Japanese rockers [Alexandros] dropped their first greatest hits album Where’s My History?, a collection of key tracks that represent the band’s history as it wraps up its 10th anniversary year. The project includes the band’s representative track “Wataridori” and concert staples from their indie days, as well as a new number called “Kaze ni natte.”

The four-man band also faces a major turning point in its career as drummer Satoyasu Shomura, who officially joined in April 2010, will be departing after the two shows set for Mar. 20 and 21. As the countdown begins for [Alexandros] to exist as the current quartet, interviewer Chinami Hachisuka chatted with the members — Shomura, Hiroyuki Isobe (bass & chorus), Yoohei Kawakami (vocals & guitar), and Masaki Shirai (guitar) — on behalf of Billboard Japan and asked about their ten years together and what’s in store for the future of the band.

You all strike me as guys who don’t dwell on the past as a matter of principle, so your greatest hits album came as a surprise. Why did you decided to release it?

Kawakami: Since we’ve released seven albums over the course of ten years, we thought that perhaps new fans would find themselves at a loss as to which one they should listen to first when they feel like checking out our catalog before coming to a show. We’ve selected some good gateway songs, so it’d be great if people like them and then decide to delve further into our other works from there.

What did you feel while you were producing the album, or when you actually listened to its lineup?

Shomura: Each track reminded me that I enjoyed life so much back then and that I lived so earnestly. And that was what led to today. Though I’ll continue on outside the band in the future, when I listen to this album, I get excited thinking about what the band will do next. I’m really proud of all the songs.

Shirai: We mixed some of the tracks over again. On one of them, “For Freedom,” our previous drummer Hiroki Ishikawa is playing on the recording, so it was fun looking back, like, “Oh yeah, Isshi used to sound like this, remember?”

Isobe: I felt that a lot of these songs now thrive as live renditions. “Kill Me If You Can” has that little twang in the end, which I’d forgotten all about because I’ve played it so many times in concert. [Laughs] I was able to enjoy it from a listener’s point of view.

Kawakami: Regarding the lyrics, I felt that what I say basically hasn’t changed. [Kawakami is the band’s principal songwriter.] The first song we included in the set, “Ondosa,” is one we had since before our debut, but the way I feel and think really hasn’t changed. I think that’s a good thing. It was an opportunity to acknowledge that I probably won’t change from now on, either, and that the essence of what I want to say exist in these songs.

If there was a turning point for the band, which song captures that moment best?

Isobe: My choice would be “For Freedom,” because it kicked off our debut. There were multiple turning points during these past ten years, but “For Freedom” is the song that I really feel like, “If we hadn’t had that one, what would have happened?”

Shirai: “For Freedom” was the moment our direction was set, and it felt like a breath of fresh air. I’d just joined the band, and switched from bass to guitar at that timing, so I was still trying to find my style as a guitarist. I think that the reason why my style gradually became so rock-tinged is because the riff in “For Freedom” leaves such a strong impression.

Kawakami: Before we made our debut, we used to busk in Yoyogi Park [in Shibuya, Tokyo] every week. There were some good songs among the ones we used to perform on the street, but none of them felt most essential for the band. One day, I was playing the guitar cooped up in my room after coming home from work, and wrote a chorus for “For Freedom” fairly quickly. It felt like I’d aired out something from inside of me and thought, “I feel much better now.”

Isobe: All four of us were living together at the time, and we each had jobs so that we could keep performing. We were in the band because we had confidence, but couldn’t debut for a long time and were at the end of our ropes. So it was like that disappointment of, “Why won’t anybody acknowledge us?” and all the pent-up frustration were loaded on top of “For Freedom.”

Shomura: When we wrote “Starrrrrrr,” we were trying to figure out how to play a song that has a kind of unifying force. That track was born by blending the things we’d cultivated until that point, and also adding what was lacking by squeezing it out through our sessions in the studio. It was tough while we were producing it, but I have a special place in my heart for that one because so much love went into it.

Kawakami: If I were to choose another one, it’d be “Mosquito Bite.” We spent some time outside of Japan [in New York to record Sleepless in Brooklyn] because we needed some time to become nobodies. For the first time in a while, it felt like something significant had popped out when this song was born. We don’t have a producer, and write songs that we want to perform at that point in time, and even choose our own outfits. Still, we have our moments when we become lost, like, “What is it we want to do right now?” At the time, our way of finding the answer to that was to write songs in New York. “Mosquito Bite” might have been my biggest turning point in a personal sense, in that it taught me the importance not being caught up in anything and sort of popping songs out like that.

