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Miley Cyrus learned early on that if you’re going to invest, invest in yourself. As part of her ongoing “Used to Be Young” TikTok series, Miley dove into the money-losing 2014 Bangerz Tour, the surreal 78-date celebration of her hip-hop inspired album of the same name featuring the hits “We Can’t Stop” and “Wrecking Ball.”
“The Bangerz tour was an investment in myself. A lot of these ideas were kind of so outlandish that no one really wanted to support me in making these pieces,” Cyrus said of the wild show that opened with her sliding down a giant slide in the shape of her own tongue and also included a parade of furries, a life-sized puppet of Big Sean and a giant flying hot dog, among other amusements.
“So I had big puppets, oversized beds, I came out of my own face on my tongue,” Miley recalled. The trippy fantasia was cooked up by Cyrus and creative director Diane Martel, with the latter asking Miley how she wanted to end the concert each night and getting an answer she likely didn’t expect.
“[Martel] goes, ‘How would you want to end this concert?’ Like, ‘The show is so big, how do you want to end it?’ And I wanted to end it in a Truman Show reference,” the singer said of the beloved 1998 Jim Carrey movie about a mild-mannered insurance salesman who slowly begins to realize his whole live has taken place inside a reality TV series.
“So I flew out on a giant hot dog, obviously, and I left through all the clouds and the exit sign, the way Jim Carrey does, because I felt like The Truman Show was really a reflection of my life.” The singer, who, like Truman Burbank, has spent her entire life in front of the cameras, was savvy enough at that age (21) to realize that the best money she could spend to promote her passion project was on her own, admittedly quirky, vision.
“‘Why are you doing this? You’re going to do like 100 shows and not going to make any money,’” Cyrus recalled being told. “I said there’s no one I would rather invest in than myself. So I paid for it all to make it exactly what I thought I and the fans deserved.”
Watch Miley talk Bangerz tour below.
For her next project, Vanessa Amorosi will unleash some Hall of Fame vibes.
The Australian artist’s new full-length studio album Memphis Love is slated for release Nov. 17, her first through Bay Street Records, Dave Stewart’s independent music label.
With Memphis Love, the powerhouse singer goes eight albums deep into a recording career that exploded out the gates in the late 1990s with “Absolutely Everybody.” Amorosi was just a teen at the time. The world opened up all at once, as the song crashed the U.K. top 10, and she was invited to perform on the biggest stages of them all, including the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
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Amorosi has called Los Angeles home for the past 13 years. Now she calls Bay Street Records her label home, joining such artists as Joss Stone.
During her time Stateside, she has immersed herself in gospel music, soul, funk and blues, sounds that influence this forthcoming collection. “It’s very, very different to what people are used to hearing me do in Australia,” she tells Billboard. “I’m really excited for this chapter to begin.”
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Memphis Love is co-produced with Stewart, was recorded at Willie Mitchell’s Royal Studios in Memphis, TN, and features the gorgeous tones of Tennessee Mass Choir.
Lead single “Wolf,” which Amorosi co-wrote with Stewart one afternoon in downtown L.A., is a confident, blues number. It rolls with the punches and gives out a few of its own. At the top, Amorosi flexes with a howl, the kind of swagger that comes with having been there, done it. That animal instinct “kind of lightened the mood in the studio,” she recounts.
Stewart is a good guy to have your corner. As one half of the Eurythmics, the legendary British synth pop act elevated last year into Rock And Roll Hall of Fame, Stewart is a creative force. He’s a real-deal multi-hyphenate, whose resume includes production across TV, stage, feature films, operating venues, and a thirst for technology. The Brit also owns Dave Stewart Entertainment (DSE), a full-service production and management company, involved in music, commercials, film, music videos, documentaries, independent productions and more.
“He is fearless,” she explains. “He understands technology. He’s always looking for ways for artists to be able to generate income to make more art. And he’s always very proactive on trying to keep an artist making art. I learned so much from him, and he’s just the most incredible human being.”
Stewart feels the same way. “I’ve stood on stage next to Vanessa Amorosi on several occasions and I’m always immediately taken aback by the intensity and the power of her vocal delivery,” he says in a statement announcing the new LP. “In getting to know her as a friend and as a true artist, I’ve found that her vocal capabilities are just the tip of the iceberg.”
Memphis Love is the followup to Amorosi’s City Of Angels, which debuted at No. 7 on the ARIA Albums Chart in March 2022, for her fourth career top 10 appearance. Prior to that, her last top tier appearance on the national survey was with 2009’s Hazardous, also peaking at No. 7.
