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Read ArticlesLainey Wilson accepted the Record Breaker Award presented by Lone River Ranch Water at Billboard’s Country Power Players 2024.
Lainey Wilson:
First of all, I just want to say thank you so much, Billboard, for having me here today. This is a big deal. A really big deal. It is an absolute honor to be just surrounded by people in country music in this room. I look around and I see so many people who have supported me from the beginning. And so many people who I get to call and get advice from and people who lead me and guide me. And this is a wild ride. So you definitely have to have those kinds of people in your life. Thank you, Kelsea. She’s over there running her mouth. But thank you so much for presenting me with this award. She is such a trailblazer and I’m so thankful that she has, what she has done for women and country music. It’s an honor to know her as an artist, but also as a friend, even though like she mentioned, the day after the Grammys, the Internet thought we hated each other. But what the Internet does not see is that she actually showed up to my Grammy party to celebrate me and to celebrate my win. And that’s the kind of person that she is. And that’s the kind of people that I like to surround myself with. So thank you so much for being here. Being named Record Breaker, that’s something that I would have dreamed about a few years ago.
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Lainey Wilson Accepts Record Breaker Award | Billboard Country Power Players 2024
The Lone River founder helped set the stage for Lainey Wilson, the honoree for the Record Breaker Award presented by Lone River Ranch Water at Billboard’s Country Power Players 2024.
Katie Beale Brown:
Welcome to Texas. I am the founder of Lone River makers of Ranch Water and Ranch Rita, which I hope you’re drinking a lot of tonight. If not go crack open a can. We are so grateful to be a part of this event and to get to celebrate these incredible artists today. I started Lone River because I wanted to give people a taste of where I come from in far West Texas, where my family has been ranching for over 100 years. And Love River is more than a drink to us. It’s part of our culture, and it represents the values of the American West. And these are the values that we have made every single decision around. It’s led us to every single person that we’ve had the opportunity to work with, people like Lainey Wilson. And tonight we get to honor a woman who knows a little something about celebrating where she comes from. She has inspired millions of people on her whirlwind world tour, and I am so lucky to call her a friend. So tonight without further ado, I am honored to say that Lainey Wilson is this year’s recipient of the Record Breaker Award and here to present her with the honor is none other than Kelsea Ballerini, three-time ACM Award nominee.
Lone River Founder Katie Beal Brown Set the Stage for Lainey Wilson | Billboard Country Power Players 2024
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Ready to hit the gym in style? When you’re on the hunt for a gym bag, versatility is key. From accommodating your yoga mat to stashing your workout clothes and everything in between, it’s all about finding a bag that fits your lifestyle and keeps you organized.
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If you are looking for a simple yet spacious option, consider this Nike Brasilia Training Duffel Bag. With its 41L capacity, it provides ample space for all your gym essentials. Whether hitting the gym or going to a dance class, this duffel bag is a one of a kind companion for your active lifestyle.
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8 Gym Bags for Working Out & More: Here’s Where to Buy Them
It takes a lot to craft the perfect, heartfelt yearbook message and Jake Gyllenhaal goes through the stress in a new Saturday Night Live promo ahead of his hosting gig released on Wednesday (May 15).
In the one-minute clip, SNL cast member Marcello Hernández approaches Gyllenhaal — who’s mid-practicing a Southern accent — and asks him to sign his yearbook in honor of the season finale on Saturday (May 18). The Road House actor then spends an excessive amount of time to think of a perfect message to write for Hernández.
“Enjoy, papi,” Gyllenhaal tells Hernández after all the drama and the effort, giving him a wink. When the comedian takes a look at the message, all it reads is “B Kewl” and signed “Jack.”
“Yo, you didn’t even spell your name right,” Hernández says, before noting, “Whatever. It’s a fake yearbook for a promo anyway.”
Sabrina Carpenter — who’s fresh off of scoring her first-ever Billboard Hot 100 top 10 hit with “Espresso” — will bring her Eras Tour- and Coachella-tested performance skills to 30 Rock to serve as the musical guest for the upcoming episode. Gyllenhaal, meanwhile, is hosting for his third time.
Watch the promo below, and catch Gyllenhaal’s full episode of Saturday Night Live this weekend (May 4) at 11:30 p.m. ET on NBC, before it begins streaming on Peacock.
Jake Gyllenhaal Puts a Lot of Effort Into Signing ‘SNL’ Yearbook in New Promo
With an upcoming album titled Hit Me Hard and Soft, you’d think that Billie Eilish would favor contact sports over basketball. Regardless, the pop star spent one of the last days before her third studio LP arrives enjoying a game of hoops at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday (May 14), sitting courtside amongst several other stars.
