As a marketing exercise, it’s hard not to be hugely impressed by Spotify Wrapped. In less than a decade, the streaming giant has somehow managed to turn what’s essentially a bit of automated data-scraping into a global event. It’s a triumphant exercise in underlining the platform’s dominance in its field – this year, it arrives with the slogan Wrapped Or It Didn’t Happen, as if music consumed via Spotify is the only music that matters – and indeed in getting free advertising by encouraging users to share on social media Spotify’s personalised and heavily branded lists of most-streamed artists and listening trends. This year, the arrival of Spotify Wrapped results was heralded by a huge billboard advertising campaign, brand partnerships ranging from Amazon to FC Barcelona, a London launch gig that stars Sam Smith, Charli XCX and Chase and Status and the launch of the “Spotify Island experience” on wildly popular online game platform Roblox. It has provoked features everywhere from Teen Vogue to the New York Times, from Variety to this very newspaper. The latter’s report was enlivened by quotes from a Spotify employee, who compared Wrapped both to “election night” and the arrival of Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.
Said employee was presumably speaking from their desk in Spotify’s legendary Department of Laying It on a Bit Thick, but empirical evidence suggests that Wrapped has become a surprisingly big deal. This week, my teenage daughters eagerly checked their results against each others’ and those of their friends. The results are more elaborately presented than ever: they now come with a “character archetype” based on the way you use the streaming platform – fans of “light upbeat music” are Luminaries, those reliant on algorithms to pick the next track are Roboticists and so on – and an add-on that tells you where in the world you’re most likely to find people with similar music tastes to you. But my kids appeared less interested in the way their ostensibly “favourite” artists were ranked than in the amount of time they’d spent listening and the number of songs they had listened to. In a world where streaming is the main means by which music is consumed these figures appear to act as a badge of honour, “proof” of how into music you are, a 2020s equivalent of walking around school with an album you were either borrowing or lending tucked under your arm to signify the seriousness of your commitment to prog or punk or metal or soul.
There’s something faintly creepy lurking behind Spotify Wrapped’s rainbow-hued graphics. At heart, its message is that something, somewhere is effectively spying on you, carefully taking note of everything you listen to and when – and it’s also a reminder of how many other companies are doing the same without actually presenting their findings back to you.
An advert announcing that Taylor Swift is Spotify’s most-streamed artist in 2023. Photograph: Spotifty
The efficacy of the data involved in actually discerning your favourite music is also questionable. It obviously favours anything released earlier in the year than later, simply because you’ve had more opportunity to listen to it. Moreover, I can tell you for a fact that the figures can be inadvertently massaged. The artist Spotify Wrapped claims is my most listened-to in 2023 is someone I’ve barely given a thought to this year (and I will therefore respectfully veil): their place at the top of the pile tells you nothing about my regular listening habits and everything about the night I came back from a convivial evening at the pub, was gripped with a sudden, beer-fuelled desire to hear a track I hadn’t played in years, then immediately fell asleep with my headphones on, thus obliviously “listening” to it over and over again for eight hours.
Those kind of mishaps aside, you might even query the point of the whole exercise. Why on earth do you need to be told who your most listened-to artists of the year are? You’d presumably know already, on account of the fact that you’ve been listening to them a lot. That the results can feel bafflingly wrong speaks to the semi-detached engagement with music engendered by Spotify’s all-you-can-eat smorgasbord approach. Presented with so much, you’re inclined to nibble a bit of this, and then a bit of that: you’re less inclined to listen to full albums, or even tracks all the way through. Overwhelmed by choice you might fall back on on stuff you already know, or throw yourself on the mercy of of curated, tightly genre-specific playlists designed to unspool unobtrusively in the background and by algorithms that throw up things that sound like stuff you’ve already heard – none of it really reflecting your true musical loves. It’s hard to argue with the news that the most-streamed artist of 2023 is Taylor Swift – well, of course it is, she’s been omnipresent all year – but perhaps Spotify Wrapped’s very existence tells you rather less about music itself than streaming’s effect on it.
In 2013, Groupmuse launched as an app to help you put on live classical concerts in your home. It was the height of the app boom, and outlets from Wired to the Wall Street Journal praised Groupmuse as the AirBnB or the Uber “of classical music.” Those comparisons read differently now—but Groupmuse was never trying to undermine an existing industry through race-to-the-bottom economics. Instead, it hoped to essentially resurrect the salon concert. Ten years later, I spoke to founders Kyle Schmolze and Sam Bodkin about the sense of musical belonging, the economics of living-room concerts, and expanding from Western to world classical music.
Sam Bodkin and Kyle Schmolze • Photos via Groupmuse
VAN: Groupmuse has been around for ten years now. What have you learned?
Kyle Schmolze: One of the big lessons on my mind recently is that certain types of communities are difficult to scale. We’ve spent a lot of years trying to grow as much as possible in order to maintain ourselves as an organization financially, and we’ve never found that the type of community we want to build has any shortcuts towards growth. Any of the shortcuts we’ve found would not be within our mission. There’s this common phrase: growing at the speed of trust. Groupmuse does that because it’s people inviting each other into their homes, and then people attending a show, deciding they want to have a concert and inviting people into their homes. It has to spread through trust. That’s a reality that I’ve been fighting for 10 years. I’m finally at peace with the idea that Groupmuse is a slow, steady, and long-standing thing; that we couldn’t kill it if we tried.
