Over the past year, Kashus Culpepper’s musical confluence of Americana, soul, blues, folk and rock have earned him a No. 1 hit on Americana radio with “Believe,” opening slots on a tour with Leon Bridges, and praise from pop/rock icons including John Mayer and Elton John.

In 2026, he’ll headline shows in New York, Boston and Nashville, while opening shows in Australia for Wyatt Flores and performing supporting slots for country music titan Eric Church. Along the way, he’ll continue bringing fans his unique fusing of musical styles on his full-length debut album, Act I, which released Jan. 23 on Big Loud Records.

Culpepper sees the 18-song project’s mesh of styles in a much simpler perspective, with the album’s “Southern Man,” written with Needtobreathe’s Bear Rinehart and recorded in collaboration with guitarist Marcus King, serving as a summarizing anthem.

“At the end of the day, I’m a man from Alabama,” Alexander City, Ala. native Culpepper says. “This is how I was born and raised. I wanted an anthem to talk about my roots a bit.”

Culpepper has packed several lifetimes’ worth of experiences into his 28 years. He grew up singing in church, while soaking in the sounds of artists including Frank Sinatra and Howlin’ Wolf. Culpepper then spent more than five years as a firefighter and EMT, and enlisted in the Navy. He was based in Spain when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and he passed the time by teaching himself to play a guitar gifted to him by a friend. He began playing and singing at bonfires near the barracks, and after his deployment concluded, he began playing leading the Kashus Culpepper Band, playing cover songs in the clubs and bars dotting Mississippi’s Gulf Coast.

In 2023, he began writing his own original music. That same year, he moved to Nashville and continued refining his songwriting. It was Culpepper’s cover of Tyler Childers’ “Messed Up Kid” that brought the attention of labels. Culpepper signed with Big Loud Records and began co-writing with The Lone Bellow’s Brian Elmquist, who also serves as producer on Act I.

Inspired by Elmquist’s work recording in Muscle Shoals, Culpepper chose to record part of Act I just over three hours north of his Alexander City hometown, at Ivy Manor Studio. Run by Dan Hannon, the studio sits in the heart of Muscle Shoals, the storied musical grounds that shaped artists including Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett.

Elmquist’s work recording a project in Muscle Shoals inspired Culpepper to record Act I at Muscle Shoals studio Ivy Manor. The studio, run by Dan Hannon, is located in the heart of Muscle Shoals, the fertile musical bedrock for artists including Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett and the Allman Brothers.

“I met Dan when I went down there for the first time seeing The Lone Bellow record their record,” he recalls. “I knew I wanted to record in Muscle Shoals, so I knew Ivy Manor was the spot. I love the people over there. My producer Brian was also there recording a record and he told me how amazing it was. I’ve recorded pretty much every song since ‘After Me?’ at Ivy Manor.”

Now, fans are getting a look into the full scope of his musical acumen, thanks to songs he wrote with writers including .

“I think this album is a great timestamp of me as an artist and songwriter,” Culpepper says. “I finished it late last year and I’ve been waiting to put it out. Sometimes I was like, ‘Man, maybe I should just leak it now,’ but no, you got to go through the process. I’m excited for fans to see all the different sides that make me an artist.”

The album’s “Alabama Beauty Queen” offers a haunting ode to his homestate roots, while also giving a stark look at the concept of local “celebrity” in rural towns.

“I felt like I knew so many people in high school that had a picture-perfect life when they got to school, but if you peel it back at home, there were problems people didn’t know about until years later,” Culpepper says. “It’s a combination of like, wanting to leave your hometown to find something better, maybe go to a big city, but also there are people going through stuff that you don’t find out about until later on. People become small-town beauty queens and in small towns, they seem like superstars. People put them on pedestals and it’s crazy. You don’t even know what they got going on at the house.”

The tender, delicate “Broken Wing Bird” features Americana queen Sierra Ferrell. He met Ferrell during a gig they both played at King’s Family Reunion event. “I was making s’mores around a firepit or something, and she came and sat down. We became friends and I had a song I had written before I met her. When we got time to record it, we knew we wanted to make it a duet and I wanted a voice that sounded like it wasn’t of this time, something that had a vintage sound. I think Nate [Yetton] at Big Loud reached out and I’m so thankful she said she would do the song.”

