Rock
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This year’s inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame all gave heartfelt speeches from the stage of Los Angeles’ Microsoft Theater detailing what the honor meant to them. And when a number of the Class of 2022 stopped backstage to Billboard’s one-on-one booth, they were able to share even more.
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Duran Duran
Before speaking with Billboard’s, the band stopped in the general press room where Duran Duran lead singer Simon LeBon talked about how he felt reading former bandmate Andy Taylor’s letter on stage about having stage four prostate cancer — a diagnosis that had not been previously made public. “It is devastating news to found out that a colleague — not a colleague, a mate, a friend — is not going to be around for very long,” LeBon said. “It is absolutely devasting. We love Andy dearly. I’m not going to stand here and cry. It wouldn’t be appropriate, but that’s what I feel like.”
On stage, LeBon delivered an emotional take on the band’s 1993 hit, “Ordinary World,” which he co-wrote about trying to cope with the death of his best friend. He told Billboard even nearly 30 years later, the song takes him back every time he sings it. “I think of my dear friend Dave Miles and what it means to me to be able to free myself of his death. That’s what the song was,” he says. “I was imprisoned by my feelings about him. I couldn’t continue on. I couldn’t develop. That song was a way of freeing myself. A way of saying goodbye, letting something go. That is in my heart every time I sing it.”
Duran Duran won the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame fan vote in April garnering nearly a million votes from fans. The support of their Duranies means “everything,” says keyboardist Nick Rhodes. Bassist John Taylor, who befriended Rhodes when Taylor was 12 and Rhodes was 10, says the band can still relate. “We were fans. Not just music buyers. Nick and I used to go hang out backstage, listen to the band do their sound check,” he says. “We love the fan culture. We love identifying with fans through music, so we’ve always had a love for our followers. We get them. We are them.”
This year’s class is one of the most musically varied in the Rock Hall’s history and each member of the band named a different honoree when asked whom they would most like to collaborate with. For LeBon, it was Terry Lewis & Jimmy Jam. Roger Taylor chose Judas Priest, Rhodes picked Dolly Parton and John Taylor selected Annie Lennox. Rhodes came up with the perfect solution: “The thing to do would be to get us and Judas Priest to do the track together and Dolly and Simon to sing with Jam & Lewis producing.”
Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo
November is a big month for Pat Benatar and Neil Giraldo. Not only did the couple, who celebrated their 40th anniversary this year, get inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but on Nov. 22 their newest project, Invincible–The Musical, will premiere at the Wallis’ Bram Goldsmith Theater in Beverly Hills (it runs through Dec. 18). They began working on the play, which is a retelling of Romeo & Juliet through the pair’s catalog and new songs, five years ago. The pandemic ended up providing a burst of creativity. “We had done four stage readings prior to the pandemic,” Benatar says. “At first it seemed like the momentum was going to be lost, but it turned out that being home and not touring gave us so much time to work on it. It wound up being something really great and when we finally did come back together to work, we were so much further ahead. That’s why we’re in full production right now.”
For the couple, writing songs is one of the few things they do apart — at least in the early stages. “I write mostly on piano,” Giraldo says. “Sometimes I start with words, sometimes I start with a title or a chorus, and I hand it off to Patricia. Then she adds to that and I go, ‘Oh my God, that’s great,’ and that inspires me. So I do more and then she hears what I do and goes, ‘Oh my god, that’s great.’ That’s how it goes.”
“We don’t really write in the same room at the same time,” Benatar continued. “We take pieces of things. If I have a story that I’m thinking of, I give it to him and he puts music to it. It goes back and forth and we don’t do it at the same time until we get further along and then we come together with our individual ideas and put them together.”
Lionel Richie
As one of several of the inductees who performed their songs at the event, Lionel Richie had the crowd on its feet and dancing during a joyous version of his signature hit “All Night Long.” As he told Billboard, he has reached a place in his life and career that is all about uniting people. “Do you know how wonderful it is to walk into a room and people start smiling?” he says. “ I’m not playing. I’m walking into a dinner, I’m walking into a restaurant, I’m walking my kids to school. What I’m saying is I don’t know how you get this blessed, but it’s a moment in time when you realize the songs have translated over into this thing called love.”
