Chris Willman-Senior Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The Grand Ole Opry has apologized to fans after outrage over an embarrassing appearance by an apparently drunken Elle King during a Dolly Parton tribute Friday night. Describing herself as “fucking hammered,” the singer cussed during the traditionally family-friendly show, awkwardly bantered with hecklers and failed to remember the Parton song she was supposed to sing as part of the birthday salute.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Devo is headed to Sundance, not just for the festival premiere of the Chris Smith-directed documentary film that share’s the band’s name, but a Jan. 21 performance by the group at the just-opened Marquis on Main Street.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The story of Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis is being steered toward a screen adaptation, with Universal having optioned the rights to the singer’s bestselling memoir, “Scar Tissue.” Kiedis himself has been set as a producer on the project along with Brian Grazer, representing Imagine Entertainment, and Guy Oseary, who took over management duties for the Chili Peppers in 2021. Kiedis was represented in the deal by CAA, Oseary, and Eric Greenspan at Myman Greenspan Fineman Fox Rosenberg & Light LLP. Universal’s announcement reports that Jay Polidoro, the studio’s executive VP pf production development, will oversee the project.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The husband-and-wife duo the War and Treaty will have a big presence during Grammy week, parlaying their nomination for best new artist into multiple performances on- and off-screen throughout the days leading up to and including the telecast. But the Grammys were destined not to be the only awards show this season that would afford them a high profile.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic The musical-comedy “Shucked” had its closing performance on Broadway Sunday night, but the show went out with an even louder set of whoops than expected, as the curtain call included the news that a feature film adaptation is in the works. Show reps confirm to Variety that a movie version of “Shucked” is being set up with Mandalay Pictures. The producers for Mandalay will be Jason Michael Berman (AIR) and Jordan Moldo, along with Alan Fox.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Paramore is a free agent. That, and not a band breakup, is the reason most of the group’s online presence has been suddenly wiped clean, sources tell Variety. The band’s longtime website, paramore.net, now leads to a “404 Not Found” message, which alarmed many fans of the group.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Everyone feels it: It can feel like a chore getting to a show. We all know the routine: dealing with the online ticket queues for bigger concerts, navigating the extra fees at checkout for shows large and small, and then, once you’ve experienced that thrill of victory, remembering that you will, in fact, have to leave the house.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Taylor Swift has broken Elvis Presley‘s longstanding record for the most weeks spent atop the Billboard 200 album chart by a solo artist. She set a new mark of 68 total weeks, as “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” landed on top of the chart for a fifth time in the final full tracking week of 2023. Although Swift set a new record for an individual, the ultimate high-water mark among all artists is still held by the Beatles, whose albums have spent 132 weeks on top of the Billboard 200.

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Mariah Carey already held the record for the most weeks spent at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, but she has put it even further out of anyone else’s grasp by claiming a 93rd week on top, thanks to “All I Want for Christmas” continuing its annual reign again this week. The song is No.

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.