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Carlos Santana likes to ascribe metaphors to his music. And in the case of his new album, Sentient, that would be floral arrangements.
“When I go to the lobby in hotels in Europe, they always have these incredible flower arrangements,” the San Francisco Bay Area-based guitar hero tells Billboard. “They hire some people to come in and arrange the flowers in the lobby. That’s how this album was made — that’s how I make all my albums. I feel like a florist who is trying to combine the right colors and textures and create a beautiful ornament. That’s what Sentient is, an ornament of flower arrangements — colors, passions, textures, emotions.”
Variety is certainly the hallmark of the 11-track set, which comes out March 28 and is the follow-up to 2021’s Blessings and Miracles. It includes three previously unreleased tracks, while the rest are remastered songs drawn from various points in Santana’s career, including collaborations with friends living (Smokey Robinson, Darryl “DMC” McDaniels and his wife Cindy Blackman Santana) and deceased (Michael Jackson, Miles Davis). The selections might appear random, but Santana promises there’s a unity when they’re brought together.
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“The theme of the story is to bring God out of people,” he explains. “There’s too much fear, there’s too much anger, too much harmony. There’s too much doubt, and the opposite of compassion. I’ve played music since the beginning — and now more than ever — to bring kindness, compassion, generosity, gratitude and divine attributes…elements to take make this world and life more delicious. I trust and believe that God wants something incredible for me to share with people, and that thing is to remind everyone that everyone is worthy of their own divinity and their own light. That’s the message.”
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He adds that featuring collaborations with some of his late friends (“Whatever Happens” from Jackson’s 2001 album Invincible, “Get On” and “Rastafario” with Davis from their collaborations with Italian pianist Paolo Rustichelli for his 1996 album Mystic Man) help illustrate that idea.
“Miles Davis is not here and Michael Jackson’s not here, but they’re in my heart, and it makes me very grateful,” Santana says. “I learned very well from them. I am one of them. It may sound a little this or that, but I’m immortal like them. Like Bob Marley and Bob Dylan, I am here to do the same thing they’re doing, which is to invite people to have a deep sense of self-worth, to look at yourself in the mirror and say ‘I am worth God’s grace. I can create blessings and miracles myself, with my grace.’ That’s the highest thing you do as a musician, to bring God out of people instead of the devil.”
Other tracks include “I’ll Be Waiting” from the Santana band’s Moonflower live album in 1977 and the title track from 1987’s Blues For Salvador, which netted Santana his first Grammy Award, for best rock instrumental performance, the following year. “Please Don’t Take Your Love,” meanwhile, is an earlier take of a track from Robinson’s 2009 album Time Flies When You’re Having Fun, while “Coherence” is a trio track with Blackman Santana and bassist Matt Garrison that’s intended as a preview of the drummer’s own next album.
Santana invokes Jackson again in an unreleased instrumental version of his “Stranger in Moscow,” which Santana recorded with Narada Michael Walden and his band during a club gig in San Rafael, Calif. “We played that on the spot, no rehearsal, and it felt really good,” Santana says. “I had been listening to that particular song for awhile. When I play ‘Stranger in Moscow’ I become Michael Jackson. My fingers become Michael Jackson; I was imagining how he would phrase, how he would sing it, so my guitar became his voice and I learned how to articulate the language, the phrasing. I learned all this from Aretha Franklin, because I play that album, Lady Soul, over and over. I play that album so much I learned the bass, the drums, how to hear her voice.”
After Sentient‘s release Santana will begin a nine-date Oneness Tour beginning April 16 in Highland, Calif., and wrapping May 1 at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. His next residency at the House of Blues Las Vegas runs May 14-25, and a European Oneness Tour leg begins June 9 in Poland and runs through Aug. 11 in Copenhagen.
Santana is working on another performance idea as well — a multi-day, multi-act worldwide festival with the utopian perspective of Woodstock. “With everything that’s happening with this planet, with fear of nuclear war and Korea and China and Russia, the Middle East, I want to create a global concert that goes around the world and (promotes) unity, harmony, oneness,” says Santana, who envisions sites such as San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, New York’s Central Park and Hyde Park in London. “It’ll keep going in Asia, Japan, Singapore, all the way to Australia and New Zealand and end up with a concert in Honolulu,” he says.
