In his new bombshell autobiography, Devout: Losing My Faith to Find Myself, pop singer David Archuleta writes with heartbreaking candor — admitting that at times he even wept while typing — about his life-long battles with poor self-esteem, extreme people-pleasing, scrupulosity (a subtype of OCD characterized by religious obsession), guilt and denial regarding his closeted queerness, and eventually suicidal ideation, before he finally came out at age 30 and then left the Mormon church.

But he says the two topics that were the most difficult for him to write about were actually his ”terrifying” run on American Idol (memories of which he’d almost entirely blocked out) and his fraught relationship with his notorious father and “dadager,” Jeff Archuleta.

“I had not yet processed my time on American Idol, which I think I associate a lot with my relationship with my dad,” he explains softly.

Back in 2008, when David was a frontrunner on Idol and the show still dominated pop culture, Jeff practically made TMZ and VoteForTheWorst.com headlines more often than David did — all about being him an overbearing “stage dad” who quickly created enemies on the Idol set (and was even ultimately banned from the set). And Devout reveals that such gossip was actually true. A man with deferred dreams of his own greatness, Jeff forced his talented but extremely shy child into the spotlight — dragging David from Utah to Los Angeles (where they often slept in parked cars instead of hotel rooms) to audition for Star Search and loiter in hotel lobbies hoping to network with American Idol Season 1 contestants and executives.

Such aggressive tactics actually worked, and David ended up competing on Idol Season 7, when he was just 16, making it all the way to second place. But David resented his controlling father’s pushiness and manipulation (as did the rest of the Archuleta family; Jeff’s laser-focus on his son’s singing career alienated not only David’s four siblings, but David’s own adored mother, Lupe). It was understandably stressful for someone so young and introverted to perform for votes on national TV while fearing he’d be “exposed” for being different and effeminate; to feel responsible for fulfilling his dad’s ambitions; to feel pressured to be a Mormon posterboy; and to eventually become the family’s breadwinner, after he signed a deal with Jive Records and continued to be managed by Jeff. It was only many years later, when a Mormon church elder warned David that he was being emotionally abused by his father and advised that David go no-contact, that David realized how extreme the situation truly was.

However, it was when writing Devout (which he was inspired to do by his good friend, former child star and I’m Glad My Mom Died memoirist Jeanette McCurdy) that David finally unpacked the secret that lay at the heart of his familial dysfunction. “[Jeff] was wrongly accused of things in my family that I didn’t really get a clear picture on until I was older, putting everything together and realizing, ‘This is a messy situation. This is complex,’” he says.

When David was 9 years old, a vindictive family friend on Lupe’s side falsely accused Jeff of sexually molesting David’s sisters, which had tragic, lasting ramifications for the entire family — especially for David, who came to fear and mistrust his father for years, long after Jeff was exonerated. And while David may never forgive the people who spread these vicious lies (as he discusses this family scandal during his Lyndsanity interview, his anger is evident), by writing Devout, he came to understand Jeff’s trauma… and forgive his father.

In the emotional video interview above and text Q&A below, David also opens up about watching his American Idol episodes for the first time in years and feeling newfound compassion for his younger self; how his fellow Season 7 contestant, the openly queer Adore Delano, made him “so seen and safe” during his Idol experience; and how he finally started living for himself at the late-blooming age of 30.

LYNDSANITY: We’ve done a lot of interviews in the five years since you came out and reinvented yourself professionally and personally. But as I found out from reading this book, you’d lived nine lives before that happened. You lived several lives even before American Idol. But it seems like you really started living at age 30.

DAVID ARCHULETA: It very much was like starting life again. In ways I was a late bloomer, but in other ways a lot of life had already been lived. There’s a lot of challenges. There’s a lot of public knowledge of parts of my life, while other parts I felt like I had to do everything to hide. Not just my family dynamics, but hiding from myself, with trying to figure out whether I was gay or not, and landing on bisexual — I just say “queer” now, to be broader, but it’s basically bisexual — and just feeling like I always had to live my life for someone else, for someone else’s approval. “Are you giving me the OK? Did I do this right?” I guess it was performative. Always performing. And I guess I never turned the performative part off until I reached my thirties. It was kind of like learning how to just finally exhale, after holding your breath for so long, and just saying, “OK, what’s it like to just be myself, regardless of what others may think of that?”

And it’s terrifying. It’s scary, because up until then, my whole identity was, “Do you like me? Do you approve of who I am? I will do whatever I need, I will be whoever you need me to be, in order to be accepted by you and approved by you and to be told, ‘Good job.’” To turn that off was terrifying, because I didn’t know how to live my life in another way.That’s why it was like restarting, because it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to live my life based off of what feels right to me.” Something I never believed I could trust, really. But yeah, it’s been so fun and exciting to just live. I feel so excited about life. Before, I was always so afraid of life.

Yes, a recurring theme in this book is you were a people-pleaser, whether you were trying to gain the approval of the Mormon church, American Idol voters, or especially your dad. As I said, I’ve interviewed you several times in recent years, mostly about either your sexuality or your changing relationship with religion, which are of course big focuses of Devout. But today, I want to talk about what you say were your two hardest things to write about: your father and American Idol. I’ll start by asking, why was that the case?

It’s probably because I already processed my sexuality, but I hadn’t yet processed the dynamic with my dad. And I had not yet processed my time on American Idol, which I think I associate a lot with my relationship with my dad. The way I coped to move forward with my life was simply to cut out a lot of that. Originally I didn’t [write] as much about American Idol [in Devout]; I talked more about my family dynamics and my religion, my growing up in Utah. And the publishers were like, “Hey, we would really love for you to talk more about your time on American Idol.” And it was just very uncomfortable.

I’m not saying it was a horrible experience. It was just extremely uncomfortable to go through. So, I went back and rewatched all of my American Idol episodes, and I experienced the cringe — but mixed with the cringe, this time I was feeling something new, which was compassion for the teenager that was there on that stage feeling so exposed, so uncomfortable, and really terrified. I mean, I was terrified to be on there, because I was so afraid of people seeing me for the “problem” that I was, that I thought I was. I mean, at the time, it was the problem that I was.

Do you mean people thinking you were a sissy? I’ll use the term “sissy” instead of a meaner one, but do you mean outing you, or figuring out what you maybe hadn’t even figured out about yourself yet?

Yeah, exactly. I think people labeling and deciding what I was, before I even understood what it was. It felt, again, like a loss of control — that I didn’t have control over the pacing of my life. I think that’s what was hard about American Idol. I was being forced to move at a much quicker pace than I was ready for. But I still did it because I didn’t want to disappoint anyone and I didn’t want to let people down, especially my dad. It was everything for him that I was there. He felt like I was finally experiencing what he always knew about me. He’s like, “David, you are one of the best singers in the world!” I was like, “Oh my God, Dad. There are plenty of singers out there. There’s Celine Dion, there’s Whitney Houston, there’s Mariah Carey, there’s Stevie Wonder. I’m not one of the greatest singers in the world!” But doing so well on that show for my dad was just like, “See what I told you? Didn’t I tell you?”

The irony is, even though Jeff was such a taskmaker that he made you almost hate music at times, like he sucked the joy out of it for you, you still do music for a living now. And you seem to enjoy it more than ever. And your whole music career might not have happened if Jeff hadn’t been such an aggressive stage dad. So, yeah, in some ways he was “right” to do what he did. How do you come to terms with all that? You must feel quite torn.

You are so right. And that’s a great observation that you’ve made. There’s a lot of resentment that I had had for my dad, but I couldn’t help but acknowledge that if it weren’t for his hardheadedness and his stubbornness and intensity… I’m a much more gentle personality. I’m a lot more passive. I’m still intense and passionate, but as far as my convictions, they just were not anywhere near the same level as where my dad’s were. He believed that I deserved to have success, and he believed that he deserved to see success from his son.

I didn’t have that same fire. I didn’t have that same drive. I wasn’t as motivated. I was just kind of fine to go with the flow. That’s just how I had always been. I did love music, but I was very shy. I was shy to sing in front of people, and my dad always pushed me to sing for people. I hated him for it, I resented it, and yet it taught me to go out of my comfort zone and take risks and do things that I didn’t always feel like doing because I didn’t feel like I was capable of doing it. It’s not necessarily that I didn’t want to sing. I just didn’t think I was good enough. I didn’t think I had the personality. I didn’t think I had the talent, abilities. I just questioned myself and second-guessed myself way too much to really do anything about it, whereas my dad was like, “No, we are doing this!” …That’s exactly what my dad was for me. To make it, especially in the entertainment industry, you need that.

Well, he got the ball rolling and put you on a path you might not have been on otherwise, but even after Idol, him being your manager created problems. Are there ways that he might’ve sabotaged you professionally — maybe that you didn’t even realize until later — where you feel like your career might’ve turned out differently if he hadn’t been in the picture?