He wrote the heartbreaker “House on a Hill” with Rhett Akins and Jimi Bell. “I wanted something that felt really bluesy and to talk about an ex-lover type of deal,” he explains. “I have no ill will for any person I’ve talked to or nothin’ like that, I was just wondering, ‘I hope that house on the hill is everything you wanted.’ It was this whole process of thinking, ‘Is that person happy? Did they get everything they want? Are the flowers the way you want ‘em in your front yard?’ I haven’t played it live yet, because it makes me cry sometimes. It’s a sad song. Even the second verse, like, ‘Did you get to paint the colors in your bedroom?’ I’m like, ‘This is sad.’”

Culpepper’s commanding, grizzly anchors each song on the album, and he has his own way of setting the right vibe in the studio. “I like to record vocals at night. I love for it to be dark, moody, so I love recording vocals at night or in a dark room,” he says.

His kaleidoscope of music residing at the central point of various genres has allowed him to traverse various musical communities.

“I love being part of these communities, country, Americana, folk. I love people telling real stories. Every time I do an Americana-leaning festival, or anything like folk or Bluegrass and they invite me, I’m so thankful,” he says. “They treat me like family. I think people just want real music and just being authentic with yourself. I think that’s why I’m able to float between these different communities of music, because at the end of the day, I’m just being real. I opened for Sierra Ferrell last year, and for Leon Bridges and Whiskey Myers and Charles Wesley Godwin, because I think people just want to know you’re being true to yourself.”

As his star continues to rise, he says he’s proud of representing his Alabama roots.

“It’s kinda cool when you walk into grocery stores and they say, even people I didn’t know that well growing up, they stopped me and just talk with me about the music and how proud they are of me. They’re just proud that I talk about my roots and I still speak up about it.”

In the late 1980s, the Detroit Pistons were widely referred to as the “bad boys,” given the basketball team’s physical style of defense, and a marketing campaign that spread around the world as the Pistons became one of the NBA’s dominant forces.

It was because of this phenomenon that producers Kevin Saunderson, Juan Atkins and Derrick May often heard people greeting them with “bad boyyyys” when they arrived in any given city to play a show.

“I used to get off the plane and into a promoter’s car, and the first thing they would say is ‘bad boys,’ even before they said anything about how wonderful it was to meet one of us,” recalls May.

This is because it was in the same era when “bad boys” Isiah Thomas, Joe Dumars, Bill Laimbeer and Dennis Rodman were playing games that ultimately led the team to back-to-back NBA championships in 1989 and 1990 that the three musicians were forging their own hometown-hero legacy while creating and spreading the musical genre they called techno.

Now, decades later, the Detroit Pistons and Saunderson, Atkins and May — historically referred to as “the Belleville Three” given that they worked together in the Detroit suburb of Belleville — are dropping an official clothing collection that celebrates techno, the Pistons and Detroit greatness.

Designed by artist, DJ and Detroit native Sheefy McFly in collaboration with the Belleville Three, the collection (t-shirts, a hat, a hoodie and more) features a whimsical cartoon take on the trio and folds in imagery related music, technology, futurism, basketball and the declaration that “techno is Black music.” See images of the collection exclusively below.

“There’s a certain demographic that really believe house music was born and raised in England, [and] there’s a certain demographic of the people that believe that techno was born and raised in Europe, and in particular in Berlin,” May says of this collection’s work in further solidifying techno as a product of Detroit and a product of Black creators. “So I think the “techno is Black music” message is really important. It’s like a sign to stop and pay attention.”

As part of the collaboration, the Belleville Three will play the halftime show of the Pistons game against the Brooklyn Nets at downtown Detroit’s Little Caesars Arena on Feb. 1, the first day of Black History Month. “Tipping off our month of Black excellence during Black History Month, this capsule honors their legacy as true disruptors and trendsetters whose influence continues to shape culture worldwide,” says Marissa Garland, the Pistons’ senior director of brand and marketing strategy. The capsule collection also goes on sale here on Feb. 1.

