Drake took it back to 2003, and while listening to a Chingy classic, something about the St. Louis rapper’s “One Call Away” anthem stuck out to him.

The 6 God took to his Instagram Story on Sunday (Aug. 18) to quote verses from the Jackpot hit, which Drake felt he related to, especially when it came to trying to go harder if certain ladies were in attendance watching him play basketball, but negatively impacting his game.

“Nah Chingy I felt this like why do I play better when the tings aren’t watching you really struck a chord with this one goated lyric,” he wrote.

Drizzy continued to salute Chingy. “Also, the face you said tryna dribble like off that bar we know you were ass at ball but your ting showed up and you started doing too much like this real af you are a guy for that bar,” he wrote.

Chingy has yet to respond to Drake’s praise on social media. However, there was much debate and confusion about what the OVO boss had to say, as some interpreted the flowers as a backhanded compliment or even dissing Chingy. “Did Drake just diss Chingy or is he just joking around?” one person asked, adding a shrug emoji.

Did Drake just diss Chingy or is he just joking around? 🤷🏿‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/YIXsVrmaeA

— COEVILLIE (@COEVILLIE) August 19, 2024

“One Call Away” landed on Chingy’s Jackpot album in 2003 and was released as a single in January 2004.

The Track Starz-produced banger went on to reach No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and ended up spending 20 weeks on the chart.

Watch the “One Call Away” video featuring Chingy in action on the basketball court below.

The latest chapter in Channing Tatum and Zoë Kravitz‘s love story involved a romantic night out at Taylor Swift‘s London Eras Tour show over the weekend.  

And in a video posted by the Magic Mike star after the show, he films the Batman actress dancing along to “Shake It Off” before leaning down and kissing his fiancée on the cheek. “Date night with TSwift,” he captioned the clip posted on X Monday (Aug. 19). “The love is real and @taylorswift13 is an absolute force!”

Tatum also tweeted a selfie in which he poses with Swift’s father, Scott, and a handful of guitar picks. “Got some guitar picks I’m gonna sell for charity from big daddy Swift himself,” he wrote. “Legend he is. #swiftiesforever #tstheerastour.”

The couple’s outing comes just over a year after Tatum attended an Eras Tour stop in Los Angeles, wearing a glitter heart around his eye and an “I’m the daddy, it’s me” T-shirt made by his 11-year-old daughter, Everly, whom he shares with his ex-wife, actress Jenna Dewan. “I was a fan of the music because I’ve listened to her forever, but I did not know she was such an unstoppable force,” the actor later raved of Swift’s concert on The Tonight Show in July.

“I kind of know her a little personally, and she’s really kind of just normal and sweet,” he added at the time, referencing his connection to Swift via Kravitz’s friendship with the pop star. “And she’ll make you, like, a dinner, and like whip it up no problem. Like, homemade Pop-Tarts. Like warm, warm Pop-Tarts. I’m like, ‘Did you just make these? How are these warm?’”

In addition to dancing with her fiancé at the three-hour-plus Wembley show, Kravitz also got to rock out to a song she helped Swift write: “Lavender Haze” from Midnights. Shortly after the album dropped in 2022, the Divergent actress revealed in an interview with GQ that she and the 14-time Grammy winner were in each other’s quarantine pods, and that Swift made her “home-cooked meals and dinner on [her] birthday” during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Zoë’s sense of self is what makes her such an exciting artist, and such an incredible friend,” Swift added in the same interview. “She has this very honest inner compass, and the result is art and life without compromising who she is.”

See Tatum’s post with Kravitz and Papa Swift at the Eras Tour below.

Date night with TSwift. The love is real and @taylorswift13 is an absolute force! Ha and got some guitar picks I’m gonna sell for charity from big daddy Swift himself. Legend he is. #swiftiesforever #tstheerastour pic.twitter.com/MhgvojuD21

— Channing Tatum (@channingtatum) August 19, 2024

Twenty-five years ago, singer-songwriter Shelby Lynne was done making her way through Nashville’s Music Row system. She’d released her first album, Sunrise, a country project produced by Bob Montgomery and Billy Sherrill, in 1989. Her sophomore album, Tough All Over, spurred top 30 Country Airplay singles with the title track and “I’ll Lie Myself to Sleep.” Lynne began contributing writing on her fourth and fifth albums, but longed for creative freedom.

