When former The Walking Dead actress and singer-songwriter Emily Kinney and alt-country artist/Season 10 American Idol finalist Paul McDonald were fixed up last year by a mutual music-business friend, Dan Spears, neither was initially enthused.

Kinney was “happy to be single” and preparing to release her fourth solo LP, Oh Jonathan, a breakup album inspired by a long-term relationship with a mysterious ex. (“You can probably Google [who it’s about]. Look up ‘Emily Kinney dating history’ and I’m sure it’ll pop up, a guy named Jonathan somewhere,” McDonald quips.) Meanwhile, McDonald was working on Modern Hearts, an equally autobiographical and vulnerable album inspired by his more high-profile marriage and divorce with another horror actress with whom he’d created music, Twilight’s Nikki Reed.

“So for the past few years, this record that I just put out, my solo record, was a breakup record, and I had been in this kind of a funk for a while,” says McDonald. “So when my buddy Dan was like, ‘Hey, I’ve got this L.A. actress that I should set you up with,’ I was kind of like, ‘Hilarious, dude. Nah, I just went through that cycle.’”

However, the two finally, reluctantly agreed to the fix-up. (“I feel like any time that I have set myself up in the past, it’s always just ended terribly, so I was like, ‘All right, I trust this guy; he has good taste in music, so maybe this’ll work out,’” recalls McDonald.) And they soon realized it was a match — both personally and, later, professionally.

“We started talking on the phone. … We talked until 3 or 4 in the morning. We probably spent a good week just talking every day, all day, before we ever went on a date or anything,” says Kinney. The two later met in person and attended a Walking Dead event together at Universal Studios (“I had the hookup,” Kinney jokes), followed by a dinner date at Moby’s Los Angeles vegan eatery, Little Pine. And they quickly connected, becoming mutual muses. Soon the real-life sweethearts’ new duo, the Sweetheart Deal, was born. The two songs they’re performing on camera for the first time, for Yahoo Entertainment — “Talk All Night” and “Figure You Out” — were inspired by this early, tentative courtship phase.

“I mean, we’re both artsy. We’re kind of outside the box in a lot of things. And we both work real hard. [Spears] always compares Emily to Patti Smith,” says McDonald. (“It’s a nice comparison,” Kinney remarks modestly, smiling.) “He said, ‘Man, you guys are very similar energies and that way of thinking.’”

“I think both of us just like making stuff, so when we were together, it happened pretty naturally, where Paul is at my place here in L.A. writing a song and then I was like, ‘Oh, can I finish writing it? Can I do the second verse?’” Kinney recalls. “So, it just kind of happened naturally — it wasn’t like we were like, ‘Let’s form a band!’”

Later, Kinney and McDonald went on tour together, playing not only Sweetheart Deal songs but also their respective solo material. So, with so much of their very personal solo songs inspired by their past relationships, do they ever feel awkward performing in front of each other?

“I don’t think so, because those songs to me have a place in time,” McDonald explains. “I’m really happy that I wrote them, but they’re not where I’m at currently. … That stuff is in the past, and actually what brought us together is the similar experiences. And I think that singing about those things and getting it out of your system is also a beautiful thing. I really appreciate Emily’s writing style, because we write in a very similar way, firsthand.”

“I think also since we’re both songwriters, we know that that’s what inspires you. Like, love is one of the most amazing special things in life, so love inspires art,” Kinney adds.

The Sweetheart Deal’s Paul McDonald and Emily Kinney. (Photo: TheSweetheartDeal.com)

“I will say I had to change up my set just a pinch,” McDonald laughs. “A few of the jokes that I used to do to segue into songs, I’ve kind of had to be like, ‘Well, that doesn’t work, because the people at this show probably know that we’re dating, so I can’t quite make that reference to some old flame or something like that.’”

One of the songs on McDonald’s Modern Hearts, the title track, is a crowd pleaser, but it almost didn’t make his album — because Rihanna was supposed to record it instead, possibly even as a duet with Adam Levine.

“Oh man, I could have multiple homes right now,” McDonald, who currently splits his time between Los Angeles and his home base of Nashville, laughs ruefully. “It could have opened up a lot of doors in the songwriting camp and stuff — the songwriter world, I guess. That song almost got cut by multiple large artists, and then I kind of got to a spot where I was like, ‘Well, if it’s been sitting around for so long, maybe I should cut that for my record.’” Still, the song ended up impressing his future girlfriend, so he got a happy ending after all. (“That’s one of my favorite songs on his record; it’s so good,” Kinney gushes.)

