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      Little Big Town Star Backs Out of 2021 ACM Performance After Testing Positive for Covid-19

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      WENN

      Phillip Sweet has been forced to pull out of a scheduled gig with his bandmates at the Academy of Country Music Awards this coming weekend due to coronavirus.

      Apr 16, 2021

      AceShowbiz –
      Little Big Town star Phillip Sweet has been forced to sit out the group’s 2021 ACM Awards performance after testing positive for COVID-19.

      His bandmates, Karen Fairchild, Jimi Westbrook, and Kimberly Schlapman, insist he is recovering, but not well enough to be out in public.

      Little Big Town are nominated for a Vocal Group of the Year award at the ceremony, where they’ll perform their current single “Wine Beer Whiskey”.

      Sweet’s bandmate Fairchild is convinced she battled the coronavirus before the official start of the pandemic in America last year (20) after falling ill with symptoms similar to those linked to COVID. Schlapman also tested positive for the virus late last year.

        See also…

      Luke Bryan has also pulled out of Sunday night’s (18Apr21) ACM Awards after testing positive. The “American Idol” judge is replaced by Lady Antebellum.

      The ACM Awards will be co-hosted by singer Mickey Guyton and Keith Urban this coming weekend, with performances staged at the same three Nashville, Tennessee venues as last year (20) – the Grand Ole Opry, Ryman Auditorium, and Bluebird Cafe.

      Miranda Lambert and Elle King will open the ceremony with the live debut of their party song “Drunk (And I Don’t Wanna Go Home)”. Lambert will perform with Jack Ingram and Jon Randall as well. There will also be sets from Eric Church and Dan + Shay and country couple Ryan Hurd and Maren Morris.

      Dierks Bentley will team up with The War and Treaty to perform U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)”. Kelsea Ballerini and Kenny Chesney will join forces for “Half of My Hometown”. Chris Young and Kane Brown will team up for “Famous Friends” while Carrie Underwood will offer up a gospel medley from her “My Savior” album with Cece Winans.

      Early winners include Kane Brown for Video of the Year, Jimmie Allen for New Male Artist of the Year, and Gabby Barrett for New Female Artist of the Year.

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      Mystikal Insists He’s a Changed Man After Going Through Rape Case

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      The Long Tail of Aphex Twin’s ‘Avril 14th’

