Ashley Gorley, Variety’s Songwriter of the Year, on Being Part of Country’s Big Crossover Moment: ‘There’s a Lot More Freedom in This Genre Now’

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Director Danny Tedesco previously scored a hit among music fans with his 2008 film “The Wrecking Crew,” a documentary about the battalion of 1960s studio musicians whose names were little known even among the cognoscenti, until these unknown soldiers started to quietly get their due decades later. Although it took another 15 years after that film to come to fruition, Tedesco had an easy go-to for an unofficial sequel.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Darlene Love‘s annual television performance of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” was essentially orphaned after “Late Show With David Letterman” went off the air in 2015, putting an end to the 28-year streak that had the music legend singing her signature holiday song with Paul Shaffer‘s band on Letterman’s last original show before Christmas each December. But they all reunited — not over the air, but on YouTube — for a resumption of the tradition, nine years after the last time this particular caroling took place on CBS. Watch the video, below.

Taylor Swift, the Rolling Stones, Drake with J. Cole, Olivia Rodrigo and Billy Joel’s final MSG concerts.Whoops, we forgot to mention Zach Bryan, Green Day, Noah Kahan, Adele and The Eagles’ farewell tour.Don’t sleep on Bruce Springsteen, either.Or Phish and Wu-Tang Clan’s first ever Las Vegas residencies.And we’re just getting started. We’ve got 39 more huge names at the ready for you, below.Alright, no more need to beat around the bush.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Not even the pain of recovering from surgery for a broken hip could keep Kareem Abdul-Jabbar from expressing his love for the Manhattan Transfer. Although he wasn’t able to pay tribute to the group during their final concert Friday in downtown Los Angeles, as he was intending to when the injury occurred, he came through on that mission on Sunday night, via a statement of appreciation he shared from his hospital bed. It was previously reported only that Abdul-Jabbar broke his hip at “a concert.” What not even fans of the Transfer knew, as they gathered at Walt Disney Concert Hall Friday, was that the Lakers legend had been on the premises and suffered an injury somewhere between parking and making it backstage.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Introducing the Manhattan Transfer’s final show at Walt Disney Concert Hall, writer Bruce Vilanch emphasized the multi-genre status the vocal ensemble built up and maintained over a 50-year-plus career that, from all indications, really was coming to a close Friday night. “I’m thrilled to be here for the final concert of the greatest pop-rock-jazz-soul-R&B-scat-vocalese-Brazilian group in the history of America,” Vilanch said. In keeping with that multi-hyphenate spirit, the group’s apparent swan song in downtown Los Angeles’ toniest venue was a happy-sad-ebullient-misty-eyed affair.

Thania Garcia It’s the end of the year and Vevo has crunched the numbers to find out which music videos and artists saw the highest viewership on the platform. After releasing multiple albums, touring the world with record-breaking numbers and launching a concert film, Taylor Swift was named Vevo’s “Most Watched Artist” in the United States with nearly 650 million views in 2023. According to the music video network, during the “Eras Tour,” Swifties across the country tuned in to view Swift’s content on Vevo — this includes videos for “All Too Well: The Short Film” (+333% lift in U.S.

Thania Garcia South Korean boy band Ateez has the No. 1 album in the United States this week, landing its first No. 1 record with their sophomore set “The World EP.Fin: Will.” The 12-song set had the equivalent of 152,000 sales, according to data provided by Luminate, and serves as the follow-up to the eight-member group’s June EP “The World EP.2: Outlaw.” Preceded by the streaming hit “Crazy Form,” which boasts elements of Afro dancehall, “The World EP.2: Outlaw” was released via Sony Music Korea/RCA Records and is the fifth K-pop record to lead the Billboard 200 this year behind releases from Tomorrow X Together, NewJeans and Stray Kids.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Laufey (pronounced Lay-vay) is captivating Gen Z by writing and singing music that almost sounds like it could be from Gen WWII. Go figure, and go marvel. But the 24-year-old has always instinctively known that a box is no place to be: She hails from Iceland, is of Asian heritage, and is in many ways a quintessentially all-American girl.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Hello, beautiful. That’s what some Barbra Streisand fans have been murmuring to their physical editions of “My Name Is Barbra,” her memoir, since it came out one month ago, and over that time has become a nightly bedtime companion (its 970-page length not quite built for bingeing), as well as a sort of objet d’art, and objet d’heft.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic It’s hard to quite think of someone who was as big a veritable child star as Brenda Lee was in the late ’50s and early ’60s a “late bloomer.” Nor can “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” really be considered an underdog song, after its accrual of quintuple-platinum sales over the decades. And yet it’s spent the last several years peaking at No. 2 each December, after spending most of its lifetime not annually charting at all.

