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      Morgan Wallen, With Latest No. 1, Tops a Garth Brooks Record

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      Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” notches its 19th week atop the all-genre Billboard 200 chart a year after its release.Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” was already a chart monster. The album, released last March, spent its first 12 weeks at No. 1, then notched another four by the fall, and two more early this year. Thanks to consistently huge streaming numbers, it was the most popular album of 2023.Now Wallen has another feather in his cap. “One Thing” has hit No. 1 for the 19th time, breaking Billboard’s record for most weeks at the top for a country album — surpassing Garth Brooks’s 1991 classic “Ropin’ the Wind,” which had era-defining country hits like “Shameless,” “What She’s Doing Now” and “The River.” (At least 11 non-country albums have logged more weeks at No. 1 in the 68-year history of Billboard’s all-genre chart, including Adele’s “21,” with 24 weeks, and the “West Side Story” soundtrack, with 54.)In its latest week, Wallen’s “One Thing” had the equivalent of 68,000 sales in the United States, including 90 million streams and 2,000 copies sold as a complete album, according to the tracking service Luminate.That is a modest take for a No. 1 album, but it was enough in an otherwise slow week. With Ariana Grande’s long-awaited new album “Eternal Sunshine” already posting big numbers, and sure hits by Beyoncé and Taylor Swift on the way in coming weeks, this might seem Wallen’s last shot at the top. But it also seemed that way last June, when he posted his 15th week at No. 1. Or in October, for his 16th.Also this week, Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” climbs to No. 2, a new peak; released a year and a half ago, the folk-pop-y “Stick Season” — with banjo, mandolin and catchy hooks — went to No. 3 last summer and has been bubbling through the Top 10 for months.“Vultures 1,” by Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) and Ty Dolla Sign, holds at No. 3; fans continue to wait for the promised release of a second volume. SZA’s “SOS” is No. 4 and Drake’s “For All the Dogs” is No. 5. More

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      9 Musicians Who Play a Role in This Year’s Oscars

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      Hear songs by Dua Lipa, Jarvis Cocker and yes, Bradley Cooper.Dua Lipa striking a “Barbie” pose.Justin Tallis/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDear listeners,Only two days until the Academy Awards! In Tuesday’s newsletter, we looked back at Oscar history and heard some tracks that won best original song. Today, we’re focusing on this year’s contenders — and the many musicians who make appearances in Oscar-nominated movies.I first had the idea for this playlist months ago, when I noticed how many musicians have roles in Martin Scorsese’s epic American tragedy “Killers of the Flower Moon.” The Americana icon Jason Isbell has a surprisingly major part, holding his own in scenes with Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro; the country crooner Sturgill Simpson also makes a memorable cameo.But then, as I caught up on the year’s most acclaimed films, I kept seeing — and hearing — musicians everywhere. That bowl-cutted court monitor who comes to assess a young boy’s safety in “Anatomy of a Fall”? That’s Jehnny Beth, a brooding solo artist and leader of the spiky rock band Savages. Is that guy sitting at the hotel desk for a fleeting moment in Wes Anderson’s whimsical “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” actually … Jarvis Cocker? (Yep, it was.)Consider today’s playlist a who’s who of musicians with connections to this year’s Oscar nominees. Some show off their acting chops; others, like Mica Levi and Jon Batiste, contributed indelible music to the recognized films. This marks the first time, though perhaps not the last, I have bemoaned the fact that Paul Giamatti (my personal best actor choice) was never in a band.You can’t make an entrance if you keep missing your cue,LindsayListen along while you read.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Onstage, Zach Bryan Howled, and the Crowd Found Its Voice

