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David Gray made sure no two shows on his recent U.S. tour supporting his 2024 album, Dear Life, were the same. Not only is the choice of songs different one night to the next, there are moments of spontaneity and humanity that give each performance a different character.
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“Even within changing the set, I’m adding things in that I haven’t planned for,” the British singer-songwriter tells Billboard’s Behind the Setlist podcast. “And why? Because the puppet is turning back into a real boy. That is the process that’s going on. I want to be sort of emotionally present on stage, not just playing the set. I don’t want us to go into battle mode — here we are, information, walk on, do the gig, come off, champagne. I want it to be more than that.”
In Detroit, for example, somebody shouted a request for his first single, “Birds Without Wings,” from his 1993 album, A Century Ends. It wasn’t on the setlist, but Gray obliged. At another concert, a fan shouted a request for “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” a track based on a poem by William Butler Yeats that Gray has performed live but never recorded. “Wow, that is obscure,” he recalled thinking. “I’m impressed.” Although Gray had never performed the song on the piano, he played the beginning and eventually made it through the song. The unexpected diversion was a memorable success. “My favorite moment of the whole night,” he says. “It’ll be one of my favorite moments from the tour.”
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Gray is best known for his breakthrough album White Ladder from 1998, one of the most successful albums in the U.K. and Ireland of the 2000s. Songs from White Ladder were spread throughout the concerts, but Gray dipped into his catalog of 13 studio albums and included numerous songs from Dear Life. “These [new] songs are very direct and instant, I feel, and I felt that they could stand next to shoulder to shoulder with the big songs from my catalog without being crushed,” he says.
Incorporating surprises, telling stories about his music and taking chances helps connect Gray to the audience and heighten the concert-going experience. “I want to be emotionally direct,” he continues. “I want to be emotionally present. I don’t want to be pornographic. It’s not like, ‘Dave’s going to show us everything. This is what’s going on inside his head.’ It’s a moment of sharing only in a way that would enrich the experience of listening to the music and explain why we’re there making the music. We’re not here to just make a few dollars. I’m here for a different reason.”
Check out the entire conversation in which Gray walked Behind the Setlist through his entire 23-song set, in order, at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles on Feb. 14. Listen using the embedded Spotify player below, or go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Amazon Music, Podbean or Everand.
The 2025 iHeartPodcast Awards Live at took over SXSW in Austin, Texas, this week, celebrating the biggest names in the audio storytelling space. The event, which took place at ACL Live at The Moody Theater, was hosted by Jack O’Brien and Miles Gray of The Daily Zeitgeist, and a number of stars took the stage […]
Drake wants to go podding. The Toronto rapper took to his moodboard/finsta account plottttwistttttt and posted a couple of clips from a relatively unknown podcast called TanksGodPod hosted by two young women: Luda Podgorna and Elena De Napoli. The clips show the pair playing a game of “Would You Rather” with one of the captions […]
Lil Yachty didn’t hold back when asked about his thoughts on the Black Lives Matter organization. The Atlanta rapper slammed BLM during an appearance on Quenlin Blackwell’s Feeding Starving Celebrities cooking series earlier this week. “BLM is a scam,” Yachty replied when asked about his philanthropic endeavors in recent years. “BLM was literally a scam.” Blackwell […]
It’s been a long lead-up to Lady Gaga‘s new album Mayhem. Aside from the collaborative Love for Sale LP with Tony Bennett and the Joker: Folie a Deux-accompanying Harlequin set — both of which mostly consisted of covers of pop standards — Mayhem is Gaga’s first official album in nearly half a decade, since the […]
There is so much pressure on pop stars to simultaneously evolve as artists while retaining what made them a beloved musician in the first place. And somehow, in that unforgiving landscape, Lady Gaga managed to thread the needle with her seventh studio album, Mayhem, and create a project that both honors the past and moves […]
New Breaking Benjamin material is on the way — but the band hasn’t been in a rush. “We still have the attitude [that] you’re only as good as your next album,” guitarist Jasen Rauch tells Billboard’s Behind the Setlist podcast. “We’re still trying to dodge the sophomore slump going into record [No.] 7.”
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It’s been a long break since record No. 6. Breaking Benjamin’s last album of new material, Ember, came out in 2018; Aurora, an album with new versions of old material, came out in 2020. At this point in the band’s two-decade-plus career, Rauch says, they can take their time to get things right.
