Earlier this year, at the age of 70, Chandrika Tandon won her first Grammy — and it may not be her last.

After taking home the award in February for best new age, ambient or chant album for her project Triveni, Tandon — a renowned businesswoman, philanthropist and grandmother — is now vying for her third Grammy nomination, but this time in the best global music album category, with a new project called Soul Ecstasy that she quietly released just before the Aug. 30 deadline to submit nominations for the 68th Grammy Awards.

“I was really trying to show [Indian] classical music in a simpler light — make it more accessible, make it more singable,” Tandon tells Billboard of the album, her seventh, which features 14 classical Indian ragas — melodic frameworks — with complex 6-, 7-, 8-, 10- and 16-beat rhythms. Having built what she describes as a “mini cult following” around her first six albums, now, she says: “I would really love to broaden the audience.”

Blending ancient Vedic verses and Indian classical traditions with vibrant instrumentation and choral arrangements, Soul Ecstasy is part of Tandon’s mission of spreading joy through both economic and emotional empowerment. The eight-song collection was recorded in New York and India with Tandon’s longtime collaborator Pandit Tejendra Narayan Majumdar.

“This album is about giving listeners access to their own joyous state in a blissful way,” says Tandon. “The songs are more high-energy than my past work, and the choral elements invite people to experience that ecstasy together.”

But producing the new album wasn’t easy: To do it, Tandon and her collaborators assembled 75 musicians from Calcutta who played more than 25 different traditional Indian instruments, as well as 16 classical singers whom they trained to sing together as a choir — a tall order and unorthodox idea given that “a lot of Indian music, classical music, is about individual expression.”

Born and raised in India, Tandon now lives in New York, serving as the current artist-in-residence for Young People’s Chorus of New York City. She was the first Indian-American woman to be made partner at consultancy giant McKinsey and Co. and then founded her own Tandon Capital Associates, but studied music at every opportunity, taking vocal lessons in her free time, training between her business meetings with Indian music masters and singing for 10 hours a day on days her daughter was occupied at summer camp. In recent years, she has devoted herself to philanthropy, supporting education and economic empowerment through the Krishnamurthy Tandon Foundation, donating $100 million with her husband 10 years ago to establish the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and earning honors that include the Ban-Ki Moon Award for Women’s Empowerment and NYU’s Gallatin Medal. She releases her music through her nonprofit label Soul Chants Music.

To promote her new album, Tandon is planning immersive performances at The Town Hall in New York and Carnegie Music Hall in Pittsburgh, where she’ll lead meditation, sing-alongs, and “sacred sound experiences.”

“I want my music to be a beautiful offering to the world,” Tandon reflected. “My prayer is that Soul Ecstasy helps listeners begin their own journey into inner bliss.”

Tandon talked to Billboard about her devoted fanbase, and the goal of traditional Indian music and why Grammy voters and contenders should listen.

You have a cult following, receiving thousands of messages after the release of your Grammy-nominated debut album, Soul Call, in 2009. Who are your fans?

Funnily enough, the 18- to 40-year-old man is my biggest demographic. Which is not what I would expect. There’s a big demographic who like India and Indian classical music. And there’s also a big demographic of that group that likes spiritual music of any kind — anything devotional. The yoga community. I would love to broaden the audience, so that’s part of the idea.

You’ve spent time recording music all over the world, from Lebanon to Brazil. What makes traditional Indian music different?

In Indian music, you have to really settle your mind, because a lot of it is around pitch and resonance. There are a lot of areas around a note, but the best teachers try to get you to the purity of that thin point of the note. That requires your mind to be quiet. I’d walk into a class and the teacher would say, “You know, you’re not here, you’re elsewhere, your mind is distracted. Let’s spend the next 45 minutes on one note.” You do that for 10 minutes and it’s a little boring. By about the 20th minute, you’re in a bit of a zone. And then remaining 10 minutes, you’re in a space of such a peace that you find yourself. So then I said, “Well, this is very interesting. I’ve got to get into meditation. I’ve got to understand why I feel so happy.” Because that’s what was happening. Music helped me find myself. I started writing “love, light, laughter” on every email I wrote.

What can other Grammy contenders take from this album?

If you look at the goal of what Indian music is, what my earliest teachers have told me, from the very beginning is that music is, you do music to find the divine in you. And then, and then they say when you step out of the way, the divine takes over.

Soul Ecstasy is a very important title, and a very important goal, and a state of being that we can always aspire to, because when we reach deep inside us, it’s not just about peace and quiet. There’s a part when you really get to a beautiful, quiet spot and you can really bubble up with joy.

Where do you keep your Grammy that you won for Triveni?

In my prayer room.

