Fans Choose Tyler, The Creator’s ‘Lumberjack’ as This Week’s Favorite New Music

Tyler, The Creator’s new song “Lumberjack” has topped this week’s new music poll.

Music fans voted in a poll published Friday (June 18) on Billboard, choosing the 30-year-old rapper’s latest track as their favorite new music release of the past week.

“Lumberjack,” which will be featured on Tyler’s forthcoming album, Call Me If You Get Lost, brought in nearly 37% of the vote, beating out new music by H.E.R. (Back of My Mind), DaBaby (“Ball If I Want To”), Leon Bridges (“Why Don’t You Touch Me”), and others.

“Lumberjack” seemingly masquerades as a straightforward rap song flexing fame and fortune. But a closer looks reveals that it’s an irrepressible Tyler tune, with ad-libs from DJ Drama and outlandish wordplay.

Call Me If You Get Lost, Tyler’s sixth album, is scheduled for release on June 25. The hip-hop star’s last album, Igor, was released in 2019 and featured “Earfquake,” which peaked at No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Igor also won the Grammy for best rap album in 2020.

Placing second on the past week’s tally with nearly 23% of the vote was H.E.R.’s engrossing new album, Back of My Mind. The R&B star’s debut full-length spans 21 tracks and features appearances by Ty Dolla $ign, Lil Baby, Thundercat, Chris Brown, DJ Khaled, and others.

On the set, she explores new terrain as a vocalist, particularly on ballads like the yearning “My Own” and the wounded “Mean It.”

See the final results of this week’s new music release poll below.

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Taylor Swift’s Dad Says He Still Has Guitar Picks From ‘Red’ Tour ‘If They’re Needed’

Scott Swift was trending on Twitter Sunday afternoon, thanks to Taylor Swift’s Father’s Day tweet about her dad — and his guitar picks.

“Happy Father’s Day to all the dads but mostly mine, who called me yesterday to remind me he still has guitar picks from the Red Tour, ‘if they’re needed,’” Taylor wrote on June 20.

Swift’s message about her father finding his Red Tour memorabilia arrived two days after she announced that Red (Taylor’s Version) is the next re-recorded album she’ll be releasing.

The new recording of her 2012 album, with “all 30 songs that were meant to go on Red,” is coming on Nov. 19.

Swift released her re-recorded version of Fearless in April. In 2019, she announced plans to re-record her first six studio albums after Scooter Braun acquired her master recordings.

See Swift’s Father’s Day tweet below, as well as some of the amusing (and sweet) reactions that followed.

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Known for Midwestern toughness and an incredible heart, Alyce Robertson dies at 65

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Macy Gray Calls for Update of American Flag: ‘One That Represents All States and All of Us’

Macy Gray is proposing that the American flag be redesigned to represent its diverse population.

The Grammy-winning singer, 53, wrote an op-ed for Market Watch in which she suggested that the flag “no longer represents democracy and freedom.”

Gray began with some background. “The Confederate battle flag, which was crafted as a symbol of opposition to the abolishment of slavery, is just recently tired. We don’t see it much anymore.” She then referenced the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, “when the stormers rained on the nation’s most precious hut, waving Old Glory — the memo was received: the American flag is its replacement.”

Addressing President Biden, vp Kamala Harris, and members of Congress, Gray wrote that the American flag “has been hijacked as code for a specific belief. God bless those believers, they can have it.” She added that, like the Confederate, the flag is “tattered, dated, divisive, and incorrect” and no longer represents all people.

“It’s not fair to be forced to honor it,” wrote Gray. “It’s time for a new flag.”

Of the flag’s stripes, Gray wrote how the Smithsonian documents that the white stripes represent purity and innocence. “America is great,” wrote Gray. “It is beautiful. Pure, it ain’t. It is broken and in pieces.” She posed the question: “What if the stripes were OFF-white?”

Gray argued that the flag should include 52 stars, D.C. and Puerto Rico among them — which she noted have been lobbying for statehood for decades.

Proposing a redesign of the stars, Gray asked: “What if the stars were the colors of ALL of us — your skin tone and mine — like the melanin scale? The blue square represents vigilance and perseverance; and the red stripes stand for valor. America is all of those things.”

Gray included in her op-ed a suggested visual re-imagination of the flag with the updated star colors and off-white stripes.

