2024 may have been stacked with major top 40 breakthroughs, but Milwaukee artist J.P. snagged a buzzy win for regional rap with “Bad Bitty” — a jaunty lowend song that became his first entry on the R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart. The viral hit, which appeared in Billboard’s weekly Trending Up column, gave way to a remix with NLE Choppa, a minor follow-up hit in “She Took” and an acclaimed LP titled Coming Out Party. 

“Bad Bitty” also thrust the then-19-year-old college sophomore into the national spotlight, opening him up to the countless pressures and unforeseen pitfalls of fame in the digital era. A viral song and near-instant social media notoriety quickly gave way to myriad controversies, including an overstimulating appearance on the 20 Women v. 1 Man YouTube franchise, a leaked X-rated video and an audience who increasingly felt he was “ruining his career” with the antics. 

After dropping a few loosies and a holiday track at the end of 2024, he went quiet, emerging this spring with “My Peace.” Released on May 30 as the lead single from his new Took a Turn EP, “My Peace” — along with fellow pre-release single “Serenity” — finds J.P. moving away from Milwaukee hip-hop and fully diving into the gospel and soul influences that comprise his vocal profile. Crafted alongside a tight-knit team of close friends and homegrown talent, Took a Turn isn’t simply J.P.’s stab at reinvention — it’s the soundtrack to him finding himself again after a deeply depressive period in the waning glow of his initial breakthrough. 

“The biggest goal for this project is me proving myself and showcasing my artistry. This ain’t no gimmick,” J.P. says. “I can cook up a ‘Bad Bitty’ in under two minutes, but it’s more difficult to take your trauma and your past and all the things people don’t want to talk about and put it in the music.” 

Below, J.P. speaks with Billboard about fleshing out his R&B pivot, overcoming depression and making the EP’s title track while on a Raising Cane’s run.

When did you start working on Took a Turn?  

The first song I recorded for the project was “My Peace.” I was in LA when I made that towards the end of November 2024. Some months before that, I fell into a deep depression; everything was going haywire. During that time, I started making the music that I would make when I was younger… before “Bad Bitty” and songs like that. And it literally brought me peace and solitude. I found myself again in creating that music. 

Would you say you built the project around “My Peace?” 

[I built it around] “Took a Turn” because it’s so colorful with so many emotions. It’s one of those songs that’s long, but the time passes because you get caught up in the story and how things build. But “My Peace” was a big contributor to that as well. 

Who did you primarily work with for the project? 

The majority of the people are either from Milwaukee or have the essence of the city. Bizness Boi produced a couple of tracks, and Daniel Church wrote on a few as well. Also, Darryl Bridgeman Jr., Felix Ames, and a lot of people from the city are on background vocals. There’s also this one guy named Kirti [Pandey] from Virginia, and he produced “Took a Turn.” 

What was the most stressful part of your “Bad Bitty” breakout moment? 

Adjusting to newfound fame, because it happened so fast. There’s a lot of people that look at you differently and have hidden agendas. I was doing some wild s—t. I was on some bulls—t. It happens when you give a 19-year-old who just came from college all this fame. I wish I understood how to navigate the way I do now, because I could have saved myself a lot of trouble. 

When did it hit you that things were going off the rails? 

I would spend days in my room; I just wouldn’t leave. I wouldn’t get up. I wouldn’t clean. I wouldn’t do anything. I would just lay in bed all day. I started to get a little bigger, and my eating habits were outrageous. I was smoking more. I had no goals and no vision. The days were just going by. I had three recording trips back-to-back to New York, Atlanta and L.A., and it took those trips for me to really get out the house and see people still mess with me. When I got to L.A., I was like, “I gotta stop this.” Ever since then, s—t’s been turning around. 

From the 20 v. 1 video to that explicit tape, what specifically do you wish you had handled a bit differently over the past year? 

Well, first of all, I damn sure wouldn’t have been in that bathroom. Knowing me back at 19, I probably still would’ve went in there, but I damn sure wouldn’t have had a phone out. In all seriousness, I would have said some different s—t, man.  

I’ve always been a blunt person with an I-don’t-care attitude, but I didn’t realize how much it was tarnishing my reputation, to the point where you can’t even really see the music because it’s so much other s—t surrounding my name. It was affecting the people around me as well. I definitely wish I had taken the media training route, but, in my defense, I started training late!  

Do you think that some people unfairly held your sexuality — or what they perceived to be your sexuality — against you? 

They really only know what I tell them. I don’t like dudes. I was trolling them, but anybody that knows me for real knows that I don’t like men. People gon’ think what they’re going to think of you regardless. I can’t really be upset for real, because I’m the one that went out there and played into it. I’m not a fan of letting other people tell my story. That’s one of the things I wish I would have stayed a bit more intimate about. It wasn’t everybody’s business. 