Saunderson advises that music played during the set will be “a bit of all of us,” with the guys’ collective catalog including all-time classics like 1983’s “Clear,” which Atkins co-produced as Cybotron, May’s essential Rhythm Is Rhythm production “Strings Of Life” and Saunderson’s work with Inner City, a group that pumped out hits like “Good Life” and “Big Fun.”

As such, Atkins advises that the show will include nothing less than “the tracks that built techno.”

While the three guys each regularly play solo shows, a Belleville Three performance is relatively rare, with one of the trio’s last big sets being Coachella 2017. But playing for the Pistons’ 20,000-strong hometown crowd puts them in front of a much more multi-generational audience that typically shows up to the club. In this, along with the collection, they see opportunity not only for themselves but the trajectory of techno at large.

“At the point of our careers we’re still out there working, we’re still quite busy, we’re still quite creative and we’re still making an impact on the world,” says Saunderson. “It’s great because you’ve got new generations coming as Pistons fans now, and some of them will become our fans because of this.”

“Our goal is to celebrate the Belleville Three and their contributions to techno, while also inviting new audiences to learn about their story,” adds Garland. “This collection is about discovery, those moments when people realize they’ve been influenced by the Belleville Three without even knowing it. Ultimately, it honors three innovators and the intersections of what makes Detroit special: music, art and basketball.”

“It’s very important not just look at the [electronic music] underground and at what we’ve achieved,” adds Saunderson, “but how we can impact the future of our city.”

Pharrell Williams has a baker’s dozen Grammy awards on the shelf at home, but on Friday (Jan. 23), the Oscar-nominated producer scored a one-of-a-kind honor from French President Emmanuel Macron.

Following the debut earlier in the week of his fall 2026 men’s collection for Louis Vuitton, Williams, 52, headed over to Élysée Palace in Paris on Friday. There, Macron presented the multi-hyphenate musician/clothing designer with the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur (Knight of the Legion of Honor) and presented him with the order’s insignia — a medal with a red ribbon — during a private ceremony recognizing Williams’ contributions to culture and the creative industries.

“Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. Grateful and blessed🙏🏾,” Pharrell wrote on Instagram in a post featuring an image of him shaking hands with Macron and celebrating with the Clipse’s Pusha T, as well as French First Lady Brigitte Macron, who posed alongside him in a shot featuring Williams’ wife, Helen Lasichanh, and the couple’s four children. It looked like Future was also on hand for the special ceremony, rocking a slim black suit in a snap alongside Williams, as was the Migos’ Quavo, who posed under the gleaming chandeliers of the French President’s official residence.

It’s not the first honor France has bestowed on Skateboard P, who was awarded the insignia of Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by France’s culture minister for his contribution to the arts. In addition to his three decades as a performer, songwriter and producer, Williams also co-founded the fashion line Billionaire Boys Club and has served as the men’s creative director for famed fashion house Louis Vuitton since February 2023.

Last week, BeatStars, the popular beat marketplace and rights platform for independent musicians, announced the acquisition of Lemonaide AI, an ethically-trained generative AI music company.

This acquisition builds on the partnership the two companies formed in 2023 which made Lemonaide’s technology available to users of BeatStars. The pair also worked together to develop fine-tuned AI tools for multi-platinum producers like Lex Luger, Kato On The Track, DJ Pain 1, Mantra and KXVI. Unlike other AI music companies at the time, which were looking to generate full songs, Lemonaide focused on generating “purposefully” short musical ideas to spark creativity within the user, as the 2023 press release stated.

Now, with the acquisition BeatStars aims to build “the future of AI-powered music creation with creators, not at their expense,” says a press release about the deal.

Lemonaide was founded by Michael “MJ” Jacob and Anirudh Mani, and now, under the new acquisition, the founders, along with the rest of the Lemonaide team, will join Beatstars to guide the integration and development of ethical AI tooling within BeatStars’ platform and rights infrastructure.

BeatStars notes that the center of its upcoming strategy with Lemonaide is to further grow BeatStars Rights, the company’s name for its group of tools that helps independent music makers manage their rights, including BeatStars Publishing and Creator Rights Agency. “Together, these systems ensure that every element used in an AI-assisted production can be registered, tracked, managed, and monetized at scale,” the press release reads.

