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Billboard’s 2026 Country Power Players Revealed

The Neal Agency’s Austin Neal leads the annual list honoring the top executives driving the success of the genre now across multiple industry sectors. Related After Slow-Burn Rise, Riley Green Is Red Hot: ‘If This Had Happened To Me When I Was 22, It Would Have Been Mayhem’ Suspect in Taylor Swift Vienna Concert Attack Plot […]

Carín León’s Manager Jorge Juárez on the ‘Significant Cultural Moment’ of History-Making Sphere Shows

Last November, when Carín León announced a series of shows at the Sphere in Las Vegas — a coveted venue where he is set to become the first Latin artist to headline — the regional Mexican singer-songwriter and his manager, Jorge Juárez, finally unveiled a secret that had been kept under wraps for a year, and an idea that had started even earlier.  “We thought of it three years before we announced it,” Juárez says. “We said, ‘Okay, maybe we won’t be ready next year, but in […]

Chart Rewind: In 2021, Eric Church Had a ‘Hell of a View’ From the Top

Most people visit a restaurant for a meal, and the wilderness to decompress. For Eric Church, they were the sites of a creative endeavor. In January 2020, Church settled in with his band at the Artisinal restaurant on the North Carolina side of the Smoky Mountains for a month of music-making. The goal was simple: […]

‘Goofball’ Tucker Wetmore Is Taking His Brand of Country Global: ‘If You Can’t Get Onstage and Be Exactly Who You Are, Then You’re Not Doing You Justice’

There comes a moment in most Tucker Wetmore shows — between performing lively hits like “Proving Me Right” and “3,2,1” — when the Washington state-born country artist sits down at a piano and leads the crowd through a medley of classics, from Beethoven to Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Great Balls of Fire.” “I’m an old cat. I’m […]

How Death Cab for Cutie Recaptured Its Roots for ‘I Built You a Tower’

When the joint Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service tour – paying tribute to the indie classics Transatlanticism and Give Up, respectively – passed through the Washington, D.C., area in 2023, Ben Gibbard made an unexpected detour. “I had been listening to an egregious amount of Fugazi, and I was reconnecting with that music […]