One music critic recently described powerpop legend Bleu’s Sargeant Pepper Grinder as one of the best albums ever made about grief, but it’s not exactly Sufjan Stevens’s Carrie & Lowell, Nick Cave’s Skeleton Tree, Eels’ Electroshock Blues, or Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night. It actually might be the funniest album about grief as well.

So, it totally tracks that during his LPTV interview, when he’s not ruminating about death and loss, self-confessed “unabashed nerd” Bleu is randomly and hilariously debating whether Oasis or Extreme can be considered powerpop, expressing his fandom for The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years, or singing the praises of Mutt Lange and Max Martin (as seen in the full interview video above).

And the fallen friends that inspired Sargeant Pepper Grinder wouldn’t want it any other way.

“This whole record is a tribute to some friends of mine who have passed, so I think everything surrounding this record is very emotional. And today was definitely no exception,” says Bleu, aka William McAuley III, as he relaxes at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records after celebrating Sargeant Pepper Grinder’s release with his first live show in about four years. (He admits that performing in public after such a long hiatus made him “super-nervous,” although he plans to play out more in the future, including a gig in his old home city of Boston on Nov. 20.)  “But the approach I took is maybe a little bit different, in that I wanted to write songs that they would have liked. That really was my goal. And both of them liked upbeat, rockin’, exciting music. I think that’s what makes this record maybe a little bit different than a lot of the grief records.

“They were both very funny people, and we shared humor. When we got together, we were mostly laughing. A vast majority of the time that we were together and we spent a lot of time together was laughing,” he continues. “It just didn’t make sense to me to write this down, depressing record, because that’s not what they would’ve wanted and that’s not how they would’ve wanted to be celebrated. … I’ve already gotten so many comments from people saying that either Scootch or Ducky would’ve loved and been proud of the record and these songs, and it would have amused them.”

McAuley is referring to two longtime collaborators: his college friend and frequent cowriter Alex “Scootch” Scutro, who officiated McAuley’s 2017 wedding, and his studio partner Ducky Carlisle, a three-time Grammy-winning drummer/engineer/mixer and “rabblerouser” who was McAuley’s best man. Carlisle, “an amazing person and incredible friend who knew how to inspire and encourage people,” who McAuley worked with from the very beginning of his career, inspired several Sargeant Pepper Grinder tracks. But the one that probably would have amused Carlisle most is “Start a Band.”

The groovy boogie-rock of “Start a Band” is as earwormy and infectious as one would expect from a veteran songsmith like McAuley. After all, along with his own eight acclaimed Bleu albums, he’s written for Selena Gomez, Demi Lovato, Hanson, the Jonas Brothers, Big Freedia, Michelle Branch, Kate Pierson, and K-pop boy band NCT DREAM, and has received multiple Emmy nominations for his screen composing. “Start a Band” even boasts a “D.U.C.K.Y.” singalong that ought to inspire an arm-spelling dance a la “Y.M.C.A.” or Chappell Roan’s “Hot to Go!” But, characteristic of the gallows humor that runs throughout Sargeant Pepper Grinder, the powerpop bop comes to a dead (pun intended) halt when McAuley sings: “He always wanted to start a band… but then that fucker died!” When McAuley blurts that line and then pregnantly pauses for effect during his Licorice Pizza performance, a few awkward giggles can be heard throughout the store — before the music resumes and McAuley insistently sings, “He would have thought that was funny!”

“Start a Band” is about a very funny dream, which Carlisle never fulfilled during his lifetime, to form a monkeys-themed (as opposed to Monkees-themed) tribute act. There’s even a line in the song in which McCauley imagines this band singing, “Hey, hey, we’re the Shock the Monkeys!” McAuley chucklingly reflects, “[Carlisle] was obsessed with this idea that so many huge bands have songs about monkeys! I mean, the Beatles have ‘Nothing to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.’ The Rolling Stones have a monkey song [“Monkey Man”]. George Michael had a ‘Monkey’ song. There’s [Peter Gabriel’s] ‘Shock the Monkey.’ He had this exhaustive list. What is this rock ‘n’ roll obsession with monkeys? Anyway, that was his point of reference, and he had always wanted to start a cover band that just did all of those songs. It was a funny thing that he always talked about. As I was in the horrific process of cleaning out his house with another friend after he died, that was one of the things that I was thinking about — the idea of this song, to sort of cheer myself up to help me get through it.”

When LPTV suggests that, possibly to celebrate Carlisle’s birthday or commemorate the anniversary of his passing, McAuley play an all-monkey-song tribute show at Licorice Pizza – and maybe even broaden the concept to include the actual Monkees, Arctic Monkeys, some Gorillaz’ hits, or Troy McClure’s Planet of the Apes musical from The Simpsons — McAuley enthuses, “Absolutely! I mean, if you open it up to all primates, we could do a five hour-set of this.”

“Shiny Dimes,” which guest vocals from Bleu’s son, is a more sentimental and less silly Carlisle homage. “It is about this myth that a lot of people don’t share now, so a lot of people don’t necessarily know about this,” McAuley explains. “I say ‘myth’ loosely, because I really believe in it. It’s about people who have passed leaving shiny dimes for us from the afterlife. I find shiny dimes all the time since Ducky has passed, so I do believe that he is sending his love and appreciation from the afterlife. He had such a huge laugh, and I can still hear it. I can still hear him laughing at all the stupid jokes.”

Scutro obviously inspired the eponymous Sargeant Pepper Grinder track “Scootch,” which cold-opens with the blunt refrain, “Alex woulda liked this song… but he’s dead, so he can’t hear it.” Later in the almost jarringly, relentlessly cheerful tune, McAuley deadpans (again, pun intended): “A bit too clever, but you liked it that way/‘A bit too much is on brand,’ you’d say/But you’re a bit too not-alive today.”

“Alex was incredibly smart, too smart for his own good, some might say. He was incredibly funny, insanely charming, and he was a complicated person. I really appreciated about that. I didn’t even really understand how complicated he was until after he died, to be honest. I felt so lucky that we had such an uncomplicated and unfettered relationship for so long. It’s making me really emotional,” says McAuley, pausing to collect himself.

“It’s OK. I’m glad that I can still be emotional about these guys,” he continues. “In a weird way, it’s like [Scutro] kind of chose me. I was his person that he chose to always stay best friends with, and it means the world to me. It really still does. He was always there for me. Being a full-time professional musician for as long as we’ve done this, it has a lot of ups and downs, and he always knew the right thing to say to keep getting me back on the horse.”

After a quarter-century in the business, making music on both major labels and with his own self-contained indie projects (sometimes crowd-funded, thanks to his cult-hero status in the powerpop world and his diehard fanbase), McAuley also does a lot of his own mid-life stock-taking on Sargeant Pepper Grinder. There’s the sardonic and psychedelic ballad “This Song Won’t Sell,” in which he parrots back jaded industry advice that, ironically, he’s “not supposed to write a sad song.” Consider it a companion piece or sequel of sorts to “I Don’t Hear A Single,” a 2008 song by a supergroup comprising McAuley, Mike Viola, and Carlisle called the Major Labels.

And then there’s “Deathbed,” in which McAuley, who was a “massive, massive hair metal fan” in his youth, looks back to his teens when “White Lions roared and Black Crowes soared” and muses: “On my deathbed looking back/How will I remember that?/Rose-colored glasses or cataracts blurring the past.” The album comes to a poignant close with the resigned yet triumphant survivor’s anthem “I’m Not Dead.”

“I am getting more used to and more comfortable with just being like, ‘It’s OK. I’m a 50-year-old guy, and this is who I am and I can’t change it. And a lot of you people who are watching this [interview] are 50 too, and here we are, just trying to be ourselves and enjoy our life together, right? Becoming comfortable with what that is really big for me. But I am also happy to say that we’re seeing such a resurgence back into physical media,” says McAuley, who pressed his new album’s vinyl at Licorice Pizza. “This idea of consuming records also seems to be coming back, even more so with some of the younger generations, so it does feel good to be still swimming in those waters and to know that this idea of real blood, sweat, and tears put into making longform, human records… people are still passionate about that.”

Bleu obviously felt passionate about his friendships with Scutro, who died in 2022, and Carlisle, who passed just one year later — “These people were just so important in my life that when I lost them, I needed to write songs about them” — but he was still processing and reeling from those two losses and finally “fully ready to release” Sargeant Pepper Grinder” when “another huge tragedy happened.” He says he’s “not really comfortable” talking about it just yet, but this ended up delaying the album for another year. However, he now realizes, “In a weird way, I think there is some subtext [about the third tragedy] there, for sure. It has been many years, but I think the advantage of that is that I am able to laugh more than cry now, if that makes any sense.”

Now that Sargeant Pepper Grinder is finally out in the world and he’s starting to play Bleu gigs again, McAuley believes “it all happened the way it was supposed to happen, and I’m glad that it’s happening now. In a weird way — because it’s been so many years, because the memorials have passed, all of the tributes on social media are long gone at this point — for [this album] feels like such a nice way to continue to keep [Carlisle and Scutro’s] memory alive. And that’s something that I’ll never stop doing, but this is obviously the most meaningful way that I can do that.”

“The very first thing you hear when you play the album is a soundbowl, and it’s in the frequency of love. Literally. It’s 528 Hertz,” says R&B diva and singer-songwriter Victoria Monét. “We kind of set the mood there, and then it goes into picking up the story where I feel like maybe the world left off with me, which was probably on the Grammy red carpet where my daughter was a meme and her dad was right next to me with family photos. We were already separated at the time, but [I was] discovering and being OK with the fact that Hazel is really all the love I needed. I needed to express that and the frequency of love, tuning into that frequency, reminding myself why I’m doing this.”

Monet is sitting with an intimate gathering of super-fans at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records on the eve of her long-anticipated sophomore album, previewing the double-disc, 22-track opus Frequency of Love, which features collaborations with SZA, Bruno Mars, Bryson Tiller, Chloe, Lucky Daye, Leon Thomas, and her 5-year-old daughter, Hazel Monét. Hazel, who inspired tracks like the mood-setting “Come Back to You,” which Vicotria says is about “the sacrifice I have to make in order to provide,” is actually in attendance, along with Victoria’s mother, L’Tanya Chestang Cubit, the woman who inspired Victoria’s Jaguar II breakthrough hit “On My Mama.” Suffice to say, there’s a lot of love in the room.

