Rock
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The Starting Line, the group behind the 2003 pop-punk classic “The Best of Me,” got a name-check on Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department album and posted a response to the pop star after hearing the song.
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Swift references The Starting Line on the emotional ballad “The Black Dog,” found on one of four deluxe editions of her Tortured Poets physical release, and as track No. 17 on Swift’s complete 31-song The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, made available on streaming services and via digital download on April 19.
The song begins with Swift’s realization that her former flame forgot to disable location tracking on his phone. It goes on to set the scene of what she imagines is playing out without her at a London pub.
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“I just don’t understand/ How you don’t miss me in The Black Dog/ When someone plays The Starting Line/ And you jump up, but she’s too young/ To know this song that was intertwined/ In the magic fabric of our dreaming,” Swift sings on the chorus of “The Black Dog.” “Old habits die screaming.”
Later, Swift’s hurt turns to anger as her words shift to “And I hope it’s shitty in The Black Dog/ When someone plays The Starting Line/ And you jump up, but she’s too young/ To know this song that was intertwined/ In the tragic fabric of our dreaming/ ‘Cause tail between your legs, you’re leavin’.”
In a note posted on The Starting Line’s Instagram account on Friday, the band wrote: “Dear Taylor, we heard the song, thank you for name checking our band. We feel flattered and humbled by the reverberations of love that have come back to us as a result. It’s an honor to have TSL memorialized on such a lovely song. You didn’t have to do that, but you did, and we appreciate it wholeheartedly. Respect!”
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Although Swift doesn’t name the song by The Starting Line she’s hearing in her head on “The Black Dog” — nor does she identify the romantic interest the song is about — her lyric could be alluding to “The Best of Me,” the lead single from TSL’s debut album, Say It Like You Mean It.
The 1975’s Matty Healy — who by all appearances Swift briefly dated in 2023 after also briefly being linked together a decade ago — happened to play a snippet of “The Best of Me” live on tour in New Zealand on April 21, 2023, and again on May 3, in the Philippines. On May 5, Healy was spotted attending Swift’s Eras Tour in Nashville. This was the first of several times he was photographed around or with her during the time period, sparking dating rumors for the pair.
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“Shout-out to people in their 30s,” Healy said with a smile after his short “The Best of Me” cover, as seen in the clip above from The 1975’s show a year ago.
Fans have pointed out signs indicating Healy as the possible muse of title track “The Tortured Poets Department,” among other songs, on Swift’s latest release.
“Tell me what you thought about when you were gone/ And so alone/ The worst is over/ You can have the best of me,” The Starting Line’s Kenny Vasoli sings on the group’s “The Best of Me.” “We got older/ But we’re still young/ We never grew out of this feeling that we won’t give up.”
See the band’s thank-you letter to Swift for the shout-out on “The Black Dog” below.
Interpol celebrated the biggest concert of its career with a free show on Saturday (April 20) at the Zócalo in Mexico City, where the band gathered over 160,000 fans, according to figures provided by local authorities.
In the words of vocalist Paul Banks, it was the “most special night” and “a great honor” to perform at a historic site for a country with which they have maintained a very close relationship for two decades. The band — also comprising guitarist Daniel Kessler and drummer Sam Fogarino (who is recovering from surgery and was covered by Chris Broome) — has the visited the country just over 20 times. Banks lived and studied in Mexico when he was 17. This partly explains why he feels like he’s in his “second home,” as he told Billboard Español hours before Saturday’s performance.
After moving to New York for college, the vocalist returned in 2005 to Mexico City and gave one of his most memorable concerts. That night, in the Salón Mexica, he says he felt the “terrifying” beauty of the Mexican audience, when the venue was about to collapse due to the number of people gathered (about 7,000, according to promoter Iguapop).
This time around, at the Zócalo — the main public square in the country and the second largest in the world after Tiananmen in China — everything was impeccable, including the sound, the lights, and the logistics. The Government of Mexico City deployed an operation with hundreds of police officers who watched over the main plaza and surrounding streets, where huge screens were installed so that more people could enjoy the show without venturing into the crowd. Although there was a slight drizzle hours before, spirits did not falter.