Sam Bodkin: The first thing that comes to mind is this relentless emphasis that we’re fed through mass media culture that people no longer have the appetite for the sublime, the beautiful and the deep. The success of Groupmuse as a grassroots project has given lie to that whole story. People actually have a deep longing for beautiful things that speak to long traditions of intricate creative work, that build on themselves over generations. It’s just a question of how it’s contextualized.
And that indeed people like classical music—which Groupmuse is no longer specific to—but you could say the same for a lot of forms of historical music. A lot of the listening experiences that go along with an old art form have baggage that doesn’t actually speak to the music itself but to the economic conditions that allowed the music to survive. And I think those structures can be alienating to a rising generation of culture seekers, but when you strip them away completely and just say, “We’re gonna have a jazz combo in a living room” or “we’re gonna have solo Bach in some basement or kitchen somewhere,” that’s when the music is really allowed to sing on its own terms. When it’s decontextualized from the gilded trappings of the concert hall, people respond really well to it.
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What would you say to somebody like me who has had their most profound musical experiences in the gilded concert hall?
Bodkin: I’ve had transcendent experiences in the concert hall, but there’s no case that needs to be made to me, because I already love the music so deeply. I don’t need to be convinced. I just need to sit there and receive. For a lot of people, when they go to see live music, it’s about this feeling of belonging to the zeitgeist: Mick Jagger will say, “Philadelphia is the best city on earth,” and it’s like, “He’s talking about me and my city and we’re all in this together.” It’s about this feeling of belonging and it being a vibe.
I don’t want to put too much emphasis on classical music—though it is where we began—[but it] has underinvested in that sense of everyone belonging. Rather, it lets the music speak for itself. People who love this music are like, We don’t have to make a case for Beethoven. Beethoven is a supernova. Just be in awe of it. If people already love the music, then the fineness of the experience, the rigor, the passion, and the genius that has been brought to rendering this performance can shine through. You’re not like distracted by, Am I gonna talk at the wrong time? Have I dressed the right way? All these things that make a person self-conscious, as opposed to being a purely receptive state.
Schmolze: I live in the U.S. and the U.S. is a country that has chronically underinvested in the arts, and that has a variety of structures that prevent the arts from propagating healthily through many of its areas. My ability to access musical offerings in the concert hall usually relies on either a small group of hyper-wealthy people giving away a ton of money to keep a certain concert hall in operation, or a $65 ticket for me to go to a standard venue. And there are lots of areas where that’s not the case; there are places where access to the concert hall is actually pretty high, and a lot of people can get these offerings, but the Groupmuse structure is infinitely scalable. It can be five people sitting around in a living room. It can be 250 people in a warehouse. As we build the culture of showing the community how to generate its own cultural offerings, it creates this resilience of access.
How often can I drag five friends to join me to the concert hall—maybe once every few months? I’m someone with a lot of privilege and access to these spaces. And I also have had a lot of incredibly powerful experiences there. And then [my friends] are like, That was awesome. And then they’re just going to keep doing their normal base socializing, which is meeting up with people and hanging out at each other’s houses. Here in the Bay Area, people don’t even really go to bars that much, because our third spaces have been so hollowed out. But how often can I get them to go to a house party where there’s also going to be live music and it’s a pay-what-you-can situation? Every weekend. That scales in all sorts of ways across different communities, and it creates a lot more access.
Groupmuse doesn’t focus only on classical music anymore; the term you now use on your website is “historical music.” What does historical music mean to you?
Schmolze:I wish we’d updated that copy before you read it. [Laughs.]
Bodkin: It’s been a topic of big controversy on the team. When we started Groupmuse, we had this mission commitment to Western canonical classical music. Our requirement was [a concert had to consist of] 50 percent canonical classical music, and then 50 percent anything the player wanted to play.
It wasn’t particularly rigorously enforced, but that was what we set forth. And then in 2020, with the murder of George Floyd, we, along with a lot of other institutions, were taking a deep look at ourselves and trying to figure out what kind of systems of oppression we were enabling and decided that this focus on Western style classical music was not in alignment with our values. We did a lot of work to talk about the Groupmuse experience and what made it special and indelible in ways that did not use words like Western, or canonical, or classical.
We arrived at this definition of historical music: One, you can trace its lineage back a century back or more. Two, it’s music that speaks to a lifetime commitment to your craft. And three, it’s intended for an intimate human scale: it doesn’t rely on industrial inputs to make the music, like stadium rock or EDM.
We no longer use historical music as a term, but it’s historically rooted performance. It’s in a ripe relationship with the past, and it’s not the you show.
How involved are you in the curation of Groupmuse programs?