At one point during Licorice Pizza’s Frequency of Love listening session, Hazel even joins Victoria for the playback of “You Mean the World to Me,” the track featuring Hazel with Thomas. It’s an adorable mother/daughter moment as Victoria tells her, “Let’s start with saying, Hazel, I’m so proud of you. You did such a beautiful job on this song. To hear you sing really melts my heart, and so I’m so happy to have you on this album. Thank you for your understanding when Mommy couldn’t be home to make this album. … You really do mean the world to me.”

Much has happened since Victoria — who was already a success behind the scenes as a pop songwriter (her multiple Ariana Grande credits alone include “Thank U, Next” and “7 Rings”) — became a solo star with Jaguar II. She won three Grammys, most notably Best New Artist, beating out the likes of Gracie Abrams, Jelly Roll, Noah Kahan, and the War & Treaty. (Addressing any complaints that she shouldn’t have been nominated in that category because of her previous industry experience, she chuckles, “I’m so thankful for my award… and I’m not giving it back!”) Hazel also received a Best Traditional R&B Performance nomination for a Jaguar II Earth, Wind & Fire collab featuring her vocals, “Hollywood,” which made her, at age 2, the world’s youngest Grammy nominee. And judging by the critical acclaim that Frequency of Love has garnered so far, Hazel might be on track to become the Grammys’ youngest two-time nominee.

“Yes, she was born into greatness. I always say I’m really here for that type of nepotism and trying to push her forward,” a proud Victoria laughs.

However, while Victoria’s professional life has been thriving since 2023, in her personal life, she split up with Hazel’s father, John Gaines, who she’d been with three and a half years, just a few months after Jaguar II’s release — forcing her to juggle co-parenting with her newfound superstardom. “Now, I’m not a single mom, but I’m a mom that’s single. And I have to be, of my household, the provider. So, I have to express myself that way and let my daughter know I’ll always return,” she explains. “Even in the interim of Jaguar II and Frequency of Love, I wrote a children’s book [Everywhere You Are] that kind of shares that same sentiment, where I’m letting her know that we’re still connected no matter if I’m at work or separated. And I often try to bring her to my work experiences.”

While only three years have passed since Jaguar II, Victoria acknowledges that in this fickle business, there was an expectation that she would rush out a follow-up. “I think any time you experience success, the thing you do right after will include pressure. And sometimes it’s self-inflicted,” she muses. “But I don’t view success as a linear thing that just keeps repeating itself no matter what. It does take a lot of hard work and culmination of all of the energy, the self-healing, the workload, but also a little bit of timing and luck. … So, I did have to unlearn some of those pressures. And some of that takes time to do, which I think is human, and that’s OK.

“I can’t type in a prompt and create masterpieces. I have to have lived experiences. I have to edit things. I have to try and tweak things. I have to be honest. I have to re-cultivate,” Victoria continues. “There’s so many things that have to take place in order to make something that you’re proud of. So, the three years, I hope, were worth the wait — which is kind of one reason why I think I was even more OK with putting out a 22-song album!”

During her dimly lit Licorice Pizza listening party, Victoria repeatedly urges her fans to go home and listen to Frequency of Love from front to back, giving a preview of that seamless at-home experience by playing its first three tracks uninterrupted: the soundbowl-chiming “All I Need,” “Come Back to You,” and the gorgeous “Care for Somebody (Interlude)” an old Hollywood Dorothy Dandridge cover that one could easily imagine Victoria performing with the Los Angels Philharmonic at Disney Hall. Victoria understandably labored over the album’s song order, to create the right vibe.

“Oh, I was back, back, forth and forth, like I was Aaliyah! There was so much thought into the process of sequencing. It’s an important part of how I feel a listen should happen,” she tells the attending fans. “For the first listen, I want you to understand what the story is, and also contextualize each song with what it’s enveloped in between. So, there’s a lot of consideration that goes into it. But also, then I’m OK with you putting all these songs on a playlist and rearranging it. This is your album now. … And I hope that you find yourselves within the album. The moments where you don’t have the words, I hope this album is there for you, and as you grow as a person or experience different things, that different songs will resonate even more with you at those times.”

Victoria, now 37, has grown so much, personally and professionally, to get to this moment, and as someone who didn’t become a household name until she was in her thirties, she says “the timing was perfect” for this phase of her career. That is why gratitude is such an overarching theme of her new album.

“There is no mistake when God had his hand on the timing. I thought I wanted it at 20, 21, 22, 23 — all of these moments where maybe I wouldn’t have been ready or handled it this way, or the music just wasn’t right yet,” she says. “I’m so thankful that I had to climb uphill to get there. It made me appreciate it even more.”

The Black Crowes have been enjoying quite a renaissance as of late. Since the Southern rock band’s famously feuding Robinsons patched things up in 2019 — a sibling rock reunion that at one time seemed as hell-freezingly unlikely as Oasis’s — they’ve been up for a Best Rock Album Grammy (and are on track to get another nod for this year’s A Pound of Feathers), have received two consecutive Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominations, and have garnered the sort of critical acclaim that inexplicably eluded them for years. But swaggering, peacocking frontman Chris Robinson is uncharacteristically humble when Lyndsanity congratulatorily points this out.

“I wish it was a renaissance!” he chuckles. “Then you would go out in the world and there’d be less people wearing sweatpants and Crocs. You know what I mean?”

Chris is still every inch the fashionable rock star, of course, looking more ready for the stage than for a home Zoom interview with rooster haircut, vintage King Tubby T-shirt, ‘70s shades, and stacked silver jewelry. And the Crowes’ notoriously mouthy mouthpiece is unexpectedly earnest (he employs the emphasis phrase “you know what I mean?” literally 84 times during this conversation), particularly when discussing his reconciliation with younger brother Rich, with whom he once didn’t speak for nearly seven years.

“There’s wisdom there, there’s forgiveness, there’s respect, and there’s also curiosity, you know what I mean? … Where we are today is miraculous,” Chris gushes.

Despite being only two and a half years apart in age, and playing music together off and on for four decades, the Robinson brothers have always been very different, resulting in a friction that sometimes worked wonderfully for the Crowes’ chemistry (“Rich and I being such juxtaposed opposites is part of the catalyst and the spark that makes it possible,” Chris notes) — and sometimes really didn’t.

“We’re in the same band, we’ve been in the same house, we had the same parents, but it was completely different experiences,” the singer muses. “How Rich goes about it and how I go about it are two different worlds, in every aspect of our lives.”

Chris stresses that he and Rich are “the engine of the band creatively,” saying, “It’s funny, because there are outside pressures, manipulations, my shortcomings, his shortcomings, the people surrounding us, greed, egos… but when Rich and I were in a room writing songs together, it was always a vibe.” But he also readily declares himself the band’s “leader” (or, more amusingly, “Professor Snape”), saying with a shrug, “I’m glad to take the ‘bad guy’ role in the Black Crowes, hands down.”

It was Chris who “pulled the plug” after what he calls the band’s “Contractual Obligation Tour” back in 2013, because he was “so heartbroken and disappointed with what the band had turned into.” However, he credits his wife, Camille Johnson, for helping him realize just how foolish the Robinsons’ stubborn feud really was.

“She’s the one who, for the first time in my life, was like, ‘What is this? What the f***?’” he explains. “And that simple kind of inquiry just made it like, ‘Oh. You’re right’ — realizing that another almost decade had gone by.”

Chris and Rich may have butted long-haired heads since boyhood (“We’re brothers! It’s like, ‘Hey, there’s one porkchop left, who’s going to get it?’ You know what I mean?”), but the two were a united front in 1990, when the Crowes explosively debuted with Shake Your Money Maker. That album’s bloozy boogie-rock sounded utterly unlike the electronically driven post-punk, jangly college rock, grunge, and hair metal that dominated the scene at the time.

“Yeah, we were different. We weren’t Jane’s Addiction, and we weren’t Guns N’ Roses,” Chris says. “Like, we were in [U.K. hard rock magazine] Kerrang! — there was no place for us, because we weren’t in the New Music Express or Alternative Press or whatever.” And even when the Crowes became mainstream rock stars after their debut album went quintuple-platinum, they remained against grain, onstage and off.

For instance, early in their career, Chris’s mid-concert rants against corporate sponsorship led to the Crowes being booted off ZZ Top’s (Miller Brewing-sponsored) tour. And 35 years later, his anti-corporation stance hasn’t changed much. “That’s what I want from the bands that I like, the bands that I don’t like, the bands that I love! I want the teeth in there. I want a snarl, sometimes,” he explains. “I think in this day and age of obsessive consumerism and aggressive capitalism, everything comes with a smile and it smells good and it’s happy, and it seems like it only goes to eight. Which is fine, but that’s not the type of dynamic that inspires me. And what I mean by that is ultimately, my imagination needs to be stirred.”

By the time the Crowes released their third album, 1994’s Amorica (with a cover featuring a woman’s curly pubes peeking out from her stars-and-stripes bikini bottom, an image pulled from a 1976 bicentennial issue of Huster), they were definitely stirring up more than just their imaginations. They were alienating many other corporations — including Walmart and Kmart (who refused to sell the record with its uncensored artwork) and, more surprisingly, even Rolling Stone.

“It’s unbelievable. In the ’90s, with Operation Desert Storm, f***ing racism, drugs, murders all over the world, all this s*** — and that’s offensive?” Chris says incredulously. “If you really think about it, [the Amorica album cover] wasn’t even about being sexy, or sexual. It was about gratuitous America. I don’t usually deal in surface meaning. … And it’s hardly patriotic, either. To this day, I would do it again. I like the visceral thing that people have with it. I like that some people like it. I like that some people don’t. I’ve always laughed about it, though.”

Chris says he never consulted anyone at the band’s label at the time (the ironically named American Recordings) about whether or not Amorica’s hairy cover would be a problem. He certainly never asked for permission. “I said, ‘This is the art, and this is our record,’” he recalls matter-of-factly. “We had that kind of pull still. The record still went gold in the United States. Art comes before some guy’s opinion who’s not us.”

For the apparently divisive Amorica campaign, the Black Crowes also threw their now-legendary fancy-dress bacchanal known among superfans as the “Mushroom Party,” full footage of which was finally uploaded to YouTube last year. The band totally expected Rolling Stone magazine to be on board with their far-out costume-party concept, but that turned out to not be the case.

“I had our tour manager dress up like a policeman in a pig outfit,” Chris chucklingly reminisces. “Our booking agent at the time was dressed as the Pope. I was like, ‘Oh, this’ll be great! Put your hands up!’ And the policeman was looking at the camera and he had this pistol in the Pope’s back. It’s really silly. The Pope was wearing Elvis sunglasses! That was the ad for the record. And [Rolling Stone] was like, “Um, no.” … They didn’t think it was funny.”

