Before Bear Rinehart co-founded the band NEEDTOBREATHE and became a platinum-selling, arena-filling rock musician, he was inspired to pick up a guitar by one of the great Southern rock bands of the last few decades: the Black Crowes. The son of a Christian pastor, Rinehart grew up around gospel music. The Black Crowes had an uplifting sound — with a swagger — that made sense to him. “It’s like such a gospel-soul-rock and roll mesh,” he tells Billboard’s Behind the Setlist podcast.

Rinehart lives outside of Nashville — the center of country, Americana and the Christian music businesses in the U.S. — but grew up in South Carolina, not far from the Black Crowes’ home of Atlanta. Rinehart was surrounded by “a well-rehearsed, very talented” church band with “all kinds of great gear,” he recalls. He picked up the music of great soul singers like Joe Cocker, Ray Charles and Otis Redding too. And growing up in the South left him surrounded by bluegrass and mountain music, where banjos and mandolins are standard instruments. 

A youth spent listening to bluesy roots music and uplifting church music comes through in Rinehart’s second solo album, FEVER/SKY, released on March 24 by Dualtone Records under the name Wilder Woods. No Depression called FEVER/SKY “a party in a bottle, an ode to the sweaty intensity of old-time rock and roll.” Across its 11 tracks, FEVER/SKY also captures the uplifting emotions that drawn listeners to NEEDTOBREATHE.

“It always felt like you’re trying to sing songs that you can lean on, you know what I mean?” Rinehart says. “I feel like that’s where gospel comes from. It’s almost like the thing that you need to survive with. And I think as I’ve grown up and got into a ton of different styles of music, I would say, that’s probably the thread that I still feel as important. The music I listen to mostly meets me in that place it needed to meet me.”

Wilder Woods opens for the Avett Brothers on July 8 at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colo., and will perform at the Moon River Music Festival in Chattanooga, Tenn., on Sept. 10. NEEDTOBREATHE will play three dates in mid-July before starting a string of dates on Aug. 11 in Green Bay, Wis., that concludes at the Kansas State Fair in Hutchinson, Kan., on Sept. 8.

Listen to the entire Behind the Setlist interview with Rinehart at Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, iHeart, Amazon Music or Audible. 

Beyoncé and Jay-Z continue to prove that they’re Hollywood’s most iconic couple. The duo recently purchased a more than 30,000-square-foot home in the Paradise Cove area of Malibu, Calif., and they paid $200 million for the property, according to TMZ.

With that hefty price, the house is now the most expensive home ever sold in California, breaking the previous record of $177 million. The architectural masterpiece of concrete and glass was bought for $14.5 million by art collector William Bell in 2003, before bringing in Japanese architect Tadao Ando to create the minimalist concrete design. The L-shaped home has floor-to-ceiling walls of glass and leads outside to a swimming pool, cabana and a grass lawn perched on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The superstar couple previously purchased a modern mansion in Bel-Air for $88 million in 2017 that had a similarly minimalist design.

In other Bey news, the “Break My Soul” singer is currently in the midst of her long-awaited Renaissance tour, which kicked off with a jaw-dropping showcase of 37 hits in Stockholm, Sweden, last week and will continue throughout Europe until July 9, before heading across the pond to the United States.

The tour is in support of her 2022 album, Renaissance, which topped the Billboard 200 albums chart upon its release and won the Grammy award for best dance/electronic album. Three of the project’s songs also won individual awards, with “Break My Soul” winning best dance/electronic recording, “Plastic Off the Sofa” taking home best traditional R&B performance and “Cuff It” winning best R&B song.

It was a good week for music stocks overall and an even better week for concert promoters, who made the biggest gains on the Billboard Global Music Index ahead of the blockbuster summer touring season.

The index rose 4.4% to 1,256.06 this week, with 15 of the 21 stocks ending in positive territory. It was led by concert promoter Madison Square Garden Entertainment’s (MSGE) 19.4% gain amidst multiple news items that influenced the share price. On Wednesday (May 17), Guggenheim initiated coverage of MSGE with a buy rating, while a report claimed that MSG Entertainment may sell the theater at Madison Square Garden for about $1 billion. On Thursday, the company released first-quarter results that showed a 4% increase in revenue to $201 million, though the company’s executives did not comment on the report during Thursday’s earnings call.

Shares of German promoter CTS Eventim also made big gains, rising 9.2% to 64.30 euros ($68.61). On Thursday, the company’s first-quarter earnings showed a 163% revenue jump to 366.2 million euros ($396 million) — beating pre-pandemic levels from the first quarter of 2019 by 29.5%. Year-to-date, CTS Eventim has sold 18 million tickets online, a 58% increase from the prior-year period. Meanwhile, Live Nation, the world’s largest concert promoter, improved 8.4% to $84.73 and is now up 21.5% year to date. Sphere Entertainment Co., which spun off MSG Entertainment in April, improved 6.1% to $23.61.

The S&P 500 improved 1.6% to 4,191.98 and the Nasdaq composite rose 3% to 12,657.90. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 index was unchanged at 7,756.87, while South Korea’s KOSPI composite index rose 2.5% to 2,537.79.

K-pop companies continued their hot streak this week. Two companies not in the Billboard Global Music Index, JYP Entertainment and YG Entertainment, gained 22.7% and 17.8%, respectively. Year-to-date, shares of JYP Entertainment, home to Stray Kids and Twice, have gained 70.6%. Shares of YG Entertainment, whose roster includes recent Coachella headliner Blackpink, are up 109.8% in 2023. Shares of HYBE dropped slightly by 0.4% but have gained 62% year to date. Likewise, shares of SM Entertainment gained only 1.1% this week but have grown 40% this year.