European dates are on the slate, and Amorosi is looking forward to a homecoming jaunt that includes the Grapevine Gathering festival tour, and a performance at the 2023 AWMA in Brisbane, on Sept. 27. Expect her to share some of that Memphis Love.
“It has all the soul and the feel and the groove,” she enthuses. “I’m really, really proud of this record. And I feel like it’s gonna make people feel good.”
Memphis Love tracklistWolfHow LongLift Us UpDon’t Judge MeOnly So MuchMemphis LoveShakeToo Much of a HeartacheSeriousWhat Do I Get
Taylor Swift shared the song that she’s currently listening to on Monday afternoon (Sept. 4).
“damn griff i love this one,” Swift wrote in an Instagram Story.
She linked to Griff‘s new single “Vertigo,” potentially encouraging up to 271 million followers to click over to the track.
Griff responded excitedly to the co-sign: “What!! Is!! Happening!! I have no words,” she wrote, and then directed a whole lot of emojis Swift’s way. “Now everyone go do what the queen says and stream vertigo.”
Although Griff seemed surprised by the social media support from Swift, the two artists have connected before. They met and took photos together at the 2021 Brit Awards, where Swift was the recipient of the global icon award and Griff was named rising star. Swift has previously called Griff’s “Shade of Yellow” an “excellent” song.
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Griff recently told Dork that “Vertigo” is a “sad, heartbreak” sort of song.
“When someone leaves your life, you spend a lot of time asking if it was your fault. This song lists all those reasons why it could be, but it’s also about trying to reassure yourself that there was nothing you could have done to make it better. With the way it crescendos, I’ve always heard it as a bit of an emotional rollercoaster,” the singer-songwriter said of the new release.
“There’s a darkness to ‘Vertigo’ that maybe I haven’t tapped into as much before,” Griff continued. “It’s still major, but there’s something quite dark and moody about it too.”
Griff is working on her debut full-length album, which will be the follow-up to her 2021 mixtape, One Foot in Front of the Other.
“It’s the start of a new season for me, for sure,” she told Dork of the new music she’s been creating.
Check out Swift’s Instagram Story here, and see Griff’s “Vertigo” visualizer below.
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Music, fashion and artistry blended seamlessly into a mesmerizing, three-hour extravaganza at Beyoncé’s weekend at SoFi Stadium.
Steve Harwell, who performed as the lead singer of Smash Mouth until announcing his retirement from the group in 2021, is in hospice care, a representative for the band tells Billboard.
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Harwell, 56, is resting at home and being cared for by his fiancé and hospice care, Smash Mouth’s manager confirmed on Sunday (Sept. 3).
“Although Steve is here with us still, sadly it will only be for a short time,” he says, adding, “We would hope that people would respect Steve and his family’s privacy during this difficult time.”
TMZ first wrote of Harwell’s current health status earlier on Sunday, reporting that he’s reached the final stage of liver failure.
Harwell was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle that can makes it hard for the heart to deliver blood to the body, several years ago. Following his initial diagnosis, he suffered from “nonstop serious medical setbacks including heart failure as well as acute Wernicke Encephalopathy,” a condition that greatly impacted his motor functions, including speech and impaired memory, a statement said in 2021.
Harwell shared the news that he was retiring from the “All Star” group due to his ongoing health issues in October 2021.
Harwell’s comment about retiring from Smash Mouth read: “Ever since I was a kid, I dreamed of being a rock star performing in front of sold-out arenas and have been so fortunate to live out that dream. To my bandmates, it’s been an honor performing with you all these years and I can’t think of anyone else I would have rather gone on this wild journey with.”
The band’s first single was 1997’s “Walkin’ on the Sun,” and they landed a top 10 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 with the earworm “All Star,” which peaked at No. 4 on the chart in 1999. Astro Lounge, Smash Mouth’s sophomore album that included “All Star,” reached No. 6 on the Billboard 200 albums chart that year. “All Star” was nominated for best pop performance by a duo or group with vocals at the Grammy Awards in 2000, an award that ultimately went to Santana for “Maria Maria.”
Smash Mouth’s most recent album is 2012’s Magic, though they released an acoustic version of debut set Fush Yu Mang in 2018, following the 20th anniversary of the original recording’s release.
Smash Mouth continues to tour with vocalist Zach Goode, who joined the band in 2022.