Much more recently, the Crowes’ frontman got in hot water when, during a gig in Florida, some audience members chanted “U-S-A!” and he reacted with: “Thanks for the geography lesson. I don’t know what you’re so proud of right now.” When Chris’s snarky comment prompted some offended concertgoers to boo (or even walk out), he snapped back: “Some of us have real faith. For those of you f***ing booing us, some of us are not afraid. And we most assuredly are not f***ing ignorant.”

Now, four months after the backlash stemming from that incident has subsided, Chris says, “It was typical of outrage culture. It was two weeks of a certain type of person threatening to murder me and my family, and then it went away. It’s funny, though. People don’t like to be called ‘fascist,’ but if they knew what fascists did, which is threaten and intimidate people with violence…”

When asked if some supposed Crowes fans are surprised by his liberal-leaning political views, given that he’s from the South, Chris answers, “I mean, I think a really dull person would think that! I’m also from Atlanta, so I’m from a very progressive city. … It would be pretty hard to find any conservative views in anything. My only conservative view is I like traditional French cuisine! And I’ve always felt this way as an artist. I’ve always felt that I’m not a Puritan; I’m hardly, hardly that. The world is an open place, and if you’re going to call that place ‘free,’ then it’s not just for straight white males. That’s just the way it is. And if you’re a straight white male and you don’t like that, then you’re not talking about freedom; you’re talking about something else.

“We were always a counterculture band. We’ve always been outsiders. We’ve always seen injustice,” Chris elaborates. “We’ve seen the bigotry and hatred and racism all around us our whole lives. I mean, I’m from the deep South! We’ve seen the greed and avarice. We’ve seen it all. … That’s why [rock ‘n’ roll] is for outsiders. That’s why it’s for marginalized, bohemian, weird people. Today, all the kids [in rock bands] look like they were on the football team or they’re jocks, and their teeth are clean and they’re happy. That wasn’t how we came up. My mom [used to tell me], ‘How come everyone you know looks like they should be in a mental ward, including you?’ I’m like, ‘Mom, give it a minute. Some of us will be in the mental ward.’ My mental ward was just on a tour bus for the first decade.”

On that subject — and back on the subject of his currently simpatico relationship with Rich — Chris looks back at the Crowes’ whirlwind early fame and reflects, “The situation we found ourselves in with success and stuff, you have to always remember, in that era and where we come from, there’s no sensitivity. There’s no, ‘Let’s talk about our problems and how we feel.’ These kids today, they’re like, ‘I need to take a mental health break,’ and I’m like, ‘Well, good for you! My parents didn’t have any money.’ Rich and I didn’t have something to fall back on, like, ‘Oh, I’m just going to sit it out for a while and let all the other bands f***ing do it.’

“I know I didn’t take a mental health break — but I wrote those songs,” Chris continues. “I didn’t really deal with how [fame and success were] affecting me and the people around me in a bad way, just because that’s the nature of the beast. You just keep going, and you keep writing and creating. And that was the therapeutic part of it, even though, of course, you wouldn’t look at it that way then. But again, unimaginably, I would never change a thing about it.”

Chris truly has no regrets, saying, “These are things I had to go through and live through; the muse dictated so much of my behavior,” and pointing out, “Like, how was I supposed to make a good decision at 24 years old? You know what I mean? I’m not Mick Jagger. I didn’t go to the London School of Economics.” Chris even remembers that when Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, who had plenty of firsthand experience dealing with fraught band relations and the dangerous of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, phoned him in 1991 to check in and offer some sage advice, he paid Tyler no mind. “Steven was like, ‘Hey man, you’ve got to really watch your back and take care.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, cool, thanks.’ Are you serious? I’m 23 years old or 24, whatever. Everything was ahead of me.”

Now that he’s about to turn 60, Chris is happy that the Black Crowes are still “an island unto our own selves,” and he’s “grateful to be still playing rock ‘n’ roll music the way we want to do it, this far into the dystopian future that we’ve found ourselves.” And he’s immensely proud of A Pound of Feathers, which was recorded over just 10 days and truly captures the electricity of a stuff-of-legend live Crowes experience.

“I definitely wanted [A Pound of Feathers] to be more raw, you know what I mean? In a world of this f***ing digital everything, AI s***, everyone’s so f***ing lazy, man,” Chris says. “I got into this for human reasons, and human beings playing music together is the thing that I love. … And we love the music we’ve made. We’re appreciative of the past, we acknowledge our hardships, and now we’re also very optimistic of where we’re going. In a world full of chaos that is just inundating us with hate and fear, to be able to have some sort of control over our navigation is nice.

“And it really is about Rich and I,” Chris adds. “Ultimately, it gets back to where we started. There’s an authenticity, and there is an eternal flame — cue Susanna Hoffs! — that we really feel is our commitment to music. Music is a mystical revelation to me all the time. It’s never hissed at me. It’s never bit me. It’s never stolen from me. And it’s never let me down. You know what I mean?”

This interview originally ran on Gold Derby. Watch it in full in the video player at the top of this page.

Toby Gad in conversation at the Grammy Museum (photos: Timothy Norris/Getty Images)

Toby Gad has co-penned some of the most enduring pop hits of the 2000s, including John Legend’s “All of Me,” Beyoncé’s “If I Were a Boy,” Fergie’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” and Demi Lovato’s “Skyscraper” — the artistic process of which is detailed in his new behind-the-scenes coffee-table book, Becoming Toby Gad. But becoming Toby Gad, songwriter to the stars, wasn’t an easy evolution.

From forming two adolescent bands with his older brother (with whom he often butted heads), to contributing three tracks to the infamous first Milli Vanilli album All or Nothing (only to have those songs replaced on the revamped U.S. version), to struggling for years in a “prison cell” of a New York City apartment after moving from his native Munich, Gad hustled hard to get where he is. But his all-or-nothing strategy eventually paid off.

Gad sat down with me for a delightful, discography-spanning discussion at a star-studded Grammy Museum event celebrating his career, available in the edited Q&A below. He dished about all of the above, and much more — including how he got over impostor syndrome and stopped worrying about being “cool”; his successful sessions with the Veronicas, and Jessie J; his “most embarrassing story,” which took place a decade ago at Clive Davis’s Pre-Grammy Gala; and even the wild five weeks he spent with Madonna crafting her Rebel Heart album. (Yes, this is the man responsible for “Bitch I’m Madonna,” the song in which the pop queen demanded respect long before her Confessions II renaissance!)

To loosely quote Madonna: Bitch, he’s Toby Gad.

LYNDSANITY: Let’s start from the beginning, because I feel like you were born to do this. You were born into music. Your parents had a band, the Jazz Kids…

TOBY GAD: Yes, I think already in the womb of my mom, I learned all their repertoire. It was a Dixieland jazz band and they had about, I don’t know, 40 or 50 songs. And I think in my mom’s womb when they were playing these songs, I really memorized everything. I guess back then I decided I want to be a songwriter.

Didn’t they want you to join the band? They wanted you to learn how to play banjo or something like that.

Yeah, I hated banjo! I wanted to play piano, but they already had a piano player with my mom, so there was no room for me in the band. My brother played drums as a young kid; he was already the drummer of this band. But then early on, my brother and me, we started doing our own songs, playing during the intermissions of my parents’ gigs. And when my parents went back onstage, we went through the audience and said, “We’re collecting money for us. Do you have some?” And from that money, I bought my first Smurf Village, which was incredible. I felt rich.

Did you ever do any music for any of the Smurf films or TV shows later on?

No, that’s still on my bucket list, I guess.

Tell me about Q, the band you started with your brother Jens. You guys were quite young.

We were first called the Gad-Rollers. This was our first television show. I must have been 10 or 11. The music wasn’t very good, but we had fun.

How did you end up on television at such a young age? The footage from that show kind of has an Osmonds/Partridge Family vibe.

Well, we played wherever we could and for anyone who wanted to listen to us, and I guess someone called my dad and said, “Do the kids want to be on a TV show?” We were on three radio shows and quite a few TV shows too. It was a lot of fun.

It seems there was never really any possibility you were going to go into anything else. Did you ever consider a different career?

When I was 10, on one of the radio shows they asked me, “What do you want to be when you’re grown up?” And I said, “I want to be an ice cream salesman, because then I can eat ice cream!” I mean, that shows the level of education of a 10-year-old from so long ago, compared to now when you just have the knowledge of the world on your phone. I was so dumb back then.

Obviously you weren’t that dumb, because you knew this was your calling! You and Jens later formed a more grown-up band, Q. When did Q get a record deal and start putting out music?

We always felt we were close to it, but it took many years until we actually got a real record out. I think probably one of the first records was with Peter Schilling at the time…

As in the “Major Tom” Peter Schilling?

Yes. That wasn’t our song, but we had the B-side of the follow-up single. That was our first record that came out. I was 15.

Peter claimed that he didn’t know the David Bowie song about “Major Tom”…

Not possible.

I know! Did you ever ask Peter about that?

No, never. He was so upset because we were wearing these neon clothes and we actually got them [from being] sponsored by a surfwear manufacturer, and he felt so [underdressed] because the camera was just on our crazy [clothes]. We had the stupidest outfits.

How did you link up with Peter Schilling?

There was a guy who let us have his studio, my brother and me, when he wasn’t working. And he wasn’t working anymore — he started drinking and doing a lot of stockbroking. He had one of these Fairlight [synthesizers], which was one of the $100,000 computers at the time, and we were able to use it. We dreamt of making our own record, and he was producing that Peter Schilling record.

Q eventually put out one self-titled album. You were working with the legendary and notorious Frank Farian, who’s probably best known as the man behind Milli Vanilli. How did that come about?

We heard from a friend that Frank Farian, who had just had a hit on the radio with “Girl You Know It’s True” with two dancers who didn’t sing — which we didn’t know at the time — needed songs for an album that had to come out in like a week from then. I don’t know, it was some Coca-Cola promotion deal where he had to deliver an album really fast. And we were lucky. We sent the songs in and an hour later, or very quickly, we got the call that we had to come to Frankfurt to record three songs. And then a week or two later, the album was No. 1 in the charts. And that was Milli Vanilli.

Whoa. So, you had three songs on the first, controversial Milli Vanilli album?

Yes, the European version [titled All or Nothing], not the American one [Girl You Know It’s True].

Did you do any singing on your tracks?

No, the other people they’d hired did the singing. They said, “These two boys don’t want anyone in the studio when they sing!”

Did you know, or at least suspect, that Rob and Fab didn’t actually do the vocals?