“AI is advancing faster than any technology the music industry has ever faced. And without decisive action, there is a real risk that creators will be erased from the value chain entirely by systems trained on their work without permission, attribution, or compensation,” says Abe Batshon, founder and CEO, BeatStars.

News of the deal builds on an emerging trend of AI music start-ups selling to more established firms. Last week, Splice announced its acquisition of Kits AI, an AI-powered voice company, and in 2025, Epidemic Sound acquired Song Sleuth, an AI music recognition startup.

“This is not about replacing human creativity. It is about amplifying it in a way that respects the people who built this culture in the first place,” adds Jacob, co-founder of Lemonaide.

“With BeatStars, we have the opportunity to push the frontier of AI in an ethical way. Our rights-first approach to generative AI proves innovation and ownership can move forward together,” says Mani, co-founder of Lemonaide.

“This acquisition allows us to move ethical AI from principle to product. Our disruptive plan is that creators who train the models continue to get ownership in the outputs,” says Sean Gorman, COO of BeatStars.

It’s been quite the year for Laura Veltz. The Nashville-based songwriter, who has co-written such hits as Maren Morris’ “The Bones” and Dan + Shay’s “Speechless,” after breaking through in 2013 with Eli Young Band’s “Drunk Last Night,” expanded her songcraft to an even higher level.

Veltz, 44, co-wrote the No. 1 song on Billboard’s Country Airplay year-end chart for 2025: “High Road,” performed by Koe Wetzel and Jessie Murph. She also landed more than 40 cuts with artists across nearly every genre, including rapper BigXthaPlug, pop star Demi Lovato, and gospel artist Blessing Offor, helping her earn her second Grammy nomination for songwriter of the year, non-classical. Before the Feb. 1 Grammy ceremony in Los Angeles, Veltz will receive another honor: the National Music Publisher Assn.’s songwriter of the year. The award will be presented at the NMPA + Billboard Songwriters Awards party on Jan. 28 in Los Angeles.

The five-time Grammy nominee started in her family band, Cecilia, before moving to Nashville to pursue songwriting more than 15 years ago. Artists including Kelly Clarkson, Reba McEntire, Tim McGraw, Lil Baby, Ben Platt and Miranda Lambert have recorded her songs as well, but she has found a particular sweet spot with young women, including Lovato and Murph, both of whom she’s written with extensively, including 11 songs on Murph’s Sex Hysteria.

Ahead of her big week, Veltz talked to Billboard about embracing where she is in her career, her life/work balance and what songwriting in Nashville looks like today. She then takes us behind the scenes of five of her biggest 2025 cuts.

You often find yourself writing with women who are a generation or half generation younger than you, like Jessie Murph or Demi Lovato. What connection do you feel with them?  

I think my particular connection has to do with safety. And I really specifically enjoy connecting to young women in– if I’m old enough– a maternal way, but sometimes big sister way. I don’t feel scared of being older than these women. Maybe it’s why these women might enjoy being around me. I’m not envying their youth. I’m identifying the things that make our youths familiar and similar, but I think sitting with somebody who loves being a mom and is physically unafraid of getting older is sort of comforting.

I’ve worked very, very hard on my inward self. I’m the type of person who probably shouldn’t be alive because of the things that I’ve been through in my life. I’m very grateful that I’ve made it this far in life and I think that resonates with young women who are pretty much told by every source in society that they should be afraid of getting older.

You just said you shouldn’t be alive. You’ve been open about experiencing homelessness with your parents when you were younger. Is that what you mean? 

I’m estranged from my parents. They just put us in a lot of dangerous situations when we were little, in terms of alcohol use and putting us in the houses of other people who you find out later were very unsafe. It’s an innumerable amount of times when I could have been a statistic or a milk carton person. I absolutely could have been in situations that end your life, and I’m just really grateful that didn’t happen.

That comes across in your songwriting. You’re not writing about a girl in a pick-up truck. While you have some lighthearted songs, you aren’t afraid to tackle tough topics, like Demi Lovato’s “29,” which is a searing song about a young girl in a relationship with a much older man.