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      A song released 20 years ago continues to inspire curiosity and covers by classical, experimental and pop artists.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.On April 14, 2020, the producer and pianist Kelly Moran woke up in Long Island. She had temporarily moved back there the previous fall to work on her next album, but when the pandemic arrived, she got stuck. Looking for a challenge to fill the hours that Tuesday morning, she figured out how to play the Aphex Twin song “Avril 14th” and filmed the results on her cellphone.Like the original, Moran performed it on a prepared piano — a technique developed by the avant-garde composer John Cage where objects are placed in between the instrument’s strings. Moran’s interpretation is tender but eerie, like the sound of a music box that’s about to die. “I always picture a ghost playing this record,” she said in an interview last month.Moran put the video on Twitter and Instagram, where it became one her most popular posts. “Not everyone is going to like drum and bass or, like, really fast IDM,” she said, referring to intelligent dance music, “but I feel like every person likes a sentimental piano song in some way, shape or form.”Moran’s cover was one more blip in the strange and improbable life of “Avril 14th,” which turns 20 this year. An instrumental piece that barely lasts two minutes, it has been sampled by pop stars, inspired classical pianists and experimental artists alike, and once cost a major TV network over $100,000 (more on that later). On YouTube there are renditions of it performed on the harp, the pedal steel guitar and dueling vibraphones.“Avril 14th” was released in October 2001, the same week the first iPod arrived, on the first disc of “Drukqs,” a double album by Aphex Twin, the most common pseudonym of the English musician Richard D. James. The 30-song collection churns across dark ambient works, aggressive breakbeats and sparse piano interludes.At the time, James claimed he released “Drukqs” because he left an MP3 player filled with unreleased music on a plane. It was only a matter of time, he maintained, before someone figured out what it was and put it all online. There were rumors that James actually released “Drukqs” to get out of his contract with Warp Records, though when its follow-up “Syro” arrived 13 years later, it was on the same label.James only did a few interviews in support of “Drukqs.” There were no music videos by Chris Cunningham, who directed wickedly perverse treatments for the landmark Aphex Twin songs “Come to Daddy” and “Windowlicker.” There were barely any tour dates or festival appearances.James doesn’t disclose much about his creative process, or anything else really. (He did not respond to interview requests and representatives from Warp declined to comment.) From the faint mechanical sounds heard on “Avril 14th,” members of his devoted fan base surmised that it was made on a prepared Disklavier — an acoustic piano created by Yamaha with internal and external MIDI capabilities, which allows it to reproduce a composition without a human player but with incredible accuracy.“Drukqs” received a mixed critical response, but it did have devotees. Not long after its release, the members of Alarm Will Sound, an adventurous group of classical musicians based in New York, decided to arrange Aphex Twin songs for their chamber orchestra’s 2005 album “Acoustica.” “It felt like a statement to say this is really serious music,” said Alan Pierson, the group’s artistic director. “Aphex Twin is a genius for color and timbre, and so much of ‘Acoustica’ is about that, but with ‘Avril 14th’ it’s really just the notes,” Pierson added. “The notes are really gorgeous.”Around the same time, the composer and music supervisor Brian Reitzell began work on Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film “Marie Antoinette.” Before shooting began, he compiled two CDs of contemporary music that captured the tone the director wanted, even though it was a period piece. Reitzell felt “Avril 14th” almost served as a bridge between the two eras.While James passed on Reitzell’s invitation to contribute new compositions for the film’s score (“Some artists are just not comfortable making their art fit into someone else’s art,” Reitzell said), “Avril 14th” does appear in a sequence where Antoinette, played by Kirsten Dunst, languorously walks through a field and up a palace staircase. Reitzell said that after an early screening for friends, the director Wes Anderson complimented him for including the song, and said he had considered using it for one of his own films, but now was bummed because he felt like it was off limits. It later appeared in the trailer for “Her,” the maudlin A.I. romance from Coppola’s ex-husband, Spike Jonze.The song’s life in pop culture spiked again just a year later thanks to a longtime fan, Jorma Taccone of the comedy trio the Lonely Island, a group that became famous from its musical digital shorts on “Saturday Night Live.” “I’m the perfect demo for liking that song in terms of I like a lot of electronic music and I’m also a totally emotional, romantic dude,” Taccone said in an interview.For years he kept a basic beat on his computer featuring a looped sample from “Avril 14th,” but never had the right opportunity to use it. In September 2007, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, then the president of Iran, visited New York City and gave a talk stating there were no homosexuals in his country. In response, the Lonely Island created “Iran So Far.” Over Taccone’s “Avril 14th” beat, Andy Samberg performed a love song dedicated to Ahmadinejad, delivering lines like, “You say Iran don’t have the bomb, but they already do/You should know by now, it’s you.”Because “Saturday Night Live” is made at a breakneck speed, Taccone brushed off the legal department when asked if “Iran So Far” used samples that needed to be cleared, figuring they could deal with any problems later. That meant the network eventually had to pay the label $160,000, Taccone said, and the group couldn’t afford to put it on its own 2009 album, “Incredibad.”Kanye West ended up replaying a part of “Avril 14th” on “Blame Game,” a key song on his 2010 opus of hedonism and self-loathing “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.” Coincidentally, West was the musical guest on “S.N.L.” the night the Lonely Island short aired, and Taccone takes pride in the fact that they both saw the possibility in the same unlikely material. “It just made me feel like I was a genius,” he said.As the popularity of streaming music services rose over the past decade, the record label Silent Star approached the British pianist Martin Jacoby about recording covers for a catalog of tranquil pieces, including “Avril 14th.” Jacoby’s version appears on compilations with search-friendly titles including “Sleepy Baby Lullaby” and “Classical for Studying.” Spotify has included the Aphex Twin version on such curated playlists as “Peaceful Indie Ambient” and “Classical Yoga.”On the service there are now more than 30 covers of “Avril 14th” by electronic artists and classical musicians. Some have millions of streams of their own. There are jaunty interpretations and atmospheric ones. Others stay loyal to Aphex Twin. “It’s almost divorced from him as an artist,” said Jacoby, of the track’s originator. “It’s become one of those pieces that’s now exploded in its own right.”While this popularity may expose classical music fans to the sometimes overwhelming, occasionally terrorizing music of Aphex Twin, the exchange also flows the other way. “It’s a gateway to Debussy, or some of the other amazing piano pieces that are out there,” said Reitzell, the music supervisor. “If you like that piece, man, I’ve got 30 more for you. That is the most beautiful thing about music. That song will probably outlive Richard’s entire catalog in a way.”But Moran hears an even more fundamental reason modern listeners have turned a haunting piano piece with minimalist influences into a digital era phenomenon. Before our interview, she transcribed “Avril 14th” again to refamiliarize herself with it. Holding up the piece of paper, she noted its chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus structure. “Honestly,” she said, “this is like a pop song to me.” More

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      Alan Vega Left a Robust Vault. The Excavation Begins With a New Album.

