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On this week’s (Sept. 6) episode of the Greatest Pop Stars of the 21st Century podcast, we take a look at a pair of Tennessee natives: Fictional pop superstar turned IRL pop superstar Miley Cyrus (No. 15) and *NSYNC spotlight-stealer-turned-solo game-changer Justin Timberlake (No. 14). Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and […]
Lady Gaga wasn’t quite ready to let her Joker: Folie à Deux character go, so she created an accompanying 13-track album titled Harlequin.
Joker: Folie à Deux follows Phoenix’s return as Arthur Fleck, a.k.a the Joker, who is now confined in Arkham Asylum. There, he meets Gaga’s Harleen “Lee” Quinzel, and they form a powerfully chaotic bond with the goal of causing mayhem across Gotham City. Unlike the first Joker film, the sequel includes a series of musical numbers, which is where fans see Gaga in her element.
“This idea of dual identities was always something that was a part of my music making,” Gaga shared in a new interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe of the inspiration behind Harlequin. “I was always creating characters in my music and when I made Lee for Joker, she just really had this profound effect on me. The film had so much music in it, so much music that I love, and I was able to discover the character through the story, through the music that we did live every day as well as dance and the costumes and the makeup. So I kind of had this deep experience with the character and she just didn’t really leave me creatively and I decided I wanted to make a whole album inspired by her.”
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She continued, “She’s a really complex woman and I think, particularly as a woman in music and a female producer, it was really fun to go, ‘This album will be and I will be what I want, when I decide, whenever I feel like it. If I want it to be blues, it’ll be blues. If I want it to be funk, it’ll be funk. If I want it to be soul, it’ll be soul.’”
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The project features covers of old classics — including reimagined showtunes like “Good Morning” (Singing in the Rain) and “If My Friends Could See Me Now” (Sweet Charity) — and “celebrates a figure who thrives on danger, who lives for the undefinable, and who embraces the beautiful chaos of her own dreams,” per a press release. Harlequin also features two original songs, the dramatic waltz “Folie à Deux” and the acoustic ballad “Happy Mistake.”
“BloodPop and I had written this together and then I kind of took it to the next place,” she said of “Happy Mistake,” before adding, “It was all in the image of the character, but also kind of at the very core of her soul, which is really just me. Every character I play, it just has me as the gravity. I am wrestling, on that record, with a lot of feelings about so much that I’ve been through as an artist, everything I went through growing up in the public eye, and the industry since I was a teenager.”
Ultimately, Gaga says filming the Joker film with Phoenix was a “really soulful experience” for her. “It’s like these two people find love in this really dark place and it brings them all the light,” she explained.
Watch Zane Lowe’s full interview with Lady Gaga below. Joker: Folie à Deux hits theaters on Oct. 4.
Billboard’s Friday Music Guide serves as a handy guide to this Friday’s most essential releases — the key music that everyone will be talking about today, and that will be dominating playlists this weekend and beyond.
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This week, Lady Gaga puts on her Joker makeup, The Weeknd joins forces with Playboi Carti and Stevie Nicks meets the moment. Check out all of this week’s picks below:
Lady Gaga, Harlequin
Although Harlequin is not exactly a new Lady Gaga album — the 13-song project is largely a mix of covered show tunes and rearrangements that serves as a companion piece to next week’s big-budget film sequel Joker: Folie à Deux — the original track “Happy Mistake,” a breathtaking ballad in the same sonic universe as Gaga’s A Star is Born work, more than justifies this stopgap before the next official full-length.
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The Weeknd with Playboi Carti, “Timeless”
Two weeks after The Weeknd and Playboi Carti separately returned with highly anticipated solo tracks “Dancing in the Flames” and “All Red,” respectively, the pair of A-listers have linked up on “Timeless,” which will appear on The Weeknd’s upcoming album Hurry Up Tomorrow but pushes the superstar more towards Carti’s synth-heavy futuristic rap, courtesy in part of co-producer Pharrell Williams.