No dates or solid details have yet been determined, but Santana says he’s already reached out to some acts to participate, including Eric Clapton, Metallica, Earth, Wind & Fire and others. “Everybody I talked to, they want to do it,” he says. “It starts and begins with me. This is my vision. This is my aspiration, and I’m not afraid to manifest what I learned from Bill Graham and (Woodstock co-producer) Michael Lang and Clive Davis. I’ve learned from the best, and I believe it’s not impossible to create a global event of this magnitude…and celebrate, celebrate, celebrate. Instead of fear. Celebrate — with joy.”
One of the indisputable perks of being a rock star is the ability to rock out with other rock stars when they swing through your hometown. Just ask Paramore singer Hayley Williams, who hopped up on stage with the Deftones during their headlining set at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville on Wednesday night (March 26) to […]
Anthony Raneri says the person least surprised that his band Bayside is still around to celebrate its 25th anniversary may be the teenage version of himself, the one from Queens, NY, who knew he wanted to be a rock star.
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“I was just so sure it was gonna happen,” Raneri, 42, tells Billboard. “You could ask me (at a different age) and I would be shocked there was a version of me still doing this. But at 15 or something, I was just so sure. I started this band so young that reality never factored in. I was a kid. I was a dreamer. Bills weren’t part of my life. It was all hopes and dreams at that point. I was too young to know better. And now fast forward…and it’s actually happened.”
Raneri and Bayside — which still includes first-album member Jack O’Shea on guitar, with Nick Ghanbarian on bass since 2004 and drummer Chris Guglielmo since 2006 — will be celebrating the group’s overall 25th anniversary this spring with The Errors Tour. The three-leg outing kicks off March 29 in Buffalo, NY, and all but one of its 23 stops will be two-night affairs with completely different setlists; the first show will feature songs from Bayside’s first four albums, and the second from the subsequent five titles, leading up to last year’s There Are Worse Things Than Being Alive.
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“We conceptualized this years ago, and we decided the 25th anniversary was the right time to put it into place,” Raneri explains. “Every tour we try to shake things up a little bit. It can’t just be the same show all the time. At this point in our career, with the back catalog we have, so many singles over the years, it’s hard to get songs into the setlist. That means track eight on our first record or track five on our fifth record, when do you ever get to that? So this way, if we can dedicate an hour and a half to just the first four records and then the next night to the next five, we get to those deeper cuts and songs that have been left out, which makes it more interesting for us and, I think, for the fans.”
Not surprisingly, Raneri says preparations for the tour have been “very intense” for the quartet. In addition to its own choices Bayside solicited fan requests via social media, which yielded surprises such as “Indiana,” a B-side from 2014’s Cult that also appeared as a bonus track on a deluxe edition of the album.
“We’ve bought into the concept,” Raneri says. “The cool thing about our band, and something we’re so insanely lucky with, is that we can pull something like this off. There’s a lot of bands that exist that have as many records as we do that couldn’t dedicate nights of a tour to newer albums. But we’re lucky that people like and buy and still enjoy our new albums. Our anniversary doesn’t mean we have to go out and just play old records.”
Bayside has, of course, scored some must-play hits from its nine albums as well as EPs, including “Devotion and Desire” from its self-titled 2005 set and “Sick, Sick, Sick,” a top 40 Alternative Airplay chart hit from 2010’s Killing Time. “The second night might not have ‘Devotion and Desire,’” Raneri notes, “but ‘Sick, Sick, Sick,’ it’s crazy to think that’s in the second half of our career, and ‘Already Gone’ and ‘Go To Hell.’ I think there’s plenty to keep people happy either night, if you don’t come for both.”
Raneri feels he and his bandmates have become “more proficient” players during the intervening years, while diving deep into the catalog has given him a perspective on why Bayside has been able to maintain a loyal following for all this time.