Absolutely. I feel like while he helped start the first momentum for my career, he had very much an us-against-the-world mentality. It’s “us-against-them,” which I think stems from how we were raised with our beliefs … always being taught that the entertainment industry was “evil.” I think he was just kind of waiting to see all the “evil” people, so he treated everyone as if they were evil. “These are bad people who want something. They probably want to take advantage of my son.” And there are probably a lot of people who did. But I think at the same time, my dad didn’t realize that he, of all people, was the one who was taking the most advantage of me.

And I think because he was my dad, he thought, “Well, this is my son. I know what’s best for him, and I only want the best for him.” It’s like his vision was blurred by that sentiment, to not realize that a lot of my grief was coming from my dynamic with him and the way he was treating me, and how he didn’t recognize his own greed in some of those moments. And I don’t think he’s even in a place to recognize all of that, because in his eyes, he was just a dad trying to protect his son.

I assume he’s read your book by now.

No, he hasn’t. I’ll send one to him today. I’m actually sending all my copies out today.

Wow. I mean, Devout isn’t completely bashing Jeff, but you really go there. I actually surprised how much you went there. I thought you’d focus more on either your American Idol era or your post-coming out era, but I’d say the core of Devout is about your unhealthy family dynamic, namely with your father. I’m shocked that he hasn’t read it yet. How do you think he’s going to react?

I wanted to finish my story and publish it without any exterior influence on what my story is. I’ve been told many times what my story is and isn’t by others, and I did not want anyone distracting me from that. I knew my dad would have heavy opinions about it, because his perspective is different from mine. I’ve heard his perspective many times; it’s time for me to share mine. I’ve tried to share my perspective with him before, and he would get too defensive. He would feel like I was attacking him, so he wouldn’t hear me. He would speak over me. He felt a need to protect himself from the accusations he felt I was making against him. And my dad, he has trauma with accusations. He was wrongly accused of things in my family that I didn’t really get a clear picture on until I was older, putting everything together and realizing, “This is a messy situation. This is complex.’”

Just to make it very clear, your dad was falsely accused of child molestation, but it broke my heart to read that you always wondered back in the back of your mind, “Is my dad a bad guy? Is there any truth to this?” Has Jeff been given any heads up about how deep you go into all this in your book?

Well, part of the legal aspect of writing this book is like, “Hey, you say a lot of heavy things about your dad, and this could be really serious.” So, my collaborator Val [Valerie Frankel] joined me on a call and recorded a conversation I had with my dad and one of my sisters. I was really worried because I thought, “My dad does not want to talk about this. He’s moved on from this.” This is like 20 years ago that this happened. It’s not always the healthiest thing to go back and dig up the past. But I felt like this was necessary in order to find relief for my sisters, especially my older sister. She wasn’t the one on the call, but she was the one who was wrongly labeled as a victim of my dad, when it was actually someone else [in the family] who she was a victim of. And when she spoke up for herself, which I was so proud of her for doing, when she was young, she was silenced, because people were like, “Oh, you didn’t say what we wanted you to say.” And then for my other sister to have been bribed with a doll, trying to get her to talk poorly about my dad… she didn’t understand why.

When I was writing the book, I had to retract a lot of things because it was too much, and just for legal purposes. But I encountered some of the people in that circle of my family, like family and friends that were close to my mom and her side that kind of instigated all this, and I was just like, “I just am trying to understand. You were all so set on what my dad did. Can you give me some clarity? When did this happen? What did you see that made you convince 9-year-old me that I had to be on your side to get my dad into prison? Because that’s really affected me psychologically.” And it did affect me psychologically. I think the biggest thing that people saw on my time on American Idol was me being afraid of my dad — that narrative. And I was still processing it as a 9-year-old, because I didn’t get to really fully process it.

I didn’t understand what was bad about my dad. I just knew that touch was bad. So, if my dad touched me, if he would just put his hand on my shoulder, I thought that was bad. And that’s really the most he ever did to me physically. If he was standing by me, I just thought, “Don’t touch me.” It really messed with me psychologically. Now I’m finally in my thirties confronting these people, and I was just like, “What did you see that caused you to be so concerned?” And they said, “Oh, we actually didn’t see anything.” I was so pissed off. Fucking pissed. I was like, “You realize you destroyed our family, because you convinced us that we needed to look at our dad as if he were a monster!” And it was like, “Well, your dad was this way and he’s rude and he was insulting.” And I was like, “That does not justify accusing him of child molestation. He can be an asshole. He’s a jerk. He says crass things. He doesn’t respect people’s feelings. He says a lot of very rude things. We can acknowledge that that is a problem and that he can be manipulative and he can be controlling. But that does not justify accusing him of being a child molester.” It doesn’t.

Of course.

And when I saw the way that accountability was deflected, I was so mad. I was like, “You guys let us believe that for decades!”

I’m mad for you and for your family, just hearing about this!

And their answer was, “Well, God knows our hearts, and God’s the judge.” And I’m like, “I don’t think this is God knowing your heart was in the right place, because what you did was wrong, and you’re not willing to own up to that what you did was horrible.”

Have the people who started this chain of false accusations read the book? Do they know that you’re …

Everyone I talk about knows I talk about them. And a lot of them aren’t happy about it. But when I told my dad, I was like, “Dad, I need to get some information about this. I don’t know if this is too touchy of a subject, but I talk about the accusations that were made about you by some of the circle of our family and family friends.” My dad said, “I would actually love to talk about this. I felt like no one ever asked about my experience with that.” And we didn’t [talk about it back then], because the attitude was just, “Let’s just move on, let’s forgive and forget.” And so, my dad was relieved to talk about it now.

I interviewed my mom as well. My mom was just like, “David, why do you feel like you have to talk about this?” It was a very traumatizing experience for her. She didn’t know who to believe. There were two sides of people she loved and trusted, and they were contradicting each other. And she’s like, “Do I side with my circle of my people that I grew up with, or do I side with my husband?” It was very difficult for her to know what to do, and it broke her. She just shut down, and she didn’t recover from that for years. The marriage wasn’t the same after that. My mom basically was just checked-out. She stopped. She was in bed so much of the time. Her depression was really heavy.

And after that, my dad had a lot of frustration. It wasn’t until then that my relationship with my dad became complicated. Before that, he was just my dad. I loved him. We got along really well. There wasn’t this weird dynamic between me and my singing. It just felt like normal. I think my dad became more obsessed with my career and my singing when he needed an escape and an outlet from watching that his family was falling apart and knowing it was probably never going to recover. That’s when he started taking me to California and chasing this dream.

But at that point, my mom was like me: She was confused and she didn’t know what to believe. And no one ever listened to my sisters. So, it wasn’t until my thirties that my mom finally got clarity too about what happened. When I was first writing the book and talking to my mom about it, she’s like, “Well, I guess we’ll never know.” I was like, “Mom, you’ve heard [David’s older sister] Claudia. You’ve heard [David’s younger sister] Jazzy. You should talk to them again, hear their story.” And she did. It was really hard for my mom to revisit because she was just like, “If I learned the truth, it means that my family and my family friends were lying to me.” I think my mom never wanted to have to come to terms to that. But she finally was just like, “I realize I need to be there for my children. And if it means making it a messier dynamic with the people I always grew up with and loved, so be it.”

It was hard. But this all happened while I was writing the book. … When I first started writing, I didn’t know. I was like, “I still don’t know if my dad molested my sisters or not.” And I talked to my sisters and I was like, “Well, Claudia’s always said that Dad never did anything to her, but maybe she was hypnotized or something.” But if [my family] really cared about my sister being a victim, they would care about who she did remember touching her and the multiple accounts that she does remember of [her actual molester]. … Oh my God, I was just so pissed off. So pissed off.

I can hear and see your anger, and I don’t blame you. But you did finally get some answers. You got closure. And I know you were or no- or low-contact with your father for some time, and maybe you still aren’t the best of friends, but I was very pleasantly surprised to read about your dad’s reaction when you came out five years ago. I would’ve expected him to be livid, or say you’re ruining your career, but he was actually super-supportive. That was the absolute opposite of what I would’ve expected from him, and maybe of what you would’ve expected. That’s pretty huge.

Right. At that point, I had not been talking to my dad for a few years. And I think those boundaries were what we needed. We needed to have space to grow away from the toxic codependency that we had in our relationship. Having that space allowed him to become his own person. It allowed me to become my own person. … And just for my dad to only have positive things to say — to say, “I’m proud of you, son, and I support you” — it made me realize that my dad isn’t who I thought he was when I was younger. I thought he just was there to put me down and degrade me and think the worst of me all the time. And that wasn’t the case.