The pop star was present at Game Five of the Eastern Conference Second Round Playoffs to watch the New York Knicks face off against the Indiana Pacers, rocking a plaid shirt, shorts and cap combo in a front-row seat next to Jennifer Hudson. The “Spotlight” vocalist’s rumored partner, rapper Common, sat on Hudson’s other side.
Also in attendance were stars such as Chris Rock, Spike Lee, Ben Stiller, Billy Crystal and Nicholas Braun. The game ended with the Knicks taking a 3-2 series lead over the Pacers, winning 121-91.
The event comes just two days ahead of the release of Hit Me Hard and Soft, a 10-track set produced by Eilish’s brother and frequent collaborator, Finneas. While in New York, the “What Was I Made For?” artist will hold an album listening party at Barclays Center in Brooklyn Wednesday (May 15) before doing the same in Los Angeles the next day.
For those who couldn’t snag free tickets to either event, Eilish will also release a listening experience for Hit Me Hard and Soft across AMC Theatres with Dolby Atmos offerings in the U.S. The showings will only be available for two days starting May 16, and tickets will cost $5.
Aside from a couple sneak peeks here and there — including a snippet of the song “Birds of a Feather” in a newly shared teaser for Netflix’s Heartstopper — the nine-time Grammy winner has largely kept details about her new project on lock leading up to its release on Friday (May 17). She told fans from the jump that she wouldn’t be releasing any singles ahead of time, noting in her initial album announcement, “i wanna give it to you all at once.”
“I feel like this album is me,” she told Rolling Stone in April. “It’s not a character. It feels like the When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? version of me. It feels like my youth and who I was as a kid.”
Billie Eilish Watches New York Knicks Game 5 Courtside With Jennifer Hudson & Common
Seth England accepts the Executive of the Year award at Billboard’s Country Power Players 2024.
Seth England:
Hey, everyone. I just want to start by saying thank you for such a huge honor. I’m a little overwhelmed, to be honest, by such a big honor when in so many ways, I feel like, you know, the mission of Big Loud is just getting started. But today, I stop and realize that it’s been about nine or 10 years, almost on the nose for the record label. And it just it astounds me, because I remember a moment when we counted the money we’d saved in the account. And we knew we had three and a half years if we’d sold no records, and we did sell some records and we kept going.
Big Loud’s a creator first business. So I’d like to first start off by thanking the creators to the big artists, songwriters, and record producers — we are nothing without your genius and creative spirit. I will also want to give a big shout-out to the department heads and employees at Big Loud. This award is just as much yours as it is mine. Big Loud was never just about myself, Joey Craig, and Chief. It’s about all of us.
I also want to give a big shout out to my wife, Kiyah, who constantly supports the crazy schedule we have. This week alone, we rented an Airbnb to bring our children down, because we have to go to New York right away on Friday and couldn’t imagine being gone that long.
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Seth England Accepts the Executive of the Year Award | Billboard’s Country Power Players 2024
After Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker made a series of misogynistic, homophobic and transphobic remarks while quoting Taylor Swift during his commencement address at Benedictine College on Saturday (May 11), GLAAD president Sarah Kate Ellis decided to set the record straight.
In a statement Wednesday (May 15) reacting to Butker’s speech — in which the footballer urged graduating women to become housewives and said Pride Month represented “deadly sins,” among other things — Ellis called out the kicker for his remarks. “Traditionally, commencement speeches are meant to celebrate and inspire graduates and their families,” she wrote. “Kansas City Chiefs player Harrison Butker’s commencement speech was not only a clear miss, it was inaccurate, ill-informed, and woefully out of step with Americans about Pride, LGBTQ people and women.”
Continuing, Ellis urged other athletes and people watching to take note of their influential voices. “Those with expansive platforms, especially athletes, should use their voices to uplift and expand understanding and acceptance in the world,” she said. “Instead, Butker’s remarks undermine experiences not of his own and reveal him to be one who goes against his own team’s commitment to the Kansas City community, and the NFL’s standards for respect, inclusion, and diversity across the League.”
In his address, Butker attacked everything from abortion to President Joe Biden to supposed “dangerous gender ideologies,” going as far as calling out the “deadly sins sort of Pride that has an entire month dedicated to it.” But the kicker’s most-quoted remarks came when he addressed the women in Benedictine College’s graduating class, telling them that they should consider embracing “one of the most important titles of all: homemaker,” rather than “thinking about all of the promotions and titles you’re going to get in your career.”