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      The Suicide singer died in 2016. Now his wife and musical partner, Liz Lamere, is releasing “Mutator,” an album the duo made in the mid-90s.In 1978, the adversarial New York duo Suicide played a show in Boston, opening for the Cars, local heroes who’d crossed over into pop success. Suicide performed a set of assaultive and static electronic music, and the unhappy audience demonstrated its distaste by throwing ashtrays, some of which hit the singer Alan Vega. But Vega and his bandmate, Martin Rev, had recently finished European tours opening for the Clash and Elvis Costello during which they caused a literal riot in Belgium. (It was later documented on a live recording, “23 Minutes Over Brussels,” named for the length of Suicide’s set before the gendarmes were summoned.)The day after the Boston gig, a local radio D.J. who’d seen it interviewed Vega and asked how it had gone. “Well, we beat the hell out of them,” Vega replied, laughing happily.Liz Lamere, Vega’s wife and musical partner for several decades, called the anecdote “a beautiful analogy for Alan’s life.” (Vega died in 2016 at 78.) “People think Alan sang about gloom and doom, all this negative stuff,” she said. “There was always a layer of beauty and hope in everything he did.”That contrast is an enduring hallmark of “Mutator,” a posthumous Vega album due April 23, which he and Lamere recorded in 1995 and 1996, and she recently produced and mixed with Jared Artaud, a Vega disciple who fronts the minimalist Brooklyn band the Vacant Lots.Liz Lamere and Vega in 1986, the year after they met at a party for his album “Just a Million Dreams.”John DiMiceliIt’s the first in a planned series of archival releases, drawn from what the singer called “the Vega vault,” that will be issued by Sacred Bones Records. The vault, a vast catacomb of Vega’s writings, paintings, drawings and music, includes a cassette tape that Artaud calls “the Holy Grail of the archive”: a soundboard recording of Suicide’s September 25, 1971, performance at Lincoln Center.When Vega and Lamere met in 1985, at a party for his album “Just a Million Dreams,” he was in his 40s and living at the Gramercy Park Hotel, and she was a Wall Street corporate lawyer two decades his junior. “We were both thunderstruck when we first saw each other,” she said during a video call from Florida, where she was visiting her mother, Toots, who briefly wandered into the frame. “Just a Million Dreams” was a tidy, new wave-sounding record helmed by hitmakers, and it was supposed to be Vega’s bid for pop success.“That was the mantra at his record company: ‘There’s a diamond in the rough here. He could be a rock star,’” Lamere said. The idea turned Vega’s stomach, Lamere said, “because that would take away some of his freedom to, as he said, be the research scientist in the basement.”At the time, New York’s punk rock era was starting to be documented, but “Suicide was never mentioned,” Lamere said. “And Alan would be like, ‘Do I exist? Did that all really happen?’” She got his song publishing rights in order and persuaded him to produce his own master recordings and then license them to record labels. They also began making music together in the Financial District loft where they lived with their son, Dante, now a 22-year-old hip-hop producer.The Vega-Lamere partnership wasn’t as unlikely as it might initially sound. Lamere played varsity soccer at Tufts before getting her law degree at Columbia, but she’d already exhibited signs of restlessness: She played drums in rock bands, including Backwards Flying Indians and SSNUB (an acronym for Sgt. Slaughter’s No Underwear Band), which performed at CBGB.Lamere said Vega’s record label believed he could be a rock star, an  idea that turned Vega’s stomach.via Saturn Strip, Ltd.Vega was known (to the extent he was known at all) for brandishing a bicycle chain onstage as a weapon, self-mutilating with broken glass and making music that was corrosively anti-commercial. But the musician born Boruch Alan Bermowitz had a life before Suicide, one that steered him toward art, confrontation, desperation, anxiety and compassion.Vega’s parents, Louis and Tillie Bermowitz, were Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who were able to move from the Lower East Side to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, thanks to Louis’s job as a diamond setter. Vega went to Brooklyn College where he majored in astrophysics, but got derailed when an art teacher saw him sketching one day and advised him to change course.At college, he met Mariette Birencwajg, a Holocaust survivor from Belgium, and they married in 1960. She is the author of “Mindele’s Journey,” a 2012 book that memorialized her family, most of whom were killed by the Nazis. In a 2016 blog post, Mariette Bermowitz wrote thatthe Swiss surrealist painter Kurt Seligmann, who taught Vega, considered him “a prodigy.” Vega also studied with the abstract painter Ad Reinhardt, another significant influence.To Lamere, this is the context that’s needed to understand her husband: “Alan came out of the Great Depression, post-Holocaust, Jewish immigrant parents. There was always a connection to what was happening to the underdog — the disenfranchised, the disempowered, the oppressed.”The young Bermowitzes lived a domestic life in Brooklyn. He worked for the welfare department (where he learned about government funding for the arts, which was soon to play a big role in his life) and painted in the evenings. In 1969, Vega saw Iggy Pop and the Stooges at Flushing Meadow Park in Queens, and was inspired to commit himself to a life of ideas and art. “And he made the decision, which was a very difficult one, to leave his married life,” Lamere said. (“My world crashed in,” Mariette wrote on her website.)Vega moved to Manhattan and helped run Museum: The Project of Living Artists, a Greenwich Village space that was open to performing and visual artists, political activists and anyone else 24 hours a day, thanks to the government funding he had secured. Late one night when he was there experimenting with musical feedback, he met Martin Rev (born Martin Reverby), a jazz keyboardist from Brooklyn. The two formed Suicide, initially with Vega on trumpet and Rev on drums, before they switched to vocals and keyboards.Vega tried to explain that the band name referred not to any particular suicide, but to the country’s. “America, America is killing its youth,” he howled on “Ghost Rider,” over Rev’s distorted, two-note organ riff. It was music made with an abundance of ideas and audacity, and a lack of money. Rev played a $10 Japanese keyboard, and a few years later added a $30 Rhythm Prince drum machine that spit out chintzy rumba beats.Gigs were hard to get. Record deals? forget it. By the time Suicide released its first album in late 1977, Vega was 39, making him the senior citizen of downtown punk.Lamere, Vega and Jared Artaud, the musician who befriended Vega and later helped mix and produce “Mutator.”Hillary ArcherThe singer Lydia Lunch, who’d recently moved to New York, wandered into Max’s Kansas City one night and joined the nine other people who’d come to see Suicide. The music “was raw, sexy, psychotic — but there was also a romance to it, with almost a doo-wop quality,” she said in an interview. “But it was Alan’s stare and intensity that was amazing. He was a Method singer — he was in those songs. If he saw you, he was seeing right frickin’ through you.”“And he and Martin were both really nice, on top of that,” she added.Artaud, who worked on the vault release, did not meet Vega until after his band covered a Vega song on “Psych Out Christmas,” a 2013 compilation. By then Vega was in what he called “the Tony Bennett phase of my career,” in which he was treated not as a pariah or a freak, but as a revered elder. He showed his light sculptures in prestigious galleries. His music was used in fashion shows by Agnès B. and Dries Van Noten. The Rollins Band covered Suicide’s “Ghost Rider” on the soundtrack to “The Crow,” which sold three million copies, and Bruce Springsteen did a version of “Dream Baby Dream.”“Suicide’s like the Beatles to me and my band,” Artaud said. He had “a close relationship” with Vega, who lived only one subway stop away. In 2012, Vega had a stroke, which slowed him to a shuffle, and his health continued to decline.“I think he knew his time wasn’t long,” Artaud said. “He would hint at things like ‘When I’m not here,’ or ‘When I’m gone.’ I felt we were building this kind of pact. The heaviest thing for me was when he said, the last time I saw him, ‘I’m ending. You’re beginning. And I’m passing the torch down to you.’”The posthumous album “Mutator” exemplifies Vega’s extremist senses of doom and beauty. On “Fist,” Vega croons “Destroy the dominators,” over a bed of swamp-crawling synths and a deadpan hip-hop beat, while on the bucolic ballad “Samurai,” he declaims lyrics that are by turns ominous (“Missing girls/Who’s been killing ’em?”) and impenetrable.Artaud is helping Lamere catalog and digitize the Vega vault. “It will take some time,” he said. Vega liked to record a bunch of songs, then move on to the next bunch without releasing or mixing the first, which has left a sprawling jumble of his work: “He was always focused on tomorrow.” More