Your R&B pivot is really grounded in shades of gospel and the blues. Who were you most heavily influenced by? 

I definitely pulled from David Ruffin. I grew up watching The Temptations [mini-series], so he was one of my favorite singers. There’s some Sam Cooke and Al Green in there, too, and some Joe. 

Above all, I really tried to showcase myself. I didn’t want to make the EP one-dimensional to the point where only women or only guys can listen to it. I tried my best to make it as universal as possible. The writing was really intentional. We edited so many lyrics and tweaked so many phrases to make sure these stories line up and make sense 

How did the title track come together? 

The song took four nights to record. The big arrangements and vocal layers in the second half of the song didn’t come in until night three. I was in New York with my brother, who’s also my manager, and my boy Jack, who’s a writer and one of my best friends, and Bridge, another writer. We were walking to Raising Cane’s, and me and Bridge were recording on voice notes and coming up with stuff off the dome. We get to Raising Cane’s, and I show my boy Jack the memo, and the first thing he said was, “I took a turn on the corner of third.” 

I was like, “Damn, that’s cold.” So, everybody started piecing s—t in, and when we got to the studio that night, we came up with the beat right there. The whole process of building the song just made sense. Me, Bridge, Jack and Felix were in there going back and forth; I don’t know what was in the air, but we hit that s—t. 

How’s your time at Roc Nation been so far? 

I enjoy Roc. They do what they’re supposed to do. They communicate, and they’re easy to work with. I got creative control, and that means the most to me. I signed with Equity Distribution in March 2024, and [by August 2024] they merged with Roc Nation’s label division to become Roc Nation Distribution. It’s been a year and some change now, and we’re doing well. We added some new people to the team, and I’m very thankful for their hard work. 

What do you have in store for the rest of the year? 

Imma give y’all some time to digest the EP, but you can definitely expect more music this year. I’m finishing out the year strong and starting the next year even stronger.

Everything’s bigger in Texas.

Including, it seems, the state’s political hubris.

Gov. Greg Abbott is expected to sign a bill passed by state lawmakers that would extract five additional Republican representatives from its already gerrymandered districts. The move proved unpopular outside of its expansive borders, with 55% of Americans believing it’s bad for democracy, according to a Reuters poll. Even among the GOP, 46% agree with that statement, while only 27% disagree.

The truth is that even before redistricting, the Lone Star government was already at odds with its people.

“The way we look at it,” says Texas Regional Radio Report founder and president Dave Smith, “there’s politicians and then there’s Texans.”

With the new Asleep at the Wheel album — Riding High in Texas, released Aug. 12 on the band’s Bismeaux label — founder and frontman Ray Benson hopes to put a dent in the misunderstandings about the state, regardless of its leaders’ behaviors.

“There’s such a clichéd image of what a Texan is,” he suggests. “But Texas is so diverse. That’s why Texas is a whole ‘nother country, as we used to say.”

That diversity inhabits the core of Riding High, a collection of 10 songs about the Lone Star State. The music stretches from early-rock-era signature “Long Tall Texan” to funk-tinged “Texas Cookin’,” country/blues classic “Blue Yodel No. 1 (T for Texas),” shuffle “There’s Still a Lot of Love in San Antone” and Western-swing instrumental “Beaumont Rag.” It all fits together within The Wheel’s good-time disposition, just as the state has historically blended roots of multiple cultures: Native American, Mexican, Anglo-Saxon and African.

“It’s always been a state of immigrants and people fleeing places that did not give them opportunity,” Benson says. “That’s what I hope it continues to be, although it seems to be taking a different track these days.”

The real spirit of the state, one could argue, was exemplified by the music industry’s reaction to the Camp Mystic flood on the Fourth of July. The Guadalupe River rose 26 feet in 45 minutes, leading to more than 100 deaths, including 27 people who were swept away at Camp Mystic outside of Kerrville, Texas. Robert Earl Keen, who was scheduled to perform at Fourth on the River, could have been among the victims had he arrived at the venue earlier.

“All of the staging and a lot of the production and all of the vendors’ [equipment] were all washed away by six o’clock in the morning,” he says. “In years past, we’d parked the bus right there next to the stage. We would have been sleeping through that. Who knows what would have happened at that point?”

Keen pulled together an Aug. 28 benefit — Applause for the Cause, at the Whitewater Amphitheater in New Braunfels, scheduled to livestream on Keen’s YouTube channel — with a long list of guests, including Tyler Childers, Miranda Lambert, Jon Randall, Jack Ingram and Jamey Johnson. It’s just one of numerous flood benefits organized by Lambert and Parker McCollum, George Strait, Josh Weathers, Dale Watson, Lyle Lovett and Michael Martin Murphey, Koe Wetzel and Pat Green, who lost three relatives to the flood.

It’s a spirit one may not expect from the state, based on the cynicism of its legislature.

