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!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by FLOOD Magazine (@floodmagazine)

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.’”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Universal Music Group (@universalmusicgroup)

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.’”

Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear chillingly begins with audio of his 911 call on the night of 2008 South Carolina private plane crash that took of lives of the Blink-182 drummer’s two close friends and left him drummer fighting for his life with third-degree burns of 65 percent of his body. The new documentary ends with Barker finally deciding to fly again, after not setting foot on an airplane for years and even taking the nine-day transatlantic Queen Mary voyage every time he toured internationally. While Louder Than Fear’s production began almost a decade ago, Barker says the film couldn’t have come out any sooner.

“I couldn’t have put it out even five years ago, because I hadn’t flown,” he explains. “I started filming it in 2017, shortly after my book was released… and at that time, we had filmed a lot of this cool footage on the boat going to England, and [the filmmakers] had put a first pass of the documentary together. They had sent it to me and said, ‘We have an idea for the ending where you walk to a plane — like you’re going to fly one day.’ At the time, my plan was to never fly again in my entire life. Even thinking of it gave me anxiety, made me lose sleep for days. So, I said, ‘I can’t do that. I can never do that. … Honestly, that will never be the ending. I don’t know what the ending is to this movie, but if we can’t figure it out, just put it out after I die. I don’t have an ending for it.’”

Spoiler alert: Barker got his happy ending after all. Speaking via Zoom from the Calabasas home he shares with the love of his life, wife of five years Kourtney Kardashian (with whom he was good friends for about 15 years before they finally started dating in 2020), his face lights up as bright as a stadium stage every time their nearly 3-year-old son, Rocky, toddles into the living room. It’s a life that the 50-year-old Barker — who was working as an Orange County garbageman before he got the fateful opportunity to become Blink-182’s supposedly temporary replacement drummer in 1998, and has battled PTSD, addiction, and various health problems in the years since — never imagined for himself.

“I didn’t set out for much, besides trying to figure out a way to play drums and survive, have money to eat and somewhere to sleep,” Barker admits. “So, everything now is magnitudes above what I could have ever dreamed of.”

Barker developed his love for drumming when he was not much older than Rocky is now, after his mother Gloria — his biggest champion, who sadly died right before he started high school — bought him an Animal-themed Muppets drum kit. And the drums still feel “like a toy” to him. “I’ve never gotten over it, since I was 4 years old; it’s the same way I look at BMX bikes,” he gushes. “I can smell what they smell like when they’re brand-new. Drums are like a piece of art when I look at them. I never get sick of it. I eat, sleep, and breathe it. … I feel weird when I don’t play the drums! It’s a form of communication and expression that you just can’t do besides playing the drums.”

However, Barker also presciently developed his fear of flying at an early age, also from his mother. “I’ll share something with you that didn’t make it into the documentary,” he says. “When I was 19 and I was playing in a band called Feeble, and I told my manager Mike one night — I was completely sober, it’s not like I was drinking or anything like that — ‘I’m going to die in a plane crash.’ I was emotional and upset, and he was like, ‘Dude, what are you talking about?’

“I had only flown once, with my mom, and she was just hysterically crying. So, I had all these signs,” Barker continues. “I had a fight with it for a while. I was like, ‘Did I cause [my own accident], because I was so afraid of it and always talking about it?’ I would have my mom’s rosary from when she passed away and I’d carry it with me when I flew, and I was always what they call ‘white-knuckling it’ during takeoff. I was super-scared. I’m like, ‘Did I just put it in the air?’ And I could believe that [making that prediction at age 19] was probably what led to me being in a plane crash. It’s something that haunted me way before I even sort of knew what it was.”

Exactly 18 years ago, on Sept. 19, 2008, there were other signs. When Barker left that day for his concert at South Carolina’s Five Points complex (a “TRV$DJAM” event with his friend Adam “DJ AM” Goldstein, who was the other lone crash survivor but died a year later from an accidental overdose), Alabama, Barker’s daughter with ex-wife Shanna Moakler, uncontrollably sobbed, “The roof is on fire!” as she begged him not to go. And when Barker later saw the Learjet 60 idling on the tarmac of Columbia Metropolitan Airport, he had such a bad gut feeling that he phoned his father to express his concerns before he reluctantly boarded.

Embed from Getty Images

“I had every sign. I had Alabama warning me, and then I had my feeling when I got to the plane. Everything was there for me. But I had no life lesson to teach me to act on it,” Barker recalls. Now that he’s flying again — albeit only when he absolutely has to, mostly for work — he knows to never ignore his instincts again.