Stevie Nicks, “The Lighthouse”
Stevie Nicks wrote new single “The Lighthouse” following the overturning of Roe v. Wade last year, but the legendary singer’s voice resonates regardless of the historical context, as she sings, “I have my scars, you have yours / Don’t let them take your power.”
Tommy Richman, Coyote
Tommy Richman could have coasted on new-school R&B bangers like “Million Dollar Baby” and “Devil is a Lie” through the rest of 2024; instead, debut album Coyote (which stunningly contains neither of his first two hits on its track list) is decidedly a more bold affair, refracting funk, synth-pop, New Jack Swing and hip-hop through the lens of Richman’s singular croon.
Rosalía feat. Ralphie Choo, “Omega”
While a fair share of Rosalía’s fantastic 2022 project MOTOMAMI boasted combustible rhythms and dance hooks, “Omega,” a new team-up with Ralphie Choo, serves as a potent reminder of the singer’s vocal might, with handclaps floating her melisma here and each syllable of the chorus delivered with piercing emotion.
Luke Bryan, Mind of a Country Boy
A press release for Luke Bryan’s album describes Mind of a Country Boy as “the culmination of a career spent studying songs and living the hunting, fishing, and loving everyday lifestyle he sings about”; indeed, there’s an authenticity intrinsic to Bryan’s latest that separates the longtime star from his country brethren, particularly on tracks like “Kansas” and “Country On.”
The Cure, “Alone”
The Cure’s first new song in 16 years is essentially a best-case scenario for longtime fans of the all-time greats: “Alone” is a gorgeous, nearly 7-minute rock epic, with a sweepingly mournful arrangement and Robert Smith sounding like he never stepped away from the recording studio.
Linkin Park, “Heavy is the Crown”
If “The Emptiness Machine” reasserted Linkin Park’s rock-solid songwriting and introduced new co-vocalist Emily Armstrong into the mix, follow-up “Heavy is the Crown” fully unleashes the newly reformed band, recalling the bruising rap-rock of “Faint” and “Bleed It Out” while allowing Armstrong to unveil her own extended scream.
Editor’s Pick: SOPHIE, SOPHIE
In her too-brief time in the spotlight, SOPHIE reconstructed the very fabric of dance and electronic music with a singular verve and boundless talent; SOPHIE, a bittersweet posthumous album which her family helped cross the finish line, honors her brilliance with wondrous moments that recall her career peaks, and glimpses of what could have been.
As their third album arrives, New York collective MICHELLE is leaning into boy bands and girl groups for inspiration.
It’s not that their latest, Songs About You Specifically out today via Transgressive Records, particularly sounds like One Direction, Spice Girls or Fifth Harmony, but examples of modern pop with four lead vocalists are hard to come by outside those groups.
“When you’re trying to learn vocal arrangements and trying to reference music that also has this many vocals, the only music you can find are these girl bands,” says Julian Kaufman, who, along with Charlie Kilgore, handles much of the production in the band. “There are girl bands like The Shirelles from the ‘50s and ‘60s that are a singing a little more vintage pop and that’s great. But in the last 30 years, all you really get is the *NSYNCs and the Fifth Harmonies of the world.”
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On Songs About You Specifically, tapping into those inspirations has led to all the voices of MICHELLE singing out in crisp clarity on songs collectively written in the small town of Ojai, Calif. outside of Los Angeles.
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Unlike their previous releases (2018’s HEATWAVE and 2022’s After Dinner We Talk Dreams), their third studio album does not divvy up songs by each singer and features multiple vocalists on each track, which adds a richness to the sextet’s unique brand of indie pop.
“We try very hard to make sure everybody sounds different,” says Kaufman, adding they have the vocalists (Sofia D’Angelo, Layla Ku, Emma Lee, and Jamee Lockard) sing on different mics and took inspiration from mid 2010’s hip-hop where features took on extremely different resonances when they were recorded separately and stitched together in a studio. “[We were] making sure that each singer has a slightly different sense of harmony. The first verse of ‘The Dropout’ and the second verse of the song have the same melody, but one is sung by Layla and one is sung by Jamee and the harmony stacks they sing are different… Can you hear any of this stuff? No, but it all adds up to subtle things in your brain.”
