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Couldn’t score tickets to the last Billie Eilish tour? Fortnite is bringing fans the next best thing. The game’s third season of its Rock Band-esque Festival experience went live Tuesday (April 23), featuring the 22-year-old pop star as its featured artist.
To celebrate the launch, Fortnite shared a trailer featuring Eilish. In the clip, her avatar — dressed in a patterned shirt and pants combo with matching sneakers, her roots dyed bright green as they were in 2019 — falls through a portal in the sky and crashes into Earth, leaving a fiery explosion in her wake.
With callbacks to the tiara of spiders and paranormal levitations in her “You Should See Me in a Crown” and “Bury a Friend” music videos, the trailer eventually finds the singer making her way to the digital stage, jumping and spinning around while performing her track “All the Good Girls Go to Hell.” ]
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“you should see her in a crown,” reads the video’s caption, referencing Eilish’s hit When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? track. “@billieeilish has arrived as our featured artist for Fortnite Festival Season 3, live now!”
Players will be able to unlock new Eilish-themed outfits in the game, instruments and Jam Tracks, which will be available to players until June 13. Eilish’s participation in Fortnite Festivals follows those of Lady Gaga (season two) and The Weeknd (season one).
Midway through her tenure in the game, the two-time Oscar winner will release her third studio album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, on May 17. Last week, Eilish shared the project’s tracklist, featuring the titles “Skinny,” “Lunch,” “L’Amour De Ma Vie,” “Blue,” “Wildflower” and more.
“Every time you put anything out, it feels like your nudes leaked a little bit,” she told Zane Lowe of the record in a recent Apple Music 1 interview. “We kind of made the album that if somebody had said, ‘I want you to make an album and no one is going to hear it. You don’t have to worry about anyone’s ears or opinions or anything at all. It’s in your contract to make an album but no one can hear it.’ We pretty much made that album. We made that album without much thought of other people.”
Watch Eilish’s Fortnite Festival season three trailer below.
Idina Menzel is heading back out on the road.
The superstar announced her Take Me or Leave Me Tour exclusively via Billboard on Tuesday (April 23), marking her first tour in nearly eight years. “I was really missing the connection with my fans,” she tells Billboard of the decision to tour again. “I have my new musical Redwood at La Jolla Playhouse that I’m passionate about, and it’s been occupying me. I thought, if that goes through another iteration, I wanted to make sure I got my time with my fans from a personal perspective as opposed to through a character.”
The North American run kicks off July 19 in Seattle, Wash., before stretching throughout the summer, hitting venues in Los Angeles, New York, Las Vegas and more before wrapping up on August 18 in Greensboro, NC. The tour title, of course, is inspired by the beloved song, “Take Me or Leave Me” from the musical Rent, in which Menzel made her Tony-nominated Broadway debut as Maureen Johnson in 1996.
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“Maureen was always uninhibited and extremely comfortable in who she was, maybe to the fault [laughs],” Menzel says. “I’ve always loved that song and I miss that character, but I would say I’m naming the tour this from a different perspective. Obviously, many, many years later, it’s about who I am in this point in my life. I haven’t seen my fans in a long time, and I want to show them how I’ve changed, and how I haven’t. I want to show them my experiences and hopefully, they’ll love me no matter what.”
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The beloved actress’ tour will feature a career-spanning setlist of hits, which she’s currently putting together and stays “up all night thinking about,” and she promises an “eclectic” mix of hits from her own albums and jazz standards as well as musicals she’s performed in like Wicked, Rent and, of course, Frozen. “I often wrestle with the fact that I often assume that people will be bored if I sing the same songs over and over, like ‘Let It Go’ or ‘Defying Gravity,’” she shares. “I’m always trying to rewrite things, discover or cover new songs, reinterpret them and then I always get this feedback of ‘No, we want to hear these songs!’ I’m trying to strike a balance between performing songs the way I think my audience would want to hear them and feeling like, as an artist, that I’m growing and singing the songs in a way that their lyrics resonate with me. I juggle it and then I sit with my band and we play with it and assess it and sort of see what kind of floats to the top.”
She concludes in theme with the tour’s “Take Me or Leave Me” title, “I’ve always said back in the day that versatility was my curse. Now, I embrace my versatility. It makes me who I am.”
Artist presale tickets for Menzel’s tour as well as VIP packages will be available starting on Wednesday (April 24) at 10 a.m. local time. General on-sale for tickets begins Friday (April 26) at 10 a.m. local time. See the full list of dates below, and check out the venues and ticket information here.
July 19 – Seattle, WashingtonJuly 21 – Oakland, CaliforniaJuly 23 – Los Angeles, CaliforniaJuly 25 – Mesa, ArizonaJuly 26 – Highland, CaliforniaJuly 27 – Las Vegas, NevadaJuly 30 – Austin, TexasJuly 31 – Dallas, TexasAugust 2 – Atlanta, GeorgiaAugust 3 – Charleston, South CarolinaAugust 4 – Orlando, FloridaAugust 6 – Auburn, AlabamaAugust 7 – Greenville, South CarolinaAugust 9 – Chicago, IllinoisAugust 10 – Pittsburgh, PennsylvaniaAugust 11 – Detroit, MichiganAugust 13 – Toronto, Ontario, CanadaAugust 15 – New York, New YorkAugust 16 – Hershey, PennsylvaniaAugust 17 – Washington, DCAugust 18 – Greensboro, North Carolina
Taylor Swift has given Swifties so many ways to interact and ingest her just-released 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department. There are multiple vinyl versions, that whole surprise second disc that came out after the LP dropped on Friday, as well as some track-by-track notes on the songs she recorded for Amazon Music. Explore […]
The latest epic from the Marvel Cinematic Universe brings together three giants of popular culture: Deadpool, Wolverine and Madonna.
