Jessica Simpson will be taking her live experience to Las Vegas this fall, announcing an exclusive one-night-only performance.

Simpson announced the performance on Thursday (Aug. 14), revealing that she will be continuing her musical comeback with a special show at PH Live at Planet Hollywood Resort & Casino on Nov. 8.

The performance is one of only a few that Simpson has announced lately, with the star having made her triumphant return to the stage for the first time in 15 years in March.

That performance itself came just weeks after Simpson revealed the details of her new EP, Nashville Canyon, which was her first new release since 2010. A two-part EP, the first half was issued in March, with the second part arriving on Sept. 5. 

The arrival of the music served as something of a new era for Simpson, who utilized music to embrace overcoming a series of heartbreaks, including a separation from her longtime husband Eric Johnson. 

“I’ve lived through the hardest parts of life, and music is what has brought me back,” Simpson said at the time. “Nashville Canyon is for anyone who’s ever been told who they are or how they should live their life. It’s about finding your true voice and the courage to be exactly who you are.”

“Music makes you un-become to become, and through this process my soul has been pulled to the very place it belongs. This music is mine to share, and it’s not just about me—it’s about everyone who’s ever felt lost or overlooked. I want to remind them that they’re not alone.”

Simpson’s last music release was her 2009 holiday album, Happy Christmas. Over the course of her music career, she dropped seven studio albums, starting with her 1999 debut project, Sweet Kisses.

Alongside her handful of live performances this year, Simpson will also celebrate the release of Nashville Canyon’s second part with an appearance at the Grand Ole Opry on Sept. 9 alongside Kolby Cooper, Noeline Hofmann, I’m With Her, Lucie Silvas, and more.

Chance the Rapper returns with his first album in six years with Star Line, which dropped on Friday (Aug. 15).

He dropped one single, “Tree” featuring Lil Wayne and Smino, ahead of the project’s arrival. BJ the Chicago Kid, Vic Mensa, Joey Bada$$ and more are also featured on Star Line.

According to a press release, Star Line follows “Chance’s global journey, artistically, spiritually and physically, over the past six years. Created with longtime producer DexLvL and shaped by travels to Ghana, Jamaica and art fairs around the world, Star Line blends hip-hop, soul and experimental sounds with lyrical meditations on identity, resilience and legacy. While Chance has circled the globe in search of new perspectives, the project remains grounded in the worldview that has always defined his art: a deep, unshakable connection to Chicago and to Black culture across the diaspora.”

Star Line arrives six years after his debut album, The Big Day. The 22-track project included many high-profile collaborators, including John Legend, Death Cab for Cutie, Megan Thee Stallion, Nicki Minaj, Shawn Mendes and SWV. The Big Day reached No. 2 on both the Billboard 200 and Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums.

In September, the rapper will embark on the And We Back Tour. The 15-date trek kicks off on Sept. 26 at Bayou Music Center in Houston, Texas, and stops in major cities including Atlanta, New York and his Chicago hometown before it wraps on Oct. 20 at Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles.

Listen to Star Line below.

It isn’t summer if Kaytranada doesn’t give fans something to dance to. He dropped his fourth studio album, Ain’t No Damn Way!, on Friday (Aug. 15) via RCA Records.

“Oh lord, not a new album called AIN’T NO DAMN WAY! – coming out this Friday???” he wrote on Instagram on Monday (Aug. 11) while sharing an image of a squiggly, winking-faced character embracing him. The Haitian Canadian DJ/producer dropped one single, “Space Invader,” the day after the announcement. “Letting y’all know that this album is strictly for workouts, dancing and studying and for my people that love beats,” he added on his since-expired Instagram Story.

Ain’t No Damn Way! arrives one year after his last album, Timeless, which reached No. 28 on the Billboard 200 and No. 2 on Top Dance Albums. Since then, he’s remixed Mariah Carey’s “Don’t Forget About Us” from The Emancipation of Mimi (20th Anniversary Edition) and JT’s “Ran Out” while producing Justine Skye’s “Oh Lala” and FLO’s “The Mood.”

This won’t be the only new release from Kay this month. He’s featured on “Open Invite” from Teyana Taylor’s upcoming fourth studio album. Escape Room, due next Friday, Aug. 22.

Kaytranada is headed on a co-headlining North American tour with Justice this fall. The 15-show trek kicks off on Oct. 16 at Rogers Arena in Vancouver, B.C., and goes through major U.S. arenas before wrapping on Nov. 16 at Miami’s Kaseya Center. He recently replaced Playboi Carti as the opener for The Weeknd’s Canada shows on the Ethiopian Canadian superstar’s ongoing After Hours til Dawn Tour after Kaytranada previously supported the 2022-2023 legs.

Listen to Ain’t No Damn Way! below.

Music films don’t get much respect — most of the older ones are basically brand extensions, and many of the new ones are extended ads. These days, most biopics and “rockumentaries” are made at least partly to introduce older artists to a new generation and boost their stream counts in the process. Considering these constraints, as well as those imposed by songwriters and artists in exchange for the use of their work, it’s amazing that the best music films — think D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 Bob Dylan documentary, Don’t Look Back, and Martin Scorsese’s 1978 swan song for The Band, The Last Waltz, as well as the best concert films — are as good as they are. 