While the Sweetheart Deal are still testing out their new songs, on the road and at Yahoo Entertainment, they plan to put out an independent EP in early 2019, followed by a full-length release later in the year. And they’re continuing to gain new followers as a duo, crossing over to the Walking Dead and Idol fanbases. “I did go to a comic book convention for The Walking Dead, and someone showed up to the table and they had Sweetheart Deal T-shirts on! It was two girls, and they had beanies,” Kinney recalls. “They were like, ‘We love Sweetheart Deal! We saw your first show in Nashville.’”

So, surely Kinney and McDonald will continue to make beautiful music together, literally and figuratively. “Oh man, it’s been good so far,” says McDonald. “So far, so good.”

The Sweetheart Deal’s Paul McDonald and Emily Kinney. (Photo: TheSweetheartDeal.com)

This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

“I don’t expect a lot of people who love drag to also be like, ‘I love Drag Race, and then I got to hear my Chris Stapleton album.’ Not necessarily an obvious crossover,” laughs Trixie Mattel, sitting at Yahoo Entertainment in flawless June Carter Cash drag. But the RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars 3 winner-turned-country artist in making real inroads in the music world with her two autoharp-laden Americana/folk albums, Two Birds and One Stone. The latter album recently hit No. 1 on iTunes’ Singer-Songwriter chart and Billboard’s Heatseekers chart; she’s received glowing coverage in NME, NPR, and Rolling Stone Country; and she even has an endorsement deal with Fender for her upcoming Moving Parts tour. She’s realistic about her longshot potential to infiltrate the mainstream Nashville scene, but so far, she’s happily finding her country niche.

“I think the perception of audiences that love folk and country is they’re perceived to be more closed-minded than they really are,” Trixie asserts. “It’s one of those things where the most extreme voices represent the masses, do you know what I mean? It’s like, not everybody goes to church hates gay people. Not everybody who listens to folk and country would object to drag. I mean, look around — is Dolly [Parton] not in drag? She’s in probably a bigger wig than I am right now! I’ve always found a way to win people over, especially with comedy. … I operate more like the crying-clown territory, where I love to tell jokes, I love sappy folk music, and I love to marry the two together.”

Trixie (real name: Brian Firkus), who started playing guitar at age 13, grew “deep in the country” of small-town Wisconsin (which inspired her new song “Little Sister”). However, she was more into “acoustic guitar-driven pop music” like Avril Lavigne, Sheryl Crow, Oasis, and Michelle Branch as a kid. “But in my bones, the way I grew up, it was the fabric of folk music,” Trixie says. It was her late grandfather, a musician, who inspired her latent appreciation of country: “I think some of the happiest memories of my life were learning to play guitar at the kitchen table, learning Roy Orbison or George Jones or ‘Conway Twitty — music I didn’t necessarily love [at first], but that’s what I knew from home.”

Trixie’s grandpa also influenced her colorful, Hee Haw-on-steroids drag aesthetic, in a way: “He always said, ‘Being a musician is 40 percent how good you are, and 60 percent how good you look doing it.’ And I think with drag, I took that a little far,” Trixie laughs.

Trixie Mattel (Photo: Jose Guzman Colon)

That being said, Trixie has toned down her nuclear-pink Malibu Barbie look for a more Joanne-esque vibe for her second album. “The visual inspirations accompany usually musically whatever is inspiring me,” she says. “So when Two Birds came out last year, the look was a lot more like square-dancing dresses, big cowboy boots, and big hair. This year, I got a lot more into Emmylou Harris, Joni Mitchell, so the look sort of turned more like late-‘60s, a little more lived-in. I don’t just wear pink now. I also experiment with mustard and brown!”

Trixie Mattel’s ‘One Stone’ album cover

Along with Emmylou Harris, Joni Mitchell, June Carter Cash, Jason Isbell, and Chris Stapleton, Trixie finds major musical inspiration from two fringe-country kindred spirits, Miley Cyrus (Dolly Parton’s goddaughter) and Kacey Musgraves — both of whom have, incredibly, expressed interest in collaborating with Trixie.