How are you feeling now as you kick off the next ten years of your career?

Kawakami: We want to destroy all the common sense that we’ve built up over the years. We have to use the past ten years as a springboard for the future or we won’t be able to grow. We still haven’t reached the place we dreamed about ten years ago. Right now, we’re taking a good hard look at ourselves once again in order to continue pursuing what we want to do, and we’re exploring what needs to be done for us to do so.

Your last show as a member of [Alexandros] is coming up soon, Mr. Shomura. How do you feel? [The Interview took place in mid-December.]

Shomura: It’s really hard to describe, but… One thing I can say with certainty is that I’ll get on that stage with my heart brimming with gratitude. I see my current situation in a positive light, and I like myself for being able to feel that way. I also love everybody who values my decision [to leave the band], so I guess in the words of Yoohei, “I love you all!” is how I feel now.

This article by Chinami Hachisuka first appeared on Billboard Japan.

In a video for the title track of his new album Spaceman, Nick Jonas beams in from outer space. Now, he’s beaming in from heaven.

The brand-new music video for “This Is Heaven,” released Wednesday afternoon (March 17), shows Jonas performing in church, backed by a choir, as the sun streaks in through stained-glass windows. In another scene, he’s in front of a giant control panel, seemingly back to his lonely “Spaceman” character. Then he truly finds happiness not up in that space observation deck, but outdoors, as he’s seen running through the woods, surrounded by sky-high trees, and he can finally breathe.

The visual, directed by Daniel Broadley, was shot in England, and Jonas is joined by the London Community Gospel Choir, led by Anthony Williams, in St. John’s Church in London’s Hyde Park for the gorgeous performance scenes.

Jonas released his most recent solo album, Spaceman, on Friday. Over the weekend, he unleashed a deluxe edition that includes a new song featuring the Jonas Brothers.

Watch the “This Is Heaven” video below:

 

 

 

Following Mickey Guyton’s stirring performance of “Black Like Me” during Sunday’s Grammy Awards, her label EMI Nashville has partnered with fellow Universal Music Group label Republic Records to promote the song to adult contemporary stations. The new version is dubbed “Black Like Me (Our Voices).”

“We believe in the power of ‘Black Like Me’ and after speaking with Republic, they too felt there was a bigger audience for this song,” Universal Music Group Nashville president Cindy Mabe tells Billboard. “They serviced the song to multi-formats Monday and are currently working it to AC radio.”

While “Black Like Me,” which EMI Nashville released in June during the protests following the death of George Floyd, has only received a few spins so far from a handful of stations, “I think ‘Black Like Me’ will do well with our listeners and they’ll certainly be able to relate,” John Anthony, PD at AC outlet WJKK, Jackson, Miss., tells Billboard.

“Black Like Me” saw immediate sales gains following Guyton’s appearance, selling 1,600 copies after the Grammys on Sunday, according to MRC Data. That signified a staggering 13,225% increase from March 13 and was enough to land Guyton among the artists seeing the biggest sales gains immediately following the telecast.

The song received a nod for best country solo performance, making Guyton the first Black woman to be nominated in that Grammy category.

Universal Music Group Nashville deployed a similar tactic in 2019 after Kacey Musgraves won four Grammys, including the coveted album of the year prize for Golden Hour. The next morning, UMGN’s MCA Nashville serviced “Rainbow” to Country, AC, Hot AC and Triple A radio.

“Black Like Me” has not appeared on any of Billboard’s country charts since its release nine months ago, and airplay for Black women remains staggeringly low. According to a study released last week titled Redlining in Country Music: Representation in the Country Music Industry (2000-2020), only 2.7% of country radio airplay over the past two decades was for songs performed by women of color.

Guyton told Billboard recently that she has “made peace” with the fact that country radio may never play her. (Her song “Better Than You Left Me” peaked at No. 34 on Hot Country Songs in 2015). “A white friend of mine signed to a major label was told by a radio promo person that country radio will not play Black people. So I realized I’m not going to get on any kind of country station,” she said. “And I’m certainly not going to do that by falling in line and shutting up and singing. I’ve made peace with that. I may not ever have some massive career, but I’m going to use the influence I have to open those doors for the future generation. And for young Black and Brown girls who have dreams that people will never consider, I’ll consider them. I’ll see them. And I will use the connections that I have to help them.”

