That’s youth gone wild for you. In her new memoir, Christina Applegate revealed one of her regrets from when she was just 17: ditching her eight-years-older date to the 1989 VMAs, Brad Pitt, for none other than Sebastian Bach.

In the actress’ You With the Sad Eyes, which hit shelves Tuesday (March 3), she recalled the time she sidestepped her fling with a 25-year-old Pitt — with whom she had been “platonic pals” for a while — to seek out the hair metal rocker during the award show. “I had spent all night staring at Bach, who was then a long-haired hunk fronting the band Skid Row,” she wrote, according to multiple outlets.

“I hate to put it like this, but Brad back then was still making his way as an actor, and he wasn’t yet THE Brad Pitt, the man of so many people’s dreams,” she continued bluntly. “I felt so powerful and sure of myself for once that when the awards show was over, I left with Sebastian Bach, not Brad Pitt.”

While Applegate was off pursuing Bach — who, unbeknownst to her, had a girlfriend and 1-year-old baby back home — Brad was “left to sullenly drive” the Dead to Me star’s mom and friend Lori Allison home from the ceremony. “Apparently, at a gas station on the way, Brad almost got into a fight with a bunch of gang members and, not surprisingly, was subsequently very mad at me,” she added in her memoir.

Such was the end of Applegate’s short-lived romance with Pitt, who she says didn’t talk to her for “many years” after the fact. But “eventually, we agreed that I’d been a kid, and though he deserved much better, it was time to forgive the child who dumped him for the lead singer of Skid Row,” she concluded. “Of course, Brad is now THE Brad Pitt, and Sebastian Bach … well, he still has long hair, I guess.”

Applegate would go on to be married to actor Johnathon Schaech for about four years before she’d wed again, tying the knot with Dutch musician Martyn LeNoble in 2013. Pitt, on the other hand, shot to global fame in the ’90s as his movie career exploded, at various points getting engaged to Gwyneth Paltrow, marrying Jennifer Aniston and later Angelina Jolie, with both of his marriages ending in divorce.

As for Bach? While Pitt may not have been “THE Brad Pitt” yet, the musician had already debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 with two tracks — “18 and Life” and “Youth Gone Wild” — by the time of the ’89 VMAs. “I Remember You” would enter the chart shortly afterward, eventually peaking at No. 6. And in 2026, Bach is gearing up to step in for Dee Snider for Twisted Sister’s upcoming 50th anniversary shows, as announced the same date of Applegate’s book publishing.

All signs are pointing to Courtney Love getting her band back together. The former grunge goddess who scored top 10 (Celebrity Skin, No. 9) and top 15 (Nobody’s Daughter, No. 15) albums on the Billboard 200 during her band Hole‘s late 1990s and early 2000s run posted a series of videos of former bassist Melissa Auf der Maur on her Instagram feed on Tuesday (March 3), sparking speculation about a possible reunion.

The post, whose soundtrack was the band’s 1998 Billboard Hot 100 No. 85 hit “Celebrity Skin,” featured a series of contemporary videos of photographer/author/musician Auf der Maur in a gauzy black dress, dark blue poncho with furry hat and a blue denim shirt dancing and smiling in front of a wall of her snaps from life on the road.

Auf der Maur, who joined Hole in 1994 before splitting in 1999, seemed in on the messaging, adding in comments, “it starts with eternal love …. ” While Love has not made any further comments, shortly after the initial tease she also added a vintage pic of herself with Auf der Maur and former guitarist Eric Erlandson taken at Los Angeles’ iconic Chateau Marmont hotel just a few months before the release of 1998’s Hollywood-obsessed, Grammy-nominated Celebrity Skin.

Love, who now lives in England, has largely receded from the music scene over the past decade, occasionally hopping up on stage as part of Green Day singer Billie Joe Armstrong’s Coverups cover band side project to sing classic covers during the group’s London shows.

Both Love and Auf der Maur have new projects in the pipeline, including the singer’s upcoming raw documentary Antiheroine (release date TBD), which premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and the bassist’s 1990s rock memoir, Even the Good Girls Will Cry (March 17). Love rejoined Instagram in January after several years away and later that month she posted a snap of her and Auf der Maur enjoying a cup of tea at the Chateau.