“The night I won [RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars 3], Miley Instagram-messaged me and was like, ‘We gotta do a song!’ And I was like, ‘I would literally throw myself under a truck for you,’” says Trixie. “She is one of my favorites. One of my dreams is to quit drag, go live in the woods somewhere, just write her music for her, and twice a year send her a mixtape and be like, ‘These are your songs. They’re great for you!’ She has such a real, human, storyteller voice. It’s also anti-songbird in a way. There’s a wisdom to it… it has a Stevie Nicks quality to it. It has a depth and such color to it. I love her voice!” Trixie is similarly gushing about Musgraves: “The fact that she even knows I’m alive, I’m like, ‘I’ll polish your boots, lady. I’ll quit music and drag today.’”

Trixie Mattel told NME in a recent interview that Miley messaged her and asked to write a song with her one day! pic.twitter.com/Em50F9tZId

— Miley Cyrus Fashion (@StylishCyrus) April 7, 2018

On the subject of quitting drag, Trixie, age 28, doesn’t think she’ll be a drag queen for the rest of her life (“I don’t think I can make this look good at 45, so I need to evolve somewhere a little more realistic”), and plans to create other comedic characters in the future. But for now, she’s proud to occupy her own country music lane. While other musical Drag Race alumni have opted to go the clubby EDM route, Trixie reasons, “That’s how you succeed: You’ve just got to pick something no one has done, no one wants to do, and that way you can say you’re the best at it. … I mean, for a cross-dresser with a guitar to be able to do that stuff, it’s crazy. I saw RuPaul recently, and she was like, ‘You’re doing things that nobody’s ever done. I’m really proud of you.’”

And, as for whether Trixie Mattel could ever become a mainstream country star, playing Stagecoach and winning at the ACMs, she says, “I think it could happen. To be honest, it doesn’t occur to me that it can’t. Trixie Mattel has always opened doors for me. It’s closed very few.”

Watch Trixie’s entire Facebook Live interview and performance session below.

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:

• RuPaul talks punk, politics, and Pulse: ‘Most people are still living in the Dark Ages’
• Courtney Love talks ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race’ appearance: ‘I think drag and punk come from the same place’
• Sharon Needles blasts Katy Perry, mainstream pop industry: ‘They use drag queens as puppets’
• ‘Drag Race’ star Adore Delano talks rainbow-raging new alt-rock sound

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Eight years ago, Lee DeWyze came to fame singing other artists’ songs on television as the winner of American Idol Season 9. But now, ironically, his original compositions are all over TV.

DeWyze has racked up an impressive 35 television song placements — more than any other Idol alumnus — on shows such as Elementary, Suits, The Fosters, Nashville, and, most recently, Shameless, which featured “Breakdown,” the lead single from his seventh studio album, Paranoia, in a key scene last month. Not too shabby for a guy who was forced to release a cover of U2’s “Beautiful Day” as his American Idol coronation single.

“When I came off of American Idol — I’ve made this pretty clear over the past few years — it was always about the songwriting for me. It’s what I loved. That’s why I did all of that in the first place. It wasn’t for fame or any of that stuff,” DeWyze tells Yahoo Entertainment. “It was really because I wanted to have music be a career for myself, so right out of the gate, I started writing music — just writing and writing and writing. Then the right things happened, the right things clicked … and I had a song on The Walking Dead.”

DeWyze had broken away from the Idol machine, after releasing one 2010 album on the show’s affiliated label, RCA Records, when he composed a song inspired by The Walking Dead, his favorite TV drama. “I was just in my house. It was dark, of course. I was by myself,” he recalls. “I imagined what it would feel like to be in that scenario, and I was like, ‘Oh, this kind of feels good.’ I kept [writing], and the next thing I know, I had ‘Blackbird Song.’”

It was a long shot, but DeWyze and his manager submitted the song to AMC … and it ended up playing during an entire two -minute scene on The Walking Dead. (“It was like a music video for me,” DeWyze laughs.) “Blackbird Song” was also featured on the show’s official soundtrack, alongside tunes by Portugal., The Man and Sharon Von Etten, and it went on to accrue 12 million YouTube views and 5.8 million Spotify streams. The single was even named one of the top 10 most influential syncs in 2014 from the Musicians Guild of America.