“I just think there is an honesty in what bands from our world have always done that’s different than other genres,” he explains. “What we do, it’s not image stuff. With other genres, there’s a lot of things that are of their time. You look at A Flock of Seagulls or something like that, and it’s just so ’80s; they look like the time, they sound like the time, the lyrics are of the time. Same thing with hair metal: [Cinderella’s] ‘Hot and Bothered’ is a bad-ass song when you’re in high school, but when you’re 40 or 50 does it still connect like that? Do you still wear your hair like that? Do you still dress like that? Of course not. I think our scene, it’s earnest as a pillar of its identity. The emotions are more timeless and not as much about the moment the (songs) were made in.”
Raneri and company plan on adding to Bayside’s catalog soon. The group is concentrating on The Errors Tour for the time being, but the frontman promises that “the day after our big, final 25th anniversary show on Long Island (Sept. 26), I’m writing the new record, and that will be our main focus. All of next year we’ll be working on a new record.
“I always start with finding influences,” Raneri explains, “so I’m just listening to a lot of music, and I’m writing down ideas. When I hear a song that I think would be a cool inspiration for something, I write it down. I have notepads around my house with my ideas, notes apps in my phone, playlists that I’ve made of songs I want to take inspiration from for the next record. I’m not at a stage where I know what that inspiration turns into, but I’m shaping. It’s almost like I’m making this very large Pinterest board in my head, and then when it comes time to actually put pen to paper, I’ll have that board to reference.”
Bayside
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Bayside’s The Errors Tour itinerary includes:
(with Sincere Engineer)3/29 – Buffalo, NY @ Town Ballroom3/30 – Buffalo, NY @ Town Ballroom4/1 – Toronto, ON @ The Opera House4/2– Toronto, ON @ The Opera House4/4 – Cleveland, OH @ House of Blues4/5 – Cleveland, OH @ House of Blues4/6 – Chicago, IL @ House of Blues4/7 – Chicago, IL @ House of Blues4/9 – Detroit, MI @ Majestic Theatre4/10 – Detroit, MI @ Majestic Theatre
(with Smoking Popes)6/6 – Denver, CO @ Summit Theater6/7 – Denver, CO @ Summit Theater6/8 – Salt Lake City, UT @ The Depot6/9 – Salt Lake City, UT @ The Depot6/11 – Seattle, WA @ The Showbox6/12 – Seattle, WA @ The Showbox6/13 – Portland, OR @ Revolution Hall6/14 – Portland, OR @ Revolution Hall6/16 – San Francisco, CA @ August Hall6/17 – San Francisco, CA @ August Hall6/19 – Anaheim, CA @ House of Blues6/20 – Anaheim, CA @ House of Blues6/21 – Las Vegas, NV @ Fremont Country Club6/22 – Las Vegas, NV @ Fremont Country Club6/24 – Mesa, AZ @ The Nile6/25 – Mesa, AZ @ The Nile6/27 -Austin, TX @ Emo’s6/28 -Austin, TX @ Emo’s
(with The Sleeping)9/6 – Lake Buena Vista, FL @ House of Blues9/7 – Lake Buena Vista, FL @ House of Blues9/8 – Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade (Hell)9/9 – Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade (Hell)9/11 – Nashville, TN @ Main Stage at Eastside Bowl9/12 – Nashville, TN @ Main Stage at Eastside Bowl9/13 – Charlotte, NC @ The Underground9/14 – Charlotte, NC @ The Underground9/16 – Philadelphia, PA @ Brooklyn Bowl9/17 – Philadelphia, PA @ Brooklyn Bowl9/19 – New York, NY @ Irving Plaza9/20 – New York, NY @ Irving Plaza9/21 – Boston, MA @ Paradise Rock Club9/22 – Boston, MA @ Paradise Rock Club9/24 – Asbury Park, NJ @ Stone Pony9/25 – Asbury Park, NJ @ Stone Pony9/26 – Huntington, NY @ The Paramount
On May 16, The Weeknd will bring his album Hurry Up Tomorrow, which topped the Billboard 200, to the big screen as a suspense thriller. Tomorrow has precedents in many yesterdays: Artists have been making movies out of albums, partly to boost their sales, for decades. March 19 marked the 50th anniversary of the premiere of The Who’s Tommy. But The Who wasn’t first — and it certainly wasn’t the last.