Schmolze: We’re pretty highly curative around which musicians get approved into the system. They have to submit audio and video samples and have to answer questions [about programming and their relationship to historical lineages]. Once they’re in the system it’s trust based. There’s a checkbox on the site that’s like, “You’re gonna bring a historical context, right?” We’re not denying people’s programs. We’re not offering notes. That’s really unpleasant and dicey territory that we don’t want to get into. We used to get into it a tiny bit, back when we were more explicitly classical. Anytime someone would post a program outside [the requirements] we’d have to have this discussion. Do we ask them to change their programs? It’s always such an uncomfortable conversation, I’m relieved we no longer have to have them.
What are the criteria that would make you pass on a musician who wants to play for Groupmuse?
Bodkin: There’s definitely the technical side: if your capacity speaks to that long term commitment. That’s the easiest way to get a yes. We prioritize people who are looking to music-making as their primary source of income.
Schmolze: Katherine [Kyu Hyeon Lim] is a fantastic musician who runs our musician approvals. The impression I get is that the most common disqualifying factor is technical.
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According to your website, the mean fee you’ve paid out to musicians since 2016 is $160 (though rising). Are you satisfied with that as a fee for professional musicians?
Schmolze: Not really. I’d love for it to be more. The way we’ve organized Groupmuse economics is that in order to keep it stable and resilient, we built a culture of musicians getting paid based on what the audiences that are built can afford. And we make asks of those audiences. This is what we’ve been able to come up with, in a way that can’t be broken because grant money is withdrawn. We would love to be subsidizing that further. But right now [the musicians’] income is not coming from grants, it’s coming through the 15 people in the room.
Bodkin: We’re not satisfied, obviously—especially with the costs of everything rising constantly. But there are ways we give musicians maximal liberty to present whatever music they wish, on the terms that they want. For a lot of musicians playing Groupmuses, it’s essential that they’re earning income doing it, but a lot of the drive for them is the gregarious, warm, and receptive audience. It’s conducive to relationship building, which is ultimately the cornerstone of making a life as a musician. That’s not to say we’re like, Oh, it doesn’t pay much, but you’re all good, because it’s going to be really happy vibes. But it might explain why we have some extremely top shelf musicians who are playing even if they know that they might walk away with $120 in their pocket at the end of the night.
Groupmuse’s non-Western classical concerts are grouped under the title Planetary Music Movement, which says it wants “to overcome the dominance of European classical music.” We’ve been talking about classical music as a pretty niche art form, so how do you see European classical music as a dominant art form against which the Planetary Music Movement is acting?
Bodkin: Classical music definitely is culturally marginal, but it still has institutional support beyond any other music form, in at least in the United States context. I think there are something on the order of 100 or 120 classical music organizations that have a six or seven-figure budget or more in the States. That represents a concentration of capital that’s specific to Western canonical music. The Planetary Music Movement comes from a desire to take some of those resources and make them available for any kind of non-commercial music that has been kept alive through devoted generations of music-making.
So you’re leaving pop music out of the equation? I feel like Taylor Swift could subsidize every orchestra and opera house in the U.S. and not even notice.
Bodkin:Yeah. We’re leaving pop music out of the equation and focusing on these non-commercial forms.
In 2022, you launched a decentralized autonomous organization blockchain token called Muse Token…
Bodkin: That was an offshoot project that I started with a worker-owner at Groupmuse who’s no longer with the project. We’re both still inspired by the possibilities there. But with the massive crash and bloodletting of the whole Web 3.0 movement over this last year, it basically forced the project into dormancy for the foreseeable future. It’s very removed from the Groupmuse context. I wouldn’t want to talk about it here, because it’s important that it not be strongly associated with Groupmuse, especially at this stage.
Why not? Because of the crash?
Bodkin: Yeah. A transformational technology, I think, was pirated by the most feckless and least desirable elements in an already broken economy. We don’t want to be associated with the looting and the thievery that is basically definitionally congruent with crypto right now.
In a Medium post from last year, you wrote that “if for the last decade, arts lovers had been buying and holding annual allotments of Muse Token, in addition to making their tax-deductible contributions, then this entire art form wouldn’t be in such precarity.” Do you still feel that way about it now?
Bodkin:I personally do feel that way. Again, I’m speaking in my capacity as Muse Token—this does not pertain to our work at Groupmuse. We haven’t talked about it for over a year at this point. [But] I still feel like [if instead of making] tax-deductible contributions, [arts donors] had been buying tokens that all these musicians were holding, and that all musicians, anytime Muse Token was purchased, saw an appreciation of the value of their holdings—I do feel that way. But the literacy is just not there, and now is not the time to make that case.
I read online that Groupmuse employees choose their own salaries with advice and emotional input from the other team members, is that right?
Schmolze: That was explicitly true for a good chunk of the pandemic. We ran out of money multiple times. Sam, me, and others forwent salaries and worked unpaid. We had to have really difficult conversations. It was this incredibly beautiful and powerful, if quite painful, series of conversations. And none of that would have been possible without our cooperative structure. This year, we received a small chunk of funding, which has been fantastic, and has allowed us to refill people’s hours.
