Rock & Pop
Just after POW reached their first anniversary, the rock-inspired K-pop boy band dropped a new EP, Boyfriend, whose lead single title track paid homage to one of the scene’s favorite artists — pop-punk princess Avril Lavigne.
For “Boyfriend,” the quintet reinterpreted Avril’s 2007 single “Girlfriend,” the Canadian superstar’s first No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and one of the year’s biggest tracks. POW kept the original’s stomping production and undeniably catchy chorus intact for the hybrid track with a new mix of Korean and English lyrics.
POW members Jungbin, Yorch, Hyunbin, Dongyeon and Hong tell Billboard that the superstar played a significant role in their musical backgrounds and made a song like “Boyfriend” happen.
“We’ve loved band sounds and Avril Lavigne’s songs were always on our playlist,” the group says. “We think she was the first to show how punk can be so appealing in pop music. We’re grateful she made it possible for us and so we’ve worked hard to release ‘Boyfriend.’”
“For this remake, I listened to all of Lavigne’s albums,” adds POW eldest member Yorch. “I was drawn to her timeless drum sounds and couldn’t get over the rawness and cool beat of the drums. I recently got an electric guitar and she’s opened my eyes to acoustic real sound. And, it’s something K-pop should also look out for.”
When honoring both the sound and aesthetics from Avril’s debut in 2002, the A&R for POW’s record label, GRID Entertainment, saw their work as helping connect K-pop more extensively to music culture today.
“We believe that youth culture is the essence of mainstream K-pop,” a representative from GRID’s A&R says. “Rebellious, grunge-like, and youthful innocence defines K-pop and POW’s music is grounded in real rock and band sounds. It still feels like the 2000s era, a period where analog and digital collide. That is why we find Avril Lavigne’s music relevant, powerful and resonating with people in their teens, 20s, and 30s. It’s her greatest strength and the reason her music inspires us for interpretation.”
From bands like POW, SEVENTEEN and Stray Kids to solo superstars like BoA and former LOONA members Yves and Heejin, here is a collection of K-pop stars who have expressed their admiration for Avril Lavigne.
POW
Image Credit: Courtesy Grid Entertainment
The final album from Canadian singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot, who died May 1 at age 84, will be released on July 14.
At Royal Albert Hall is a double album that was recorded live in concert at the legendary London venue on May 24, 2016. It’s Lightfoot’s fourth live album, following a 1962 release, Two Tones at the Village Corner; Sunday Concert (which reached No. 143 on the Billboard 200 in 1969); and All Live, a 2012 release.
At Royal Albert Hall is described in a press statement as “an unembellished live mix of that night’s performance, without edits, overdubs, remixing, or re-sequencing. It captures every song performed in the order they were played, down to the encore by Gordon and his band – Rick Haynes on bass, Barry Keane on drums, Mike Heffernan on keys, and Carter Lancaster on guitar.”
It is being released via Linus Entertainment, the Canadian independent label that released Harmony, Lightfoot’s last studio album with his band, in 2004. (A subsequent studio album, Solo, did not feature his band.)
The upcoming, 26-track album features six of Lightfoot’s 11 Billboard Hot 100 hits, including all four of his top 10 hits: “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Sundown,” “Carefree Highway” and “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” It also has his Hot 100 hits “Rainy Day People” and the exquisite “Beautiful” and includes “Early Morning Rain,” a Hot 100 hit that Lightfoot wrote in 1965 for Peter, Paul & Mary.
The collection also features songs that have never previously appeared on a live album, including “The Watchman’s Gone,” “Sea of Tranquility,” “Now and Then,” “All the Lovely Ladies,” “Drifters,” “Beautiful,” “Did She Mention My Name,” “Sweet Guinevere,” “Never Too Close,” “Don Quixote,” “Minstrel of the Dawn,” “I’d Rather Press On” and “Waiting for You.”
In the weeks prior to his death, Lightfoot reportedly insisted that this live album be released as soon as possible. He approved the cover artwork and made it clear that no changes were to be made to the recording.
Lightfoot’s songs have been recorded by Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, Eric Clapton, Barbra Streisand and hundreds of other artists.
