Pop
Page: 186
Coldplay are gearing up to launch their Moon Music era. On Thursday (June 13) the band announced that the first single from their upcoming follow-up to 2021’s Music of the Spheres, “feelslikeimfallinginlove,” will drop on June 21. The tease featured the song’s unwieldy title across the face of a waning planet with a colorful corona […]
Over the last few months, Chappell Roan has gone from being a slow-rising pop up-and-comer to becoming one of the most talked-about names in music. As great as that may be, even Roan is feeling a little overwhelmed with her new level of fame. During her Midwest Princess Tour stop in Raleigh, N.C., on Wednesday […]
When RIIZE goes out to dinner, it’s a 20-person affair.
On this particular Sunday evening, the pioneering South Korean mega-label SM Entertainment has reserved a private room at a hot spot in Los Angeles’ Koreatown popular with music artists for its new boy band. The six members file in around a long table — along with an SM-associated translator (who is occasionally assisted by two other team members), a publicist from RCA Records (an SM partner for RIIZE), a veteran manager from Seoul and eight additional crew members who sit in a nearby booth.
The Korean group is in town for its RIIZING DAY Fan-Con Tour tomorrow — a “fan-concert” where the group intersperses choreographed performances of its own K-pop hits with casual games, informal onstage chats among themselves and special covers of both K-pop classics and global boy band hits, like One Direction’s “One Thing.” It’s RIIZE’s first time headlining a show in the United States, but its third group visit to L.A. Before the May 20 concert, the group flew here in August to attend the city’s annual KCON K-pop mega-fest and also filmed two music videos in town: the jovial “Memories” (a pre-debut single that generated buzz for the group that month) and its official debut single, “Get a Guitar,” a slick, bubblegum earworm released in both Korean and English that’s now RIIZE’s most streamed song globally, with 219.6 million official on-demand streams since its September release, according to Luminate.
“Not even a year has passed since our debut, but so much has happened,” says RIIZE’s youngest member, 20-year-old Anton, as his bandmates nibble on naan bread and citrus-splashed hamachi crudo. “Back then, our group was, like, innocent, you know? Now, we’ve sort of adjusted to traveling and visiting other countries.”
Trending on Billboard
Shotaro
Munachi Osegbu
Sungchan
Munachi Osegbu
In fact, RIIZE’s members weren’t totally green when the group made its official debut on Sept. 4, 2023, through K-pop giant SM in a partnership with RCA. Shotaro and Sungchan had previously debuted in NCT, the ambitious boy band project that SM launched in 2016, becoming its two newest members in 2020 and contributing to Resonance, Pt. 1, NCT’s highest-charting Billboard 200 release. Two years later, SM’s board of directors moved to terminate the company’s production contract with founder Lee Soo-Man (from whom SM gets its name) in 2022 in an effort to shift SM away from Lee’s creative authority. In May 2023, Korean multimedia conglomerate Kakao became the company’s largest shareholder after a heated bidding war with K-pop titan HYBE (which initially bought Lee’s stake in the company but then sold it to Kakao during a tender offer) for access to SM’s nearly 30 years of K-pop glory, including an extensive catalog, dedicated divisions for nonmusic opportunities like acting, technology and the metaverse, as well as dozens of active artists — soon to include its newest addition, RIIZE.
Just days before Kakao became majority shareholder, SM CEO Jang Cheol-Hyuk revealed that as part of a company restructuring, NCT — originally pitched as a group with infinite members splintered into localized subunits worldwide — would no longer infinitely expand and that Shotaro and Sungchan would leave to debut in a new group, joining previously announced SM Rookies (the company’s team of trainees) Eunseok and Seunghan, along with other Korean and American members. In July 2023, excitement mounted when K-pop media outlets reported that the son of acclaimed Korean singer-songwriter-producer Yoon Sang — later revealed to be Anton — would also join the project.
