Month: September 2023

After dealing with a public set of health scares over the last few months, Tori Kelly said that she is ready to get back to work.

Speaking with Entertainment Tonight in an interview published Tuesday (Sept. 12), the 30-year-old singer-songwriter reflected on her hospitalization back in July after she collapsed in public reportedly due to blood clots in her legs and lungs. “It happened out of nowhere,” Kelly said. “I was feeling just a little tired throughout the day, and my heart rate was kind of high. I was at dinner with my husband and [I’m] so thankful he was there because I ended up collapsing.”

The Grammy-winner said she was not aware that she had blood clots — she still is unsure of how they came about — but added that she’s very grateful to be healthy again. “On one end it was scary, and then on another end, I did feel this sense of unexplainable peace that it was gonna be OK,” she said. “I just felt like God had me and it was gonna be OK, but yeah, definitely in the midst of that it was just kind of a confusing whirlwind.”

Kelly’s interview comes after the singer first updated her fans following her hospitalization with a handwritten note posted to her Instagram in late July. “As you may have heard, I’m dealing with some unexpected health challenges. It’s been a scary few days but I can feel your prayers & can’t stop thinking about you,” she wrote at the time. “I’m feeling stronger now & hopeful but unfortunately there are still some things to uncover.”

In her new interview, though, Kelly revealed that she is treating her blood clots with “medication and blood thinner,” and that she remains confident that she will be able to complete her upcoming Take Control Tour while monitoring her health status.

“I’m able to tour now. I’m back [and] healthy, and so it was definitely scary but I think it’s definitely given me a different outlook on life and just being so grateful that I made it through that and [that I] am here now,” she said. “Looking out in the audience and seeing all my amazing fans again has been keeping my spirits high.”

Kelly’s nine-date tour kicked off on Sunday (Sept. 10) in Toronto, and will continue throughout the U.S. until her final pair of shows in Los Angeles on Sept. 25 and 26.

Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny graces the cover of the new Vanity Fair issue, and in a wide-ranging, candid interview, gives insight into new music, how he really felt about his album of the year Grammy loss and addresses his relationship with Kendall Jenner.

The “Me Porto Bonito” singer explains that when he lost album of the year at the Grammys on Feb. 4, he had mixed feelings. Although he understood how momentous that win could’ve been, Benito felt some sort of relief. “It wasn’t because I didn’t feel I was deserving or because I thought I couldn’t win. It was because I don’t really want to hear myself,” he said in the interview published Tuesday (Sept. 12). “I know I was going to get emotional. It would have been powerful and hard, dealing with that pride.”

Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti made history as the first all Spanish-language album to score a nod in the album of the year category. (The award went to Harry Styles’ Harry’s House.) It wasn’t until after the ceremony that he began to question his loss, he explained. “I didn’t even feel like [album of the year] had been stolen from me until the media started saying [it] and I saw that everybody thought I deserved the prize and everybody thought it was a robbery. … That’s when they kind of convinced me and I said, ‘Well, yes, it was a robbery then.’”

While Bad Bunny is reluctant to get into specific details about a new album, which according to the interview is slated to release sometime in the fall, he’s a bit more vocal about not having to clear anything up with anyone about his outings with model Jenner, with whom he’s been linked to romantically.

“They don’t know how you feel, they don’t know how you live, they don’t know anything, and I really don’t want them to know,” he said. “I’m not really interested in clarifying anything because I have no commitment to clarify anything to anyone. I am clear and my friend Jomar … and my mother is clear. They are the only ones to whom I have to clarify anything.”

Bunny has reportedly been dating Jenner since early this year. The two were spotted in April while at Coachella together, and in May, they sat courtside at a Lakers game, wearing matching snakeskin boots. They still haven’t officially confirmed their romance.

“There are people who say that artists have to put up with it,” he added. “I don’t have to accept anything and everything because I wanted to be an artist. At the end of the day, you listen to me because you want to. I don’t force you to.”

With summer over — not officially until Sept. 23, but for chart purposes, given that Billboard has announced the season-end 2023 Songs of the Summer chart, which measures performance on the weekly Billboard Hot 100 between Memorial Day and Labor Day — a look at the season’s biggest hits reveals what the average summer smash sounded like this year.

Here is an analysis of compositional characteristics of the survey’s top 10 titles at the season’s close.

To recap, here is a rundown of the Songs of the Summer chart’s top 10 for 2023:

Summer of Love

Love was in the air in the summer of 2023. A hefty 80% of the Song of the Summer chart’s season-wrapping top 10 features a love/relationship lyrical theme, with the majority sporting romantic subject matter. Among them, Morgan Wallen’s “Last Night” chronicles his continued desire for his love interest despite their push-and-pull dynamic, while Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” and SZA’s “Kill Bill” narrate breakups.

Also notably, and logically, the positive songs about love include major-key tonalities, while the more negative ones are complemented by minor-key tonalities.

Meanwhile, only one song in the above 10 leaned toward the platonic end of the spectrum: Taylor Swift’s “Karma” featuring Ice Spice.

Playing Hooky, in the Summer

The biggest summer 2023 hits were earworms, even if they weren’t as fast as might be expected.

While all hits in the season-end Songs of the Summer top 10 feature catchy hooks, largely in their choruses, many bolster their hook presence by hitting the listener with a notable, recognizable hook in their intros (60% of the 10 songs) and/or following their choruses with additional post-chorus hook reiteration (70%).

Meanwhile, when most people think of summer hits, they typically think of uptempo, highly danceable bangers. However, summer 2023’s top 10 includes only three songs at over 100 beats per minute, two of which have a notable dance/club influence: “Flowers” (118 BPM) and Rema and Selena Gomez’s “Calm Down” (107 BPM).