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      Fyre Festival Ticket Holders Win $7,220 Each in Class-Action Settlement

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      Nearly four years after the infamous festival stranded thousands of attendees in the Bahamas, 277 ticket holders learned they will receive payouts, pending approval.Nearly four years after an infamous festival that was billed as an ultraluxurious musical getaway in the Bahamas left attendees scrounging for makeshift shelter on a dark beach, a court has decided how much the nightmare was worth: approximately $7,220 apiece.The $2 million class-action settlement, reached Tuesday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York between organizers and 277 ticket holders from the 2017 event, is still subject to final approval, and the amount could ultimately be lower depending on the outcome of Fyre’s bankruptcy case with other creditors.But Ben Meiselas, a partner at Geragos & Geragos and the lead lawyer representing the ticket holders, said on Thursday that he was happy a resolution had at last been reached.“Billy went to jail, ticket holders can get some money back, and some very entertaining documentaries were made,” Meiselas said in an email mentioning Billy McFarland, the event’s mastermind. “Now that’s justice.”Lawyers representing the trustee charged with Fyre’s assets did not immediately respond to a request for comment.McFarland and the festival’s co-founder, the rapper Ja Rule, have faced more than a dozen lawsuits against their company, Fyre Media, in the event’s aftermath. The plaintiffs have sought millions and alleged fraud, breach of contract and more.McFarland, 29, is serving a six-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to wire fraud charges. In 2018, a court ordered him to pay $5 million to two North Carolina residents who spent about $13,000 apiece on VIP packages for the Fyre Festival.“I cannot emphasize enough how sorry I am that we fell short of our goal,” McFarland said in a 2017 statement, though he declined to address specific allegations. “I’m committed to, and working actively to, find a way to make this right, not just for investors but for those who planned to attend.”The festival, billed as “the cultural experience of the decade,” had been scheduled for two weekends beginning in late April 2017. Ticket buyers, who paid between $1,000 and $12,000 to attend, were promised an exotic island adventure with luxury accommodations, gourmet food, the hottest musical acts and celebrity attendees. Influencers including the models Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid promoted it.But when concertgoers arrived, they were met with what the court filing describes as “total disorganization and chaos.” The “luxury accommodations” were in fact FEMA disaster relief tents, the “gourmet food” a cheese sandwich served in a Styrofoam container and the “hottest musical acts” nonexistent.The festival, which sold a total of approximately 8,000 tickets for both weekends, was canceled on the morning it was scheduled to begin, after many attendees had arrived. (The debacle spawned two documentaries, on Hulu and Netflix.)Fyre has attributed its cancellation to a combination of factors, including the weather. But some Fyre employees later said that higher-ups had invented extravagant accommodations like a $400,000 Artist’s Palace ticket package, which included four beds, eight V.I.P. tickets and dinner with a festival performer, just to see if people would buy them. (There was no such palace.) Production crew members stopped being paid as the festival date neared.Mark Geragos, another lawyer at the firm that represented ticket buyers in Tuesday’s settlement, filed the initial $100 million class-action lawsuit days after the event, which stated that Ja Rule and McFarland had known for months that their festival “was dangerously underequipped and posed a serious danger to anyone in attendance.” McFarland faced a second class-action lawsuit two days later.A hearing to approve Tuesday’s settlement is set for May 13. More

