Promotion executive John Fagot died Tuesday at the age of 78 following complications from a stroke. Fagot was a beloved executive who worked for Columbia, Capitol and Hollywood Records over the course of his more than 40 years in the industry.  

“John was the consummate record man, beloved by everyone in the industry. But he was so much more than that; he was a loving husband, father, grandfather, and friend to so many,” Capitol Records said in a statement provided to Billboard. “He played an important role in establishing the legacy of Capitol Records and his contributions will endure. As sad as we are today, thinking of John can’t help but make us smile. We extend our deepest condolences to his family and loved ones. John will be missed.” 

Fagot got his start in the industry in the 1970s working in the mailroom for CBS Records in Atlanta. His career then took him to the role of promotion manager for Columbia Records, serving Atlanta, Dallas and the Carolinas. By 1984, Fagot became Columbia’s national director of singles promotion before being promoted to vp promotion two years later. Capitol hired Fagot in 1987 to take on a similar role at the label. In 1995, Fagot moved from senior vp promotion at Capitol to the same role at Hollywood Records.  

In a 1990 interview with music and radio trade publication The Network 40, when asked what makes a great promotion person, Fagot said, “You have to love music, and you have to love the music you’re working. But the most important thing is the willingness to work. You have to be very dedicated and willing to put in a lot of time and effort.” 

In the 2000s, Fagot began working for trade publication Radio & Records as senior director of digital initiatives. He also served as a consultant for peer-to-peer monitoring service Webspins.  

Survivors include his wife Lucy, children Mary and Chris and two grandchildren.

U2 are back. The Irish rockers are lending their talents to the animated sequel Sing 2, with the release of their new track “Your Song Saved My Life” on Wednesday (Nov. 3).

The piano-and-strings-driven pop track sees frontman Bono singing about the transformative nature that music holds and pushing through life even in difficult times. “You know your song saved my life/ I don’t sing it just so I can get by/ Won’t you hear me when I tell you, darlin’/ I sing it to survive,” he sings on the chorus.

U2 first teased the song after joining TikTok on Monday, posting an official lyric video snippet of the track and alerting viewers that Sing 2 — in which Bono stars as the reclusive rock star lion Clay Calloway — will be in theaters Dec. 22. “Your Song Saved My Life” will appear in the closing credits of the movie.

Garth Jennings, director of Sing 2, told Entertainment Weekly that Bono was eager to sing on the movie’s soundtrack and didn’t need much convincing. After telling the celebrated rock icon that “some people sing for a living and some people sing to survive,” Bono was game to do a song for the soundtrack. Jennings said he “couldn’t believe [Bono’s] enthusiasm for it,” and added, “The band recorded this amazing U2 song. It’s just full of so much emotion and heart and literally did exactly what he said in that first phone call. It just says, ‘OK, here’s how we want your audience to feel as they leave the cinema.’”

U2 has received two Oscar nods for best original song, for “The Hands That Built America” from Gangs of New York (2002) and “Ordinary Love” from Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (2013). Will “Your Song Saved My Life” become their third Oscar contender? We’ll find out when the 94th annual Academy Award nominations are announced on Feb. 8, 2022.

“Your Song Saved My Life” is U2’s newest offering since April’s The Virtual Road: iNNOCENCE + eXPERIENCE (Live In Paris) EP. Listen to the track in full below.

In 2017 Eddie Montgomery’s life and career unalterably changed when Troy Gentry, his longtime musical partner in Montgomery Gentry, died in a helicopter crash.

Four years later, Montgomery, who’s an ACM and CMA Award winner, Grand Ole Opry member, cancer survivor and self-professed bar fly is admirably soldiering on with his first solo album, Ain’t No Closing Me Down, which came out last week exclusively at Walmart via Average Joe’s Entertainment.

Produced by Noah Gordon and Shannon Houchins, the 12-song set features eight songs co-written by Montgomery. The title track is a rebellious country anthem taken directly from the Kentucky native’s pandemic playbook, while “Alive and Well,” finds Montgomery candidly singing about the loss of Gentry and two of his sons. The music veteran has survived more than his share of tragedy and his solo debut unflinchingly explores heartbreak, but doesn’t get mired in despair.

“It’s my heart and soul poured out,” Montgomery tells Billboard via Zoom. “With ‘Alive and Well,’ I’m talking about my two sons and T-Roy [his nickname for Gentry]. It was opening up my soul and it kind of helped me a little bit. I ain’t going to lie about it and that’s the stuff that I tried to write about — the good, bad, and ugly, and the party on the weekend.”

