Chris Willman-Senior Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic With his new album less than three weeks away from release, Kanye West has taken to Instagram to post a blanket apology to the Jewish community for unspecified past actions… in Hebrew. The boilerplate nature of the message, translated into English, led many fans and detractors alike to wonder whether the message was really written by West or a business associate — coming so shortly after the superstar was captured live, on camera, sounding the opposite of penitent.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Taylor Swift‘s “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” has returned to the top spot on the Billboard 200, as Nicki Minaj‘s “Pink Friday 2” drops to No. 2 in its second week out. The Swift release is spending its fourth non-consecutive week at No.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Tammy Faye Starlite knows few boundaries in her love for Marianne Faithfull, and the New York-based singer and performance artist is expressing it in two ways this season. For starters, she’s one of 25 performers who participated in a compilation album that came out earlier this month, “The Faithful: A Tribute to Marianne Faithfull,” along with other fellow fans ranging from Shirley Manson to Iggy Pop — a record earmarked to have proceeds go toward paying for Faithfull’s medical bills as she deals with long COVID.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic There’s a secret to having a Christmas record that is successful in the 21st century: Put it out before 1970. That’s clear from just looking at the top 10 songs each December, and knowing that Brenda Lee‘s “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first two weeks of this month.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Noah Kahan is Zooming to us right from the heart of Vermont’s stick season, where things are looking cloudy with a chance of multi-platinum. Now, if you happen to know what that “seasonal” reference actually is, you are probably (a) an 80-year-old New Englander who grew up with that term as a euphemism for the dog days of late fall, or (b) one of the millions of people that have taken to the music of Kahan, who spent 2023 becoming a nearly stealth superstar.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic What a funny way of saying hello — by saying “Good Riddance.” But as Gracie Abrams happened to be saying goodbye to certain things in her life in the album of that name, she was also introducing herself to much of the general public. Although the now-24-year-old singer-songwriter had released EPs on Interscope going back to 2021 and singles as far back as 2019, “Good Riddance” marked her first full-length album, and the first release where she really found her own voice, with some help from producer/co-writer Aaron Dessner.

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.

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.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Credit country superstar Luke Combs for being a lot faster to get out ahead of a potential public-relations crisis than your average celebrity — to the point that he’s cleaning up messes before he’s had the chance to wipe the sleep out of his eyes. Combs woke up early Wednesday morning learning of a TV news interview with a weeping woman in Florida, Nicol Harness, who’d been slapped with a $250,000 judgment by a federal court in Illinois, along with having thousands of dollars seized from her frozen Amazon seller’s account, because she had sold $380 of unauthorized Combs merch on the website.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Jeffrey Foskett, a musician familiar to Beach Boys fans for more than four decades as a presence in the touring bands led by both Brian Wilson and Mike Love, died Monday at age 67. He had been battling anaplastic thyroid cancer. Foskett, who was deemed the “vice principal of the Beach Boys” by its core members, was the rare musician who found favor in all of that group’s sometimes competing camps over the decades.

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 Before talking about the meat of Peter Gabriel’s new album, “i/o,” which stands for “input/output,” it is inevitable that initial discussion will focus on the level of output (or the lack of it) he’s had prior to this year. It’s his first studio album of original songs in 21 years (and only the second in 31 years).

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.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Country music hasn’t had a huge presence in the mainstream top 10 since Florida Georgia Line provided a couple of big crossover blips in 2014 and 2017 with “Cruise” and “Meant to Be.” But that changed in triplicate in 2023 with three Nashville exports— the well-established Morgan Wallen and Luke Combs, plus a blazing-hot newcomer, Zimmerman. His first three singles all hit No.

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.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Who should be counted as country music’s currently most successful songwriter? You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who could come up with a metric where the end result is not clearly Ashley Gorley, who’s being honored as Songwriter of the Year at Variety‘s annual Hitmakers event. He has been a co-writer on five of the last six Morgan Wallen singles, all of which inevitably topped the country chart — with “Last Night” also going top 5 at pop radio, no small factor in the song spending a near-record 16 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

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.

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.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Elizabeth Chan continues to be the most prolific recording artist in the Christmas music space, and certainly the only singer of any notoriety doing a new release each year, having just released her 13th consecutive holiday album, “Songs From Noelle.” Variety is already on record as calling the singer-songwriter “Christmas’ one-woman Brill Building.” But if a new holiday collection from Chan seems inevitable every fall, there was nothing clockwork-like about this one’s making — since for Chan, unlike Taylor Swift, the number 13 actually seemed unlucky in 2023. The title “Songs From Noelle” refers to Chan’s 6-year-old daughter, who co-sang and even co-wrote a few songs on the album.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Taylor Swift announced Monday morning that her “Eras Tour” film will be released for streaming on her birthday, Dec. 13 — and that, as hoped by fans, it will include songs from the tour not included in the movie’s theatrical release.