Bodkin: We do our very darndest to have honest and transparent conversations about the finances. Everyone in the team is aware of this finite pot of resources and of everyone else who is trying to make a life doing this work. We really fostered this work community, this mission family. It’s a negotiation spearheaded by the individual and their needs, but it never happens in a vacuum. We’ve never been in a situation where it seemed like someone was making an untoward draw on our resources, because of our relentless emphasis on relationality and transparency. It would be really weird and unprecedented for someone to think of themselves as a free agent at Groupmuse, because our whole culture has been about relationality and the relationship to the big mission work. ¶
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Mr. Williams, 32, is one of modern Atlanta’s rap icons, having remade the genre in his image over the past decade. Combining psychedelic experimentalism in voice, melody, lyricism and fashion with a hardened street edge and a sneaky pop sensibility, Mr. Williams has earned three No. 1 albums on the Billboard chart and collaborated widely with musicians including Drake, Kanye West, Future and Travis Scott.
In 2018, as a featured artist, Young Thug reached No. 1 on the singles chart with the singer Camila Cabello’s “Havana.” The following year, he won a Grammy for song of the year as a writer of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America,” the first rap song to win that award.
The 10th of 1l children, Mr. Williams was raised in the Jonesboro South housing projects and along the desolate South Atlanta corridor Cleveland Avenue. He founded YSL in the area around late 2012, according to court documents, in association with two other men, both of whom have pleaded guilty in the case.
What exactly is Mr. Williams charged with?
The case centers on the Jan. 10, 2015, killing of Donovan Thomas Jr., known as Nut or Big Nut, in a drive-by shooting. Mr. Thomas, according to law enforcement, was a high-ranking member of another Bloods subset known as the Inglewood Family, or IF, as well as a behind-the-scenes connector in Atlanta rap music affiliated with the artists Rich Homie Quan and YFN Lucci.
Ms. Willis, the district attorney, said that Mr. Thomas’s killing led to a gang war that “created violence like Atlanta has never seen,” including more than 50 violent encounters, as YSL and its allies traded attacks with IF members and their affiliates in the crew known as YFN. (YFN Lucci, born Rayshawn Bennett, is also awaiting trial following a 2021 RICO indictment against YFN in Fulton County.)
Amid the daily reports of man’s inhumanity to man, it was a welcome relief to spend two hours in Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall with this life-affirming programme from the BBC Philharmonic under chief conductor John Storgårds. The UK premieres of two BBC commissions, flanked by Copland’s rousing Fanfare for the Common Man and Nielsen’s titanic intrepid Fourth Symphony – “The Inextinguishable” – offered plenty of intellectual red meat and enough adrenalin-charged jollies to lift the most downtrodden spirits.
James Lee III likes to contemplate contemporary issues through the prism of history. In the Michigan-born composer’s piano concerto, Shades of Unbroken Dreams, Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech serves as a launchpad to reflect the ongoing struggle for equal rights, especially, he says, for people of colour and women. Cast in three movements, it opens with a vivid exploration of dreams, calm and troubled, before quarrying King’s text and ending in a blaze of optimism.
Lee’s shiftily chromatic musical language and gift for colourful orchestration includes allusions to African drumming and the occasional nod to minimalism. In an accessible, crowd-pleasing work, episodes of Ravelian delicacy jostle with bellicose marches and celebratory climaxes of immense power that narrowly avoid toppling over into bombast. Alexandra Dariescu was the muscular soloist, plunging into dialectical games with the orchestra and taking the demanding piano writing in her stride.
Squeezing out every ounce of drama … John Storgårds. Photograph: BBC/ Emma Naylor
In contrast, the sobriety of Sebastian Fagerlund’s Helena’s Songfor violin and orchestra felt a trifle pale, though the Finnish composer’s music is certainly multihued. Storgårds was the violinist here, dividing his attention between the solo line and conducting the orchestra in a surefooted, if slightly self-effacing performance.
There was certainly nothing shy about the barnstorming brass and percussion in Copland’s musical pat on the back for the ordinary men and women who inevitably end up doing the politicians’ dirty work. Nor in the Nielsen, which received an electrifying, edge-of-the-seat performance. From the urgent, opulent opening to the duelling timpanists who begin the finale, Storgårds squeezed every ounce of drama from the score’s schizophrenic twists and turns. With the Philharmonic firing on all cylinders, it was an earthshattering performance of an under-programmed masterwork.
Isaiah Collier is keen on “the ancestors”. Opening this, his fourth album, the young Chicagoan pays fulsome vocal tribute to bygone jazz giants and soul stars, while his previous record, 2021’s Cosmic Transitions, was a handsome homage to John Coltrane’s masterpiece A Love Supreme. It consolidated Collier’s reputation as a shamanic saxophone prodigy (he’s also an adept multi-instrumentalist with a fine voice), and showed that his admiration for the spiritual jazz of Coltrane, Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders is about inspiration rather than imitation.
Parallel Universe is a different creature, the latest direct-to-disc recording from the Night Dreamer label, meaning it’s a live-in-studio performance without overdubs. Musically, it’s more diverse, folding funk and gospel flavours into a mix animated by vocal parts (from Jimetta Rose and Collier), and catchy riffs as much as knockdown sax, though there is ample post-bop wailing, especially on the title cut. The 13 minutes of Village Song return to the ancestral wellspring, moving from Yoruba chants to a sprightly melody led by Collier’s flute, while The Lean and Open the Door draw on 70s soul flavours with Rhodes piano and wah-wah guitar. Peace, love and liberty are much evoked, but in a dynamic way.