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Anything You Want
“Arlo Guthrie is about to become The Thing to talk and write about,” trumpeted an ad in the Aug. 23, 1968, Billboard for the just-released Alice’s Restaurant movie based on his 1967 album of the same name. Soon, Guthrie’s name was littering the pages of Billboard, and a piece in the Oct. 18 issue said the film “sparked sales for the Reprise album … racking up $1 million sales.” A month later, the Nov. 15 issue showed the set at a new chart peak of No. 17 on the Billboard 200, two years after its release.
See It, Feel It, Buy It
Six years after The Who released Tommy, the British rockers followed it with a 1975 film starring Roger Daltrey as the titular pinball wizard. The Ken Russell movie was divisive: The March 29, 1975, Billboard ran two reviews. One praised it as a “gripping fantasmagoria,” while another panned it as a “travesty of worn-out symbolism and general tackiness.” The same issue also reported on “the record war between the original rock opera and the movie soundtrack,” which were on MCA and Polydor, respectively. Buyers bought in, pushing the soundtrack to No. 2 on the Billboard 200, above the original album’s No. 4 peak.
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Band From the ‘Club’
When the Bee Gees’ 1978 jukebox musical Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band hit theaters, expectations were as high as Lucy in the sky. The July 29, 1978, Billboard reported that the soundtrack of Beatles covers was “taxing virtually every record presser, jacket printing facility and freight company contracted to get the initial order of four million units in the hands of consumers.” A report from an advance screening told a different story: “A movie where the audience laughs at all the wrong moments is in trouble, no matter what its advertising budget.” It was a boon for The Beatles, at least: “Sales of Capitol’s Beatles catalog are surging,” according to the Aug. 26 issue.
Hitting a ‘Wall’
Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Billboard’s No. 1 album of 1980, famously inspired an animated film of the same name. Unfortunately, critics wanted to run like hell. “The $10 million movie adaptation of Pink Floyd’s international double-album bestseller was demolished” at a London premiere, reported the Aug. 7, 1982, issue. Despite an end-credits promise of a forthcoming soundtrack, one never appeared. “We intended to make a soundtrack album,” David Gilmour told the Sept. 18 Billboard. “But we just didn’t have enough new music to reasonably justify putting one out.”
This story originally appeared in the March 22, 2025 issue of Billboard.
Lucy Dacus has some mixed feelings about her newly minted public profile. “My dream is that I could play huge shows where [the crowd] knows every word,” she says, “we can connect after the show — and then I can wipe everyone’s mind of myself once they leave.”
The lack of Men in Black-esque technology notwithstanding, it’s easy to see why Dacus may feel that way. After spending the majority of her career as a cult artist with a tight-knit fan base in the indie scene, the singer-songwriter broke big alongside her friends Phoebe Bridgers and Julien Baker with The Record in 2023. Their supergroup, boygenius, sold out arenas, led Billboard’s Top Rock Albums chart while also earning a top 10 debut on the Billboard 200 and dominated the rock categories at the 2024 Grammys, winning three awards.
As she prepares her first solo release since the band’s breakthrough, Dacus, 29, still struggles with her shift from underground phenom to rock headliner. “Honestly, I don’t like being culturally relevant,” she says with a giggle. “I don’t like being somebody where people think they need to have a ‘take,’ in either direction.”
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Yet even in that discomfort, Dacus exudes a confidence that feels new for her. Forever Is a Feeling, her fourth studio album (out March 28 on Geffen Records), takes the sound that Dacus has painstakingly crafted over the last decade and broadens it as her most lush collection to date.
Going into the creation of Forever Is a Feeling, Dacus says she “knew the scope was going to be different” for this album. That process included honing what she wanted to sing about. Whereas her past albums confronted loss and childhood trauma, the new set focuses almost entirely on romance. The first proper track off the album, “Big Deal,” finds Dacus reminding a doomed lover just how important they are; “Talk” traces the shifting dynamics of a relationship to its near end; and album closer “Lost Time” is one of the boldest love songs of her career, on which she declares, “I notice everything about you.”