“Sixty-two years later, in 2021, we have changed and it’s time for a reset, a transformation,” wrote Gray. “One that represents all states and all of us.”

In response to the op-ed, which received a mixed response on social media, the singer was trending on Twitter for much of Saturday, June 19 — known as Juneteenth — in which Biden signed legislation on Thursday to establish it as a Federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery.

The Hollywood Reporter has reached out to a representative for Gray for comment.

This article originally appeared on The Hollywood Reporter.

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Taylor Swift’s ‘Red (Taylor’s Version)’ Has 30 Songs: Our Track List Predictions

Taylor Swift promised that with the release of Red (Taylor’s Version) — her upcoming re-recorded Red album, due out on Nov. 19 — “this will be the first time you hear all 30 songs that were meant to go on Red.”

The original Red album, which arrived in 2012, was already packed with 16 tracks, plus some extras on a deluxe edition release. Still, that leaves quite a few blank spaces on the 30-spot Red (Taylor’s Version) track list.

Below, Billboard makes some predictions about what fans might be able to expect from Swift’s re-recorded Red.

The Original 16 Songs of ‘Red’

This part of the list is a given, but just to jog your memory, here are the 16 songs that appeared on the standard version of Swift’s Red album in 2012: “State of Grace,” “Red,” “Treacherous,” “I Knew You Were Trouble,” “All Too Well,” “22,” “I Almost Do,” “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” “Stay Stay Stay,” “The Last Time” feat. Gary Lightbody, “Holy Ground,” “Sad Beautiful Tragic,” “The Lucky One,” “Everything Has Changed” feat. Ed Sheeran, “Starlight” and “Begin Again.”

The Deluxe Edition Bonus Tracks

A few more obvious choices for the Red (Taylor’s Version) track list are “The Moment I Knew” (“about the worst party I ever had … My boyfriend decided not to show up, and we broke up,” Swift has said), “Come Back… Be Here” and “Girl at Home,” a trio of tunes that were not on the standard release of Red in 2012, but added to the deluxe edition.

The deluxe edition of Red also had demo recordings of “Treacherous” and “Red,” as well as an acoustic take of “State of Grace.” “State of Grace” acoustic could very well be re-recorded for Red (Taylor’s Version), if this release follows the same formula of Fearless (Taylor’s Version), which included the piano take of album track “Forever & Always.”

The Uncensored, 10-Minute Take of ‘All Too Well’

As Billboard theorized earlier, a 10-minute version of “All Too Well” could very well be on Red (Taylor’s Version), in addition to the more standard album-length cut of the song.

Swift possibly gave a nod to the fan-favorite when she revealed that one of the 30 tracks on the re-recorded Red “is even ten minutes long.”

You can see all the reasons we think that 10-minute track is likely “All Too Well” here, but to summarize: Thanks to tidbits Swift and co-writer Liz Rose have told over the years, it’s widely known among Swifties that there once was a 10-minute “All Too Well” that was whittled down to a run time of about five-and-a-half minutes for the original Red album.

“It had probably seven extra verses and it included the F-word,” Swift recalled.

‘Nothin New,’ Inspired by Joni Mitchell & Getting Older

When Swift released Lover in 2019, she included booklets featuring personal, handwritten old journal entries with the deluxe editions of the album. One journal entry detailed her experience writing a song that mentioned her being 22 years old, which would be around the age she was while writing for Red.

“I wrote a song on the plane ride from Sydney to Perth on the Appalachian dulcimer I bought the day of my flight,” Swift’s journal entry read. “I bought it because Joni played on most of her Blue record. I taught myself to play ‘A Case of You.’ Anyway, I wrote a song on it called ‘Nothin New’ and it’s about being scared of aging and things changing and losing what you have.”

She shared the following lyrics: “I’m getting older and less sure of what you like about me anyway/ How can a person know everything at 18 and nothing at 22/ And will you still want me when I’m nothing new?”

Taylor’s Recording of ‘Better Man’

In 2016, country group Little Big Town released (and later won many awards for) “Better Man,” a song written by Swift that just didn’t make the final cut for any of her own albums (though she did once perform it live, at Nashville’s Bluebird Cafe).

In an interview with On Air With Ryan Seacrest in 2019, while talking about her upcoming album re-recordings, Swift confirmed “Better Man” was indeed a track she “wrote during Red — it was originally going to be on the Red album.”

