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Kelly Clarkson turned her Kelly Clarkson Show into a club on Friday (Jan. 27), delivering the ultimate dance floor hit for her popular Kellyoke segment.
Backed by her My Band Y’all, the OG American Idol winner performed and upbeat cover of CeCe Peniston‘s “Finally,” flawlessly executing all the runs and high notes while rocking a paisley printed dress and cozy brown cardigan.
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The track, released in September 1991 as Peniston’s debut single from her 1992 album of the same name, peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 songs chart, and remained on the tally for a total of 33 weeks. Meanwhile, over on the Dance Club Songs chart, “Finally” hit No. 1 for two weeks in October 1991.
Clarkson’s daily mini-performances have become so popular since The Kelly Clarkson Show first began in 2019, she released an EP featuring recordings of six Kellyoke-ified songs over the summer. Her standout cover of Whitney Houston’s “Queen of the Night” was one of them, along with Billie Eilish’s “Happier Than Ever,” The Weeknd’s “Call Out My Name” and more.
Watch Kelly Clarkson’s cover of CeCe Peniston’s “Finally” below.
Rita Ora and Taika Waititi are officially hitched! On Friday (Jan. 27) the singer revealed she and her longtime love secretly got married last summer.
“Yes. I am officially off the market, people,” she said in an interview with the U.K.’s Heart Breakfast Radio, per ET Canada. “I chose to keep it more private and keep it to myself…It was exactly, exactly how I wanted. It is nice to keep some things just to myself sometimes. It was nice and sweet. Sorry it’s not that interesting. One day I will throw a big party.”
Ora is, however, giving fans a taste at what her nuptials could’ve been in the music video for her new single “You Only Love Me.” In fact, the clip opens with video messages from her celeb pals like Chelsea Handler, Lindsay Lohan and Kristen Stewart wishing her well on her wedding day. But from there, disaster strikes at nearly every turn, and not even a surprise cameo from Sharon Stone or a voice memo from Waititi himself can save the nuptials.
“I can’t believe you look at me the way I look at you/ ‘Cause no one’s ever loved me back the way that you do do/ I’ve been messed up a thousand times, but you make it right/ And even on my darkest days, you show me the light,” she sings, as the rainbow-hued bridesmaids cause chaos, the wedding cake arrives as the size of a cupcake and the regal venue quite literally goes up in flames. (Hey, at least Ora looks fabulous in her vintage wedding dress by Yves Saint Laurent.)
Watch Ora’s hilariously doomed wedding fall apart in the “You Only Love Me” video above.
Upon dropping her new “Lavender Haze” music video, Taylor Swift raved about her costar Laith Ashley. And in a couple tweets following the video’s premiere, Ashley is returning the favor by gushing about his experience with the 33-year-old pop star.
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“Thank you so much @taylorswift13 for allowing me to play a small part in your story,” he tweeted early Friday morning (Jan. 27), 20 minutes after the “Lavender Haze” video premiered. “You are brilliant and this is an experience I will never forget.”
Then, a few hours afterward, the history-making transgender model tweeted: “Still at a loss for words. Trying to gather myself and my thoughts. I am so grateful. Thank you @taylorswift13.”
Ashley stars as Swift’s leading man in the “Lavender Haze” visual, self-directed by the 11-time Grammy winner in partnership with her All Too Well: The Short Film collaborator Rina Yang. Playing her romantic interest in the video, he lies next to Swift in bed, asleep as she traces galactic skies printed on his back, and cozies up to her at a house party.
After the project went live on Swift’s YouTube channel, she shared some photos from the video shoot — including one of her watching footage back on a handheld monitor with Ashley — and shouted out the Dominican-American singer by name on Instagram. “The Lavender Haze video is out now,” she wrote in her caption. “There is lots of lavender. There is lots of haze. There is my incredible costar @laith_ashley who I absolutely adored working with.”
“This was the first video I wrote out of the 3 that have been released, and this one really helped me conceptualize the world and mood of Midnights, like a sultry sleepless 70’s fever dream,” she added. “Hope you like it.”
See Laith Ashley and Taylor Swift’s posts about working together on “Lavender Haze” below.