“There’s been times where I get to a plane and they’ve switched the tail number, and if I don’t know anything about the plane and we’re flying private or something, I just say, ‘I’m going to get off the plane and I’ll meet you guys in a day,’” Barker says. “I have to go through a certain process just to feel safe. I want to know what plane we’re on. I want to know its safety records. I want to know the pilots are good. I’ve been on tour and I’ve looked side of stage and I saw our pilot drinking, partying, and I was like, ‘We are not flying tonight, I’m sorry. This dude is s—faced. We’re not going anywhere tonight. Can we please let him sober up for when we fly in the morning?’ I’m so clued-in to everything that it’s really easy for just the smallest error to really have a big effect. Now if I have a feeling or I see something like that, I just call it.”

Barker was gravely injured in the 2008 crash, which occurred when the plane overran the runway, broke through a fence, hit an embankment, and exploded during takeoff. After Barker managed to escape through an emergency exit door, he was covered in jet fuel and flames before he stopped/dropped/rolled to extinguish most of the fire enveloping his body. Despite his injuries, he never gave up on the idea that he’d eventually play the drums again. “I broke my hand once. I broke my foot once. I broke my arm again, and toured with one hand. I’ve toured with one foot. As long as I’m here and I’m breathing, I’m playing the f—ing drums. I’m going to find a way,” he asserts. However, as he spent more than 11 weeks in hospitals and burn centers, undergoing 16 surgeries and multiple blood transfusions and skin grafts, there were even more serious concerns.

“Yeah, there was a lot of talk like ‘you might not play drums again’ … but it started off way worse than that,” Barker reveals. “The first month at the burn center, I was in such critical condition, I would overhear them [wondering] if I was going to live, if I didn’t get through these next couple surgeries, if this blood transfusion didn’t work. It went from being really, really scary then to being, ‘We are more than likely going to have to amputate your foot, because these grafts are not working and we’re running out of skin.’” To this day, Barker still has nerve damage in the pinky and ring fingers of his left hand, but he stresses, “They work. My hand works. I can’t complain.”

Now Barker is considered one of the greatest working rock drummers today — Questlove, Sheila E, Lars Ulrich, Tommy Lee, the late Taylor Hawkins, and even Stewart Copeland praise his talents in Louder Than Fear — and he actually has a career goal to become to most collaborative drummer in music history. He’s currently working again with pop/punk band Yellowcard (after co-producing their 2025 comeback album, Better Days) and he just finished a record with Alkaline Trio (whose Matt Skiba fronted Blink-182 before Tom DeLonge returned in 2023); the classic Blink lineup, whose emotional reunion with DeLonge following band member Mark Hoppus’s cancer battle is also explored in Louder Than Fear, plan to begin work on a new album next year.

Another, posthumous collaboration, with rapper/singer-songwriter Oliver Tree, will hopefully be released eventually. The end credits of Travis Barker: Louder Than Fear includes a sadly very long list of dedications to Barker’s deceased loved ones (including DJ AM and two other friends who died in the 2008 plane crash, Barker’s assistant Chris Baker and bodyguard Charles Still), and a last-minute addition to that list is  Tree, who died in helicopter accident, at age 32, while on tour in Brazil this past June. “That was awful for me,” says Barker, who recorded “a bunch of unreleased stuff” with Tree and is waiting for the right moment, out of respect for Tree’s family, for that music to come out.

“He had actually hit me up two weeks before [he died]. I think he said, ‘I’ve been recording in fiftysomething countries’ — he said something crazy — ‘and I want to bring it back to the studio. I’d love to work on this with you.’ And I said, ‘Yes, anytime, anything. That’s always how it goes with you.’ Because I loved working with him,” Barker reveals. “There’ll never be anybody like him.”

Flying is, understandably, still a struggle for Barker, who finally was able to board a plane in August 2021 thanks to his wife Kourtney’s support and encouragement. “I had to first overcome the idea of just, ‘You’re not going to die. Just get on the plane, have faith in God, everything’s going to be fine.’ That’s still the process for me,” he explains. “I acknowledged that this thing had such power over me and was controlling my entire life, controlling how I lived, how my kids lived, how I toured. So, I just set out on this road to overcome it. And then it wasn’t until afterwards — I didn’t even tell anyone — but after I flew, I said, ‘Now I can start thinking about my documentary again.’ I had years of sobriety under my belt. I was flying, my kids were flying. Now my story could be told.”