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      Did the Music Industry Change? A Race ‘Report Card’ Is on the Way.

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      The Black Music Action Coalition, a group of managers, lawyers and others, was created last summer with a mission to hold the business to account. In June, it will report on the progress so far.Last summer, as protests roiled over the death of George Floyd, the music industry began to take a hard look at itself with regard to race — how it treats Black artists, how Black employees fare at music companies, how equitably money flows throughout the business.Major record labels, streaming services and broadcasters pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in donations, convened task forces and promised to take concrete steps to diversify their ranks and correct inequities. Artists like the Weeknd and BTS donated money to support social justice, and Erykah Badu and Kelis signaled their support for economic reforms in the music industry.Everything seemed on the table. Even the term “urban,” in radio formats and marketing — to some a racist euphemism, to others a signifier of pride and sophistication — came under scrutiny. But there was still wide skepticism about whether the business was truly committed to making substantial changes or whether its donations and lofty statements were more a matter of crisis P.R.The Black Music Action Coalition, a group of artist managers, lawyers and others, was created last summer with a mission to hold the industry to account. In June, it intends to release a “report card” on how well the various music companies have made good on their promises and commitments to progress.The report will lay out what steps the companies have taken toward racial parity, and track whether and where promised donations have been made. It will also examine the number of Black executives at the leading music companies and the power they hold, and how many Black people sit on their boards. Future reports will take deeper looks at questions like how equitably the industry itself operates, Binta Niambi Brown and Willie Stiggers, a.k.a. Prophet, the coalition’s co-chairmen, said in an interview this week.“Our fight is much bigger than just whether or not you wrote a check,” said Prophet, an artist manager who works with Asian Doll, Layton Greene and other acts. “But the fact that you said you were going to write a check, we want to make sure that money was actually given and that it went to a place that actually hit the veins of the Black community.”The report, to be written by Naima Cochrane, a journalist and former label executive, will be modeled on the annual media studies by the advocacy group GLAAD, which track the representation of L.G.B.T.Q. characters in film and television and assign ratings to the various companies behind them. It is expected to be issued by June 19 — Juneteenth, the annual holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.The coalition’s public statements have made it clear that it sees itself as a strict and unflinching judge of the music industry, which has a dark history of exploitation of Black artists even as Black music has long been — and remains — its most essential product. Last summer, an online campaign called #BlackoutTuesday brought out painful commentary that, even today, many Black executives feel marginalized, subject to white supervisors who hold greater powers and earn more money.Brown, a label executive and artist manager, said the goal of the report is not punishment but encouragement.“We want to do it in a way that is more carrots than stick, so we can continue to incentivize good behavior,” she said. “We want to hold folks accountable, not cancel them.”Most of the major music companies have hired diversity officers and promoted some top Black executives to positions equal to those of their white colleagues, though there are still only a handful of Black people at the uppermost levels of leadership.A number of outside studies have also been commissioned to examine diversity within the industry, including one by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative at the University of Southern California and another by the Recording Academy, the Berklee College of Music and Arizona State University about women in music.Yet there has been relatively little public discussion about looking at artist contracts, including ones from decades past, and curing any unfair terms.One company, BMG, examined thousands of contracts and found that, of 15 catalogs it owns that have rosters with both Black and non-Black artists, 11 showed no evidence of racial disadvantage. Among the four that did, the company found “a statistically significant negative correlation between being Black and receiving lower recorded royalty rates” of 1.1 to 3.4 percentage points. BMG has pledged to take action to correct that disparity.Those deeper issues about fairness in the music industry may well be covered in future reports by the coalition. For now, they are limiting their scope to whether promises have been kept.“Racism is 400-year-old problem,” Prophet said. “We didn’t think it would be solved in 12 months.” More