At one point in his speech, Butker also quoted Taylor Swift — who is famously dating his teammate Travis Kelce — when criticizing bishops who “become overly familiar” with their parishioners. “As my teammate’s girlfriend says, ‘Familiarity breeds contempt,'” he said.
Billboard has reached out to both the NFL and the Kansas City Chiefs for comment.
GLAAD President Slams Harrison Butker’s Homophobic, Misogynistic Remarks As ‘Inaccurate, Ill-Informed’
Yesterday, Google held its annual I/O conference keynote and, as expected, introduced a bevy of AI tools and products that it believes will completely transform the company as we know it today.
Writing on the company blog, CEO Sundar Pichai explained how the 2023 launch of Google’s Gemini AI model was the start of a new era for the search giant. “A year ago on the I/O stage we first shared our plans for Gemini: a frontier model built to be natively multimodal from the beginning, that could reason across text, images, video, code, and more,” he wrote. “It marks a big step in turning any input into any output — an ‘I/O’ for a new generation.”
And to help introduce that new generation, Google made a commercial using one of the most beloved songs in Jay-Z’s catalog — 2003’s “Public Service Announcement (Interlude),” from his eighth full length The Black Album. The ad, called “Welcome to the Gemini Era,” premiered on YouTube and features clips from the keynote that highlight all the new products and functionalities that AI model will bring to consumers.
The clip starts with the somber keys Just Blaze sampled from The Little Boy Blues’s “The Seed of Love” as Google’s homepage appears on screen. Then, as Jay bellows out, “Allow me to reintroduce myself! My name is,” the Google logo transforms to highlight new AI features.
The tenor of the yesterday’s presentation was that of rebirth. Each executive who took the stage explained how every Google product will be infused with the power of Gemini. Search, imagine and video generation, virtual assistants, and more will all inherit new features thanks to this company-wide AI push.
Outside of Gemini’s new multimodal capabilities, the most interesting part of the keynote for creators and artists involved the introduction of Veo, Google DeepMind’s generative video model. According to Kory Mathewson, a Google DeepMind research scientist, Veo is “trained to convert input text to output video.” And to help introduce that product, Google tapped Donald Glover who praised the technology because it will allow artists to “make a mistake faster, which is all you really want at the end of the day.”
You can watch the entire keynote presentation below.
Google Reintroduces Itself With Help From This Jay-Z Track
When Reba McEntire watched last year’s ACM Awards and saw her buddies and fellow country icons Dolly Parton and Garth Brooks co-hosting the show and leading the festivities, she knew she wanted to join in again on the ACMs fun.
“They were so great, I was like, ‘I want to do that again!,’” McEntire told Billboard, just days before it was announced that McEntire will host the Academy of Country Music Awards for a 17th time on May 16, when the 59th annual awards show streams on Amazon Prime Video, returning to the Ford Center at The Star in Frisco, Texas.
“I was really anxious to get back on the stage,” she said. “Going back to Texas is always good for me — because that’s close to home, southeastern Oklahoma.”
The ACMs, which launched in 1966, has highlighted country music’s biggest stars for nearly six decades. But the awards show’s team is still intent on breaking new ground: In 2022, the ACM Awards made history by becoming the first major music awards show to exclusively livestream when it shifted from CBS to Amazon Prime Video.
McEntire, a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, has 16 ACM Awards trophies to her credit, and nine ACM entertainer of the year nominations. She won the entertainer of the year accolade in 1994.
She says promoting new music and spending time with industry friends — as well as making new ones — are always big draws for taking part in the awards show ceremony.
“You get to go have fun with all your friends and buddies that you’ve gotten to know over the last 45, 50 years in the business and meet new people,” she said. “It’s the best place to get to meet the new artists, and that’s what I really enjoy getting to do. The last time I was at an awards show, it was Lainey Wilson. I got to hang out with her a bit, and Jelly Roll. Meeting new people and making new friends is what I love about the business.”
Having hosted a previous 16 ACM Awards ceremonies when the show was held in Las Vegas and various cities in California, McEntire knows well the work involved in preparing for hosting — from working with trusted writers to create and refine dialogue used for the evening, to balancing multiple outfit changes (McEntire says this year’s fashion theme will lean “a little more tough, sexy cowgirl”). She easily summarizes the essentials to being a great awards show host: “Keep it interesting, keep it running smoothly and show up. Be on time, be prepared.”
Of course, with live television, anything can happen. McEntire recalled how at the 2004 ACM Awards, producer Dick Clark assisted her in filling a time delay after performer Keith Urban’s guitar had been lost backstage.