Barker admits that he also still grapples with “survivor’s guilt,” and he still sometimes wonders why he was given a “second chance.” Along with the plane crash, and an addiction to prescription painkillers that he finally kicked in 2008 (ironically, while he was recovering in the hospital), in 2018 he developed blood clots in his arms and then had to fight off a resultant staph infection and cellulitis.) However, making Louder Than Fear provided him with some answers.

“They say when something really traumatic happens to you, you can curl up in a ball and just waste away or die, or you get up and fight. And I definitely chose to get up and fight,” Barker states. “So, I feel like my purpose is to talk about my experience and what I lived through — talk about my story of having nothing, coming from nothing, and making something of myself, being relentlessly determined and not giving up, getting up and fighting time and time again, any time I faced adversity. I feel with the stories and the lessons you can learn from my documentary, maybe ultimately that’s why I was spared — to share this with the world.”

Barker has been deeply touched by the response to his film, from fans who’ve told him that it inspired them to get clean, face a phobia, seek mental health help, reconnect with estranged friends, or simply pursue their dreams. “I’ve never experienced so much love from anything I’ve done in my life,” he says proudly. “I’ve had a lot of highs. I’ve made some amazing albums. I’ve played the Grammys with Drake and Eminem and Lil Wayne. I’ve lived so many of my dreams. But I’ve never had anything like the overwhelming abundance of love like I’ve had from the documentary. It’s been really cool.” And the movie-making experience has made Barker thankful for even the bad things that have happened to him.

“Life’s not promised,” he states. “It’s not for certain that you’re just going to go through life and everything’s going to be perfect. I’m a good example of that. But I’m so grateful to be here. I did everything they said I couldn’t, and I’ve lived through it all. I couldn’t imagine life any other way now.”

Embed from Getty Images

This interview orignally appeared on Gold Derby..

On the day their fifth album’s release — they made history as the first all-female band and first Mexican band to score a No. 1 hit on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart, with “Kerosene” — Daniela, Alejandra, and Paulina Villarreal Vélez of superstar rock band the Warning came by Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records for an autograph signing. The sister trio then sat down with Licorice Pizza’s LPTV to discuss how making that album, Everything’s Falling, helped them lean into their anger, face their fear of failure, and strengthen their family bond.

Watch the video of the Warning’s insightful conversation in the video above, and check out their “5 Questions” article from this interview over at FLOOD magazine.

They say every picture tells a story, and that a photo is worth a thousand words. But no one tells a story quite like legendary photographer Henry Diltz, who had fans hanging on his every priceless word when he recently sat down for two career-spanning “Vinyl & Vision: The Golden Era of Rock ‘N’ Roll” live Q&As at Studio City’s Licorice Pizza Records — just ahead of both the 60th anniversary of the Monkees (the TV band whose career he closely chronicled on-set and off) and his own 88th birthday.

“I didn’t go to photo school. I didn’t know how to use lights. I never developed a roll of film,” Diltz revealed with a good-natured shrug during the course of his nearly three combined hours of LPTV conversation. “All I knew was to look through the little hole, and when it looks good, push the button. And then you got it.”

Nothing about Diltz’s career was ever typical. The stepson of a U.S. State Department diplomat, he spent his childhood playing in post-WWII, bombed-out Tokyo and his teen years in Bangkok and Germany, and he’d planned to become a forest ranger before studying psychology and briefly attending West Point. But then the mail-order Pete Seeger albums he got from the Columbia Record Club inspired him to quit West Point after a year, buy a banjo, and move to Hawaii. Somehow this all led to Diltz becoming a member of the Modern Folk Quartet (a supergroup of sorts that also included future Monkees record producer Chip Douglas), and it was on tour with that band, while under the influence of “God’s herb,” that he impulsively purchased a secondhand camera for $20 in a small-town Michigan thrift shop.

And whether it was God’s plan or because of God’s herb, the rest was fateful rock ‘n’ roll history. “On that tour, we had about two weeks driving back to L.A., doing gigs along the way, and we took pictures of each other,” Diltz recalled. Upon the band’s return home, Diltz suggested they throw a slideshow party to watch the results. “When I saw the first slide glowing in the dark, eight feet wide, I said, ‘Oh my God, this is really something.’ That’s when I became a photographer: the first time I projected the pictures to all my stoned hippie friends.”

