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Wizkid and Brent Faiyaz‘s “Piece of My Heart” has topped this week’s new music poll that features artists in various genres of music.
Music fans voted in a poll published Friday (Oct. 18) on Billboard, choosing the pair’s chill R&B bop as their favorite new music release of the past week.
“Piece of My Heart” brought in nearly 85% of the vote on the poll, securing a very notable edge ahead of new releases from Bruno Mars and ROSÉ (“APT.”), Kylie Minogue (Tension II), Morgan Wallen (“Love Somebody”), Gracie Abrams (The Secret of Us (Deluxe)), and others.
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“Piece of My Heart,” which dropped Oct. 18, is the lead single from Wizkid’s upcoming sixth studio album, Morayo. The forthcoming set is scheduled to arrive Nov. 22 through Starboy/Sony Music International/RCA Records.
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The slinky love jam doesn’t shy away from old-school R&B pleasures and allows the Nigerian superstar to showcase his nimble flow. “Nothing can tear us apart/ You’ve got a piece of my heart/ Nothing can tear us apart (Nothing in this world)/ You’ve got a piece of my heart (That belongs to you girl),” Faiyaz sings in the chorus.
Wizkid has only been featured on a couple of collaborations this year, from “MMS” with Asake on his third album, Lungu Boy, to “Work Me Out” with Shenseea on her sophomore release, Never Gets Late Here. The only collaboration Faiyaz was a part of this year was “Should’ve Wore a Bonnet,” with 21 Savage on his third album, American Dream.
Morayo, which is a Yoruba word for “I see joy,” will arrive two years after Wiz dropped his fifth album, More Love, Less Ego. The 2022 set reached No. 59 on the Billboard 200 and No. 2 on World Albums.
Trailing far behind Wizkid and Faiyaz on this week’s poll is Bruno Mars and ROSÉ’s “APT.,” which brought in 13% of the vote. The BLACKPINK star and Silk Sonic hitmaker’s fresh collaboration finds the duo mixing energetic chants with hooky pop melodies.
See the final results of this week’s poll below. Check out Billboard‘s Friday Music Guide to catch up with more must-hear releases from this week.
Billie Eilish isn’t interested in going viral on TikTok — at least that’s the message she gives in a Saturday Night Live sketch about the social media platform.
During SNL‘s Michael Keaton-hosted episode on Oct. 19, the 22-year-old pop star made a cameo in a nearly four-minute sketch, aptly titled “TikTok,” in which she brushes off influencer Harry Daniels (played by Bowen Yang), who’s made a name for himself by singing to random celebrities on TikTok.
“Excuse me, Miss Eilish, can I sing to you?” Bowen’s Daniels requests as he accosts Eilish in hallway and quickly belts out a tune. Clearly annoyed, the “What Was I Made For?” hitmaker quickly interrupts him with a lucrative request. “Here’s 10 grand, please stop following me,” she says, handing him a wad of cash and scurrying off.
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Daniels has indeed encountered Eilish in real life, as seen in videos on his TikTok account, which boasts 1.6 million followers. During the SNL skit, Bowen’s Daniels also sings to Maya Rudolph’s Kamala Harris and James Austin Johnson’s Donald Trump
The pre-recorded “TikTok” sketch featured a person doomscrolling through their social media tread, encountering clips of a cat dancing to SNL cast member’s Marcello Hernandez viral cover of Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” Chloe Fineman playing Call Her Daddy podcast host Alex Cooper and Kenan Thompson portraying a foodie reviewing a Fruity Pebble-covered chicken sandwich from his car.
Elsewhere during the episode, Eilish appeared for the fourth time as musical guest, performing Hit Me Hard and Soft album tracks “Birds of a Feather” and “Wildflower” alongside her brother Finneas. She previously performed on SNL in 2019 and 2023, pulling double-duty in 2021 as host and musical guest. Her appearance with Keaton follows last week’s Ariana Grande-hosted episode, which featured live performances from Stevie Nicks.
Watch SNL‘s “TikTok” sketch below. For those without cable, the broadcast streams on Peacock, which you can sign up for at the link here. Having a Peacock account also gives fans access to previous SNL episodes.
Billie Eilish made a celestial appearance on Saturday Night Live. The 22-year-old pop star dropped by Studio 8H on Oct. 19 for her fourth time as musical guest on the long-running NBC sketch comedy show, delivering a pair of out-of-this-world live performances from her third album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, which dropped in May. […]
Singer-songwriter GOAT Joni Mitchell took over the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on Saturday (Oct. 19) for the first of two “Joni Jam” concerts.