Finally, on July 27, 2023, SM introduced RIIZE. The group (whose name is a portmanteau of “rise” and “realize”) launched its Instagram with 27 photos — casual selfies and mirror pics without the flashy fashion, perfect makeup or glossy finishes that often characterize K-pop photo shoots even on social media — revealing the seven-member lineup of Shotaro, Eunseok, Sungchan, Wonbin, Seunghan, Sohee and Anton. (Six are at dinner tonight; in November, SM placed Seunghan on “indefinite suspension,” though he is still listed as a RIIZE member on the label’s website.)
RIIZE has sought to present itself as more down-to-earth — a noticeable change from previous, high-concept SM artist launches like the supernatural-inspired boy band EXO; the girl group aespa, which sings about straddling the real and virtual worlds; and other larger-than-life K-pop idols the label has served up since the late 1990s. RIIZE describes its music as “emotional pop,” a phrase it uses, Anton says, “because we hope that people can relate to it emotionally. The members all do, and I think that’s what our fans want from us as well.”
Clockwise from top left: Wonbin, Shotaro, Eunseok, Sungchan, Anton, and Sohee.
Munachi Osegbu
But RIIZE differs from other K-pop outfits in ways that go beyond the aesthetic or concept. For one, its social media approach is far more hands-on than that of its contemporaries, who tend to have marketing-approved captions; @riize_official sprinkles comments across fans’ TikTok accounts. The members also filmed the #GetAGuitarChallenge with influencers including Merrick Hanna (who has 32.5 million followers on TikTok), reacted to tasting Indonesian snacks with Jerome Polin (8.2 million followers on Instagram) and shot charming content with South Korea’s most prominent openly gay celebrity, the tastemaker Hong Seok-Cheon, who predicted Wonbin as a “face” to watch in 2024.
“We have a concept called ‘real-time odyssey,’” Eunseok explains. “We post a lot of pictures of our daily life and intimate [moments] on social media.” Anton clarifies: “We don’t really think of it as a concept — we’re just trying to show our authentic selves.”
Unlike many of its peers, RIIZE also does not have a designated “leader,” even if the Tokyo-raised Shotaro — at 23, the group’s eldest and only Japanese member — naturally steps up. At dinner, he ensures everyone around him (including this reporter) has water and their drink of choice. He’s the first to speak at the meal and divulges the most about his musical tastes; Sam Smith is a favorite. To his left is his fellow ex-NCT member, Seoul-born Sungchan, 22, whose beaming smile helped him become a host of the weekly K-pop performance TV program Inkigayo while he was in NCT. One day, he hopes Pharrell Williams will collaborate on a track for RIIZE. Shotaro likens Sungchan to the color sky blue because he has “a very clear heart… and is very innocent.”
Sohee
Munachi Osegbu
Wonbin
Munachi Osegbu
RIIZE’s four other members sit across from the duo. Born and raised in Seoul, Eunseok, 23, prefers calm ballads and the music of Ed Sheeran. While his outside demeanor matches his musical taste, his bandmates reveal he has a more lighthearted side: As Sohee describes, Eunseok is known for giving “very random and fantastical” nonsensical nicknames to everyone he meets. Anton calls them “basically video-game character names,” which makes everyone laugh.
The 22-year-old Wonbin — or “Dark Bean,” as Eunseok has dubbed him, to the rest of RIIZE’s amusement — was born in Seoul but raised in South Korea’s southern port city of Ulsan; he digs Justin Timberlake’s 20/20 Experience-era singles like “Mirrors” and “Suit & Tie.” Baby-faced powerhouse vocalist Sohee, 20, grew up in Siheung, located in the country’s most populous province, Gyeonggi; he is not only “really bright,” Anton explains, “[but] his mindset is always really positive as well.”