Taylor Swift‘s “Cruel Summer” is the latest song to enter Spotify’s Billions Club. The music streaming service announced on Sunday (Sept. 3) that the hit single from the pop superstar’s 2019 album, Lover, has surpassed 1 billion streams. “It’s been no cruel summer for @taylorswift13 this year,” potify wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “Congratulations on […]
Is Olivia Rodrigo‘s “Vampire” about … Taylor Swift? Rodrigo commented on fan speculation that the lead ballad from Guts, on which she scathingly sings about an unnamed “bloodsucker, famef—er,” is somehow about one of her childhood idols.
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“How do I answer this?” Rodrigo reportedly whispered to Guardian journalist Laura Snapes, when the question about “Vampire” arose during an interview ahead of the Sept. 8 release of Guts.
“I mean, I never want to say who any of my songs are about,” said Rodrigo. “I’ve never done that before in my career and probably won’t. I think it’s better to not pigeonhole a song to being about this one thing.”
“I was very surprised when people thought that,” she added in the article that was published on Saturday (Sept. 2).
Swift championed Rodrigo, who was a self-proclaimed Swiftie, very early on. “I say that’s my baby and I’m really proud,” she sweetly shared on social media when Rodrigo’s breakout smash “Drivers License” first started appearing on charts next to Swift’s music. Swift gifted her a ring like the one she wore when working on her Red album — “She is absolutely the kindest individual in the whole world,” Rodrigo gushed at the time — and the pair met in person and posed together for a cute photo at the 2021 Brit Awards.
After Rodrigo’s debut album, Sour, dropped, interpolations found in her work proved costly. Rodrigo ended up retroactively sharing songwriting credits for “deja vu” with Swift, Jack Antonoff, and Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent) for its reminiscence of Swift’s “Cruel Summer.” She also gave writing credits to Swift and Antonoff on “1 step forward, 3 steps back” before Sour‘s release for including an interpolation of Swift’s “New Year’s Day” on the song.
Rodrigo and Swift seemingly haven’t associated with each other since, at least publicly. In a recent New York Times profile, Rodrigo said she hasn’t seen a show on Swift’s Eras Tour.
Back to the song meaning of “Vampire”: To her point, Rodrigo’s lyrics could have been inspired by a number of personal experiences the singer-songwriter might have encountered since “Drivers License” made its mark in 2021 — so her answer to the question doesn’t really answer much at all.
“Hate to give the satisfaction, asking how you’re doing now/ How’s the castle built off people you pretend to care about?” she sings in the opening of the song.
Later in the profile about Rodrigo and her sophomore album, Guardian writer Snapes, in her own words, notes that “‘Vampire’ is primarily about a romantic relationship with an older guy.” Many of its lyrical barbs do point toward this interpretation: there’s a line directed at a “cool guy,” and one pointing out that “every girl I ever talked to told me you were bad, bad news.” In the track’s second verse, Rodrigo says, “Went for me, and not her/ ‘Cause girls your age know better.”
Read the full piece at The Guardian here.
Before Jimmy Buffett appeared on Billboard’s charts, he was writing about other artists who did.
Buffett, who died Friday (Sept. 1) at age 76, worked as a Nashville reporter for Billboard from 1969 to 1970. He quit when his first album, Debut to Earth, was released because he was told that continuing, would be a conflict of interest.
Among the concerts he reviewed was Isaac Hayes at Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium, writing, “The Hot Buttered Soul Man combined his songs and his keyboard work on both organ and piano with a full and powerful voice range that created a style [that] was truly his own.”
In 2021, Buffett revisited his time as a reporter, telling Billboard during an interview that as a burgeoning artist, he couldn’t bring himself to write anything negative about a fellow performer.
“I can never give anybody a bad review because I knew how hard it was to get up there,” he said. “Now, there has to be something toxic that [a review] says, but I can never do it because I knew how hard it was. I know performers who are scared to death to get up there and still do it. And I go, “Why are you that scared to get up there?” I mean, you should be doing something else if you get scared to go up there. It’s one of the greatest joys you could ever have on planet earth to me.”
The best part of the job was the free music. Although unbylined, Buffett believed he reviewed Elton John’s 1970 album, Tumbleweed Connection, glowingly writing, “Although this is but his second LP, Elton John’s track record already speaks for itself and the album is sure to be one of the biggest of the new year.”