“Dick was like, ‘Get out there and stall,'” she said. “I panicked. I mean, I got booed offstage in 1978 for telling jokes because I only had three songs to sing, so I think I have flashbacks of that when somebody says, ‘Get out there and wing it.’ I’m not [actor/comedian] Melissa Peterman — I cannot do that. So, Dick had to come out and help with it, and we got through it.”
Over the years, she’s learned a few key strategies for filling in any gaps.
“If anything does happen, they don’t have to depend on me to fill the space,” she said, “I’m going to have everybody mapped out in the audience that I will take a microphone down to, and they will be the ones to bridge the gap. There’s a lot of interesting characters in a country music industry party, so I will be making my rounds down into the audience.”
Through leading the ACM Awards more than a dozen times, McEntire has hosted in various configurations — both solo and co-hosting alongside artists including George Strait, Blake Shelton, Alan Jackson and John Schneider. Still, she does have a couple of bucket list people she would love to co-host with — including her beau, Rex Linn.
“I’d love to co-host with Rex. Rex is the biggest fan of music,” she said. “He and Melissa Peterman are two people who love music more than anybody. Boy, that would be fun. Melissa, Rex and me — the three of us hosting it? That would be a hoot. I would just sit back and have an iced tea and let them do all the work,” she quipped.
In addition to hosting, McEntire has over the years been responsible for some of the ACM Awards’ most memorable performances, such as in 2007, when she performed “Because of You” alongside Kelly Clarkson. This year, McEntire will also perform her new single, “I Can’t,” which she called “a very strong woman’s song about standing up for herself.”
And yes — a new album is in the works, she says. McEntire worked on the project with producer Dave Cobb, who also worked on her 2021 album Reba: Revived Remixed Revisited.
“We’ve been working on it for over a year now, so not sure when it will be released, but I’m very proud of it,” McEntire said. “We wanted to do something a little more laid-back, with not so many instruments on it. But by the time we got more involved with it, we started putting more instruments back in and making it to where we like it.”
Ever a passionate music fan herself, McEntire says one of the projects she’s been listening to lately is Lauren Daigle’s Look Up Child. “I was listening to her album the other day. I love her singing and I got to sing ‘Back to God’ with her on the ACMs years ago — that was one of the highlights.”
McEntire added, “The ACMs have been very good to me, and the collaborations I’ve gotten to do, not only singing but hosting, have been very memorable.”
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Reba McEntire Talks the ACM Awards, Keys to Awards Show Hosting: ‘Keep It Interesting, Keep It Running Smoothly and Show Up’
40 years ago, a style of new music was emerging from Chicago. The sound was made for dance floors and played at clubs around the city including the Warehouse, a space after which the nascent genre — house music — was named.
Four decades later, house music is a global phenomenon heard in underground clubs, at massive music festivals and — via Beyoncè’s 2023 Renaissance tour — on stadium speakers.
This summer, the genre’s hometown of Chicago is celebrating house music’s anniversary and global impact with an official event series, House Music 40. The new run of parties and parades begins on May 29 with a free daytime party at Chicago’s Daley Plaza that will feature sets from hometown heroes Derrick Carter and DJ Heather. The event will be hosted by Mother Diva, a Chicago scene mainstay and the self proclaimed “Madam Ambassador of House.”
Starting at 12 p.m., this lunch break party is co-sponsored by ARC Music Festival, which launched in 2021 as a platform to celebrate Chicago house and all varieties of the genre that came in its wake.
“I was raised on house music here in Chicago. It’s one of those rare global movements where we can still show our love and appreciation to a lot of the original pioneers and innovators,” ARC co-founder John Curley said in a statement. “House Music 40 understands that after everything those DJs have given us, it’s important for us as fans to give back. It’s impossible to fully thank someone for the gift of house music, but in every action we take with ARC we aim to keep letting them know that ARC is a living monument dedicated to them and house music everywhere.”
House Music 40 is a non-profit that aims to raise awareness of the contributions of Chicago house artists to the global dance scene and raise money for members of the Chicago house scene that are experiencing health issues.
Additional anniversary events this summer include the Chicago House Music Conference on May 31, the Chicago House Music Festival on June 2, the Inaugural House Music Parade and Festival on August 31 and other citywide celebrations.
ARC Music Festival returns to Chicago this Aug. 30-Sept. 1 at the city’s Union Park. The lineup includes Carter and DJ Heather, Marshall Jefferson, Dennis Ferrer, Armand Van Helden, Disclosure, Chicago-born star Honey Dijon, genre icons Carl Cox playing b2b with Green Velvet, German techno pioneer Sven Väth, a redux set from Kaskade, current phenom Dom Dolla, grime veteran Skepta and many more.
Chicago Announces Celebration of House Music’s 40th Anniversary
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