He just was a hurt person at the time. He had a lot to figure out during American Idol. My dad didn’t have a lot of close friends that he could talk to. His family was falling apart. My mom had left right before American Idol; she only came back because the kids needed someone to be there at the home [while I was in Los Angeles doing the show]. But my mom had wanted out of the marriage for a while. My dad’s best friend died while I was on American Idol, too, and that tore him up. And I think it just made him dive even more into getting lost in the world of David.

photo: Joseph Adivari

Your father didn’t always do things right, but as I said, he did put you on Idol, which changed your life in so many ways. In fact, the first LGBTQ+ person you ever discussed homosexuality with was one of your fellow Idol contestants. She’s now known as Adore Delano, who found much greater fame on RuPaul’s Drag Race, and has since transitioned. But as you clarify in your book, you spoke with her and she gave you permission to refer to her in context as Danny Noriega, which was her name when she competed on American Idol Season 7. And Danny was very out, very opposite of the childhood you’d had. I think for a lot of kids watching at home, seeing someone like Danny Noriega make the top 16 on a mainstream TV show was a big deal. And meeting her made a big impression on you as well.

Yeah. I was very devout, focused on my beliefs, Mormon at the time. And Danny was a year older than me. And so, with Adore, I saw her life and I thought, “That’s wrong.” And yet at the time I was like, “I feel so seen and safe with this person. I don’t even understand why.” I didn’t understand that I could relate to an extent of what her experience was, to an extent of being misunderstood for your sexuality or your identity. We both could relate to each other, but I felt like I could somewhat pass and blend in. Danny couldn’t. Adore couldn’t. Adore was a lot more flamboyant naturally than I was. She couldn’t hide. She just had to be herself. She had to get bullied. She had to get the brunt of it. She had to get called all kinds of names to her face all the time. And she learned how to be tough and to fight. In school, she would get in a lot of fights because of it, but it’s because she was just like, “I’m not going to let other people tell me what I am. I’m not going to let them decide whether I am worthy of being here or not.”

I admired that so much, because I was letting everyone decide for me. I was hiding. I was doing everything I could to be what I wasn’t. And I didn’t understand the scope of that; I didn’t understand it at the time and who I was. I was in very much denial, which is why I didn’t understand why I related to Adore. I just knew I could let my guard down with her. And yeah, I’m so grateful. She didn’t pressure me. She didn’t try to push me. I think sometimes people feel like, “A-ha! I knew [that David Archuleta was queer]!” And it’s like, OK, cool. I didn’t. I needed my time to figure that out.

I’m so glad you did.

Thank you!

On that American Idol season, George Michael performed on the finale. By then he was out, and now he’s considered an LGBTQ+ pioneer. But he had been outed in a way that at the time was considered disgraceful and scandalous. Do you have any memories of George that day? Did he make an impression on you?

Unfortunately, George didn’t allow any of us to be on the stage, and he didn’t even want us on the stage with him when we were singing his songs. He wanted everyone off the stage by the time he was there. He did not want to interact with any of us; I don’t know why. So, I didn’t really think anything of him [back then]. I didn’t really know his music and I didn’t really appreciate him. I didn’t think too much else of it because I was just like, “OK, this guy doesn’t want to even interact with us on our show.” It wasn’t until I came out that I really became a fan of George Michael and appreciated his music, his message, his journey, what he had to go through with the public scrutiny. At a time when it wasn’t yet accepted, he was bold to be himself. I went back and listened to his music and I was just like, “Oh, this makes so much sense now.” It spoke to me, and it was the motivation I needed. I played “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” on repeat, as well as “The Voice Within” by Christina Aguilera, the day I came out. They just became my anthems.

Well, what George Michael’s music did for you when you were beginning your coming-out journey, maybe your music can do that for someone now. I think your story is going to help a lot of people.

Thank you. I hope so. I hope it’s encouraging for somebody out there. That’s the whole goal.

This Q&A has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Robert Smith watches the ‘Later… with Jools Holland’ performance that launched KT Tunstall’s career.

Twenty years ago, on Feb. 7, 2006, Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall released her debut album, Eye to the Telescope, in America. Three months later, runner-up Katharine McPhee covered the LP’s first single, “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree,” on American Idol Season 5, which was the top-rated show of 2005-2006, averaging more than 30 million viewers a night.

McPhee actually performed Tunstall’s relatively obscure folk song on two of those nights: on the top five episode, and as a reprise for the top two finale. It was an unexpected song choice, back when female pop contestants still mostly stuck to Mariah, Whitney, and Celine ballads, and McPhee’s breakout performance subsequently catapulted “Black Horse” from the bottom half of the Billboard Hot 100 all the way to the top 20.

“It suddenly changed America for me,” says Tunstall, speaking onstage at the Grammy Museum. She notes that she did eventually get to meet McPhee. “And I did say thank you!”

One American artist that Tunstall still hasn’t had the chance to thank, however, is Nas. The hip-hop star was accidentally instrumental in securing Tunstall some “Black Horse” television exposure on the other side of the pond, which was even more important to her then-fledgling career.

Tunstall says it “completely changed [her] life overnight” when she appeared on Britain’s in-the-round variety series Later… with Jools Holland, as a last-minute booking after Nas canceled. “The rapper pulled out, and I got his spot. Obvious choice!” she chuckles.

“I had 24 hours’ notice to get down to London and do it,” Tunstall recalls. The fact that she was a “portable” one-woman show, utilizing loop pedals to create a layered, full-band sound in real time, made it easy for her to pack up quickly and accept the BBC’s invitation. But she had no idea that her looping would make her such a TV sensation.

“I’d been doing it for a bit, like for maybe six months, playing in coffee shops and setting it up myself. Everyone would kind of look up from their lattes and be like, ‘All right, that’s cool,’ but no one was going crazy,” she shrugs.

The next day, “after trying to get somewhere for 10 years, all through my twenties — I was just really lucky that I looked 15 when I was 29,” Tunstall found herself at BBC Studioworks’ Television Centre, sharing that hallowed circular stage with music’s greats. “It was Anita Baker, Jackson Browne, and the Cure… and me! It was crazy.”

The Jools crew then made the brilliant decision to include an over-the-shoulder camera angle of  Robert Smith standing in iconic “Boys Don’t Cry”-style silhouette, as the Cure frontman observed Tunstall’s career-making performance with intense interest. “You could see me through Robert Smith’s hair,” Tunstall laughs. “It was like I was a little egg in a nest.”

Afterwards, Tunstall was still in shock, as she processed what had just happened and tried to make small-talk with Smith. “He was the first famous person I ever met. After the show he was so nice, and he gave me a quote for my press release about how much he loved the performance. And I was just completely overwhelmed and didn’t know what to say to him,” she recalls. “I was trying to think of what to say to him, so I said, ‘What are you doing this weekend?’ He said, ‘Oh, I’m going to my parents for lunch.’ I didn’t know what to say next, so I said, ‘What do your mom and dad think of your hair and your lipstick and everything?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I don’t usually put that on when I go home.’ Incognito — much like Stevie Nicks, he can disappear. So, if you saw Robert Smith without, you would not know that was him. It’s genius!”

KT Tunstall chats with Lyndsey Parker at the Grammy Museum about her career. (Photo by Rebecca Sapp, courtesy of the Recording Academy/Getty Images)

After Jools and Robert Smith’s endorsement, Tunstall’s website, which she was still running on her own, “totally exploded,” receiving hundreds of messages a day from new fans. “My favorite email I got was from this guy who said, ‘I’m fiftysomething. I can’t tell my friends that I’m sending you a message because I’m a punk. I just need to tell you that I love your music. I can’t tell anyone else.’”

Adding another twist to this story of happy TV accidents was the fact that Tunstall’s just-completed but not-yet-released Eye to the Telescope didn’t even originally include “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree,” because it had been written after the LP was recorded. “The Jools Holland scouts had come to see me at rehearsal… and my label boss was like, ‘Play that new one.’ I was like, ‘OK,’ and that was that. I didn’t hear anything from them. Then when it came to the show, my label boss said, ‘Play that ‘woo-hoo’ thing,’ and I said, ‘But it’s not on the record!’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’”

Tunstall reluctantly complied, but she admits that she “thought it was a terrible mistake” at the time. “I was like, ‘Why on Earth wouldn’t I play the single from the record?’ Obviously, it went mental, so he made a great call with that song. And so, the first 10,000 copies of [Eye to the Telescope] have the audio from the TV show, because they rush-released the album and we didn’t have a recording.” The official studio version that appeared on later pressings of Eye to the Telescope was named Best Single of 2005 by Q magazine, and received a Best Female Pop Vocal Performance nomination at the 2007 Grammy Awards.

Tunstall’s Jools performance aired just a few months before YouTube launched, and McPhee’s Idol performance aired about a year after that, so Tunstall was actually one of the early pop stars to go viral, at a time when “going viral” wasn’t even a thing. The irony is not lost on her, even after all these years.

“Really, if YouTube hadn’t existed, I probably wouldn’t be here, because I was always about the music and didn’t particularly want to be about the image. I just wanted to be a musician and a player,” she says. “And actually, in the end, it was people seeing what I did that was the thing that blew it up.”