Republic did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Demi Lovato doesn’t hold back one bit about what led to her 2018 heroin overdose and what the future of her sobriety holds in Dancing With the Devil.

The four-part YouTube Originals docuseries, which opened SXSW on Tuesday (March 16), takes place over three years since she started filming a completely separate, now-shelved documentary that was meant to follow the pop superstar around her Tell Me You Love Me Tour.

In fact, the clips of her past performances and talk of the doc’s companion album Dancing With the Devil… The Art of Starting Over, which she recently announced will be released on April 2, doesn’t add up to a total of more than 10 minutes over the course of the four 22- to 28-minute episodes. The album is about where she is today, but where she was on July 24, 2018, the morning paramedics arrived at her Hollywood Hills home after she had overdosed on heroin, takes precedent in the new feature.

Even from the trailer she released on Feb. 17, fans couldn’t begin to wrap their heads around how much damage Lovato had suffered from her overdose, including three strokes, a heart attack and blind spots in her vision that don’t allow her to drive anymore.

Dancing With the Devil, directed by Michael D. Ratner, is not a by-product of her discarded 2018 documentary. It has a completely different foundation, refocusing her narrative from center stage — as seen in snippets of the previous performance-heavy feature Lovato says would’ve only captured the “tip of the iceberg” — and opening up the floodgates about her 2018 overdose while the cameras began rolling again in 2020. The anecdotes are so harrowing that YouTube Originals featured trigger warnings regarding addiction, mental health, eating disorders and sexual abuse ahead of each episode.

With the entire docuseries having premiered at SXSW on March 16, and ahead of the first two episodes making their debut March 23 on YouTube Originals, here are the 10 biggest revelations we learned from Dancing With the Devil.

Father’s Day Triggers Her Fear About Her Biological Father’s Death

Her biological father Patrick Lovato, who died in June 2013, also struggled with alcohol and addiction on top of bipolar and schizophrenia. Lovato notes no one in her family knows the exact date of his passing because his body, which she added had been discovered a week and a half after his death, was “too decomposed” upon discovery for an open-casket funeral.

She says she spends every Father’s Day contemplating which day he passed away on. “And then also knowing that by the time Father’s Day rolls around, he was just laying there, rotting,” she says. “That was the fear I always had for him was that he would end up alone — and he did. He died alone.” The singer had been estranged from her father since 2007 after witnessing him abuse her mother, Dianna De La Garza, who wrote about it in her 2008 memoir Falling With Wings: A Mother’s Story.

She Wrote “Sober” Shortly After Her Introduction to Hard Drugs

One month after DJ Khaled and Kehlani celebrated Lovato’s six-year anniversary of her sobriety at a March 16, 2018-dated concert, Lovato confesses in the doc that she relapsed with alcohol and drugs one month after the show. “I’m surprised I didn’t OD that night,” she recalls of the night she picked up a bottle of red wine and contacted someone she knew would have drugs on them.

“I ended up at a party. I just so happened to run into my old drug dealer from six years before,” she continues. “That night, I did drugs that I had never done before. I had never done meth before — I tried meth. I mixed it with molly, with coke, weed, alcohol, oxytocin. And that alone should have killed me.”

Her dear friends, Matthew Scott Montgomery and Sirah, emphasize her secrecy about that night and how it plays into her pattern of hiding details from her family and friends. “The thing was is that we really didn’t know about the drugs,” Sirah says during her interview portion.

Lovato shares that two weeks after the party, she was introduced to heroin and crack cocaine. While on a trip to Bali, she realized she had a physical dependency on the hard drugs and wrote her June 2018 somber anthem “Sober”; performed it on tour that wrapped by July. By the time she returned to L.A., she began heavily using again. “That is one thing that I was very good at is hiding the fact that I was addicted to crack and heroin,” Lovato says, her eyes flitting across the floor.