Last is Anton, 20, son of singer Yoon Sang and the actress Shim Hye-Jin. While Anton has appeared on South Korean TV since childhood (Yoon Sang is based in South Korea), he was born in Boston and raised in New Jersey; growing up in the United States fostered his appetite for music discovery and exploration, which ultimately became the foundation for his K-pop career. “I don’t really think I have a favorite artist per se,” he says, soft-spoken but self-assured. “I just like to explore as many genres [as I can] and try to listen to a lot of different music even if I don’t understand the language. People who enjoy K-pop might not understand Korean.”
From left: Anton, Sohee, Wonbin, Eunseok, Shotaro, and Sungchan of RIIZE photographed May 21, 2024 in Los Angeles.
Munachi Osegbu
Anton’s musical philosophy encapsulates the growing mindset of the young audience with whom RIIZE, as well as SM and RCA, hope to connect. As U.S. listeners become increasingly interested in foreign-language music, RIIZE has earned 37.8 million official U.S. on-demand streams — contributing to 641.2 million globally — according to Luminate. And it hopes to continue expanding its fan base (known as BRIIZE, pronounced “breeze”) with the June 17 release of RIIZING – The 1st Mini Album. Its new single, “Boom Boom Bass,” incorporates the same hooky energy of “Get a Guitar” while adding shimmery disco vibes and an irresistible bassline. Sungchan and Wonbin both say it’s their favorite RIIZE song yet.
After five different K-pop releases topped the Billboard 200 last year, driven by K-pop fans’ love of physical product and labels delivering collectible album packages in multiple versions, RCA Records COO John Fleckenstein says the label is “absolutely focused on delivering physical versions for RIIZE” in the United States — but as just one way to elevate the group’s presence.
“The vision behind our global partnership was to marry what both our companies do best across all areas to bring additional opportunities, reach, resources and growth to support RIIZE,” Fleckenstein adds. “Our passion lies in exploring the intersection of music, art, culture and then connecting that to an audience. SM have been incredible partners who truly understand the market.”
Eunseok
Munachi Osegbu
Anton
Munachi Osegbu
As the members of RIIZE dip into Basque cheesecakes for dessert, they share their personal goals for the future, both near and distant. They hope that “Boom Boom Bass” can crack multiple Billboard charts and are looking forward to their first original Japanese-language single, “Lucky,” due in July, calling it “a perfect song for the summer.” Shotaro dreams of someday performing at the Super Bowl and the Billboard Music Awards.
RIIZE wants fans to understand that the Fan-Con Tour is only the beginning, and that the members plan to visit many countries. When Shotaro and Anton burst into tears during the band’s two sold-out dates at Tokyo’s Yoyogi National Gymnasium arena in May, it brought new meaning to the group’s “emotional pop” — and conveyed how much RIIZE wants an offline fan connection that is as strong as its online one.
“I really did not plan on crying whatsoever,” Anton reflects. “That was our biggest concert to date, and seeing the fans far away holding up our signs and stuff was just sort of overwhelming.” At the concert the day after dinner, the members manage not to break into tears — but their performance is no less heartfelt. Amid heart-stopping choreography, Anton pauses to address the audience. “We’ll work hard,” he says, “to become a RIIZE that BRIIZE can be proud of.”
When RIIZE goes out to dinner, it’s a 20-person affair. On this particular Sunday evening, the pioneering South Korean mega-label SM Entertainment has reserved a private room at a hot spot in Los Angeles’ Koreatown popular with music artists for its new boy band. The six members file in around a long table — along […]
Sam Smith is gearing up to celebrate the tin anniversary of their debut studio album with In the Lonely Hour 10 Year Anniversary Edition. The collection due out on Capitol Records on August 2 will include the original’s 10 songs, as well as the exclusive new track, “Little Sailor.”
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
A collector’s edition of the refreshed LP will feature 25 songs on four LPs and two CDs, including live versions of the some of album’s original songs and special features with Mary J. Blige, A$AP Rocky and John Legend.
