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.

  

Travis Scott makes a dramatic entrance in the new trailer for Oscar-winning director Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. The first look at Scott’s character came during a minute-long teaser that debuted during Sunday’s AFC Championship game between the Super Bowl-bound New England Patriots and the Denver Broncos.

In the brief scene, Odysseus’ son, Tom Holland’s Telemachus, asks, “what do you know about my dad?,” while Jon Bernthal’s Menelaus howls, “who has a story about Odysseus? Huh? You? You, you have a story?”

Cut to Scott, banging a staff on a wooden table to command the attention of the room full of men about 20 seconds into the minute-long preview. “A war, a man, a track — a trick to break the walls of Troy,” Scott’s character intones ominously amid images of Matt Damon’s Odysseus putting on his helmet to prepare for battle and hiding along with his men inside the massive Trojan Horse that will surreptitiously ferry the elite group of warriors inside the walls of Troy.

Amid scenes of Odysseus and his men torching the city during their nighttime raid, Scott shouts, “…burning, screaming to the ground.” Though the Scott footage was widely shared after the spot first aired on Sunday night, at press time it did not appear that Universal Pictures had made it officially available online — with a number of links taken down due to copyright violations — and spokespeople for Universal Pictures and Scott had not returned Billboard‘s request for comment.

In addition to Damon, the film due out on July 17 will also feature Anne Hathaway as Odysseus’ wife Penelope, Robert Pattinson as Antinous, Zendaya as Athena, Charlize Theron as Circe, filmmaker Benny Safdie as Agamenon, John Leguizamo as Eumaeus and Mia Goth as Melantho.

Nolan and Scott first collaborated in 2020 when the MC recorded “The Plan” for Nolan’s sci-fi movie Tenet. In a GQ interview that year, Nolan said that Scott’s voice “became the final piece of a yearlong puzzle. His insights into the musical and narrative mechanism [composer] Ludwig Göransson and I were building were immediate, insightful, and profound.”

After the twisty film’s release, Scott posted a handwritten note Nolan sent him praising the rapper’s video for the song “Franchise,” which played before some Tenet IMAX screenings. “Love the video (shot on film, no less!),” Nolan wrote at the time. “I can’t wait to hear it on the IMAX speakers, and see those sheep stampede across the giant screen as part of a Travis/Tenet/Travis Sandwich! Great work.”

Scott has previously been seen/heard on TV as the voice of Rhyme-a-saurus in 2021’s Trolls Holiday in Harmony Christmas special on NBC and as Zion in director Harmony Korine’s experimental 2023 action movie Aggro Dr1ft.

The adaptation of Homer’s Greek epic familiar to most high school students was shot entirely with IMAX cameras and is Nolan’s follow-up to his atomic bomb inventor biopic Oppenheimer, which grossed nearly $1 billion worldwide and scored seven Oscars, including best picture and best director for Nolan.

Billie Eilish is calling out other A-listers for staying silent about the chaos unfolding in Minneapolis amid ICE’s ongoing presence in the city.

In a Monday morning (Jan. 26) post on her Instagram Story, the pop star shared a photo of herself looking quizzically at the camera. “hey my fellow celebrities u gonna speak up?” she wrote over the snap.

Shortly prior, Eilish had reshared a couple of posts about the death of Alex Pretti, whom an ICE agent shot and killed Saturday (Jan. 24) during an immigration enforcement operation. The Donald Trump administration has claimed that the officer was acting in self-defense, alleging that Pretti was threatening violence with his handgun, but multiple videos taken by witnesses on the scene show that Pretti did not appear to be holding his gun during the confrontation, and that a federal agent had already seemingly removed it from Pretti’s holster before the 37-year-old Minneapolis man was shot. Pretti’s family said that the ICU nurse had a permit to carry a concealed handgun in Minnesota, according to the Associated Press.

The nine-time Grammy winner’s brother and frequent collaborator, Finneas, shared his take on the situation in a video, which Eilish reposted on her Story. “The conservative argument that allows school shootings to continue has always basically boiled down to, ‘We have to protect the Second Amendment,’” the visibly heated producer says in the clip. “Every argument I’ve seen for why Alex Pretti’s death was justified yesterday is like, ‘Well he had a gun.’”

“Shut the f–k up!” Finneas continues in his video. “This guy was being beaten to a pulp on the ground. He didn’t draw his weapon. He had a weapon on him legally. And they still shot the f–k out of him!”

Both Eilish and Finneas have been vocal in their opposition to ICE’s continued occupation of Minneapolis, which has now resulted in two civilian deaths. A few weeks prior to Pretti’s death, Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent in the city; similarly, the Trump administration claimed that the officer in that incident, Jonathan Ross, had been acting in self-defense, while witness footage contradicted that he’d been in danger.