It was the keen eye for detail he’d developed while living and studying all over the world, along with his knowledge of psychology and ability to capture his fellow trusting musicians in unguarded moments, that helped Diltz launch a whole new unexpected career at the relatively advanced age of 27 (after he sold a Redondo Beach snap of his friends the Buffalo Springfield to Teen Set magazine for a cool $100).

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Henry Diltz (@henrydiltz)

“Look, I was a musician; if you’re a musician, you belong to the club and you know how to hang out,” Diltz explained at Licorice Pizza. “That’s what it was. They were all friends of mine, because I lived in Laurel Canyon as a musician, and so did Stephen Stills and Mama Cass and Joni Mitchell and Mickey Dolenz and all those people. Long before I took pictures, they were friends of mine… so, I wasn’t perceived as a ‘photographer.’ Otherwise, I would’ve gotten kicked out. Photographers are pushy, like, ‘Look over here! Smile! Stand over there!’ I never did that. I would just sit and look at my friends, and when it looked good, I’d take a picture.”

Diltz went on to shoot more than 250 album covers for many of his friends, serve as the official photographer for The Monkees and the Woodstock festival, and even become one of very few photographers to receive a Lifetime Achievement Grammy. And he still did things the unorthodox way, his way, creating several “accidental album covers” (like James Taylor’s Sweet Baby James, which was initially intended to be a black-and-white publicity headshot) and shooting in forbidden buildings that were later torn down (like an abandoned Hollywood house for the Crosby, Stills & Nash rogue album cover shoot, or Downtown Los Angeles’s long-gone Morrison Hotel, where he snapped a quick roll of film of the Doors while the “slumlord” was away from his post for five minutes). A day-drinking session with Jim Morrison on the same afternoon as that stealth Morrison Hotel shoot actually inadvertently inspired the name of the Hard Rock Café restaurant chain — yet another amusing accidental tale that Diltz shared during his Licorice Pizza Q&A sessions.

Even Diltz’s arguably most famous portrait, of David Crosby aiming a prop American-flag pistol at his own head, was unplanned. Diltz was simply hanging with CSN&Y and Bob Dylan at a Minneapolis hotel room afterparty when Graham Nash handed Croz a toy gun — a random gift from a fan. And Diltz saw something that looked good, as he’d put it, and he instinctively reached for his camera. “I just took a couple of shots. Click, click, click, bang, and that was it. Just a total accident.”

During his two delightful conversations, Diltz also discussed how his jungle-themed, Grammy-nominated cover for Richard Pryor’s debut comedy album nearly got him sued by National Geographic; shooting what turned out to be the Mamas and the Papas’ final album cover; touring with troubled teen idol David Cassidy at the height of Partridge Family mania; getting high on a “basket of peyote buttons” in Joshua Tree with the Eagles, then engaging in a deep (if one-sided) chat with a few friendly cactus plants; literally riding through the desert on a horse (albeit a horse that did have a name: Frank) to photograph the band America; that time noted nudist Peter Tork showed up “totally naked” to a record-executives-packed Monkees tour afterparty at Chicago’s swanky Astor Tower; the one artist who was difficult on set (hint: his name rhymes with “Ron Gone Hovey”); the one living artist Diltz still wants to photograph (hint: her name rhymes with “Sailor Rift”); and one goosebumpy career highlight when, during an iconic Life magazine photo shoot at Paul and Linda McCartney’s Malibu home, Diltz heard the Beatle casually workshop an unreleased ukulele song by the pool.

Diltz exhibited the excitement and energy of a man one-fourth his age, whether he was talking about photographing Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Webb, or discussing his many lesser-known photos of bicycles, fire hydrants, and especially chairs (he became fascinated with four-legged furniture during an acid trip with the Lovin’ Spoonful in 1966). Watch both Diltz Q&A sessions in full here, and enjoy all of his vivid photographic memories.

Twenty-five years ago, on Sept. 6, 2001, Britney Spears, at the peak of her it-girl pop powers, delivered one of the most electrifying and gabbed-about numbers in MTV Video Music Awards history — one that not only solidified her status as the 2000s’ reigning pop princess, but established her equally sinuous co-star as a member of reptilian royalty.

Showcasing a sultrier, more sophisticated sound on the Neptunes-produced “I’m a Slave 4 U,” Spears strutted onstage at New York City’s Metropolitan Opera House with a seven-foot albino Burmese python draped around her dainty shoulders, looking like the ultimate in-control snake-charmer. But that was just a testament to her professionalism at the time — because she was actually deathly terrified of her scaly co-star, according to that evening’s veteran python-wrangler, Mike Hano.