The title track was inspired by Montgomery transforming his garage into a gathering place during the pandemic. “They closed all the restaurants and bars down,” he says of COVID restrictions in his home state of Kentucky. “Of course, we’re bar flies. We’ve got to find that place. You can’t take that away from us… I’ve got a pretty good size garage, so I started to hang a few TVs, then a disco ball and an old dart board. When the restaurants all closed down, they were selling their stuff. I saw this big refrigerator and I was like, ‘Well, hell I’ll just go get it and put it in the garage too.’ We started grilling and people started hanging in there. We were watching sports on TV. That’s the way we live.”

Montgomery’s home backs up to a golf course, and soon he was feeding everyone from golfers to the mail carriers. “If a FedEx guy or mailman would come up, we’d fix them a hamburger or steak,” he says. “Whatever we were fixing at the time. It’s still going on. Eddie’s Garage is what it’s called. Somebody made me a big neon sign for it.”

Montgomery penned the title track with Chris Wallin and Ira Dean, who also collaborated with Montgomery on “Alive and Well.” “If anything good came out of COVID, it’s me sitting in that garage writing,” he says. “It took me a long time to figure out when I was going to do a solo project because a day don’t go by that I don’t think about T-Roy. I think through this whole thing he may have been there with me.”

When asked why he chose to carry on solo, Montgomery says it was something they had agreed on. “Me and T-Roy made a promise to each other over some Jim Beam quite a few years back,” he says. “We told each other if anything ever happened to one of us, we wanted the other to make sure the MG logo and Montgomery Gentry is always there. I made a promise and I’m going to keep that promise. So even though it’s a solo, it’s still me and T.”

Montgomery Gentry scored a number of hits, including such Billboard Country Songs No. 1s as “If You Ever Stop Loving Me,” “Lucky Man” and “Back When I Knew It All” in the first decade of the 2000s.

Montgomery takes great pride in the fact that their band, The Wild Bunch, plays on his solo record instead of the standard Nashville practice of using session musicians. “Me and T had been fighting for a long time to get them on there — because we thought they were that good. I told the label, ‘Let’s do three or four cuts, and if it don’t work, then we’ll trash it. I’ll pay for it and we’ll go on.’ They came in and they killed it… We’ve been touring together and have been through divorces and bus fires or whatever. That’s gives the CD maybe a little edge, because those guys know who we are.”

In addition to recording for the first time with his band, Montgomery has a couple other significant firsts on the album, including duetting with country legend Tanya Tucker on “Higher,” written by Jim “Moose” Brown, David Wade, Shane Grove and Erik Michael Westfall. “I’m just glad Tanya would sing with me. I can’t believe it,” he says, shaking his head with a big smile. “She’s an icon, and her voice is so unbelievably strong. I’d put her up against anybody that’s coming into town now — and I promise you she’ll smoke them. To get the chance to sing with an icon like that, that’s pretty awesome.”

He also wrote his first-ever love song, “She Just Loves Me.” “Of course, I wrote it about my smokin’ hot wife,” he says. “When I come home, I told her, ‘I wrote a song for you. I’ve got the demo on it, and I want you to listen to it.’ I said, ‘I can’t sing it right now’ — because there was no way I could have done it [without getting too emotional]. I wanted her to hear it first on the demo, just in case she thought it sucked. She got tore up and loved it, so I reckon that’s a good thing.”

Another personal song on the album is “My Son,” a song Montgomery co-wrote with Gordon that is featured on the soundtrack of the western Old Henry, starring Tim Blake Nelson and Trace Adkins. “I got to thinking about my sons, and me and Noah got to talking. The next thing I know, we had that song written,” Montgomery recalls. “I’ve got a bunch of boys and of course I lost a couple of them. [I was] just trying to think, ‘What do I tell my sons? And what did my old man tell me?’ So that’s how that come out. It means a lot to me that song does.”

Filming the video for “Alive and Well,” which also addresses the loss of his two sons, was understandably difficult. “If I get to thinking about that song too much when I’m singing it, too much emotion gets up in there, but it helped my heart and it helped my soul after I got it done.”

Though Montgomery co-wrote the bulk of the album, he also recorded some outside tunes, including the patriotic “Ain’t She Beautiful,” which was written by Chris Rafetto, Brendan Cooney and his nephew Walker Montgomery (Eddie’s brother John Michael Montgomery’s son). “I call it ‘The Flag Song.’ It just shows you, as young as [Walker] is, he loves this country that much. I feel like we let her down sometimes, but we’ve got the greatest country in the world.”

Montgomery pours a lot of life and emotion into every song on the album, matching his philosophy on living life to the fullest. “We can either lay down or we can go get it,” he says. “Life is very short and I’m going to live it by the second. That’s the way T-Roy did. That’s the way we grew up. If you aren’t living, then you probably don’t know much or you probably ain’t been hurt. You ain’t been nothing because you’ve been sitting still, but once you go out there and live life, sh*t is going to happen.”