While some contemporary artists might scoff at the bubblegum pop comparisons, D’Angelo loves it. “Wait, so when you listen to MICHELLE, are you like, ‘Oh my god, that’s Emma. Oh my god, that’s Jamee. Oh my god, that’s Layla. Oh my god, that’s Sofia’? Hell yeah,” she says. “I’m freaking out about this, because this is what I would do with One Direction.”
MICHELLE is also leaning into the stage presence of the major pop acts. While a MICHELLE show has never lacked energy, Ku says people can expect more elaborate choreography. “Shout out to overlord Lee. She choreographs everything with great intent,” Ku says. “We’ve been putting so much work into this dancing element of our performance. It’s become very visually pleasing. I see videos of us dancing and I’m like, ‘Yeah, we ate that up.’”
Audiences can also expect live drums, coordinated outfits (not matching just yet, but they tease the possibility) and lots of hairography.
“The last two shows we did [on the Still Woozy tour] we had wind machines or fans at the edge of the stage. Oh boy, did that make a difference,” says Lee. “You’re like, this is just where I stand to sing and then you see a video and…it’s life changing.”
“Those experiences when the fan was in my hair made me realize this is what I’ve always wanted to do for my whole life. This is what I would do with the hair dryer in my bathroom when I was a kid singing Miley Cyrus or Britney Spears or Beyoncé or whatever,” says D’Angelo. “The hair is really the fifth vocalist, the fifth dancer in the band.”
When the group was recording the new record in Ojai, they would split up into writing groups of two or three and whichever group finished their track first would make dinner for everyone else. Having six writers, all from varying backgrounds, genders, sexualities and styles gives MICHELLE the rare ability to create honest music from many perspectives.
“It’s so exciting that we can write about queer relationships or maybe an experience that only two of the members have had, but we can present it under [MICHELLE],” says Lee. “We have this vessel to constantly be tons of different things that are true to different parts of the group.”
MICHELLE has successfully avoided being pigeonholed as just a queer band or just a pop group over the past six years, as their sound has evolved and changed. For their latest, direct inspiration is extremely difficult to pinpoint. There are the ‘90s R&B sounds on “Akira” and the beachy breeziness of “Cathy.” There are traces of late 2000s and early 2010s indie like Phantogram and Phoenix, alongside consistently strong basslines and danceable drumbeats.
“Sonically, it is not very clear what genre this [album] is. That is something we were going for,” says Kaufman. “We were trying to have that thing where you put on this album and it’s not exactly just another pop album. This is MICHELLE. That’s the intention.”
“When we went into writing we wanted to experience catharsis and really express ourselves,” says D’Angelo. “With this record, it was anything goes in terms of what we were bringing into the room. The focus was just crafting great music, helping each other. If someone had an idea, being there for them.”
The group has always billed themselves as a predominantly queer collective and, as the culture embraces LGBTQIA+ artists like Chappell Roan, MUNA, Reneé Rapp, Janelle Monáe and more, MICHELLE sees this as a turning point for queer representation.
“Queer people aren’t going anywhere. Lesbians aren’t going anywhere,” says Lockard. “We finally reached a moment in pop culture where queer people feel comfortable sharing who they are and it’s being well received. It’s just going to continue to grow as younger queer listeners are hearing these artists and writing their own stories.”
“The only element of this moment that I’m looking forward to ending….” Ku adds — pausing while her bandmates laugh, in order to reassure, “Everyone’s going to be like, ‘I feel that’ at the end of my sentence. Don’t worry.
“Whenever there’s rumblings of a cultural shift with young people, there is a quick [instinct to] vulture, to prey, swarm, that companies hop on,” she continues. “The music industry is a huge perpetrator of that — and I look forward to when the commodification of queer aesthetic and art comes to a close. So many of our queer musical predecessors did it in anonymity for so long, and I look forward to when it’s just music and stories being told by these people are accepted and understood to be regular rather than something to profit off of.”