Limp Bizkit are back with their first new song in four years and it is a classic Bizkit banger. “Making Love to Morgan Wallen” bursts out of the gate with a funky wah-wah guitar riff before a marching band beat bubbles up and singer Fred Durst launches into a sung-rap tribute to some fallen rock heroes.

“Damn, I miss you Chester/ Sending love from a bass compressor/ Ground control with a soul like Bowie/ And I’ll chop you up if I’m under pressure,” Durst raps in the opening couplet paying homage to late Linkin Park singer Chester Bennington and rock icon David Bowie.

From there, if you can believe it — and if you’ve ever listened to a single Bizkit song before, you can — it gets way, way weirder. 

“Bizkit beats from the pirate band/ Signed this deal with a lobster hand/ Freestyle like a bowling pin/ Flex these bars on a dolphin fin,” Durst raps over the spare backing track. “Life’s too short, but I can’t complain/ Doin’ backflips on a candy cane/ Ride my scooter with a cape at night/ And I’ma high-five me a traffic light.”

Naturally.

By the time the explosive, Beastie Boys-nodding “Hey, ladies” chorus comes around, true Bizkitheads might be having flashbacks to the band’s beloved 2000 Billboard 200 No. 1 album Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water, which featured similarly absurdist shout-it-out-loud nu-metal anthems such as “Rollin’ (Air Raid Vehicle)” and “My Way.”

Durst isn’t done climbing to the top of mount weird, also claiming in the lengthy first verse that he got “kicked out of the Trump resort” in a seeming reference to Donald Trump’s Florida Mar-a-Lago residence. The second verse is no less random, with lyrics about moonwalking on a UFO, dropping bars while brushing teeth and a shout out to legendary 2001 blaxploitation-adjacent comedy Pootie Tang. 

Propelled by one of guitarist Wes Borland’s hypnotic riffs, crunching beats, old-school record scratches and the group’s signature shouty choruses, the whole thing comes crashing to a close with a pummeling final chorus that finally nods to the country star in the title.

“I make this motherf—ker diamond plated/ Makin’ love to Morgan Wallen in an elevator/ I’ll be turnin’ on you b–ches like a generator,” Durst spits over the titanic beat with no context whatsoever for the shout-out to the country chart dominator. 

In keeping with their determination to put the biggest target on their own back, Durst ends with a classic DGAF Bizkit kiss-off, “I’ll be the greatest motherf—ker that you ever hated/ That you ever hated.”

The new single is the first fresh music from the band since 2021’s “Dad Vibes” single from their sixth studio album, Still Sucks. They teased it in their patented jokey fashion last week by pretending to be outraged that L.A. drummer Kristina Rybalchenko “leaked” the song by playing along to it in a video. “Kristina, that’s our new song, it’s now out yet, how did you get that?” an annoyed Durst says in the clip after busting through the door and wagging his finger at her while warning not to post it online.

Listen to “Making Love to Morgan Wallen” below.

A year after Neil Young launched a new backing band called The Chrome Hearts, the rock legend is now facing a surprising new problem: A trademark infringement lawsuit from a decades-old fashion brand with the exact same name.

The case, filed Thursday, comes from Chrome Hearts, a luxury brand that’s been using that name since the late 1980s for apparel, jewelry and accessories. Its lawyers say the name of Young’s new group – which debuted last year and released an album this summer – is clearly infringing the company’s “unique and valuable” name.

“Defendants’ continued use of the confusingly similar [Neil Young & The Chrome Hearts] name in commerce violates Chrome Hearts’ valuable intellectual property rights,” reads the lawsuit, obtained and first reported by Billboard. “Defendants have intentionally and knowingly capitalized off of confusion between the Chrome Hearts [trademarks] and the NYTCH name.”

For decades, Young has toured and recorded off-and-on with the band Crazy Horse, often under the name Neil Young and Crazy Horse. But last year, after he called that group’s summer tour due to an unspecific illness in the band, he debuted out The Chrome Hearts at FarmAid in September. The new group released its debut Talkin to the Trees album in June, and has been on a world tour this summer.

That was all apparently unwelcome news for Chrome Hearts, a Los Angeles-based brand that says it has sold apparel and other goods under that name – often written in a Gothic script with stylized cross – since 1988.

In its lawsuit this week, the company claimed that consumers are going to be confused by Young’s new name — mostly by mistakenly believing that the fashion brand has launched an official sponsored collaboration with the iconic singer.

“The likelihood of confusion is not merely hypothetical,” Chrome Hearts’ lawyers write. “Some clothing and apparel vendors have apparently already mistakenly assumed that there is a connection between NYTCH and Chrome Hearts, and are actively promoting [it.]”