“We’re seeing our neighbors being kidnapped, peaceful protesters being assaulted and murdered, our civil rights being stripped,” Eilish said while accepting the 2026 MLK Jr. Beloved Community Award For Environmental Justice on Jan. 17, adding that many Americans “no longer feel safe in our own homes or in our streets.”

One star who has joined Eilish in speaking out is Olivia Rodrigo, who also posted about the violence unfolding in Minneapolis over the weekend. “ICEs actions are unconscionable but we are not powerless,” she wrote. “our actions matter. I stand with Minnesota.”

Kid Cudi is hitting the road this year. The Grammy-winning rapper announced the dates for an extensive 2026 North American outing on Monday (Jan. 26), the 33-show Rebel Ragers tour, which is slated to kick off on April 28 at the Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre before hitting arenas and outdoor sheds across the U.S. and Canada and wrapping up at the North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre on June 27.

Cudi will have plenty of company on the outing, including special guests M.I.A., Big Boi, A-Trak, me n ü, and Dot Da Genius presents GLKPRTY w/ Powers Pleasanton across select dates. Tickets for the Live Nation-produced tour will be available beginning with an artist pre-sale beginning on Tuesday (Jan. 27) at 10 a.m. local time, followed Citi and Mastercard pre-sales on Tuesday beginning at 11 a.m. local. There will be additional pre-sales throughout the week ahead of the general on-sale that kicks off on Friday (Jan. 30) at 10 a.m. local time; click here for additional ticket information.

According to a release, the Rebel Rangers tour will span Cudi’s entire discography, from his breakthrough hit, “Day ‘N’ Nite” from his debut album, 2009’s Man on the Moon: The End of Day, to “Mr. Rager” (from 2010’s Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager) and other fan favorites, as well as songs from his most recent LP, last year’s Free. Cudi has pledged to donate $1 per ticket sold to the Big Bro Foundation, which works to guide, uplift and empower youth facing mental health challenges.

Check out the dates for Kid Cudi’s 2026 Rebel Ragers North American tour below:

+with special guest M.I.A

#with special guest Big Boi

^with special guest A-Trak

%with special guest me n ü

*with special guest Dot Da Genius presents GLKPRTY w/ Powers Pleasanton

This podcast episode is part of the Billboard editorial staff’s Greatest Pop Stars of 2025 list. Find our accompanying Sabrina Carpenter essay here, and all the rest of our essays and podcasts related to the list here.

Sabrina Carpenter had a year for the ages in 2024, breaking through to the highest levels of pop stardom with a blockbuster album, three smash hit singles, best-selling arena tour and total cultural ubiquity, and ending up our No. 2 Greatest Pop Star of that year. Fans expected that she would likely spend 2025 still cruising off the successes of that era, but instead, she jumped right back in — kicking off another full album cycle while still in the late throes of the previous one — and confirmed herself as again not just one of the year’s great pop stars, but one of the leading lights for the entire decade.

This Greatest Pop Stars of 2025 episode of the Greatest Pop Stars podcast looks at how Sabrina Carpenter ended up at No. 6 on our list — thanks to a year where she kept extended her winning streak with another chart-topping, Grammy-nominated album with at least one chart-topping, Grammy-nominated single, and more touring and media omnipresence. (You can find Meghan Mahar’s essay on Carpenter’s still-busy year here.) Today, Song vs. Song podcast co-host and Sabrina Carpenter megafan Lina Morgan joins host Andrew Unterberger to recount the giddy rush of one of the era’s great pop stars continuing to push for a second straight year of dominance, with some of her greatest releases and achievements yet, even with a couple mini-controversies clouding her latest All-Star season.

While reliving her 2025, we ask all the most pressing questions about the year in Sabrina Carpenter: Is Man’s Best Friend actually a better album than Short n’ Sweet? Is the rest of the Recording Academy really just jealous of Jack Antonoff? Are we missing out by not getting her performing at the CMA Awards? Why does she keep relegating some of her best songs to her deluxe editions? Is she setting herself up for failure with the reported upcoming Alice in Wonderland musical? (Should she be remaking Moonstruck instead?) And perhaps most importantly: As great as her 2025 was, do we still inevitably view it as being a little in the shadow of her wildly successful 2024?

Check it out above, along with a YouTube playlist of some of the greatest moments of Sabrina Carpenter’s 2025 — all of which are discussed on the pod — and subscribe to the Greatest Pop Stars podcast on Apple Music or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts) for complete podcast coverage of this year’s Greatest Pop Stars of 2025 list!

And as we say in every one of these GPS podcast posts — if you have the time and money to spare, please consider donating to any of these causes in the fight for trans rights:

Transgender Law Center

Trans Lifeline

Destination Tomorrow

Gender-Affirming Care Fundraising on GoFundMe

Also, please consider giving your local congresspeople a call in support of trans rights, with contact information you can find on 5Calls.org.