Lana Dey Rey finally got to wear that white dress she sang about on Chemtrails Over the Country Club. This time it was of the wedding variety, though. People confirmed that the 39-year-old singer born Elizabeth Grant married Louisiana-born alligator tour guide Jeremy Dufrene on Thursday (Sept. 26) after a brief romance that began earlier […]
With the mystery of “LG 6.5” officially solved, Lady Gaga is ready to let fans in on the making of her newest album, Harlequin.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Gaga explained that the idea for her new album of jazz and pop classics came to her after she finished filming Joker: Folie à Deux. After performing for so long as her character Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (aka Harley Quinn), Gaga felt that she still had more to say. “I had such a deep relationship with Lee,” she said. “And when I was done filming the movie, I wasn’t done with her.”
As for why she teased the album as “LG 6.5,” the singer explained that she didn’t want fans to see this only as her next album. “It is my record. It’s a Lady Gaga record, but it’s also inspired by my character and my vision of what a woman can be,” she said. “It’s why the album does not adhere to one genre … it’s not my next studio album that’s a pop record, but it is somewhere in between, and it’s blurring the lines of pop music.”
The new project sees Gaga taking on a series of jazz standards — such as “Get Happy,” “World on a String” and “That’s Life” — much like she did in her Tony Bennett duet albums Cheek to Cheek and Love for Sale. While Gaga says she struggled with not having her friend and collaborator in the studio with her following his death in 2023, she thinks he would have appreciated Harlequin for its shapeshifting nature.
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“If I had put rock n’ roll chords over production in a record that I did with Tony years ago, I don’t know how he would’ve felt about that. Tony didn’t love rock n’ roll, but he would’ve said, ‘Wow, that’s amazing,’” she explained. “He was somebody who loved how risk-taking and different I am, and I always thought that was so cool. He was 60 years older than me, and he would flinch less than young people that I would meet … He was just a really compassionate, inclusive person. So he was definitely with us [in the studio], but he was mostly inside of me.”
As for fans still eager to hear what her long-awaited seventh studio album will sound like, Gaga remained tight-lipped, but offered a small hint. “The pop album is nothing like Chromatica. It’s a completely different record,” she said. “It’s meant to be ingested as a time in my life. And I’m also really excited about this idea that I don’t have to adhere to an era if I don’t want to. I can have a few going at once.”
When Billie Eilish sings, “I’ll love you ’til the day that I die” on “Birds of a Feather,” that deadline also includes the afterlife. In the Hit Me Hard and Soft single’s new Aidan Zamiri-directed music video that arrived Friday (Sept. 27), the 22-year-old pop star sits alone in an abandoned office building, smiling to […]
What’s the most difficult way to follow-up a terminally bleak, billion-dollar, Oscar-winning blockbuster superhero (adjacent) movie with no super heroes? Add in some live song and dance numbers, naturally. That’s what Joaquin Phoenix said the team behind the anticipated Joker: Folie à Deux decided to do, a choice that terrified the notoriously fearless actor from day one.
“How could we possibly do the music in the most honest way possible?” he asked in a joint interview with co-star Lady Gaga and director Todd Phillips that aired on Good Morning America on Friday (Sept. 27) about the bold decision to have untrained singer Phoenix and Grammy-winner Gaga sing together live on stage during the film’s fantasy sequences. “When we first started, I did not want anything to be spontaneous and I wanted to sound as good as possible,” said Phoenix, who was previously described as being “sick” with nerves over singing alongside Gaga.
Phoenix noted that it was Gaga’s idea to do it live, which he thought sounded great for her, since that’s what she does for a living. “You were really cool and kind of made me feel comfortable about that,” he said, with Gaga adding, “I can assure you that Joaquin using his natural voice was just so much more compelling than any lip synching would ever be.”