“She was extremely, extremely scared at first. I was very impressed with the way that she was able to just focus and force herself to do what she needed to do,” recalls Hano, a former vice president of the New York Herpetological Society. “She’s from Louisiana, and there are several types of venomous snakes down there and people do get bit sometimes. So, when I first showed up for the first rehearsal day, she was very frightened.”

Spears did have some reason to be concerned. Hano, who didn’t initially realize when he was hired how elaborate the “I’m a Slave 4 U” production would be, explains: “Britney Spears is pretty small — and she was going to be dancing with [the python]. She had to position the snake on her shoulders by herself and dance around, and then she had to hand it off to a third person. … It’s easy to screw up that kind of thing. You know, it gets wrapped around your arm and doesn’t want to let go. It could have been really risky, because that was a live performance. One take.”

Hano calmly notes that Spears’s snake was a “relatively young animal” and not fully developed, and that the Burmese breed is usually “pretty mellow” and “pretty handleable” when raised in captivity. But two years before the 2001 VMAs, it had become illegal to keep Burmese pythons as pets in the New York City area, so he still had to obtain a special permit from the NYC Department of Health in order for one to be used during Spears’s MTV performance.

photo courtesy of MTV/YouTube

“The bad thing is [Burmese pythons can get] tremendous, and most people have no business keeping one, because they get big enough to kill you easily. And it’s not that they mean to kill you; it’s usually a so-called accident, a feeding response, where they think that they’re constricting a prey item,” Hano explains. “Once they’re wrapped around something, they can’t even see what they’re wrapped around. All they know is [the object they’re wrapped around is] warm and it’s struggling — so, the snake keeps squeezing. There was an incident back in the ’90s where a young man, I think about 19 years old, right here in New York City, was killed by his pet Burmese python.”

It’s no wonder that Spears — who was the same age as the above-mentioned unlucky python victim, just 19, when she performed at the 13th annual MTV Video Music Awards — was skittish when it came time to rehearse with the python. So, it was imperative to Hano that he spend some quality one-on-one time with her, to put her at ease. However, in order to do that, he had to get past her entourage.

“They had some person who I guess was supposed to be my ‘handler’ or whatever, my liaison, and they had me sitting in the audience area,” Hano remembers. “So, I’m just waiting until they’re going to need me, and I told this guy several times that I would like to have a few minutes alone with Ms. Spears, so that if she had any questions or concerns, she could speak to me in private. And if she’s going to be holding the snake, she could try it away from everybody watching — just me, her, and the snake. Sometimes with that kind of thing, if [an inexperienced-with-reptiles performer is] a little uncomfortable, they can hold the rear part of the snake’s body while I’m holding the front part of the body, and as they get more comfortable with it, they can gradually move to the point where they can hold the snake on their own. That’s the way that I prefer to do it. Why would you want a hundred people watching you, if you’re scared and you might be a little embarrassed? And I told this guy that a couple of times, ‘Give me a few minutes alone with her, especially if she’s scared.’ I don’t think she had ever handled a snake before.”

Hano was eventually granted his request for private meeting with the pop starlet, although the ensuing encounter was explicably awkward. “They didn’t even let me speak to her before. This is my first time face-to-face with her — and I’m holding this python! And all of a sudden, she’s not ready to do that. I could see that she was uncomfortable. But [the liaison] gave me a few minutes — and it only took just a very few minutes — where she was able to sit with me on the sidelines and realize that it’s not a big deal to hold a snake. So, we did the rehearsal that day, and then it was either later that day or the next day that I got a call from the agent: They wanted to do an additional rehearsal with the snake, just so that she would get very comfortable with it.”

On the second rehearsal day, Spears “said something to me about how she ‘broke out in hives’ everywhere that the snake had touched her during the rehearsal — which is just really not possible,” Hano chuckles. But in the end, she was “very professional, very focused. I remember a couple of times when the director said, ‘OK, everybody take five’ and basically everyone walked offstage, she [stayed onstage] by herself. You could kind of hear her counting: ‘One, two, three, four…’ She kept practicing her moves by herself, without the music playing. You could tell that she was a really hard worker. And she did fine. She did great.”

Embed from Getty Images

Interestingly, there was also a tiger in Spears’s jungle-themed “I’m a Slave 4 U” number — but even though it turns out that that big cat was handled by none other than future Tiger King star Doc Antle, most fans only remember that yellow python. Animal rights activists groups like PETA did condemn Spears’s VMAs performance at the time, but Hano recall the public outrage being more focused on the tiger back then. “And I sort of agree about that,” he notes. “Those animals are not really meant to be around pyrotechnics and loud music. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t be doing that with tigers. But with snakes it’s different, because they can’t see or hear or whatever.”