Her Assistant’s 911 Call Saved Her Life

On the morning of July 24, 2018, Lovato’s assistant at the time, Jordan Jackson, discovered the singer’s immobile body in her bed and called head of security and chief of staff Max Lea in a panic. While Jackson describes more people rushing into the house, she recalls sneaking downstairs out of fear of “[getting] in trouble for calling 911.” She had been alerted by someone in Lovato’s home to instruct the operator that there be no sirens, but the operator said he had no control over the matter.

In his interview, Lea commends Jackson for her action, adding he was “quite impressed” with how she handled the emergency. The medics who arrived quickly administered Narcan, a nasal spray version of naloxone that reverses the effects of an opiate overdose, before rushing the performer to the hospital.

“I’m really lucky to be alive,” Lovato, who suffered what one of her physicians said was “multiple organ failure,” reflects while thinking about what the doctors had told her. “My doctors said that, like, I had five to 10 more minutes, and had my assistant not come in, I wouldn’t be here today.”

Lovato’s Inability to Recognize Her Little Sister Was Part of a Full-Circle Moment

Her younger sister Madison De La Garza describes the moment she first saw Lovato in the hospital and grabbed her hand. “And she looked me dead in the eye, and she said, ‘Who is that?’” De La Garza tells the camera.

Lovato woke up legally blind following her heroin overdose, and she remembers asking her younger sister who she was, which caused De La Garza to start sobbing because, according to the artist, “she thought from then on, I was not going to be able to see.” One of Lovato’s doctors, neurologist Dr. Shouri Lahiri, explains with Lovato by his side in an interview that one of the initially affected areas of her brain were the vision centers.

Lovato calls it “ironic and in a weird way, poetic” that she couldn’t physically recognize her little sister. The reason, she explains, is that one of the reasons why she first became sober was because her parents said she couldn’t see De La Garza, despite her best efforts to want to have a relationship with her younger sibling. “God has a twisted sense of humor sometimes,” Lovato chuckles while blotting away her tears.

There Are More Layers to the Night She Overdosed

Toward the end of the second episode, Lovato says that on the night of July 23, 2018, she didn’t just overdose.

“I’ve had my fair share of sexual trauma throughout childhood, teenage years. And when they found me, I was naked. I was blue,” Lovato says of the morning following the visit from the man who supplied her drugs. “I was literally left for dead after he took advantage of me.”

Despite telling her doctors that she had had consensual sex, the singer adds it wasn’t until a month after her overdose that she realized she was not “in any state of mind to make a consensual decision.”

When the Going Got Tough, Scooter Braun Got Going

While Lovato stayed in The Cirque Lodge rehabilitation facility shortly following her overdose, she told her longtime business manager Glenn Nordlinger that she wanted to get back into music under the condition that new management would be in place. Having been managed by Phil McIntyre since she was a teenager, Lovato purposefully sought out Scooter Braun, who currently oversees Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande, and who had meticulously planned out how he would say no to Lovato because he felt “overwhelmed.”

But once the two sat down together, he knew she not only needed a manager, but she also needed a friend, and Braun was willing to be both. “I am an artist who just overdosed on heroin. I’m kind of a liability,” Lovato admits in the doc while sitting next to Braun. “I don’t know if people are going to want to work with me.”

He was adamant on figuring out what treatments worked and didn’t work for her, who was her support system, and where she was in her recovery process.

Her Overdose Wasn’t the Last Time She Used Heroin

“I wish I could say that the last night that I ever touched heroin was the night of my overdose, but it wasn’t,” Lovato says while setting the record straight about her relapse following a brief pause in the third episode.

After a weeklong intensive trauma retreat, the singer called the same man who had previously given her what she believes to be fentanyl-laced “after-market pills” and later allegedly took advantage of her the night she overdosed. “I wanted to rewrite his choice of violating me. I wanted it now to be my choice,” she declares while facing the camera head on. “And he also had something that I wanted, which were drugs. And yeah, I ended up getting high. I thought, ‘How did I pick up the same drugs that put me in the hospital?’ I was mortified at my decisions.”

She also remembers calling her dealer back and asserting, “No, I’m going to f— you” as a way to take her  power back. But the singer adds it only brought “me back to my knees of begging to God for help.”

Rihanna’s 2009 Assault Made Her Uncomfortable Coming Forward About Her Own

Prior to Dancing With the Devil, Lovato had only briefly hinted at being sexually abused in her 2013 song “Warrior,” which  starts off with the lyric, “This is a story that I have never told.” She told Cosmopolitan for her August 2017 cover that she’ll tell the story behind “Warrior” when she’s ready.