Speaking at Sunday’s 2026 Grammy Awards, singer-songwriter/actress/multihyphenate Rita Wilson was understandably excited to discuss her new single “Sound of a Woman,” the title track from her forthcoming sixth studio album. But our red-carpet conversation also turned to the surprising sound of another iconic woman.

Two days earlier, Wilson had had the honor and delight of introducing the Foo Fighters and Taylor Momsen’s buzzy appearance at Mariah Carey’s MusiCares Person of the Year gala, where the Foos and the Pretty Reckless frontwoman performed, for the first time publicly ever by anyone, two tracks from Carey’s lost ‘90s grunge album.

“First of all, it must be so secret, because I tried to find it on the internet and I could not find it!” Wilson laughed, referring to the mythical Hole/Sleater-Kinney/Garbage-inspired LP that Carey secretly recorded in 1995. “It’s Mariah Carey’s grunge album that she did with her band Chick, called Someone’s Ugly Daughter. And the Foo Fighters, if you don’t know this, are amazing Mariah Carey fans — huge fans. And so, I think it was their idea to tribute Mariah in this way. And if you noticed at MusiCares, she was singing along to every word, stood up. It was fantastic!”

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Carey co-produced Someone’s Ugly Daughter with her friend Clarissa Dane, who was credited as Chick’s lead vocalist after Carey’s record label, concerned that the project would ruin the pop star’s glossy image, intervened. (Sony forced Carey’s original vocals to be stripped, and Carey was demoted to backup-singer status.) The long-out-of-print Chick record has sold for as much as $800 on resale sites like eBay, although Wilson was thrilled to learn that it has since resurfaced on YouTube.

“I think that the Foo Fighters and Mariah should redo the album and put it out,” Wilson proposed. “I actually think that was Dave Grohl’s idea when we were backstage. It was like, ‘I think we should do it,’ and I’m like, ‘Yes, 100 percent! Exactly!’” When it’s suggested that Wilson should also join the new Chick lineup, she brightened and quipped, “Oh, I’ll join Chick, absolutely! I’ll just play tambo. I’ll do it!”

In the meantime, Wilson is focused on readying her own deeply personal album, Sound of a Woman, out May 1. The titular single was co-written by Wilson and Amy Wadge (Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud,” Kacey Musgraves, Alicia Keys, Kylie Minogue, James Blunt, John Legend, P!nk, Mika, Noah Cyrus).

“It was partly inspired by this quote that I read that was on my bulletin board by Michelangelo, the famous Italian sculptor. And the quote was this,” Wilson explained, as the veteran actress prepared to break out her best Florentine Renaissance accent for dramatic effect. “People asked him, ‘How do you carve these incredible statues out of these huge chunks of marble?’ And he said, ‘I see the angel in the marble, and I carve until I set him free.’ And I thought to myself, ‘That is the perfect metaphor for what it’s like to be in this world.’ You’re born, you come into this world, you evolve your entire life, and you chip away and carve away the things that don’t really work, that aren’t really you, so that you can arrive at who you are. And that’s what the album’s about.”

The Instagram interview video above is courtesy of the Recording Academy.

Jeff Goldblum is one of his generation’s most beloved actors, known for his roles in both blockbuster popcorn-movie franchises like Jurassic Park, Independence Day, and Wicked and cult classics like The Fly, Earth Girls Are Easy, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and several memorable Portlandia episodes. But he’s also an acclaimed and accomplished jazz pianist, releasing four albums with his Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, who just announced a world tour playing some of their most prestigious venues yet.

So, when Goldblum and his wife, dancer and Canadian Olympic rhythmic gymnast Emilie Livingston Goldblum, briefly joined me on the red carpet on music’s biggest night, the 2026 Grammy Awards, I had to ask how he — unlike many “moonlighting” actors who shall remain nameless — was able to make such a credible transition to the jazz world and be taken seriously as a musician.

“You’re so nice. What a lovely question. Well, in a nutshell, yeah, we’re doing OK,” Goldblum said with his usual humble charm. “We’ve got our fifth album coming out on Decca, on Verve and Fontana, June 5. It’s called Night Blooms, and we’re the most proud of it of anything we’ve done. And we’re going to around celebrating with a tour — we’re going to the Sydney Opera House and to the Royal Albert Hall, with a 50-piece orchestra. So yes, as you say, things are going swimmingly.

“And how did that happen? I don’t know. It’s just very lucky. I feel at the height of my powers in acting, but at the same time, this thing has taken off — the seeds of which were planted when I was 10 years old and started to study,” Goldblum reflected (referring to his idolized other brother Rick, who died in 1971, and who instilled in him an early love of jazz). “I started to call cocktail lounges around Pittsburgh and tried to get jobs there, just as a fun thing, as I pursued [acting]. My heart was set on the acting career, so [the music career] has kind of blossomed unexpectedly and magically.”

That was supposed to be my only question, due to Goldblum’s tight red carpet schedule (he was set to co-present the Best Contemporary Country Album award that night on air with Lainey Wilson). But when I joked about the pressure of making sure my one allowed question was a good one, he had joked, “There are no bad questions, except the ones you don’t ask.” So, I couldn’t resist slipping in a second query, about a deep cult in his filmography:

“Will there ever be an Elephant Man musical?”

“Very good question — from The Tall Guy,” he chuckled with clear amusement. The 1989 British rom-com, which marked the feature-film debut of screenwriter Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love Actually ), starred Goldblum as a struggling American actor working who lands the title role in a Andrew Lloyd Webber-like London musical, based on The Elephant Man, called Elephant! — featuring numbers like “He’s Packing His Trunk,” “Here He Comes, Mr. Disgusting,” and the finale, “Somewhere Up in Heaven, There’s an Angel with Big Ears.”

“Well, Richard Curtis wrote that. He’s fantastic. And hey, as you know, I like the musical theater world!” laughed Goldblum, referring to his recent role as the Wonderful Wizard of Oz in the Grammy-winning Wicked and its sequel, Wicked: For Good. “I love David Lynch’s Elephant Man movie… who knows? Sounds good to me! If you’re involved, sign me up.”

As an editor’s note, I’ll mention that I have since learned that there was an Australia production called The Marvellous Elephant Man: The Musical, which ran in 2022-2023. But I’m sure it wasn’t nearly as entertaining as entertaining as Elephant!, because Goldblum didn’t take part. So, watch his space. And in the meantime, look out for Jeff Goldblum & the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra’s Night Blooms and tour dates later this year.

The Instagram interview video above is courtesy of the Recording Academy.

When Reba McEntire performed at the 2026 Grammys, held Feb. 1 at Los Angeles’s Crypto.com Arena, it was, incredibly, her first time ever singing on the Grammy stage. That alone would have made the occasion momentous, but McEntire (along with Brandy Clark and Promise of the Real’s Lukas Nelson, son of Willie) was tasked with one of the evening’s most daunting and important assignments: appearing in the ceremony’s In Memoriam tribute.

And this year, that segment hit especially close to home for Reba.

“I’ve got a lot of friends on that screen tonight. My oldest son, Brandon Blackstock, is also up there. He went on back in August,” McEntire told me on the preshow red carpet, referring to her talent-manager stepson. (McEntire was married to Brandon’s father Narvel Blackstock, for more than 20 years.) “So, it’s going to be a very emotional song to sing. But Lukas Nelson, Brandy Clark, and I will do our best to get through it.”

As the country queen steeled herself to perform a retooled version of “Trailblazer” — a song she cowrote with Clark and the track’s other two recording artists, Lainey Wilson and Miranda Lambert, as a way of “honoring the [country music] ladies who have been before us who have gone on” — she revealed that she could hear the voice of her stepson in her head. She knew that the talent manager, who died last August from malignant melanoma at age 48, would give her just the right tough-love pep talk she needed.

“I know Brandon would say, ‘Suck it up there, Mom! Get up there and do it,’” McEntire chuckled. However, when she was a coach on The Voice, she was used to helping her own contestants power through emotional and deeply personal performances. And she’d remember some advice she received from another dearly departed loved one, her mom Jacqueline, who died in 2020.

“I’ve always had a little trick that my mother told me: When you get a little emotional, look up at the ‘EXIT’ signs, and try to read it backwards,” McEntire revealed. “It gets you out of that moment of heartbreak when you’re just about to choke, and so you switch [in your brain], and then you stand and you can tend to business. That’s why you’re there.”

The Instagram interview video above is courtesy of the Recording Academy.

At the 68th Annual Grammy Awards, held Feb. 1 in Los Angeles, guitar god Nuno Bettencourt was in a fantastic mood as he spoke with me (and other remote reporters from around the globe) at the Recording Academy’s Virtual Red Carpet press box. And that was before he even won his very first Grammy, for his work on Yungblud’s “Changes (Live from Villa Park),” which took home the prize for Best Rock Performance.