With a string of No. 1 hits like “Rich Girl, “Maneater” and “She’s Gone” in the 1970s and ’80s, followed by a more recent cultural resurgence, Daryl Hall and John Oates have long been one of pop music’s most celebrated duos.
But over the decades, there have been hints that things were not entirely copacetic between the two men whose names are almost always uttered in sequence. (Oates is the one with the famous mustache.) In the ’80s the group went on hiatus, and both members have at times pursued solo work. In 2020, they announced plans for a 19th studio album, but it never came to fruition; this year, the musicians performed separate tours.
Now, the discord is undeniable as Hall, 77, has filed a lawsuit in Nashville against Oates, 75, the partner with whom he was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2014. Because a judge allowed the complaint to be filed earlier this month under seal, details on the disagreement are scant, but court records classify it as a contract lawsuit.
Lawyers for the two men did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The lore of Hall and Oates dates back to 1967, when the musicians were students at Temple University. As Oates tells it in his 2017 memoir, both men were performing in separate bands at a sock hop in Philadelphia when gunfire broke out and they ended up in a service elevator together. A few weeks later, Oates’s band split up after two of its members joined the military, and Hall invited Oates to play guitar for his group. Later on, they started writing music together, landing a deal with Atlantic Records in 1972 that propelled them to pop stardom.
“John and I decided when we first came together as kids that we were both going to share the stage,” Hall, who has generally been seen as the principal writer and lead singer of the duo, told Classic Pop Magazine last year. “And that’s really the way that both of us have treated our careers.”
Known for their soulful music and bountiful heads of hair, the duo gained cultural cachet when their music became frequently sampled by hip-hop artists. Though their most recent studio album was a Christmas-themed effort in 2006, new generations have been exposed to their songs through TV and film placements: See Joseph Gordon Levitt’s elated strut to “You Make My Dreams” in “(500) Days of Summer.”
Hall and Oates have performed together often in recent years, including in a visit to the White House in 2015 and on their band’s most recent tour in 2021. In an interview that year with GQ, Oates said that he and his collaborator had “way more ups than downs,” adding, “It’s actually a miracle, I’m actually shocked that we are able to still play together and it’s great. It’s something that you have to really appreciate.”
Always prepared to do things differently, French conductor Laurence Equilbey, her Insula Orchestra and choir Accentus have collaborated with British artist Mat Collishaw on Sky Burial, a striking multimedia piece, first seen in Paris earlier this year, now given its first UK performance at the Barbican. Fauré’s familiar Requiem is prefaced by Gounod’s unfamiliar oratorio Saint François d’Assise, depicting the saint’s death; both works form a live soundtrack to a film by Collishaw that contemplates our common mortality before reflecting on, and depicting, the eastern practice of sky burial, in which the dead body is returned to nature by being exposed in the open to be eaten by vultures and scavenging animals.
Musically, this was beautiful, with Equilbey’s approach to both works at once reflective and austere. Insula’s period instruments conferred starkness on music that in lesser hands might all too easily cloy. Accentus sang with admirable focus: the altos and tenors circling in close harmony sounded genuinely unearthly in the Requiem’s Offertoire, while the sopranos were exquisite in both the In Paradisum and the angelic chorus that closes Saint François. Tenor Amitai Pati played the saint with great fervour. Oliver Barlow was the sweet-toned treble in the Requiem’s Pie Jesu, John Brancy the excellent, warm-voiced baritone in both works.
Collishaw’s film, meanwhile, hovers in unsettling, albeit spiritual territory. Black clouds scud across the moon as François lies dying, though an azure empyrean awaits him beyond the grave. A lone vulture hovers in the same blue during the Requiem’s Introit, before Collishaw’s camera begins gliding round a modern-day skyscraper, entering through windows as a dispassionate observer of death as a natural end, calmly accepted. Images of waterfalls and rivers suggest the final release of the soul. In the Libera Me, bodies are taken to the building’s roof, where the vultures gather and strip bones clean. The final shot, of Earth seen from space – or maybe heaven – is reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and strikes a slightly false note, though it dissolves into a star-scape that forms the backdrop to the evening’s encore, Fauré’s Cantique de Jean Racine, breathtakingly sung and almost unbearably moving after all that has preceded it.
Whenever Jelly Roll returns from touring, he falls into a depressed state. For a long time he couldn’t figure out why. The rapper turned country singer had written it off as an adrenaline dump; his body getting back to normal after long stretches of wild highs. But recently, he made a breakthrough with his therapist.
“Tour is about the only time that I’ve ever felt valuable in my life,” he says, speaking over Zoom from his home in Nashville, Tennessee. This big man, who spent years of his youth in prison, “felt like I brought no value to any situation; that I’ve only taken away. That I take up too much space.” When he performs he feels as though he’s giving something back. “Now I’m learning to find value when I’m not on stage, because that’s the real test.”