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      The singer and songwriter has become one of pop’s least expected new stars. On opening night of his arena tour, he showcased the bond with his fans that brought him there.The first two songs Zach Bryan played at the United Center on Tuesday night were from the more muscular end of his catalog. They landed hard and quick — Bryan was singing with a rugged howl, guitars were churning, the fiddle poked through the top like a squeal. This was opening night of The Quittin Time Tour, and the first of three sold-out shows here, and he was wasting no time pumping the audience into a frenzy.Then he needed them to breathe — maybe he needed to breathe — and so next came “God Speed,” one of the most delicate and precise entries in Bryan’s catalog. It’s a song about surrender and, most importantly, hope, that rests entirely on his strummed acoustic guitar and determined, dusty voice. Bryan pulled his vocals back to let the words sink in, but somehow the crowd got louder and more committed, turning the song into a hymn. In a room of over 20,000 people, everyone was singing, yet somehow it was eerily quiet — the loudest hush imaginable.Bryan, 27, is a singer whose hollers feel like hugs and whose laments land with a roar. For the past few years, his country-rock-adjacent rumbles have been inspiring a level of fevered devotion that has made him one of music’s most popular and least expected new stars. “Zach Bryan,” his second major-label album, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart last year, and its lead single, “I Remember Everything,” a duet with Kacey Musgraves, reached the top of the Hot 100. Half a year later, the song remains in the Top 10.Songs like “God Speed,” from his self-released 2019 album “DeAnn,” heralded Bryan’s arrival as a singer and writer of uncommon vigor.Evan Jenkins for The New York TimesA Bryan live show is rooted in his sandpapered voice, his modest affect and his band’s surprisingly jubilant musical arrangements. But just as crucial is the crowd shout-along. It is something slightly different than a regular singalong; the harmony it suggests veers past musical to the emotional.A couple of years ago, Bryan’s audience was packed with young men who sang his scraped-up songs unselfconsciously back to him. It all had the eau de Springsteen — deploying the magic of seeing a tough, resilient man confess to something much more wounded and ambiguous. But while that’s still part of the appeal, his crowd has expanded. There are more women now, and loads of teenagers, too, an indication of Bryan’s reach even if he has yet to become a traditional radio presence, and even if his allegiance to country music — which he toys with, and which the crowd’s outfits suggested an affinity for — is fickle.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Twice’s ‘With You-th’ Tops the Billboard Chart

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      The act’s six-song EP “With You-th” debuts at No. 1, while Morgan Wallen celebrates a year of “One Thing at a Time” by hitting the No. 2 spot.The nine-woman K-pop group Twice leads the Billboard album chart for the first time this week with its latest mini-LP, thanks to collectible CD and vinyl sales, while Morgan Wallen marks a full year of blockbuster streaming numbers.Twice’s “With You-th,” a six-song EP, opens at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart with the equivalent of 95,000 sales in the United States. The vast majority of its consumption — 90,000 copies — was through purchases of physical copies, which included 14 collectible variations on CD and three vinyl LP versions, according to the tracking service Luminate.“With You-th” also garnered 6.3 million streams, the lowest streaming total for a No. 1 album in almost five years, since Celine Dion’s “Courage” opened with 3.9 million in 2019 — a period when sales “bundles” helped albums top the charts by including the music with purchases of concert tickets or merchandise. (After an industry uproar, Billboard tweaked its rules to rein in the practice.)Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” rises one spot to No. 2 in its 52nd week on the chart, with the equivalent of 67,000 sales. Since it came out a year ago, Wallen’s album has remained remarkably popular, holding at No. 1 for a total of 18 weeks and never dipping below No. 6 on the all-genre album chart — and even then, only hitting that low point two times.Week after week, “One Thing” has been a streaming champion, logging a total of 8.3 billion streams since it came out. Even after a full year, each of the album’s 36 tracks is clicked an average of more than two million times on streaming services weekly — by comparison, the six songs on the brand-new Twice album had an average of a little over one million streams apiece.Also this week, “Vultures 1,” by Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) and Ty Dolla Sign falls to No. 3 after two weeks at the top, while Noah Kahan’s “Stick Season” is No. 4 and SZA’s “SOS” is in fifth place. More

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      Disgraced but Embraced: Pop Culture Pariahs Are Making Big Comebacks

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      Shane Gillis hosted “S.N.L.,” the show that rebuffed him. Ye topped the Billboard chart after making antisemitic remarks. Has the mainstream given up on banishing bad actors?Last weekend, the comedian Shane Gillis hosted “Saturday Night Live,” five years after he was fired from the show before ever appearing on it, when old podcast appearances in which he’d used slurs were brought to light. During his opening monologue, Gillis showed how he had evolved since then, which is to say, only slightly. In a tame bit about his parents, he fondly recalled spending time with his mother when he was younger, noting sweetly, “Every little boy is just their mom’s gay best friend.”For the past two weeks, Ye — formerly Kanye West — has sat at the top of the Billboard albums chart with “Vultures 1,” his collaborative album with the singer Ty Dolla Sign. In late 2022, Ye began a public stream of antisemitic invective that, for a while, effectively imploded his career, leading to the dissolution of his partnerships with Adidas and the Gap. He seemed, for a time, persona non grata. But he, too, has returned to something approaching old form, with a single, “Carnival,” that went to No. 3 on the Hot 100, and a series of arena listening sessions that have been the hallmark of his album rollouts in recent years.Ye debuted his latest album, a collaboration with Ty Dolla Sign, at a series of arena listening events.The New York TimesCancellation was always an incomplete concept, more a way of talking about artists with contentious and offensive personal histories than an actual fact of the marketplace. Except in the most extreme cases, moral failure has never been an automatic disqualifier when it comes to artistic work.What changed in the years since the beginning of the #MeToo movement is the presumption that strong enough discursive pushback might indeed lead to actual banishment. That proved to be true in the wake of #MeToo, in which powerful men like Charlie Rose, Bryan Singer and Matt Lauer were effectively cast out of public life after allegations of sexual misconduct. (And it should be noted: Most of those facing banishment, or the threat thereof, have been men. Roseanne Barr is perhaps the most high-profile woman to meet that fate, following racist and antisemitic public statements.)The sense that bad actors could be weeded out at the root was satisfying liberal fantasy, though. What’s happened instead is the emergence of a class of artists across disciplines — call them the disgraced — who have found ways to thrive despite pockets of public pushback. Their success suggests several possibilities about cultural consumption: Audiences that don’t care about an artist’s indiscretions can be more sizable than the ones that do; those who publicly agitate on these matters might be privately relenting; or that perhaps some audiences may have a tolerance — or maybe even an appetite — for offense.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Toby Keith and His Complexities