The six-times-platinum original album that was originally released on June 17, 2014 — and which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart — featured Smith’s breakthrough Billboard Hot 100 No. 2 hit “Stay With Me,” as well as the No. 5 hit “I’m Not the Only One” and Lay Me Down” (No. 8) and fan favorites “Money On My Mind” and “Like I Can.” The collection garnered six Grammy nominations, including bids in the “big four” categories, with Smith snagging gold for best new artist, best pop vocal album, song of the year (“Stay With Me”) and record of the year (for the Darkchild remix of “Stay With Me”).
Trending on Billboard
“This year marks a decade since the release of my debut album. I feel so incredibly lucky to be celebrating this milestone with you,” Smith wrote on X. “My team and I have created this beautiful anniversary edition for us all, and for the last 10 years. Today is only the beginning ‘Sailors,’ we have so much to celebrate with you between now and August. I can’t wait to look back on In The Lonely Hour together.”
Smith debuts their first podcast, The Pink House, today (June 13), with each episode promising a sit-down between the singer and friends/queer icons sharing how they “all found their own places in the world and share stories of belonging, chosen families, and the journeys we take to become who we’re destined to be,” according to a statement. The Lemonade Media-produced show named after Smith’s childhood home in Great Chisill, England will feature guest appearances from Elliott Page, Joel Kim Booster, Ben Platt, Gloria Estefan and others, who will explore their own Pink Houses on the pod, explaining how they “navigated early struggles and ultimately found their place in the world.”
The first two episodes are available now, with a new ep dropping every week.
See Smith’s announcement and the full track list below.
In The Lonely Hour (10th Anniversary Edition)This year marks a decade since the release of my debut album. I feel so incredibly lucky to be celebrating this milestone with you. My team and I have created this beautiful anniversary edition for us all, and for the last 10 years.… pic.twitter.com/46VVpFF4sU— SAM SMITH (@samsmith) June 12, 2024
In the Lonely Hour 10 Year Anniversary Edition Collector’s Edition Tracklist:
Vinyl 1Side A 1. “Good Thing” 2. “Stay With Me” (Re-record)3. “Leave Your Lover” Side B 4. “I’m Not The Only One”5. “I’ve Told You Now”6. “Like I Can”7. “Not In That Way”
Vinyl 2Side A1. “Make It To Me” 2. “Lay Me Down”3. “Little Sailor” Side B4. “Money On My Mind”5. “Life Support” 6. “Restart”
Vinyl 3Side A1. “Safe With Me” 2. “Nirvana” 3. “I’ve Told You Now” (Live at St Pancras Old Church, London) Side B 1. “Latch”2. “La La La”3. “How Will I Know”
Vinyl 4Side A1. “Latch” (Acoustic)2. “Drowning Shadows” 3. “Writing’s On The Wall”Side B 1. “Stay With Me” (feat. Mary J. Blige) 2. “I’m Not The Only One” (feat. A$ASP Rocky) 3. “Lay Me Down” (feat. John Legend)
Camila Cabello came to The Tonight Show to play on Wednesday night (June 12), with robot dogs, ice cold stories and killer dance moves. In addition to performing her frenetic single “I Luv It” with help from blindfolded dancers, Cabello talked about her upcoming album, C, XOXO (June 28)) played a new game with host Jimmy Fallon and cleared up some rumors about her viral frozen Met Gala purse.
Cabello and Fallon reminisced about running into each other at the annual fashion fantasia earlier this year and the singer admitted that by the time she saw Jimmy she was “very drunk” because she was so stressed from what happened earlier. Fallon then pulled out a picture of Cabello’s purse from that night, which consisted of a rose frozen in a block of ice.
“I didn’t think about the fact that ice, very quickly, melts,” Cabello said. “And so I get there and it’s my worst, the nightmare situation where suddenly the clutch breaks. I think it was Ed Sheeran was there he was telling a joke or something and somebody accidentally moved it and before I get my picture taken the clutch completely breaks.”