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.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The mystery of why Daryl Hall obtained a restraining order against John Oates has been solved, at least in part, now that part of the case has been unsealed by a Tennessee judge who previously ordered all details to be kept under wraps. It’s now been revealed that Hall is attempting to block his longtime musical partner from selling his share in their joint venture to Primary Wave Music. On Friday afternoon, the Associated Press was first to report the actual reason for the restraining order, after the judge quietly unsealed some — but not nearly all — of the case two days earlier, on Thanksgiving eve.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic “Brutal out there” may be a good description for how Record Store Day Black Friday will feel for those customers who have their appetites set only on the limited-edition piece that Olivia Rodrigo has coming out for the occasion. Rodrigo is essentially playing the role of Taylor Swift this time around, in drawing the attention of consumers who might otherwise be fine leaving a Record Store Day event alone with a special release that will be noted for its immediate scarcity — in this case, “Guts: The Secret Tracks,” a four-song EP that has not been pressed in anything near the quantity to meet the demand.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic You won’t even have to already love Wilco to find joy in the experience of reading Jeff Tweedy’s new book, “World Within a Song: Music That Changed My Life and Life That Changed My Music” — although nothing about coming in as a fan will exactly hurt. His tales about how dozens of pieces of (mostly) pop and rock music have hit him in a personal way over the decades is full of anecdotal pleasures that get at more universal truths about how we’re shaped by art… or, alternately, just illustrate a funny story Tweedy neglected to include in his previous books, the music memoir “Let’s Go (So We Can Get Back)” and the instructional “How to Write One Song.” The book includes his thoughts on youthful favorites he remains unabashed about into his adulthood, like “Smoke on the Water,” “Takin’ Care of Business” and “My Sharona,” adult fare that rewarded more mature readings, like Randy Newman’s “In Germany Before the War,” and songs as disparate as the Replacements’ “God Damn Job,” Wings’ “Mull of Kintyre,” Rosalia’s “Bizcochito” and “You Are My Sunshine.” Variety caught up with Tweedy on the road between stops on Wilco’s fall tour supporting the band’s recent “Cousin” album, following a solo tour in the summer of 2023.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Was there anyone who didn’t have an opinion — and the strong need to express it — when the Beatles‘ “last single,” “Now and Then,” came out earlier this month? The surviving members’ long-aborning completion of a 1970s John Lennon demo profoundly moved millions of fans, and put off some others, but no one in practically any demographic — not boomers or even Gen-Z-ers and millennials — wanted to hold their tongue about it. And that’s the kind of marketing that money and promotion can’t buy.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Mars Williams, a saxophone player known for his work as a member of the Waitresses and later the Psychedelic Furs, died Monday at age 68. His hometown newspaper the Chicago Tribune first confirmed Williams’ passing and reported that the cause of death was ampullary cancer.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Taylor Swift did not offer an introduction to “Bigger Than the Whole Sky” when she performed it as a surprise song at her concert Sunday night in Rio de Janeiro. But she didn’t have to — fans implicitly understood her live premiere of the number, arguably the most wrenchingly emotional song in her catalog, as a tribute to Ana Clara Benevides Machado, who died after attending Swift’s previous show at the stadium.Full video of Taylor performing Biggen Than The Whole Sky (right in front of my face like wow) #RioTSTheErasTour pic.twitter.com/q5rNYixG1z Swift had previously expressed her sorrow over the fan’s death in a social media post, and had written that “I’m not going to be able to speak about this from stage because I feel overwhelmed by grief when I even try to talk about it.” But, clearly, she wanted to sing about that which she could not talk about.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Liz Phair remains larger than life, in a way — even taller than 6’1”, if you will — as a result of her utterly down-to-earth yet myth-making first album, “Exile in Guyville,” in 1993. Thirty years after it changed the course of rock ‘n’ roll, that debut is being celebrated on a cross-country tour in which Phair is playing the entirety of the album for the main part of her set, delighting houses full of Gen-Xers, and not a few boomers or Gen-Z-ers who also recognize the record as one of the all-time great freshman efforts.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic In a time when country music is suddenly flusher with credible newcomers than it has been in a lot of years, Megan Moroney is one of the freshest of the fresh — with a clever debut single, “Tennessee Orange,” that stands as one of the best No. 1 singles the format has wrought recently, from an album, “Lucky,” that bears no skips among its 16 deluxe-edition tracks.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic When a record comes with a warning label, believe it. That’s the case behind André 3000’s solo album debut, 17 years after the close of the recorded catalog of his Atlanta-based hip hop behemoth, Outkast.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Bob Dylan rarely speaks in his concerts beyond a “thank you,” so when he says even something trivial from the stage, people listen — and when he suddenly breaks with form to defend a controversial figure, they lean in even more. At a show Thursday night at the Beacon Theatre in New York City, he defended Rolling Stone magazine founder Jann Wenner, who in September was removed from the board of directors of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation — which he also co-founded — after remarks in a New York Times interview that were perceived as sexist and racist.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Tish Melton, the 17-year-old singer who recently made a splash with her official debut single, “Michelle,” can’t wait to graduate high school next year and devote herself fully to her nascent music career. But in the meantime she’s got a hell of an early graduation present: a forthcoming debut EP helmed by one of the music world’s most notable artist-producers, Brandi Carlile.