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThe country music superstar Toby Keith, who died this month at 62, was best known for the songs he released in the wake of 9/11 — especially his big, brawny anthems about American power and soldiers.But while he is most remembered for those tracks, they comprised only a portion of his whole catalog, which also included tenderly lighthearted love songs and numbers about the hollowness of masculinity.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Keith’s various modes, and the ways in which they bolstered each other; how his most successful songs were used as cultural proxies for political arguments; and the ways that patriotism and jingoism have shaped country music over the past two decades.Guest:David Cantwell, longtime country music journalist, co-author of the No Fences Review newsletter and author of “The Running Kind: Listening to Merle Haggard”Connect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Roni Stoneman, Country Music’s ‘First Lady of the Banjo,’ Dies at 85

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      A featured player on ‘Hee Haw’ and member of the famed Stoneman Family, she was the first woman to play modern bluegrass banjo on a phonograph record.Roni Stoneman, a virtuoso banjo player, mainstay of the country music television show “Hee Haw” and one of the last surviving members of the Stoneman Family, a renowned Appalachian string band, died on Thursday at her home in Murfreesboro, Tenn. She was 85.Her death was confirmed by Julie Harris, a family friend. No further details were available; a cause was not given.Ms. Stoneman made her mark in 1957 with her driving instrumental version of “Lonesome Road Blues,” which made her the first woman to play modern bluegrass banjo on a phonograph record. Also known as “Going Down the Road Feeling Bad” and often including lyrics, the song was included on a compilation album of three-finger, five-string banjo numbers in the style popularized by Earl Scruggs.Ms. Stoneman’s greatest claim to fame, though, came 16 years later, when she joined the cast of “Hee Haw,” entertaining millions while proving herself to be a rustic comedian on a par with Minnie Pearl and June Carter Cash.From left, Marianne Gordon, Roni Stoneman and Cathy Baker, from the cast of “Hee Haw” in 1978. Ms. Stoneman played the gaptoothed character Ida Lee Nagger on the show for almost two decades.CBS, via Everette CollectionHer most amusing, and enduring, character on the show was the gaptoothed “Ironing Board Lady,” Ida Lee Nagger, a beleaguered housewife whose feckless husband never lifted a finger to help her. A case of art imitating life, she said, the skit drew on a time in Ms. Stoneman’s life when, as a young housewife and mother of four children, she fell on hard times and had to take in washing to feed her family.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Beyoncé Becomes First Black Woman to Top Billboard Country Chart

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      Her single “Texas Hold ’Em” debuted atop the country airplay chart after its release during the Super Bowl.Beyoncé’s new country single “Texas Hold ’Em” reached No. 1 on the Billboard country airplay chart this week, making her the first Black female artist to hold the top spot.Beyoncé’s other single, “16 Carriages,” released simultaneously on Feb. 11, also debuted at No. 9 on the Billboard country chart. The songs reached No. 2 and No. 38 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Texas Hold ’Em” has already drawn more than 19 million streams, and “16 Carriages” has 10.3 million streams.Historically, Black artists have struggled to gain recognition in the genre of country music, a field often dominated by white male singers. But the sudden success of Beyoncé’s country singles comes at a time when Black women have started to receive acclaim within that realm. At last year’s Country Music Awards, Tracy Chapman won song of the year for “Fast Car,” which topped country charts three decades after it was released, thanks to a cover by Luke Combs. Black female country artists like Mickey Guyton and Brittney Spencer have also gained popularity in recent years.Beyoncé is the first woman to top both the Hot Country Songs chart and the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart since they were established in 1958, according to Billboard. Both Beyoncé singles are part of her upcoming album, a country-themed follow-up to “Renaissance,” which she referred to as “Act II.” The full album, announced during a Verizon ad that aired during the Super Bowl, is expected to be released March 29. More