And so, Spears’s “I’m A Slave 4 U” number became iconic largely because of the leggy pop star’s legless dance partner. It has been referenced in pop culture many times since —Grimes’s “Genesis” music video, Kaley Cuoco’s epic Britney tribute on Lip Sync Battle, Witney Carson’s slithering tango routine on Dancing With the Stars, even a sci-fi/Jungle Book-esque animated short  that MTV commissioned to commemorate the 2001 VMAs’ 20th anniversary. And the golden girl herself has even shared fond memories, retroactively christening her golden co-star “Banana” in a 2012 tweet, and declaring this performance one of her all-time favorites in a 2023 Facebook post, even if she later claimed in her autobiography The Woman in Me that Banana — as the female python will henceforth be known for the remainder of this article — got up in her face and hissed directly at her mid-song.

Sometimes I wonder what this snake is up to these days… Anybody know where it’s at? haha http://t.co/cfKClrGe

— Britney Spears (@britneyspears) August 19, 2012

Hano isn’t sure where that moniker came from, because “Banana” was nameless at the time — “It can’t even hear you saying its name, you know!” he quips — and he certainly didn’t expect this Y2K-era moment to be so epic and enduring. While he was excited to work at the Metropolitan Opera House (because he had sung in a children’s choir there from 1976 to ’78, and had even shared the stage with Luciano Pavarotti at a televised 1977 concert special), he wasn’t well-versed in modern pop music, and wasn’t even aware that Spears was pop’s most mega megastar at the time. It was only when he returned home that evening with Banana, after the VMAs wrapped, that he realized he’d been part of MTV history.

“I actually took the subway on the night of the job — because how are you going to park down there? — so I just had the snake in a cooler,” Hano chuckles. “It was a half-hour later that I came out of the train station and walked into my building, and there’s all these kids hanging out on the front stoop. They all knew me, they knew that I had a bunch of animals, so they saw me coming and said, ‘Hey, did you see that VMAs thing with Britney Spears? She had a snake!’ The whole neighborhood already knew about this thing! And I’m telling them, ‘Yeah, yeah, I just did that job. I got the snake right here on my shoulder, in this cooler.’ … And then I actually took out the snake for them to check out. They could not believe it.”

Hano, who was just the wrangler and not the actual owner of the superstar snake, says that as of 2020, the original Banana was still alive and residing “somewhere in upstate New York,” although at an estimated age of 28, she is now “getting up there” in her golden years. (The average lifespan for a Burmese python is 20 to 25 years, but well-kept domestic pythons can live to be 30 or older.) However, Hano and Banana did collaborate again on Steven Klein fashion shoot for a W magazine September 2007 issue — when he was shocked to see how much larger the python has become. The Burmese python is one of the biggest snake species in the world, and Banana, who’d been about seven feet long and weighed about 25 pounds in 2001, had now more than doubled in length and quadrupled in weight.

photo courtesy of Mike Hano

“The snake had gotten much bigger, but the owner failed to admit it to me. And when I picked up the snake on the way to the job and realized how big it had grown, it was too late to look for another one,” Hano recalls. “Fortunately, at this job the models were completely covered in greasy black body paint — which I had also not been informed of! — so the decision was made to suspend the snake from the pipe structure behind them, instead of draping it on their bodies.”

There have been other changes, much more serious, since Spears’s landmark MTV moment. Just five days after this performance — Sept. 11, 2001 — New York City was a very different place, obviously. And Spears, who racked up 28 VMAs nominations and six wins over the course of her career (including the lifetime-achievement Video Vanguard Award in 2011), will probably never grace the MTV Video Music Awards’ stage again. (Her most recent VMAs performance was amlonst exactly a decade ago, when her comeback appearance was actually hyped by a promo starring a slithering Banana lookalike.) But Hano has fond memories of the VMAs, and he wishes Spears well, still impressed by the talent and work ethic he witnessed during their brief time together.

“As far as her professional career or career in entertainment, I have no thoughts or feelings about that,” states Hano, who hasn’t closely followed the #FreeBritney movement or Spears’s many ups and downs over the past 25 years. “But I’d say that she’s already accomplished an awful lot. I hope she’s able to get through that and enjoy her life. She’s worked hard and she’s had a lot of success, and she deserves to enjoy it. And if she does work again, I hope it’s just because it’s something she wants to do — not for anyone else, and not for money. She should be able to do whatever she wants to do.”