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      Dawn Richard Will Find a Way to Be Heard

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      Dawn Richard is accustomed to being by herself. During the pandemic, she got used to being unable to seek inspiration in the typically vibrant streets of New Orleans — no catching a last-minute show at Preservation Hall, no detouring to pick up dessert at Pandora’s Snowballs. Instead, she went for long solo drives at night, where she’d listen to her favorite classical composers — Debussy, Chopin — and sit with the city’s emptiness.In the early days of the singer, songwriter and producer’s career, all of her waking (and, actually, sleeping) moments were captured by the camera crew on “Making the Band 3,” the MTV reality show that brought her to national fame as a member of the Diddy-created R&B-pop girl group Danity Kane in 2005. It was a wild time, filled with cutthroat singing and dancing competitions, screaming matches in the studio, and the inherent drama of housing multiple people under the same roof and telling them, “Try to be famous.”So it’s not a big surprise that she prefers a little peace and quiet now. She likes to record without anyone else in the studio. For much of the last decade, she has worked as an independent musician with few of the resources afforded to more connected artists. And as a result she has had one of the most unconventional, eccentric R&B careers in recent memory.This didn’t happen as a point of principle, but as a necessity. “I didn’t wake up one day like, ‘Yeah, I want to be independent. Screw the industry,’” Richard, 37, said in a recent interview. “I was in the mainstream. I liked that money. I liked that help. It just didn’t believe in me. So I picked myself up, and I got really good at picking myself up.”That’s changed — sort of. Adding another unexpected twist to a career full of them, Richard’s sixth solo album, “Second Line,” will be released April 30 on the storied North Carolina indie label Merge Records. Merge, founded in 1989 by members of the punk band Superchunk, is more typically associated with earnest and outré guitar bands like Arcade Fire, Neutral Milk Hotel and Waxahatchee.“I was kind of like, ‘I don’t see a lot of Black on the roster,’” she said.But she was convinced after meeting with the label at her manager’s suggestion, and realizing how many of its artists (Caribou, Destroyer) she loved. And the adventurousness of the broader Merge lineup syncs up nicely with “Second Line,” which channels R&B, electronic, house and bounce into a loose narrative about a synthetic android named King Creole navigating her way through art, love and the music industry.Speaking over two video interviews from Los Angeles in the middle of a full-time relocation to New Orleans, Richard was enthusiastic when talking about her music — she illustrated several songs by spontaneously beatboxing the rhythm — and candid about the many ups and downs of her career.“I have literally been rejected by everybody in this industry,” she said with a warm laugh, her bejeweled heart-shaped earrings flashing as she shook her head. “But those failures have really created this beast in me. I really don’t take no for an answer anymore.” Growing up, music hadn’t seemed like a career option — she won a college scholarship playing softball, and studied marine biology. Now she’s been a professional musician for nearly half her life, with no plans to slow down anytime soon.“I’ve always known what I wanted — who I wanted to be,” Richard said.Myles Loftin for The New York TimesThe new album is named for the New Orleans tradition in which the leading section of a funeral parade — the first line — is followed by musicians and dancers improvising off the beat. “In New Orleans, when you hear a second line, you can walk outside and join in,” she said. “You don’t even know the person you’re celebrating; you’re just dancing because it feels like their legacy is big enough. That’s what this album is.”Born in New Orleans, Richard grew up around the arts: Her mother was a dance instructor, and her father was the lead singer of the funk band Chocolate Milk. “Making the Band 3” culminated in the formation of Danity Kane, named after a drawing Richard made of an invented anime superhero. With hits like “Damaged,” its first two albums topped the Billboard charts, but the group’s creative output was heavily regimented, from the songs the members were told to sing to the outfits they were instructed to wear. It was also subject to the conventions of ’00s reality television, when explicit abuse and exploitation were rarely challenged by the broader culture.“Now, you can’t just tell a woman on national television that she’s fat,” she said. “But that was what was said back then. And then when you don’t have a team or someone behind you, you have to tread very carefully.”After Sean Combs decided to disband Danity Kane — a process that also largely played out on television — Richard remained signed to his Bad Boy Records label, and moved to Baltimore, where her family had relocated in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. With nothing to do, she convinced Combs to let her record at his Manhattan studio, and started commuting by train to New York. Those songwriting efforts were eventually noticed, resulting in the formation of a new group with her boss and the singer Kalenna Harper: Diddy-Dirty Money, which released a single album, “Last Train to Paris.”Richard in Danity Kane, second from right. “I was a grown person who had never been able to say ‘I want to wear what I want to wear,’” she said. After leaving the group, “I just started doing what felt good.”Peter Kramer/Getty ImagesIn 2012, after gradually losing interest, Combs broke up the group over email, and Richard successfully requested a release from her contract. (She and Combs remain in touch.) She met with multiple major labels, which all passed. Undeterred, she committed to going independent, and began working on a trilogy of concept albums with experimental electronic producers such as Andrew “Druski” Scott, Noisecastle III and Machinedrum.