Talking to Billboard again in 2022, Buffett recalled the thrill of getting John’s album in the mail while writing for the magazine. “People were sending me free albums because I was the reporter for Billboard, and that album came in a stack of records from I think it was MCA,” he said. “When I got [to Billboard], my editor told me, ‘Just let them know you’re a Billboard reporter and give them your address and they’ll give you records so hopefully you review them or you’ll say something about them.’ So I went ‘free albums? No sh—!’”
He also wrote of his time at Billboard in his 1998 autobiography, A Pirate Looks at Fifty, calling it “the only real job I would have in my adult life.”
From the first day, he was wined and dined as he traveled with his boss, Bill Williams. “In twenty-four hours, I had gone from just another nobody songwriter who couldn’t get his foot into a music publisher’s door to the assistant Southern Editor of Billboard,” he wrote. “Hell, people took me to lunch. I had business cards. I flew to New York for editorial meetings. I had an expense account. I had a WATTS line at work on which I called all my friends after working hours, and I got free albums from the record companies. Not bad for a real job.”
Buffett even managed to break some news, including bluegrass titans’ Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs’ split.
After switching from covering country music to pop, Buffett interviewed Otis Redding and James Brown, reviewed Led Zeppelin at the Palladium, and learned a little about the importance of taking care of business. “What I mainly saw were a lot of wonderfully talented artists and writers who let somebody else worry about ‘all that stuff,’ and I saw the trouble it got them into,” he wrote in the book.
Billboard threw Buffett a going away party when his album came out, gifting him a guitar case. Even though that chapter of his life was over, it’s clear his time at Billboard remained a treasured memory and set him on his way: “One of the true joys of my later success was going back and sharing it with Bill,” he wrote in the autobiography. “He was as proud as a parent when I finally broke out.”
Nelly Furtado is back and better than ever, and in celebration of her reunion with Timbaland and Justin Timberlake on “Keep Going Up,” she sat down with Billboard‘s Jason Lipshutz to discuss where she’s at in her career at the moment. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news […]
Thursday’s announcement that AMC Theatres is partnering with Taylor Swift to present Taylor Swift / The Eras Tour Concert Film in thousands of North American cinemas starting Oct. 13 was a blockbuster — both in terms of cultural impact and ticket sales, which broke AMC’s record for single-day advance revenue with $26 million in the first 24 hours.
And according to a new report at Puck, the unorthodox deal that bypasses traditional studios and instead release the film directly in cinemas with AMC Theatres acting as distributor came about only after discussions with traditional distributors, including Universal Pictures, broke down.
The story claims that talks with AMC Theatres began more than three months ago — while Swift was already in the midst of her smash Eras Tour in the United States and before the concert film was shot at some of the Los Angeles shows in August — after AMC CEO Adam Aron received “a call from a friend who also happened to know [Swift’s father] Scott Swift” that Team Swift was interested in talking.
Citing sources, the report states that Aron personally negotiated the deal directly with Swift’s parents, Scott and Andrea Swift, over several weeks. Among the agreed-upon terms is that 43% of the gross will remain with theaters, while the remaining 57% will be shared (in an undetermined split) by the Swifts and AMC. (Variance Films, a small sub-distributor, was reportedly hired to book the film in Regal, Cinemark and other theaters on a fee-for-service basis.) Notably, standard tickets for the film will be priced at $19.89 (plus tax) for adults and $13.13 for children and seniors (plus tax).
All theaters playing the Sam Wrench-directed film will reportedly also take all concession revenue, including any commemorative Eras Tour items. The story claims that AMC and Cinemark have also ordered four million posters to give away to fans for free, while a “small offering” of paid merchandise is planned.
Other details in the report include that theaters playing the film (which reportedly came in at a budget of between $10 and $20 million) must agree to carry it for a minimum of four weeks and can play it for as many as 26 weeks without worrying that the terms of the deal will change. Additionally, after 13 weeks, the Swifts are free to put the film on streaming services (the streaming rights are still up for grabs).
At least one traditional film studio that had discussed distributing the film with the Swifts was reportedly under the impression that the film would be a 2025 release — after the completion of the tour’s global run — but according to the story, the Swifts decided to strike while fan demand for all things Taylor was at an all-time high.
Speculation that the unusual deal could lead to similar plays by AMC and other exhibitors to act as distributors for other major concert films has been rampant, and indeed, the Puck report notes that “AMC is already talking about what other major artists might want a Taylorstyle deal” — suggesting there may be more of these to come.
Representatives for Taylor Swift and AMC Theatres did not immediately return Billboard‘s requests for comment on this story.