Bettencourt had only been nominated one other time, at the 1991 Grammys for Extreme’s “More Than Words.” But this was an especially important honor, as Yungblud’s performance was taped at Ozzy Osbourne’s Back to the Beginning all-star tribute concert in Birmingham, England — where the Prince of Darkness sang live for the very last time, just 17 days before his death.

Yungblud’s Back to the Beginning performance — which included not just Bettencourt, but also fellow 2026 Grammy-winners Frank Bello (Anthrax, Helmet, Satyricon), Sleep Token drummer II, and Osbourne keyboardist/rhythm guitarist Adam Wakeman — was the breakout moment of the July 5 event. The fact that it was an unbilled appearance, that its arrangement was switched at the last minute, and that it was the only official single to be released from that concert, made the Recording Academy’s acknowledgement all the more special and meaningful.

“It was something that was crazy, because the night before we actually performed it, we didn’t really have an arrangement for it,” Bettencourt revealed. “The original was just piano and vocal, and I was like, ‘Why don’t we make this the “Purple Rain” version of this song? Let’s make it like emotional, and we include the band rocking.’ And we didn’t know it was going to touch people the way it did.”

While Yungblud has certainly had his share of haters, who’ve wrongly dismissed as some sort of pop-punk poser, the British rocker radically reinvented himself last year with his Idols opus, which also scored nominations for Best Rock Song (for “Zombie”) and Best Rock Album. However, it was his surprise Ozzy tribute in Birmingham that finally silenced many rockist doubters.

“He obviously came from the pop world initially, but I think he’s that kid that’s kind of like, when you’re around him, you feel the rock ‘b’ roll in him,” said Bettencourt. “And with the vocal performance he had that night on that song, I think changed his career — because the emotionality of it, it was touching, and it was magic.”

When I mentioned that what Queen was to Live Aid, Yungblud’s performance was to Back to the Beginning, Bettencourt marveled, “It’s incredible that you said that, because the text that we got when we got offstage was from a Queen member. It was from Brian May, who was in a box, and he said, ‘That performance really touched me.’”

As for Osbourne’s feedback and Bettencourt’s memories of that historic night, the guitarist said with a chuckle, “Well, the crazy thing is, back in the 1900s as a kid, when Randy Rhodes was still in the band and before he passed away in that accident, after he passed away, there was an ad in Circus magazine that Ozzy’s looking for a new guitar player. I think I was about 14 or 15. I’m like, ‘This is my gig! I’m getting this gig!’ So, I borrowed gear from my friends, played two Ozzy songs, sent it in. Every day after school, I was asking my mom, ‘Dd they call? Did they call?’ And I’m like, ‘No, really? They didn’t call me?’ So, then of course, Jake Lee got it. Ten years later, Ozzy reached out to my booking agent and said, ‘There is a jet waiting for Nuno at Heathrow. He’s got the gig.’ And as he’s telling me this, the only thing I could say is, ‘They heard the cassette!’ … To me, he’d finally heard it.

“And the last words that Ozzy said to me, when we were taking that photo [at Back to the Beginning last year], is he grabbed my wrist really hard and he said, ‘You are the only beep that said no to me. I think that’s pretty special.’ So, that’s the last thing he said,” Bettencourt added a bit more somberly. ‘We didn’t know we were going to lose him after that.”

Another way in which Bettencourt’s Birmingham experience was a full-circle career moment was — as a remote journalist from Music for Music People pointed out — Prince, whose “Purple Rain” inspired that day’s “Changes” arrangement, once declared Bettencourt one of the three greatest guitarists of all time.

“I am still in therapy because of it. I’m still in therapy, because he’s one of my idols, if not the top,” Bettencourt joked. “And yes, when he came to see me perform live and said that to one of my best friends after the show, they were messing with me: ‘We’re not going to tell you what he said!’ And that meant the world to me, because I have so much influence in the funk part of what Extreme is and everything that we did. And yes, this [Grammy] partly has to go to [Prince], because those are the words that came out of my mouth at rehearsal: “Let’s do the “Purple Rain” version of “Changes.”’ And that’s what it was. And I believe that that’s why it was as emotional as it was, as ‘Purple Rain’ was. We all cried. It’s one of my favorite songs of all time.”

As Bettencourt headed back the Premiere Ceremony learn the results of the Best Rock Performance category (which included worthy nominees Amyl and the Sniffers, Linkin Park, Turnstile, and Hayley Williams), Bettencourt already felt like a winner.

“[Osbourne] attended his own life celebration, his own funeral, his own everything. What a legend,” he gushed. “To me, the win was already that day. Whether we win or not [tonight], it’s beautiful thing to be here.”

The Instagram interview video above is courtesy of the Recording Academy.

Veteran musical comic (or is it comical musician?) Kyle Gass is reclining on a velour ‘70s sofa at Licorice Pizza Records, getting ready for his eponymous band’s very first in-store concert, live in Studio City, celebrating the release of their new release, Live in Palmdale.

But since it’s Grammy week in Los Angeles, Gass’s rare pre-show chat with the store’s LPTV (only his second interview in the past 18 months, after he recently broke his silence via Rolling Stone) inevitably turns to that historic night at the Grammy Awards — when Gass’s other band, Tenacious D, were up for Best Metal Performance. It was an especially stacked category that year, with the D’s fellow nominees being rock titans Slipknot, Motorhead, Mastodon, and Anthrax.

“And who do you think won?” Gass laughs, incredulously. “And [the other nominees] were so unhappy about it. Oh, they were not happy at all. Who were these ‘punk comedy dudes’ coming in, ‘stealing our hard rock?’ But it was a great track.”

Yes, that’s right: In a total upset, Tenacious D’s “The Last in Line,” a Dio cover recorded for the Ronnie James Dio tribute album This Is Your Life, prevailed at the 2015 Grammys. One might have assumed that the D’s fellow nominees — particularly Anthrax, who were nominated for their own contribution to that same Dio tribute compilation — would’ve actually been totally fine with this result. After all, it was technically a win for both the D and the late, great Dio, right?

“No, they didn’t see it that way,” Gass chuckles. (Anthrax’s Scott Ian, for what it’s worth, had more of a problem with the Recording Academy than with Tenacious D themselves.)

“I mean, the Grammys are pretty bogus — except when you win, and then it’s like the greatest thing ever! But come on, the Grammys, they’re so clueless over there,” Gass continues. He actually thinks that he and his Tenacious D cohort Jack Black, who were “very surprised” to be recognized by the Recording Academy in the Metal category at all, were more deserving at the 2013 Grammys, when their third LP, Rize of the Fenix, was up for Best Comedy Album.

“I think Jimmy Kimmel… no, who’s the other guy?… Jimmy Fallon. He won. I thought we were actually better. So, we didn’t win when I thought we should have won. And then of course, when we shouldn’t have won, really, because of all those great bands — we did!”

Sadly, Tenacious D were on tour in Europe at the time, so they weren’t able to accept their Grammy in person. This prompts LPTV to suggest that Gass launch an awards-season campaign for the Kyle Gass Band, so that Live in Palmdale can nab a nomination and he can enjoy a full, proper Grammy experience next year. To that, he quips, “Um, is there an award for Best Side-Project?”

Gass has a long list of acting credits (during his wide-ranging LPTV interview, he lightning-rounds about his onscreen debut in a 1988 commercial for the short-lived spinoff soda 7-Up Gold; his film debut in the then-little-known Peter Jackson’s splatter flick Braindead; starring in the Vandals’ cult TV series Fear of a Punk Planet; and his various roles in Elf, Wild Hogs, Seinfeld, and Friends). And the Kyle Gass Band isn’t even his only musical “side-project — he’s also played on and off for the past two decades with the Southern Rock comedy group Trainwreck. But of course, he will always be best known as one half of Tenacious D.

And so, LPTV’s conversation also inevitably turns to questions about the status of that comedy duo, who’ve been on hiatus for the past year and a half. In July 2024, during a Tenacious D concert in Sydney, Gass was surprised with a cake for his 64th birthday onstage, and when Black told him to “make a wish,” he blurted the unplanned, unfortunate comment, “Don’t miss Trump next time.” (There’d been an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, who was running for a third presidential term, three days earlier.) Despite Gass’s sincere apology on social media for what he called a “highly inappropriate” and “dangerous” joke and “a terrible mistake,” the backlash was so intense and immediate that the Australian tour was cancelled, and all future plans for the band were put on hold. Tenacious D have not been heard from since.

“Read the Rolling Stone [interview]. It’s all about it,” says a visibly uncomfortable Gass, referring to the above-mentioned exclusive he granted the iconic rock magazine just two days before he visited Licorice Pizza. “That’s my last interview on that [subject].”

Gass understandably has no desire to keep rehashing what went down that night in Syndey, or the subsequent fallout. He’d rather spend his LPTV interview, which he eventually cuts short to grab some preshow grub, cracking wise about blue ice meth (which is apparently popular in Palmdale?), bogus concert albums (Live in Palmdale isn’t one of them. but apparently The Last Waltz is?), or that time he visited Peter Jackson in New Zealand and took a secret passageway to Bilbo Baggins’s Bag End house, as one does.