We now live in a golden age of music documentaries — as well as a glut. It’s never been more practical to make a cool documentary like What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears? But we may also have reached Peak Documentary. Not every artist has a great story, and not every filmmaker can tell that story well. This became obvious to me when I watched HBO’s new two-part Billy Joel: And So It Goes, as well as the newish Becoming Led Zeppelin and Pavements, which are streaming on Netflix and MUBI, respectively. 

Personally, I really love Pavement, I love Led Zeppelin and I like Billy Joel. (Pavement is the most consistent of the three; Zeppelin soared the highest; and I think Joel’s Turnstiles and The Stranger are masterpieces, but his later albums suffer by comparison.) So I was surprised to find that I liked So It Goes the most by far — especially since Joel was never as mysterious as Zeppelin or as effortlessly cool as Pavement. After seeing all three movies, I spent a few days listening to Joel’s albums, but I wasn’t tempted to put on Pavement, even though I listen to the band’s music far more often.  

I wasn’t alone in this. In the three weeks since the first part of the documentary premiered on HBO, Joel’s on-demand streaming in the U.S. is up more than 24% compared to the three weeks before its debut, according to Luminate. That’s up from about 16% in the week the first part of the movie came out, indicating that interest in Joel’s music only accelerated in the weeks following its premiere. In the three weeks after the release of Becoming Led Zeppelin, the band’s on-demand streaming in the U.S. rose 17% compared to three weeks in January, and the boost is even higher compared to late 2024. (Anticipation for the movie seemed to boost streams before its release, which didn’t happen for Joel.) Even Pavement, whose music and film are less popular, saw a 14% increase in the three weeks after the release of Pavements compared to the first three weeks in April.

This tracks how much I liked the movies. I found So It Goes incredibly compelling. It’s not especially innovative — it switches between shots of Joel sitting at his piano, telling his story and archival photos and videos — but he’s an engaging storyteller. He looks back at his past with honesty and a certain self-deprecating humor: “I did a lot of my own research for ‘Big Shot,’” he says, after calling it “a hangover song.”  

Parts of Joel’s story are much less funny. He struggled to find a style that worked for him, and he seems to carry some wounds from childhood: His father, the son of Jewish refugees from Germany, left his family and returned to Europe. Joel eventually found him, but they struggled to reconnect emotionally, and he vows to be a better dad. The movie implicitly makes a case for Joel as the heir to a certain songwriting tradition — a pop auteur who brings rock instrumentation and attitude to classic pop songwriting. It made me curious enough to listen again to some of his older albums. If I didn’t know his music, I think it would have the same effect.  

On the surface, at least, Led Zeppelin seems like a much more promising subject for a documentary. The band has few equals as a live act, and the performance footage in Becoming Led Zeppelin, which tells the story of the group through the release of its second album, is just stunning. The film smartly puts Zeppelin in context — watch enough music documentaries and you start to think people in the United Kingdom actually lived in black and white before Beatlemania — and it’s remarkable just how much the group turned up the volume on pop. The commentary from the bandmembers is far quieter, though — both literally and figuratively — because they are only seen on camera separately.  

Becoming Led Zeppelin also doesn’t deliver on the band’s legendary excess. Some of that took place later, and neither the band’s exploits with groupies nor its tendency to borrow liberally from blues artists plays well today. The group’s story is interesting, but there isn’t that much there that I didn’t know. The concert footage is so vital that it makes the rest seem slow by comparison, and the band members don’t look back with the humor that Joel does. To quote another Zeppelin film, “Does anyone remember laughter?”  

And then I got to Pavements, the movie I liked least, about the act I love most. It’s meant to be a rock-doc about rock-docs, in a way that some of Pavement’s songs were about songs — most famously “Cut Your Hair.” It’s about time someone did this. But Pavements underwhelms because it overdelivers. It’s a documentary about the band interwoven with a “documentary” about the show Slanted! Enchanted! A Pavement Musical, which played for two nights in 2022; a “documentary” about a museum exhibit about the band, which also existed; and a “documentary” about a nonexistent biopic. It’s a lot.  

Pavement deserves a documentary that punctures pop music pretensions, but this one has too much going on at once. Worse, for a band that oozed slacker charm, Pavements is just too conceptual — more polished jewel box than dusty trunk. One of the funnier lines comes from Butt-Head of Beavis & Butt-Head fame: “They need to try harder!” Maybe. But the movie tries way too hard — and when it works, the humor is so specific that it’s hard to imagine anyone who’s not familiar with the band will understand why they were so important to so many people. 

I’d love to end this with a grand theory on how to make music documentaries work, but I don’t have one. The closest I can get is that many listeners still want to know more about the person behind the music. So It Goes works because it delivers that. Becoming Led Zeppelin doesn’t, but it has enough fantastic live footage to interest anyone. Pavements doesn’t even try, because that was never the point of Pavement in the first place, and maybe that’s fine. Some things are just easier to sell than others.