He touched on another love: country music. It’s been 10 years since Richie released Tuskegee, his wildly successful album reimagining his greatest hits as duets with country artists including Tim McGraw, Kenny Chesney and Jason Aldean. Richie, who also wrote Kenny Rogers’ smash, “Lady,” says he promises his own country record of new music is coming. “Country is so solid with me and the answer is it will happen,” he says. “I’m a gigantic procrastinator, so [when] it hits me over the head or runs over me is when I go, ‘Ok, I’ll get on it,’ but [my manager] has been pushing me. Tell Nashville it’s coming. It won’t be too long. I promise.”
The Eurythmics
Dave Stewart and Annie Lennox wore identical black suits in an intentional homage to the Eurythmics‘ early days. “All through the years, Dave and I, especially with [1983 breakthrough hit] ‘Sweet Dreams,’ we had very small budgets. We didn’t have any budget, actually,” Lennox says. “We’d buy second-hand things and put them together. We wore the suits at the very beginning with ‘Sweet Dreams.’ There was a sense for us of being equals, of being like twins. There was something about the unit of being one and one makes three. It was always what we felt. I always loved it because it wasn’t an overtly feminist statement at the time, but nevertheless it gave me permission not to have to be a pretty kind of accessory. That was where it came from.”
Added Stewart, “There was a conscious decision to try and step away from anything that was happening at all and make ourselves like a single unit. United front.”
The duo also performed at their induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame earlier this year (postponed from 2020), but say they can go years without playing together. When they do, muscle memory kicks in. “We’ve played so much in the past, we know instinctively, ‘OK, this is this song, we can do this,’” Stewart says.
But any thoughts of reuniting for a tour are not realistic, Lennox clarifies. “There’s always a certain joy that does come from performance and all singers’ bodies are their instruments and, for me, I actually did have a quite serious thing happen in my back,” she says. “I have certain health issues and the thought of doing a long tour is really arduous. In my time in life, it’s like, ‘What’s best to do?’ We do enjoy playing together. I very much enjoy playing with Dave. He’s great. One of the best musicians in the world.”
For Lennox, preparing for the energetic Rock Hall performance helped pull her out of pandemic doldrums. “I kind of lost a lot of my will to live,” she says. “I’m kidding. I just had to say that. Throughout the pandemic, I just didn’t feel like going out. I didn’t feel like exercising, but this gave me a motivation to go back and get fit again, which was a great bonus for me.”
Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis
Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis have more No. 1s on Billboard charts than any other songwriting and production team — and they aren’t slowing down. The pair are at work on Volume 2, their follow up to to 2021’s Jam & Lewis, Volume 1, which paired them with Mariah Carey, Mary J. Blige, Toni Braxton and more.
They wouldn’t spill any names for Volume 2 just yet, but from their Rock Hall class, the two acts they’d most like to collaborate with are Lennox and Duran Duran, “because we just had a discussion with them about ‘Hungry Like the Wolf’ influencing [Janet Jackson’s] ‘Escapade,’” Jam said.
Friends since their teens, Jam and Lewis have always operated on a handshake deal and split everything 50/50. “We don’t really worry about the money or the budgets or any of that kind of stuff, it’s just about the creativity,” Jam says. “We’re free to individually do what we want to do…Sometimes there will be a song that came out on the radio and it sounds great and I’ll be like, ‘Terry, when did you do that?’ But I got 50 % of it, so it doesn’t matter and it eliminated about 99% of anything creatively that we could ever disagree about… It’s not my way or his way, it’s the best way.”
On Saturday night (Nov. 5), the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted its 2022 class in grand fashion. Inductees included Dolly Parton, Eminem, Pat Benatar & Neil Giraldo, Duran Duran, Eurythmics, Lionel Richie and Carly Simon. Judas Priest and Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis are also joining the Rock Hall with the “award for musical excellence.”
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And while little was known about what Eminem in particular would do to commemorate his induction — as is expected from the reserved rapper — the surprises, plural, made for an even more impactful showing.
Longtime friend and collaborator Dr. Dre had the pleasure of inducting Eminem, recalling the first time Jimmy Iovine called to let him know that Eminem was a white guy. “That completely f—-d me up,” said Dre with a laugh.
He continued to recount how nearly everyone tried to discourage him from working with the then-unknown rapper, saying no one believed or saw the vision. “I knew that his gifts were undeniable,” Dre affirmed. “Each of us was what the other one needed — and I was willing to bet my entire career on it.”
As Dre said, Eminem “brought hip-hop to middle America.” In doing so, he became one of the best-selling and most celebrated rappers in music, evidenced by the Rock Hall video montage that included clips from Adele, Elton John, Rihanna and more all praising his unmatched skills.