And she made it very clear that she loved the idea of eventually putting it on Red (Taylor’s Version). “Fans were like, ‘Maybe she’ll put ‘Better Man,’ her version, on the Red album?’ And I was like, ‘That’s an amazing idea!’” noted Swift.

Taylor’s Recording of ‘Babe’

In 2018, Sugarland released “Babe,” a song written by Swift and Train’s Pat Monahan. While Swift never released the song on her own, she did record guest vocals on Sugarland’s take — and she treated some lucky fans to a solo acoustic performance of the track on a stop of her Reputation Stadium Tour.

As Monahan recalled in an interview with ABC News Radio in 2013, he’d first asked Swift to collaborate with him on a song for a Train album — but they ended up writing “Babe” for Red instead. Unfortunately, “Babe” didn’t end up on the original Red track list, though Monahan said “the song, I think, will be on” the deluxe edition of the album. Of course, that didn’t happen either, but perhaps it finally will find a home on a Swift album with Red (Taylor’s Version).

“I was just lucky enough to be a part of it with her, and I’m gonna ask the same of her in the future,” Monahan said at the time.

A Never-Before-Heard Song With Mark Foster

In the summer of 2012, just months before Red was released, Foster the People’s Mark Foster confirmed that he’d recently penned a song with Swift — one that still has yet to surface.

“We wrote a song … It’s a really cool song, you know?” he said in an interview at Bonnaroo that summer. “We kind of just went into it casually, like let’s just jam and just have fun, and something really cool came out of it. We’ll see what happens with it. She’s been writing a lot for her next record. It was a lot of fun working with her — she’s super talented.”

An Ed Sheeran Collab From the Vault

Longtime friends and collaborators Swift and Sheeran first got together to write music in 2012. Their sweet duet “Everything Has Changed” made it onto the original Red album, but the pair have both implied there is at least one more song out there from their Red-era session.

In a pair of now-deleted old tweets, they’d written cute coordinating messages while working on music:

“In and out burger, defacing guitars and writing music with @taylorswift13,” Sheeran had written with a smiley face.

Swift confirmed that scenario, also with a smiley face: “Eating cheeseburgers, scribbling on guitars, writing songs with @edsheeran.”

And in an interview with Rolling Stone that summer, Sheeran added that they “wrote two tunes, actually, one on the record [Red] and another that’s still out in the ether somewhere.”

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Nogizaka46 Shoots to No. 1 on Japan Hot 100 With Over 700K CDs Sold

Nogizaka46’s “Gomenne Fingers Crossed” soars to No. 1 on the latest Billboard Japan Hot 100, dated June 7 to 13, selling 704,346 CDs in its first week. The popular girl group’s new single sold more copies than its predecessor, “Boku Ha Boku Wo Suki Ni Naru” (678,684 copies), to lead sales and look-ups, while also coming in at No. 6 for radio airplay, No. 15 for downloads, No. 19 for Twitter mentions, and No. 83 for video views.

After leading the tally for two straight weeks, BTS’ “Butter” slips to No. 2, but continues to hold the top spots for streaming, video and Twitter. While the figures are tapering off — streams are down from last week’s 18,729,013 to 16,133,460, video views are also down from 11,348,160 to 7,309,315 views — the numbers themselves are still far greater than the tracks at No. 2 and beyond. “Butter” has logged its third week atop the Billboard Hot 100, and continues to maintain enough momentum to return to No. 1 in Japan.

Kenshi Yonezu’s “Pale Blue” rules downloads and radio this week, while also performing well in streaming (No. 2), video (No. 2) and Twitter (No. 7). The track falls 2-3, but with the CD going on sale June 16, whether or not it can overtake BTS’ “Butter” to rise to No. 1 is something to keep an eye on next week.

The Billboard Japan Hot 100 combines physical and digital sales, audio streams, radio airplay, Twitter mentions, YouTube and GYAO! video views, Gracenote look-ups and karaoke data.

See the full Billboard Japan Hot 100 chart, dated June 7 to 13, here.

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Here’s Who Topped PRS’ Most Played UK National Football Anthems Chart

The fans have spoken! As the UEFA Euro 2020 heats up, U.K. collecting society PRS for Music has revealed its list of top UK national football anthems.

Ahead of the European football championship, the popular 1990s track “Three Lions (Football’s Coming Home)” has placed No. 1 on PRS’ Most Played UK National Football Anthems Chart, according to data compiled by the organization.