Trending on Billboard
Cabello described being surrounded by shocked A-listers including poet Amanda Gorman, actress Rachel Sennott and model Kaia Gerber, who all gasped when the purse’s straps broke off. “This is the thing you least want to happen — a bunch of famous people looking at you having a breakdown during the line before you take your picture at the Met Gala!” So Camila said she turned to Gerber and a few others for advice, landing on the solution of converting it into a (very slippery) clutch instead.
Fallon then assured Cabello that she was “glamorously” holding the block of ice, putting up a picture of a stone-faced Camila cradling the drippy purse. Also, for the record, she threw cold water on the viral report that her purse cost $25,000. “Guys! It’s water frozen!” she yelled. “You can make it at home!”
Cabello also explained her fourth album’s title, saying the new collection is a chapter in her life that feels “personal to me and authentic to me and like signed by me. Like writing a letter to someone. This is me, like it or not.” When Jimmy asked Cabello about her writing process, after noting that she has no co-writers on this album, Cabello gave an example of her skills by busting out her phone to sing a tune she wrote for the show on her way to the studio.
The voice note featured Cabello humming lightly while she sang, “New suit, same chair, new dress, blonde hair/ We’ve seen each other through some phases/ Past lives, debuts, Met Ball, saw you/ Good to have a friend in scary places/ Jimmy-a, Jimmy-a, Jimmy alright/ They came for a show well Jimmy alright/ It’s another late night/ It’s another late night talkin’,” as an astonished Fallon looked on.
The singer came back for a round of the new game Dance Charades, in which one player wore headphones and danced to a song whose title the other player had to guess. Cabello proved to be quite adept at the game, acting out Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire” while pretending to bite her arm as Fallon shimmied awkwardly to Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie.”
Cabello came back one more time to sing “I Luv It,” the first single from her follow-up to her 2022 LP Familia, which features guest spots from Drake, Lil Nas X, Playboi Carti and City Girls. The set opened with Cabello in a silver dress, baggy leather gloves and a black blindfold with white x’s over her eyes — a spooky look her four dancers mirrored — in the high-energy performance that featured her back-up crew holding a pair of dancing Unitree robot dogs on leashes as giant fans sent their strappy costumes flying.
Watch Cabello on The Tonight Show below.
[embedded content]
[embedded content]
[embedded content]
At this point, Charli XCX should just officiate Matty Healy and Gabbriette Bechtel’s wedding. The “Von Dutch” singer is permanently tied to the 1975 frontman and model’s love story following Wednesday’s (June 12) news that the couple are engaged — starting with the fact that Charli mentions Gabbriette in the first few seconds of her new album Brat.
On the LP’s opening track, “360,” Charli uses Gabbriette as an example of an effortlessly cool tastemaker, singing, “I went my own way and I made it/ I’m your favorite reference, baby/ Call me Gabbriette, you’re so inspired.”
Bechtel also stars in the “360” music video alongside several other internet “it girls,” such as Julia Fox, Rachel Sennott and Emma Chamberlain. In the eclectic visual, she repeatedly hits a vape, poses next to a man lying in a gurney and tells Charli to “fulfill the prophecy of finding a new hot Internet girl.”
Trending on Billboard
The “Fancy” singer is also connected to Bechtel through their respective romances. Charli got engaged to The 1975’s George Daniel in November, which means both women are marrying into the band family.
Everything came full-circle, though, when Bechtel announced her engagement to Healy by posting a photo of her ring taken at Charli’s Brat release party in Brooklyn on Tuesday night. The influencer wrote in her caption, “MARRYING THE 1975 IS VERY BRAT.”
Healy’s mother, Loose Women host Denise Welch, later confirmed the news on her talk show Wednesday morning, according to People. “I have known for a few weeks that Matty got engaged,” she said. “Black diamond [ring], he had it made for her. I couldn’t be more thrilled. We couldn’t be happier — she is everything I would want in a daughter-in-law.”