But he shows no bitterness as he reminisces about the D’s early days, when — after he moved from Northern California to study music at UCLA, realized he didn’t fit in with all the “serious musicians playing piano and violin,” and switched his focus to acting — he met fellow Actors’ Gang theater troupe member Black. And he is willing to vaguely yet optimistically address Tenacious D’s future, saying they’re just “on a break.”

 

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“I’m actually a lot older, like nine years older, than Jack. But he did a play with us in the Actors’ Gang [in 1986] as kind of a youngster, and he was just a great singer,” says Gass, recalling Tenacious D’s formation. “He was doing these four-track tapes on the TEAC, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this kid’s amazing!’ And I was like, ‘’Well, do you play an instrument?’ He didn’t play an instrument. And I thought, ‘Well, dude, you’ve got to just have rudimentary guitar, if you’re going to do that.’” Gass offered to teach Black guitar, and he says Black was “a very good student. I remember for three months, he played the same three chords on the guitar, D, A, and E, over and over again. … He actually accused me of not showing him all the hard stuff!”

Eventually, in ‘94, Tenacious D made their official but humble musical debut at the legendarily seedy, now-shuttered DTLA dive Al’s Bar (“It was kind of our CBGB”), where they played their future classic “Tribute” and were approached afterwards by David Cross, who asked them to open for the live cabaret version of Mr. Show. “And the rest is history,” says Gass.

But are Tenacious D history now? Are they broken up? Gass insists that’s not the case. For the time being, he’s keeping busy with projects like the Kyle Gass Band and Guitarings (his recently revived guitar-tutorial YouTube series with his longtime “virtuoso” guitarist John Konesky), but he assures fans that the D will rise, or rize, again. Maybe they’ll even win another Grammy someday.

“Listen to Rize of the Fenix. That’s about us burning up and coming back from the ashes. So, the Fenix will rise again… as long as we’re alive,” Gass declares. “We’re buds. [Black] is working on his movies; he’s got a couple movies coming out. But we have a saying: We will serve no D-wine before it’s D-time.”

 

 

 

 

 

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When a 22-year-old West Coast rapper and reformed ex-gang member named Anthony Terrell Smith — soon to be better known as Tone Lōc — stepped into a “hot-ass closet” in a “raggedy part of Hollywood” to record ”Wild Thing,” he certainly didn’t expect that track to sell 2.5 million copies, let alone dominate MTV (with a lo-fi music video, shot by then-rising director Tamra Davis, on a meager $400 budget).

And of course, he definitely never imagined that he’d end up cosplaying as the Handyman on The Masked Singer 37 years later, at nearly age 60.

But so many developments in Lōc’s loco life have not been foreseeable. For instance, his signature rasp (which Yo! MTV Raps-raised Masked Singer judge Robin Thicke instantly identified) was the “unexpected benefit” of a childhood accident when he “snuck and drank” some of his mom’s freshly brewed hot tea and damaged his throat. And he “was not expecting to be in the music business or an entertainer at all,” and was “planning on probably going into real estate or something like that”… until a random referral by his cousin/early manager led to a fateful meeting with former Jean-Michel Basquiat studio assistant and eventual Beastie Boys/Dust Brothers associate Matt Dike.

“Two days later, next thing I know, we were starting to make a record,” says Tone, who became the very first signing to Delicious Vinyl, Dike’s indie record label that also helped launch the careers of Young MC, the Pharcyde, the Brand New Heavies, and Mellow Man Ace.

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“[Dike] was a white guy, basically a cool dude with long blond hair… the type of guy you would look at and be like, ‘Nah, he’s just some sort of stoner or whatever; he does not look like he knows music,’” Tone recalls with a chuckle. “But this guy knew everything, from blues to hip-hop to country to rock ‘n’ roll. He knew it all. He had it all in there. In fact, he had so many records in one room [of his apartment] that the owner of the building had to come and ask him to remove the albums — because they were starting to sink into the lower level, coming into the apartment below!”

Tone says it was “totally a Matt Dike thing” to sample classic rock on his debut album, Lōc-ed After Dark — like a pastiche of Foreigner, the Rolling Stones, KISS, Free, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive on his second hit, “Funky Cold Medina,” and, more famously (and more problematically, since it prompted an $180,000 copyright lawsuit), the guitar riff from Van Halen’s “Jamie’s Cryin’” on his first hit. In fact, Lōc admits that he’d never even heard “Jamie’s Cryin’” before he recorded “Wild Thing.”

“I wasn’t familiar with the [Eddie Van Halen] guitar part at all,” he says. “I think [Dike and Delicious Vinyl co-founder Michael Ross] were searching for the bridge of trying to cross over [to pop and rock audiences]. They were more familiar with that, because I had never even heard of the pop charts before.” And while Tone might have been a bit hesitant or skeptical, he decided to give it a shot. “I mean, the beat wasn’t [my style] at first, but I’m like, ’I’ll work it out. I’ll do something to it.’ And it worked out fine.”

Tone reveals that “Wild Thing’s” iconic opening line, “Let’s do it,” was actually an ad-lib, because he was so uncomfortable recording in Dike’s unventilated closet-turned-makeshift studio in East Hollywood. “When I said, ‘Let’s do it,’ it wasn’t like, let’s do a song. I’m like, ‘Let’s do it, because I’m tired of being hot up in here right now!’ … I was like, let’s do it, because it was hot, like, ‘I’m ready to get the hell up out of there!’” he laughs. “That’s why I was ready. Let’s do it and get the hell out. … I did it in, I would say, probably like three takes.”

Lōc-ed After Dark sold double-platinum, went to No. 1 on the U.S. album chart (making it the first album by a Black rap musician to top the Billboard 200), yielded two top three Billboard Hot 100 singles, and even earned Lōc two Grammy nominations, including Best New Artist. (Fun fact: He lost in that category to the soon-to-be-disgraced Milli Vanilli.) So, it’s surprising that he only released one other album after that, 1991’s less successful but still gold-certified Cool Hand Lōc, and then, after recording “Ace Is in the House” with Jim Carrey in 1994 for Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (in which he also played police Sergeant Emilio), he never released any music again.

Tone admitted he felt “pressure” to follow up his debut LP. Delicious Vinyl had unexpectedly exploded and would soon form a partnership with major label Atlantic Records, and, according to a petition that Ross eventually filed in L.A. Superior Court, Dike was beginning to “abdicate responsibility and management” of the label. (Ross later retained ownership of Delicious Vinyl; Dike died of cancer in 2018.) But regardless of any music-business complications and machinations behind the scenes, it was simply impossible for Lōc to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle (or lightning-in-a-closet) magic he’d created in Dike’s stuffy, humble home studio, back when he and the label were working with no set parameters or expectations.

“For some reason, [Delicious Vinyl] didn’t put in the effort for my second album they’d put in for the first one, so it kind got all messed up in certain ways,” laments Tone. “I didn’t see it in the beginning, but I saw what they really wanted to do. They weren’t really concerned with the rest of the album; they just wanted two particular songs. They’re like, ‘Just let us have two, and you can go on and do the rest and make your own beats and do whatever.’ And the songs that they made, pretty much, it was right when hip-hop was changing straight into the gangsta-type thing, hardcore. So, what they were trying to do was not happening anymore. That type of style, like ‘Wild Thing,’ was over.”

Lōc branched into acting for a while — not just with Ace Ventura, but with roles in films like The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, Poetic Justice, Juice, Heat, Spy Hard, and Car 54, Where Are You?; TV shows like Touched By an Angel, NewsRadio, Living Single, Martin; and animated voiceover work in Bebe’s Kids and King of the Hill — so he decided to “just chill for a while” musically. He insists that he “wasn’t concerned about making any new albums,” since a music career had never been his Plan A. “It wasn’t something that I wanted to do anyway,” he shrugs. But even though he stopped making records, he never stopped playing concerts.

“I perform every weekend. It’s amazing,” Tone grins. “People are still surprised. They’re like, ‘You still do shows?’ But I’ve never really stopped. … I still love doing those songs. Those songs are for people of my age and my era. People tell me, ‘Oh, it brings me back to high school, it brings me back to college or my younger days.’ I hear all the good stuff about those songs, so I love it. Of course, you might hear something… somebody might post something here and there negative about it. But for the most part, people just really want to smile and have a good time and dance to those songs.”

Regarding negative reactions, Lōc is specifically referring to “Funky Cold Medina,” which is a stone-cold classic, but has some lyrics that admittedly haven’t aged very well. He doesn’t address the (in retrospect) transphobia of the song’s third verse about “Sheena,” which (much like the cringey, transphobic Lois Einhorn/Ray Finkle subplot in Ace Ventura) passed for humor in the ‘80s/‘90s. But he does address the fact that the raunchy song, which is about an aphrodisiac adult beverage that render anyone who imbibes it irresistible to the opposite sex, has in recent years been wrongly criticized for supposedly glorifying date rape.