There was only one way to follow such a hefty induction, and that was with an even meatier performance. Em delivered just that, ripping through hits like “My Name Is,” “Forever,” “Not Afraid” and more — while also featuring unexpected guests from Steven Tyler to Ed Sheeran.
“I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” said Eminem following his set. “One, I’m a rapper; two, I almost died from an overdose; and three, I really had to fight my way through… I’m a high school drop out with a hip hop education.”
The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony will air on Nov. 19 on HBO.
On Saturday night (Nov. 5), the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inducted its 2022 class that included singer-songwriter great Carly Simon. Following an induction and performance from Sara Bareilles, Olivia Rodrigo made an appearance to deliver a theatrical and passionate take on Simon’s hit “You’re So Vain.”
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In the video montage honoring Simon (who was unable to attend the ceremony), Taylor Swift even called “Vain” “the best song that’s ever been written… that is the best way anyone has addressed a breakup, it’s amazing.”
Wearing stockings and a gray dress, Rodrigo skipped on stage during the sing-songy chorus, giving a performance so convincing it was as if she had written the 50-year-old song herself.
“You’re So Vain” topped the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks. It’s Simon’s only No. 1 on the tally. Bareilles performed “Nobody Does It Better,” which hit No. 2 on the Hot 100.
The 2022 ceremony is the first time in the Hall’s 37-year history that six female acts — Benatar, Parton, Simon, Cotten, Robinson and Annie Lennox (as part of Eurythmics) — were inducted in one class.
The 2022 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, which took place this year in Los Angeles, will air Nov. 19 on HBO.
Andy Taylor was expected to join his former bandmates tonight (Saturday, Nov. 5) at Duran Duran’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Los Angeles. However, after performing a medley of their hits, current members Simon LeBon, John Taylor, Nick Rhodes and Roger Taylor took to the podium and explained his absence.
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“Four years ago, Andy was diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer,” LeBon said, breaking the news. He read a portion of a letter from Taylor, who had hoped to join the band on stage for the first time in 17 years but his health did not allow him to travel from Ibiza.
Taylor left the band in 1986. He rejoined in 2001 and played guitar on 2004’s Astronaut before leaving again in 2006.
Below is his letter in full.
Dear Simon, John, Roger, Nick, my fellow inductees and countrymen
I wanted to send a personal note to pass along my sincerest respect to you all for what’s been an amazing career, and to also share what has happened to me.
Firstly, can I say what an absolute honour it was to be nominated let alone be inducted into the RRHOF. There’s nothing that comes close to such recognition. I’m proud of everything we’ve achieved together and of the way you have continued. As a guitar player in a progressive band from the synth days of the early eighties, literally from the day I met Nick, John, Simon and Roger they truly valued the contribution of a rather noisy, versatile Northern brat. We all grew up on the same vinyl records and live gigs, from David Bowie to Roxy Music, The Sex Pistols and of course CHIC. I could go to all those places as a player and developed a hybrid guitar style that fitted this amazing concept OF A BAND…
I loved going into the studio and recording our material; nobody else sounded like us. We were ripe to absorb what was the art of analogue recording, but with some different kit, Nick’s artful obsession with synth technology was something I’d never seen before and I was introduced to layers. Because we were instinctively the right fit, we evolved very quickly, writing RIO as our second album with the confidence our very early success with ‘Girls On Film’ and ‘Planet Earth’ inspired.
You can dream about what happened to us but to experience it, on one’s own terms, as mates, was beyond incredible.
I would like to thank each of my brothers in this great band.
My family: my incredibly sane wife of 40 years – Tracey – my amazing children, Andy, Georgie, Bethy and Izzy, not forgetting my grandson Albie, who’s probably online listening or on Fortnite!!!
The original believers: Paul and Michael Berrow, Dave Ambrose, Terry Slater, Rob Hallett.
The Producers: Colin Thurston, Alex Sadkin, Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers – I’ve also really dug the work with Mark Ronson – I particularly admire ‘All You Need Is Now’, that’s a DD melody if ever I heard one.
Thanks also to Merck, Andrew and Wendy.
Now for the bad blood, well the good news is that there is none, just pure love and respect for everything we wrote, recorded and achieved together. What’s the point? There’s no stopping this 44-year thing called “Duran Duran”.
Now to the reason I’m not here:
Just over 4-years ago I was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic prostate cancer. Many families have experienced the slow burn of this disease and of course we are no different; so I speak from the perspective of a family-man but with profound humility to the band, the greatest fans a group could have and this exceptional accolade.
