways on TikTok. Trends include edits of fictional characters (many of whom died young), inward-looking content about aging and reminiscing about younger days, a choreographed theme where one creator picks up the other and spins them around while spraying a water bottle in slow motion, and more.
Over the last few weeks, “Forever Young” has also returned to Billboard’s Alternative Digital Song Sales charts thanks to the TikTok resurgence; it appears at No. 10 on the latest survey via 1,000 downloads in the week ending Sept. 26, according to Luminate. It also pulled 2.1 million official U.S. streams in that span.
The TikTok Billboard Top 50 coronation of “Forever Young” comes ahead of Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham-Carter’s “By the Sea,” from the soundtrack to the 2007 film Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which vaults 32-2 in its second week on the chart.
The trend on the 17-year-old song? Generally lip-synching to the song’s opening “Ooh, Mr. Todd/ I’m so happy/ I could eat you up, I really could” lyric, while others skip the lip-synching and simply kiss someone or something to Bonham-Carter’s cues from the tune.
Another debut from the Sept. 28 chart, NLE Choppa and 41‘s “Or What,” ranks within the top three for the first time, jumping 44-3, mostly via lip-synching uploads. The song was released Sept. 6 and earned 3.2 million streams in the week ending Sept. 26, up 73%.
Odetari’s “Keep Up” (No. 14), leaps into the top four, rising 14-4 in its second week on the list. It ties Odetari’s top-performing song on the tally, equaling the No. 4 peak of “I Love You Hoe,” co-billed with 9Lives, in September 2023.
Released in mid-July, “Keep Up” has exploded in recent weeks thanks to a dance trend. It concurrently hits a new peak of No. 6 on the Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart, accumulating 5.8 million streams, up 39%, as the ranking’s greatest gainer in that metric.
IV of Spades’ “Come Inside of My Heart,” the previous No. 3 on the TikTok Billboard Top 50, rounds out the top five, while Ken Carson’s “Overseas” jumps 23-6 in its second week, nearly six months after its April release.
Carson’s TikTok success with “Overseas” is owed mostly to lip synchs, usually to the song’s lyric of “That boy repeat everything he hear like a parrot, he a b–ch/ The last b–ch I broke up with slit her wrist.”
“Overseas” earned 3.2 million streams in the week ending Sept. 26, a gain of 7%.
Two more songs hit the top 10 of the TikTok Billboard Top 50 for the first time: Freak Nasty’s “Da’ Dip” and Olivia Rodrigo’s “Deja Vu” at Nos. 7-9, respectively. “Or What” is led by lip synchs and “Da’ Dip” by a dance trend (notable since the song, which peaked on the Hot 100 at No. 15 in 1997, is inherently named for a dance), while “Deja Vu” gains from the “and suddenly” trend.
See the full TikTok Billboard Top 50 here. You can also tune in each Friday to SiriusXM’s TikTok Radio (channel 4) to hear the premiere of the chart’s top 10 countdown at 3 p.m. ET, with reruns heard throughout the week.
Four women have been there for Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Selena Gomez and Travis Kelce on their respective rises to superstardom over the years, and they aren’t their agents, managers or publicists. They’re their moms.
Tina Knowles, Maggie Baird, Mandy Teefey and Donna Kelce got a rare moment in the spotlight on Thursday (Oct. 3) with the publication of Glamour‘s new Women of the Year cover story, which features all four of the women posing together. In a group discussion, the quartet opened up about the best and worst parts of parenting kids who become globally famous, from watching their children perform in front of thousands of people to feeling limited on when and where they can go without being bombarded by fans and paparazzi.
At one point, Knowles and Teefey — moms to Bey and the Wizards of Waverly Place alum, respectively — bonded over making sure their daughters didn’t turn into divas despite finding fame as teenagers.
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“We had some moments where I was like, ‘Listen, they can pick up their own suitcases,’” Knowles recalled of the “Break My Soul” singer. “’You look people in the eye, say hello, don’t turn into a diva. That’s not going to work here.’ You have to teach your kids that … because everybody’s trying to handle everything for them and kissing their butts sometimes. And I am like, ‘No, no, no, you’re not helpless.’”