Oh, we were just happy to have a record out! And then I went to Thailand, I remember, and I heard it on the radio and I was like, “Wow.” To hear your own song in a different country on the radio is such an insane feeling.

Which were your three Milli Vanilli songs, by the way?

“Boy in the Tree,” “Is It Love,” and “Can’t You Feel My Love.” Not very good songs.

Well, it was a pretty wild start to your songwriting career. How did you react when the lip-sync scandal went down and Milli Vanilli’s Grammy was taken back? You were young and new in the business, and suddenly you’re witnessing all this craziness.

At the time, Frank Farian was one of my early mentors; for seven years, I worked with him at his studio quite a bit. He had a heart attack just before that thing with the Grammys happened. He couldn’t even hear the words “Milli Vanilli” anymore. He had to come to America to accept a Grammy, which was all he ever wanted, but it was all a lie. … At the time they told us there’s problems, and we were totally on the other side. We were kind of “Camp Frank.”

But didn’t the Milli Vanilli scandal tarnish your reputation in the business in any way, or were you afraid that it would?

We had no reputation at the time! This was amazing! … No, I was super-proud, because people loved the music. And you could just separate the music from the scandal and all of that.

Tell me about the Q album.

It was our big dream to have a record together, but we were just fighting all the time and couldn’t wait to separate. There were radio interviews where [Jens] said one thing and then I proved him wrong right after.

What is it about brothers in bands? There’s Oasis, the Black Crowes, the Kinks… a long list of feuding brothers in bands. Why did you and Jens have that friction?

We had no respect for each other. He was really talented, a great musician. We could have really done so much together. It just didn’t happen. … We did a second [Q album] that never came out.

Is Q’s debut album from 1990 in print or available to stream?

And how do you feel it’s held up?

It’s embarrassing. It’s not good. I still had a thick German accent, but we were trying to sound American, I guess. And the lyrics are not good either.

So, you decided to go solo.

Yes, my big dream was always to come to America. In Germany, to listen to music that comes from America is like listening to something that’s the truth, that’s so unreachable and everyone tries to copy it. That was the holy grail. It took me 10 years until I finally dared to move to New York. My apartment had a toilet in the corner. It was more like a prison cell. … It took me three years before I really made money. At the end of the first year, I was running dry on money because some money was held up, and I lived for months on instant soup and bagels. It was pretty tough. … But it didn’t matter. It was all about the music.

When you moved to New York, was it with the intention of being a songwriter for other artists?

Yes. Well, after that Q record. I did an album myself and I spent a year recording all the live instruments, and then when it was finished, I made demo cassettes. I looked at the best managements in London and I sent these demo cassettes to 20 of them, and a month later I had 10 of them returned and I thought, “Wow, 10! There’s hope!” So, I went to London and knocked on the doors of the ones that hadn’t sent them back. And one by one, rejection after rejection. Some of them said the songs were good, but nobody liked my singing or my voice. So, that was the end of my singing career.

Obviously the Milli Vanilli thing was a bit of a break, but as a songwriter in New York, what was your real first success?

In 2002, I had the chance to work with a girl who had just left a girl group called Wild Orchid [Fergie]. She came into the room in tears, and I was wondering what’s wrong. She said, “I just broke up with my long-distance boyfriend.” I said, “Did you love him?” She said, “Yeah, very much.” I suggested maybe she write him a goodbye letter and explain why she broke up with him. She was sitting down on the carpet with lots of papers around her, and she started writing. A little bit later she hands me this thing she’s written. I read it and it says: “The smell of your skin still lingers on me now/You’re probably on your flight back to your hometown/Fairytales don’t always have a happy ending, do they?” I felt chills, and I got the guitar out and said, “Can we maybe sing this to these chords?” She sang this very unorthodox melody. Then for the chorus I suggested a melody, and the words were just flowing out of her; it was everything very personal to her. We got through the chorus at the end, and it was just a lot of words and nothing repetitive or memorable. I usually have a clipboard with titles I collect, and I had written down “Big Girls Don’t Cry” somewhere. I saw it and suggested it to Fergie. And she thought that was the perfect ending for the chorus. And so, we wrote “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” It still took years and years and years [for it to come out]. After this, she joined the Black Eyed Peas.

You two held onto that song the whole time? Until 2006?

Yes. Well, I recorded it with two other artists, but they fell through as well. There was Meleni Smith on Columbia Records, who got dropped before her album could come out, and then with Jordan McCoy from Dream.

I guess it all worked out.

Yes… and it wasn’t [Fergie ‘s] first single. It wasn’t her second. It was her fourth single! And it ended up being her biggest song — and the song that put me on the map. She was already on the map by then. She was a superstar by that time.

Didn’t you work with a few other rising Y2K pop stars before “Big Girls Don’t Cry” came out?

Willa Ford was one of the first I worked with. We had a song called “Fuck the Men (A Toast to Us).” … It wasn’t big, but it was one of my first records in America. I was very proud of it. There were lots of records, but maybe the first one that got on the radio was Jaci Velasquez’s “Unspoken.” Madeline Stone was a songwriter who took me under her wing early on, and she had a friend, Orrin Hatch, who was a senator. I never met him, but he added some lines to it and pitched it to Jaci Velasquez. And it was in the Christian radio charts for six months.

I’d love to do a lightning round of some of your biggest hits. Let’s start with Beyoncé’s “If I Were a Boy.”

So, in 2007, “Big Girls Don’t Cry” was the ASCAP Song of the Year. I thought now that everyone has heard this song, Beyoncé must’ve heard it too! I tried to research who’s her manager, who knows her. It took me six months until I finally got the call that Beyoncé wants to work with me. She booked me in Jay-Z’s studio for six days, and the first day, she didn’t show up. Second day, no. Third day, she briefly walked in and showed me a few of her demos that she had done. One of them was “Single Ladies,” which floored me — I thought, “Oh my God, the bar is high!” And then the next day she came in and I played her a song that I had just written with an artist named BC Jean, who’s a very good writer. I met her on Myspace.

BC Jean and I had written this song, and Beyoncé listened to it and said, “Play that again, Toby.” I played it again, and then she stood up and says, “You won’t believe this, but I want to sing this song right now!” We got in the vocal booth and I recorded her for an hour and a half, and she sang every take maybe five, six times. She was in incredible control of her voice and such a boss. Then after that, we sat at the couch for another half-hour. She asked me about my family, and I showed her how to play the song on the guitar, and it was just a wonderful time. And that was the last time I ever saw Beyoncé!

That’s too bad, although that song has been recorded by other artists too. Reba McEntire had a hit with it. Alex Newell sang it on Glee. Mickey Guyton covered it. But let’s move on to “All of Me” by John Legend, which is not only your biggest hit, but overall the fifth-highest certified single in RIAA history.

I must say, I’d always wanted to work with John. And after three years in New York, I found my first manager, David Sonnenberg, who was instrumental to my career — a real pitbull manager, respected everywhere, great guy. And he managed John Legend early on. I said, “Why can’t I work with John?” David said, “John doesn’t want to work with you.” I was kind of the European pop kid, and John was the Philadelphia neo-soul, cool Kanye West guy. After “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” I kept asking, “Can I work with John?” And John still didn’t want to work with me! But after Beyoncé, finally John says, “OK, I’m going to work with Toby.”

I think [“All of Me”] was the third song we wrote, and that day he came into the room and went straight from the door to the piano, which is rare. He said, “Toby, I have an idea. I need to write a love song today.” And he sat at the piano and was like, “All of me, loves all of you…” And he said, “That’s all I have.” He didn’t know what to do next. I said, “Can maybe I sit at the piano?” So, we traded places, and I was thinking of my wife who I love very much, and I thought of her “edge and curves and imperfections.” And then he was like, “I’ve got to get back to the piano!” We were going back and forth; it was really exciting. I think in an hour or an hour and a half, we had finished the song.

Does your collaborative process vary a lot from artist to artist?

I do like to start the song with something that is authentic and urgent to the artist. With “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” that’s just out of Fergie’s journal, basically. BC Jean in the moment just really felt this: She thought if she were a boy, she would be a better man. And with John, he was so in love with [his future wife] Chrissy [Teigen]. I think at the Grammy performance from John, there’s a moment where they caught him looking at Chrissy — they had them both in the [camera] frame. At the time the song had been in the urban chart and kind of got stuck there, but from that moment on, it started climbing in the pop chart; it was the second-slowest climb, I think, in the history of Billboard. It took six months to go No. 1.

Obviously you’ve had so many hits, but what do you think it is about “All of Me” that made it your biggest one in your entire discography?

My music was never “cool,” and for the longest time I wanted to be cool and trendy. And I just never managed to be that. These are kind of, I don’t know, old-fashioned or timeless or just simple songs, that aren’t necessarily beat-driven or anything. But maybe that’s why they survived.

Why didn’t you feel you were cool? And why or how did it eventually become no longer important for you to chase coolness?

It’s kind of a simple question that goes very deep, because my brother early on was kind of the older one who was better at everything, until I was maybe 12, 13. I was always trying to catch up, and he was getting the pretty girls and he was the one who would play in the band with my parents. I guess it was imposter syndrome. Or second-sibling syndrome.

Jens still does music as well, right?

Kind of, yeah.

Ha, OK. Let’s move on to “Skyscraper” by Demi Lovato. Here’s another very personal song, deep, and meaningful song. Demi seems to be in a really good place now, but she’s had many trials and tribulations in life. She’s the kind of artist that her fans root for, and then she released this triumphant anthem of the spirit. How did “Skyscraper” come about?

Lindy Robbins is a songwriter I love writing with. I’ve written a lot of songs with Lindy. Lindy is an amazing songwriter. And that day she came into the room with [Estonian pop artist] Kerli, who was signed to L.A. Reid at the time. She was cool. So, I always teased Lindy and would say, “Why don’t you come in the studio with a list of titles or some ideas?” And that one day she said, “I have a title, and it’s ‘Skyscraper.’ I was like, “Skyscraper?” I just didn’t think that was a word that you could sing in a song. We were trying a little bit on the piano, and… when these words came up, I thought, “Wow, we have an amazing song.” But until then, I thought “skyscraper” was the dumbest word ever for a song. A lot of that lyric is Lindy’s genius, I must say.

Was Demi involved with the writing, or was this something you presented to her?

This song was for Kerli. And she showed it to L.A. Reid and according to Kerli, they threw that record in the trash bin and said, “This is horrible. We’re going to drop you.” And she got dropped! We recorded [“Skyscraper”] with Kerli as a demo, and then Jordin Sparks recorded the song too in the meantime. And her label wasn’t going to have her have it on the record, [even though] she’d killed it! And then Benjamin Grofff at [music publishing company] Kobalt at the time played it to Jon Lind. Bless John Lind. He passed. He was an amazing A&R person. And Jon Lind convinced Demi that this was going to be her first single off her new album — which is rare, to have a ballad as a first single.