I have the Rodgers and Edwards of doctors and medical treatment that until very recently allowed me to just rock on. Although my current condition is not immediately life threatening there is no cure. Recently I was doing okay after some very sophisticated life extending treatment, that was until a week or so ago when I suffered a setback, and despite the exceptional efforts of my team, I had to be honest in that both physically and mentally, I would be pushing my boundaries.
However, none of this needs to or should detract from what this band (with or without me) has achieved and sustained for 44 years. We’ve had a privileged life, we were a bit naughty but really nice, a bit shirty but very well dressed, a bit full of ourselves, because we had a lot to give, but as I’ve said many times, when you feel that collective, instinctive, kindred spirit of creativity mixed with ambition, armed with an über cool bunch of fans, well what could possibly go wrong?
I’m truly sorry and massively disappointed I couldn’t make it. Let there be no doubt I was stoked about the whole thing, even bought a new guitar with the essential whammy!
I’m so very proud of these four brothers; I’m amazed at their durability, and I’m overjoyed at accepting this award. I often doubted the day would come. I’m sure as hell glad I’m around to see the day.
All My Love
AT
Live. A note. A melody. A passing riff. It’s fleeting, one-of-a-kind artistry. Few know this better than Deadheads.
In the 160-odd years since audio was first recorded, many a musical legend has attempted to bottle the elusive magic of their live performances. Some successfully. Others less so. But few rock bands have produced anything as influential as Europe ‘72, the Grateful Dead’s triple live album, chronicling their wild ride through The Continent in April and May that year. Released 50 years ago on Nov. 5, 1972, it remains one of the most commercially successful albums by the Dead. It’s also perhaps their one release most responsible for The Live Cult of the Dead – the cultural movement that today is still very much alive and well. It’s the gateway drug for prospective Deadheads. While bootleg tape-traders can argue over which recording of what show during which era is the band’s best, Europe ’72 is their best-known and most widely acclaimed.
By the early 1970s, it had already been a long strange trip for the Grateful Dead. What started in 1964 as the trad-folk group Mother McCree’s Uptown Jug Champions quickly and temporarily became The Warlocks by 1964, before the core group—singer-guitarist Jerry Garcia, singer-rhythm guitarist Bob Weir, keyboardist Ron “Pigpen” McKernan, bassist-vocalist Phil Lesh and drummer Bill Kreutzmann—settled on Grateful Dead by ‘65. From their first show at Ken Kesey’s Acid Tests, the band was at the center of the 1960s psychedelic and counter-culture explosion in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Second drummer Mickey Hart and lyricist Robert Hunter joined in ’67, and the band then went on a run of classics, starting with the heavily experimental (1968’s Anthem of the Sun and 1969’s Aoxomoxoa) before moving out of SF to Marin County, Calif., to reinvent the Americana sound with their legendary psych-folk duo of Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty (both 1970).
It was an incredibly productive period for the Dead. In ’69, the band released their first live album, Live/Dead, for which the band’s audio engineer, Owsley “Bear” Stanley, adopted then-revolutionary new gear and techniques, including 16-track recording and a microphone splitter that cleaned up the sound. Recorded at SF’s Fillmore West and the Avalon, the LP introduced exploratory renditions of tracks like “Dark Star,” “St. Stephen” and “The Eleven.”
“Studio versions could never do those songs justice,” Kreutzmann said in his 2015 memoir, Deal.
In ’71, they followed up with a self-titled live album, lovingly known as Skull & Roses for its iconic cover art, which introduced tracks like “Bertha,” “Wharf Rat” and “Playing in the Band.” Then, in early ’72, Garcia dropped his eponymous debut solo album, shortly followed by Weir’s solo release, Ace. It all helped add to the Dead’s live repertoire.
A few more lineup changes occurred during this time: Hart began a three-year absence in ‘71, leaving Kreutzmann as the Dead’s sole drummer. Keyboardist Keith Godchaux joined in September ’71 to help prop up the 26-year-old Pigpen, who was by then in and out of the hospital with health problems. And finally, Godchaux’s wife Donna, a onetime session singer for Elvis Presley, joined as a backing vocalist. The stage was now set for Europe ’72.
“Magical stuff was happening in ’72,” longtime crew member/manager Steve Parish said in Amazon’s four-hour documentary A Long Strange Trip. “Stuff that to this day, I can’t explain. They we repushing us into the light, and the light was bright.”
