Podcasts
John Mayer knows exactly what you think about his high-profile dating history, and he’s ready to prove you wrong.
During a SiriusXM-presented live recording of SmartLess — the popular podcast hosted by actors and friends Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes — at Hollywood’s Avalon nightclub on Thursday night, the singer/songwriter served as the night’s “mystery guest” and was an open book about his love life, confirming that he’s currently single and “a catch.”
“I’m older now,” he said. “It’s been a very long time since I had my own situation. I stay inside the house. Aren’t I a good boy, America? I’m not dating anybody!”
After Mayer said he’s a big fan of the “skip the wait” upgrade on the dating app Raya (shoot your shot, ladies), Bateman asked whether the musician is looking for something different now than he was 10 years ago. “Let me ask you: What’s right and what’s wrong for a girlfriend vs. a wife vs. somebody that you might have a child with?” Bateman asked.
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“They’re one in the same,” Mayer said. “I would not date someone if it didn’t have the upward mobility of becoming a marriage.”
You can watch a preview clip of the conversation here:
Elsewhere in the conversation, Mayer said the biggest lesson he’s learned in relationships over the years is to not hide behind sarcasm and to leave himself open to potential pain.
“I think that younger people need to get a head start on being more vulnerable,” the 47-year-old artist told the trio of hosts. “Being sarcastically invulnerable and apathetic is a really good healing mechanism to get over the past breakup. … There’s a fear that there’s a generation of … people, men and women, who have decided to come into relationships in a very inflexible, sarcastic [headspace]. Vulnerability is the sh–. Leave yourself so vulnerable that you could die if someone said the wrong thing to you, and just die 1,000 times.”
Mayer has had a number of high-profile relationships over the years, including with Katy Perry, Jennifer Aniston, Jessica Simpson and Taylor Swift.
A lot of topics were covered during the live podcast recording, including Mayer’s experience trying his hand at stand-up comedy, his innate obsession with correct grammar and punctuation, and what musicians he would put in his dream band, dead or alive. “Alive,” Mayer deadpanned, before (literally) singing the praises of Eddie Vedder with a little impromptu take on Pearl Jam’s “Daughter.” He also offered up a medley of three of his songs: “Slow Dancing in a Burning Room,” followed by Hayes’ personal favorite “All We Ever Do Is Say Goodbye,” and finally a sing-along of his breakthrough hit “No Such Thing.”
The full episode will premiere July 24 on SiriusXM Stars (channel 109) and then become available on demand in the SiriusXM app and to SiriusXM Podcasts+ subscribers in Apple Podcasts. On July 31, it will be released widely wherever podcasts are available.
Mayer has his own SiriusXM station, Life With John Mayer, which debuted in November 2023 and airs on channel 14.
It’s been a week of “Weird Al” on Billboard.com. Our recent cover star and indie spirit award recipient comes to us at a fascinating place in his career, where despite having recorded only sporadically over the past decade, he’s in many ways at a career peak — culturally ubiquitous, about to embark upon the biggest […]
Thanks to a decadeslong love of Frank Sinatra and a relationship with his family that started when Frank Sinatra Jr. guest-starred on Family Guy, Seth MacFarlane was entrusted with a gold mine of never-released material arranged for the late crooner that has become his just-released ninth studio album, Lush Life: The Lost Sinatra Arrangements.
“If you’re an aficionado of this kind of music, it’s like being a Lennon-McCartney fan and finding something that was written in like 1969 that was just never played,” MacFarlane tells Billboard‘s Pop Shop Podcast of Frank’s daughter, Tina Sinatra, approaching him with the opportunity to dig into 1,200 archival boxes of unrecorded sheet music arranged specifically for her dad. “And you hear it, and it’s like, ‘My God.’
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“You know, the songs that we have are the songs that we have from his discography; obviously he’s gone, the arrangers are gone, so there’s nothing new. And then all of a sudden, it’s like, ‘Oh, you know what? There’s one more cookie at the bottom of the bag.’”
Listen to MacFarlane’s full interview in the new Pop Shop Podcast episode below:
Below, find highlights from our conversation with MacFarlane, and listen to the full chat in the podcast above.
Did Seth know these songs before digging in?
In many cases, no one has ever heard of them, because they just didn’t exist. There’s a song called “Who’s in Your Arms Tonight” — you could travel to the ends of the earth before we did this, and you would not find a single person who knows that song, because it just was never recorded, and everyone involved with this writing is long gone. … We asked the oldest guys in the band — I mean, our bassist played for Frank Sinatra for years in the last part of his life, and he had no idea what this was. So about a third of the songs on the album are songs in which both the song and the arrangement are just completely unknown.
What stood out in these unreleased arrangements?
Particularly in the case of [Sinatra arranger] Nelson Riddle, you could instantly hear his signature trademarks, like those flutes. And that was what was so interesting. There was no question who wrote this, but it was new. It was familiar stylistically, but it was new, in the same way you watch a Wes Anderson movie that’s brand-new, you’re instantly going to know it’s him. You’re going to see his visual touchstones, but the movie’s brand-new. That’s kind of how it was. It was so clearly Nelson Riddle, but we were hearing the first new Nelson Riddle chart that anyone has heard in decades. So it was a pretty profound moment.