Did the song’s message resonate with Demi?

Yeah, Demi came into the studio and she was sitting on the edge of the seat. She said she was going to rehab the next day or so, but she’s going to give it a quick try. And she sang it and she poured her heart out. We were all sobbing. It was so brutal and excruciating. And then she went to rehab, and she came back two or three weeks later and said, “Toby, I feel great. I want to sing this again!” We spent three days recording a “perfect” vocal — and it had no emotion. So, we went back to that first “excruciating “vocal performance. I believe in first-demo magic.

Let’s talk about another female empowerment anthem that you cowrote with Shelly Peiken, Jessie J’s “Who You Are.”

Jessie at the time was an unknown. All we knew that she had just got signed to Universal Republic and had done this incredible audition where she sang “Mamma Knows Best.” That blew me away. Jesse came into the session and I saw a little tattoo lurking, and I said, “Can I see that?” And she pulled the pants down a little bit and it said, “Don’t lose who you are in the blur of the stars.” And it was misspelled! I said, “First of all, why do you have such a big tattoo — and then it’s not even spelled right?” And she’s said it was her first time coming to Los Angeles and she was worried that she would lose herself in Hollywood amongst the stars. So, it felt right, and that led to the song “Who You Are.” We wrote it then.

Did Jessie get the tattoo corrected?

No, it’s still there.

Let’s discuss “Untouched,” by Australian sister duo the Veronicas. This is actually one of your more upbeat songs.

That’s my coolest song!

It’s definitely the Veronicas’ biggest hit in America.

It went double-platinum in America, but in Australia when they perform it, the crowd goes crazy. They know every word. I’m proud of this one. At the time Veronicas were a new signing and David Sonnenberg said, “They only work with Max Martin and the big shots. … If you follow them to Australia on their Christmas break, maybe they will write with you.” So, I booked a ticket to Australia, and the moment I landed in Sydney, the girls knocked on the door and said, “Toby, we’re ready to write!” I was super-jetlagged, but they really just wanted to quickly get it over with, so they could go to Brisbane and spend Christmas with their parents. I had to really convince them for every little bit that we would write together, but we ended up writing 10 songs and hit it off. I had three songs on their first album and then there was the second album, which I would say is the fastest album we’ve ever written — in two weeks we wrote 13 songs, and I think 11 were released from those. And “Untouched” was among them.

You’ve done many songs with the Veronicas, so what was it about “Untouched” that made it their biggest international smash? Was it the lyrics again? I feel like the lyrics have a lot to do with why people connect to your songs.

Funnily enough, in this song, the lyrics don’t really make a lot of sense! And the verses are kind of crazy. When I had the idea for some of the chorus words, I thought of the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” I don’t know if you hear any similarities, but for me, that feel led to this hook. I had prepared a lot of tracks for the Veronicas because they had very clear ideas of where the second album was going to go, very much like Muse and a lot of more heavy rock bands, so this was one of the tracks I had prepared before the session. I was just humming this melody and they loved it. Writing with them those two weeks, that was magic. Everything went so quick. And the third album took four years!

Do you find it easier to write ballads or upbeat pop jams?

Well, with a ballad, I can just play it on the piano and we can sing along, and it can have a great emotion. I think with [upbeat pop], we have to do a track and I have to program it, and it has to be cool and trendy. I feel more challenged if it’s with a rhythm. And then sometimes there’s another person in the room who is better at that than I am.

I don’t know about that, but there is a very cool artist that we must discuss. You spent five weeks with Madonna working on Rebel Heart, and you cowrote 11 of that album’s 20 tracks — including “Bitch I’m Madonna,” which is most definitely not a ballad! What was it like working with the queen of pop?

Well, it started when Neil Jacobson from Interscope asked if I want to do a writing camp for Madonna. I usually always said no to any writing camp, because you sit in some dark room and give your best ideas and the artists never show up. And that also happened! I was at Interscope for a whole week writing lots of ideas with writers, and Madonna did not show up. And the next week Neil calls again and says, “Do you want to do a writing camp with Madonna in New York?” And I was like, “Fuck no!” But then he called my management and said, “Toby must come. Madonna really wants him to come.”

They persuaded me, and the first day she showed up, [songwriters] MoZella and S1 and I had prepared some ideas. … She would come a few hours later, but first the assistants would come and put in incense and candles, and declare the bathroom off-limits. Everything has to be really nice and the lights get dimmed. And then finally she walks in and everyone’s trembling — there are rumors that if she doesn’t like you or you say something wrong, she will excuse herself to the bathroom and then someone will walk out with a ticket and say, “Here’s your ticket. You’ve got five minutes to clear the room. She does not want to see you anymore.” So, we were all terrified. But luckily, she liked that first idea we had prepared.

What was that first idea? What song did that become?

I think it was “Iconic.” I thought, “Madonna’s iconic, so let’s write a song called ‘Iconic.’”

You ended up being all over Rebel Heart, so I guess Madonna liked a lot of your ideas.

Yeah, we did a lot of songs. … It was a lot of work. On the second day we wrote another song; I think it was “Illuminati,” because there were speculations on the internet. Then it came time to record Madonna these three demos; I was at the mixing board and she was in the vocal booth. Madonna, as much as she’s an incredible performer,  and I thought vocally, if we try harder, maybe she can make it more emotional and make it better. And so, she sang it a few times and I was like, “OK, now sing it with more emotion and put more grit to it.” And at some point she was like, “Fuck you, Toby. I’m not singing this anymore.” And I was like, “Fuck you, Madonna. You’re going to sing this now.” And there was silence in the room, and I was waiting for her to go to the bathroom and for someone to hand me the ticket. But that didn’t happen. She started smiling, and from that moment on, something happened and we bonded.

It seems like she respected you, not only because you knew what you were talking about, but because you stood up to her. You weren’t a yes-man.

She was so sweet. She invited us to her birthday party in France and wanted me to go on tour with her, which I really wanted to do. At first I said yes, and then she said, “OK, the next two weeks we’re going to rehearse for the Grammys.” And then I thought, “Wow, every day I need to play the same song, the same bit.” And I just cannot do repetition. For me, it’s all improvisation. I can’t even read notes. Everything’s always different, whichever way I feel it at the moment. So, I was a complete mismatch to play with her on tour, and I canceled.

Can we talk specifically about “Bitch I’m Madonna”? It’s such snarky and silly song, and the whole idea of it is just so fun.

That was a track that Ariel Rechtshaid and Diplo brought in. They had already started a few bits and couldn’t finish the song, and I had the challenge to look at those half-finished songs and tell Madonna, “These lyrics aren’t great yet. Let’s try to do this better.” She was like, “No, I like it.” I said, “No, let’s try it again. We can fix this and make it better.” That probably one of the hardest songwriting challenges for me, to tell Madonna that she could do better.

But again — she didn’t give you the ticket! Was there any reason why she wanted to do this song, which was sort of a reclamation of her legacy, demanding respect?

Well, there was some alcohol involved in the session. I remember she was finishing the bottle and Diplo took a photo and posted it in that moment. Until then, we’d kind of had an agreement that no one’s going to post anything, but he didn’t care. He was getting very famous at the time.

Did he get a ticket after he did that?

No. It’s Diplo!

OK, then. Are there any other songs that you’re really proud of that you’d like to discuss?

No, but do you want to hear my most embarrassing story?

Absolutely!

I had just changed management [around 2016/2017]. … I’d switched to the management that managed U2 and Madonna. David Sonnerberg had always gotten me into the Clive Davis’s pre-Grammy party, so I asked the new management, “Are you going to get me in?” And he said, “Sure.” And then a day before the party, I said, “Where’s my [party] ticket?” Usually, I got a ticket by this point. He said, “Just see me at the door.” So, I was there at the party and people were about to walk in, and I couldn’t find him. Finally I see him, and he acted like he didn’t want to see me. I pushed myself in front of him and he’s like, “OK, OK, just wait a minute.” He went somewhere and brought back a little piece of paper where he wrote a number and said, “That’s your ticket.” I walked through the door and sat down at the table with that number, and then after some talk and some food, the lights went dim and the show was about to begin. I was sitting next to Pharrell and Ryan Tedder — everyone who was somebody was at my round table in the front row — and then security walks in. They started checking Pharrell; he showed his ticket. Ryan Tedder showed his ticket. Me, I show this little piece of paper. And security walked me out, in front of everybody who was somebody at Clive Davis’s party.

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Oh no! Well, I’m sure you’ll never get kicked out of any Grammy parties ever again. And you don’t have much else to be embarrassed about, with your stellar career. You’ve worked with so many greats. But who are some dream artists that you’d love to write with or for one day?

[That answer] has actually changed quite a bit now, because now I really enjoy being onstage. It’s brand-new for me in my old age, to be onstage as a “new artist “and perform with incredible singers. … I want to do that more. David Foster is a great inspiration — what he is doing is insane, filling out the Hollywood Bowl for his 75th birthday just recently with [famous guest] artists. I’m very inspired now to work with people who also like to perform with me — and that is very different from back when I would write with anyone who’s a household name.

I got something I wanna talk about, talk about, talk about…

My Desperately Seeking Susan action figures and I joined music industry veteran Seth Schachner on his Breaking Down the Biz podcast this week to discuss the resurgence of Oasis, iconic moments from the 2026 MTV Video Music Awards, and what the future holds for legacy acts releasing new music.

I was only supposed to be on for a roughly 10-minute “mini-sode,” but once I started gabbing about three topics near and dear to my heart (Britpop, the early days of MTV, and Her Madgesty Ciccone), I didn’t want to stop! Thank you, Seth, for indulging me.

You can watch the extended episode in the YouTube player above, or listen below.

On Monday, Chilean-American singer-songwriter Marilyn Hucek auditioned for The Voice Season 30 with her own take on Latina superstar Shakira’s dancehall crossover hit, “La Tortura.” OG coach Adam Levine praised her for pulling off such a tricky and vibrato-heavy song, and she ultimately joined Team Adam.

Hucek made it to the Battle Rounds — also turning the chair of new coach Queen Latifah, who told her, “You managed to capture that cadence, that pocket, and you did it your way” — on the strength of her performance alone, without relying on any sob story. But when she sat down for an LPTV interview last year at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records, on the night of her vinyl release party for her debut album MARILYN, she opened up about her first, unsuccessful Voice audition, which took place way back in 2017.