Teefey had a similar story about Gomez. “She was getting out of the trailer, and there was an umbrella, and they were holding it for her, and then they were bringing her food and all this stuff,” the producer told the other three moms. “I was like, ‘She can hold her own umbrella.’ She needs to learn how to pump her own gas in her car. She needs to be a person first.”
Baird — mom to the “Bad Guy” musician as well as producer Finneas — and NFL matriarch Kelce also found common ground when talking about their family’s home lives pre-fame. “My husband and I are working class actors,” Support + Feed founder Baird said. “We eked out a meager living, and it afforded us a lot of time with our kids, which was awesome. But the industry is primarily people like us or even people not even like us who couldn’t even do that. So when all of this happened to our kids, we’d never been on that side of it.”
“It was like, ‘Oh, Billie is a nepo baby,’” Baird added of the internet’s past response to finding out she was an actress. “And I’m like, ‘Did you know that I got that episode of Friends because I was about to lose my health insurance?’”
“I was a commercial banker for a bank in several different states,” said Kelce, who shares both Travis and retired Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce with ex-husband Ed Kelce. “I was a major breadwinner in the family… My husband and I knew that our marriage was not working, but we stayed together for the kids. Ours was a very friendly relationship. So, we could do that and make sure that their life was normal as possible.”
The interview comes as the Kansas City Chiefs tight end is at peak levels of fame, thanks in large part to his romance with Taylor Swift. The same could be said for Bey, Gomez and Eilish as well, with the Destiny’s Child star garnering Grammy buzz for her latest Billboard 200-topping album Cowboy Carter, the Rare Beauty founder recently crossing into billionaire status and the “Happier Than Ever” artist embarking on a global arena tour over the weekend.
After the Glamour cover story came out, Gomez shared it on her Instagram Story and wrote, “Congratulations mommy.”
See Knowles, Baird, Teefey and Donna Kelce on the cover of Glamour below.
On Thursday (Oct. 3), one day before first-round voting opens for the 67th annual Grammy Awards, the Recording Academy released its 2024 Membership Report. The most eye-popping statistic: 66% of the current Grammys electorate has joined since the Recording Academy introduced its new membership model in June 2019. Under that model, the academy invites large new member classes to join, with an eye on boosting the numbers of women, people of color and people under 40 in the academy.
Thus, the voting membership that delivered album, record and song of the year to Adele in 2017 and those same three awards to Bruno Mars in 2018 is much different today. We started to see a shift in voting patterns in February 2019, even before the new membership model was introduced, when Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” became the first hip-hop hit to win record or song of the year. (It won both.) That same year, Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour won album of the year.
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Since 2019, approximately 8,700 creators have become voting members of the Recording Academy. Of that total, more than 2,000 joined just this year. There are now more than 13,000 total voting members, according to the Academy.
Other key takeaways from the report include:
Boosting Numbers of Women
In 2019, the Recording Academy set an ambitious goal to add 2,500 women voting members by 2025. With a year to go, the Academy has already surpassed this goal, adding more than 3,000 women voting members. Since 2019, the percentage of women voting members has grown by 27%.
Increasing Racial Diversity
The Academy reports that the percentage of people of color has grown by 65% since 2019 among voting members. Since 2019:
The percentage of Black or African American+ members has grown by 90%.
The percentage of Hispanic or Latin+ members has grown by 43%.
The percentage of AAPI+ (Asian American or Pacific Islander) members has doubled, reflecting a 100% increase.
The current voting membership, counting the new voting members added this year, is 49% white or Caucasian; 38% people of color; and 13% prefer not to disclose or unknown. That “people of color” slice breaks down like this: 19% Black or African American+; 10% Hispanic or Latin+; 4% Asian or Pacific Islander; 2% prefer to self-describe; and other smaller slices.
The current voting membership is 66% men; 28% women; 6% prefer not to disclose/unknown; and other, smaller slices.
Too Much Jazz. Not Enough Country
By genre, the current voting membership is 27% pop; 19% jazz; 17% R&B; 17% rock; 13% American roots; 13% alternative; 12% classical; 10% global music; 10% Latin music; 10% other; 10% rap; 9% dance/electronic; 9% country; 8% gospel/Christian; 8% visual media; 7% contemporary instrumental; 5% new age; 4% children’s; 4% musical theatre; 3% reggae; 3% spoken word; and 1% comedy. (Members could select more than one genre.)