I think I’ve finally gotten to a point where I realized what my superpower is. I don’t do the same thing twice, because I don’t believe a human being is replicable. I don’t believe the human condition is identical. I feel fearless. I don’t feel like there are songs that shouldn’t be written. I think if we need to talk about it, we need to talk about it. I see it now, after 20 years doing this, my songs do come out a certain way. And I don’t know why that is, but when I listen to them, I’m like, “Wow, that went to the bone.” Even if it’s just hilarious and making fun of thing by way of women’s senses of humor.

How does a song like 2019’s “The Bones,” which spent 19 weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, change your life?

Oh, my God, permanently. It’s an insane thing to happen that you go and you do the same exact motion— by that I mean it’s probably a lot like digging for gold — and then one moment you just hit gold and you’re like, “Oh my God, everything just changed.” It was just my homies. We just wrote a song like we always do, and it really impacted the legacy I’ll get to leave behind and the care I get to give my children. Yeah, a very, very, very dramatic effect on my life.

That’s as a writer. What’s a song that changed your life as a listener?

“Just Another Day in Paradise” by Phil Vassar. It is just a sweet little country bop about an everyday moment in a person’s life. You’ve got kids, you got dogs, you got bills to pay. And then the hook is “It’s okay, it’s so nice, it’s just another day in paradise and there’s no place I’d rather be.” I’m 19 years old. I am living in tumult. I’m in a family band I don’t want to be in. I’m living this kind of alt-life that has nothing to do with the casual American dream, and I hear this song, and I cried.

I realized much later that that day set in motion a desire for normalcy. I wanted to just have a house, a bunch of kids and some dogs to feed, dealing with the bills and gratitude for that life. I changed my behavior because of that song. It was one of the very first country songs I had ever heard, too — so you could say it made me move to Nashville.

Many Nashville writers work 9-5, five days a week. How do you control your writing calendar?

I approach most things pretty fruit-loopy, and I don’t have methodical approaches on that. I could write 50 songs in a week if the vibe is there. If the vibe isn’t there, I cannot push myself to do things. I’m much more precious about my energy, and if something is sucking me dry, I’m just like, “Nah, I’m okay.”

This year, I’m really taking things down because I want to spend more time with my 11-year-old twins. I told my team, “Let’s stick with three days a week, and we’ll just see what that feels like.” Meanwhile, my publisher, [Big Machine Music’s] Mike Molinar, was like, “Hey, something came up.”  I was like, “Look, I’m a last- minute b-tch. Let’s go.” Something comes up the night before, and it’s one of my “no” days but I feel like it, I’m going to be into it.

You co-wrote the No. 1 song on Billboard’s Country Airplay year-end chart for 2025, “High Road,” performed by Koe Wetzel and Jessie Murph. There are seven songwriters credited. Were you all together?

It was written in stages. It’s such an honor to be a part of a song, especially one that’s like that. Mainly because you take your eye off of the ball in country for five minutes and  get swept up in other genres, which I have been, so it’s been a very bizarre thing to suddenly be like, “Oh wow, look at that. I’m still rocking country stuff doing all this other stuff!” It’s hard to maintain them all. This is where I started. I’m still doing things here. It’s very satisfying.

We’ve gone from an average of 1.8 songwriters on a Hot 100 No. 1 song in the ‘70s to 5.3 in the 2010s. Why is that? Do you have a sweet spot for a number of songwriters on a song?

I don’t have a hard, fast rule about what the right way to do it is. Even though it feels like an enormous amount, [it] sometimes creates something that’s never been heard before… I’ll tell you that those huge numbers don’t always reflect songwriting. Sometimes those credits reflect producers who add things and end up on the copyright now. There are lots of times when there are credits on a song that are not necessarily the people who are sitting in a room thinking of words and singing melodies into the air and holding instruments or even being behind a computer and writing music. There are times when people end up on those that aren’t actually writing the song. But I wish I could tell you how to fix that problem. I don’t know.

That goes back to the days of Elvis, when Col. Parker insisted Presley get songwriting credit even if he didn’t participate in the songwriting. AI is also entering writing rooms. How are you incorporating AI into your songwriting process?