Then, she made the career-shifting decision to move from Nashville to California, crafting her liberating 2000 project I Am Shelby Lynne which perhaps served as her true debut. The album marked her foray from country into soul and R&B, with her commanding vocal and writing perspectives shining through every track. I Am propelled her to win new artist of the year at the 2001 Grammys, and marked her first project to debut on the Billboard 200.

This year sees the celebration of I Am Shelby Lynne’s silver anniversary, celebrated through the re-release of the project’s vinyl and digital versions. As her decampment from Nashville to California propelled her breakthrough those years ago, Lynne’s return to Music City two years ago has heralded her latest reinvention — as she also releases her ninth studio album, Consequences of the Crown, which arrived Aug. 16 via Monument Records. The album marks her first since 2021’s The Servant.

After living in California for the better part of three decades, Lynne relocated back to Nashville to live closer to her sister, fellow singer-songwriter Allison Moorer, and to her nephew.

“I just wanted to get back to the South after all that time,” Lynne tells Billboard, noting songwriting — not recording — was her primary goal. “My original plan was to scooch into Nashville real quiet and find me some folks to write some songs.”

But Nashville’s creative community ultimately had other plans. Her friend Waylon Payne offered to introduce her back into Nashville’s writing circles. The first person Payne brought over was Ashley Monroe. “We were instantly drawn to each other and actually wrote a couple of songs on the first day,” Lynne recalls.

From there, her community of collaborators kept expanding, with Monroe bringing her Pistol Annies cohorts Angaleena Presley and Miranda Lambert — and soon, Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild was brought into the fold. It was Fairchild who set Consequences of the Crown into motion, first becoming Lynne’s manager and then encouraging her to record the album and landing Lynne a deal with Monument Records.

“She’s just an amazing woman,” Lynne shares. “Karen said, ‘Well, we need a new record from you,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, no. I think that part of my career… I think I’m done. I just want to write songs.’ But she made some calls and Katie McCartney at Monument [Records] said, ‘Let’s make a record.’ So here I am.”

Lynne began those writing sessions last Spring, with the deal with Monument happening in August. When it came time to record the album, the all-woman creative collective naturally fell together: Lynne, Fairchild, Monroe and engineer Gena Johnson.

“We found ourselves in there together, and we just decided we’d go four ways on this thing,” Lynne says. “We met when the four of us could meet, because we found that we would never work without the four of us together, because it just didn’t feel right. The songs we were writing were good songs. I’d look around my living room and see these amazing, talented people. I felt loved and kind of taken in.”

The album’s pop-fused, yet stripped-back instrumentation, features Lynne not only on vocals, but on bass, acoustic and electric guitar, percussion, and drums. Monroe played a range of instruments including keys, piano, organ and acoustic guitar, while Fairchild contributed percussion and background vocals, with Johnson also handling percussion and programming. Also on the project is Eleonore Denig on strings, while Lynne’s sister Moorer offers background vocals.

Monroe is a co-writer on all but one of the songs on the album, with Fairchild contributing to five of the songs. Other writer credits scattered throughout the project include Payne (“Keep the Light On”) and Presley (“Keep the Light On,” “Over and Over”), as well as Meg McRee, Carter Faith and Jedd Hughes.

In the process, Lynne found a camaraderie and safe space for free-flowing collaboration and emotional excavation. Music led the way in the studio, leaving room for unexpected twists and turns, spoken-word moments, vocal howls and sonic shifts. The new album also nods to the work of I Am Shelby Lynne, as “But I Ain’t” interpolates “Dreamsome” from that seminal album — another mark of that impulsive studio vibe.

“When I’m on the mic and I’m hearing the music, letting things happen, it just kind of fell down because it was so real and we had to keep it,” Lynne says.

The album opens with “Truth We Know,” which Lynne calls “a sketch of words that I had written down right in the middle of my heart breaking.” Songs including “Shattered,” “Consequences” and “Over and Over” offer up the nuanced process of navigating a breakup and the work of healing and moving on.