Jazz and classical are overrepresented, relative to their share of the music market. Country lags behind its share of the music market.
By area of specialization, the current voting membership is 46% songwriters/composers; 33% producers; 33% instrumentalists; 32% vocalists; 19% engineers; 12% arrangers; 6% other; 4% music video; 3% album packaging; 3% album notes writers; 2% music supervisors; 2% conductors; 2% spoken word.
In a letter accompanying the release of the report, Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of the Recording Academy, said in part: “The Recording Academy membership has never been more reflective of the music community than it is today. It has more women, more People of Color, and a broad representation of diverse genres and crafts. But we’re not just celebrating numbers. Our organization has been fundamentally transformed by this extraordinary infusion of new talent, making us an unquestionably better, stronger, more successful, and more impactful organization.
“And we’re not done yet. Even though we’ve made huge strides towards creating a diverse and representative membership body, there is still much work to be done. We want to recruit more young voters, because the future of music is in their hands. We want to see an increase in the percentage of women and people of color, because our goal must always be to accurately represent our community.
“And as we globalize our mission, we want a membership body that reflects every corner of the music world.”
Mason added some specifics in an interview with Billboard this week. “It’s been a very intentional effort to try and make sure that our membership is the most relevant, the most diverse. …We’re not just trying to build numbers. We’re looking at, what is the music community made up of? … A big goal for us is to make sure that we’re matching or coming close to the community that makes music. That’s not the same as the general population of our country. We know that R&B/hip-hop is roughly 33%-34% of all music created and consumed. We know what the numbers are for Latin music, women, and other groups. We have a rough idea of what the numbers feel like.”
On July 26, Mason sent a pointed letter, via email, to the Academy’s voting members, “It’s about the current year and the quality of the work, period!,” he implored. “There should be no other rationale for voting. If you are taking into account an artist’s older work, or their reputation, or race, or gender, what label they are on, who their manager is, how many friends participated in the project, or anything else like that, you’re not doing your job.”
Talking to Billboard, Mason expressed a little more sympathy for members who may be inclined to take other factors into account, though he again said he hoped the focus would be on the music. “Voters have their own ideas around how they vote and what they chose to vote for and we want to give them some latitude to be able to do that but it’s my hope and I believe it’s the Academy’s desire that our voters will evaluate the music based on the merit of that music exclusively. It’s not about past sins [of the academy]. It’s not about genre representation. It’s really about the quality of the music. My hope is that people listen to the music and evaluate it based on the merits.”
At another point in the conversation, he said “The whole idea of this membership [drive] is not just to hit numbers, it’s to try to get the right results and the right outcome.”
Asked to be more specific about that statement, Mason said, “I’m not saying the positive result is any specific album or genre winning any specific award. I’m just looking for accuracy and relevance and making sure the outcomes are reflective of what’s happening in music. I don’t care what genre that is. I’m definitely not looking at making reparations [for past Grammy outcomes]. I’m just saying the outcomes for our academy … are all driven by our membership and if we have the right membership, we’re a better organization.”
First-round voting for the Grammy Awards opens on Friday Oct. 4 at 9 a.m. PT, and closes on Oct. 15 at 6 p.m. PT. Grammy nominees will be announced on Nov. 8. Final-round voting will be held from Dec. 12 to Jan. 3. All voting members, including those welcomed in the 2024 new class, are eligible to participate in the voting process. The 67th annual Grammy Awards will be held on Feb. 2 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. The host has yet to be named. Trevor Noah hosted the last four Grammy telecasts.
The 66th annual Grammy Awards were held on Sunday, Feb. 4. Ben Winston, Raj Kapoor and Jesse Collins were executive producers. Hamish Hamilton directed. The show received a Primetime Emmy nomination for outstanding variety program (live), but lost to The Oscars (which was also executive produced by Kapoor). The Recording Academy has yet to announce the host, producer or director of the 2025 show.