Today, Jelly Roll – his stage name, also that of a dessert, was given to him by his mother on account of him being a pudgy kid – is feeling good, and in demand. After eight hours of media commitments, he’ll fly to San Antonio to perform before flying to California for another show. “That’ll be my day, yes sir. It’s a great time to be alive, baby.”
You can see why. Earlier this month Jelly Roll – real name Jason DeFord – won the Country Music award for best new artist, and was nominated in four other categories. It was the peak of an already successful year on the awards trail: he had already bagged three CMT Music awards. Then, two days later, he was nominated for two Grammys, including in the prestigious category of best new artist. Aged 38 and after more than a dozen albums across different genres, he’s only now finding mainstream recognition. “There’s something that’s kind of brokenly beautiful about this almost 40-year-old man making his way, you know,” he says. “I’m the real Cinderella man.”
You can split DeFord’s career neatly in two at the release of his 2020 single Save Me. Before: the rapper who spent 15 years handing out mixtapes, self-promoting albums, taking any gig that paid. After: the bona fide tattooed, gold-toothed country star, who is now the new face of the genre, according to one recent interview. As he puts it, “the man changed and the music followed it”.
In both stages of his career, though, DeFord has always spoken candidly about his struggles and his need for redemption. He has suffered from drug addiction, been diagnosed with severe depression, has low self-esteem, and is plagued with insecurity. For a long time he had impostor syndrome, since replaced by fears of ephemeral success. In his own words, he’s been a loser, a stealer, a lost cause whose past still haunts him. His most recent album, Whitsitt Chapel, is a raw, aching distillation of all this hopelessness and torment.
“I see myself as a broken man that’s trying to put the pieces of the puzzle back together,” he says. “I looked at the whole experience as a cry for help. And it was heard. The music represents so many people that haven’t felt heard.”
DeFord’s ascension is the latest to suggest country music is broadening. But while the genre may be diversifying in terms of its sound and (to some extent) the artists themselves, in other areas it’s hardening. In a recent LA Times interview Maren Morris said that she had to step back from the genre owing to what she perceives as endemic industry racism and misogyny.
‘Country music’s never been more diverse’ … Jelly Roll. Photograph: Ashley Osborn
It’s a friction DeFord is aware of, but he doesn’t “do the politics stuff … I miss when politics didn’t get involved. I hate that we’re so tribal. Tribalism is higher than it’s ever been in America right now. When we’re down to politics being our last way to find a way to connect with people, we’re in trouble. This thing is going to hell in a handbasket.”
But is there still room for progressive music in the country space? “Yeah, for sure, man.” He cites Tyler Childers and Sturgill Simpson as two stars who have also been outspoken on liberal causes. “Maren Morris jumped off a winning horse. Bottom line. Period. You know what I mean? Country music’s never been bigger and better than it is right now. It’s never been more diverse.”
DeFord grew up in Antioch, Tennessee, a blue-collar suburb of Nashville he has described as “Anytown, USA”. His father was a meat salesman with a side hustle as a bookie, while his mother struggled with mental health issues and a drug addiction that started with pain medications. Through his childhood DeFord never felt comfortable: at school he was made fun of for his size, his clothes and his background. He found some worth in music, rapping in middle school and gathering crowds. But he knew no one around him that “actually had a career. I love when artists are like, ‘I dreamed about this since I was five.’ It’s like, nah, I didn’t. I didn’t think I was gonna make it out of being incarcerated most of my life.”
At 13 he spent time in a juvenile facility after being caught with weed. By 15, he says, he had tried most drugs: pills cocaine, acid, mushrooms, meth. At 16, he was charged as an adult for an aggravated assault case after attempting to steal weed from someone while armed and landed himself an 18-month sentence. For a decade he drifted in and out of prison. Offences included violating probation, failing drug tests and possession of crack with intent to resell.
His music was still there, on mixtapes that he handed out with the cocaine he sold, but life felt hopeless, so more time inside was hardly a deterrent. “Jail was like a high school reunion for me. You go in there, it’s like, ‘Oh, you’re still here, what’s up dude’,” he says. “The rotating door of the judicial system, it’s rough, man.”
In 2008, when DeFord was 23 and sitting in his cell, a guard told him he now had a baby girl (her mother was an ex-partner from a short-lived relationship). It was the motivation he needed to turn his life around. He had two plans. One was to study for his General Educational Diploma (he passed first time), become a social worker and do “whatever it took not to go to jail or get shot and killed”. The other was music.
At 25 he left prison for the last time and, without any studio help, built a sizeable fanbase. “I had a billion views on my YouTube channel before I signed a record deal,” he claims.
But initially, the music establishment didn’t want to know. He was too rock for country, too country for rap, too rap for rock. Record labels told him he was not a relatable figure, pointing to his obesity, tattoos and criminal record. “[I was told] nobody’s gonna buy a 400-pound man singing sad songs. Like, it’s just not in the bingo card for what the climate of music is.”
The tipping point came in 2020 with Save Me, his unvarnished cry for help with addiction. YouTube views rolled in, eventually in their hundreds of millions, and record labels started calling. Since then he has had two successful albums, Ballads of the Broken and Whitsitt Chapel.