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That line also encapsulates a key part of the singer’s songwriting process: Since she broke onto the scene with 2016’s No Burden, Dacus has always thrived at transforming specificity into universal lyrics. “Once you focus on one thing and one person, it actually recontextualizes everything else, and you realize that every detail is its own universe,” says Dacus, who recently revealed that she and her boygenius bandmate Julien Baker are in a relationship. She then quotes a line she read in one of Susan Sontag’s journals: “Love is noticing.”
With Forever Is a Feeling marking Dacus’ major-label debut on Geffen, the singer’s new music is striking a chord with mainstream listeners. “Ankles,” the project’s exhilarating lead single, earned Dacus her first solo entries on the Adult Alternative Airplay and Rock & Alternative Airplay charts. “She writes songs that are potent and timely but will endure for years to come,” says Matt Morris, executive vp of A&R at Interscope Geffen A&M. “The success of ‘Ankles’ at radio is a very deserved accomplishment for an artist who has already been so influential and continues to break new ground with this album.”
The set also finds Dacus continuing to evolve as a producer, after she recently helmed singer-songwriter Jasmine.4.t’s debut, You Are the Morning, alongside her boygenius bandmates. “A lot of [producing Jasmine’s album] was about advocating when it comes to being less experienced in the studio,” she explains. “It’s about helping develop a language and asking folks, ‘What do you want? Here’s how to say it.’ I want to continue to help hold the emotional space of saying, ‘Do us the favor of being a control freak.’ ”
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That experience speaks to Dacus’ larger goal of late: using her newfound platform to create good. Shortly after the Trump administration began rolling out its anti-trans policy agenda, Dacus took to her social media and called for any of her trans fans hosting fundraisers for gender-affirming surgeries to share their campaigns so that she could donate $10,000 in $500 increments to those in need of help.
There’s a reason Dacus made that pledge in public. “Ten thousand dollars is not that much in the grand scheme of things,” she says. “But I wanted there to be a list of links on my profile so that if anybody else wanted to do what I was doing, then they could scroll through and donate as well. If other people are jumping in, then that can really matter.”
It’s that sense of renewed purpose that shows how far Dacus has come as a leading voice in rock — even if, as she points out, she is the “guinea pig” of the boygenius bandmates as the first of the trio to release a solo project since The Record.
“I feel really gratified when putting my albums out means something to someone else,” she says with a warm smile. “I wouldn’t do this if it didn’t matter to some people.”
Lucy Dacus photographed on March 5, 2025 in New York.
Meredith Jenks
This story appears in the March 22, 2025, issue of Billboard.
Garbage announced the dates for their first U.S. tour in nearly a decade on Tuesday (March 25). The 31-city Happy Endings run is slated to kick off on Sept. 3 at the Hard Rock Cafe in Orlando and hit Atlanta, Nashville, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, Toronto, Chicago, Minneapolis, Dallas, Denver, Seattle, Vancouver and San Francisco before winding down on Nov. 2 at the Van Burn in Phoenix.
The fall tour will follow the upcoming release of the band’s eighth studio album, Let All That We Imagine Be the Light, which will drop on May 30. Tickets for the tour will go on sale on April 4 here. Singer Shirley Manson said in a statement last month that the follow-up to 2021’s No Gods No Masters will flip that LP’s rage into a more optimistic outlook.
“Our last album was extremely forthright. Born out of frustration and outrage – it had a kind of scorched earth, pissed off quality to it,” Manson said. “With this new record however, I felt a compulsion to reach for a different kind of energy. A more constructive one. I had this vision of us coming up out of the underground with searchlights as we moved towards the future.”
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She added, “Searching for life, searching for love, searching for all the good things in the world that seem so thin on the ground right now. That was the over-riding idea during the making of this record for me – that when things feel dark, it’s best to try to seek out that which is light, that which feels loving and good.”