Mexican music merges with rap in Fuerza Regida‘s groundbreaking new project. The entrepreneurs of the San Bernardino band announced their inaugural Don’t Fall In Love Fest on Thursday (Oct. 3), a nod to their latest Jersey corridos album Pero No Te Enamores — an album that blends Jersey club and hip-hop with a corridos bélicos mindset.
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A homecoming of sorts, the Nov. 2 event at the NOS Event Center will be Fuerza Regida’s first performance in their hometown of San Bernardino since 2018.
The festival that the group will headline showcase a dynamic array of stars from both the OG Cali rap scene, hip-hop new heads and Latin music superstars. The lineup includes high-profile names such as Lil Baby, Kodak Black, and Luis R Conriquez, alongside Chino Pacas, Sexy Red, Xavi, and Clave Especial. Also gracing the stage will be Los Rieleros del Norte, Mi Banda El Mexicano, Bone Thugs N Harmony, Too $hort, Roberto Tapia, Larry Hernandez, MC Magic, Baby Bash, and Lil Rob.
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Additionally, another major headliner will be revealed on Monday (Oct. 7).
“I wanted to do something big for San Bernardino,” said Fuerza Regida frontman JOP (real name Jesús Ortiz Paz) in a press release. “I’m bringing hope to the city with this festival.”
The SoCal band have earned plenty of critical praise. The group are finalists for eight 2024 Billboard Latin Music Awards, including Artist of the Year, Top Latin Album of the Year and Regional Mexican Album of the Year for their 2023 Pa Las Baby’s Y La Belikeada, and more. Additionally, JOP is up for Songwriter of the Year and Producer of the Year. Last year, the quintet made Billboard history by becoming the first Latin band ever to be crowned No. 1 on the Top Artists – Duo/Group list of Billboard‘s year-end charts.
See the full lineup below:
JOP will star on the The Sony Music Publishing Icon panel, presented by Sony Music Publishing during the 2024 Billboard Latin Music Week, taking place on October 14-18 at the Fillmore Miami Beach. Get your tickets here.
How do you think my life has been these past few months?” Shaboozey asks with a wry smile.
The 29-year-old multihyphenate artist — one of 2024’s biggest breakout acts — has twisted my question and flipped it back on me, his measured poker face masking the tornado of emotions he’s feeling. There’s no hiding that he’s tired; we’re speaking the day after September’s MTV Video Music Awards, where he snagged two nods (including best new artist), and its star-studded afterparty, where he mingled with the likes of Taylor Swift and Sabrina Carpenter. Some hours later, he went to Brooklyn for his Billboard cover shoot, soundtracked by Zach Bryan and Chris Stapleton. Now we’re grabbing lunch in a hotel restaurant, where Shaboozey has finally settled down with a half-dozen Prince Edward Island oysters and some fries.
The VMAs were just the latest marquee moment in a year full of the kind of highlights most artists dream of achieving over their entire careers. A year in which his appearances on Beyoncé’s culture-shifting Cowboy Carter (on “Spaghettii” and “Sweet * Honey * Buckiin’ ”) were just the beginning of his string of feats. A year when Shaboozey went from a supporting stint on a Jessie Murph tour to his own headlining North American tour. A year when his own “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” notched a historic 12 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. And a year that could still get even bigger if “A Bar Song” gets likely-looking Grammy nominations for record and song of the year; or if the album it’s on, the Billboard chart-topping Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going, gets album of the year and best country album nods; or if Shaboozey himself contends for best new artist.
At his core, Shaboozey (or Boozey, to his friends) exudes the calm cool of a rebel who always knew his outside-the-lines plan would lead him to glory. Still, America’s favorite new cowboy admits that he doesn’t always “feel prepared for this stuff. You just kind of get thrown in it.”
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With “A Bar Song” — which has racked up over 771 million official on-demand U.S. streams, according to Luminate — Shaboozey became the first bona fide Black outlaw country star, a status he has been working toward achieving for a decade. The son of Nigerian immigrants, the artist born Collins Obinna Chibueze grew up just outside Woodbridge, Va., the second of four children. Though he spent two years at boarding school in Nigeria, Shaboozey spent most of his childhood in Virginia, including his high school years, when his football coach’s misspelling of his surname evolved into his nickname and now-stage name.