This is an updated story that originally ran on Yahoo. The 2026 MTV Video Music Awards will take place Sept. 27 at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.

On Aug. 25, 2026, the day of Dolly Parton’s shocking death at age 80, I was honored to reflect on the country queen’s legacy on New York City’s Fox 5 evening news. I shared my personal memories of interviewing Parton in 2022 and, that same year, seeing her duet with Judas Priest’s Rob Halford at the Rock & Roll Hall Fame induction ceremony, where she proved to her doubting self and everyone else that she was indeed a real rock star.

I also spoke about Dolly’s deceptively un-serious image, her very serious musical talents, and why her kindness and philanthropy just might be her greatest legacy of all… and I reacted in real time when the anchorwoman interviewing me, Natasha Verma, announced the breaking news of Dolly’s cause of death, which gave me David Bowie deja vu.

Thank you, Fox 5, for having me. And thank you, Dolly Parton, for everything.

On Aug. 25, 2026, arguably the greatest woman of all time, the universally adored Dolly Parton, died at age 80, leaving a hole in country music, pop culture, and our hearts that can never be filled. I only got to interview her once, via Zoom in 2022 when she was promoting her new line of delicious Duncan Hines cake mixes and frostings on a confectionary-pink, Lisa Frank-like set. But just seeing her laughing, smiling, and sharing her alternately touching and salacious life stories on my computer screen will forever remain one of my career highlights.

Parton was dressed for her interview in true Dolly style, although she joked that she looked slightly less glam than usual. “I’m normally not wearing aprons or stuff. I’m usually wearing my gaudy stuff with my boobs hanging out or whatever, but I didn’t wanna get icing on ‘em,” she told me. She even later joked about jumping out of a giant Duncan Hines pastry, musing, “That’d probably sell a lot of cakes!”

There was one thing Dolly said during our delightful chat, however, that I did not agree with: She humbly insisted, repeatedly, that she was not a “natural beauty,” explaining, “I have to work hard to look good. I like to look a certain way, but I honestly am not a natural beauty. I try hard to look as good as I can, because I have a certain way to. But I try to shine from the inside to make up for a lot of other stuff. But no. But that’s OK. I do all right.”

Dolly did more than all right. She was beautiful, inside and out. As tributes to this lovely lady come pouring in, I am sharing our thoroughly charming and fascinating lightning-round chat about the celebrities Parton baked for, that time Elvis Presley was supposed to record her hit “I Will Always Love You,” and the scary New York City street altercation that inspired her infamous “rooster to a hen” zinger in 9 to 5. It was a conversation that felt like a party from beginning to end, and I might eat some Dolly Parton Banana Pudding today in her honor. This interview was literally and figuratively very sweet. I will always love her.

LYNDSANITY: You’ve probably had all sorts of people at your table — who are some of the most famous people you’ve baked or cooked for?

DOLLY PARTON: Well, anybody that ever comes to my house that I’m starring with, whether it’s [Rhinestone co-star] Sylvester Stallone — who is more on a diet, he stays more on a diet. [Best Little Whorehouse in Texas co-star] Burt Reynolds always was happy to eat anything. I often cook for all the cast and crew when I’m doing a movie. Lily [Tomlin] and Jane [Fonda]… Jane at the time we did 9 to 5 was really heavy into her workout tapes and she wasn’t eating a lot of greasy, buttery stuff, but Lily grew up in the South, so she loved my cooking, and still does, if we get a chance to do it.

Did you ever bake for Elvis? Because I know that there’s a famous story that one time he was going to record “I Will Always Love You.” And I know he liked his Southern food!

No, I didn’t know Elvis. I never met him. I was going to meet him for the first time when he was coming to the studio to sing “I Will Always Love You” —  which didn’t work out, as you know, because Colonel Tom Parker, his manager, wanted half of the publishing. But anyway, I would’ve cooked for him if he’d have wanted me to. … But when he was going to do my song, I was gonna meet him and I’m sorry, I didn’t get to meet him.

Whitney Houston went on to cover that song, and it was quite lucrative for you. You’ve always been so business-savvy in your career. As cool as it may have been for Elvis to do that song, you must be grateful that you didn’t cut what probably was not a very lucrative deal with Colonel Parker.