Still at a loss for words. Trying to gather myself and my thoughts. I am so grateful. Thank you @taylorswift13— Laith Ashley De La Cruz (@laith_ashley) January 27, 2023
It takes a very intimate, deep level of trust to pull off what Sharon Stone and Sam Smith did on last weekend’s Saturday Night Live. In Smith’s second performance of the night, the legendary Casino star channeled a Hollywood siren from the early silver screen era as she posed elegantly on a couch in a gilded custom gown while Smith and a choir performed the spiritual title track from the singer’s upcoming Gloria album.
Without a word, and hardly even a gesture, Stone’s surprise cameo managed to both upstage Smith and low-key compliment the dramatic performance without making it all about her, a delicate balance the actress told Variety was a result of the very special relationship the two have developed.
Stone told the magazine that she’d met Smith before through her good pal singer Rufus Wainwright — they all sat together at the premiere of the 2019 Judy Garland biopic Judy — which led to Smith DMing Stone a month ago asking if she would be willing to join him on SNL. “And I said, ‘Well, it’s funny, I am listening to Sam Smith radio [on a streaming service] at the moment, so I think the universe has already decided this. I’d be so thrilled to do it, Sam. I just think you’re the most astounding performer and I’d be absolutely ecstatic to do it,’” she said she told Smith.
Because she’s that kind of pro, Stone reached out to her head costumer to have a custom dress made by Indian designer Gaurav Gupta. Describing the “sound bath” she was in on the SNL stage surrounded by Smith and a gospel choir, Stone said the singer’s directions were minimal. “[They] just asked me if I would do it and trusted me. We just innately understand each other, at an almost intimate level. We have no judgment of each other; we have only affirmative feelings about each other as an artist,” she said. “It’s not a competitive sport, but we want each other to bring our best game, and in order to do that, it’s like, ‘Just go for it, girl.’”
As a veteran who has endured too many co-stars stepping on her close-up moments, Stone said her job during Smith’s performance was simple: just listen. “I’m listening. I’m listening and allowing it to be alive in my heart,” she said before seemingly revealing a bit of news. “I think that what we really wanted was that idea of an apparition — almost like [Russian-French painter] Erte. Sam has asked me to do the music video, so I’m sure that’s going to be quite interesting to see how they would like to process that.”
In an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe this week, Smith expounded on the collab as well, explaining that on their upcoming tour the stage is shaped like Aphrodite, which, of course, called for a golden goddess body to inhabit the SNL stage.
“Sharon Stone is going to be in the middle of the stage at SNL in gold as like a piece of life art. The whole performance is just the choir around her singing ‘Gloria’ to her in this golden light. Isn’t it so sick?,” Smith said, noting that the golden goddess had to be Stone because “she’s a powerful woman, and she exudes vulnerability and beauty in a way that to me is real and authentic.”
Watch the SNL performance below.
There’s something fishy about Taylor Swift‘s new music video … but Swifties are already on the case. After noticing that koi fish were featured heavily throughout the pop star’s “Lavender Haze” visual, which dropped Friday (Jan. 27), fans were able to tie the random (or maybe, not so random) aquatic animal back to an iconic guitar she used during her 2011 Speak Now tour, a connection they interpreted as a clue that Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) is on its way.
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In the new video, Swift at one point reaches into a TV screen and discovers that it’s some sort of portal, revealing a space-like alternate dimension where spotted koi fish swim through the stars. The final shot of the video features the musician sitting on a cloud in that same alternate dimension, the koi fish swimming majestically around her.
As many eagle-eyed Swifties were able to point out almost immediately, these fish look the same as the ones printed on the neck of a fan-favorite blue acoustic guitar that Swift used during the Speak Now Tour. You may also recognize that exact guitar as the one Swift was filmed smashing on the floor in her October music video for “Anti-Hero,” Midnights‘ No. 1 lead single.
Fans’ natural conclusion, of course, was that Swift is majorly hinting that her next music release will be Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), aka a rerecorded, rereleased version of her 2010 album Speak Now. It would mark the 11-time Grammy winner’s third “Taylor’s Version” release of the six she has planned, following Fearless (Taylor’s Version) and Red (Taylor’s Version).
