Chris Willman-Senior: Last News

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticNickelodeon is extending its brand to produce the channel’s first full-on music festival, to take place over two days at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena Oct. 22-23, with the Kid Laroi and K-pop group Monsta X as the headliners and support acts including Beabadoobee, 24KGoldn, Alec Benjamin and Joshua Bassett.General admission tickets are $115 plus fees for a single day or $175 for both.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticWhat happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay in Vegas. The Academy of Country Music Awards will be sticking with Amazon Prime Video for a second year in 2023, but not sticking with Las Vegas, where the broadcast has been based almost every year since 2003.The next ACMs will take place May 11, 2023 in Frisco, Texas at the Ford Center at the Star, a 12,000-seat indoor stadium that hosts sporting events and serves as a practice facility for the Dallas Cowboys.It won’t be the first trip the ACMs have taken to Texas.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticCelebrated guitarist Zakk Wylde has made it official, after rumors and anonymously sourced reports that he was joining Pantera for a reunion tour: It’s all true. Except maybe for the part that he is truly “in” Pantera.In Wylde’s view, the guitarist whose shoes he will be filling, the late “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott, can’t be replaced, so he considers himself more of an auxiliary member going into the upcoming concert and festival engagements.“Obviously, it’s not Pantera,” Wylde said over the weekend.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticThere aren’t many Tony-winning productions in which one of the veteran creator-performers can announce that he’s retiring, right in the middle of a performance… and do it in song form… and have it be part of the natural flow of the evening. But that’s what happened at the opening night of “Freestyle Love Supreme” at the Pasadena Playhouse Thursday night, as the high-profile musical revue reached the final stop of an 11-city tour.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticSteven Spielberg has a new first in his 50-year-plus directing career — he’s directed a music video, for Marcus Mumford’s first solo track, “Cannibal.”Kate Capshaw may have some firsts on her resume, too: She acted as dolly grip and art director as well as producer for the single-take clip.A post shared by Marcus Mumford (@marcusmumford)Mumford announced the news in an Instagram post: “On Sunday 3rd July in a high school gym in New York, Steven Spielberg directed his first music video, in one shot, on his phone. Kate Capshaw was the almighty dolly grip,” he wrote.“I’ve been overwhelmed by the support of the people around me to bring this music to you, and I cannot hope to express all of my gratitude.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic“Come on. I’m very good at music, man,” Lizzo declared in an interview with Zane Lowe this week, as if this were an unstated or under-stated thing that needed to be said out loud.You know, she’s not a liar.So let’s just say that Beyonce has her work cut out for her.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticIf we were going to borrow the terminology of one pop-culture juggernaut, “Star Wars,” for another, BTS, we might call this phase of the career of one of the group’s members “BTS, Episode II: A New J-Hope.” At least, J-Hope himself considers this the beginning of a second chapter in the ensemble’s career as well as a fresh start for his own, as today he releases “Jack in the Box,” the first of in a series of solo albums that each member of BTS is expected to be putting out in the months to come.It makes sense that the artist known offstage as Jung Ho-seok would be the first band member to release a full solo project during what is being characterized as a refueling between group endeavors. Since he’s known primarily as a rapper, there will necessarily be fewer comparisons drawn between his solo material and pop earworms of BTS’ past like “Dynamite” and “Butter.” But in another sense, there’s risk involved in coming right out with something that bears quite so little similarity to anything that would be described as a BTS signature sound.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticHip-hop titan Kanye West, a.k.a. Ye, is the subject of a lawsuit filed Thursday that alleges he and his firms are holding out on more than $7.1 million owed to a production and design firm that worked on his “Donda 2” livestream release show, his canceled Coachella appearance, the “Free Larry Hoover” concert with Drake, several “Sunday Services” and the rapper’s studio spaces.The firm, Phantom Labs, alleges that, as the unpaid bills began piling up from multiple projects, it was assured that everything would be paid up once the star collected a reported $9 million fee for appearing at Coachella.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticA newly recorded, one-of-a-kind record of Bob Dylan singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” sold at an auction at Christie’s in London Thursday for over its estimated value — going for 1.2 million pounds, or just under $1.5 million in U.S. dollars.The actual amount of the winning bid in American dollars works out to $1,441,045 under current exchange rates.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticAttention, L.A. country music fans: It may be time to charter a bus.Come Sept.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticWhen Leslie Fram, formerly a top programmer and morning cohost in radio’s alternative format, made the jump from FM to television by coming aboard the CMT network as the VP in charge of music in 2011, she liked almost everything she had to learn as a quick study in country music. That ranged from the greater collegiality of country’s artist community to how much earlier the music showcases started in Nashville than they had in New York.