Earlier this year DeFord released a documentary with ABC, Jelly Roll: Save Me, profiling his redemption arc. Most notable is his relationship with fans, young offenders and recovering addicts, who tell him how his music saved them or helped them grieve. He seems to feel every word. Jelly Roll gigs have been compared to church revivals and 12-step programmes. People hold up signs naming loved ones lost to addiction. He says he cries almost every night he’s on stage, usually when it comes to the part where he celebrates those in the audience in recovery, or who are there on behalf of people they love. He is almost in tears just talking about this.
Does it ever take its toll on him? “I don’t look at that as bad at all, man,” he says. “God gave me a platform to be useful and of service to people.” Why does he think people respond to him so viscerally? “It’s sad to say this, but there’s just not a lot of people that write the kind of songs I’m willing to write and talk about the topics I’m willing to talk about, but yet they’re so common.”
When DeFord sold out his gig at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, he donated the profits (an estimated $400,000) to a local nonprofit charity for at-risk kids and built a recording studio inside a youth centre. “When I was a kid, I feel like they focused on discipline and not rehabilitation, and dude, when you’re 16 years old, I don’t care what crime you committed, you don’t need to put your nose in the corner. You need a hug. You need somebody to tell you they love you.”
Jelly Roll plays his sold-out home town Bridgestone Arena concert. Photograph: John Shearer
DeFord is still feeling the impact of his own conviction; as a result of his felony conviction for robbery he still can’t vote, own a firearm or volunteer at most charities. Travel is complicated, too; he recently had to cancel a show in London. He has been in touch with the governor of Tennessee and while a pardon would change his life, his eyes are set on broader criminal justice reform. “I just want to be a part of the solution, because I saw what the problem was for sure.”
DeFord desperately wants action on the US fentanyl crisis, too. “Fifteen people an hour die in the United States of America right now.” He knows at least 30 people who have died. When he thinks about his own friends still struggling with addiction, he’s overcome with survivor’s guilt. “I have a phone full of the sob stories; guys I knew from the past. And they want two grand, five grand, a car, a house.” He laughs at the notion that people think he is in a position where he can just hand out houses. “So you read them. And it just hurts. The guilt you feel creates a spiral of shame. But it also hurts to separate yourself from these people.”
Some of his attempts to help have been stymied by a completely overwhelmed rehabilitation system. “I tried to pay for a guy to go to rehab recently and we called every rehab in America. The best one that we could find – with the resources even I have – had a two-week wait before you could get in. Like, what is he supposed to do for two weeks? Die? I can’t get him off of it – he’ll die right here on the floor.”
Today, DeFord still smokes weed and drinks, but has cut out the drugs he knew would kill him. “I walk the line when I talk about my recovery out of respect for the people that have actually worked the programme and completely sobered up,” he says. “I had to get rid of the lean [codeine-laced drink], the pills, the cocaine. I didn’t have a choice. It was me or them, and I had to learn to love myself.”
He lives with his wife, Bunnie DeFord, AKA Bunnie XO, a former sex worker from the west coast who now hosts the popular Dumb Blonde podcast, and his 15-year-old daughter, Bailee (from a previous relationship). (He also has one son born in 2016 from another previous relationship who lives with his mother.) He finally feels he belongs and has purpose. “I feel I’ve never felt more heard or seen or more appreciated and more loved than I have the last year,” he says. “The biggest thing is, I know in my heart, I changed. That’s what I know – I’m not who I was.”
The Billboard Music Awards took an experimental, digital-only approach to its ceremony this year, and fans are asking organizers to “NEVER” do it again.
The award show ― which has aired on various networks over the years including Fox, ABC and NBC ― diverted course from a traditional broadcast or livestream on Sunday, opting instead to share clips of performances and artists’ wins via Billboard’s website and social media channels.
The BBMAs billed the ceremony as a “reimagined award show concept” this year to “entertain fans with music and exclusive content,” according to a press release.
Performances and acceptance speeches didn’t take place in a single venue and instead occurred in a number of “global locations, in the midst of sold-out tours, and in custom venues,” organizers said.
Critics on X, formerly Twitter, weren’t happy with the changes, pointing to the lack of a livestream as well as technical difficulties with the videos on Billboard’s website.
Representatives of the award show as well as Dick Clark Productions, the producer behind the ceremony, were not immediately available for comment.
It all started in a loft in Tribeca, New York, long before it was a trendy neighbourhood. “I had 47,000 records and nobody wanted them,” recalls Bob George, who had just published a discography of punk and new wave music. “That led a lot of people coming to me and saying you have to save this stuff; no one else is saving it. That got the ball rolling in my loft in what is now fashionable Tribeca, which was an incredibly unfashionable war zone in 1974 when I was first there.”
George turned his record collection into the ARChive of Contemporary Music (Arc) in 1985 with co-founder David Wheeler. The non-profit music library and research centre now contains more than 3m sound recordings or over 90m songs, making it one of the biggest popular music collections in the world. Donors and board members have included David Bowie, Jonathan Demme, Lou Reed, Martin Scorsese and Paul Simon.