Interpol joins a list of international stars who have performed at the Zócalo, including Paul McCartney, Roger Waters, Justin Bieber, Shakira, Rosalía, Café Tacvba, and Vicente Fernández, among others.
Here are some of our favorite moments from Interpol’s Mexico City concert, including the complete setlist.
“Evil” in Mariachi
Patti Smith has acknowledged being named alongside Dylan Thomas on Taylor Swift‘s “The Tortured Poets Department,” the title track from the prolific pop poet’s 31-song anthology released on Friday (April 19). Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news “You’re not Dylan Thomas/ I’m not Patti Smith/ This ain’t the […]
Five years after its last concert tour, what Nancy Wilson calls “the actual Heart,” with herself and older sister Ann Wilson, is beating its way toward the road — and looking toward making some new music, Heart’s first since its Beautiful Broken album in 2016.
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“The thing that we really hope to achieve is to maybe write some more stuff together,” Ann tells Billboard. She adds, however, “We don’t have plans for that right now. We don’t really plan too far in the future; we’re not calculating like that. We’re just gonna do this tour and see what comes. But I think if a song comes out of a situation, it’ll be a real good one, ’cause it’ll be authentic. It’s just a matter of me and Nancy getting our heads around that.”
There is, however, one new song that Heart’s been working on — “Roll the Dice,” written with longtime collaborator and Lovemongers groupmate Sue Ennis with an eye toward including it in the Royal Flush Tour shows that begin April 20 in Greenville, S.C. Ann says it’s still “a work in process,” which Nancy began when she and Ennis got together “just for songwriting purposes. A lot of times we text with each other and we get on concept ideas and title ideas and lyric ideas. When she finally came to visit me at my house in northern California, we spent about a week together, and we actually recorded some demos.”
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There are no plans for “Roll the Dice” yet beyond playing it at shows, but Nancy says she’s also been trolling through the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-inducted group’s vaults, listening to unreleased material with the thought of releasing some of that in the near future, too. “There’s a couple unfinished things I’d like to finish off with Ann and Sue,” she says. “There’s one really, really cool song called ‘Sweet Deceiver,’ but the words were never right, so we never recorded it properly. I think I might want to finish that song; I’ve been trying to think of new chorus lyrics ever since I heard the demo. I would love to write some new stuff, too.
“If we have a song or two that comes out of Heart, that would be really great. These days, it’s kind of like one song at a time, but you can still do a whole album, which is cool. I love albums,” she adds. “When I can put on an album in its entirety, in the sequence it was intended, that’s the best to me. The new Kacey Musgraves [Deeper Well] is really great. I love the Post Malone album, Austin. Taylor Swift’s stuff is amazing. So we’ll see.”
In the meantime the Wilsons are happy to have Heart headed back out on tour, with a lineup of mostly new members; only guitarist Ryan Waters was part of the group’s last tour, in 2019, while he and his Tripsitter bandmates — guitarist Ryan Wariner, guitarist-keyboardist Paul Moak, bassist Tony Lucido and drummer Sean T. Lane — have worked with Ann during the interim. The sisters are planning covers-free setlists this time out, focusing on what Nancy says are “songs that mean a lot to a lot of people, that are the Heart songs they know and love that are also the soundtracks to people’s lives.”
“What I really love about Heart and miss about Heart is the flexibility, musically, inside of the band itself,” she notes. “If we wanted to, we could be a Led Zeppelin cover band. Or if we wanted to, we could be a total comedy routine band. We could do all kinds of amazing covers of stuff, but this time, it’s going to be all us.”
Ann adds, “We’re really trying to keep it pure. The whole idea is to do something we have not done before … just a whole set of Heart music from different eras of the band.”
That immersion, meanwhile, has led to some unexpected perspective on Heart’s nearly 50-year recording career.
“I think I was always so busy performing the songs and trying to just be excellent on stage that I never really sank into the true meaning of some of the songs until now,” Ann explains. “The other day at rehearsal they had been working out ‘Dog and Butterfly,’ and I sat down and it was so beautiful and the sentiment was so great and beautiful and tender, and I just teared up right off, even before I sang anything. It was awesome.”