“It was a little bit devastating for me, and I was in a sad kind of a way,” Lynne says. “These songs are little chapters of the pain I was going through when I was breaking up with somebody, and I compare it to all of my crappy relationships, but they can fit in through all of the broken hearts that we’ve had.”

The Nashville Lynne has returned to has both changed and stayed the same. It’s notable that in that time, the Nashville country music scene has moved from the height of the “bro country” era dominated by hip-hop-inflected country songs recorded by white males, and the spark of “Tomatogate” that continues to see women artists fighting for a precious few slots on male-dominated mainstream country radio. Currently, traditional-leaning artists including Lainey Wilson and Cody Johnson are making waves, while as country audiences take to streaming, Americana and folk-oriented artists such as Zach Bryan, The Red Clay Strays, Tyler Childers and Allison Russell are surging, and Shaboozey’s genre-blending anthem “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” is dominating.

“Of course, Nashville’s grown into this huge city, so that’s different,” Lynne says of the changes she’s seen in Music City. “But the good old boy network still runs — it’s just another set of boys. So that exists.

However, Lynne, who is gay, also acknowledges that Nashville has changed in other important ways: “How can I put it? Queers have come in and we just f—king run everything. And so, Nashville has had to embrace all of the changes — and look at this eclectic group of people we have, like Allison Russell, Fancy Haygood… people that are saying, ‘I’m doing this.’

“I’m proud of musicians just taking over and saying, ‘F—k you. This is who I am. I’m country. Kiss my a–,’” she continues. “I don’t think genre really matters anymore, because everybody’s doing exactly whatever in the hell they want to do, musically. I love the variety, and the mixed bag of what country music truly is — I don’t listen to mainstream music much, but I guess they’re Americana artists.”

Consequences also serves as a potent reminder of Lynne’s own trailblazing, genre-blending ways, as she melded different styles long before it was the “in” thing to do — though she’s quick to recognize that fearless spirit in others, such as Beyoncé. Lynne is a fan of Beyoncé’s country-influenced Cowboy Carter, a project she calls “well done and brilliant. I couldn’t wait until it came out because I love her and I said, ‘This is not just a country album, but it’s an album for the country.’ It’s an uplifting, creative experience.”

Ahead, Lynne has select shows, including what is sure to be a homecoming of sorts at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium on Sept. 26. But for now, she’s celebrating the creative community that has formed around her, as she’s open to exploration on her next ventures.

 “I’m still kind of blown away that everything happened the way it did, because it’s just proof that you don’t need to plan everything — just get out of the way,” she says.

This time of year, Tony Brown is frequently reminded of his work with Elvis Presley.

On Aug. 16, 1977, he was at the Nashville Airport with several other Presley band members waiting for a plane that would take them to Portland, Maine, for a show. Instead, Colonel Tom Parker sent word that the tour was off and they should go home. In his car, Brown heard on the radio that Presley had died. If the DJ had teed up Presley’s then-current “Way Down,” Brown would have heard himself playing piano even as his world tipped over.

“My first thought was, ‘Now what am I going to do, man?’ ” Brown recalls. “ ‘I already spent the money I was going to make on that tour.’ ”

Brown’s doubts about his future were understandable, though with hindsight, they were temporary. He got a job in the RCA A&R department, and in a few short years, Brown led the MCA A&R department, where he became one of country’s leading creative figures, pushing the genre’s edge through his 1980s work with Steve Earle, Lyle Lovett and Nanci Griffith. He would also play a significant role in shaping ’90s country — still very much in vogue in 2024 — through his productions of Vince Gill, Wynonna, Reba McEntire and George Strait.

The Academy of Country Music will recognize Brown’s influence on the format’s direction on Aug. 21, as he receives the ACM Icon Award during the ACM Honors at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. During the event, to be hosted by Carly Pearce and Jordan Davis, trophies will also be bestowed upon the likes of Lainey Wilson, Chris Stapleton, Luke Bryan, Trisha Yearwood and Alan Jackson.

“Getting this award just sort of gives me, I don’t know, credibility in my mind that I’m not an old-timer,” Brown confesses.

He is, to be certain, in a different part of his career. Working at a label, particularly before laptop technologies and the internet became dominant, provided an opportunity to be at the hub of the creative activity, and it fed the extroverted part of his personality.