At first, she cites the pictures coming out of Rihanna and Chris Brown’s assault case as making her “very uncomfortable with even more of my story playing out in the press and also maybe people not believing me.” Lovato later begins telling the story of how she lost her virginity “in a rape” as a teenager. And similarly to her situation with the dealer, she called the person back a month after “and tried to make it right by being in control, and all it did was just make me feel worse.” Archival footage of her Camp Rock 2: The Final Jam days and an old interview around that time reveal how aware a young Lovato quickly became of needing to her protect herself in the industry.

“I was a part of that Disney crowd that publicly said they were waiting till marriage,” she notes about the pressure she faced in the PG environment as a “little child star role model.” Without naming anyone, the actress adds how difficult it was to see the person who raped her all the time while they never faced any consequences, such as being taken out of the movie they were filming.

It all took a physical toll on her, as her bulimia worsened to the point where she was vomiting blood. In finally disclosing her #MeToo story, Lovato encourages others to speak out, saying, “I’m coming forward about what happened to me because everyone that it happens to should absolutely speak their voice if they can and feel comfortable doing so.”

Ending Her Engagement Changed How She Viewed Her Sobriety

Due to the pandemic, the singer had to film her own interview segments, and she ended up documenting one of her biggest milestones in her life when she got engaged to now ex-fiancé Max Ehrich in July after the couple began dating in May. But a minute after she breaks the happy news during the fourth and final episode, her demeanor switches completely from ecstatic to earnest when discussing how they broke off their engagement and how she hadn’t picked up any hard drugs to cope.

Another minute passes, and self-taped footage from the same night as the previous clip reveals a tearful Lovato expressing how she “missed the person I started quarantining with.” Quarantine not only impacted how she filmed her discussions about her relationship, but also how rapidly it had evolved, leaving her feeling “just as shocked” as the rest of the world after getting to know Ehrich better.

But the impact of her high-profile breakup impacted how she perceived her sobriety. “I’ve learned that it doesn’t work for me to say, ‘I’m never going to do this again,’” she explains of her personal discipline. She expresses her desire to seek relief from smoking marijuana or having a glass of wine, but telling herself those options are completely off the table feels like she’s setting herself up for failure.

After hesitantly admitting she occasionally smokes joints and drinks wine now, Lovato cautions viewers that she’s not endorsing a “one-size-fits-all solution” for recovery after years of being upheld as the “poster child of sobriety.” Elton John, who celebrated 30 years of being sober last summer and hopes Lovato also experiences the “most incredible things” in life while in recovery, puts it simply in the doc that, when discussing sobriety, “moderation doesn’t work.”

But her recovery case manager Charles Cook begs to differ, saying he hopes a takeaway from the docuseries is that no one path to sobriety looks the same for each person. Cook and Lovato also elaborate on the precautions she’s put in place, such as taking the Vivitrol shot, an injection of naltrexone that blocks the opiate receptors and is used to prevent relapses.

“The one slipup that I ever had with those drugs again, the scariest thing to me was picking up heroin and realizing, ‘Wow, this isn’t strong enough anymore.’ Because what I had done the night I overdosed was fentanyl. And that, that’s a whole other beast,” she says while slightly shaking her head. “Realizing the high I wanted would kill me was what I needed to get me clean for good.”

She Was Misdiagnosed With Bipolar Disorder

Lovato has been incredibly vocal about mental health issues ever since the then-18-year-old star revealed to ABC News’ Robin Roberts that she had been diagnosed with bipolar in 2011. Now, a full decade later, she’s revealing that that is thought to have been a misdiagnosis.

“I came out to the public when I found out I was bipolar because I thought that it put a reasoning behind my actions,” she explains, while an old headline pops up about Lovato leaving the Jonas Brothers tour after hitting a backup dancer. “I know now from multiple different doctors that it was not because I was bipolar. And I had to grow up. I had to grow the f— up.”

If you or anyone you know is struggling with mental health and substance abuse disorders, contact Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) by calling 1-800-622-HELP (4357). For those who are experiencing suicidal thoughts and/or distress, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is available 24/7 at 1-800-273-8255. People struggling with eating disorders can call the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) Hotline at 1-800-931-2237. If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, contact the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673).