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticEric Holder Jr., the gang member who shot superstar rapper Nipsey Hussle to death in 2019, has been convicted of first-degree murder in a Los Angeles court.Beyond the murder conviction, Holder was also convicted of several other charges, including attempted voluntary manslaughter and assault for shooting two other men who survived the shootings. He faces a possible life sentence.Jurors went only an hour into their second day of deliberation before announcing they had reached a verdict siding with the Los Angeles Country prosecution.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticThe story of women in country music is being written anew every day, but it needs its actual scriveners, too, to keep a record of what progress is or isn’t being made in a genre that sometimes has wavered between nourishing and ignoring its queens. That role has been well-filled in recent years by music journalist Marissa R.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticIf there were an award to bestow for the most accomplished living American pop songwriter who never doubled as a recording artist, the frontrunner would almost definitely be Mike Stoller, 89, half of one of the most famous writing duos of all time, Leiber & Stoller. Even if the memory of Elvis Presley were completely wiped away, like the Beatles’ in that “Yesterday” movie, this pairing would still be in the history books and collective consciousness for “Stand by Me,” “On Broadway,” “There Goes My Baby,” “Young Blood,” “Kansas City,” “Love Potion #9,” “Yakety Yak,” “Charlie Brown,” “I’m a Woman,” “Ruby Baby,” “Is That All There Is?” and other numbers deeply embedded in pop culture from the mid-‘50s forward.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticRenowned music producer Dave Cobb was working on a film job where he recreated the music of one singing icon — Tammy Faye Bakker — when he got the assignment to do the same for an even more significant vocalist, high a bar as that may have been: Elvis Presley. Truly, both figured into his youth, growing up as a Pentecostal kid in the Southeast.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticAccording to Stephen Schwartz, nothing can follow “Defying Gravity.” And for the “Wicked” songwriter, that’s one key reason why the movie version of his blockbuster Broadway musical has to be split into two parts.It’s not just about overall length, the composer is saying — it’s about the audience needing a breather after one of the great Act 1 closers of all time. (Even if that breather is 12 months of moviegoers going on with their daily business, versus 20 minutes cooling their heels outside a Broadway house.)“We found it very difficult to get past ‘Defying Gravity’ without a break,” Schwartz says.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticIt may be a polarizing album, but the public is voting with its streams on Drake’s dance-oriented new music, and he seems to be winning listeners over with his change of direction, or at least drawing huge numbers of fans to give it a first listen. His “Honestly, Nevermind” has bowed at the top of the Billboard 200 album chart with an impressive 204,000 album-equivalent units. A single from the album that has 21 Savage as his featured guest, “Jimmy Cooks,” debuted at No 1 on the Hot 100.The 204,000 first-week number for “Honestly, Nevermind” is huge by the standard of nearly all other debuting albums in 2022.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticWhen Mandy Moore headlined Nashville’s historic Ryman Auditorium Sunday night, it might have seemed to some attentive audience members as if some trickery was going on. The singer-actress tours with her husband, Taylor Goldsmith, the frontman of the group Dawes, playing alongside her every night.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticDid ye get healed? This is a rhetorical question Van Morrison posed many years ago that may pop up in the back of your mind at someone else’s show, on one of those rare nights when there’s enough strife or upset in the world that the crowd can be collectively understood to be experiencing a wound. That was the case with Brandi Carlile playing two sold-out shows at L.A.’s Greek Theatre over the weekend right in the wake of the Supreme Court issuing a decision that the vast majority of her progressive-leaning audience would find deeply grievous, or ominous, with one justice vowing that another right should be on the chopping block — the same-sex marriage that Carlile has sung and talked about on stage virtually every night for years.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticDoes the phrase “that’s all right” apply to the new “Elvis” movie… as in, “that’s all correct”? No one is probably expecting that — any practiced watcher of biopics knows virtually any example of the form will take deep liberties with the facts for dramatic purposes. And maybe it’s a given that a director who puts hip-hop and hard rock on the soundtracks for period films, as Baz Luhrmann does, might favor effect over absolute verisimilitude.Still, “Elvis” is right on enough counts — literally or spiritually — that it’s worth trying to separate fact from fiction in the movie’s narrative of Elvis Presley (played by Austin Butler) and his nearly career-long manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks).

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music CriticNews of a forthcoming Marcus Mumford solo album began to leak out this past week, which countless radio stations and websites around the world immediately leaped to assume meant that old gang of his was breaking up. Mumford made it official on two counts — yes, his solo record is coming up, and no, Mumford and Sons are not splitting — and offered a first taste of the new project as he sat in with Brandi Carlile Friday at L.A.’s Greek Theater.During the encore portion of the first of Carlile’s two sold-out gigs at the Greek, the two sang a collaborative new ballad (the title of which was not announced) that Mumford said would be the closing track of his solo album, publicly confirming a heretofore secret project that has become widely speculated upon over the last week.