The recently released song “Awaken” is a case study in Breaking Benjamin’s deliberate pace. Rauch says the first demo for “Awaken,” released in October 2024, was recorded in either 2020 or 2021. The lyrics were changed “three or four times.” The song’s key changed. The band tried out different tempos. And the verses were written twice. “Sometimes you’ve got to put brakes on it and be like, ‘It’s just not ready. It’s not there,’” he explains.
As for a new full-length album, Rauch says a new Breaking Benjamin album will be released in 2025. After six albums for Hollywood Records, the next album will be released through BMG, just as the band’s recent single, “Awaken,” came out through Benjamin Burnley Recording — Burnley is the band’s founder and singer — and was licensed to BMG.
Working with BMG has also given the band the freedom to not rush through writing and recording new material. And with three platinum and two gold albums since 2002, Breaking Benjamin is at a point in its career where it doesn’t need a label to invest the kind of resources required for a younger, developing band. “They’re already walking into an established product,” says Rauch. “They’re helping us get to the next step — whatever that is — with new music. And that’s been a cool, refreshing experience for us.”
Breaking Benjamin is co-headlinging the Awaken the Fallen Tour with Staind from April 26 to June 1. The band will also perform this summer at Rocklahoma in Prior, Okla., on Aug. 30, and Louder Than Life in Louisville, Ky., on Sept. 19.
Listen to the entire interview with Jason Rauch using the embedded Spotify player below, or go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Amazon Music, Podbean or Everand.
“I’m not typical New Orleans,” says Tarriona “Tank” Ball, singer for the group Tank and the Bangas, when chatting on Billboard’s Behind the Setlist podcast.
Just as New Orleans has a long history of absorbing aspects of different cultures, Tank and the Bangas is a music genre-blender. The group’s stunning mix of R&B, funk, jazz, rap and poetry helped Tank and the Bangas win NPR’s Tiny Desk Content in 2017 and most recently a 2025 Grammy Award for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album for their fourth studio album, The Heart, The Mind, The Soul (Verve Forecast).
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“You need to know how to do something in this culture,” says Ball of her hometown. “This is a big culture.” But Ball isn’t always sure she fits in. She says she can’t cook traditional New Orleans dishes. She can’t “second line,” otherwise known as dancing in a New Orleans parade. Nor does she perform classic New Orleans songs like The Meters’ “Hey Pocky A-way” in her concerts. Her relationship with her hometown is captured in a stand out track from The Heart, The Mind, The Soul, “Am I Still New Orleans?”
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“Sometimes I’m like, ‘Man, am I still New Orleans if … the only thing I lost in the storm was my way?’ I really love that place,” says Ball. “And apparently, when I’m in the streets, a lot of other people love it too. They say, ‘Am I still New Orleans,’ which lets me know I’m not the only one that feels that way — especially in a city that is driven by its culture. If you are not a part of the bigness of that culture, then you could sometimes feel like an outsider.”
Tank and the Bangas have won over audiences around the world with their genre-blending style that reflects the diversity of her upbringing. “I think it’s the perfect combination of like listening to your parents old records from like Stevie Wonder and Peabo Bryson, and listening to 98.5 with Anita Baker [and] Luther Vandross, and then also meeting new friends around the corner from your new neighborhood and listening and watching Selena for the first time, and watching the Spice Girls, and then not wanting to go to church sometimes, and sitting at home watching the Disney Channel over and over, really close to the television,” she explains. “And then growing up in New Orleans, where you’re just hearing bounce music, and you learn to dance and pop very early on.”
Next month, Ball and her band gets to perform for her hometown crowd at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival — otherwise known as Jazz Fest — with such artists as Lil Wayne & The Roots, Dave Matthews Band, Burna Boy, Santana and Trombone Shorty, a New Orleans local who is taking Tank and the Bangas on tour this month. “I want to tear it up,” says Ball of the upcoming Jazz Fest performance. “I want to give them something to see. I want to have a good time, and I want to execute well. I think this is going to be one of our best performances.”
Don’t miss the entire interview with Ball — listen using the embedded Spotify player below, or go to Spotify, Apple Music, iHeart, Amazon Music, Podbean or Everand.
Though February is the shortest month of the year, it didn’t feel that way from a pop stardom perspective in 2025. Within 28 days, we got all kinds of major pop events — the Grammys, the Super Bowl, multiple music-heavy celebrations of Saturday Night Live‘s 50th anniversary — as well as several major new releases […]
The Oscars might be the biggest night for the film industry, but the 2025 awards show included some pretty epic music moments as well. On the new Billboard Pop Shop Podcast, Katie tells Keith all about her night inside the Dolby Theatre for the 97th Academy Awards, where the Wicked duo of Ariana Grande and […]