“I just saw something [on social media] about ‘Funky Cold Medina,’ like, ‘Oh, he’s the guy that likes to drug women and get ‘em drunk or give some sort of drug and do whatever.’ … It’s nothing like that,” Tone stresses. “Whatever, you get some of the good and some of the bad. But for the most part, everything is all good and people absolutely love those songs. Well, not everybody. … But you have no idea: I go all over the country, and to other countries, all over, and [audiences love the music] in places that you would not believe.”

While Tone hasn’t released music in more than three decades, he reveals that he does plan to finally record a new single this year, which will hopefully capitalize on his elevated post-Masked Singer profile. “I have a record that I do in my shows, called ‘Hey, What’s Up?,’ that gets a bigger reaction than ‘Wild Thing’ or ‘Funky Cold Medina,’ so that’s pretty surprising. And with the success of that song, I think I will go for it. Why not?” he says. “I’m telling you now, you can look for that single. I’m going to put that out. Will it be in the summertime? I don’t know if I’ll have time, but right after the summer, probably.”

While “Hey, What’s Up?” evokes Tone Lōc’s classic era, sampling the instantly recognizable monster riff from AC/DC’s “Back in Black,” times have changed. When the artist formerly known as the Handyman eventually records the party track, he won’t be doing it in some raggedy, un-air-conditioned apartment closet.

“No, that’s not happening,” he laughs. “Definitely not.”

As Mothersbaugh and his Devo bandmate Gerald Casale prepare to perform at Netflix Is a Joke’s just-announced 40th-anniversary celebration of Pee-wee’s Playhouse at Los Angeles’s Greek Theatre (on a lineup that also includes Pee-wee’s Big Adventure composer and fellow new wave pioneer Danny Elfman), I’m revisiting this interview I did with Mothersbaugh on July 31, 2023, the day after Reubens died.

“I’d never done a TV show before,” Mothersbaugh marveled over the phone, recalling when Reubens asked him to compose the theme song and weekly episodic music for the groundbreaking and subversive Saturday morning kiddie program Pee-wee’s Playhouse. “That took me into the world of film and television and video games. It totally changed the trajectory of my career.”

Speaking from his Mutato Muzika headquarters in Hollywood, Mothersbaugh was still processing the tragic news of Reubens’s death; like many of the actor’s friends and colleagues, Mothersbaugh had no idea that Reubens had been fighting a secret battle with cancer for the past six years. “He always had a good personality and a good heart. … It’s just shocking and sad that he’s gone,” Mothersbaugh said. “I really didn’t expect it. We’d even been talking about working on an animated version of Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”

But Mothersbaugh chose to mainly focus on his happy memories with Reubens and express his gratitude for the Playhouse opportunity, which could not have come at a better time.

Mothersbaugh and Reubens’s friendship pre-dated Playhouse by almost a decade. The two had met when Mothersbaugh was dating original Saturday Night Live “Not Ready for Prime Time Player” Laraine Newman, a founding member of the pioneering comedy improv theater the Groundlings. It was there that Reubens, along with future SNL star Phil Hartman, created the nerdy, childlike Pee-wee Herman character — a process that Mothersbaugh got to witness firsthand. “The character came from a [1950s] show that we both watched when we were kids, Pinky Lee. Paul wore something similar to what Pinky wore. I mean, there were three channels on TV in those days; there wasn’t much choice. You had Captain Kangaroo, and then later in the day, you had Pinky Lee,” Mothersbaugh chuckled.

“We were all just artists in L.A., a group of people that we kind of loosely associated as ‘Southern California lowbrow art,’” said Mothersbaugh, recalling how he and Reubens would hang out in the ‘70s and early ‘80s with painters and illustrators like Robert Williams, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Gary Panter (who later became Playhouse’s Emmy-winning set designer), Georganne Deen, and Neon Park; future Emmy-winning Playhouse animator Prudence Fenton; and pop songwriter Allee Willis.

“It was good times,” Mothersbaugh said, remembering their own real-life big adventures when they’d embark on road trips to Palm Springs. “Paul would search out all these theme hotels, like a log-cabin hotel or a Russian motel; most of the time they were pretty seedy and decrepit, but that made it all the more fun, and funnier. … We had a lot of similarities outside of business, where we all were collectors of kitsch. Paul and Allee would stop the car at a junk shop and both get out of the car, running, trying to get a Barbie lighter or something before the other one did.”

Paul Reubens and Mark Mothersbaugh with friends Prudence Fenton and Allee Willis (photo courtesy of Mark Mothersbaugh)

Mothersbaugh and Reubens’s first film collaboration of sorts was as surreal as anything that could have sprung from either of their imaginations: the 1980 cult flick Pray TV, with Reubens, in his first-ever movie role, playing a sassy aerobics instructor and Devo (as Dove, the Band of Love) performing a song called “Shrivel Up” while dressed in “Century 21 outfits.” Five years later, after building a buzz with his Pee-wee stage show and HBO special, Reubens was ready for his real big-screen moment with the Tim Burton-directed breakout film Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, and he originally approached Mothersbaugh to write the score. However, a conflicting touring schedule with Devo prevented Mothersbaugh from accepting that offer. (Rookie film composer Elfman, better known then for fronting Oingo Boingo, famously ended up getting the Big Adventure job instead, and his career trajectory of that eccentric was also forever changed.)

By the time 1986 rolled around, Devo had signed a “bad deal” with Enigma Records, which would go bankrupt and close its doors by ‘91, and the band was “kind of in a cocoon/slumber/siesta state.” So, Mothersbaugh was thrilled to get another shot at working with Reubens, and he was ready to try something totally new.

“I was used to writing 12 songs, the band learns ‘em, goes into a studio, records them, starts rehearsing for a tour. Then we go out on tour for six or seven months, come back, and write 12 more songs a year later. We did that six or eight times, and it was starting to feel like Groundhog Day to me, because the fun part for me was writing the music, not going out and playing the songs we’d written years ago,” explained Mothersbaugh. He soon found out that he loved working at television’s much brisker pace. “[Pee-wee’s Playhouse producers] would send me a three-quarter tape on Monday, I’d write 12 songs’ worth of music on Tuesday, record on Wednesday, put a tape in the express mail on Thursday, they’d mix it into the show on Friday… and on Saturday morning, we’d all watch it on TV. And then the next Monday, I’d get another tape in the mail. I was like, ‘Sign me up for this job!’”

Mothersbaugh’s most iconic Playhouse composition was, of course, the Spike Jones/Esquivel/Martin Denny-inspired theme song, the perfect soundtrack for Pee-wee’s own space-age bachelor pad. The song’s vocals were credited to an unknown mystery singer named Ellen Shaw, but it turns out that familiar-sounding squeak belonged to another new wave sensation of the era: Cyndi Lauper. Mothersbaugh chuckled recalling what happened on the “very odd day” that Lauper secretly recorded the theme.

“She had agreed to sing the theme song for it. She was all into it, because she does a great Betty Boop voice, and that’s what we thought would sound so cool on the song,” said Mothersbaugh. “So, we get to New York and we’re in the studio, and she comes in and sings. And meanwhile her boyfriend/manager [Dave Wolff] goes into the next room with Paul’s manager, and while we’re recording her voice, we’re hearing all this yelling coming out of this other room. They were fighting about something. And when they came back in, [Wolff] said, ‘All right, I’m telling you what’s going on. Cyndi is a serious singer now. We don’t want her associated with kids’ shows. We’re gonna take her name off of this.’ And Paul and I were going, ‘Um, wasn’t she just on MTV with that blond-haired wrestling guy [Hulk Hogan] last weekend? What is he talking about?’ We were kind of all in shock.

“Cyndi just kind of looked at us like, ‘Eh, what am I gonna do?’ Like, she thought it was silly, but she said, ‘We’re going to Hawaii to get married tomorrow.’ And we’re like, ‘Er, OK. Sorry for you!’ [Editor’s note: Lauper and Wolff never married.] So, I put an effect on her voice and it just kind of garbled her voice so you couldn’t tell it was her. And then they had us put the name of her assistant down as the singer. But when she left, we just took the effect off the voice — and nobody even noticed!”

Mothersbaugh revealed that he “got to put in subliminal messages and a lot of in-jokes between Paul and me in the songs,” along with a lot of “Devo references — if you knew to listen to it for it, you would find it.” But there was one funny message, after the Lauper incident, that stayed between Mothersbaugh and Reubens. “I don’t think we played this for anybody,” Mothersbaugh laughed. “You know how on the theme song, Paul goes, ‘Why, Chairry?’ Like, after there’d be a line about Chairry or the Countess, he’d say their names in all these little voices in between every line? Well, we did an [unreleased] version — and I still have it — where he goes, ‘Hey, is that Cyndi Lauper? I think that’s Cyndi Lauper! I’m sure it’s Cyndi! That’s Cyndi singing!’ That was definitely our own private in-joke.”

