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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As in the “Major Tom” Peter Schilling?

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

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

Not possible.

I know! Did you ever ask Peter about that?

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

How did you link up with Peter Schilling?

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

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

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

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

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

Did you do any singing on your tracks?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tell me about the Q album.

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

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

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

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

And how do you feel it’s held up?

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

So, you decided to go solo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess it all worked out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jens still does music as well, right?

Kind of, yeah.

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

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

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

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

Did the song’s message resonate with Demi?

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

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

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

Did Jessie get the tattoo corrected?

No, it’s still there.

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

That’s my coolest song!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did he get a ticket after he did that?

No. It’s Diplo!

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

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

Absolutely!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are you from a musical family?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did making your MARILYN album help you heal?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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“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.”

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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).

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“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.