The Arc is not open to the public but has been a vital resource for film-makers, writers and researchers ranging from Ken Burns looking for a song for his series Baseball to the new Grammy Hall of Fame and Museum in Los Angeles needing cover art for its inducted recordings. Now, however, this unique treasure trove is under existential threat.
The Arc cannot remain at its current Hudson Valley premises indefinitely and is in need of a new and bigger home. “We have to move and we don’t know when we’ll have to move and the collection is really at risk because it’s all on pallets,” says George, who dreams of a patron like James Smithson, the British scientist who left his estate to the US to found the Smithsonian Institution. “We’re looking for someone to help us buy a very wonderful property or for us to build a new building on vacant land in upstate New York.”
After growing up in Youngstown, Ohio, George moved to New York in 1974 as a visual arts student and started collecting records as a DJ. In 1981 he released Laurie Anderson’s first single, O Superman, which sold nearly a million copies worldwide and made it to number on the UK singles chart. He was a guest on John Peel’s beloved BBC radio show, sneaking in little-known records from New York, and took music to European broadcasters too. People kept giving him records that other collections turned down.
Some of the 18,000 recordings in the Keith Richards Blues Collection. Photograph: Arc NYC
“I was doing the book and then doing Peel shows and it accidentally became this large collection that nobody wanted. They kept saying, oh, we collect classical, we collect Broadway, we collect ethnic music. I said, well, I have funk, reggae, African and hip-hop and they said, oh, no, we don’t collect any of that. Forty years later, I say, you put all those together and that’s what music has become.”
The simple goal of the archive, which has always had a peripatetic existence, is preservation. “We have no interest in quality,” George cheerfully admits. “It started that way from the very beginning because there’s no way to tell what’s valuable in the future. Everybody brings their own criteria and tastes to things in their own time. But the future is quite different, as we hope.”
The archive has never received aid from any city, state or federal organisation but its scale gives the Library of Congress a run for its money. It has absorbed major collections from musicians and fans and is home to most of Rolling Stone Keith Richards’ extensive blues inventory.
George dispatched two semi-trailers to a condemned house in Boston sinking under the weight of Jeep Holland’s set of more than 125,000 recordings and over 2,500 signed albums from the likes of the Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley and the Sex Pistols. “Going towards the bathroom, he has a gas stove, the pilot light is on, there are records in the oven. It was just a storage space ... His car had become so full of records that he abandoned it and rented a car.”
George has made repeat trips to countries such as Brazil, Cambodia, Colombia, Cuba, Japan, Jordan, Laos and Thailand. The Arc contains Demme’s personal collection of Haitian albums. More than 150,000 pieces of world music have been catalogued; there are plenty more to do. “We’ve tried to get as much of that material as possible so that collection is just fabulous.”
The Arc preserves copies of every recording in all known formats. It has electronically catalogued more than 400,000 sound recordings and digitised 200,000 with the Internet Archive – more than any other public university or private library in America. It also contains more than 3m pieces of material including photos, videos, DVDs, books, magazines, press kits, sheet music, ephemera and memorabilia.
The late Andy Rourke of the Smiths at Arc looking at Smiths records he had never seen. Photograph: Arc NYC
George says: “We catalogued 105,000 singles just recently; we have another 200,000 or 300,000 to go. This is the first way a band at one time got their feet in the water. They put out one or two or three singles. If they did hits, they got the chance to do an album and so much of this material does not exist on LP or CD. Little by little more of it might be streaming because of YouTube, as people can get away with murder on YouTube, which is great, but YouTube will disappear. Everything commercial will disappear.”
Among those who have turned to the archive is the Oscar-winning director Ang Lee, who wanted records by the singer Bert Sommer for his film Taking Woodstock. “The archive is amazing because we don’t know what we have until somebody needs it. We’ve been into the stacks and we found five LPs by Bert Sommer. For me, it’s like I have no idea who this guy is and what he did; he’s sort of a folkie. For Quincy Jones, we just sent him a list of the 8,000 things that he’s either produced or on.
“Research was how we basically stayed alive along with the largesse of the rock stars or celebrities that we had hooked up with. The idea was never to open to the public but that’s what we want to do now. I don’t think it’s untrue that we’re one of the largest in the world and that we want to make that available. We’ve tried to save two copies so there will always be a listening copy and then that would then become a listening library.”
George hopes the new archive will be open to students, educators, historians, musicians, authors, journalists and the general public. An anonymous donor has come forward with a million dollars to help realise that dream but more money is urgently needed. One possible new home is an abandoned IBM campus spanning 34 acres, although that would cost $8-10m. George is considering partnering with an upstate university and has plans to offer residencies for scholars.
“People could come in and produce a work, and that would go out into the world. It could be a blog, essay, tape, compilation, new recording, whatever. We’re really quite un-academic. I’m against it somewhat and I’d like people to have ideas and bring those ideas and put them back into the world as opposed to making it an interactive experience for everybody. I don’t want to be Disney World. It’s nice to have seminars. It’s nice to have listening parties. It’s nice to have dances.”