This isn’t the first time Swift has appeared to tease Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) via Easter eggs in a Midnights music video, however. In her October visual for “Bejeweled,” the singer included a shot of different-colored elevator buttons, prompting fans to conclude that each button represented a different album in Swift’s catalog. In the video, she ends up pressing a button that’s purple — aka, the color heavily associated with the Speak Now album, largely thanks to the purple gown a young Swift sports on the cover art.
With that in mind, it’s also worth noting that the “Lavender Haze” music video is packed with violet-tinted visuals, from Swift bathing in purple water, to a bedroom filled with lilac-colored smoke. This makes sense, of course, for a song with “lavender” in the title, but some Swifties think that the purple overload has a double meaning.
“Lavender haze being the last Midnights single with a purple music video is perfect actually cause it’s simultaneously a silly little easter egg for speak now and also acts as a bridge from this era to speak now,” tweeted one such fan.
Other small “Lavender Haze” video details that might be Easter eggs in disguise include a couple No. 13s displayed on a weather map at the 1:42 mark. There’s also a stray vinyl casing shown at the beginning of the video labeled “Mastermind” (could that be the next single off Midnights?), with boyfriend Joe Alwyn’s astrological sign — Pisces — printed on the cover.
See which possible clues you can detect in Taylor Swift’s “Lavender Haze” music video by watching it below:
Harry Styles‘ concert outfit is definitely not the same as it was 24 hours ago. Right in the middle of his performance at the Forum Thursday night (Jan. 26), the 28-year-old pop star had his own Lenny Kravitz moment — meaning, his pants split open right down the crotch for everyone in the audience to see.
On the upside, this is Harry Styles we’re talking about here, so he was somehow still able to look cool singing his Harry’s House track “Music for a Sushi Restaurant,” even with his boxers hanging out of his ripped pants seam. But on the downside, this is Harry Styles we’re talking about here, which means that hundreds, maybe thousands of fans were filming him at the exact moment the wardrobe malfunction happened.
The incident was indeed captured on video from all angles and uploaded to social media shortly afterward. In the clips, he opens his arms and kneels into a deep lunge, at which point his leathery brown trousers burst open. Styles’ eyes widen in shock as he quickly puts a hand in front of his crotch to cover the wardrobe malfunction, before stamping his foot in lighthearted frustration.
Luckily, the Grammy winner was able to laugh it off as he pranced away. Later videos show that he proceeded to tie a Pride flag around his waist to hide his exposed undercarriage, so at least he proved that he’s resourceful.
Less luckily, Styles’ self-professed first celebrity crush (as revealed in a 2020 appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show) Jennifer Aniston was spotted in the audience that night, meaning she likely saw the whole thing.
But, as Kravitz can attest, it could easily have been much worse. In 2015, the rocker famously split the crotch seam of his pants wide open during a live performance in a very similar mishap — except he wasn’t wearing underwear.
See videos from the moment Harry Styles split open his pants during his Thursday night concert at the Forum in Inglewood, Calif., below:
@timmy.styless I LITERALLY CANT WITH HIM HE’S RIPPED ANOTHER PAIR OF PANTS AND NOW HE HAS THE PRIDE FLAG COVERUP AGAIN – “My trousers ripped. I feel I must apologise to a certain few of you right down in the front there. I mean this is a family show. You sir, are you okay? I promise it’s not part of the show. Okay. It’s a family show…or is it is! It is! Or is it.” – Harry at L#LoveOnTourLA via wildflwrlbbh, GRAPEJUICEB00BS #harrystyles ♬ original sound – ✿ Dannie ✿
Billboard’s First Stream 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, Sam Smith continues a hot streak, Rosalía is down for fake love and The Kid LAROI brings things back to basics. Check out all of this week’s First Stream picks below:
Sam Smith, Gloria
Sam Smith has scored several hits over the course of their career, but “Unholy,” his team-up with Kim Petras that became their first No. 1 single, sounded like none of them when it was released last year; the smash not only revitalized Smith’s voice at top 40 radio, but suggested a major shift in sonic approach. Gloria, their fourth studio album, sports a level of freedom rarely heard in Smith’s past oeuvre of precisely drawn pop: their vocal gifts are positioned toward sweaty, sexually liberated dance floor anthems like “I’m Not Here to Make Friends” as well as fearless midtempo confessionals like “Perfect,” with Smith sounding more relaxed in every mode on the album.