Trademark law doesn’t grant anyone an absolute monopoly on words, and it only protects a brand name to the extent that it’s used on similar goods or services in a way that confuses consumers into falsely thinking there’s a connection. That’s why Delta Air Lines and Delta Faucet can both peacefully co-exist on completely different products.

Would music fans really be misled into thinking there’s connection to a fashion brand when they see “Chrome Hearts” next to Neil Young’s name on an album cover or a concert poster? That could be a difficult case for the company’s lawyers to prove in court. But the use of “Chrome Hearts” on band t-shirts and other similar merchandise might be a closer case.

To support that crucial confusion argument, Chrome Hearts cites several previous collabs with musical artists, including The Rolling Stones, Madonna, Rihanna, Drake, Lou Reed and Cher. The company also says Timothée Chalamet wore a Chrome Hearts leather suit on a red carper last year while promoting his Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown.”

“The Chrome Hearts brand has become iconic, especially in the fashion and music industries,” the group’s lawyers say. “And that was the intention. From the very beginning, the company placed special emphasis on promoting the Chrome Hearts brand among and with the help of musicians.”

Earlier this summer, Chrome Hearts says it reached out to Young’s team with a letter “respectfully requesting” that he stop using the name. But they say those efforts were unsuccessful – meaning the company “is now forced to bring this complaint to protect its valuable and longstanding intellectual property rights.”

The lawsuit is seeking an injunction that would immediately force Young to stop using the Chrome Hearts name, which the group is currently using each night on its “Love Earth Tour” across Europe and North America. It is also seeking damages, though it did not specify how much.

Representatives for Young and attorneys for Chrome Hearts did not immediately return requests for comment on Friday.

“Everyone was invited — including the dog,” Devendra Banhart chuckles over Zoom, looking back on Cripple Crow, his sprawling 2005 opus that was part artistic manifesto, part communal love letter. Dubbed “freak folk” at the time, the genre-bending opus was, in his words, “a snapshot of community,” where Brazilian-inspired tropicalismo, psych-folk and radical inclusivity collided.

Recorded in home studios and retreats filled with friendships and free-spirited experimentation, Cripple Crow felt more like a collective effort than a solo project. Its debut at No. 24 on Billboard‘s Independent Albums chart suggested a modest arrival, but its legacy has only grown in the years since.

Ahead of its time in both sound and perspective, Cripple Crow brought Banhart’s dual Venezuelan-American heritage into sharp focus, serving as an early example of bilingual experimentation. In an era when U.S. indie music rarely acknowledged deep ties to Latin American traditions, the album broke the mold, drawing inspiration from legends like Venezuela’s Simón Díaz, Argentina’s Mercedes Sosa and Brazil’s Caetano Veloso. Its impact continues to echo in a new wave of bilingual, U.S.-born Latin artists, such as Cuco and Omar Apollo, who carry their roots beyond the boundaries of the indie scene.

Now, as Banhart launches his new label, Heavy Flowers, and works on a forthcoming album with Ecuadorian-American artist Helado Negro, he’s marking the occasion with the release of Cripple Crow 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition. Out Friday (Sept. 12), the reissue features nine new songs and previously unseen photos shared by friends — retrieved after Banhart set fire to his personal archives during a pandemic-era cleansing ritual.

Additionally, the singer-songwriter also kicked off a nearly 30-date global tour on Thursday (Sep. 11), performing the 20-year-old album in its entirety. The trek stars in Homer, N.Y., with stops in Brooklyn and Boston before heading internationally to Japan, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Mexico, Chile, and culminating in Santa María de Punilla, Argentina, where he will take the stage at the Cosquín Rock festival on February 14 of next year.

Here, the artist takes us back to the communal spirit, creative ethos, and cultural influences that shaped Cripple Crow in this brief oral history.

Looking Back at Cripple Crow

Devendra Banhardt: I feel warm vibes toward the innocence of that time — a combination of a lot of embarrassment and less embarrassment. I’m not the most social person, a bit but not totally agoraphobic or misanthropic. But I’m impressed by how much community there was back then. There’s something radical about physical community. [My artist friends and I] did everything together back then — we lived together, had venues and bars that we would play at almost every night. We had this little scene, and it would rub up against these other scenes. We were all friends, supportive of each other. It was an attitude of, “if I’m playing a show, you’re invited on stage.” Everyone was invited — including the dog, who is on the record. 

It applied to visual art. I have to thank the San Francisco Art Institute [and pioneers of the ’90s Mission Arts scene] that came right before us, Alicia McCarthy, Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen, and more. Alicia, for example, had her first show at [Jeffrey] Deitch [art gallery] in New York. Everyone from SF came and could put a piece [of art] on her wall which was a big deal, a “wall of friends.” That ethos of “if I have a show, you have a show,” was born from that time in San Francisco, and it was applied to Cripple Crow. 