Despite the size of the open-air, highway-adjacent venue, a crowd of 17,000 worshipful fans was gifted with a show that felt like an intimate, inviting look into life for Mitchell at 80: shooting the breeze with friends and admirers from the comfort of a plush (yet appropriately regal) chair, sipping pinot grigio by the mellow lamplight and singing a song (or 25) when the spirit takes her.
Cozy at that may sound, getting to this warm hug of a victory lap has been a hard-fought victory for Mitchell — a brain aneurysm in 2015 left her unable to speak or walk, and she had to watch videos of herself playing guitar to relearn her own songs. But the Canadian artist, who suffered from polio as a child, is no stranger to uphill battles, and after years of keeping out of the public eye following her health crisis, the Grammy-winning Rock & Roll Hall of Famer stunned the world in 2022 by making an unannounced return to the stage at the Newport Folk Festival.
A proper headlining gig followed in June 2023 at The Gorge Amphitheatre in Washington, and her soul-scraping turn at the 2024 Grammys allowed an even wider audience to experience the depth and gravitas Mitchell is still capable of bringing to a performance.
Joining her at each of those gigs was Brandi Carlile, an avowed acolyte whom Mitchell has described as “my ambassador.” Naturally, Carlile joined Mitchell onstage Saturday at the Bowl, too, radiating joy and nervous excitement as she sang with her hero and served as the de facto emcee/hype woman for the evening. Carlile even revealed that the Joni Jams – when held in Mitchell’s real-life living room “five or six years ago” – helped Mitchell heal following the aneurysm. It started out with friends and musicians singing Mitchell’s own material to her as she recovered, an experience Carlile said was “terrifying”; before too long, Mitchell began harmonizing and taking a verse or two from the comfort of her couch. Now, she’s regained enough vocal control to command an audience of thousands.
“Joni is about to destroy us right now,” Carlile said with a Cheshire Cat grin before Mitchell sang the Blue standout “A Case of You” in a resonant, husky tone. That statement could easily have been inserted into any number of between-song moments, given how frequently folks could be spotted wiping away tears to the icon’s lyrically incisive meditations on love, pain and our brief lives on a rock circling a giant ball of gas.
“I’m honored to have her as a friend because she brought me out of retirement,” Mitchell said of Carlile during the show, laughing.
Thanks to a backing band that included Blake Mills, Robin Pecknold, Jacob Collier, Lucius, Annie Lennox, Marcus Mumford, Jon Batiste, Allison Russell, Wendy & Lisa, Rita Wilson, Celisse and more, Mitchell’s remarkable songs were treated more like jazz compositions than pop songs, stretched out and contracted depending on the lead vocal, embellished with curious flourishes in some moments then pointedly unadorned the next. Even if the Bowl got a little chilly toward the end of the evening, the warm tapestry of Mitchell’s music kept spirits warm.
Here are some of the highlights from an unforgettable evening.
‘Hejira’ Highlights
The 2024 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction ceremony in Cleveland on Saturday (Oct. 19) meant a lot to everyone involved, of course. But you can consider Peter Frampton among, if not the most, delighted people in the Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse.
Long considered one of the Rock Hall’s great snubs, Frampton’s induction was particularly poignant in light of his nearly decade-long battle with Inclusion Body Myositis (IBM), a degenerative condition that was expected to take him out of commission shortly after he revealed it six years ago and went on what was supposed to be a farewell tour. Yet he’s still playing — including at the induction ceremony, joined by his band and guest Keith Urban — and was beaming after his time on stage at Cleveland’s Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse.
“It was fantastic,” Frampton told Billboard. “It went better than I thought, which was wonderful.” He did note, however, that “halfway through the speech, as I looked down at my family… I needed a drink of water at that point. It can be a tear-jerker. It’s very emotional having everybody here. All my children are never all here together at a show. There’s always one here, one there or whatever. So it was wonderful.”
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Given, like other inductees, just seven minutes of performance time, Frampton originally planned a shortened version of his signature hit “Do You Feel Like We Do,” a song — featuring a Talk Box solo — that can stretch to 20 minutes during his concerts. “That’s the one everybody wants to hear,” Frampton noted, “so we edited that down, and that includes jamming with Keith as well. But then (show producers) said, ‘We feel really bad you’re doing just one number.’ I said, ‘Well, I’ve got the same amount of time as everyone else.’ They said, well, can you do another one for two minutes?’” For the “bonus cut” he chose “Baby (Somethin’s Happening)” from his third solo album, Somethin’s Happening, which turned 60 this year.