The sisters acknowledge that there are still some differences in their individual views of what Heart is and should be, but they’ve found enough common ground to put the band on tour for the remainder of 2024 in North America and Europe — with opening acts such as Cheap Trick, Jason Bonham’s Led Zeppelin Evening and Randy Bachman’s BTO, as well as three stadium dates this summer supporting Def Leppard and Journey.
“We’re talking. We’re fine together. We just felt it, so why not?” Ann says. “The common ground is that we both want it to be excellent and we both want it to be absolutely Heart. We just basically put it together and said, ‘Let’s go!’” Nancy — who performed with her own Nancy Wilson’s Heart during 2022 and 2023 — adds that “there’s so many things, circumstantially, since 2019 … a lot of it’s just family drama and unavoidable, and just other stuff people wanted to do besides Heart. So we were off doing our own things for a little while, and there was also this little interruption called the pandemic.
“And, y’know, I just turned the big 7-0 [on March 16], so it’s like, ‘Whoa … If I ever want to get a chance to do this amazingly fun thing one more time, now is the time.’”
That said, Nancy, for one, would not mind if Heart’s resumption lasts an even longer time than is currently planned.
“I think this will carry us at least through the year, if not beyond. My fingers are crossed,” she says. “There’s no telling if it’ll run like a well-oiled machine, but I think once we get started it’ll go smooth and steady and rock like the well-oiled machine it knows how to be, and that’s the fun part. The shows can be so elating and so transcendent, and the electric energy is unbelievable. So that’s what we’re here for.
“We’ve built this train,” she adds. “We’ve got the wheels on and we’re putting it on the track, and we’ll see how fast things thing can go — and how far it can go.”
Maggie Rogers hits No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult Alternative Airplay chart for the fourth time as “Don’t Forget Me” rises to the top of the April 27-dated list. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news The song follows reigns for “Light On,” which led for three weeks in […]
Green Day’s “Dilemma” lifts to No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart dated April 27, marking the trio’s ninth leader and second in a row.
The Billie Joe Armstrong-led trio first led Mainstream Rock Airplay with “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” in 2005 and had last topped the list with “The American Dream Is Killing Me” for eight weeks beginning last November.
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“Dilemma” makes it three straight albums for Green Day topping Mainstream Rock Airplay with each set’s first two singles. “Bang Bang” and “Still Breathing” from 2016’s Revolution Radio started the current streak, followed by “Father of All…” and “Oh Yeah!” from 2020’s Father of All…, while “The American Dream Is Killing Me” and “Dilemma” are via Saviors, released in February.
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Concurrently, “Dilemma” dominates the all-rock-format, audience-based Rock & Alternative Airplay chart for a fourth week, racking up 7.9 million audience impressions April 12-18, up 4%, according to Luminate.
The song also ranks at its No. 2 high for a second week on Alternative Airplay; Green Day has so far notched 12 No. 1s on the chart.
Saviors, Green Day’s 14th studio album, debuted at No. 1 on the Top Rock & Alternative Albums chart dated Feb. 3 and has earned 106,000 equivalent album units to date.
“It definitely deals with mental health and addiction,” Armstrong told People about “Dilemma” earlier this year. “When I say, ‘I was sober, now I’m drunk again,’ that could be looked at two different ways. It could be someone going, ‘F-k, yeah. I was sober, now I’m drunk again,’ at a party, or it could be someone that’s fallen. That’s what it means to me, anyway.”
All Billboard charts dated April 27 will update on Billboard.com on Tuesday, April 23.
For part-time potheads, 4/20 is a holiday that comes but once a year. But for the steadfast stoner, you can celebrate 4:20 every day (twice a day is possible, but inadvisable).
Regardless of how deep your love for the leaf runs, everyone knows that marijuana and music are peas in a pod. We’ve previously rounded up 25 toking tunes, an editorial playlist that encompasses Cypress Hill, Afroman, Miley Cyrus, Bob Dylan, Peter Tosh, Wiz Khalifa and, of course, Snoop Dogg.