On the Dead’s first extended European tour, the group played a total of 22 shows (most of them clocking in north of three hours) starting and concluding in London, and hitting Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Paris, Amsterdam, Munich and others in between. It was a 50-person traveling circus of family members, wives, girlfriends, friends, kids, roadies, dealers and hanger-ons. Live, the band leaned into the kaleidoscopic, yet dusty, psych-Americana sound of Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty with slithering guitar solos and rollicking rhythms. Each night’s full set was recorded with a future release in mind—the band was in debt to their label and the tour needed to be profitable. They jammed into the night aided by a bottle of distilled LSD smuggled across the Atlantic on the plane.
In the end, the best 17 tracks were chosen for Europe ’72, including the introduction of a handful of new tunes: “He’s Gone,” “Jack Straw,” “Brown-Eyed Women,” “Ramble on Rose” and “Tennessee Jed,” most of which never saw release in the form of a studio version, adding more value to Europe ’72 as a stand-alone album.
Extended, energetic improvisations abound, and post-tour overdubs eliminated most of the crowd noise (some new vocal takes were added, too). The tour de force is Garcia’s messianic closer, “Morning Dew,” recorded at the last show of the tour in London. It’s a Canadian folk tune, recounting a conversation between the last man and woman alive on earth following a nuclear apocalypse, but heavily interpreted by the Dead and Garcia: “Walk me out in the morning dew my honey,” he sings, his guitar gently reassuring, Pigpen’s organ lines floating beneath. “I’ll walk you out in the morning dew my honey. I guess it doesn’t really matter anyway.” Garcia reportedly played the version on the live album with his back to the crowd, tears running down his face.
Europe ‘72 was one of the first triple-record rock albums to be certified gold, and has since been certified double platinum. The Dead’s best-selling live album also marked a coda: the group’s final recording with Pigpen, who died the following year.
In 2011, all recordings from the tour were released as Europe ’72: The Complete Recordings—across 73 CDs.
And the legend roles on. After Garcia’s death, in 1995, the band’s various members carried the torch, performing their classics in too many incarnations to mention. In 2015, members of the Dead unexpectedly partnered with John Mayer for a new band, Dead & Co. Yes, “Your Body Is a Wonderland,” Rolex-collecting, Jessica Simpson-dating Hollywood pop-blues playboy John Mayer. At first, it was a very curious partnership. Many Deadheads were livid. Now, in hindsight, it feels like destiny. The band’s live shows over the past seven years have drawn millions and been positively embraced by Deadheads. Meanwhile, the band’s quarterly archival live release series, Dave’s Picks, have delivered their highest chart placements in recent years. And in summer 2023, the Dead & Co. will wrap up their run with a series of shows across North America. It’s one of the hottest tickets on earth.
But that won’t be the end of the Dead or their Cult of Live.
“Being alive, means continuing to change,” Jerry Garcia said in A Long Strange Trip. And The Dead never die.
Arctic Monkeys return to No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Rock & Alternative Albums chart dated Nov. 5 with the debut of their first album in four years, The Car.
In its first tracking week dated Oct. 21-27, The Car earned 38,000 equivalent album units, according to Luminate. The set is Arctic Monkeys’ third to top the chart, following 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel + Casino and 2013’s AM.
The Car also debuts at No. 1 on the Top Rock Albums and Top Alternative Albums rankings. Concurrently, The Car starts at No. 6 on the all-genre Billboard 200, tying AM for the band’s best rank and marking its fourth top 10, dating to its first, the No. 7-peaking Favourite Worst Nightmare, in 2007.
Two songs from the new album reach the multi-metric Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart. “I Ain’t Quite Where I Think I Am” debuts at No. 36 (1.9 million official U.S. streams) and “There’d Better Be a Mirrorball” re-enters at No. 39 (1.7 million).
The tracks concurrently place at Nos. 22 and 25, respectively, on Hot Alternative Songs, and “Quite” is bubbling under Billboard’s Adult Alternative Airplay chart.
In all, the band has three songs on Hot Rock & Alternative Songs and Hot Alternative Songs. “505,” the closing track on 2007’s Nightmare, is currently charting due to TikTok virality over the past few months, putting it at No. 10 on the latter and No. 13 on the former. In the Oct. 21-27 tracking week, “505” accumulated 4.7 million streams, down 3%.
As part of our annual Indie Now package, we asked notable figures in the independent scene to offer advice on how to succeed in the industry. Below, Illuminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzin talks to Billboard‘s Jason Lipshutz.