No, it wasn’t. … “I Will Always Love You” I wrote when I had left The Port Wagoner Show. … But actually, that had been my first No. 1 hit, and it was the most important song in my catalog at that time. If it had been a new song, if I’d had just written something for [Elvis Presley], I might have reconsidered that. I’ve still always wanted him to sing it. I wrote a song later called “I Dreamed About Elvis” and it was about dreaming about Elvis singing that song. And I had an Elvis soundalike to come in and sing the Elvis part, and it sounds great! Maybe one day I’ll put that out.

It’s interesting, the story of you breaking professionally from Porter, who had been so instrumental to your early career. I saw you give this speech at MusiCares — you said you actually “never met a man you didn’t like,” and you also said, “I’ve never met a man whose ass I couldn’t kick if he didn’t treat me with respect.” How did you navigate things back then? It was very different time in the business.

Well, I happened to have six brothers, uncles, cousins, that I loved. I know of the nature of men. I love men, and I love my husband. So, I was never intimidated by men. And I tried to always kind of be pretty and sexy. I mean, I wasn’t a natural beauty, so the way I dressed was kind of provocative, and so I never took it as an insult — like, if men came onto me, I thought it was like a compliment! But I was not bringing that [energy] in. … I never slept with anybody I didn’t want to. I didn’t feel intimidated to have to, you know, whatever. But I was lucky. I loved men and knew how to talk to men. I also knew how to express myself. Hey now, like I said, if I wanted to [be intimate with someone], that’s different! But nobody ever made me or forced me to do it.

I would always say, “You gotta look like a woman and think like a man.” And I really feel like I do that. I have a new song called “Woman Up and Take It Like a Man.” Like, if you want to be strong, if you wanna be all that, you gotta kind of walk the walk and talk the talk, so to speak. There were some times that I was made to feel very uneasy, but I also knew that I was going get out of that — because I have a pretty good knee, too!

Did you actually ever do that? Do you have any stories? It doesn’t have to be a story that involves a knee [to the groin], but stories where you were in a weird place, not being respected or whatever, where you took a stand and came out of it?

Yes, but it wasn’t in Nashville. It was in my early days. My friend Judy and I’d never been to New York and I wanted to go. … We went down, walking down the street and we were looking around at all this stuff… and this guy came up and he started trying to put the make on me and saying all this stuff. And I was saying, “No, now, get away! We’re not interested. We’re just out walking.” And he kept trying. And at that time my daddy had given me a gun when I left home, and he said, “You use it if you have to — but only if you have to. But it’ll help you. If somebody knows you got a gun, they’re gonna leave you alone.” So anyway, this guy would not stop. … I said, “If you touch me” — and I was really angry and scared — I said, “If you touch me one more time, I’m gonna shoot your, you know, crotch off!” That’s kind of where that the [9 to 5] movie [line] came from, that “I’m gonna change it from a rooster to a hen” thing. Well, that actually happened me. And I said, “I’m gonna shoot it off!”

Anyway, Judy thought that was so funny. She started laughing, and I was so mad at her that I turned around and I said, “I’m gonna shoot you too! Why are you laughing? This is serious!” Well, about that time, she just thought that was so funny. We were both scared, though. But a guy came up to me and he knew who I was. He said, “Are you girls lost?” I said, “Yes, we are.” We didn’t know how to get back to our hotel. We wound up… is it 52nd Street? Or one of those where the whores run in pairs. We didn’t know that. And we did look the part, ’cause we both were, you know, country and tacky! … And so, he took us back to the Americana [Hotel] and sure enough, they had locked us out of our room. They thought we were trash, and because we had one room, they thought we were turning tricks in our room! They had put all of our stuff out in the hall and had locked the door. So, we had to go to the airport, get a cab and go to the airport, and wait for hours till we could get back home. And I thought, “I’m never going back to New York again!” But anyway, you have your stories, you live your life. And then you have memories and they make fun stories.

You have many fun stories! I want to ask something to pick up on something you said earlier: Do you really think you are not a natural beauty? Because I would beg to differ, as would many fans of yours.

Well, I’m telling you, I’m not! I’ve seen me before you do! I am not a natural beauty. I have to work hard to look good. I like to look a certain way, but I honestly am not a natural beauty. I try hard to look as good as I can, because I have a certain way to. But I try to shine from the inside to make up for a lot of other stuff. But no. But that’s OK. I do all right.

Obviously, you’re doing quite all right! But did anyone ever advise you that your image would hinder you, like it would prevent you from getting respect?

In the early days, a lot of people tried to tell me that. But I didn’t listen. And I’m still not listening when it comes to people trying to tell me what to do.