Since then, DeWyze has successfully separated himself from what was, unfortunately, one of the more maligned seasons in American Idol history — and from any lingering Idol–propagated misconceptions that may have hurt his early career. “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people come up to me and how much the storyline has changed, where it’s like, ‘Hey man, I’m a huge fan of The Walking Dead. I didn’t even know about [American Idol]!’ It’s really kind of turned that way.”

DeWyze remembers being inspired by Paul Simon’s songs in The Graduate, and he would love to write film scores or full soundtracks like Elliott Smith’s music for Good Will Hunting or Aimee Mann’s Magnolia soundtrack — so he couldn’t be happier to find a new way to reach music fans through visual media. “I look at it the same way some artists might look at radio. At the end of the day, what’s the goal? I want as many people as possible to hear my music.”

Back when DeWyze first appeared on television in 2010, the Chicago Tribune in his hometown dubbed him “The Reluctant Idol,” and he admittedly struggled to come to terms with the fact that American Idol didn’t really showcase his dark, folky aesthetic. “American Idol does not cater towards the singer-songwriter. It just doesn’t, and that’s OK. That’s not what it is,” he shrugs. “I’ll just be blunt and honest: Coming off of that show, I always felt I had to reverse-engineer my career. It’s like someone handing you a Mustang and saying, ‘How does it work?’ and you being like, ‘I gotta take it apart and figure it the f*** out, because I don’t know,’” he chuckles. “I never was prepared for that. At least for me personally, I knew how to write songs, and I sang the way I sang. But to then be thrust into this thing — there was an element of finding myself again.

“As far as people ‘underestimating me’, it’s hard [for me to say that], because, you see, I won,” DeWyze continues. “And because of that, it could sound like, ‘Oh poor you.’ But the truth is, when I came off of the show, it was definitely a tug of war, like, ‘Do I play this character that was just on the show?’… Or do I say, ‘OK guys, I’m really a singer-songwriter; that’s what I do, and check it out’? I wasn’t able to show that on [Idol]. But it’s no one’s fault. … That job was up to me. I wanted my body of work to prove itself. That was really why the focus ever since then has been that.”

And so DeWyze insists he’s not bitter about his time on Idol. “I went on the show, truthfully, for no other reason than I wanted to do this for a living. That is why I did it,” he said. “There’s so many things you could look back on, and say, ‘I would’ve done this,’ but you know what? It’s hard for me to say I would change anything, because I’m pretty happy with what I’m doing.” One of the heaviest and most personal tracks on Paranoia, “Closer,” even touches on his Idol experience. “The opening line is ‘Pick me out of a line,’ so figure it out,” he laughs, adding: “I think a big part of the reason why my music has lent itself to [television] is I think I write in a very honest, direct way that really goes hand in hand with these emotional scenes.”

And, back to the subject of whether people have underestimated him in the past, DeWyze says modestly, “I think there’s always an element of underestimating. … I don’t even know if I knew what my potential was. I just knew I wrote songs and sang, and that’s it. But once I had a better grasp on the industry and how things worked, I kind of was like, ‘I don’t really give a s*** about what people think I’m supposed to do. This is what I do.”

Watch Lee DeWyze’s entire Yahoo Entertainment Facebook Live chat and acoustic mini-concert below.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Top three finalist Dalton Rapattoni stood out on the final season of American Idol – or what was supposed to be the final season of American Idol, at the time — not only for his passionate performances and quirky, theatrical style, but for his outspokenness about living with bipolar disorder since age 9. He was a rare positive example of bipolar disorder in the media — and Rapattoni, now 21, says negative stereotyping of mental illness in the media, in general, needs to change.

“It’s nice to have people talk about it, because there’s not a lot of media figures that have bipolar disorder that are really good influences,” he tells Yahoo. “Any time people see someone with bipolar disorder on television, it’s always on Law and Order where a person with bipolar disorder murdered 14 people — and it just makes people afraid of people with any sort of mental illness. And that’s real bad. Don’t do that anymore, please. But it’s good to talk about it, just because it’s nice to not only give people with some sort of mental illness someone to look at, but also to show people who don’t have mental illness that we’re not all psycho murderers. Which is cool.”