Auf der Maur joined the band after the release of their breakthrough 1994 opus Live Through This, following the overdose death of bassist Kristen Pfaff and later played bass and sang backup on Celebrity Skin, but did not appear on 2010s Nobody’s Daughter, which was essentially a Love solo album with an all-new backing band. Auf der Maur briefly joined the Smashing Pumpkins in 1999 and then released her self-titled solo debut in 2004, followed by a second, independently-released effort, Out of Our Minds, in 2010.

Back in 2018, Auf der Maur and Love reunited to play some Hole songs during a tribute to Love at the Basilica Hudson, the upstate New York venue that Auf der Maur runs with her husband, filmmaker Tony Stone.

The pair also were back in the studio in 2024 for an unspecified project, and in a New York Times profile over the weekend about her book, Auf der Maur revealed that she spent five days in London last spring recording vocals for Love’s upcoming album. “I wanted her voice,” Love told the paper, “because it’s robustly an octave over mine. It’s surprisingly, to me, more robust and embodied now than it was in ’98 … Silver, tinkling, all the things I can’t do. We’re perfect together.”

Love has been coy about reuniting the band over the years, telling Vogue in 2021 that it was “just not gonna happen,” and then seeming to have a change of heart three years later in 2024 when she performed in London with the Coverups and told the crowd, “Later, I’ll be back in Hole.”

At press time no additional information was available about a possible Hole reunion and co-founder guitarist Eric Erlandson and longtime drummer Patty Schemel did not appear to have commented on Love’s posts. The last time all four members performed together was in 2012 during an unannounced after-party for Schemel’s Hit So Hard documentary.

Two women country artists, back to back atop Billboard’s biggest charts: Megan Moroney crowning the Billboard 200 with her glittery pink buzzsaw of a third album, Cloud 9, and Ella Langley reclaiming the top of the Billboard Hot 100 with the improbably twangy and groovy “Choosin’ Texas.” Their feat would, unfortunately, be something of an anomaly for women artists in any genre, but in country music — where two women back to back can be explicitly verboten — it’s absolutely historic.

Gender parity has been tough to come by in country music just about since its genesis as a popular music, even accounting for the mononymous ladies in the ’90s — Faith, Shania, Reba — and the force of a pre-pop Taylor. Langley and Moroney, then, are not only compelling success stories in their own right but also potentially symbolic, beacons of better days ahead for the hundreds of aspiring women artists who decamp for Nashville in search of fame and sustainable success that’s always been far more of a longshot for them than for their male counterparts. Their enormous success challenges a Music Row status quo that’s existed for decades now: the unspoken rule that only one woman can bask in the spotlight (and get significant radio airplay) at a time.

Over the past couple decades, things for women in country music have gone from bad to glaring as those ’90s powerhouses faded and men — mostly white, often trading in the kind of pointed pop crossover that their female peers rarely get away with without leaving the format all together — began to eat up an ever-increasing majority of Nashville’s pie. That shift is attributable in part to the 1997 Telecommunications Act and its attendant corporate radio consolidation, as Marissa R. Moss describes in her recent history of women artists in country, Her Country. Slowly, what little diversity in gender and aesthetic had existed on country radio began to fade; women artists were compelled to compete with each other for space while men racked up No. 1 hits as a matter of course.

It became impossible to ignore in 2015, when country radio programming director Keith Hill referred to women as the “tomatoes of our salad” (men being…the lettuce) while describing why he’d never play two women artists back-to-back. The backlash was swift, garnering attention from the kind of national publications that tend to ignore country music. But none of it made much of a dent in the kinds of country artists who were able to cut through and succeed. So-called “bro country” was followed by the rise of Sam Hunt and his “Body Like a Back Road,” and then the stadium-sized impact of Luke Combs and Morgan Wallen —  the latter now one of the biggest pop stars in the world. Combs and Wallen spurred Nashville to accept streaming, ushering in a new country gold rush that still only seemed to reward male artists, in spite of streaming’s seemingly democratic consumption model. Carrie Underwood, Miranda Lambert, Kelsea Ballerini and finally Lainey Wilson traded places in the meantime, jockeying for position in a genre that left them almost no room to maneuver. 