“I went to a convention center, and there were thousands of people and I waited in line all day. It was not at a time when I felt I was at my best artistic level, so I’m not surprised it didn’t work out,” said Hucek, who didn’t make it far enough in the casting process to actually sing in front of those four big red chairs. At the time, she didn’t even tell anyone that she’d auditioned.

“I kind of felt like I was a closeted artist, so to speak,” Hucek mused. “I never would sing in front of people. There was a time where I stopped singing in front of people, because I think I was taking it too seriously.”

Hucek confessed that she truly had no idea how to break into the music business, which is why she answered NBC’s open call. “It was kind of funny because I was like, ‘Oh, this is how you make it! You have to audition for The Voice and you have to get on the show,’” she chuckled. “It’s really not the case anymore, but that’s how I felt: that this was the only way to do it. And then I was like, ‘OK, well, I auditioned for The Voice, so I can put my dreams to rest and move on.’ But the truth is, I could never move on, and it was always in me. It was like I had locked my dream in this Pandora’s box and just tucked it away. It was always in there beating, trying to get out.”

Hucek continued to focus on her career as a fashion blogger/buyer in New York, until her musician father’s long battle with early-onset Alzheimer’s — another personal-life detail that she opted not to mention on The Voice this week — inspired her to reopen that Pandora’s box. And in 2020, she made the bold and risky decision to leave her cushy job at Ralph Lauren to pursue her long-deferred musical dream.

“It wasn’t until around the pandemic, when I started writing my own music, that I felt more confident in my artistic self, and that’s when I started releasing music and really going after it,” she explained. “Before that, it was a lot more just singing covers. … And I think that singing covers, you kind of compare yourself to other artists, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m never going to sound like them.’ Well, of course you’re never going to sound like them! Because you have your own voice and your own unique ability to just be yourself, which is what I learned.”

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Ironically, Hucek will be singing cover songs again on The Voice (which, unlike rival talent show American Idol, doesn’t regularly allow contestants to do originals), so she won’t have the opportunity to perform her deeply personal tracks from MARILYN — many of which were inspired by her father, who died in 2023. But at age 34, Hucek returns to the show with much more professional experience, as well as life experience. She has attended New York University’s summer songwriting workshop, the female artist development program New Roots Nashville, and a nine-month course at the Los Angeles Academy for Artists & Music Production (LAAMP), which was co-founded by Norwegian super-producers Stargate and is executive-directed by industry veteran Chris Anokute (who has worked with Katy Perry, Rihanna, Fifth Harmony, Zara Larsson, Bebe Rexha, and Joss Stone). So, she is clearly ready for battle.

“I don’t think I’ll ever not continue to hone my craft,” Hucek asserted. “I’m the type of person who always wants to get better and always wants to learn.” Surely she has made her late dad proud, and he will be watching over her as she continues her Voice journey. Read more about that journey in the LPTV video above and the Q&A below.

LPTV: Before making music your full-time career, you were a successful fashion blogger with The Lunar Phase, and you had a day job as a fashion buyer in NYC. Why didn’t you pursue music seriously before?

MARILYN HUCEK: Honestly, I will say that I’ve always had a passion for music very early on… but it wasn’t until 2020, when the pandemic happened. My late father had been suffering from early-onset Alzheimer’s for a very long time, and he got COVID and he was in the nursing home, and we weren’t able to go visit him. It was so tough and painful. I ended up writing a song in his name [“Memories”], and I felt compelled to release it into the world. And ever since then, I haven’t looked back. That’s when I took that leap of faith. So, now more than ever as an artist, I feel like I have this dual purpose of not only pursuing my dream as a musician, but also using my platform to raise Alzheimer’s awareness. … In fact, $3 for every [MARILYN] vinyl record sold is going to the Alzheimer’s Association, and five percent of the royalties for [the MARILYN track] “Neil Young” are going towards the Alzheimer’s Association. I hope to make a bigger impact as I grow.

When you quit fashion to pursue music, was there any self-doubt? Or were other people, maybe even family members, saying, “What are you doing?” Music is not the most stable vocation, after all.

Interestingly enough, no one that I spoke to questioned it, which is funny. But no, I didn’t have any doubts. I think that’s how I knew it was the right thing to do, because as soon as I started pursuing music, it felt like I’d found that last piece of the puzzle. I was like, “Yes! I have found my purpose!”  I think when I was working in corporate fashion, I was searching — and I didn’t know for what.

Are you from a musical family?

Interestingly enough, my parents met through music. My mom is Chilean, and she was in Chile studying to be a musician. My dad was a piano hobbyist. He actually was a scientist, working for NASA, but he really enjoyed the arts. And they met in the piano room.

When you wrote “Memories,” was your father able to hear it and realize it was about him? Did you play it for him?

Yeah, I played it for him a lot. Music was always something that connected us through the years.

In “Neil Young,” there’s the standout line: “You don’t even know I’m a singer now.” I’ve read that musical therapy can help people with dementia, Alzheimer’s, or brain injuries, because music holds such deep core memories. And I know you used to play Neil’s Harvest Moon for your father.

Exactly. And at the time that I decided to take that leap of faith, I’m not sure if he knew [that I had become a professional singer]. I can’t be certain. But that’s where that line came from. … It’s a very heavy song, about how he eventually forgot my name. But with music, if I played him his favorite songs and his favorite artists… the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Eagles, Bob Marley… he’d come to life.

Are there any other especially meaningful or emotional MARILYN tracks you’d like to discuss?

I would say one of the toughest songs to write was “Love to Hate You,” because it revealed the messier sides of me and the character traits that you don’t really want to brag about. But the comforting thing about that song is now people are like, “Oh, that’s my favorite song. It’s really relatable.” And I’m like, “Oh, thank God I’m not the only one!” … I wrote that song when I was at LAAMP and got a lot of great feedback, so it was very encouraging. But during the week that I was writing it, it was torturous, because I was really just digging into my soul, just trying to get at the heart of my feelings. Now that I’ve gotten it into a song, when I’m singing it and performing it, I feel like I’m healing from that experience, which has been great.

Is it ever hard for you to perform these songs live, especially in an intimate setting like Licorice Pizza Records?

Yeah, it depends. I recently was performing at the Annapolis Songwriters Festival, and it was broad daylight, and I had all these faces looking at me. In the past, I haven’t had an issue, but it’s really day-to-day or show-to-show, because I remember in that moment I was like, “Oh my God, all these faces!” I was like, “I’m just going to close my eyes for a second.” Usually, I try to just do the songs justice and perform them so that people can experience them how I want them to. But sometimes, it’s unpredictable.

Sadly, watching a parent suffer from Alzheimer’s is something many adult children have gone through. I imagine you’ve had fans reach out with stories about how your music has helped them, or that they relate to your story.

Yeah, absolutely. People DM me or tell me after shows that they have a loved one, or that someone in their family has gone through Alzheimer’s; they’ll tell me the music has connected with them. It’s touching and it’s sad to know that other people are going through it, but that’s the reality. I just think the more we can talk about it, the more we can make a difference and heal and educate people.

Did making your MARILYN album help you heal?

Well, songwriting is my therapy, through and through. Even growing up, I would just do poems and stuff whenever I was in my feels. And yes, I think that it’s been very, very healing, especially with this album, because it’s so personal and so introspective. It’s gotten me through a lot of adversity on my emotional rollercoaster.

When alt-pop chanteuse and TikTok superstar Nessa Barrett was just 17 years old, she experienced a “divine intervention moment,” ran away from her New Jersey family home in the “middle of the night,” and landed in Los Angeles — in the middle of a pandemic. And she never looked back.

“COVID hit and I didn’t know how long we were going to be stuck in lockdown, and I was like, ‘I need to get out, or else I’m going to lose all the dreams that I’m trying to chase. I’m going to do it, and I’m going to make it work.’ I had no plan, but it was or-never moment,” she recalls, sitting at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records on the release day of her aptly titled third album, Tough Love.

“I was really impulsive. It was a crazy night, but I just got a one-way plane ticket to L.A. and I left without anyone knowing,” she continues. “It was really scary and a lot of people were upset by it. … I just remember putting my phone off of Airplane Mode and my parents away blowing me up. The cops were after me, trying to find me apparently, because I was a runaway. Yeah, it was crazy.”

Things could have gone very, very wrong for Barrett, but it was easy for her to find friends and resources on the West Coast because of her already huge social media following, so she never returned to Jersey — other than one day to get her high school diploma, before immediately flying back to Los Angeles. Now at age 24, she muses, “I think that how far I’ve come, it’s really shocked everyone.” But she always believed in what she was doing.

“There was not a doubt in my mind,” she asserts. “I was so passionate, and I was just like, ‘This is a life I want to live and I’m not going to stop until I get it.’ I feel like when I had that powerful force in me, there was not really a sense of doubt. I didn’t let myself believe that there was going to be a plan B, ever.”

Barrett may seem like a superhumanly confident baddie when she’s discussing her career goals and her wild runaway story, and Tough Love boasts tracks with titles like “Bad Girls Never Die” and “Too Fast to Live, Too Young To Die,” delivered with the sexy, steely allure of a film noir femme fatale. But there’s still a certain fragility and guardedness to Barrett. She’s a tiny slip of thing, at only 4-foot 9, and while she’s always been open about her mental health issues (including borderline personality disorder, bipolar II disorder, anxiety, depression, and eating disorders), she’s also very soft-spoken, almost timid, giving the sense that she’s holding back.

But Barrett is nothing back on Tough Love, her most startlingly vulnerable work yet. That’s particularly true on track 1, “Candy,” which Barrett says is her “most raw and painful song to this day” — a sadly all-too-relatable confessional about sexual exploitation that has resonated so intensely with her fans, she has often been “in tears” when reading her comments.

“It just makes it so worth it when I see so many people connect with it. It makes me feel seen,” Barrett says with a shy smile. “I was really scared [to release “Candy”], because I’d never really touched on that sort of topic before or been honest about that dark part of me. Seeing so many people feel seen too, it makes me feel like I’m not alone, which is amazing.”

On that gut-punching album-opener, she croons dissociatedly, “Had me on my knees, I did my best work/Gave it up for free, and still I get hurt/If I charged a fee, I might feel better/Silly little me, thinking love was more than sex work.” While Barrett understandably declines to reveal the lover(s) or encounter(s) that inspired “Candy” (“There is a really fine line that I walk on when writing, to make sure that I’m not being too personal or giving up too information — because that’s when it kind of gets a little dangerous,” she explains), she does confess, “I think in my head I struggle with intimacy problems, so that’s kind of what that song is about.”