“I was instantly taken aback by how talented she was, and how she gravitated towards the stranger beats,” Machinedrum said in an interview. “A lot of artists these days are sucked into social media; they seem like they’re not all there. But you could tell that she’s there to work.”After nearly a decade of having her creativity dictated by others, tapping into this freedom was like uncorking a bottle. “I was a grown person who had never been able to say ‘I want to wear what I want to wear,’” she said. “So I just started doing what felt good. I had been rejected so much, I didn’t care if people got it. I just needed to get it out.”While she received critical acclaim, there was a slight backhanded element to the praise for her post-girl group career. “It made me feel like maybe Danity Kane was a joke — like everything that I had done before had been seen as some bubble gum thing, and now I’m a legitimate artist,” she said. “I was mind boggled by that because I hadn’t changed anything; I just literally got an opportunity to write more.”Over the next few years she worked incessantly on full-length records, loose singles, feature appearances, remixes and ornate music videos — most of it self-funded, which made it even more disappointing if it didn’t make the impact she had hoped for. Drained, Richard decamped to New Orleans for an extended period for the first time since she’d moved away. There, she reacquainted herself with the city’s creative rhythms, which had changed dramatically post-Katrina, and settled on translating that into her music. (Instead of dialing down her production values, she covertly audited a finance class at the University of New Orleans to better manage her funds.)“You can take people outside of New Orleans, but you can’t take New Orleans out of them; no matter where we are, the culture lives inside of us,” said the jazz musician Trombone Shorty, who’s known Richard since childhood. “She wanted to add her taste and her style to what we already have here and move it forward, while at the same time respecting the culture and where it comes from.”“In New Orleans, when you hear a second line, you can walk outside and join in,” Richard said. “You don’t even know the person you’re celebrating; you’re just dancing because it feels like their legacy is big enough. That’s what this album is.”Myles Loftin for The New York TimesThe summation of that work fed into her 2019 album “New Breed,” which she laced with samples from her father’s old band. For “Second Line,” she wanted to shift the focus to her mother, who underwent a knee surgery at the start of 2020. After Richard moved back home to help take care of her, the pandemic struck, and Richard suddenly found herself occupying a guest room in her parents’ home with an album that still needed to be finished.But she adjusted, as she tends to do, linking up with local engineer Eric Heigle to complete the record while accepting the responsibilities that come with living with your parents. (Folding clothes and towels, which she recounted with relatable exasperation.) And her extended proximity to her family flowed back into the album: Her mother appears throughout as a kind of narrator, and Richard said their relationship reached a new, adult level through their many conversations for those recordings.“Second Line” was made in close collaboration with the Los Angeles producer Ila Orbis, who performs much of the music. (“Sometimes you have to tone it down a bit” when working with other artists, he said, “but she allowed me to experiment as much as I wanted to.”) It also bears Richard’s first solo production credits, and her synth playing can be heard across the album.“It took so long to get to production as a producer, because I had other things to figure out — how to build a set, pay the workers, master the album, get the clothes and the outfits, learn the eight-count, get the choreographer to teach the eight-count,” Richard said.Her interests stretch outside music: She owns and oversees Papa Ted’s, a vegan food truck in New Orleans that she plans to expand into a brick-and-mortar restaurant; still an anime fan, she consults for Adult Swim; she acts, from time to time. Speaking about the future, Richard brought up the possibility of starting her own animation production studio, or even an awards show geared at independent artists. She also held out hope of fully reuniting Danity Kane.“I just wanted to be seen as an artist — less ambitious, and more celebrated for the fact that as a Black woman, I was pushing something that wasn’t being pushed, at that time,” she said about the early reactions to her solo career. But ambition was not something she shied away from. “Radio Free,” the first song she recorded with Ila Orbis, opens with a dramatic synthesizer barrage before Richard begins singing tenderly to an artist who’s being swallowed up by the music industry’s predations. “Where do you go when the radio’s down?” she asks. “Who are you now, when no one’s around?”Richard agreed that the song was partially directed at her younger self. She had played by the rules, and done what was asked of her, and it hadn’t worked out — twice, she emphasized. Asked what she wished she’d known at the onset, she was unequivocal: “I’m going to be frank with you: I’ve always known what I wanted — who I wanted to be. I think the only thing I would tell myself is ‘Commit to it.’ I would have found my freedom earlier and attacked it harder.”“‘Second Line,’ to me, is that freedom,” she continued. “And I want to have that conversation because maybe somebody doesn’t relate to it through the music industry — they relate to it through their queerness, or they’re stifled in their job. They feel like the world has turned them off. But just because the radio doesn’t play, it doesn’t mean you can’t be heard.” More

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      Kristin Chenoweth to Headline Tribute Concert Honoring Late Rebecca Luker

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      In honor of the Tony Award nominee who died in December, the virtual fundraiser show called ‘Becca’ will benefit ALS research through the non-profit Target ALS.