Charli and Bechtel were friends long before the latter started dating Healy in September, however. In 2019, the “Boom Clap” artist cast Bechtel as the lead singer of Nasty Cherry, a now-inactive girl group assembled in the Netflix documentary I’m With the Band.
Watch the “360” music video below.
[embedded content]
It’s May 4, 1999, and Jennifer Lopez releases “If You Had My Love,” the song that marked her embarkation to a fruitful dual-track career.
The Rodney Jerkins-produced single came as a surprise to critics then, as Lopez became one of the relatively few actors to effectively crossover from the screen to a successful recording career. “I embraced all of it to be who I was and offer something really different,” Lopez told Billboard in 2020.
“When I started working in my early 20s, it was size 0 models on the cover of magazines,” Lopez mused. “Tall, blonde, white, sometimes Black. But never Latina. I didn’t shy away from being from the Bronx, I didn’t shy away from my humble beginnings.”
[embedded content]
The single, the opening track from Lopez’s 16-track debut studio album, On the 6, her first of eight top 10s on the Billboard 200 chart, was initially intended for Michael Jackson, but the King of Pop passed as he thought it was a better fit for a female artist, and he was right.
Trending on Billboard
With “If You Had My Love” — written by Rodney Jerkins, LaShawn Daniels, Fred Jerkins III and Cory Rooney — Lopez broke the surface of the mainstream as the commercial hit propelled her to a maiden entry on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 chart, It debuted at No. 81 on the May 15, 1999, chart and hit No. 1 on the June 12-dated survey, beginning a five-week command.
The 2020 Billboard Women in Music icon joined Ricky Martin for the longest-leading Hot 100 No. 1 of 1999 to that point, as the Puerto Rican’s fellow Latin pop explosion “Livin’ La Vida Loca” ceded the top spot to “If You Had My Love.”
The song’s 25-year anniversary arrives on the heels of the star’s recently canceled This Is Me… Live Tour, which was scheduled to be her first concert run in five years, in support of her ninth studio album, This Is Me… Now, her first in a decade.
To date, “If You Had My Love” has pulled in 3.8 billion in radio audience, 122.8 million official on-demand U.S. streams and 263,000 downloads sold, according to Luminate.
Lopez, who also boasts three No. 1s among seven top 10s on the Hot Latin Songs chart over 1999-2020, subsequently led the Hot 100 with “I’m Real,” for five weeks in 2001, “Ain’t It Funny” (six, 2002) – both feature Ja Rule – and “All I Have,” featuring LL Cool J (four, 2003). She has notched 10 top 10s, through the No. 3 hit “On the Floor,” featuring Pitbull, in 2011.
French pop singer, actress and model Françoise Hardy died on Tuesday (June 11) at 80 after a long battle with cancer. Her son, musician Thomas Dutronc, announced her passing in a touching Instagram post featuring a picture of him as a baby in the arms of his mother with the message “Maman est partie (mom is gone).”
Explore
Explore
See latest videos, charts and news
See latest videos, charts and news
One of the most versatile and beloved French artists of her generation, Hardy went public with her lymphatic cancer diagnosis in 2004 and was briefly put in an induced coma in 2015 when her condition worsened.
Hardy was born in Paris on Jan. 17, 1944 in the midst of an air raid on the Nazi-occupied city and by most accounts had a melancholy childhood whose spell was broken when her absent father gifted her a guitar after her early high school graduation at 16. The singer got her break in 1961 when the Disques Vogue label signed the then-18-year-old and released the single “Tous les garçons et les filles,” which became an instant hit and sold more than 2.5 million copies.