The band that also features original members producer/drummer Butch Vig and guitarist/keyboardists Duke Erikson and Steve Marker recently wrapped a South American tour and have a pair of dates in Mexico in early April. They were forced to cancel the rest of their 2024 dates in August after Manson required “surgery and rehabilitation” for an undisclosed injury she suffered on tour in Europe earlier in the year.
Check out the tour promo poster and full list of Happy Endings Tour dates below.
Sept. 3 — Orlando, FL @ Hard Rock CaféSept. 5 — Pompano Beach, FL @ Pompano Beach AmphitheatreSept. 6 — St Petersburg, FL @ Jannus LiveSept. 8 — Atlanta, GA @ The EasternSept. 10 — Nashville, TN @ The PinnacleSept. 12 — Cleveland, OH @ Agora TheatreSept. 13 — Detroit, MI @ Masonic Cathedral TheatreSept. 16 — Philadelphia, PA @ Franklin Music HallSept. 17 — Washington, DC @ The AnthemSept. 18 — Boston, MA @ RoadrunnerSept. 20 — Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn ParamountSept. 23 — Pittsburgh, PA @ Stage AESept. 24 — Toronto, ON @ HistorySept. 29 — Chicago, IL @ The Salt ShedSept. 30 — Newport, KY @ MegaCorp PavilionOct. 1 — Columbus, OH @ KEMBA Live!Oct. 3 — Madison, WI @ The SylveeOct. 4 — Minneapolis, MN @ First AvenueOct. 6 — Kansas City, MO @ Midland TheatreOct. 7 — Dallas, TX @ The Bomb FactoryOct. 12 — Denver, CO @ The Mission BallroomOct. 15 — Seattle, WA @ Paramount TheatreOct. 18 — Spokane, WA @ Knitting Factory SpokaneOct. 20 — Vancouver, BC @ OrpheumOct. 21 — Portland, OR @ McMenamins Crystal BallroomOct. 23 — Saratoga, CA @ The Mountain WineryOct. 24 — San Francisco, CA @ The WarfieldOct. 26 — Reno, NV @ Silver Legacy Resort CasinoOct. 29 — Salt Lake City, UT @ Rockwell at The ComplexOct. 31 — Las Vegas, NV @ The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas – The ChelseaNov. 2 — Phoenix, AZ @ The Van Buren
Mumford & Sons could have done the usual promotional run to get fans hyped for their upcoming Rushmere album, the folk rock trio’s first in seven years. And while singer Marcus Mumford will surely sit down for some interviews and the band have booked a run of intimate promo gigs in New York and the U.K. through April 3, one of the things the group’s frontman tells Billboard they wanted to do this time around was find a way to deeply connect with fans where they already are.
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“We’re full of songs at the moment — we spent two years in the studio writing [and] this first batch is Rushmere — and it’s encapsulating the spirit of our band in a lot of ways. That made us look back a bit at some of the collaborations we’ve had, some of the records we’ve made, EPs… it’s a lot of music,” says Mumford of the group’s half dozen EPs and four studio albums since 2008.
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So, with their follow-up to 2018’s Delta due out on Friday (March 28), Mumford, bassist/drummer Ted Dwane and keyboard player Ben Lovett will help celebrate Tuesday’s (March 25) launch of their first dedicated SiriusXM channel, Mumford & Sons Radio, with a special event for their die-hards. On Thursday (March 27), the trio will give North American fans a chance to call in and ask questions during a live Q&A session, followed by a live performance in the SiriusXM studios.
“When the SiriusXM team suggested it we leapt at it,” Mumford says of the channel he promises will feature hand-picked songs from across the band’s catalog, as well as some of their favorite collaborations with artists including The National’s Aaron Dessner on the Grateful Dead’s “Friend of the Devil,” and “special moments” with Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen and Joni Mitchell, among others.
“It was fun to look through our previous recordings, like, ‘oh s–t! I forgot about that song!’,” Mumford says of the culling process. “But we had to draw lines through some of [the songs] because you can’t put them all on.” The limited-run channel is the latest such offering from the satellite radio giant, joining temporary ones from Mary J. Blige and Lady Gaga earlier this month, as well as quick-hit channels featuring the music of Maxwell in February and Billy Joel in January.