Is there a duet opportunity for frequent collaborator Liz Gillies or Carpool Karaoke partner Ariana Grande?
It would have been nice if we had found some, you know, Rosemary Clooney or Peggy Lee duet. I mean, Liz would have been my first call. For this kind of music, there’s just no one better on the planet, but so far, we have not found any duets. We haven’t dug through these boxes in such detail that there couldn’t be one — there may be. There are 1,200 boxes. We couldn’t play everything on that day because an orchestra is expensive. … But there’s so much in that archive that it is possible, and, yeah, if we find something, then we’ll give Liz a call.
How long could Seth be mining this material?
There are a couple [songs] that we recorded that we cut from this album, just because we had, I don’t know, some edict to get it down to 12 songs or less. All I know is we were told initially, I think they wanted it to be like six songs. I’m, like, “Guys, that’s not an album.” I don’t know, there’s all this, like, marketing data that they go by, and really, nobody knows sh–, because if they did, everything would be a monster hit. [Laughs] So I do remember us pushing back and saying, “Let’s do an album’s worth of songs for this thing.” So it’s a dozen songs, which, for a Sinatra album, was in the ballpark. And there were a couple songs that we did record that were not included that would be on the next one. … There are probably two albums’ worth of real, honest-to-God songs that can be released.
Is three days a residency? [Laughs] I once spent a week in Vegas, and I was like, “I’m forgetting who I am. I’m an insane person. The walls are moving.” That’s a lot of Vegas.
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Also on this week’s Billboard Pop Shop Podcast, Taylor Swift’s former No. 1 album reputation, released in 2017, jumps from No. 78 to No. 5 on the Billboard 200 following an outpouring of fan support of the project after Swift announced she had acquired her Big Machine Records-era music catalog. Plus, SEVENTEEN and Miley Cyrus’ latest releases debut in the top five, while the top slots on both the Billboard 200 and Billboard Hot 100 are static, with Morgan Wallen’s “I’m the Problem” and Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” staying put.
We also hit the biggest pop headlines of the week, including Sabrina Carpenter’s new “Manchild” single and video, Darren Criss and Nicole Scherzinger winning at the Tony Awards, David Byrne joining Olivia Rodrigo onstage at Governors Ball, and Mariah Carey returning with her new Eric B. & Rakim-sampling single “Type Dangerous.”
The Billboard Pop Shop Podcast is your one-stop shop for all things pop on Billboard‘s weekly charts. You can always count on a lively discussion about the latest pop news, fun chart stats and stories, new music, and guest interviews with music stars and folks from the world of pop. Casual pop fans and chart junkies can hear Billboard‘s executive digital director, West Coast, Katie Atkinson and Billboard’s managing director, charts and data operations, Keith Caulfield every week on the podcast, which can be streamed on Billboard.com or downloaded in Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast provider. (Click here to listen to the previous edition of the show on Billboard.com.)
This May, only a handful of pop stars made major movement on the charts — including one with a historically huge Hot 100 album bomb, and one with a rare runaway breakout smash for 2025 — but we still saw some big names making big waves, with massive new tours and game-changing news announcements. And […]
After Taylor Swift surprised the world late last week with the news that she now owns the masters of her first six albums, once the dust settled, fans wondered: Will the final two planned re-recordings of her self-titled 2008 debut album and of 2017’s Reputation ever see the light of day?
The thing is, even though Swift no longer has an express reason to re-record the projects to reclaim their ownership, her fans have grown accustomed to the fanfare around the Taylor’s Version releases, including unheard “From the Vault” tracks and new music videos.
Swift addressed the burning question directly in her open letter to fans posted on her website Friday, revealing that she had only re-recorded “a quarter” of Reputation, while she had “completely re-recorded my entire debut album, and I really love how it sounds now.” She also said both “can still have their moments to re-emerge when the time is right, if that would be something you guys would be excited about. But if it happens, it won’t be from a place of sadness and longing for what I wish I could have. It will just be a celebration now.”
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On the new Billboard Pop Shop Podcast, Katie & Keith are talking all about Swift being reunited with her first six albums and what the circumstances might be for their Taylor’s Version re-releases.
Listen to the full podcast here:
Also on the show, we’ve got chart news on how Alex Warren hits No. 1 for the first time on the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart with “Ordinary,” and, while Morgan Wallen’s I’m the Problem holds at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for a second week, two more Wallen albums join Problem in the top 10, making him only the seventh act in the last 60 years to have at least three albums simultaneously in the top 10.