“The actual playing part, which I was most concerned about, obviously, because I’m the stupid perfectionist person and I worry about every little tiny detail… it just had to be great. That’s what made me nervous,” Frampton explained. “Or excited. Keith said, ‘Don’t say nervous. Say excited.’”
Urban, for his part, was excited to jam out with Frampton, even in an abbreviated fashion, on “Do You Feel Like We Do.” “When he called and asked me if I’d play that song, of all songs, I was very happy to get to do it,” Urban, who subbed for Bryan Adams at the 2021 Rock Hall inductions in Cleveland, told Billboard after the performance. “It was amazing getting to play with Peter. He’s just got such a control over sensitivity and dynamics and intents. He makes to look easy, but it’s really hard to do what he does. He’s like a black diamond (trail) skier making it look like a green. It’s insane.”
Peter Frampton performs onstage at the 2024 Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame Induction Ceremony at Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse on October 19, 2024 in Cleveland, Ohio.
Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic
Frampton and Urban spoke of their Nashville history, meeting up during the ’90s after they’d both moved there and before Urban’s career took full flight. “I was living in an absolutely awful, crap house in a pretty gloomy part of town at the time,” Urban recalled, “and my manager called and said, ‘Hey, do you want to write with Peter Frampton? I’m like, ‘Holy s—, yeah! Where are we gonna write.’ He goes, ‘He’s gonna come to your house.’ I Go, ‘No, no, no. He’s not gonna come to my house. But sure enough he came over to my dwelling and we spent the day just playing music and writing.” Nothing came out of the session, however. “It was one of those strange, mismatched moments, musically. I wasn’t in a good headspace. I don’t think either of us was in the best place we’ve been in — but I was glad we got a good, solid friendship out of it.”
Another friend on hand Saturday was the Who’s Roger Daltrey, who delivered the induction speech for Frampton, who had opened for the Who on his first tour with his band the Herd. Daltrey also led the humorous revelry in the press room after the induction, joking that the original tour was “the pinnacle of your (Frampton’s) decline. No wonder you joined up with [Humble Pie], because you needed to be there. You were gonna be forever stuck in the Who — if being in the Who is forever stuck.”
Daltrey also gushed about hearing Frampton and Urban playing together at the ceremony.“It was fabulous to hear the sound of real guitars instead of all the fuzz box s— that they put out these days, detuned…,” Daltrey noted. “It’s not rock ‘n’ roll. It’s not music… and it was wonderful to hear Peter’s guitar sound and Keith and the band work together, and the sensitivity in (Frampton’s) voice… Your secret is everything you do comes from the heart and it’s always been that way and it’s always affected me… And I mean it! I’m not blowing smoke up your ass, or blowing it on the way down. I really do mean it.”
Frampton, who partied after the ceremony with family and friends back at the Four Seasons hotel, recently finished a short late summer concert tour and said he’s hoping to go out again next year. In the meantime he’s working on completing both an album of all-new songs as well as a documentary that’s being directed by his keyboardist Rob Arthur.
Despite the ebullient induction, the Foreigner camp was roundly sad not to have founder Mick Jones, who’s battling with Parkinson’s disease, in attendance. “We wish he was here, but we understand why he isn’t,” longtime bassist Rick Wills said. “He’s a very sick person right now, and he would be here if he could but he doesn’t want to be seen the way he is now. That’s not Mick. It’s just not his way. But he knows that we’re thinking of him, and we send all our love to him.” Original frontman Lou Gramm added, “And we’re representing him.”
Members of the group’s current lineup felt the same way. “To me it’s very tragic,” says Jeff Pilson, Foreigner’s bassist since 2007. “It really breaks my heart that he’s not here because this is his baby; we want to make sure that what we do is really right. I want to do that for him ’cause I love him dearly and I love his legacy and I love what he’s all about, so I want to make sure that he’s happy. So that’s what we’re doing and, yes, (Jones’ absence) does motivate us.”
Two of Jones’ children — actress daughter Annabelle and son Christopher — were in attendance on Saturday while the others were with their father at home, watching the stream on Disney+. “He was sad he couldn’t be here but was excited to watch on TV with our brother Alexander and our two sisters Charlotte and Samantha,” Christopher says. “They have balloons and everything. They’re doing a whole party.”
The two called the all-star performances “mind-blowing,” while Annabelle added, “I think it means the world to him. It’s a very kind of singular honor and recognition, and it means a lot to us. We’re extremely proud of him and really sad he can’t be here.”