“We put some real effort into it… we sat down to talk about our songs for far too long!,” says Mumford about the band interviews that will be featured on the channel along with DJ sets in which he can geek out over playing favorite artists such as Mk.gee and talk about how much he loves Gracie Abrams and Kendrick Lamar. There will also be some pleasant surprises, including songs Lamar producer Sounwave worked on for Mumford’s self-titled 2022 solo album.
“There are also some heavier moments, like when we really plug in and go electric with Gang of Youths, or we do a cover version of Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Hurt’ via Johnny Cash and then plugged back in again,” Mumford promises of the surprises that will pop up alongside songs by other artists that have influenced and inspired the group. The channel will also tap into Mumford & Sons’ long association with SiriusXM with replays of their 2015 SiriusXM exclusive performance at New York City’s McKittrick Hotel, their 2019 show at Stephen Talkhouse in the Hamptons and other in-studio sets from over the years.
Mumford & Sons Radio will be available in cars on channel 79 through April 8 and on the SiriusXM app through April 24.
Bruce Springsteen has joined the all-star lineup for Wednesday night’s (March 26) all-star tribute to Patti Smith. The Boss will make the trip to Carnegie Hall in New York for the sold–out People Have the Power: A Celebration of Patti Smith show celebrating the 50th anniversary of Smith legendary 1975 debut album, Horses.
In addition to Springsteen, the show will feature appearances from R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe, Bangles singer Susanna Hoffs, Pretenders frontwoman Chrissie Hynde, Sharon Van Etten, the Kills’ Alison Mosshart, director Jim Jarmusch, Scarlett Johansson, Kronos Quartet, Ben Harper, Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karon O, former Sonic Youth singer/guitarist and solo performer Kim Gordon, Sean Penn, Angel Olsen, Courtney Barnett, Interpol’s Paul Banks, Maggie Rogers, Glen Hansard, Michael Shannon, Jesse Malin, The National’s Matt Berninger and others.
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The house band will be lead by Smith’s longtime bassist/keyboardist Tony Shanahan, who will be joined by Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench, Bob Dylan guitarist Charlie Sexton and Rolling Stones drummer Steve Jordan.
In addition to celebrating the Horses anniversary, the show will also mark the 20th anniversary of City Winery founder and CEO Michael Dorf’s “Music Of” series, which spotlights the work of legendary rockers and benefits nonprofit organizations focused on music education; since 2004, the annual Carnegie Hall series has donated more than $1.8 million to such groups. General admission tickets are sold out, but VIP tickets are still available here.
Springsteen and Smith’s relationship also stretches back nearly half a decade, when the Boss was struggling to figure out how to finish his song “Because the Night” and his engineer, Jimmy Iovine — who was also producing Smith’s 1978 album Easter at the time — suggested he give it to Smith. She worked it over and adding new lyrics in honor of her husband, the MC5’s Fred “Sonic” Smith, and it became her highest-charting single to date, hitting No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Smith will also be hitting the road for a Horses anniversary tour, slated to kick off in Dublin, Ireland on Oct. 6 and criss-cross Europe for a month before landing in Seattle on Nov. 10 for a run of shows that will keep her on the road through a Nov. 29 gig in Philadelphia.
It’s fair to say the three members of Imagine Dragons are over the moon about their new concert film Imagine Dragons: Live From the Hollywood Bowl (with the LA Film Orchestra), showing in theaters March 26 and 29. The fact that it comes in the wake of the band’s music actually being on the moon makes it even better.
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On March 5, Imagine Dragon’s “Children of the Sky” — which the Las Vegas-formed group co-wrote with Inon Zur and others in 2023 for the video game Starfield — was embedded in Athena, a ship the space startup Lonestar Data Holdings sent to Earth’s moon. And while music had previously arrived there on other voyages, it marked the first time a song was transmitted back to Earth — albeit a day later because the Athena craft landed on its side, and short of its target, so some adjustments had to be made.