“It could be a little confusing at times,” he says of growing up Nigerian American in Woodbridge, a Washington, D.C., exurb that was markedly more rural in his youth than it is today. “Hearing your name [mispronounced] during attendance was always a thing; you felt like you had to make it easier for everyone else to understand.” Most Black children of immigrants know such experiences (microaggressions, really) well, and some are also familiar with another phenomenon that marked Shaboozey’s childhood: the endless words of support from parents who understood the importance of reminding their children of their power in a society actively trying to strip them of it. “If I’m going to do anything,” Shaboozey — whose surname means “God is king” in Igbo — pledges today, “I’m going to make sure I’m damn good at it.”
Vintage t-shirt, Wales Bonner pants.
Eric Ryan Anderson
Growing up in Virginia — the home of all-time greats like Patsy Cline and Missy Elliott — also meant that Shaboozey was always aware of the intersections between diverse music genres and styles. But first and foremost, he rooted himself in his father’s playlists, where he encountered country legends Don Williams and Kenny Rogers. As a kid, “outside of MTV and BET, I wasn’t getting the specific names of the artists my parents played around the house and spoke about,” Shaboozey says. “It was all just music to me.”
He didn’t just latch on to the music his father played — he was also enamored with the aesthetic of his pop’s old photos. “Every time I saw a picture of him, he was always in Wranglers. He always gave ‘young country guy,’ ” Shaboozey recalls. From Wrestlemania to Westerns, American culture and its archetypes are exported to, and emulated in, nearly every corner of the globe. Still, most media about cowboys disproportionately features white men, which can feel incongruous to those who feel connected to cowboy culture’s actually multicultural history — and it’s for those people whom Shaboozey wanted to create a unique soundtrack.
At 19, Shaboozey moved to Los Angeles — his first time truly living beyond Virginia — with the goal of writing scripts, making movies and recording music. Shortly after, in 2014, he scored his first quasi-viral moment with his piano-trap banger “Jeff Gordon.” (Shaboozey is a big NASCAR fan.) Around that time, he was also delving into the catalogs of rock icons like AC/DC and The Rolling Stones, indoctrinating himself into the school of Prince and studying the folk roots of Bob Dylan and John Prine.
“In that [period of] discovery, I found country music to be the thing that resonated with me in a really strong way,” he says. “Me being from Virginia, me loving the style and the way of life and the things they talked about. It all seemed very peaceful. It seemed like I could be real.” Even more importantly, Shaboozey began to realize that Lil Wayne and Rogers could be complementary, not opposing, influences. Finally, he understood: “This is who I am.”
When Shaboozey first tried to launch a country album, the project bricked. Two years before the release of his 2018 debut album, Lady Wrangler, he had joined forces with writer-producer Nevin Sastry for Wrangler — which remains shelved to this day.
Shaboozey and Sastry met in 2016, and their connection was so strong and immediate that within a month, Shaboozey moved into Sastry’s apartment. Before completing the “more rap-adjacent” Lady Wrangler, Shaboozey decided to put Wrangler to the side because “something in my head told me, ‘The world ain’t ready for this,’ ” he says. In a sense, he was right. Lady Wrangler (released on Republic Records) arrived in the aftermath of “Daddy Lessons,” Beyoncé’s first country music foray that was rejected by the Recording Academy’s country music committee for the 2017 Grammys and that she performed with The Chicks at the 50th annual Country Music Association (CMA) Awards, one of the most controversial moments in the event’s history; and a few months before Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus rewrote the rules of country, pop and hip-hop with 2019’s “Old Town Road.”
“The rap we looked at on TV was always glamorized,” Shaboozey recalls. “That wasn’t the reality for everybody. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t write music in that world. I found country music could teach people that the little things in life are where the value is. Just having a working truck that you can take your girl in to ride to a cliff and watch the sunset is enough.”