“People in Texas are for each other,” Smith says. “I don’t care if you’re a Democrat, Republican or independent, or don’t give a hoot, you know. They take care of their own.”

Matching the state’s melting-pot history, Texas’ country music community has a reputation for bringing disparate segments of society together, most obviously through the cross-cultural appeal of Willie Nelson.

“Willie, who got me to Texas, really brought people together back in those days — the hippies and rednecks, basically,” says the Philadelphia-born Benson, who lived in San Francisco before relocating to Central Texas. “For a period of time, it really was pretty incredible in the ’70s that the people seem to come together over music and forget about their differences.”

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Well, they don’t completely forget them. The Texas football obsession hits peak intensity in the rivalry between the Texas Longhorns and Texas A&M Aggies. The Longhorns are ranked No. 1 in the Associated Press preseason poll for the first time in history. Benson, who was a friend of iconic Longhorns head coach Darrell Royal, feels positive about the news; Keen, a Texas A&M distinguished alum, is skeptical.

“UT has bigger coffers than we do,” he deadpans. “They must have spent a lot of that to buy their way up to No. 1.”

The football team isn’t the only state institution riding high in Texas. Strait (whose “All My Ex’s Live in Texas” is covered on Riding High)was recently announced as a 2025 recipient of a Kennedy Center Honor. Benson expects to rerecord one of Strait’s first compositions — “I Can’t See Texas From Here,” featured on the 1982 album Strait From the Heart — with the Cowboy in September as a Riding High bonus track. The Wheel will also cut a new Bill Anderson song as an additional bonus.

The state’s extreme gerrymandering effort may not reflect a diverse population’s ability to find common ground, but the music — of Texas, and of high-riding Asleep at the Wheel — encourages unity, even if it’s a temporary truce.

“One of my friends, John Burnett, was an NPR correspondent for years,” Benson says. “He’s retired, but his last thing, he came to a show of ours in Kerrville about a year ago, and he wanted to interview our audience because he knows we have a very diverse audience. We have everything from Trump people to Democrats, and we don’t ask them who they vote for. He decided to interview everybody, and every single person he went to said, ‘I came here to forget about that. We came here to have a good time and dance.’ “

After a wildly successful breakthrough last year, Xavi is set to take his meteoric rise one step further with the announcement of his upcoming X Tour. The U.S. trek kicks off on Nov. 8 in his native Phoenix as part of Bélicofest, and will span 19 dates across major cities, including stops in California, Texas, New York and more.

Promoted by Live Nation, the tour will showcase Xavi’s Billboard No. 1 hits such as “La Diabla,” “En Privado” and “Flores” on some of the nation’s most buzzed-about stages. And fans can look forward to even more excitement because Fabio Capri, Xavi’s brother and frequent collaborator, will join as a special guest, ensuring the performances feature a family-driven celebration of música mexicana. Adding to the momentum, Xavi will release a new cumbia single, “No Capea,” in collaboration with Grupo Frontera ahead of the tour.

Additionally, Xavi — who won Artist of the Year (New) at last year’s Billboard Latin Music Awards — is set to make an appearance at this year’s Billboard Latin Music Week. The event is set to place Oct. 20-24 at the Fillmore Miami Beach. Registration is now open.

Tickets for the X Tour go on sale Aug. 29, at 10 a.m. (local time) via LiveNation.com. See the complete list of dates below:

When Big Loud released “A Song to Sing” to country radio on July 10, the email featured a gold, heart-shaped mirror ball with the names of Miranda Lambert and Chris Stapleton blasting from the background in a groovy retro font.

The image fit. “A Song to Sing” uses musical elements that exist in the same sonic pocket as the Kenny Rogers & Dolly Parton classic “Islands in the Stream.” That single was produced by Barry Gibb, whose band The Bee Gees played a key role in the late-1970s disco era. The Brothers Gibb’s most iconic songs from that period – “Islands,” “Night Fever,” “Jive Talkin’,” “Stayin’ Alive” – invariably featured sticky melodies, bittersweet harmonies, dogged optimism and sometimes-abstract lyrics over compellingly light dance beats.

“A Song to Sing,” like “Islands in the Stream,” has all of those characteristics. “It’s, like, all the stuff that I’ve always loved,” Lambert says. “I’ve just never explored it as an artist.”

The bones of “A Song to Sing” were grounded in the supporting parts. In 2023, songwriter Jesse Frasure (“Park,” “Dirt on My Boots”) reached out to fiddler Jenee Fleenor, a five-time winner of the Country Music Association’s musician of the year award, about creating some musical beds that he could present during writing sessions.

“It’s actually something I’d always wanted to do,” she says, “but I didn’t know who to approach.”

