Music

Chris Stapleton turned 43 on Thursday (April 15), but it was his fans who got the gifts, courtesy of his wife. Morgane Stapleton opened up the country superstar's old photo albums and shared her findings in honor of his big day.Baby-faced Chris ready for a day of hunting? Check. Teenage Chris in a suit? Check (multiple times over). Sports team portraits from his days playing baseball, basketball and more? Check, check and check.What's perhaps most incredible about Morgane's treasure trove of photos is that we (gasp!) can actually see Stapleton's chin...

Last summer, Beck was at loose ends in Los Angeles. “My whole year was canceled, with the shutdowns and everything,” says the singer. “My engineer’s wife was having a baby, so he wasn’t available. I really hadn’t been making much music. My studio had been dark for a year.” Then came word that Paul McCartney had a new solo album in the works — and that he’d asked for Beck to remix one of its songs. “‘OK, McCartney’s calling, let’s get in there and figure out how everything works!’” Beck...

When Dierks Bentley had a big question for the War and Treaty — would they perform at the 2021 ACM Awards with him? — he kept it casual: He sent them a text.Husband and wife Michael Trotter Jr. and Tanya Blount Trotter first met Bentley in 2018, at that year's Country Music Hall of Fame induction ceremony. He invited the couple to play his Seven Peaks Festival in 2019 — and then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit."We kept in touch with one another, not as artists, but as Americans going through the...

Weezer are over video meeting calls in their new visual for “Grapes of Wrath.” The song appears on the group’s 14th studio album, OK Human, which arrived in January. The Brendan Walter and Jasper Graham-directed clip opens on Rivers Cuomo, who is lamenting having to do another weekly meeting tied to the computer screen when he has a giant list of books he’d rather tackle. He opts out by adding a photo of himself in front of his computer camera. Soon, each of his bandmates — Patrick Wilson, Brian Bell...

When 2021 ACM Awards nominees were announced in late February, Ashley McBryde was on her way home from a writing retreat and unable to watch the announcement live. It was one of her Album of the Year competitors, actually, who let her know about her nomination."I got a text from John Osborne," McBryde shares. "Of course, he left out the part that he was in the category, too."In addition to McBryde, who earned her ACM Album of the Year nod for her sophomore album, Never Will, and John and his brother TJ, who...

Fresh off releasing a pair of Ronnie James Dio-era reissues, Black Sabbath will return to Ozzy Osbourne’s tenure for their next archival release, a deluxe edition of Black Sabbath’s 1975 album Sabotage. The “Super Deluxe” edition of Sabotage, due out June 11th via Rhino, pairs Black Sabbath’s newly remastered 1975 fifth studio album with 16 live tracks — 13 unreleased — recorded during the band’s North American tour in 1975. Available to preorder now on both compact disc and vinyl, both formats come with a fourth disc containing the “single...

Gabby Barrett's star continues to rise: The singer has earned her second chart-topping hit with "The Good Ones."The singer's sophomore release hit No. 1 on Billboard's Country Airplay chart for the chart dated April 17, 2021 — nearly a year to the date after her debut single, "I Hope," topped the same chart in April of 2020. That winning streak makes Barrett the first female artist in nearly five years to reach No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart with both her first and second singles. Kelsea Ballerini was the last woman to do...

Brockhampton have recruited Lil Nas X and Dominic Fike for their “Count on Me” video. The song appears on Roadrunner: New Light, New Machine, which the group dropped last week. In the Kevin Abstract and Dan Streit-directed video, Lil Nas X and Fike take a sunny ride into a forest as they exchange pleasant banter about the music they’re enjoying. Later that night, the pair go for a stroll through the woods where the carefree excursion takes a trippy and foreboding turn for the lovers, and they find comfort in...

Morgan Wallen says he's been working on himself, and he'll need to keep working on himself. He's not going to play any live shows this summer, he says.Specifically referring to tour dates with Luke Bryan and scheduled festival dates, Wallen says he's bowing out. "But it's important to me personally, if you can, still go to these shows — support country music," he writes in a letter posted to social media on Tuesday (April 13). "Country music is back and that's a beautiful thing."Wallen was to open Bryan's Proud to Be Right...

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band drummer Max Weinberg turns 70 today. “I feel better at 70 than I did at 30 for some reason,” he told Backstreets in a statement. “We’re vaccinated, I’ve been busy with City of Delray Beach business, & starting to perform again. Tell all the readers that their support for the past 47 years has been a blessing to me and all my colleagues.” The “Delray Beach business” he’s referencing is his recent appointment to the Delray Beach Planning and Zoning Board in Florida,...

Country-leaning American Idol contestant Chayce Beckham has officially made it into the show's Top 12 for Season 19, thanks to the fan vote before a live episode that broadcast on Monday night (April 12.)Beckham first caught ears as the gritty singer-songwriter who overcame a difficult period in his personal life that included a precipitous relationship with alcohol and a near-fatal car crash. During each round of performances on this season of Idol, he's proved his country and Americana chops, covering artists like Tyler Childers, while simultaneously demonstrating his rock edge, duetting with Incubus...

Sufjan Stevens previewed the next installment of his Convocations project with “Lamentation II,” an ambient instrumental piece featuring muted electronics and chrome-plated synth. He paired the song with a visualizer filled with comet-like streaks of rainbow color. Convocations is a five-volume series dedicated to Stevens’ biological father, who died in September — two days following the release of his 2020 record, The Ascension. Each installment of the album is themed around a different stage of the mourning process — a statement describes the project as “five sonic cycles exploring loss,...

Billboards calling Morgan Wallen his fans' choice as Entertainer of the Year have popped up around Nashville. The mystery of who paid for them runs deep.The Boot and Taste of Country confirmed the locations of three billboards, each with two Wallen-focused graphics in rotation, at various, highly trafficked intersections near downtown Nashville. One billboard design reads "Support that boy from East Tennessee," while another includes the GAHT hashtag in larger font; Urban Dictionary's definition of GAHT is not fit for publication, but it's not clear how the person or company paying for the billboards intended it.The messaging also refers...

Justin Bieber’s Justice returns to Number One on the Rolling Stone Top 200 Albums Chart, edging out Demi Lovato’s seventh studio album, Dancing With The Devil…The Art of Starting Over, by just over 1,100 units — the second closest race for Number One in RS 200 history. Justice is only the second album so far this year, after Morgan Wallen’s long-running Dangerous: the Double Album, to top the RS 200 for more than one week. While Dancing With The Devil…The Art of Starting Over was the biggest album of the...