This list ain’t that. Looking at biggest Billboard Hot 100 hits of all time, we decided to round up the highest hits in the chart’s history. For purposes of this list, we’re casting a bloodshot eye toward songs with a title that includes “smoke,” “puff,” “high,” “stoned,” “burn,” “drug,” “toke,” “weed” or some variation. If the song’s title doesn’t tip to something along those lines, it’s out. (That means songs such as Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 & #35” aren’t eligible; we’re sure he’ll get over it.)
We are also discounting songs where weed-adjacent words are in the song title but are clearly not referring to drugs or intoxication. For example: We include Sean Paul’s “We Be Burnin’” but not Usher’s “Burn.” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” isn’t here because The Platters weren’t singing about hotboxing the dance floor, but “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” is eligible. Sure, most folks assume cigarettes are what Brownville Station and/or the Crüe were puffing at school, but we don’t know for sure, so we’re giving that one the benefit of the dank doubt.
Anyone who’s a fan of mind-altering substances should know that truth is subjective, man, and this list is no exception. While the selections – and the order in which they appear – are culled from the biggest hits in Hot 100 history (more on that below), editorial decisions were made on what to include on this list. Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” isn’t here because it’s about a love that is above (i.e., better than) others; “I Want to Take You Higher” is eligible, however, because you can (and probably should) interpret “higher” as substance adjacent.
Also included: The many songs that refer to love as a drug, as well as songs that use “stoned” for a general sense of intoxication. If it’s about a mind-altering state brought about by romance, booze or whatever, it’s in.
Don’t like the criteria? Sounds like you need to chill out, catch a cool buzz and hit play on one (or all) of these songs and just follow the vibe where it takes you. Responsibly, of course.
This ranking is based on actual performance on the weekly Billboard Hot 100 chart. Songs are ranked based on an inverse point system, with weeks at No. 1 earning the greatest value and weeks at No. 100 earning the least. To ensure equitable representation of the biggest hits from each era, certain time frames were weighted to account for the difference between turnover rates from those years.
Afroman, “Because I Got High” (2000)
Travis Barker celebrated wife Kourtney Kardashian Barker’s 45th birthday on Thursday (April 18) by sharing some sweet (and one pretty salty) pics of his beloved, as well as one of the first glimpses of the couple’s adorable 5-month-old son, Rocky Thirteen Barker. Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news […]
On Thursday night (April 18), for the first time, a band not named U2 performed at the Las Vegas Sphere. Phish shares some traits with the Irish group – both are quartets with decades-long histories of concert production experimentation who remain major live draws – but the revered Vermont jam band still had something to […]
Following the experimental music journey that was 2020’s Gigaton, Pearl Jam returns to familiar, heavy turf on Dark Matter, the legendary Seattle rock band’s 12th studio album.
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Dropping at the stroke of midnight, Dark Matter (via Monkeywrench Records/Republic Records) spans 11 (mostly) burly numbers, including the previously-released midtempo cut “Wreckage” and the title track, which powered to No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay and Rock & Alternative Airplay Charts.
Grammy Award-winning producer Andrew Watt is back behind the desk on Dark Matter, built on foundations of blazing guitars and busy drumming, and which ought to be played “loud, like, really loud,” frontman Eddie Vedder told Alt 98.7.
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Pearl Jam was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, recognition of a mighty, three-decade-plus career that has yielded 12 top 10s on the Billboard 200 chart, including five leaders, and over 85 million albums shifted worldwide, according to reps.
The members of Pearl Jam—Vedder, Jeff Ament (bass), Stone Gossard (rhythm guitar), Mike McCready (lead guitar), and Matt Cameron (drums)—workshopped the album last year at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La Studios in Malibu. With Watt at the desk, the creative process found turbo-packs, and the record came together in three weeks.
Vedder, McCready, and Ament premiered the LP at a listening party in West Hollywood earlier this year, attended by a few hundred family, friends, industry professionals and media, the Associated Press reported at the time.
“You all get together as a group as we’ve been doing for 30-plus years and you say, ‘Let’s try it again,’” Vedder reportedly told guests from the stage as he introduced the record. “No hyperbole, I think this is our best work.”In support of the new LP, Vedder and CO. will embark on a world tour. Those Dark Matter World Tour 2024 dates will see the band visit nine countries and 25 cities, kicking off at May 4 at Rogers Arena in Vancouver, BC.
Stream Dark Matter in full below.