Marvel’s forthcoming action-comedy “Deadpool & Wolverine” is a superhero dream team, which sees Hugh Jackman reprise his role as the hard-as-nails X-Man Wolverine alongside Ryan Reynolds’ reckless (and foul-mouthed) Deadpool.
The trailer should fill the cups for anyone weaned on Marvel, comics, action and ‘80s music.
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It’s a two-and-a-half-minute NSFW blockbuster, loaded with fight sequences, drug references, Deadpool crashing through the fourth wall and a carpeting of f-bombs, soundtracked to the Madonna classic “Like a Prayer.”
The Queen of Pop’s Billboard Hot 100 leader from 1989 gets a dancey-upgrade for the clip, which was shared on Reynolds’ YouTube page and can be seen in full below.
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Madonna justified her royal status earlier this year as “Popular,” her collaboration with the Weeknd and Playboi Carti, creates an impressive piece of U.K. chart history when it became the U.S. pop veteran’s 64th top 10 single, extending her lead as the female artist with the most top 10s in Official Chart history.
Madonna sets chart records for fun. According to the Official Charts Company, the superstar singer has 12 U.K. No. 1 albums, the most among solo female artists, though Taylor Swift is days away from equaling that feat. The Like a Prayer LP, which recently celebrated its 35th anniversary, is one of those leaders (it logged two weeks at the chart summit).
When “Popular” splashed on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2023, Madonna joined Cher as the only women to have debuted titles on the chart in five separate decades (Madonna has debuted songs on the Hot 100 in the 1980s, ‘90s, 2000s, ’10s and now ‘20s).
Directed by Shawn Levy, Deadpool & Wolverine is due out July 26 and is Marvel Studios’ first R-rated film. The forthcoming film is the third in the Deadpool series and follows Deadpool 2 by six years.
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Rihanna‘s 2012 smash “Diamonds” is staying true to its title 12 years later by earning diamond certification from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) on Monday (April 22). Roc Nation officially announced the news via X on Monday morning, revealing that the single has accumulated 10 million equivalent song units. According to the RIAA, […]
Looking for some motivation to help power you through the start of another work week? We feel you, and with some stellar new pop tunes, we’ve got you covered. These tracks from artists including Alfie Templeman, Debbii Dawson, Nxdia and more will get you energized to take on the week. Pop any of these gems into […]
Taylor Swift called on all the tortured poets with the release of her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department on Friday (April 19). What was originally slated to be a standard 16-track album turned into a 31-song anthology when Swift surprised fans just hours after release with an additional second half of the project. […]
It’s take two for BTS and UNICEF. The K-pop superstars and United Nations Children Fund announced the #OnMyMind initiative on Monday (April 22), the second chapter of their Love Myself campaign. The new initiative aims to improve and support the mental health youth around the world. To help kick off #OnMyMind, BTS, label Big Hit […]
Now that you’ve spent the entire weekend obsessively poring over all the lyrics on Taylor Swift‘s sprawling, 31-track The Tortured Poets Department, the singer has graciously stepped forward to offer Swifties some additional context.
On Monday morning (April 22), Amazon Music launched a track-by-track album experience featuring Swift providing commentary on the songs interspersed throughout the album’s tracks; Swifties can also listen to the album with Taylor’s full commentary by saying, “Alexa, I’m a member of The Tortured Poets Department” or in the Amazon Music app.
Describing the first single, “Fortnight,” which features Post Malone, Swift says, “‘Fortnight’ is a song that exhibits a lot of the common themes that run throughout this album. One of which being fatalism — longing, pining away, lost dreams. I think that it’s a very fatalistic album in that there are lots of very dramatic lines about life or death. ‘I love you, it’s ruining my life.’ These are very hyperbolic, dramatic things to say. It’s that kind of album.”
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Speaking of another song fans have cued in on, “Clara Bow,” Swift says it was inspired by her experiences in the entertainment industry and the tendency to pit female artists against each other. “‘Clara Bow’ is a song that I wrote as a commentary on what I’ve seen in the industry that I’ve been in over time,” Swift says. “I used to sit in record labels trying to get a record deal when I was a little kid. And they’d say, ‘you know, you remind us of’ and then they’d name an artist, and then they’d kind of say something disparaging about her, ‘but you’re this, you’re so much better in this way or that way.’ And that’s how we teach women to see themselves, as like you could be the new replacement for this woman who’s done something great before you.”
Her collaboration with Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine, “Florida!!!,” is described as being inspired by true crime. “I’m always watching Dateline. People have these crimes that they commit; where do they immediately skip town and go to? They go to Florida,” Swift says. “They try to reinvent themselves, have a new identity, blend in. I think when you go through a heartbreak, there’s a part of you that thinks, ‘I want a new name. I want a new life. I don’t want anyone to know where I’ve been or know me at all.’ And so that was the jumping off point. Where would you go to reinvent yourself and blend in? Florida!”
The singer’s 11th studio album instantly became the most-streamed album in its first day on Amazon Music on Friday on its way to selling 1.4 million copies in its first day of release in the U.S.
Other bits of insight Swift shares include the origin of “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” which she says is a metaphor woven from the perspective of a child’s toy. “Being somebody’s favorite toy until they break you and then don’t want to play with you anymore. Which is how a lot of us are in relationships where we are so valued by a person in the beginning, and then all of the sudden, they break us or they devalue us in their mind,” she says “We’re still clinging on to ‘No no, no. You should’ve seen them the first time they saw me. They’ll come back to that. They’ll get back to that.’”