Rosalía, “LLYLM”
“I don’t need honesty / Baby, lie like you love me, lie like you love me,” Rosalía pleads on new single “LLYLM,” switching over to English and soaring into a falsetto as she explores the theme of fake affection. “LLYLM” is not a complicated single — created in part with Max Martin, the song’s handclaps and muted synthesizers eventually evaporate for a sparse, guitar-led interlude — but Rosalía remains one of the most magnetic vocal presences in music today, and powers “LLYLM” with technical skill and unadulterated emotion.
The Kid LAROI, “Love Again”
Anticipation is high for The Kid LAROI’s first full-length album, and the release of lead single “Love Again” was preceded by a lead-in intro track, “Can’t Go Back to the Way It Was,” last week, and is being paired with a one-of-a-kind Fortnite experience. Yet LAROI wisely decided not to one-up that rollout with an overly grandiose song: “Love Again” recalls the raw acoustic nerve that his breakout hit, “Without You,” touched to make LAROI a star, and this time he offers clipped, unflinching rhetorical questions while trying to find resolution in a relationship.
Chlöe, “Pray It Away”
After years of readying her solo debut, Chlöe’s first album will arrive in March, and “Pray It Away,” an ode to heading to church to shake off the energy of a romantic mistake, displays a greater confidence in personal craft that should excite longtime believers in the powerhouse vocalist. The harmonies on “Pray It Away” are downright gorgeous, even as Chlöe admits to unsavory thoughts and decisions — a gleeful juxtaposition of soulful R&B and pissed-off exclamations that the singer handles masterfully.
Zach Bryan feat. Maggie Rogers, “Dawns”
With his epic project American Heartbreak last year, Zach Bryan enjoyed the type of breakthrough year that Maggie Rogers, who issued her sophomore album Surrender, experienced three years earlier with her debut LP Heard It In a Past Life; the artists may be at slightly different chapters in their respective stories, but as two supremely gifted songwriters, a collaboration was always going to yield an interesting product. “Dawns” is delightfully haunted, a broken howl of a duet on which Bryan sounds lost as he navigates a breakup, and Rogers steadies his hand and centers the song’s intensity.
Lil Yachty, Let’s Start Here.
Let’s start here: Lil Yachty’s new album is not a rap project, even slightly. Those expecting the veteran hip-hop star to follow up his recent viral rap single “Poland” with a mainstream victory lap will be upended by this freaky, fuzzed-out psychedelic rock album, which Yachty created with a host of guitar-toting collaborators in an effort to capture his love of Pink Floyd. Somehow, the full-throttle detour completely works: Yachty’s warbling sounds natural over the swirling ‘70s-indebted production, and even when the instruments pile up, Let’s Start Here. never implodes, or bores the listener.
As the music industry evolves, so do expectations surrounding new music. With trends and listening patterns shifting at a break-neck pace, artists are expected to usher in each new project as a brand new “era,” creating a recursive loop of authenticity, followed by slight reinvention, followed by re-established authenticity.
But when Sam Smith reintroduces themselves on Gloria, the pop superstar’s long-awaited fourth studio album, it feels different. This is not a pop star merely trying to make headlines or fulfill a promise of something “new” — Gloria sounds like it’s coming from an artist who finally feels comfortable enough to take risks with their sound in the name of honesty.
For that reason, Gloria can sound a lot like whiplash. In one moment, you’re listening to a slowed-down, smooth R&B-tinged song about a selfish ex; in the next, the sonic landscape has shifted to reggae-pop, where Smith is singing frankly about sex and desire. Bouncing around from song to song with wildly different sounds, this LP refuses to be pinned down to any specific label of genre or lyrical atmosphere.
That spirit of eclecticism is not for its own sake; in creating a sound this varied, Smith is making a point. For the last decade of their career, Smith has often been perceived as the crooner-next-door: a soulful, comforting voice conveying their own heartbreak as a means of soothing their pain — and in the process, their fans’ as well.