      Apr 15, 2021

      AceShowbiz –
      Kristin Chenoweth will join forces with fellow singer/actress Laura Benanti to headline a special tribute concert in honor of late Broadway star Rebecca Luker.

      The multiple Tony Award nominee died in December 2020, aged 59, after a battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) – a progressive neurodegenerative disease.

      Now some of her Broadway peers are getting together to stage a virtual fundraiser in her memory, with Kelli O’Hara, Sierra Boggess, Michael Cerveris, Victoria Clark, Santino Fontana, Judy Kuhn, Howard McGillin, Norm Lewis and Sally Wilfert among the stars taking part.

      Simply called “Becca”, the show will take place at 7 P.M. ET on May 4, with all ticket proceeds and donations benefiting ALS research through the non-profit Target ALS. There will also be streams available for fans on America’s West Coast and in the U.K.

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      To be hosted by Frank DiLella, the tribute show is written by Sarah Rebell and Steve Schonberg. It will have Lucy Simon serving as an honorary producer, while Mary-Mitchell Campbell and Joseph Thalken will take on the role of its co-music directors.

      Schonberg, who also oversees public relations for Target ALS, has issued a statement regarding the show. “This show is about celebrating who Rebecca was both onstage and off and reminding us that each life is precious. ALS not only affects patients, but their family, friends, and colleagues, too,” he said.

      He went on to add, “This concert serves multiple purposes; providing a sense of healing to those who loved Rebecca, telling the story of another beautiful life cut short, and raising funds that can help us realize a world where no one dies of ALS.”

      For more information and tickets, visit Celebrate Becca official site.

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      Zayn Malik and Ingrid Michaelson Capture Bright Side of Pandemic in 'To Begin Again' Music Video

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      [embedded content]

      The song itself, which they co-wrote with Sarah Aarons, talks about holding on to the past while finding hope of rebirth in the promise brought by COVID-19 vaccine.

      Apr 15, 2021

      AceShowbiz –
      Zayn Malik and Ingrid Michaelson have released the visuals for their collaboration “To Begin Again”. After previously teased in an approximately 1-one-minute snippet, the music was debuted in full on Wednesday, April 14.

      The video, which was directed by Marykate Schneider, captures the bright side of pandemic as it shows people doing various activities despite the restrictions placed as safety measure. Several guys are seen exercising with their masks on, while musicians are playing on the street.

      A boy is happily playing in a park with his father, while owners of clothes and hat shops still run their business with their masks on. There’s also a dancer, Ayla Ciccone-Burton, who cheerfully performs to entertain passersby. In a heartwarming moment, Ayla is seen sharing an embrace with a man who holds a “free hug” sign.

      Zayn and Ingrid themselves make sporadic appearances in the video, with the former being seen working in the studio and running on the street while wearing a hoodie. As for the “Girls Chase Boys” songstress, she is mostly filmed when she’s playing her piano at home, looking comfortable in her sweatshirt and matching pants.

        See also…

      In the song, Zayn and Ingrid sing about holding on to the past while finding hope of rebirth in the promise brought by COVID-19 vaccine. “When the world was ending/ I’d hold you in my arms/ And we talked about the places we’d never been/ When the world was ending/ We’d hold on to the past/ Because it’s all we thought that we would ever see,” Ingrid sings over gentle, muted piano.

      She then switches into a more hopeful mindset as she continues, “But then the sun came right back/ And the birds sang as if nothing had happened/ And, it’s alright/ It’s OK/ We will get/ Another day/ To begin again, to begin again, to begin again.”

      Zayn’s verse finds him feeling equally eager to find hope in the dawn. “When the world was ending/ We looked up at the sky/ And we talked about the last song that we’d play/ So far from comprehending/ They’d lift us to the stars/ Never seen each other from so far away,” he croons. “But then the sun came right back/ And the kids played as if nothing had happened/ And, it’s alright/ It’s OK/ We will get another day/ To begin again, to begin again, to begin again.”

      In a March interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, Ingrid said she hopes the song will give people a “collective sigh” of relief. “The collective sigh of relief resonated with me in such a way that I had to get it out musically,” she recalled writing the song after Joe Biden won the presidential election. “The song is a song of hope and of release. Of beginning again,” she added, gushing that Zayn’s voice “was the perfect fit.”

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      Keyshia Cole Fires Back at Haters After Being Told Too Old for Flexing Hickey

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