Rapattoni continues, “I 100 percent blame television [for creating this stigma]. There’s a lot of people in TV that are trying their best to make mental illness a more commonly accepted thing, but for years the only people who had mental illness are plot points. This person has dissociative identity disorder — like, Split was horrible. Things like that just use mental illness as an excuse to make a serial killer. And that is so horrible for public perception, because when someone who has seen Split or another horror film that uses that as a plot point, and then they meet someone with dissociative identity disorder, of course they’re going to be afraid. That’s their only frame of reference. So yeah, with the public stigma being around, I blame television, because it’s so easy as a plot point to use. Like, ‘How do we make this guy crazy? Oh, give him a mental illness, it’s fine. We don’t have to write an interesting backstory. Just say that he’s nuts.’”

Rapattoni is about to release his solo album Nobodys Home (the deliberately grammatically vague title was inspired by an Emily Dickinson poem), on which he worked with Blue October’s Justin Furstenfeld and Matt Noveskey; Rapattoni cites Furstenfeld, who has always been candid about his own mental health struggles, as a key influence. (Proudly wearing a cheeky “Pink Freud” T-shirt during his Yahoo visit, Rapattoni also expresses admiration for Pink Floyd’s troubled Syd Barrett.) He does note that many mainstream artists — like Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Kesha, Dan Reynolds of Imagine Dragons, Mary Lambert, and Sia, with whom he shared a poignant moment on Idol – have come forward recently to talk about their own mental health battles, and says he’s glad progress is finally being made.

“It’s kind of always been something that’s pushed by the wayside, because it’s a problem that is not visible to anyone who doesn’t experience it, therefore it’s kind of out of sight, out of mind,” Rapattoni says. “It’s nice that artists are getting loud about it, because it’s not like with Chester Bennington… it’s something that can’t be ignored.”

Reflecting on his bonding experience with Sia, he says, “I didn’t know that Sia had bipolar until the day we met, and then a lot of stuff kind of started to make sense. I always say that there’s ups and downs [with bipolar], but then there’s mountains and valleys, and you occasionally hit one of those really hard ones — and those are when it makes it easier to write songs. That’s when you find a moment of manic clarity. And you can kind of see that in her songs.

“Meeting her was really cool, because it’s nice to see that this won’t end you. You don’t have to sit at home on your couch for the rest of your life, feeling sorry for yourself. You can be not only a productive member of society, but you can be a genuinely great human being that contributes a lot. That’s really nice to see.”

Rapattoni, who made it to the top three, admits he initially didn’t think he would go far on Idol because of his condition, but decided it was best not to hide who he truly is. “I was really nervous to talk about it at first, because I had assumed that like, crap, people are going to find out that I’m bipolar, and then they’re going to be like, ‘Oh, this kid’s weird. We don’t want to vote for him anymore.’ But then I started to get messages from families and moms and dads with kids with bipolar disorder, and I read them and they were very nice. They said that it helped a lot. I remember thinking… I was sitting in my hotel room and I was like, ‘Even if I don’t win, even if this is the thing that sinks me and sends me home, it’s probably worth it.’”

Nobodys Home comes out Sept. 22. Check out two acoustic performances from the album above.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Take one listen to chamber-folk singer-songwriter Miranda Lee Richards’s wistful, winsome fourth solo album, Existential Beast, and some of her influences are evident: classic English folk troubadours like Nike Drake, Pentangle, Fairport Convention, and protest singer Shirley Collins; cosmic psych collective the Brian Jonestown Massacre, with whom Richards has performed off and on since the late ‘90s; Buffalo Springfield and other ‘60s California country-rockers; and dreamy alterna-poppers Mazzy Star.

One connection a casual listener probably wouldn’t make is… Metallica. But as Richards visits Yahoo Music to perform three stunning acoustic Existential Beast tracks, she revealed how a few chance encounters with Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett in the early ‘90s set her on her unlikely artistic path.

“When I was a teenager in San Francisco, I loved music; I went to a lot of shows,” Richards explains. “And a friend of mine was dating Kirk Hammett — so the age gap there was lessened by the fact that she was older than I was, and then he was older than her. But anyways, I was teenager going to Metallica shows, and they brought me to see Mazzy Star, and we had backstage passes… I’ve always been able to sing and I love writing, but right then and there I thought, ‘I want to do this. Can I do that? If [Mazzy Star frontwoman Hope Sandoval] can do that, can I maybe do that?’ So Kirk taught me how to play some songs on guitar; ‘Fade Into You’ is a good one to start with. And then I began writing songs, shortly thereafter.”