But alongside that image has always been a sharper, more fun Smith, crafting dance-adjacent anthems of elation and anger and sex. Gloria is Smith’s proof of concept — they contain multitudes, not just the sad broken heart of the person from In the Lonely Hour.
To celebrate Gloria’s release, Billboard takes a closer look at each of the album’s 11 original tracks and ranks them (we’re not including the album’s “Hurting” or “Dorothy” interludes here — ranking two less-than-30 second tracks against the rest feels unfair). Check out our picks below:
P!nk dropped the dramatic video for “Trustfall” on Friday morning (Jan. 27), the pulsing title track to her upcoming ninth album. The clip opens with the solitary image of a person crouching on a cliff overlooking the ocean as the singer solemnly intones, “Are you gonna fall? Is someone supposed to catch you? Or do you catch yourself? There will be something worth falling for,” as the action shifts to a chill house party.
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The Georgia Hudson-directed visual then follows our young protagonist as she burns out into the night on a scooter in what appears to be an emotional state. The scene jumps to P!nk standing on the rooftop of the “Illusion Hotel,” where she sings, “Picture a place where it all doesn’t hurt/ Where everything’s safe and it doesn’t get worse/ Oh my, we see through bloodshot eyes.” As with most P!nk videos, there is some impressive dancing, with choreographer Ryan Heffington adding a layer of emotion to the tune’s message with midnight choreo in the middle of a darkened street that brings to life the mix of hope and fear in the lyrics.
The song, co-produced by Fred and Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid — who co-wrote it with the singer — features a driving EDM beat and emotionally fraught lyrics about pushing beyond your fears and putting faith in things you may not be able to see. “Close your eyes and leave it all behind/ Go where love is on our side, it’s a trustfall baby,” P!nk sings on the song’s chorus.
The journey ends with P!nk hugging the clip’s female co-star and offering the sage advice, “You’re s–t scared and your whole body is shaking… go in there and just f–ing do it. Just do it, whatever it is, and then boom, it’s gone. The fear is gone.”
P!nk’s upcoming studio album, also called “Trustfall,” is due out on Feb. 17 via RCA Records. So far the singer has released the undeniable bop “Never Gonna Not Dance Again” and announced the dates for her massive 21-city “Summer Carnival 2023” stadium tour featuring Brandi Carlile and new Rock and Roll Hall of Famers Pat Benatar & Neil Girlado on select dates and Grouplove and KidCutUp on all the shows.
Watch the “Trustfall” video below.
Taylor Swift pulled back the curtain on the making of her new video for “Lavender Haze” on Friday morning (Jan. 27), revealing in a tweet that the treatment for the Midnights opening track was the first one she wrote out of the three visuals she’s dropped so far from her latest album.
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“This one really helped me conceptualize the world and mood of Midnights, like a sultry sleepless 70’s fever dream. Hope you like it,” she wrote.
In a second tweet, Swift shouted out her “incredible” co-star Laith Ashley, the sultry model and trans activist who she said, “I absolutely adored working with.” The latter also included four behind-the-scenes photos from the shoot, including one of the singer sitting on the floor, and a bed, looking forlorn, dancing in a plume of purple smoke and checking out some shots on a monitor while surrounded by cast and crew.
Swifties have been eagerly anticipating the “Haze” video for months, ever since the “Bejeweled” visual premiered in late October. Swift shared the Cinderella-inspired “Bejeweled” clip just two weeks after dropping the video for the album’s No. 1 lead single, “Anti-Hero.”
The video for “Haze” — which was co-written by Swift, Jack Antonoff, actress Zoë Kravitz, Mark Anthony Spears, Jahaan Akil Sweet & Sam Dew — was also directed by the singer. It opens with Taylor waking up at midnight, naturally, staring at the ceiling while listening to vinyl, burning incense and tracing the outline of the universe on the back of her Ashley’s back. The scene then explodes into Swift dancing through a purple haze and lounging in a retro 70s living room, where she crawls across a carpet blooming with, obviously, lavender.
Check out Swift’s tweets and the “Haze” video below.
This was the first video I wrote out of the 3 that have been released, and this one really helped me conceptualize the world and mood of Midnights, like a sultry sleepless 70’s fever dream. Hope you like it 😁https://t.co/auFTSVBP0A— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) January 27, 2023