Lightfoot was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2012. He won 13 Juno Awards in his native Canada, capped by his induction into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1986. He won four Juno Awards for male vocalist of the year (1971-73 and 1975) and two for composer of the year (1973 and 1977). Lightfoot was nominated for four Grammys (but never won) — best folk performance for Did She Mention My Name (1968), best pop vocal performance, male for “If You Could Read My Mind” (1971) and song of the year and best pop vocal performance, male for “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” (1976).
The esteem with which Lightfoot was held was reflected in tweets and other messages that were released following his death. Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wrote: “We have lost one of our greatest singer-songwriters,” he states. Lightfoot “captured our country’s spirit in his music – and in doing so, he helped shape Canada’s soundscape. May his music continue to inspire future generations, and may his legacy live on forever. To his family, friends, and many fans across the country and around the world: I’m keeping you in my thoughts at this difficult time.”
Neil Young, Billy Joel, Bryan Adams, Brian Wilson, Belinda Carlisle and more also weighed in with thoughtful messages.
“Gordon was a great Canadian artist,” wrote Young, a fellow Canadian. “A songwriter without parallel, His melodies and words were an inspiration to all writers who listened to his music, as they will continue to be through the ages. There is a unique and wonderful feeling to Gordon’s music. Lightfoot is a Canadian legend.”
Joel wrote: “Sad morning over here. Rest easy Gordon Lightfoot. So sad to hear of the death of Gordon Lightfoot. He was a lifelong musical hero of mine…”
“This one is really hard to write,” read a statement from Adams, another Canadian musician. “Once in a blue moon you get to work and hang out with one of the people you admired when you were growing up. I was lucky enough to say Gordon was my friend and I’m gutted to know he’s gone. The world is a lesser place without him. I know I speak for all Canadians when I say: thank you for the songs Gordon Lightfoot. Bless your sweet songwriting heart, RIP dear friend.”
Here’s the complete track listing for At Royal Albert Hall:
Disc One
“The Watchman’s Gone”“Sea of Tranquility”“Now and Then”“All the Lovely Ladies”“Drifters”“A Painter Passing Through”“Christian Island”“Rainy Day People”“Shadows”“Beautiful”“Carefree Highway”“Did She Mention My Name”“Ribbon of Darkness”“Sundown”
Disc Two
“Sweet Guinevere”“The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”“Never Too Close”“Don Quixote”“Minstrel of the Dawn”“I’d Rather Press On”“Let It Ride”“If You Could Read My Mind”“Restless”“Baby Step Back”“Early Morning Rain”“Waiting for You”
Actress and singer/songwriter Rita Wilson and Grammy-nominated Latin pop star Sebastián Yatra have teamed up to record the new track “Til You’re Home” for the upcoming film A Man Called Otto starring Wilson’s husband Tom Hanks.
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“I am extremely honored by Rita Wilson’s invitation to join her on ‘Til You’re Home’ for the A Man Called Otto soundtrack,” Yatra said in a statement. “The story behind the film is heartwarming and moving and I was inspired to convey that emotion in this song. Overall, this project has been very inspiring and I’m proud to be a part of it.”
“Til You’re Home” was co-written by Wilson and Grammy-nominated songwriter/producer David Hodges. Its co-producers include Wilson and Grammy winner Matt Rollings. The song, with its warm, inviting vocals over a piano, is already receiving recognition, as it was nominated for best song in a film (independent) at the 2022 Hollywood in Music Media Awards.
The collaboration is a first for Wilson and Yatra, which was sparked after the director of A Man Called Otto, Marc Forster, asked Wilson to write a song for the film.
“I was very humbled and grateful for the opportunity, but also made him promise to be honest with me if he didn’t want to use the song. As the producer of the film, my first allegiance is to the film and to the director’s vision,” Wilson said. “David Hodges and I had written together before and have always been like-minded musically and lyrically. A lot of the inspiration began with David Magee’s script. This is a movie about love, the depths of love and how love continues even after a person leaves this earth,” she continued.
“There are two LatinX characters in the film – I wanted to find a way to bring them into the song,” Wilson added. “I envisioned it as a duet… I have loved Sebastián Yatra’s voice since hearing him in Encanto, and he felt like the perfect person to do it. We were incredibly lucky he said ‘yes’ and all the planets aligned.”