Trending on Billboard
Best known for her melancholy ballads, Hardy became one of the leading lights of the Yé-yé style of music, whose name was a spin on the frequent “yeah, yeah” chants in English language pop songs of the era by the likes of the Beatles. More hits followed, including “Je Suis D’Accord” and “Le Temps de L’Amour” and in 1963 Hardy came in fifth place as the entry from Monaco in that year’s Eurovision Song Contest.
With her stylish, androgynous look and a deadpan, breathy style that landed with young audiences thanks to lyrics about the heartache and angst of adolescence, films came calling and the singer was cast by director Roger Vadim in his 1963 comedy Château en Suède (Nutty, Naughty Chateau), alongside established star Monica Vitti. As a testament to her growing popularity, Hardy began translating her songs into English (as well as German and Italian), scoring her first top 20 UK hit in 1964 with “All Over the World.”
In addition to influencing (and being fawned over by) everyone from Bob Dylan to the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger, Hardy became a muse for fashion designers Yves Saint Laurent and Paco Rabanne as well, with famed photographers Richard Avedon and William Klein shooting her over the years. Dylan was so entranced by her, in fact, that in the liner notes of his 1964 Another Side of Bob Dylan album he included a poem in her honor that began, “For Françoise Hardy, at the Seine’s edge, a giant shadow of Notre Dame seeks t’ grab my foot.”
David Bowie was similarly smitten, once saying that he was “passionately in lover with her. Every male in the world, and a number of females, also were.”
After releasing a series of albums and EPs in France, Hardy’s debut full length release in the U.S. was 1965’s, The ‘Yeh-Yeh’ Girl From Paris!, a repackaging of her 1962 French debut album, Tous les garçons et les filles; her early albums were often released without titles and were frequently known by their most popular tracks. Her first English-language album, 1965’s In English, featured “All Over the World” and a number of other songs she co-wrote with collaborator Julian More, including “This Little Heart,” “The Rose” and “Another Place.” It was followed in 1968 by another English album known as The Second English Album and Will You Love Me Tomorrow. She scored her biggest English-language hit in 1968 with the Serge Gainsbourg-penned “It Hurts to Say Goodbye,” which hit No. 1 in France and the U.K.
Working with a series of collaborators throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Hardy released a dozen albums exploring Brazilian funk, rock, disco, jazz and electronic pop before taking a six-year break before 1988’s Décalages LP, which was followed in 1996 by Le danger, which she said at the time would be her final album. She continued to release albums throughout the early 2000s, though, issuing her 28th and final studio collection, Personne d’autre, in 2018.
Speaking to the Associated Press in 1996, she explained her unusual approach to songwriting, in which she emphasized the importance of melody. “I always put the words on the music. It’s always like that. I don’t write before, and then, I’m looking for music,” she said at the time of the method that gave her songs a unique quality mixing poetry-like lyrics with entrancing melodies. “First, I get the music and (then) I try to put words on it.”
In addition to collaborating with everyone from Iggy Pop to Blur, Hardy also appeared in films by such acclaimed directors Jean-Luc Godard (1966’s Masculine Feminine) and John Frankenheimer (Grand Prix). The singer also developed an interest in astrology, authoring a series of books on the subject as well as publishing fiction and her autobiography, The Despair of Monkeys and Other Trifles, in 2018. She was the only French singer to be named on Rolling Stone‘s 2023 list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time, coming in at No. 162 thanks to what the magazine said was “a breathy, deadpan also that wafted like Gauloises smoke.”
See Dutronc’s post and some of Hardy’s performances below.
[embedded content]
[embedded content]
Celine Dion was so desperate to alleviate the pain from severe muscle spasms during her secret, nearly two-decade-long battle with the rare neurological and autoimmune disease Stiff-Person Syndrome that she took near-lethal doses of Valium in search of relief. In her one-hour primetime NBC special on Tuesday night (June 11), Dion said she took up to 90 milligrams of the medication used to treat anxiety, seizures and muscle spasms, an amount that is more than twice the recommended daily dose.