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Eric Ryan Anderson
Sastry and Shaboozey have now collaborated on all three of the star’s full-length projects, but it was 2017’s “Winning Streak,” a woozy trap fantasia gilded in Western aesthetics, that helped Shaboozey land a deal with Republic and release Lady Wrangler. The label dropped Shaboozey following that album’s release (Shaboozey is tight-lipped as to why; Republic did not respond to a request for comment by press time), and soon after, the coronavirus pandemic changed the path of his life. In 2020, Shaboozey met Abas Pauti while playing basketball with mutual friends; after the two got to know each other, Pauti immediately offered to move across the country once Shaboozey told him that Virginia was the place he “needs to be in order to be the artist he wants to be” — a display of commitment that inspired the then-budding star to make Pauti his manager.
They remained in L.A., and by the following year, Shaboozey signed to indie label EMPIRE — which had previously worked with Black country artists like Billboard chart-topper Kane Brown — after a successful pitch from Eric Hurt, vp of A&R publishing, Nashville, at the company. “We understood what he was trying to do and we loved it, but obviously, it wasn’t anything that was out at the moment,” EMPIRE president Tina Davis says of her first impression of Shaboozey and his music. “It’s a feeling you get when artists on a [certain] level come into your presence. It’s kind of like the air goes out of the room. His presence was so full and prominent, I knew he was going to go somewhere.”
Standing at around 6 feet 4 with broad shoulders and lengthy wicks, Shaboozey is a dark-skinned Black man who wears his racial identity with pride. He’s a magnetic presence in any room he enters, though not in a domineering way. But his often stoic face can conceal the “manic, creative energy,” as Sastry puts it, that lies behind it — which he harnessed to finesse his sound and style going into his second and third albums.
On Cowboys Live Forever, Shaboozey joined forces with rising producer Sean Cook (one of the talents behind Paul Russell’s “Lil Boo Thang”), with whom he wrote three songs in three days. “In the studio, he likes to ride on music,” explains Cook, who later co-produced “A Bar Song.” “Sometimes he’ll get on the mic and I’ll loop the guitar, and he’ll freestyle melodies and conceptualize lyrics. Other times, he’ll sit in the booth and write the song as he goes; on the newest album, he actually brought in some guitar ideas himself.” With Cowboys Live Forever, Shaboozey intensified his country bent and enhanced his narrative-driven, cinematic soundscapes that straddle hip-hop and Americana-steeped country.
That genre-agnostic approach culminated with “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” 2024’s longest-running Hot 100 No. 1. Written and recorded in November 2023, near the end of the Where I’ve Been sessions, “A Bar Song” — which interpolates J-Kwon’s 2004 smash, “Tipsy,” and was borne out of Shaboozey’s desire to flip an aughts song — didn’t even need a final mix for those who heard it to recognize it as a hit. Pauti, who was in the studio the night Shaboozey recorded the song, immediately texted Jared Cotter, a Range Music partner who joined Team Shaboozey as co-manager in 2022: “We got one.”
For her part, EMPIRE’s Davis was so instantly enthralled by the track that she shifted her attention from getting the album to the finish line to clearing the “Tipsy” interpolation. J-Kwon, whose “Tipsy” reached No. 2 on the Hot 100, was so thrilled with Shaboozey’s country flip of his track that “he was listening to the record for three weeks straight, not clearing it because he thought the song was already out,” as Shaboozey tells it with a glimmer of childlike glee in his eye. Once J-Kwon eventually cleared the track, it primed the path for “A Bar Song” to become the first song by a Black man to simultaneously top Hot Country Songs and Country Airplay — and the longest-running No. 1 debut country single since Carrie Underwood’s “Jesus, Take the Wheel” in 2006.
Although “A Bar Song” dropped after Shaboozey’s dual appearances on Beyoncé’s historic Cowboy Carter, the whistling track was instrumental in helping him secure those coveted features. When Shaboozey performed the then-unreleased song at Range Showcase Night at Winston House in Venice, Calif., in early 2024, the crowd loved it so much that he played it again. According to Cotter and Pauti, in that crowd was one of Beyoncé’s A&R executives, Ricky Lawson, who instantly knew Shaboozey would be perfect for the record Beyoncé was then working on. Shaboozey says he was initially invited only to write on Cowboy Carter; then, Beyoncé asked him to record some verses, one of which included his freestyled outro on “Spaghettii” (with Linda Martell, which peaked at No. 31 on the Hot 100), and he appeared as well on “Sweet * Honey * Buckiin’ ” (No. 61).