I’m not. I can’t necessarily track what [my co-writers are] doing every time, but I feel like I would know if a co-writer was using AI for ideas. I feel like that is a really risky situation for a million reasons — the main one being, this is your favorite thing to do on earth. You’ve chosen the best career. The most exciting, most fun thing is writing poems. The idea of giving that over to a robot seems foolish [and] boring. Secondly, ideas come because you’re constantly thinking about them. If you give yourself a crutch, they will stop coming. For me, my ideas are relentless. It doesn’t ever stop. I’ve had ideas even just chatting with you on the phone right now.

Below, Veltz reveals in her own words the stories behind writing five of the songs that helped earn her a songwriter of the year Grammy nomination.

“Blue Strips” (Jessie Murph): Jessie and I have written so many songs together, but the day we wrote “Blue Strips” holds our record for most songs written in a 24-hour window. We play this game called “beat roulette,” where our cowriter, Bēkon, plays 10-20 minutes of a beat on a loop. Jessie riffs for all of those minutes while I hunt for the song, story or idea. If we like it, we give ourselves 10 or so additional minutes to finish. Then we move onto another beat.

We did that around 30 times in one night! Two of those songs ended up on Sex Hysteria, one of which was “Blue Strips.” One other fun fact is that as soon as that beat started, “I just bought a mansion in Malibu” fell out of Jessie’s mouth. We built the story from there, and the rest is history. 

“About You” (BigXthaPlug and Tucker Wetmore): Word got around that BigXthaPlug wanted to make a rap album with all country features. I’d worked with BigX before on “Holy Ground” featuring Jessie Murph, and loved everything he was doing, so this idea thrilled me. I dedicated a lot of my pitch writing sessions to serve up choruses to BigX and his team — and one fateful day, writing with my Nashville homies, Jon Hume, Jackson Nance and David Ray Stevens, we got one. And to top it all off, one of my favorite voices in country music, Tucker Wetmore, ended up being the featured artist. Watching that song find its home and this whole project doing so well has been one of my favorite parts of this year of my career.

“What Tomorrow’s For” (Blessing Offor): I met Blessing during Grammy Week years ago. He and I instantly dove into a huge conversation about God and the human experience, connecting over our similar views of the world, even though I’m not a practicing Christian. Whatever energy we found that day poured right into the first song we wrote months later in Nashville with AJ Pruis.

“What Tomorrow’s For” is our comfort song for anyone having a shitty day for reasons that, in the moment, make no sense, and feel unfair. We were delighting in how we get a new chance every time the sun rises, no matter how bad a day is, courtesy of whatever is cosmically in charge of all this. I’m grateful to Blessing for inviting me to write with him and finding the through-line of our perspectives of our maker. 

“Grand Bouquet” (Maren Morris): “Grand Bouquet” was one of three songs I had the privilege of writing with Maren at Electric Lady Studios in New York City. I’ve always had a remarkable rapport with Maren, but this was my first time experiencing the Swiss Army knife that is Jack Antonoff. His talent for pulling music out of phase, bending instruments to his will and inspiring the room into new realms really pushed Maren and me to summon fresh melodies and new stories out of our writing.

This particular song is one of my favorite lyrics I’ve ever been a part of. I love when a person realizes something new about themselves, particularly when that something requires them to change, self-correct or apologize. Some of my best seasons as a human being grew from extending apologies and I think there should be more songs for those moments. 

“Leave Me Too” (Josh Ross): I have strong feelings about this song not only because I think it’s really well written, but also because I wrote it with my sister, fellow hit song writer Allison Veltz Cruz. We were writing with Ben Stennis and Michael Tyler that day and I remember this moment when we all landed on the hook, “If I were you, I’d leave me too.” I stood up and shut the door. I don’t even think I noticed I was doing it! My reasoning I guess, was that I didn’t want anyone else in the publishing house to catch this idea. I thought it was so good, it shocked me that it hadn’t been written before.

The subject of this song touches on the same themes I love present in “Grand Bouquet.” Admitting something uncomfortable to oneself, about oneself, is brave. Hot, even. I don’t think there’s truer selfless love than letting go of someone who, you know in your heart, deserves better than you. I’m grateful to Josh Ross for recording it. It’s a mature way to approach a break-up, but one that would save a lot of people time and heartache.