I think the label “DIY” is a little misleading — like you’re out on this island, fighting your way toward some sort of success or fame. To me, it’s really about doing it with all the people around you. The DIY community is what sends artists into the next levels of their careers, so it’s about surrounding yourself with people whom you believe in, who believe in you and want to support you. For me, that was mostly going to shows, meeting people who liked music that I liked [and] being open to new situations.
When you place yourself in a community, you learn about your own skill set and what other people are really good at — you realize you’re not an A-plus graphic designer but know how to record a band. Being able to produce and write with people comes naturally to me, and I like being around musicians, so it becomes this endless feedback loop of, “How can we help each other?”
Recording is more accessible than ever [right now] — if you have a laptop, or even an iPhone, you can do so much. It’s so easy to jump in with a limited set of tools, and the best way to get comfortable in that setting is to just do it over and over again: Practice, sit in your room with a guitar, record yourself, and listen back. Some of the music that I’m most blown away by is from high school kids with Ableton on their laptops, making crazy stuff. Or someone who went to a Goodwill, got a tape recorder and started there.
There’s a lot of talk on the internet now about the sustainability of the music industry — it’s hard to tour, and it’s often not fiscally rewarding while also taking a lot of time and energy. With live music feeling a little tenuous, I think DIY could come back stronger than ever because nothing beats a basement show. And that’s what will come back if middle-tier artists can’t afford to put on shows at a 500-capacity venue with sound and lights. We’ll get to go back to the basics of finding a warehouse and a community and feeding the scene.
This story will appear in the Nov. 5, 2022, issue of Billboard.
Get ready, North America — Paramore is coming. On Friday (Nov. 4), bandmates Hayley Williams, Taylor York and Zac Farro announced plans to embark on an arena tour in 2023, with shows in 26 cities across the United States and Canada.
The tour, simply titled Paramore in North America, kicks off in Charlotte, N.C., on May 23 — five days after the pop-punk group opens for Taylor Swift at one show on her recently announced Eras Tour — and ends in St. Paul, Minn., on Aug. 2 next year. Bloc Party, Foals, The Linda Lindas and Genesis Owusuare are slated to open for the band at select shows on the trek, which will also make stops at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Austin’s Moody Center, Los Angeles’ Kia Forum and more.
Tickets go on general sale at 10 a.m. local time next Friday (Nov. 11), and will be available on Paramore’s website. A presale for American Express cardholders will go live 10 a.m. local time on Wednesday (Nov. 9), meanwhile a general presale for verified fans starts at 8 a.m. local time the following day.
Fans have until Monday (Nov. 7) to register for both presales on Ticketmaster’s website. A portion of ticket sales for all North American shows will be donated to eco-conscious hunger relief nonprofit Support + Feed and environmental nonprofit REVERB.
The tour will follow the Feb. 10 release of Paramore’s sixth studio album This Is Why, the band’s first LP in almost six years. The record’s lead single — which doubles as the title track — dropped in September.
The “This Is Why” era comes after Paramore took a nearly five-year hiatus from releasing music and performing. The trio made their official return to touring this fall with a run of intimate North American shows, their first circuit since 2017’s After Laughter Tour.
See the full list of dates for Paramore’s 2023 North American tour below:
PARAMORE IN NORTH AMERICA TOUR DATES
Tue May 23 – Charlotte, NC – Spectrum Center*×
Thu May 25 – Atlanta, GA – State Farm Arena*×
Sat May 27 – Atlantic City, NJ – Adjacent Festival!