Imagine Dragons’ guitarist Wayne Sermon is still stoked that “Children of the Sky” skied its way back to its home planet. “I was here, and I was following the mission live on YouTube,” Sermon tells Billboard via Zoom from Los Angeles, where he now resides. “I’m very much into space exploration, I’m into anything NASA’s doing. I’m very fascinated with that kind of stuff…It was one of the easiest yeses we had. Things looked a little dicey there for a minute…but (Athena) was able to still do a couple of things and one of them happened to be beaming our song.
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“We were happy just to be part of it. It’s a crazy thing. Put it up on the list of things that are just surreal, having your music beamed from the moon. It’s like alright, sure, that sounds reasonable, OK.”
Sermon says he hasn’t had a chance to flex any bragging rights over the achievement, however. “I haven’t used it once, man. Unbelievable,” he says. “It hasn’t come up in conversation, casually. Once it does I have an ace in the hole at a dinner party — ‘So, how about the moon…?’”
Sermon says the filmed Hollywood Bowl experience was also otherworldly. Filmed Oct. 27, 2024, at the last of four shows Imagine Dragons performed at the venue (and the final date of the North American leg of its Loom World Tour), the concert found the band — also including frontman Dan Reynolds and bassist Ben McKee — playing with a full orchestra conducted by Zur, whose video game scoring work the group has long admired.
“We saw these Hollywood Bowl shows coming down the pipeline while we were on tour,” Sermon recalls. “We just felt like something needed to happen there. We’d sold out four shows, which was kind of crazy to us, and it seemed to be special, so we thought, ‘Why don’t we do something with an orchestra, a one-night-only thing.’” The group recruited Zur to create orchestrations and then watched it grow from a handful of numbers to the entire 22-song concert.
“We’d keep getting emails from (Zur), ‘OK, send me another one,’ and the next day we’d have an arrangement and ‘Send me another one,’” Sermon says. “This kept happening until he’d arranged every single moment of the show. From start to finish it was a complete collaboration, which I think is pretty rare in a show like that.”
Among the concert moments that most stand out is “Radioactive,” for which Zur created a duel between violin and cello players in the orchestra. “Children of the Sky” was another highlight, according to Sermon. “That was a song conceived in the studio, and we weren’t present for when (Zur) came up with the orchestration for it,” Sermon says. “We wrote our part, he wrote his part and we got ’em together remotely. We never actually played that song together in the same room with an orchestra before. So for that song to come to life at (the Hollywood Bowl) felt like a full-circle moment. (Zur) wrote a really incredible intro to it where he could stretch out and show some of his chops. It was great to do that song and have it represented and documented forever.”
The film, however, was not part of the initial discussion and only decided upon “probably a couple of weeks before the show,” according to Sermon. “It was just going to be this thing that happened, that you just had to be there for. In this day and age, where everything is documented and overshared, it was maybe something that just lived for a night and was gone, and maybe there’s something beautiful about that. But the more we thought about it, so many people who would like to see it couldn’t. With Inon being involved and hearing his arrangements…we felt it would be a real shame for people not to hear it. Luckily our management scrambled to find some extra cameras and we threw it together and willed it into existence so people could see it.”
Live From the Hollywood Bowl was directed by Vincent Adam Paul and will be screened in CJ 4DPLEX, ScreenX, 4DX and Ultra 4DX as well as standard formats. Theater and ticket information is available via ImagineDragonsMovie.com.
Sermon plans on catching one of the big-screen showings himself but anticipates the film will eventually go to streaming as well. “The whole point of filming it was so people can see it,” he says. “Seeing it in theaters, especially in 4DX formats, is gonna be mind-blowing for people, but eventually it will be streamed.”
Imagine Dragons will resume the Loom World Tour on April 4 in China and then begin a European run on May 27 in Italy. The trek is set to wrap up July 25-26 in London, while he, Reynolds and McKee are “just starting to write our new album now. We are exploring a lot of different options, including parting things back a lot — just trying new things and seeing what sticks. We don’t really know what we’re doing for next things until we just do it.”