She elaborates, choosing her words thoughtfully: “It’s that feeling of feeling dirty and used and shame. I feel like when I had to be intimate in those moments, that was kind of a character that I was playing. And so, that’s where ‘Candy’ comes from — from trauma and just I guess how I see myself in the mirror. I’ve always really struggled with being intimate, even with someone that I feel comfortable with, and I guess it is something that I’m really struggling with right now. I feel like in the past year it’s been something that has been really hard for me, and I’ve been working through it. But yeah, it’s tough.”

Tough Love is a loose concept album of sorts about all different types of love — “love that’s hard to find,” but not necessarily only the romantic kind. “I feel like my whole life, all forms of love were really tough and hard for me,” Barrett reflects. “I do feel like my mindset and my thought process and how I approach my relationships and other forms of tough love, that stems from my relationship with my family too. I guess it’s all one big thing.

“There are so many different types of love,” she points out. “I have the songs ‘Glamorous’ and ‘God Gave Me Expensive Taste,’ about the love I have with fame and success in the music industry and Hollywood in general. … But I feel like the most important love is the love I have for myself. And I think that’s something that I’ve been really working towards recently, and something that I’ve really learned while writing this album.”

Barrett is “still learning how to adjust” to life in Los Angeles, and she admits that trying to find true love in the city has been difficult. But she has, overall, thrived in L.A., where she has found a home, chosen family, and “so much inspiration in the air. … I feel like I owe everything in my life to this place.” And finally, her sense of self-image/self-love is catching up with that fierce self-belief that she had at age 17 about her career and music.

“I was really able to separate what I wanted and my passions and my talent and my love for music from myself. I think how I felt about myself and how I was treating myself, it was almost like I was really able to separate that,” she explains. “Only up until recently was I really was able to see myself as a whole, and really take care of myself as a whole. I love this music so much, and I can also love myself, and that has become so special, because it really starts to bleed into everything else that I’m able to do. I think as soon as I really found that self-love within myself, that’s when I started to love my music even more. And I really started to believe even more in this future that I really want.”

A little more than a quarter-century ago, Mexican musician Leonel Garcia and Argentinian-Mexican artist Noel Schajris were pursuing individual solo careers when their shared record label, Sony Music, set them up on a blind date of sorts. And as soon as Schajris got a look at Garcia’s CD shelf, it was clear that these two soul music fans were creative soulmates. And thus, the duo Sin Bandera was born.

“That was the way you get to know someone back in the day. [You see someone’s] the record collection and you’re like, ‘I think I’m going to get along with this guy,’” Schajris chuckles, sitting with Garcia at Los Angeles’s Licorice Pizza Records to promote their most emotional album yet, Escenas, and their current tour, which includes a date at L.A.’s Forum on Sept. 27. “When I arrived at his home, he had his CD rack and he had a Kevon Edmonds CD. And I said, ‘How do you have this one?’”

“It was weird,” Garcia laughingly recalls. “They told me, ‘There’s this guy that sings R&B like you, in Spanish.’ That was weird because we’re talking about ‘99, 2000, and in Mexico, that was not a common thing to see — someone listening to Maxwell or Babyface’s MTV Unplugged at that time. Not too many people [in Latin America] were into R&B.”

“So, from the get-go… it was not, ‘Oh, how are we going to make this work?’ No, no. [Sin Bandera] was born like that,” Schajris asserts.

“It was like something that happens for a reason. I’m not very into the mystical side of things, but when you enter somebody’s house and they have the same albums you have in a very weird manner, you feel there’s something you have to investigate there,” says Garcia. “That was the first thing that made us think we could do something.”

Garcia and Schajris ended up writing three songs on that fateful day, and by 2001 they were releasing Sin Bandera’s self-titled debut album, which sold more than 1 million copies worldwide. They went on to earn seven Latin Grammy nominations (winning two), and they eventually even got to collaborate with some of their R&B idols, like Brian McKnight (which made them “super-nervous”) and John Legend. But they initially faced much industry resistance, because they didn’t neatly fit into one radio genre.

“It was a nightmare for the promoters. … They didn’t know where to put us,” Schajris recalls. “It was kind of the challenge of doing that kind of thing because it was unheard-of, but also it was a thing that make us special. … We were like the Simon & Garfunkel Latinos!”

Garcia thinks Sin Bandera have always been more like Latin America’s answer to Air Supply, because “the kind of audience we have that is very romantic, soft music.”

“There have been a lot of birthing situations because of our songs,” Schajris jokes.

“Yeah, if you need a population [boost] in your cities, just take us there,” Garcia laughs.

It makes sense, then, that Sin Bandera scored their first real hit, the romantic “Entra En Mi Vida,” not through traditional radio airplay but through a sync in a Mexican telenovela, Cuando Seas Mía. (“It was a remake of a Colombian soap opera about a coffee plantation. They did it around the coffee beans,” Schajris quips.) But something larger — a real movement and culture-shift in Latin music — was going on at that time.

“I remember examples of people starting to do [R&B-crossover music] in Spanish, like with Christina Aguilera with Luis Fonsi. They had this beautiful ballad ["Si No Te Hubiera Conocido"] together in 2000, and that was very influential and very important for us. They kind of set the way of where to go; we said, ‘There’s a path,’” says Garcia. “It was a group of artists — for example, Luis Fonsi coming from Puerto Rico, David Bisbal from Spain, and us from Mexico and Argentina. There was a Brazilian guy, Alexander Pires. It was moment where a group of [Latin] people were singing R&B-ish stuff, a little more contemporary. It was very exciting. … And I think what we did gave a lot of courage to people that had thought it was impossible.”

“That’s probably one of the biggest moments in our lives,” Schajris says proudly. “We kind of opened a new door.”

Twenty-five years later, Sin Bandera are still confounding expectations in a post-radio digital age; Garcia says Spotify and other streaming services usually categorize them incorrectly because they’ve “always been misunderstood,” and Noel says, “I think not even the algorithm gets us. We confuse even the algorithm!” But in a streaming era when young genre-fluid music fans listen to a bit of everything, this is working in Sin Bandera’s favor — with people of all ages, including many Gen Z concertgoers who learned about the duo from their parents, coming to their shows.

“I think there’s a strong point in our music that we’re better live than in the recordings,” notes Garcia. “That’s a characteristic of R&B and jazz — that you never repeat the same show two times.”

“We love Brazilian music. We love bossa nova. These genres are improvising a lot, always changing melody, making it differently,” Schajris elaborates. “Music happens in the moment. I think that’s life too. And music is life; its vibration is right now. So, when you buy a ticket, you’re paying for a ‘right now’ moment. … Sometimes we are even surprised ourselves! We look at each other [onstage] and it’s like, ‘Whoa, man. That was awesome.’”

The world is finally catching up with Garcia and Schajris, who are in their fifties now, and the partnership they forged long ago over a shared love of R&B and jazz is still going strong — ever after a breakup in 2007, followed by an eight-year hiatus during which they resumed their respective solo careers. They seem to appreciate what they’ve built together more than ever with the release of Escenas and the kickoff of their potentially population-boosting tour, with hopefully another 25 years of creativity ahead of them.

“I think we still have a lot of affinities, and we can talk about those, and we can talk about time and death and the end of the story and what we can do,” Garcia muses, looking back on how Sin Bandera’s music has evolved. “We’re still here, and stuff that was not there in the beginning of our careers appears later when you have a kid, when you have a wife, when you have responsibilities, and you start getting older and all this. The horizon starts to come closer, and you start to write different when you have less distance [between] the end and the beginning.”

“It’s probably because of that that we’re still so passionate,” adds Schajris. “Because it’s not forever.”

“It’s not forever. And we love that experience inside of our music,” Garcia continues. “We are trying, and I think we’re succeeding, to not to see age as a negative. We learned from artists that we really admire that are 60, 70 and they’re touring, and they’re amazing live — because they are older, they are even better. We’re trying to follow that path, staying away from the idea that youth is a necessity to be an exciting artist.”

I recently had the nonstop ecstatic thrill of interviewing the legend Marc Almond for FLOOD about Danceteria — the final, full-circle Soft Cell album that revisits the synthpop provocateurs’ early days, when he and the late Dave Ball were out in clubland having fun in pre-Giuliani New York City.

“It was a bit like the Wild West. Boarded-up buildings. You’d go back to your hotel and there’d be a car on fire on the side of the road. It was kind of like that movie The Warriors,” he recalled, speaking via Zoom from his home in Portugal. “It was dangerous, but it was exciting and creative.”

Almond shared many memories of the nights before, including meeting Cindy Ecstasy (who he gave her stage name) during the “dying days” of “bridge-and-tunnel” Studio 54, and experiencing his first MDMA trip with her while listening to the Cure’s “All Cats Are Grey”; his admiration of the “female David Bowie,” Madonna, who recently released a song titled “Danceteria” inspired by her own formative clubbing era; and the final time that he and the ailing Ball performed together, at the 2025 Rewind Festival. But since Almond and I ended up chatting for more than an hour (after we said hello, I never wanted to wave goodbye; I could have talked with him all night), not all of our conversation could make it into my epic FLOOD Q&A. So, I’m exclusively publishing three of my favorite outtakes here.

Of course, I had to ask about the Tim Pope-directed, banned and bootlegged “Sex Dwarf” video — which for so long, before the internet, was almost imposable to see in its infamous uncensored version, so it took on a mythical status and became an urban legend. (When I told Almond that it might have been the first viral video, he said, “I think that’s really cool. I like that!”) Almond revealed that the “vertically challenged” leatherman in the S&M-themed video, who became a fleeting tabloid sensation when he lied to the sensationalist British press and claimed that Soft Cell had forced him to do “horrible things,” was in fact responsible for “Sex Dwarf” going viral.

“He went to the video company and said, ‘I’m in the video. Can I borrow a copy to watch at home?’ He took that VHS, bootlegged it, and sent it to all the tabloid newspapers in a brown paper package. So, what you see on YouTube is probably a bootleg from that time,” Almond explained. “It’s usually really bad quality, which I think adds to it and makes it even better, actually! It kind of looks like some ’80s video nasty/slasher film, which is great. The record company got hold of the master and locked it in a vault: ‘It must never be seen!’ But it was too late. It was already out there.”