“Everybody would come to your office to play songs, and even the artists would come to your office to listen to songs together,” he says. “Now you need to call them up and say, ‘Do you want me to come to your place to listen to songs? Are you going to come to my place?’ And they go, ‘Just send them to me.’ It’s a whole different dynamic, and I’m not used to that. I’m a face-to-face kind of guy.”

The North Carolina-bred keyboard player grew up in a gospel environment — his evangelist father forbade him from listening to secular music. Studying with a piano teacher in Louisiana one summer as a teenager, he got introduced to country — particularly through Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music — and pursued that direction professionally. He played piano with Presley, The Oak Ridge Boys, Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell’s Cherry Bombs, and ultimately landed on Music Row, where his gospel background applied nicely. Gospel is a format defined by the words more than the sound, and Brown was keenly focused on lyrics as he signed singer-songwriters and picked material for his production clients. He frequently demanded song pluggers supply lyric sheets when they pitched material.

“I love the melodies,” he says, “but I really follow the lyric.”

Brown’s impressive rèsumè includes, just for starters, Crowell’s Diamonds & Dirt, Stapleton’s “What Are You Listening To?,” Wynonna’s “No One Else on Earth,” Yearwood’s “How Do I Live,” Gill’s “I Still Believe in You,” Strait’s “Blue Clear Sky,” David Lee Murphy’s“Dust on the Bottle,” Chely Wright’s“Single White Female,” Gary Allan’s“Smoke Rings in the Dark,” Steve Wariner’s“The Weekend,” Sara Evans’“A Little Bit Stronger” and Brooks & Dunn’s “Believe,” which infused Brown’s gospel history in both its sound and its lyric.

“I still cry, man,” Brown says of the recording. “It just makes me cry.”

But McEntire’s “Fancy,” he suggests, is probably the most famous of his productions. More than 30 years after its debut, its swampy tone — enhanced by Steve Gibson’sslide guitar — still feels current.

“Just before he walked out of the studio, he said, ‘Hey, let me put some slide Mac Gayden kind of thing on there,’ ” Brown notes. “It was kind of like an afterthought overdub. He put it on there, and it gives it that snaky kind of Deep South, snake-oil thing.”

Brown survived a horrific ordeal in April 2003, suffering a head injury when he slipped at a Santa Monica, Calif., restaurant. His mother died while he was hospitalized, and it left him with plenty to process as he began appearing in public again roughly two months later. He eventually discovered he was mired in depression.

“Depression is a strange thing — it’s hard to know you got it,” he says. “I didn’t realize it until I went to a therapist, and he figured it out. It’s nice to get out of it.”

Working in a freelance capacity, Brown admittedly doesn’t produce as many albums as he did at the height of his career, though he’s hardly finished. He oversaw a diverse-sounding 2023 album, Gaither Tribute: Award-Winning Artists Honor the Songs of Bill & Gloria Gaither, featuring Ronnie Dunn, Josh Turner, CeCe Winans and Jamey Johnson, among others. Brown also co-produced several of the tracks on Strait’s Cowboys and Dreamers, due Sept. 6, and he’s producing a portion of McEntire’s next project.

The ACM Icon Award is a welcome confirmation amid that renewed activity. The fear he had when the Presley gig came to a tragic halt isn’t much different from the uncertainties he still feels about his future as an independent contractor. When he was producing 13 albums a year, he took the work for granted. Now he has enough time between commitments to savor just how fortunate he has been — and to know he’s not ready to stop.

“I am totally pumped that this [award] popped up right now,” he says. “It’s a big deal.”

Subscribe to Billboard Country Update, the industry’s must-have source for news, charts, analysis and features. Sign up for free delivery every weekend.

This week, Post Malone made his much-heralded country music debut with his collaborations-packed album F-1 Trillion–and then surprised fans with the release of F-1 Trillion: Long Bed, with an additional nine songs. Elsewhere, Brantley Gilbert teams with Justin Moore for a new track, while bluegrasser Bella White covers an Emmylou Harris classic.

Check out all of these and more in Billboard‘s roundup of the best country songs of the week below.