Released 25 years ago, “Three Lions” — known for its popular lyric “It’s coming home” — has spent 45 weeks on the UK Official Singles Chart, peaking at No. 1. The anthem was originally performed by David Baddiel, Frank Skinner and the Lightning Seeds.

A fan favorite, “Three Lions” served as the official song of the England team at Euro ’96. Two years later, the enduring track was re-released as an unofficial anthem for England’s FIFA World Cup campaign.

PRS’ Most Played UK National Football Anthems Chart ranks the official Football Association, FIFA World Cup and UEFA Euro songs for England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The list is based on streams and downloads across online music and video-on-demand platforms in 2020.

Placing second on the list is “World in Motion,” performed by British rock band New Order with the English national football team (credited as Englandneworder) for the 1990 World Cup. Coming in at No. 3 on the chart is “This Time (We’ll Get it Right),” by the England World Cup Squad ’82 for that year’s World Cup.

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Is ‘All Too Well’ the 10-Minute Song on Taylor Swift’s Re-Recorded ‘Red’?

Taylor Swift’s announcement about her re-recorded Red was wrapped with a big hint that die-hard fans might finally get a gift they’ve been wanting for years: the original, 10-minute long opus of her heartbreaking album classic “All Too Well.”

“This will be the first time you hear all 30 songs that were meant to go on Red,” Swift wrote in Friday’s (June 18) reveal that Red (Taylor’s Version) will be released on Nov. 19. “And hey, one of them is even ten minutes long.”

It’s important to note that Swift has not officially confirmed the title of the 10-minute song that will appear on Red (Taylor’s Version). But on Twitter, she accessorized her casual mention of a 10-minute track with an emoji of a cozy red scarf.

Below, read on about that clue and others that point to “All Too Well” being the super long Red song that Swift is teasing.

The Legendary Old Scarf

The scarf emoji in Swift’s recent tweet just might be a very obvious wink at a certain scarf that has taken on a life of its own to Swifties — the one left in a drawer to be immortalized in “All Too Well.”

“But you keep my old scarf from that very first week ’cause it reminds you of innocence and it smells like me,” she sings. “You can’t get rid of it ’cause you remember it all too well.”

The 10-Minute Track Length

“All Too Well” is the first song Swift wrote for the breakup album Red, and clocking in at just about five-and-a-half minutes, it’s already the longest recording on the original 2012 album’s track list. In several interviews over the years, both Swift and co-writer Liz Rose have referred to even longer versions of the song that the public has never had the privilege of hearing — including one that’s just about 10 minutes long, with a number of verses that didn’t make the final cut.

“It was a day when I was just, like, a broken human, walking into rehearsal just feeling terrible about what was going on in my personal life,” Swift recalled of the origins of “All Too Well” on a podcast with Rolling Stone. “I ended up sort of just playing four chords over and over again, and the band started kicking in … People just started playing along with me. I think they could tell I was really going through it. I just started singing and riffing and sort of ad-libbing this song that basically was ‘All Too Well.’ It started with, ‘I walked through the door with you, the air was cold.’ It literally just was that song, but it had probably seven extra verses and it included the F-word.”

She continued, “Basically I remember my sound guy was like, ‘Hey, I burned a CD of that thing that you were doing in case you want it … I ended up taking it home and listening to it, and I was like, ‘I actually really like this, but it definitely is like 10 minutes long and I need to pare it down.’”

She then went to Rose, one of her longtime songwriting collaborators, to help her do just that. “She had this long song — story, basically — that she had put to music,” Rose recalled.

The F-Word’s Appearance

As Swift revealed, a 10-minute “All Too Well” with profanity exists. The original Red was, of course, never marked as explicit, since neither the F-word nor any other swear words made it onto the 2012 album.

However, upon the announcement of Red (Taylor’s Version), Swift detectives might have noticed that her official webstore lists both clean and explicit versions of the album to pre-order. Could the as-yet-untitled 10-minute track, presumed to be an angsty “All Too Well,” be the culprit?

“I thought it was too dark, too sad, too intense, too many things,” Swift, who seemed surprised that a non-single became such a fan-favorite over the years, has said of “All Too Well.”

Will fans only have to wait 22 more weeks to find out just how dark, sad and intense it was in its original form, when Red (Taylor’s Version) arrives?

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