The Role of Bilingualism in Music of the ‘00s and Latin American Identity

I would never make Cripple Crow today, I couldn’t and wouldn’t. It really is a product of its time. There are Spanish songs on that record because I am Venezuelan-American, and I exist in both of those worlds. My brain switches from Spanish to English. At the time, I was listening nonstop to Mercedes Sosa, Atahualpa Yupanqui, and Simón Díaz, [the latter] who we cover with “Luna de Margarita.” He’s the Caetano Veloso of Venezuela, the great poet. 

[Simón Díaz] is so special because he combined two things that people typically would never think go hand in hand: poetry and comedy. He was a comedian and one of the most beautiful singers ever. I got to pay homage to somebody who influenced me so much that I grew up seeing on billboards. He was the most extraordinarily subversive person, because he was so mainstream and beloved. His songs were about the beauty of nature in Venezuela. He also has a couple of direct, explicitly anti-fascist songs. I don’t know if you know this, but Venezuela is a fascist country. He celebrates the people and never the regime. I’m really happy that I got to play this. 

Then there’s the whole Brazilian influence — I was so obsessed with tropicalismo: Caetano Veloso, Maria Bethânia, Gal Costa, Novos Baianos. We were so influenced and inspired by that. We didn’t see that reflected in the world that we lived in. We’d see footage of the movement there and how revolutionary and radical it was. To be yourself, express yourself in the way that you feel most comfortable, to feel safe within the community, and to be a freak. 

On “Freak Folk” and Queerness as Marginalization

None of us made up “freak folk,” and none of us liked it when it came up. We didn’t think it was classy. We thought we were “classy” freaks. Then with the [SF drag pioneers of the late ‘60s] the Cockettes and the Angels of Light [communal theater]. We felt marginalized. I equate queerness with marginalization, in a nonsexual way. It’s about the oddness that comes from being yourself at the cost of being ostracized. That is what I think of a queer space; that’s the ultimate safe and artistic space.

I remember seeing these two subcultures parallel from one another. Tropicalismo’s attitude was “the freak flag flies” and “anything goes.” All that mattered is that you are courageous amidst the face of so many obstacles, and that you are being yourself, whether that’s sexually, philosophically, or religiously. It means “follow your bliss,” Joseph Campbell’s famous line. Do the hard thing and listen to yourself over anybody else, and try not to judge others, as you don’t know what other people have been through.

The Deluxe Edition (and “Tender Embarrassment”)

We felt like it was time to reissue it as a way to also debut the label, Heavy Flowers, which I started. Most of my favorite records have been reissues anyway. I don’t think I would have been open to this idea if I wasn’t working on a record right now with new songs — it’s the only way that I could have even wanted to look into this “scary box.” Like I said, I feel a lot of tender embarrassment. 

During the pandemic, I decided to burn my archives as a cleansing and purification ritual. I had a pantry in my house with everything — photos and notebooks. It usually takes like 20 to 25 notebooks to write one album. Over the course of how many albums I’ve made [12 LPs], that pantry was just full. Everything went into the fire. The fire is very important to give an offering back and witness this primordial power — to let it return to something. All of that felt very healing and liberating. It was an ego trip in a way, and an ego release. This identity and how important I think this work is, it’s all gone, gone, gone. 

When my manager Christian Stavros said, “Let’s look at Cripple Crow. What do you got?” I ended up asking friends, “Do you have anything from those days?” [Music photographer] Alissa Anderson, who shot the cover, had all these old photographs and b-roll. Different friends found cassettes, others found [unreleased] demos. We had this opportunity to add these new songs, photos and drawings from that time that a couple of [friends] had been holding on to. That was wonderful. Then I had the opportunity to write a bit about my memories of that time. The album opens with a gatefold and some reflections, written in the style of Joe Brainard, a poet who wrote a beautiful autobiographical book called I Remember. So together, we all get to open up that box titled “T.E.” (Tender Embarrassment). 

What New Generations Can Take From Cripple Crow

That it’s a joint effort, a snapshot of community, a record of community, and how important community is. Social media is a form of community and obviously a form of communication. But there is something to getting in a room and all playing music together, which is what that record was born from. The door is open, everybody’s invited, and let’s communicate through instruments. I feel like that could be a part of today’s musicians’ lives, if they’re not. We spend so much time online, and sometimes we think of our real lives as backstage, and when we’re on social media, that’s when we’re on stage, like “I have arrived!” Maybe there could be more balance. It’s so important to find people that you can find your tribe with. How about this? Delete everything I said. Just find your tribe.