Almond also went into detail about how both Soft Cell’s 1981 debut Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret (which he and Ball recorded during their first whirlwind visit to NYC) and Danceteria were concept albums with deliberately constructed narratives, and that he’d been pleased that his friend Neil Tennant had picked up on that. Since Tennant’s Pet Shop Boys once had a West End musical called Closer to Heaven, I asked Almond (a self-described “romantic cynic, or disillusioned romantic” who tries to “write in a cinematic way,” who cited “The Rainbow Room,” a sentimental ballad about a birthday dinner while looking out at the Twin Towers, as his favorite Danceteria track) if he’d ever thought about doing a stage musical based on Soft Cell’s catalog.

“There has been talk of that, actually,” he told me. “Somebody wrote a musical a few years ago of mostly Soft Cell songs, with a few of my solo songs as well. I went to a workshop of it and I liked it a lot. I thought it was quite cool. But Dave didn’t like it at all. He just really hated it. He said, ‘That’s not how I imagine this thing to be.’ So, it never happened. They came to me with another draft a couple of years ago, but then I didn’t like what they’d done to it; I liked it what I first saw in the original workshop! I don’t know, maybe that can be ignited again, now that we’ve got the newer songs from Danceteria. I love the idea of it.”

But perhaps my favorite “outtake” is in the video at the top of this page. Almond unfortunately had his Zoom camera off due to connectivity problems in Portugal, but mine was still on. And so — right in the middle of our Cindy Ecstasy discussion — when I reapplied my glittery pink lipgloss like an ‘80s club kid, he stopped himself mid-sentence to tell me, “Your lipstick looks great, by the way!” Almond is a glamour icon who knows a thing or two about face-painting, so that was the ultimate compliment. Under the deep ringlight, he could see the makeup sliding down, indeed.

Read my full FLOOD magazine Q&A with Marc Almond here!

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Nick Carpenter, aka Medium Build, was working on “It’s Not Easy (Falling In Love),” a standout track on his fifth album King of Having Fun, with superstar pop producer Julien Bunetta when he experienced a midlife crisis of confidence of sorts. And he started to second-guess himself. As an artist who’d never quite fit into any specific genre, and up until then had never worried much about success or playing the showbiz game, he suddenly felt — as he’s amusingly mentioned in his own official press release — like a “washed-up thirtysomething.”

“The day I ended up in Julian’s studio, I was maybe a month sober,” says the 35-year-old Americana singer-songwriter, sitting at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records getting ready to perform for a packed store of fans of varying ages (an impressive turnout that proves he never had anything to worry about). “I had just been on a tour opening up for this pop boy that was blowing up [Role Model]. At the time it was like ‘Sally’ was just starting to go viral. He hadn’t fully stepped into his sleazy-dad rock-thing. He was really just still on the verge of trying to be ‘white boy who’s aware of Frank Ocean’ — which, hey, all of us fell into that for a while! … So, I came from the Role Model tour, and I’m like, ‘OK, whatever’s working, it’s not working for me. I don’t have these 20-year-old girls. No Medium Build fans are making TikToks. And that was what the labels tell me: They’re like, ‘We need your people to start making TikToks.’”

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Carpenter was already a critics’ darling with a devoted cult audience, but as he points out, “What [labels] notice is fanbases that go crazy and grow quickly. … My fans were kind of gatekeeping me. My fans are big fans, but they’re sitting in their room just listening to me and not really telling anybody. So, I’m like, ‘OK, how do I get the young people?’ And so, then my brain starts going to pander-y places. Do I need to lose weight? Get more tattoos? And I ended up in Julian’s studio. I’m a month sober. I feel like shit. I feel like I have nothing. And I’m like, ‘What do I do? You know Harry Styles. You know Sabrina. What’s wrong with me?’”

Carpenter expected Bunetta to tell him to do just that — shed some pounds, get some new ink, or undergo some other sort of glow-up to youthify his image and increase his Gen Z appeal. But, surprisingly and refreshingly, Bunetta offered the opposite advice. “He’s like, ‘No, you have experience. You can talk to the pain that these kids haven’t gone through yet.’ And so, that was a really empowering conversation, from a guy who’s seen a lot of eras of people and watched a lot of people try to reinvent themselves,” Carpenter marvels. “He’s like, ‘You can just talk from where you’re at. You don’t need to pretend to be young. You don’t need to pander. You have this wisdom.’ That was helpful for me.”

The result was what was Carpenter now considers the best and most important album of his career. “I’m just really proud of this record. I feel like I was present the whole time,” he gushes. “I don’t think I always had a plan; I’ve made music out of urgency, boredom, curiosity, playfulness, exploration. … Usually I’m just like, ‘Oh, here comes this urgent feeling. I’ve got to go to the piano and find it!’ And then I puke it out and I’m like, ‘Well, this is what I made.’ It’s kind of like the kid brings the art to Mom, put it on the fridge. Everything I wrote for years I would release. For this record, we really got a little more big-boy britches — like, everything we record, we’re not going to release. We’re going to really pressure-test them and see. I remember in high school hearing that they recorded 200 songs for Thriller and being like, ‘What? Only nine songs? They picked nine against whatever? That’s insane!’ But now I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s because they wanted it to be the best, with no skips.’”

Carpenter must be doing something right, because just a few days before playing Licorice Pizza, he performed at the Grand Ole Opry and part of that legendary Nashville venue’s ongoing 100th anniversary celebrations. He confesses that, as a longtime self-confessed “people-pleaser” who recently covered Charli XCX’s insecurity anthem “Sympathy Is a Knife,” he did suffer from imposter syndrome when he was on the same Opry bill as the Oak Ridge Boys and John Conley. He hilariously likens the feeling to being a Goth teenager at Thanksgiving dinner, when he “got up there and sort of yelled in my denim, in my little Canadian tuxedo.” And he once again felt like he should pander and “offer what these people like,” so he played the two of King of Having Fun’s twangier tunes, “Cone Off” and “Home Depot.”

“I didn’t grow up listening to country music,” Carpenter freely admits. “I learned about country music really intensely in college, studying songwriting in Nashville, and then I slowly began to see there’s this really deep world, that I had to excavate personally and find out what’s real and what’s good. … I was kind of trying to completionist and put my ears on everything in high school — I wanted to know everything — and then once I got to college, that’s when the streaming stuff really came about, and I was like, ‘I can know about everything!’ I can know about L.A. punk like X, and I can know about Northern England sad gray weather boy shit. And then I’m doing my homework on old country at the same time, because I’m in Nashville, and I’m like, ‘Oh, I guess I should know about Randy Travis and all the way back to George Jones,’ all the way back to Roy Acuff and all this stuff.”

Even when discussing serious subjects, Carpenter, a clever and self-aware lyricist, has a delightfully inventive and snarky way with words, often inventing “micro niche genres” that sound like Spotify daylist titles; along with “white boy who’s aware of Frank Ocean” and “Northern England sad gray weather boy shit,” he describes mainstream country bros’ sound as “eat pray, fish” and slacker Midwest rock as “Tuesday trip to the ATM to buy weed from your uncle.” However, his own music has always been difficult to categorize.

“I actually really do fuck with country music now, so it’s not fake, but I don’t make mainstream country music. But my indie rock keeps kind of rolling towards some twangy-type stuff, and so I find myself in these spaces that I do respect,” he explains. “So, if these people in this light, at this angle, at this exact moment, are like, ‘He’s country enough to play the Opry,’ then hell yeah, bro! I’m playing the Opry!” And he does think his organically growing appeal is a sign that he’s “a part of something” bigger going on in country music.

“I don’t think this is a diss or whatever, but sometimes you have to widen the tentpoles. If you really want to reach the next generation, you need to offer some alternatives. If the only thing that’s feeding country music is white guy trucker hat radio songs, then those are going to phase out eventually and you’re not going to have a base,” he says.

Carpenter, who was raised in an evangelical household and came out as queer five years ago, semi-cynically imagines record label meetings with TikTok-obsessed music executives saying, “‘We should get some queers and some Black people. And we should get some rockers in here.’ It’s sad, but you know that’s happening!” he laughs. “But yeah, I had a friend this week post on their story — this is a producer in Nashville who I think kind of sees himself as a bit of a gatekeeper — and he was like, ‘The Opry’s really letting anyone [play] this year.’ And I’m just like, ‘Oh my God. OK, thanks, bro.’ I just went ‘LOLOL’ — I commented as I was posting about my Opry debut.”

Now Carpenter is on a creative tear ( “I don’t even think I have enough time in my entire life to make all the stuff I want to make,” he says enthusiastically), and that coincides with his newfound sobriety. “I spent years on and off the wagon trying to figure out how to control this beast, because I love how alcohol made me feel,” says the troubadour, who actually used to work as a bartender in Alaska, which didn’t exactly help him stay on the wagon. “I loved how it made me feel relaxed, and I loved how it would ease my mind and kind of push some of the dark, painful thoughts away. I started to see that I was doing some intense bargaining with my mental and physical health, and my shows were starting to take dives. My relationships were starting to take dives. I was starting to not be able to see what was important — or at least I could see it the next morning, but I couldn’t see it last night. It was on that Role Model tour that I was just like, ‘This is going to destroy me. I’m literally looking at the most beautiful sunset on the beach day and I have no joy. I gave it all to the night demons. I gave it all away and here I am feeling rock bottom.’”

That’s where those above-mentioned fears about being “washed-up” came from. As Carpenter, who acknowledges that the “lore” about his exploits and unreliability was starting to eclipse his reputation as a genuine talent, recalls, “The voice in me was like, ‘You’re shit, you’re trash, you have nothing left.’ It just felt obvious. It was like, if I don’t change, I’m going to die. Maybe not immediately, but I will. I mean, we’re all going to die, but I’m going to die faster than I should.”

After he had a panic attack onstage and called an emergency band meeting, Carpenter finally asked for and received help, and now he says brightly, “It’s been pretty good! I had a little fall-off last year, but I’m 11 months kind of dry, and I have a lot of friends that are sober now, and it feels like the only way forward for me. But now it’s exciting. It’s like every day feels kind of like a sandbox. What am I going to play in? What am I going to explore, instead of how am I going to push the feelings down? What am I going to discover?”

And so, the title King of Having Fun holds multiple meanings, some of them sincere and some ironic, but Carpenter truly is having the time of his life now. “It’s this sort of hero’s journey,” he explains. “I think what I was referencing [in that title] was I was a fun kid. I think there was a kid who was having fun before he found booze, but then I found booze and I became the ‘party guy’ king of having fun. So, there’s the performative king of having fun, and then… there’s the kid, the original, who didn’t need chemicals to do it, who could do it just with a bike and a Blockbuster subscription or whatever. And then there’s the kid who needs chemicals to do it. And now here’s this 35-year-old who’s like, ‘OK, shit, we’re back to square one.’”