“I did not know, honestly, that it could kill me. I would take, for example before a performance, 20 milligrams of Valium, and then just walking from my dressing room to backstage — it was gone,” Dion said of the instant pain relief the medication offered at levels, however that “could have been fatal” if she’d continued at that pace. “At one point, the thing is, that my body got used to it at 20 and 30 and 40 [milligrams] until it went up. And I needed that. It was relaxing my whole body. For two weeks, for a month, the show would go on… but then you get used to [and] it doesn’t work anymore.”
Dion was taking such high doses of Valium every day that, she said, the amounts, “can kill you. You can stop breathing.” The 56-year-old singer said she began to cut back on her intake during the COVID-19 pandemic when the world went into lockdown and she was unable to perform.
Trending on Billboard
Though she leaves the door open during the special that she will return to the stage this year, Dion has not performed on stage since March 2020, when the global pandemic arrived just in time to give her time away to focus on her health and wean off her dangerously high doses of Valium. “It was an opportunity for me to take a break,” she said. “Do not be brave… I stopped everything with the help of doctors. I was weaning off all the meds, and especially the bad ones. I stopped everything because it stopped working.”
Though the doctors helped her wean off the drugs, Dion noted that even that process can kill you if not done correctly. “You cannot just, like, stop everything,” she said. Another downside, she revealed, was that once she weaned off the medication her symptoms got much worse.
Dion has said that the symptoms of the chronic, incurable disorder began appearing in the mid-2000s, getting progressively worse until she finally revealed her struggle in a December 2022 announcement after cancelling her planned tour that year.
In the emotional NBC special, Dion describes being gripped by fear when the disorder’s symptoms began to affect her in 2008, affecting her mobility and causing spasms so intense they caused broken ribs and sometimes made it feel like “somebody is strangling you.” In a scary moment, she said that “anything” could trigger the painful symptoms. “Too much work, not enough work. If I sit all day long I’ll be wobbly. Walking wobbly.” Shockingly, Dion said even joyful moments could lead to pain. “Happiness, sound, a touch unexpected,” she said.
She described first noticing the symptoms of her body getting “more rigid” during a before a show in Germany on her 2008 Taking Chances world tour. “I said to my assistants and to my people, ‘I don’t know if I can do the show. I don’t know what’s happening,’” she told Kotb, sending her voice into a higher register to imitate the effects on her voice. “I was very, very, very scared. And then you panic, and the more you panic, the more you spasm. I went onstage… of course. And I started to sound more nasal.”
She said the panic led to more spasms, which forced her to lower the keys on some songs in order to gain some control over the situation, lamenting that she had to lie to her beloved fans at the time by blaming her issues on a sinus infection. During the pandemic, Dion’s team struggled to figure out what was going on, with the symptoms persisting even after she stopped performing and the singer worrying that she might be facing the end of her four-decade career.
It was at that point she began working with director Irene Taylor Brodsky on the upcoming Prime Video documentary I Am: Celine Dion (June 25) in which she vows to find a way to make it back on stage for her fans. “If I can’t run, I’ll walk,” she says in the film. “If I can’t walk, I’ll crawl… I won’t stop.” In the NBC special, Brodsky talked about seeing one of Dion’s attacks in person, saying it came on quickly and then, just as quickly, progressed in a scary fashion.
“She was giggling, and five seconds later, we were in a totally different stratosphere,” Brodsky told Kotb. “She had a cramp in her foot, and I thought, ‘That doesn’t look right.’” Then, just minutes later, Dion couldn’t talk because her body had stiffened up so badly. “It was the most extraordinary and extraordinarily uncomfortable moment in my life. As a filmmaker, but also as a mother, as a fellow human, because I didn’t know what was happening,” Brodsky said. “We were this close, and her body was enduring something that was unimaginable, and I wasn’t sure if she was aware of it, and I wasn’t sure if she was going to survive it.”
You can watch the full NBC News interview with Dion now on Peacock.