Tue May 30 – New York, NY – Madison Square Garden*×
Fri June 02 – Washington, DC – Capital One Arena*×
Sun Jun 04 – Cleveland, OH – Rocket Mortgage Fieldhouse*×
Mon Jun 05 – Indianapolis, IN – Gainbridge Fieldhouse*×
Wed Jun 07 – Detroit, MI – Little Caesars Arena*×
Thu Jun 08 – Toronto, ON – Scotiabank Arena*×
Sat Jun 10 – Columbus, OH – Schottenstein Center*×
Sun Jun 11 – Pittsburgh, PA – PPG Paint Arena*×
Tue Jun 13 – Orlando, FL – Amway Center*×
Wed Jun 14 – Hollywood, FL – Hard Rock Live*×
Thu Jul 06 – New Orleans, LA – Smoothie King Center+°
Sat Jul 08 – Fort Worth, TX – Dickies Arena+°
Sun Jul 09 – Austin, TX – Moody Center+°
Tue Jul 11 – Houston, TX – Toyota Center+°
Thu Jul 13 – Denver, CO – Ball Arena+°
Sun Jul 16 – San Diego, CA – Viejas Arena+
Wed Jul 19 – Los Angeles, CA – Kia Forum+
Sat Jul 22 – San Francisco, CA – Chase Center+
Mon Jul 24 – Seattle, WA – Climate Pledge Arena+°
Tue Jul 25 – Portland, OR – Veterans Memorial Coliseum+°
Thu Jul 27 – Salt Lake City, UT – Vivint Arena+°
Sat Jul 29 – Tulsa, OK – BOK Center+°
Sun Jul 30 – St Louis, MO – Enterprise Center+°
Wed Aug 02 – St. Paul, MN – Xcel Energy Center+°
*With Support Bloc Party
+With Support from Foals
°With Support from The Linda Lindas
×With Support from Genesis Owusu
!Festival Performance
It’s fitting that Phoenix’s live show, specifically on a temperate night at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall on Sept. 9, is buzzing with electric energy. After all, the lauded French band — consisting of members (and decades-long pals) Thomas Mars, Laurent “Branco” Brancowitz, Deck D’Arcy and Christian Mazzalai — had been waiting with bated breath and crossed fingers for this exact moment.
After a glittering showcase of the band’s beloved material — including the No. 6-charting Adult Alternative Airplay hit “Entertainment,” fan favorite “Too Young” from its self-titled debut LP and multiple cuts from the group’s Grammy-winning classic Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix — the quartet stripped things back for the live debut of “Winter Solstice,” a stark insight into Phoenix’s mindset amid a pandemic that left the members starving for connection. That outlook frames the band’s seventh studio album, Alpha Zulu, out now via Glassnote Records.
To be clear, Phoenix “didn’t want to make a cliché pandemic album” with Alpha Zulu. But when France was under lockdown due to COVID-19 and Mars was separated from his friends, musical bits acted as the band’s letters to each other. On the other side of the world away from Branco, Mazzalai and Deck, Mars penned and recorded stream-of-consciousness lyrics that would later become “Winter Solstice” to speak to the isolation he felt amid the wildfires in northern California. Out of this bleakness, the light that would inspire the rest of Alpha Zulu started to shine through.
“It sounds corny, but music became the way to communicate when we were separated. It was our way of saying we knew everybody was okay, but on standby,” Mars explains of the brooding, synth-driven track over a four-way Zoom call, accompanied by his bandmates. “We wanted something to happen in our lives, but the only thing that could happen was a good song and the possibility of playing it live someday.”
The quartet didn’t want to steep in the sorrow for too long. “After we recorded ‘Winter Solstice,’ we wanted to escape and think about a brighter future,” Branco adds. As lockdown restrictions across countries began to ease, hope started to break through the clouds. In between pockets of travel for Mars — “he could come back to Paris, but no more than a week or 10 days and had to rush back because of new waves in other parts of the world,” according to D’Arcy — Phoenix was feverish with inspiration when they finally were able to reconvene.
Hunkered down for weeks in a storage room-turned-studio located at Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs (“real studios are very boring,” says Branco), the musicians were immersed in both chaos and solitude, a combination that set their creativity aflame.
“We were surrounded by Napoleon’s throne and works from the medieval period and the second century. All this culture melting together in a sordid, empty museum with no one seeing us…it was a big mess!” Mazzalai explains with a certain glee. “But it was helpful to us. Very freeing and joyful, in a way.”
He further recalls, “We’ve never been that inspired, because Thomas was stuck in confinement during lockdown for many months in the United States. It was the first time we didn’t see Thomas for more than a month, so once he could travel to the studio after weeks of waiting, we produced more than ever. It was maybe the most creative time of our entire life.”
“The stillness made recording the album even more intense for us. The world was asleep, and that gave gravity to us and depth to the record,” Mars adds.
The trying conditions resulted in some of Phoenix’s brightest and most ambitious work to date. “After Midnight,” a cut from the top half of Alpha Zulu, sees the group tapping into a euphoria that leaves its listener equal parts jittery and energized; “Season 2” calls back to Phoenix’s classic — and infectious — use of wordplay (“giddy up, I’m bored”), while “Artefact” highlights the band’s consistent, artful use of synthesizers and lyrical repetitions, also seen in the tongue twisters on the album’s title track, “Alpha Zulu.”