There were really no rules when it came to creating the Pee-wee’s Playhouse score. “When I got the first episode slot, Paul said, ‘Here’s my only notes. When it’s something sad, make it really, really sad. When it’s something happy, make it really, really happy. When it’s something shocking, make it really, really shocking.’ He just wanted everything to be done to extremes. That was the only request he made,” Mothersbaugh chuckled. As a first-time TV composer, Mothersbaugh didn’t realize then how unique this working environment truly was.

“Maybe with a different television show, I might have said, ‘I never want to do this again!’ But it was such an ideal, perfect situation. We were all thinking outside of the traditional box. Paul had never done [a TV series] before, so he had no reason to be worried or think maybe it’d be a bad idea to take a chance on somebody who’d never scored a TV show before. It was one of those shows that I don’t know if it could ever happen again. They gave him so much artistic leeway. They don’t do that anymore, and they haven’t done it since. It was kind of funny, because people would hire me for shows after that and they’d go, ‘This is the new Pee-wee’s Playhouse!’ That’s how they’d pitch their shows. And then you’d see it and go, ‘That’s not anywhere near as good as Pee-wee’s Playhouse!’ Maybe the closest show to creating an energy and enthusiasm like that was Yo Gabba Gabba!. You don’t see that very often.”

Pee-wee’s Playhouse ended its five-season run on CBS in November 1990, but reruns continued to air — until Reubens was arrested for exposing himself in a Florida adult movie theater in July 1991. Reacting to that scandal, CBS pulled the remaining reruns from its schedule, and it seemed like the show’s legacy might be ruined forever. “It was an awful time. It was so awful. I remember when he first told me what happened, he goes, ‘You know, Mark, I have nightmares remembering being at the police station,’” said Mothersbaugh. “It took him a while to go out again. We stayed friends through the whole thing, and we talked about it if he wanted to, but most of the time he didn’t want to. It was just a horrifying thing that kind of put a speed bump in his career.”

But fortunately, fans rallied around Reubens, and that incident turned out to be just that: a speed bump, not an irreparable career-derailer. “It was just terrible to see everything happen, but it was wonderful to see him make a comeback,” said Mothersbaugh. And even though that animated version of Pee-wee’s Playhouse­ sadly never came to fruition, Mothersbaugh will always fortunate that, in a full-circle moment, he was able to compose the music for the Judd Apatow-co-produced third and final installment in the Pee-wee film series, which turned out to be Reubens’s final film role.

“I ended up dong Paul’s last movie, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, in 2016. We had a really great experience on that,” Mothersbaugh said fondly. “There’s some sweet, emotional moments in that movie, and I liked that I got to make him cry.”

This interview originally ran on Yahoo Entertainment.

To most viewers, newly crowned The Voice champion Aiden Ross might have seemed like an obvious frontrunner throughout Season 28. After all, his four-chair Blind Audition was the first to air on the premiere; his social media and YouTube stats were always among the contestants’ highest; and of course, he performed in the finals’ coveted “pimp spot,” spectacularly closing the show with “The Winner Takes It All.”

That song, of course, seemed prophetically titled. But Ross tells Lyndsanity that he chose the deceptively bittersweet ABBA ballad because “it’s not a song about winning at all. It’s a song about the loser’s perspective — about losing everything.”

Ross elaborates: “I did ‘Mamma Mia in high school my junior year… the song always spoke to me, the lyrics. That meant a lot to me, because being a senior in high school, knowing what I wanted to do, but being too scared to do it — the whole music thing — I threw in the towel. And I went to go be an engineer at A&M [University], which ended up being a great decision because I made incredible friends, learned a lot about myself. … But I never want to forget that feeling like I had lost everything.

“I had just been ready to let go of music and just go be an engineer and just go live that life — which I don’t think would be a bad life, but I don’t want to forget that feeling, because that reminds me of why I’m here and why I’m now pursuing what I love,” he continues. “And so, I wanted to share that with people and I wanted people to be able to relate to it, because everybody’s been a loser at some point. You can’t be a winner without losing at some point.”

The 20-year-old pop stylist and college sophomore, who grew up on a strawberry farm in College Station, Texas, had performed in theater and a cappella groups through high school, but he never realistically thought he could do music for a living — which is why he had given up that dream at a surprisingly young age to pursue an engineering degree instead.

“I’m not from Nashville or L.A., so I don’t have any neighbors that are just super-successful in music, that are artists, or that are even in the music industry. So, there was no light at the end of this tunnel,” he explains. But then, when Ross submitted a Voice audition video during his freshman year at A&M and made it through, “a candle was lit. And that candle turned into a flame, come the Blind Auditions. And it began to burn brighter and brighter, until I won the show. And win or lose, I’ve proven to myself that music isn’t just something I love, but it’s the thing I’m meant to do. And so, that’s really just been my calling, and the decision that I’m at right now.”

Ross actually first auditioned for The Voice during his senior year of high school (he received a callback, but didn’t make it onto the air), but he never considered giving any other TV talent shows a shot (unlike this season’s runner-up, Ralph Edwards, who’d not only tried out for The Voice a whopping 11 times, but had also auditioned for American Idol, America’s Got Talent, The X Factor USA, and even The Four).

“The Voice was the only one I ever auditioned for. I would definitely watch the others, but my family and I, we grew up watching The Voice,” says Ross, who’s been a fan of the show since Season 1, when he was just 6 years old. “American Idol was cool, but it was a little bit messier — which is kind of entertaining sometimes! But I appreciate how The Voice, they only want to get the best of people, which I really respect about them. They don’t want the drama. They want to be of service to you and of your brand, and I really respect that about them and their community. And so, it was a no-brainer for me.”

Ross saved the drama for the stage, starting with his stunning four-chair audition of Adele’s “Love in the Dark.” And he felt an immediate “big brother/little brother connection” and sense of Voice community and mutual respect with the coach he picked, Niall Horan, that was “really, really special” — particularly because Horan had competed on a similar talent show, The X Factor U.K., at a young age.

“I think one thing [Horan] really helped me with was with these songs and these competitions where they’re set up, I have two minutes to essentially pour my heart on the floor and do all these things, and so I’m quick to do all these big runs and all these high notes and stuff like that. But I would be quick to sometimes lose sight of the story, and he would keep me grounded. He would be like, ‘Look, man, the heartbeat of the song is what makes the song,’” Ross reflects. “It’s not ‘don’t do the runs’ and ‘don’t do the big notes,’ but do them within the context of the song and when it feels right to you — do them because it fits this song, not because you need to show off, essentially.

“And that was the best advice he gave, as well as just enjoying the moment, being happy to be here and loving what I’m doing. Your best performance is going to be the one where you’re having the most fun and you love what you’re doing. I think that’s advice that he learned from being on his show —  that he wishes he would’ve slowed down then and just loved the moment and loved the time, rather than taking it so seriously.”

Horan saw a bit of himself in Ross, and he believed in Ross so much that he designated him as his one Team Niall pick during the Playoffs, thus fast-tracking Ross straight to the finale. But this was a double-edged sword, in a way. Because this Voice season was truncated, with four of the top six finalists being handpicked by their respective coaches, Ross advanced all the way to the finals without ever once having to perform for America’s votes. So, he had no idea what sort of fanbase he had when he finally did have to compete this week — and he truly didn’t see himself as a frontrunner.

“That was a little bit scary, because I wasn’t voted for anything else, because I didn’t have the chance to be. It was a little bit of unproven, this. I hadn’t been voted for something yet, so I didn’t really know. I hadn’t seen the votes in real time, and so that was a little bit of uncharted territory,” Ross admits. “And so, in some ways I was less focused on whether or not I thought I would win, and more so focused on ‘I want to leave everything I have out there on that stage. Win or lose, I’m happy to be here.’”

Ross says he still wants to take online classes at A&M University “just because I think it’ll be good for my brain,” and he actually believes that his engineering studies gave him an advantage on The Voice with “arranging these songs and navigating and being able to figure out, even from an emotional standpoint — how I connect to this song and where I should do my runs and my big notes and where it makes sense I think engineering has really helped with that.” But he confidently vows that he’s now “ready to give everything to music.” And in retrospect, he realizes that even if he hadn’t made it onto The Voice, let alone won, he would have eventually pursued this Plan A dream.

“I’d like to think that there would’ve been another candle that was lit in some other resource, in some other space,” muses Ross, who recently released the song “Everything and More” and teases that “some really, really special content” will be coming out in a few days, with a new single slated for next month. “If I hadn’t gone on the show, I would love to teleport to that universe and tell myself, ‘Dude, you don’t need The Voice.’ The Voice has been an incredible opportunity, it’s been such a platform, but the success doesn’t just come from the show. It comes from me and do I believe in myself? Do I want to do this?

“And yes. I absolutely want to do this.”