Post Malone, F-1 Trillion: Long Bed

Post Malone’s country era officially arrived in full bloom on Friday (Aug. 16) via his new album F-1 Trillion. While his foray into the genre came with the help of one of the format’s biggest artists, Morgan Wallen, on “I Had Some Help,” the full F-1 Trillion project displays Post Malone’s undeniably deep-seated love for the genre, with an array of collaborations with Luke Combs, Dolly Parton, Tim McGraw, Ernest, Hank Jr. and other genre stalwarts. Each of those collabs feels crafted toward the featured artist’s strengths (in the case of McGraw’s collab, it even ties in titles of some of McGraw’s lengthy list of hits). However, Post Malone also proves he can do country just fine without any star-studded collabs, such as on the tender ode to his daughter, “Yours.”

Later in the weekend he also surprised fans with nine additional, solo-recorded songs for the Long Bed edition, and in the process, offered up a slate of some of the overall album’s strongest, and delightfully country, material. This “no skips” string of songs includes the Western swing romps of “Who Needs You” and “Back to Texas” and flirty ’90s country of “Hey Mercedes.” “Two Hearts” looks at the reverberations that heartbreak has on an entire family, while he makes the case for a post-breakup, passion-filled reunion on “Ain’t How It Ends,” but acknowledges that “Hank and Johnny, Strait and Ronnie Dunn made all the rules.” Meanwhile, the somber “Killed a Man” is a clear-eyed look at viciously and suddenly putting his various vices behind him.

The extended version of F-1 Trillion cements Post Malone as an artist with a full-fledged sense of his musical vision and contributions to the genre — while the fiddle, steel guitar and ’90s country twang that fill this album suits this Texas native with aplomb.

Brantley Gilbert feat. Justin Moore, “Dirty Money”

Georgia native Gilbert and Arkansas native Moore team up for this pride-fueled celebration of those who earn their “dirty money” straight from the ground, providing food for communities through raising and harvesting crops. Written by Gilbert with Josh Phillips, this track revs up with all the gritty churn of a combine, as a bed of industrial-scale, frothy guitars, sharp percussion and thudding bass carry the two artists’ intertwined, destinctive drawls.

“Dirty Money” serves as the opening song to Gilbert’s upcoming album, Tattoos, out Sept. 13.

Morgan Wade feat. Kesha, “Walked on Water”

On her new album Obsessed, Wade offers her most detailed and unvarnished storytelling to date, particularly on her new song with veteran pop hitmaker Kesha. “Walked on Water” is a post-breakup realization of one’s own faults and delusions that led to the relational dissolution. “People like me/ We don’t do well at sea/ ‘Cause I thought I walked on water,” Wade sings, as her oil-and-sandpaper voice weaving together with Kesha’s on this tender piano ballad, a solo write from Wade.

Bella White, “Luxury Liner”

Canadian-born White issued her debut album, Just Like Leaving, four years ago and since then has proven to be a prolific and essential new voice, thanks to songs including “Not to Blame.” Here, White covers the Gram Parsons-written, Emmylou Harris-recorded “Luxury Liner,” which was the title track to Harris 1976 album. White’s version retains the song’s frenetic instrumental urgency, particularly with razor-sharp fiddle and a steady percussion, while White’s voice interjects a hazy, twangy purity.

“Luxury Liner” is from White’s new five-song covers EP Fire for Silver, which also includes covers of Lucinda Williams’ “Concrete and Barbed Wire,” and Jeff Tweedy’s “Nobody Dies Anymore.”

Muscadine Bloodline, “Good in This World”

Since forming their duo in 2016, Muscadine Bloodline’s Charlie Muncaster and Gary Stanton have forged a reputation as two of country music’s liveliest entertainers, and a duo deadset on creating their career on their own terms, outside of the major label system. On their latest album, The Coastal Plain, released, Aug. 16 on Stancaster via Thirty Tigers, they further elevate their songcraft, particularly on the meticulously detailed album closer, “Good in this World.” The song hinges on the tale of a young man’s chance meeting with a Vietnam veteran at a gas station, as the veteran tells of relishing in (and intentionally making) many of his life’s simplest but best moments, from listening to “Brown Eyed Girl” to buying his loved one pearls. The conversation is a perspective-shifting one, leading the younger gentleman to make the most of his own moments, both present and future.