A Man Called Otto — which hits theaters on Christmas Day — tells the story of Otto Anderson (Hanks), someone who no longer sees purpose in life after losing his wife. He plans to end it all, but his plan is derailed when a young family moves next door and he meets his match in the character Marisol, who challenges Anderson to see life through a different lens, leading to a friendship that changes his life for the better.
The A Man Called Otto soundtrack album, featuring composer Thomas Newman’s score and “Til You’re Home,” will be released Dec. 30 via Decca Records.
Watch the “Til You’re Home” video below.
Singer Shay Mooney of Dan + Shay is looking good and feeling even better. The 30-year-old Arkansas native is down more than 50 pounds on his fitness journey. He stopped by with his bandmate Dan Smyers on the TODAY show on Wednesday (Nov. 30) to perform and discuss what the duo has been up to, and shared his inspiration for losing weight.
The topic came up when TODAY‘s Craig Melvin pointed out the band’s new look, joking that Mooney and Smyers looked like they had “dropped half of Dan and half of Shay.”
Melvin then wanted to know what drove Mooney’s weight loss journey.
“I gotta stand next to this guy all of the time,” the singer began, gesturing to his partner. “I had this moment where I was just not feeling healthy. It wasn’t necessarily for my appearance, but it was to feel healthy. And I’m down about 53 or 54 pounds.”
Melvin complimented Mooney, saying, “Well, you were handsome and sexy before.”
This isn’t the first time Mooney has addressed his weight loss. In October, he took to his Instagram story, telling his followers that he had lost nearly 50 pounds in five months.
“Thank you guys so much for all your kind words about me looking healthy,” he wrote at the time. “Really means a lot. Been a little over 5 months, I believe, and I’m down almost 50lbs.”
But what’s the secret?
Mooney added at the time that he’s been eating clean, not drinking alcohol, and walking 7 miles a day with some weight lifting included. “That’s it!” he concluded. “I completely changed my lifestyle and I’ve never felt better physically, mentally, and spiritually.”
Watch Dan + Shay’s TODAY show interview above.
Colson Baker, better known as Machine Gun Kelly, released the title track from his semi-autobiographical movie Taurus on Wednesday (Nov. 23). The flick features MGK in the lead role under his birth name. The 32-year-old plays a troubled artist on the rise searching for the spark that will inspire his next record.
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“Fighting with myself so I can’t help that I’m competitive/ This movie is my life but I still remain uncredited,” he raps on the track. “I don’t care how big I get, I still remain unedited/ I built this from the ground up, y’all just living it.”
The film, written and directed by Tim Sutton, also stars Kelly’s fiancée Megan Fox, as well as Maddie Hasson, Demetrius “Lil Meech” Flenory, Ruby Rose, Scoot McNairy, Lil Tjay and “Glass House” collaborator Naomi Wild. It is currently available in select theaters and on demand.
On Sunday, MGK won favorite rock artist at the 2022 American Music Awards, saying during his acceptance speech: “There have been some people in the rock community who have called me a tourist, but they’re wrong. I’m a rocket man,” he proclaimed.
Additionally, he received his first Grammy nomination last week, earning a best rock album nod for Mainstream Sellout, which includes the singles “Maybe” and “Emo Girl” with Willow Smith. The album was his second straight to top the Billboard 200.
Check out the “Taurus” video below.
Members of Duran Duran teased a 2023 tour, saying they would return to the U.S. and Europe, and lead singer Simon Le Bon revealed his favorite U.S. venue of all time.
In an onstage chat at Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre on Thursday (Oct. 27), before premiering their docu-concert film, A Hollywood High, the British new wave legends — Le Bon, keyboard player Nick Rhodes, bassist John Taylor and drummer Roger Taylor — confirmed they will be back on the road next year.
“We are going to be touring again next year,” John Taylor said. “Nothing is confirmed yet, but we will be coming back to the Los Angeles area. We are going to be in Europe, we are going to be in the U.K.”
Roger Taylor added that the band will hit “all the cities that we didn’t do in the U.S.”
Duran Duran has kept up a busy touring schedule in 2022, playing 35 dates including Midsummer at Skansen near Stockholm and Sommerstemning Lillestrøm near Olso and headliner performances at Tuscany’s famed La Prima Estate Festival near Lido di Camaiore and a special one-night engagement at Caledonian Stadium in Inverness, Scotland.