They met a couple times and created 8-10 musical tracks in a variety of styles, with Fleenor playing riffs on her fiddle over chord progressions that Frasure supplied. One began with a major-seventh chord – used frequently in ‘70s pop songs – and Fleenor gave it an arching, nine-note melody in the intro and at the end of the prospective choruses.

It came to its full fruition during a writing appointment Lambert booked at Frasure’s studio in Nashville’s Crieve Hall neighborhood. They reached out to Stapleton on short notice, not knowing if he was even in town, and he agreed to meet them. Neither artist was at work on a specific album, so the crew had plenty of freedom to pursue whatever struck them.

“He pulled up, he was driving a Corvette — like a rust, ‘70s-looking, brown Corvette that day — so it was kind of fitting,” Frasure remembers. “We had wrote another song that probably sounds more like what you would expect Miranda and Chris to do, and then right before he was leaving, I just kind of played him that [‘70s-sounding track].”

Stapleton stayed. This track was too inspiring to quit, and they spent the next hour turning it into a full-fledged song. “There was certainly some mention of Dolly and Kenny vibes,” Stapleton says. “It had that vibe out of the gate.”

The opening major-seventh chord set the tone. Someone – no one remembers who, for certain – started a melody that played on its key feature, vacillating between the tonic note and the dissonant seventh (akin to alternating between “ti” and “do” in “Do-Re-Mi,” the Sound of Music song about musical scales). They came up with hazy lyrics that drew on the commitment required to maintain a relationship with their traveling lifestyles. The two singers traded lead parts, slipped in harmonies, and built to an ascendent chorus that compared romance to writing a song. “A Song to Sing” showed itself as the title, though it was positioned, unconventionally, in the middle of the chorus.

Instead of following that chorus with a second verse, Stapleton segued into a new, rising melody along with a lyric about overcoming “everything heavy on our shoulders.”

“We talked about it in the room,” Lambert recalls. “’Do we need a bridge? Do we not?’ And then just hearing Chris go, ‘And when this world…,’ it’s like, ‘Okay, we need a bridge if that’s what it’s going to sound like.’”

Lambert sat in a blue velvet chair and Stapleton stood in a corner as they dashed off vocals for the demo before they wrapped. Fleenor had picked up her engraved CMA award that same day and announced the debut EP for her bluegrass group Wood Box Heroes. She was stunned to receive a text from Frasure announcing that Lambert and Stapleton had just written a song based on their track.

“There was no second verse when they sent me the demo,” she says. “I dug it, but I remember Jesse and I having this conversation because the song was so short, and I think Jesse encouraged them to write a second verse.”

Frasure got Lambert and Stapleton back together a few weeks later to knock it out.

“I just wanted to hear that [opening] chord – maybe it’s the major seventh there – but I wanted to hear that first melody again,” Frasure says.

Sometime in 2024, Lambert and Stapleton went to Savannah, Ga., to record “A Song To Sing” with Stapleton’s band and producer Dave Cobb (Brandi Carlile, John Prine) in leisurely fashion at the Georgia Mae Studio.

“It’s on the intercoastal waterways, so it’s kind of like an escapism house that we started making records in,” Cobb says. “We just got out there and, Gilligan Island it, and stayed in kind of a little private setting on the water, which is really beautiful and calming.”

Bassist J.T. Cure and drummer Derek Mixon locked into a steady, deep groove. “J.T. has so much soul and feel,” Cobb says. “He’s kind of [like Motown’s] James Jamerson and all these great players, where he’s really making a bass part, and not just towing the line. He’s really individualistic with it. And Derek just has such a beautiful swagger and pocket. I think that’s what you hear with the combination of people, just turning off the math of it all, and just feeling the heart of it.”

They revised Fleenor’s fiddle riff as a combination of sounds – Lambert and Stapleton singing along with a guitar and keyboard, though no one can recall which parts they kept in the blend. Lambert felt vocally challenged by Stapleton, and dialed up an edgy, soulful quality.

“Singing with Chris, you have to be so powerful,” she says. “Country music just bleeds out of my pores. But this song, with the soul part of it, how the melody goes and how soulful Chris is, I was like, ‘All right, I gotta step up and really find some other places to go in my voice.’”

Lambert leaned on Morgane Stapleton as they developed some of the harmonies, and Frasure’s wife, Stevie Frasure, provided high harmonies in a separate session. The final step came when engineer Tom Elmhirst, affiliated with New York’s Electric Lady Studios, mixed it this year. “A Song To Sing” fit both artists’ single patterns, and following its July release, it’s at No. 33 on the Country Airplay chart dated Aug. 23, providing a joyful counterweight to a rancorous time in American life.

“There’s a lot of great things in the world, and I think if we concentrate on the things that are only heavy all the time, that’s all we’ll ever see,” Stapleton notes. “That’s what songs are for. It’s supposed to be one of those reminders that, ‘Hey, there are still good things, and we can enjoy those things.’ Even if they’re three minutes long.”