The Billboard Pop Shop Podcast is your one-stop shop for all things pop on Billboard‘s weekly charts. You can always count on a lively discussion about the latest pop news, fun chart stats and stories, new music, and guest interviews with music stars and folks from the world of pop. Casual pop fans and chart junkies can hear Billboard‘s executive digital director, West Coast, Katie Atkinson and Billboard’s managing director, charts and data operations, Keith Caulfield every week on the podcast, which can be streamed on Billboard.com or downloaded in Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast provider. (Click here to listen to the previous edition of the show on Billboard.com.)
It was fitting for Janet Jackson and Jennifer Lopez to hit the stage at Monday’s American Music Awards at Las Vegas’ Fontainebleau, since both have found a second home in Sin City. Jackson has a current residency at Resorts World, which kicked off in December and has dates scheduled through September. Lopez is returning to […]
It would’ve been a big-enough weekend for Morgan Wallen simply from the release of his fourth album Friday’s (May 16) I’m the Problem — his third album this decade to consist of 30+ tracks, this time with six of them already ranking as pre-release Billboard Hot 100 top 10 hits. But the biggest star in […]
Rihanna fans have been waiting not so patiently the last three years for new music, and it finally arrived Friday in the form of the Smurfs soundtrack song “Friend of Mine.” The vibey new song is the perfect backdrop for a Smurf dance-off, as evidenced by the mostly animated music video, but the three-minute-plus track […]
After taking a few years off, the irreverent and one-of-a-kind podcast Promoter 101 is back and dropping hot takes on the concert business like it’s 2018 all over again.
Understanding why music manager Luke Pierce and Live Nation promoter Dan Steinberg revived their podcast is nearly as complex as understanding why they stopped in the first place. When they shelved the show in 2020, shifting priorities and the increasingly complicated post-pandemic concert industry played a major role. But what surprised Steinberg most was that no one stepped in to capitalize on their absence.
“We thought that we’ve been talking for quite a while, and maybe there was another voice; maybe if we got out of the way and somebody else wanted to speak up and fill that void,” Steinberg says.
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But no one did — and Steinberg and Pierce believe that’s partly because the concert business has only grown more complex in the wake of the pandemic, especially with the rise of dynamic pricing and nine-figure tour grosses. While they plan to keep the show’s popular interview format, they also intend to dive deeper into topics like ticket pricing and the reasons behind the sharp rise in concert costs in the post-pandemic era.
“I think it’s a mistake to say the promoters are outpricing the market,” Steinberg said. ” I think the managers are setting the prices. The artist may say they want more money, but I think that call is usually the manager, and it’s their job to direct that, and most artists leave that to the manager and the agent to figure out. I don’t know the promoters that want a more expensive ticket — more often, the promoter is trying to bring the ticket price down.”
Pierce added that there’s a “good swath of working artists that have priced themselves out of the middle class of live music.”
In the months immediately following the reopening of concert venues, fans were spending significant money on concerts and live experiences, making up for time lost during the pandemic. That period was followed by what Pierce calls a “burnout period” that’s happening “right now.”
“While fans return to some of their pre-pandemic behaviors, you know, artists continue to kind of tour at peak levels, and I think that will cause some problems with soft tours and unsold inventory,” he said. The result is a “top-heavy touring ecosystem, where the middle is kind of getting squeezed out a little bit, and I think it’s something artists and their teams really need to be cognizant of.”
The pricing problem will become more acute in the next 24 months based on what happens with the economy, Pierce adds, noting that “we just saw GDP figures come out, and the contraction of the U.S. economy is certainly not a great sign. Paying attention and making adjustments to your business is prudent right now.”
“Put more simply, the demand in the post-pandemic environment was enormous because we couldn’t do anything for a while, and we got free money from the government for a little bit, and nowhere to spend it,” Pierce says. “But that has to reset somewhere along a sensible trend. And I think it’ll be challenging for some people to figure out what that looks like.”
Steinberg notes that while the festival market will need to make some adjustments to navigate a tough economic climate, he remains optimistic about its long-term potential.
“Festivals are not done, it’s just a competitive space,” Steinberg says. “And they’re for younger people. And so there’s always going to be a cooler festival with a more cutting-edge lineup. But festivals can come back from a bad year. Coachella had some rough years, but they came back. Bonnaroo definitely had some tougher years, but they have come back. It’s very cyclical.”
One real challenge festivals face, Pierce notes, is “headliner fatigue, due to a lack of inventory of headliners.” Artists can make more money touring, especially artists playing arenas and stadiums, where they can deliver “the exact experience they want their fans to have, and that’s a better business decision for them, top to bottom.”
Steinberg and Pierce plan to release one new Promoter 101 episode each month and have launched a refreshed brand identity, complete with updated logos and artwork, to mark their return. Their comeback episode, No. 230, features interviews with Paladin Artists agents Steve Martin, Andy Somers and Chyna Chuan. The latest episode is available now at promoter101.net.
Over the past four years, when Morgan Wallen releases an album, it has camped out at the top of the Billboard 200 for quite some time. Starting with the 10-week No. 1 Dangerous: The Double Album in 2021 and continuing with 19-week chart-topper One Thing at a Time in 2023, Wallen has a pretty unimpeachable […]