The “Beyoncé bump,” as Cotter calls it, spurred Shaboozey’s team to advance the release date of “A Bar Song” a couple of weeks to April 12. “In this world of virality and quick hits, we wanted to be closer [to Cowboy Carter’s release] and be able to capitalize [on the exposure] with what we thought was a hit,” Cotter says. Early in its gargantuan run, “A Bar Song” usurped Beyoncé’s “Texas Hold ’Em” atop Hot Country Songs, making the collaborators the first Black artists to earn back-to-back No. 1s in the chart’s nearly 70-year history.
“It just feels great to see a true talent like Shaboozey win,” a representative from Beyoncé’s Parkwood Entertainment tells Billboard. “He has a clear sense of the artist he always was, and now the world knows it. To see him dominate the country space is a win for all those Black artists who have been authentically honing their craft for a long time now.”
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Eric Ryan Anderson
As “A Bar Song” came to dominate the summer, it continued to help Shaboozey notch major milestones. When he played the BET Awards for the first time in June, J-Kwon joined him for a whimsical, saloon-set mashup of “A Bar Song” and “Tipsy.”
“Traditionally, I feel like country music wasn’t really accepted in that space as much,” says Shaboozey, who became just the second Black male solo country artist to play the BET Awards (after Brown in 2020). “I even felt — whether that’s my own insecurity or [self-judgment] — ‘Is this thing really connecting with people?’ as I’m performing the song. That’s my biggest fear… when I’m feeling out of place in this space. But that’s what I want to do with my music: be disruptive and show people that music is progressing.”
Shaboozey and J-Kwon’s performance was well-received — including by rappers such as Skilla Baby, French Montana and Quavo, all of whom gave him words of support at the show or hit him up in the days following. “I love hip-hop; I’m a part of their community, too,” Shaboozey reiterates — and he’s right.
Shaboozey is as country as he is hip-hop, as evidenced by the featured artists he tapped for Where I’ve Been. While Texas country-rocker Paul Cauthen helps bring the house down on “Last of My Kind” — ESPN’s new Atlantic Coast Conference college football anthem — Dallas rapper BigXthaPlug appears on the fiery hip-hop party track “Drink Don’t Need No Mix.” But while Shaboozey could promote songs from this album that don’t cater to country audiences, he doesn’t currently plan to. “Shaboozey is a country artist — that’s what he’s passionate about,” Cotter stresses. “What we’re seeing across all genres is artists don’t need to be in one box. Shaboozey is the first one that’s genuinely both in hip-hop and country music; he can rap as well as he can sing. We’re definitely going to promote that because it’s who he is. It’s not a new thing that we’re trying.”
“[Shaboozey] is a little bit of everything,” Davis adds. “That’s what separates him from everyone else. I think Taylor Swift shows that you don’t have to stick with one genre — you can try them all and push them all.”
Vintage t-shirt, Huey Lewis denim jacket, Wales Bonner pants and shoes.
Eric Ryan Anderson
But Nashville and its leading industry players have not been so uniformly open-minded regarding Shaboozey’s generally genreless approach, or his appearance. “They kept wondering if other songs were country on his album or if it was just going to be one song and then all of a sudden, he’s a street thug,” Davis recalls. “I think it’s both [his sound and appearance]. Obviously, if you looked at him walking by and he didn’t have a belt buckle and cowboy boots, you’d swear he was doing something different. I think it’s just the stereotype of what people see, but having those conversations and sharing the whole album made things a little bit easier.” While Shaboozey is acutely aware that he’s “definitely a new artist in [the country] space,” he says he now feels embraced by Nashville — and vows that his “next project is going to be even more country, even more dialed in.”