That’s why looking at most of the country charts this week is so surreal, especially for those of us who have been covering women country artists in the years since “Tomatogate.” For decades, labels, PDs, agents and other powerful figures knew that Music Row had a major problem with gender (among other things). Yet they all still continued to pass the buck when it came time to explain why artists like Kacey Musgraves, Mickey Guyton, Maren Morris, Ashley McBryde and — surprisingly often — even Miranda Lambert had to fight so hard to get any kind of traction at radio. 

Now, there’s something to celebrate. Ella Langley has two of the top three songs on the Hot Country Songs chart dated March 7, where you can find 14 of the 15 songs on Cloud 9 as well. Four of the five top Country Songwriters this week are women, with Moroney and Langley joined by Jessie Jo Dillon and Joybeth Taylor. The Country Producers chart, perhaps the most male-dominated of them all, features Langley and Lambert (both credited on “Choosin’ Texas,” as well as on follow-up hits “Dandelion” and “Be Her” off Langley’s upcoming sophomore album). Even country radio, which still lags behind when it comes to any kind of gender parity, got “Choosin’ Texas” to No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart in just 16 weeks, lightning fast by that chart’s pace. It’s Langley’s first solo entry in the top spot; she previously held No. 1 with her Riley Green duet “You Look Like You Love Me,” which, when it bested the chart in December 2024, it was the first No. 1 by a female artist on Country Airplay that year. 

It’s still hard to be too optimistic about sweeping change in Nashville given that, for example, in spite of all the energy behind Cloud 9, Megan Moroney has just one song on Country Airplay and has still never had a No. 1 there. And beyond these two new leading lights, there’s hardly a slew of women artists on deck that have the full weight of Music Row’s marketing power behind them, in contrast to the booming middle class of male country star responsible for the majority of hits on the Country Airplay chart.

But as country music continues to grow, it’s reassuring to finally see hard-earned room for two instead of just one, especially in a moment when even having just the one hardly feels guaranteed. Langley, Moroney, and all the other women on and off the country charts aren’t trying to be exceptions, nor are they even trying explicitly to rewrite the rulebook that’s designed to stifle them. They’re just trying to get the slice of that pie that was meant to be theirs all along. If we’re lucky, they’ll just keep churning out undeniable country-pop hits, breaking rules and making a little more space at the top as they go. 

AI-powered music platform Moises has tapped Charlie Puth as its chief music officer. As part of the newly created role, Puth will provide guidance and feedback to Moises on product development and creative direction, bringing the perspective of a professional musician to the Salt Lake City-based music tech company.

“Every musician I know is using Moises, and I’ve been using it in my own creative process for years,” says Puth. “It opens up possibilities that used to take hours or expensive studio setups, whether that’s isolating vocals to study technique or experimenting with arrangements in real time. AI, when done right, isn’t here to replace musicians. It’s here to help artists learn, explore, and bring their ideas to life.”

Moises, which trains its AI models on licensed and otherwise ethically sourced songs, offers a suite of tools for music makers, including stem separation and isolation, mastering , and chord identification. Instead of taking the approach of using generative AI to create an entire song at the click of a button, Moises allows users to upload their own musical ideas and then use its tools to generate additional instrument parts that pair well with the upload one stem at a time. In total, the company offers 45 proprietary AI models to users.

To kick off Puth’s new role, Puth and Moises launched a global remix competition, called Moises Jam Session, which allows musicians and fans to access Puth’s original stems and use them to create their own remix or cover of Puth’s new single “Beat Yourself Up,” the lead single from his upcoming album Whatever’s Clever, set to release March 27. The winner and finalists from the competition will receive up to $100,000 in cash and prizes, signed merchandise and a backstage meet-and-greet at Puth’s May 29 Madison Square Garden show.

According to Moises, the company boasts 70 million users across 190 countries, 15 million of whom joined Moises this year. To date, its top markets are the U.S., Brazil, Mexico, India, Indonesia, Japan, Turkey and France. In total 2.5 million minutes of audio are processed through Moises daily.

“Musicianship has always evolved alongside technology, and AI represents the next chapter in that story,” says Geraldo Ramos, CEO of Moises. “But we believe the future of music creation isn’t about AI generating songs for you. It’s about AI amplifying what makes human creativity irreplaceable: intuition, emotion, and artistic vision. AI should be a brush in the artist’s hand, not a paint-by-numbers kit. Championing that human element is our passion and purpose.”