Of course, Richards’s career took a decidedly different turn from Hammett’s — “He made it seem really glamorous to play in a rock ‘n’ roll band. For him it was! I don’t think most bands have that kind of success,” she chuckles — and the two are no longer in touch. But surely Hammett would be impressed by Richards’s rich body of work since she launched her solo career with her first solo album, The Herethereafter, in 2001 via Virgin Records. She has since gone on to enjoy music placements in various films and TV shows, airplay on KCRW and the BBC, rave reviews in Mojo and Uncut, and collaborations and tours with the Dandy Warhols, Tricky, the Jesus & Mary Chain, Nikka Costa, Suzanne Vega, Tift Merritt, Grant Lee Philips, Turin Brakes, Juliana Hatfield, Albert Hammond Jr., Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Beachwood Sparks, Tim Burgess of the Charlatans U.K., Neil Halstead, and many others.

Miranda Lee Richards photo by Paul Rosales

Existential Beast, out on the British independent label Invisible Hands Music June 16, is an especially ambitious effort, and Richards reveals the inspiration behind its (somewhat heavy-metal-sounding) title. “It’s a mashup of terms. There’s the existential crisis or existential angst, but basically as human beings we’re all existential beasts,” she muses. “We’re still overcoming those animal urges and those lower frequencies, if you will, if you want to think of it as a spectrum of evolution. And I think all of those animal instincts and behaviors have been revealed and are being revealed in our world. And everyone’s at a different place with it all. So yeah, we’re all the ‘existential beast’… Why are we here and what are we doing and what is our role in all of this? And do we have a responsibility to the world, do we not? Is it just a responsibility to be a good person and that’s enough?”

Richards says the album is definitely “politically driven,” although many of its tracks were composed before the 2016 presidential election. “So it’s not purely focused on specifics, politically, but it’s more speaking of the issues of our time,” she explains. “There’s been lots of things on the table for a very long time, so I just felt like now was the time.” Nothing is off the table — “environmental issues, health care, civil rights, feminist issues, global economics, and big pharma takeover” were among the topics on Richards’s mind during the album’s writing process — and first song sets the tone for Existential Beast straight away.

“The opening track, ‘Ashes and Seeds,’ is very much about ‘How much do I get involved?’ You know, I think a lot of us are asking that question,” Richards says. “We came out of an era of complacency, I think, and we got a wakeup call… So ‘Ashes and Seeds’ is an ode to ‘What’s my role in this whole big picture here?’”

Miranda Lee Richards photo by Paul Rosales

While the album obviously has its heavy moments, ultimately Existential Beast is a timeless, beautiful, and uplifting album, brimming with hope. “Sometimes we feel maybe even helpless in the face of big corporations and money, that’s sort of the root of a lot of these evils, but then you realize that a lot of people are good people,” Richards tells Yahoo Music. “So we just have to have faith in our people that if we stand together, that ultimately government will eventually, hopefully represent the people as it has not really been for a very long time.”

Check out Richards’s full interview and three lovely unplugged numbers from Existential Beast here.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.

Matt McAndrew may have placed second on The Voice Season 7, but he’s come out a winner, as one of the most popular contestants to ever compete on the show. His official Voice single, “Wasted Love,” skyrocketed to a then-record-setting #14 on the Billboard Hot 100 (with opening sales of 209,000), and he has returned to the show again and again, most recently serving as the host of the Voice‘s Amazon Echo-cast series and touring with his Season 7 friend Luke Wade.

But Matt is making a name for himself outside the show, too, with his wonderful self-released EP, Rush in Slowly. Matt recently stopped by Yahoo Music to play acoustic versions of two of the EP’s tracks, “Bones” and “Cahuenga Blvd.,” as well as a world premiere of a lovely unreleased tune, “Just a Boy.”

He also sat down to talk about life after The Voice (and after Republic Records), his childhood aspirations of being a talk show host, his diehard fans, what happened behind the scenes of his Fight Club-themed “Counting on Love” music video, and that infamous night when he dislocated his shoulder only 20 minutes before his big headlining show at L.A.’s Roxy — and played the gig anyway, in a hospital gown.

McFandrews, catch up with Matt here!

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.