And Shaboozey has made inroads with the country establishment, including at a pair of country music awards shows. He scored 12 nods at the People’s Choice Country Awards and two nominations — new artist and single of the year — at the CMA Awards. At the latter ceremony, Shaboozey is just one of three Black performers to be nominated, alongside Michael Trotter Jr. and Tanya Trotter of The War and Treaty. “There’s a weight that comes with it,” Shaboozey acknowledges, adding that Michael personally called to congratulate him — and also to recognize that “Man, it’s just us.” (Significantly, Beyoncé and Cowboy Carter didn’t receive any CMA nominations. “All I know is that she made a great body of work and I know she’s proud of that,” Shaboozey says of the snubs.)
The crossover success of “A Bar Song” has conjured comparisons to “Old Town Road,” another country-rap joint that ruffled more than a few feathers back in 2019 — and Shaboozey has found kinship with Lil Nas X. “That’s the homie,” says Shaboozey, who connected with Lil Nas at the previous night’s VMAs. “We haven’t had deep conversations, but I can tell what’s happening to me now is probably very similar to what he experienced.”
For Shaboozey, the VMAs were a “fishbowl” experience, where he was aware of outsiders looking at Lil Nas and him, waiting for the two to interact and acknowledge how their stories intersect. “It’s like everyone is like, ‘Do they know?’ ” he quips. And while the VMAs are technically genre-agnostic, Shaboozey did feel a bit of a disconnect with the audience. “Love the VMAs, but sometimes it felt like they weren’t there for me, to be honest,” he says with a droll chuckle, noting how some audience members seemed almost embarrassed to cheer for him after screaming for more top 40-facing pop stars. “But there were more Black folks and people working the event that were showing me love, and that’s what it’s about.”
Givenchy sweater, Helmut Lang archive top, Object From Nothing jeans, Birkenstock shoes, Cartier, Sydney Evan, and Spinelli Kilcollin jewelry.
Eric Ryan Anderson
He knows, however, that these awards shows are all a prelude to February’s Grammys. In addition to best new artist and record and song of the year for “A Bar Song,” Shaboozey will likely contend for best country song and best country solo performance. Should he take home a trophy in the country field, he would become just the fifth Black act to do so, joining Charley Pride, The Pointer Sisters, Aaron Neville and Darius Rucker, who tells Billboard, “We’re fortunate to have Shaboozey in country music.” Shaboozey’s team confirms that it will submit Where I’m From and its songs in the country field, and the campaign includes stops at “the right looks,” according to Pauti, including The Late Show With Stephen Colbert (where he recently performed his new single, “Highway”), a sit-down interview with Gayle King, an intimate L.A. showcase and meeting Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr.
“I think it’s something for me to bring home to everybody,” Shaboozey muses about his potential first Grammy wins. “This is the peak of the mountain as far as recognition comes. This is a long-standing ceremony, it’s history and tradition, and hopefully we’re able to take it home. That childhood fear of never winning anything is still there. It would mean the world to win one of these things, but if not, the year we had was crazy. If not now, it’ll come. We in the club now.”
“The Grammys are always going to matter to me,” says EMPIRE founder Ghazi, whose commitment to a genreless future brought him out to Nashville years before he crossed paths with Shaboozey. “From being a 14-year-old making my first records to now being a seasoned executive, I never lost sight of that journey, and the Grammys never [lose their] luster.”
As Shaboozey picks at his final few French fries, I take in the man sitting across the table from me, who, though he’s currently relaxed in the booth of a Brooklyn eatery, has more than a little of a classic gunslinger’s gleam in his eyes. When he picks up his final oyster, it feels nothing short of poetic. A few years ago, it would have been borderline unimaginable to see someone like him at the zenith of country music, yet here he is — reshaping signifiers of so-called authenticity and injecting them with the street-smart swagger of the contemporary hip-hop gangster. A distinctly 21st-century manifestation of the spirit of Marty Robbins, channeled through a voice and persona equally steeped in Stanley Kubrick, Garth Brooks and Juvenile, Shaboozey is a lone star — a true outlaw who has effectively rewritten the rules of a land that’s actually his to reclaim.
And like any genuine outlaw, he never breaks eye contact while making plain his message: “I’m just making music I love,” Shaboozey says. “It’s cool being recognized, but I’m making music for a group of people that are usually underrepresented. I’m going to keep doing that. It’s good to be that guy — those are the people who are remembered.”
This story appears in the Oct. 5, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Check out pics of the “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” hitmaker.