Mike Wass Since founding Nonstop Management at her kitchen table in 2017, Jaime Zeluck Hindlin’s boutique management company for songwriters and producers has become a stealthy power player in the music business. Getting the right people in a room is Hindlin’s specialty, but her range of clients contributing to three songs from the Hitmakers 2023 Top 25 is nothing short of remarkable: Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers,” Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night,” and Rema and Selena Gomez’s “Calm Down (Remix).” “Never in my wildest dreams did I think that something like this would happen,” Hindlin says of Nonstop’s blockbuster 2023. “Obviously, you hope for one big hit.

Charlie Amter Few artists ever have had a year on the scale of Morgan Wallen’s 2023. The crossover country star broke multiple streaming and radio records — such as having his smash “Last Night” become the longest-running solo No. 1 in Billboard Hot 100 history, with 16 weeks atop the chart — all while picking up the millions of new fans that helped sell out shows nationwide.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Billie Eilish remembers being aware there were some puzzled — or just wary — reactions when a song she and Finneas co-wrote, “What Was I Made For?,” was one of the last tracks announced for the “Barbie” soundtrack. “I remember everybody being like, ‘What the hell? It’s gonna be a fun, cute, girly, pink movie for the summer and we’re all going to be laughing.

Jordan Moreau Variety has announced additional honorees for its annual Hitmakers Event on Dec. 2 in Los Angeles. Sabrina Carpenter will receive the Rising Star Award presented by H&M, celebrating her transformative year as a music artist.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The latest episode of Variety‘s “Strictly Business” podcast features Aaron Dessner — the man Swifties are indebted to for collaborating on big chunks of “Folklore” and “Evermore,” but who more than earned his keep for a quarter-century prior to that as a member of the exalted-in-their-own-right band the National. Dessner’s Grammy-winning group has been one of the mainstays of rock ’n roll since the late ’90s.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic What part of fast in “Fast Car” did anyone not understand? Country superstar Luke Combs’ cover of the 1988 Tracy Chapman classic proved to be as turbocharged as anything acoustically based in this world can be, with unexpected multi-format success: It was No. 1 at adult pop and country for two weeks each; a healthy No. 6 at Top 40 radio; No.

NewJeans, BTS‘ Jungkook and more.Apple Music unveiled the 2023 edition of its annual ranking of the most streamed songs on the serviceyesterday (November 28), per Variety, with several K-pop tracks making it into the Top 100. The most streamed K-pop song in 2023 was ‘Ditto’ by NewJeans, which came in at Number 19 on the overall list.Two other NewJeans songs also made it to Apple Music’s ranking: with their January single ‘OMG’ at Number 37, and 2022’s ‘Hype Boy’ at Number 64.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic “Summer’s lease hath all too short a date,” wrote William Shakespeare in one of his sonnets. Well, Bill, you might be enchanted to meet Taylor Swift, who has been busy proving just how long a summer can last: four years and counting, in the case of “Cruel Summer.” The song was released in 2019 but didn’t become a smash until 2023, when by popular acclamation her quasi-oldie was all but officially declared the song of summer.

Natalie Weiner Reports of Maren Morris leaving country music have been greatly exaggerated. “You don’t fight for what you don’t love,” says Morris over Zoom during a chat from her Nashville home, squeezed in while her son Hayes is taking a nap.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Love hurts, and so, if you’re a Gram Parsons fan, does the idea that the world has had to do without him for 50 years, as of September of this year. Imagining how his style might have changed over the subsequent half-century is never-ending, as is conjecturing how he might have simply have brought the world closer to his own fearless hybrid of country and rock, with more years to grow his audience after what amounted to a mere five-year heyday.