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While Phoenix said that he just didn’t want his Joker ride to end after his Oscar-winning first spin as washed-up clown Arthur Fleck in 2019’s intense Joker, Gaga said that original film really interested her in joining Phoenix and director Phillips’ demented world. “I loved Arthur so much, like, who would be the love in his life?” the singer said she wondered.
Plus, she added, there was something “so completely freeing” about playing Quinn, including the ability to sneak some bits of herself into the character that she’s always been a bit embarrassed, or private, about. “When I first saw the film I was like, ‘Oh, that’s in there! That part of me that I want no one to know about,’” said Gaga of her third starring role in a major motion picture following her breakout in 2018’s A Star is Born and a strong showing in the all-star ensemble in 2021’s House of Gucci.
Though she seems to always be poised and powerful, Gaga said those moments she sees herself in Quinn are when her chracter seems “so uncomfortable… she’s like on the edge. There’s definitely been times in my life where I felt that way.”
Even more challenging, Gaga recorded an entire Joker-themed album, Harlequin, out today, in which she channels her character Harley Quinn on a series of classic covers and a few originals. “Lee’s not a performer and I am and in a scene as a different character it’s just completely different,” Gaga said of tapping into what makes the Joker’s equally off-kilter love stand out from Gaga’s stage persona.
“It’s Lee’s reality, it’s their shared reality, it’s coming from that character not from me as a performer,” she said. “I don’t just sing that way in this movie, I also sing with my full voice.”
The 13-track album features a number of Harley-fied covers of “Good Morning” (from Singing in the Rain), “If My Friends Could See Me Now” (Sweet Charity), as well as a soul-funk version of “When the Saints Go Marching In” (here titled “Oh, When the Saints”), “That’s Entertainment,” the Carpenters’ “Close to You” and “World on a String” as well as two originals, “Folie à Deux” and the rock-edged “The Joker.”
The surprise companion album to the film was recorded alongside the sessions for Gaga’s upcoming as-yet-untitled seventh studio album, which is due out in February, with a first single dropping next month. Joker: Folie à Deux opens in theaters on Oct. 4
Billy Joel‘s historic Madison Square Garden run might be over, but the Piano Man is not done playing to the rafters. Joel announced a new run of 2025 stadium shows on Thursday (Sept. 26) that will once again find him sharing the stage with recent tour mates Sting and Stevie Nicks. Explore Explore See latest […]
Billie Eilish and Finneas have been a package deal since day one. The siblings’ musical kismet has worked out pretty well so far, netting them billions of streams, two Oscars and Golden Globes, nine Grammy Awards and three Billboard Music Awards, among many others.
But there comes a time in every artist’s career when they are ready to branch out on their own, and according to Finneas that time is now for his sister. Speaking to Guitar.com, Finneas, 27, said he’s been busy building out Billie’s home studio, and by the sound of it he’s pretty confident she’ll make good use of it.
“I’ve been setting up Billie’s recording studio for her so she can do home production without me, because she’s very good at it!,” Finneas said of Eilish, 22. “And it’s funny, I’ve been giving her, like, the bare minimum of stuff, just so that she learns it all. Y’know what I mean? I’m like ‘Listen, I could give you all the stuff that I use now, but it took me years to even have a use for it. And, if I give you this basic thing, it’ll make sense to you right away.’”
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To date, Finneas has produced all three of Billie’s album, from her breakthrough 2019 debut, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? — which featured such beloved tracks as “You Should See Me In a Crown,” “When the Party’s Over” and “Bad Guy” — as well 2021’s Happier Than Ever and this year’s Hit Me Hard and Soft. In between, Finneas has also released two solo albums, 2021’s Optimist and this year’s For Cryin’ Out Loud and the 2019 EP Blood Harmony.
Before she can get into that studio, though, Eilish will hit the road for her 2024-2025 Hit Me Hard and Soft The Tour, which kicks off on Sunday (Sept. 29) with a sold out show at the Centre Videotron in Quebec.