Gramm, meanwhile, was less supportive of original drummer Dennis Elliott’s last-minute decision to skip the ceremony due to what he called “totally unacceptable” conditions — including, according to sources, the fact that band members’ wives were not permitted to join them on the small red carpet in the bowels of the arena. “He emailed us very angry, saying he and his wife wouldn’t be there and something, something, something and that’s it,” Gramm noted. “He’s real angry about something and we can’t figure out what it is, but he’s not coming. You’d think there’d be solidarity within the band, but not Dennis.”
More than 18 months in, everyone can agree that Taylor Swift‘s Eras tour is more than just your average concert. It’s an event. Swift herself even used that word to describe what her record-slashing trek has become during the second of three sold-out nights at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium on Saturday (Oct. 19). Fans by […]
For nearly 40 years, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame has made it a tradition to gather together a batch of the biggest stars in the world and invite them to join the ranks of some of the greatest performers who have ever lived. On Saturday night (Oct. 19), that tradition continued with the […]
Sarcastically noting that answering questions is “my favorite thing to do,” Cher answered a few from the press backstage at the 2024 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony on Saturday (Oct. 19).
After taking the Rock Hall to task during her speech for waiting 35 years to induct her after she became eligible, Cher acknowledges that, “I have a kind love hate relationship [with the Rock Hall], because I thought, ‘What do I have to f–king do , y’know, to be inducted into this place? What do you have to do to be a part of it?’”
Though tempted to tell David Geffen, who she said wrote a letter to the Hall of Fame Foundation on her behalf, to “please take it back,” Cher said that in the end she was happy with the way things turned out. “I felt good. I can say that I’m happy that I’m in,” she says. “If I didn’t [think] it, I wouldn’t be here.”
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Reflecting on a 60-year career dating back to work with her late ex-husband Sonny Bono and sessions with Phil Spector’s Wrecking Crew, the singer said that she struggles with thoughts of legacy. “I [didn’t] have perspective, exactly — I just was busy living my life, so I wasn’t like thinking about it at all,” she says. “I was thinking about it from minute to minute, thing to thing. I thought of myself as a bumper car and when I hit a road I would just back up and turn in a different direction, because I wasn’t going to stop doing what I loved.”
And what about Sonny & Cher making it to the Rock Hall one day? “I think that we deserve it, ” Cher tells Billboard. “Even if we weren’t exactly rock ‘n roll, we represented music. I know it’s not like … we were corny, but we were very avant garde for what was happening at the time, so, I don’t know. I didn’t expect to get in. I just thought, ‘They’re never gonna let you in, b–ch.’”
During her speech, Cher made sure to send a message to all of the women watching around the world: “The one thing I have never done, is I never give up,” she explained. “And I am talking to the women, okay … we have been down and out, but we keep striving, and we keep going and we are somebody. We are special.”
The Rockabye Baby! collection Lullaby Renditions of Taylor Swift Volume 2, which was released digitally last month, is now available on vinyl to lull little Swifties to sleep.
Lullaby Renditions of Taylor Swift Volume 2 was released on Friday (Oct. 18), giving record player lovers an excuse to buy one for the nursery.
Sweet, instrumental reimaginings of “Fortnight,” “Wildest Dreams,” “August,” “Cardigan” and “Lover” are included on the release, as well as gentle lullaby versions of dynamic pop hits like “Cruel Summer” and “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.”
The new release, found on Rockabye Baby!’s website for $30, features clear and purple color-in-color vinyl, a full-color sleeve, a fold-out, poster-sized coloring page and a digital download card. The sleeve design is a play on Swift’s tour poster, swapping teddy bears in for the many eras of Swift.
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It follows 2015’s Lullaby Renditions of Taylor Swift, Rockabye Baby!’s first set of Swift-themed lullabies.
Swift, who will officially release her The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology album on vinyl on Black Friday, resumed hers Eras Tour this weekend with three concerts in Miami following a two-month break. She’ll bring the show to New Orleans next, which will be followed by performances in Indianapolis, Toronto and Vancouver (where on Dec. 8 she’ll officially wrap the tour).
Get a preview of “Cruel Summer” as a lullaby and see the full track list below.
Lullaby Renditions of Taylor Swift Volume 2 Track List
1. “Anti-Hero”2. “You Need To Calm Down” 3. “Fortnight”4. “Look What You Made Me Do”5. “Cruel Summer”6. “Karma”7. “Don’t Blame Me”8. “Wildest Dreams”9. “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”10. “August”11. “Willow”12. “Cardigan”13. “Lover”14. “Enchanted”