For the first time, the band needed a friend to help bring one of its songs to life. On single “Tonight,” Phoenix enlists fellow indie pop heavyweight Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend to provide supporting vocals and a verse on the upbeat track. Marking the band’s first time collaborating with another artist, the band spent months cultivating a relationship with Koenig. At first, the uptempo track started off like any other Phoenix song, with the group jotting down lyric ideas on the makeshift studio’s whiteboard and assigning names to each of the song’s parts for easy swapping. But when the track’s second verse rolled around (“What if we last ’til it’s dawn like you promised me?/ Who let the boys spill their entrée?”), the band knew something — or rather, someone — was missing.
“The playfulness of the track reminded us of Ezra, so we had to call him. We were intimate enough with him that we knew the song was safe,” Mars says. “If it wasn’t good, we wouldn’t have to put it out or he could say no if he didn’t like it. It’s rare that we know people well enough to do that.”
To be let into Phoenix’s circle is a privilege not afforded to many. The group — friends since elementary school who have been in a band together for the past 25 years — still manages to maintain an unwavering chemistry without resorting to breaking up or bringing in new members. So what’s the secret? “The lead singer is not one of the brothers. If you look at every band where the lead singer is one of the brothers, they’re totally collapsing and hating each other,” the frontman jokes.
The true formula to Phoenix’s tight-knit nature resides in the most benign form of communism — each member of the band has a hand in all moving parts. “We share everything in four, in a very communist manner,” Branco explains. “Our music belongs to us because we control everything, from the publishing to the production, the four of us, equally. It’s the French motto ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’ (liberty, equality, fraternity).”
Whereas other bands might rely on the lead singer to craft lyrics or handle most of an album’s production, Branco insists It’s Never Been Like That for the French quartet: “There is not one of us that is more gifted than the other. There’s not that one genius songwriter and the others are just following. We are pretty average — or bad — when we are on our own, but when we add our forces, we produce a result that is better than the sum of our individual qualities. We know we need each other.”
The band’s unofficial member, Philippe Zdar, was also crucial to Phoenix’s friendship story. Alpha Zulu marks the first album the band has worked on without the guidance of the French music producer, who passed away in 2019 — the quartet touches on the producer’s passing in the LP’s stunning closer, “Identical.” The track, which also appears in Sofia Coppola’s (Mars’ wife) 2020 movie On the Rocks, serves double duty by shedding light on the band’s perception of life post-pandemic.
Speaking of Zdar’s role in “Identical,” Mars says the track “was the best way to end the album because he was the main thing that was missing in us working together. The song has the light at the end of the tunnel, which fits the pandemic. That’s the strong identity of the album. We’re trying not to be in denial of what happened or to wash it away. It’s a reminder that every album is a Polaroid of its time.”
Whereas Phoenix’s previous studio effort, 2017’s Ti Amo, saw the band tapping into Italo disco sounds and nostalgia sweeter than scoops of melted gelato, Alpha Zulu has no set purpose. There’s no obvious takeaway, just the unbridled “joy of creating things as different as possible from each other.”
The band’s message, however, has always remained the same — to infiltrate their listener’s most human senses to make them feel something at their core.
“The power of music…it’s like a charm or a spell. This magical trick that is so powerful that even us, the magicians, we don’t understand how it’s working,” says Branco. “That’s why we make music.”
Måneskin is all for keeping the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll alive — which is why the Italian rockers took issue with the MTV Video Music Awards censoring their performance back in August.
When Maneskin’s Victoria De Angelis suffered a wardrobe malfunction that left her chest exposed during their performance of the Alternative Airplay No. 1 hit “Supermodel,” the live broadcast cut away from the bassist to wide shots of the stage instead. In a new NME interview with De Angelis and frontman Damiano David published earlier this week, the duo shared that the censorship was a major disappointment to them as a band.
“It shows that there are still many, many prejudices towards rock bands and towards women,” David told NME. “There is a lot to work on and we try to do our part.”
The televised moment saw cameras at the awards show hastily panning away from the stage following De Angelis’ exposure and to an area containing empty seats; shortly after the moment, De Angelis went down into a pit of fans at the show to continue the performance.
“It’s sad, but it’s good that people then talk about it and think about it,” De Angelis added. “It’s stupid that there has to be this control and censorship over people’s bodies.”
On Sept. 6 — a week after the 2022 VMAs took place — MTV shared a “restored,” slightly less censored version of Måneskin’s performance. De Angelis’ wardrobe malfunction remains, though her bare chest is blurred in the final cut.
Revisit Måneskin’s performance of “Supermodel” at the 2022 MTV VMAs below.