The band spent August touring U.S. arenas, including a stop at Madison Square Garden in New York on Aug. 25, and an epic three-night run at the Hollywood Bowl for the release of their fifteenth studio album, Future Past.
The band is slated to perform a Halloween show on Monday at the Wynn Las Vegas’ Encore Theatre but would not reveal their costumes — though they did rule out dressing as Santa Claus (Rhodes), an M&M (John Taylor) or a jelly fish (Le Bon). Rhodes said his recent trip to a costume store left him “quite cross” because it was dominated with Christmas wear. “All the fabulous creatures were gone,” Rhodes said.
Responding to an audience member question, Rhodes said the band may also release their next album, Reportage, in 2023. “It needs a little work, but it’s possible,” he said.
On Thursday, Duran Duran celebrated Le Bon’s birthday (which is also his father’s) with the movie premiere audience — which sang happy birthday to him before the 75-minute film screened in Dolby Vision-Atomos. The film delves into the band’s early history and connection with Los Angeles to set up a performance earlier this year on the rooftop of the Aster, a private members club in Hollywood. While the group performs at sunset a drone captures sweeping shots in the background of the Hollywood sign and the Capitol Building, which at one point during the show was lit up in the yellow and light blue of Ukraine’s flag in a show of support for the nation’s effort to repel an invading Russia.
The band confirmed that in its four-decade history it had never performed a show on a rooftop, but that it made more sense during pandemic. “We kind of had to be talked into it,” John Taylor said, noting that the band initially planned to perform on a flatbed truck driving along Sunset Boulevard to promote their three-date Los Angeles swing. But that “started getting problematic,” Taylor said. “There was a point where there was a slope. And we were like, ‘How are we going to keep the drums on this?’”
Duran Duran said that the rooftop gig wasn’t intended initially to be turned into a film. “We document a lot of what we do, and it generally just goes into the archive and nobody every sees it,” John Taylor said. The show “was essentially a showcase to launch the American tour. And the fact that we didn’t know we were making a movie, you get an authenticity that you wouldn’t get if we knew we were making a film.”
Roger Taylor said that co-director Gavin Elder “kind of snuck up on us with this film. He didn’t’ really tell us he was making a movie … and [as a result] it’s very real.”
The film hits theaters in the U.S. and around the world on Nov. 3.
While the rooftop was a new special memory for the band, when asked by an audience member what was their favorite U.S. venue of all time, Le Bon enthusiastically endorsed Denver’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre. “You go there, and you look at it and it looks like some ancient alien, space-faring race had just dumped this spaceship there a million years ago,” he said, “and we turned it into a music venue.”
Additional Reporting by Dave Brooks
Last Wednesday (Oct. 19), Billboard sat down with singer, songwriter and humanitarian Julian Lennon to discuss his new music video for the song “Lucky Ones,” The White Feather Foundation, and more. The video, which premiered wide on Monday (Oct. 24), lives at the intersection of art, technology and beauty, depicting a love for music that brings humans from different cultures together as they take steps to nurse our environment back to health.
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“Lucky Ones” was directed by David Dutton and created using Artificial Intelligence (AI), Disco Diffusion and Stable Diffusion. The team started by using Google Notebook Colab to write AI code to the footage they shot and animated on a green screen.
When asked how he decided to use Artificial Intelligence, Dutton told Billboard, “The choice to use AI wasn’t just an experiment to make something viscerally stunning (though we think it is!), but a tool to afford our grand vision we had for this music video. It’s amazing how we were able to enhance the visual narrative with descriptive words. The technology is ground breaking and changing every week. It’s exciting to see what creatives will do next.”
In 2007, Lennon founded The White Feather Foundation to address environmental and humanitarian issues. It was created with the intent to work with partners worldwide to raise funds for the betterment of all life and to honor those who have made a difference. Over the years, he has dedicated his time to working on creative projects across mediums such as music, photography, documentaries, children’s books and more, while donating the majority of his profits to the foundation.
“Lucky Ones” is the single currently at radio on Julian Lennon’s most recent full-length, Jude. The album was released after the artist’s 11-year hiatus from releasing new music.
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