The greatest share of the summer’s top 10 is 80-99 BPM (four titles), including Luke Combs’ “Fast Car,” Swift’s “Cruel Summer” and “Karma,” and “Kill Bill.”

The remaining three songs are under 79 BPM, comprising the R&B/hip-hop hits “All My Life” by Lil Durk featuring J. Cole, SZA’s “Snooze” and Gunna’s “Fukumean.”

Familiar, But Unique

While hit songs possess a host of commonalities that make them familiar to audiences and enable them to easily connect, most also have unique qualities that help them stand out from the pack. The 10 biggest hits on 2023’s Songs of the Summer chart for the season are no exception. Among them:

“Fast Car” has an unusual song structure by today’s mainstream standards. Most hits are based on a core A-B-A-B-C-B form (whereby A: verse; B: chorus; and C: bridge). “Fast Car,” written by Tracy Chapman, who first sent the song to the weekly Hot 100’s top 10 in 1988, features an I-A-T-A-T-A-T-PC-T-B-T-A-T-B-T-A-T-B-T-PC-O form (I: intro; A: verse; T: turnaround; PC: pre-chorus; B: chorus; and O: outro).

“Calm Down” features standout qualities including repetition, more than the other season-end summer top 10s, and the weekly Hot 100’s top 10 in general; hooks combining proper language, slang, nonsensical phrases and Nigerian Pidgin; and an Afrobeats sound, which, despite gaining traction, is still relatively uncommon in the Hot 100’s top 10 and is not present in any of the other top 10 songs of the summer.

Plus, “Flowers” is the only top 10 hit of the summer with a 1970s disco influence and “Kill Bill” features an atypical ‘60s psychedelic influence, while its lyrical hook (“I might kill my ex”) definitely sets it apart.

David and Yael Penn are the co-founders of Hit Songs Deconstructed. In 2022, Hit Songs Deconstructed and fellow song analysis platform MyPart partnered to launch ChartCipher, a new platform analyzing hit songs, as defined by Billboard’s charts.

Olivia Rodrigo launches a fiery barrage of pinpoint lyrical missiles at unnamed targets on her laceratingly catchy second album, GUTS. But ask the Grammy-winning 20-year-old singer to go into specifics about who she’s put a bullseye on in her lyrics and the singer who snarls “I wanna meet his mom/ Just to tell her her son sucks” on the new album’s “Get Him Back!” is not going there.

Such as in a new Rolling Stone cover story, in which interviewer Angie Martoccio attempts to get an answer to a burning question about whether Olivia is currently feuding with her musical inspiration Taylor Swift. “I don’t beef with anyone,” she said about the singer she said she was “in awe” of constantly in an 2021 interview with Ryan Seacrest; the pair also exchanged letters, Swift gifted Rodrigo a ring she wore while recording Red and the singer later gave Taylor (as well as producer Jack Antonoff) co-writing credits on the Sour songs “1 Step Forward, 3 Steps Back” and “Deja Vu.”

“I’m very chill. I keep to myself,” Rodrigo explained, despite heated rumors that the GUTS song “The Grudge” is about a Swift fallout. “I have my four friends and my mom, and that’s really the only people I talk to, ever. There’s nothing to say. There’s so many Twitter conspiracy theories. I only look at alien-conspiracy theories.”

Pressed further on how the co-writing credits on her debut happened — she also retroactively gave Paramore a co-write on “Good 4 U” — Rodrigo demurred. “It’s not something that I was super involved with,” she said, making it unclear if her hand was forced in the matter. “It was more team-on-team. So, I wouldn’t be the best person to ask.”

As for whether she might do the same to a young artist if they were clearly inspired by one of her songs, or if she’d slough it off as Elvis Costello did when the clear similarities between his “Pump It Up” and her “Brutal” were pointed out, Rodrigo said she doesn’t think she would. “But who’s to say where I’ll be in 20, 30 years,” she said. “All that I can do is write my songs and focus on what I can control.”

The profile also featured a co-sign from Katy Perry about the intense pressure to follow-up a debut album, with Perry recalling that she faced similar angst while recording 2010’s Teenage Dream. “You have your whole life to make your first record, and then maybe two years to make your second — while going through a real psychological change as well,” said Perry, who added that she offered to be Rodrigo’s pop music mentor and sounding board. “Like, ‘Oh, my God, I can buy my mom a car,’ and, ‘Oh, my God, I don’t have to have the stress from my past.’ But it’s a mental jungle out there.”

For the record, Olivia said, even though there’s a song on GUTS called “Teenage Dream” — and she calls Perry’s album of the same name one of her favorite sophomore collections — it was totally a coincidence. “We thought about changing the name,” she said. “If someone looks up ‘Teenage Dream’ on Spotify, there’s no way in heck that my song’s going to pull up first.”

Rodrigo also noted that the goal on GUTS was to make a more “playful” record than her debut, Sour, which she said was “definitely a breakup record, much to my chagrin.”

One of the pop third rails Rodrigo would also not touch was the speculation that her breakthrough hit from that album, “Drivers License,” was inspired by a love triangle that allegedly involved her, her ex, fellow High School Musical: The Musical: The Series co-star Joshua Bassett and another Disney actress/singer, Sabrina Carpenter.

“I mean, that’s a tricky one. I actually, genuinely did not read the article you’re talking about,” she said of an story from 2022 in which Bassett said he had a major health crisis as a result of the backlash from strangers about the alleged love triangle. “But, yeah, all that stuff was really crazy. It’s all been handled privately… Handled isn’t the right word, but it’s just not something I like talking about publicly. I take all that stuff seriously, but it happens in privacy. I’m not going to put out a statement. That’s phony. We’re all just people at the end of the day. I deal with it on a person-to-person level that people on Twitter don’t see.”