In 2014, British singer-songwriter Coyle Girelli’s indie rock band, The Chevin, went on hiatus, and he says, “I jumped into a million other things.” One of them was a trip to the Los Angeles home of another singer-songwriter Mac Davis, who scored 15 Billboard Hot 100 hits between 1970 and 1981 — including the chart-topping “Baby Don’t Get Hooked On Me” — and wrote or co-wrote memorable songs for such acts as Elvis Presley (“In The Ghetto,” “A Little Less Conversation”), Kenny Rogers & The First Edition (Something’s Burning”), Dolly Parton (“White Limozeen”) and Weezer (“Time Flies”).

Girelli and Davis were both published by Primary Wave, and its CEO Larry Mestel suggested they meet because, Mestel says, “They were both extraordinary writers — but also genuinely nice, down-to-earth human beings.”

More than a decade after the two artists met — and nearly five years since Davis’ death in 2020 — Girelli will release the extraordinary result of their collaboration on Aug. 29: Out Of This Town.

The solo album, which Girelli also produced, features his interpretations of 10 songs he and Davis wrote and a coda by Davis that was lifted from a voice memo he sent to his writing partner.

Girelli, who’s currently based in New York, says that he had Bruce Springsteen‘s Nebraska in mind when he arranged and recorded the songs on the album, and Out Of This Town‘s acoustic guitar, pedal steel and piano sound is spare and crystalline. The richest instrument on the album is Girelli’s voice, which, at moments, recalls Roy Orbison‘s lush falsetto.

It’s appropriate then, that Orbison’s onetime label, Sun Records, will release Out of This Town. As Girelli recounts in this interview with Billboard, he and Davis initially intended to record the album together and came close to a deal with another label until an executive shakeup derailed it.

Enter Sun, which Primary Wave acquired in 2021. Primary Wave and Sun Label Group chief strategy officer Dom Pandiscia, says, “Coyle had played the demos of these songs for me years ago, and we’ve talked regularly about finding the right way to bring them to market. The creative connection between Mac & Coyle align perfectly with the history of Sun,” he adds, “while also leaning it forward and adding to its legacy.”

Girelli talks with Billboard about the set and his relationship with Davis below.

Coyle is an unusual name. What’s its origin?

It’s an Irish name. My father was Irish and my mother, Italian. Very New York but not very common in England.

How did you come to collaborate with Mac Davis?

I think it was Larry [Mestel] who shared a performance of me in my old band, The Chevin. We performed on [Late Show With David Letterman]. He shared it with Mac, and according to Mac’s wife Lise, Mac said something along the lines of, “This kid is the next Roy Orbison.” He wanted to get in a word with me, so Primary Wave threw that out.

I was super excited. It was a real curve ball. I had only just started cowriting outside of the band — it was a matter of months — and I got this opportunity.

The next time I was in L.A., I went over to Mac’s house. I didn’t know what to expect. I had listened to the music he had written, but I had no idea how it was going to look. We grabbed guitars, sat over a cup of coffee and wrote something together probably within an hour of meeting each other. It’s a song called “Already Gone,” which is on the record.

What did you do for an encore?

We spent the rest of the day just talking about music and songs. He told me stories about Elvis and Frank Sinatra. We really got on. Him being a small-town guy who had really hustled., and me, also being a small-town guy who had really hustled for everything I’d gotten — there were a lot of similarities between us. We then kept getting together. I just loved writing with him. I’d always loved Elvis and Roy Orbison, and Americana [music] was always my favorite. That kind of influence is always in there.

Being from Northern England, I never had the confidence to be okay, “I can sing this stuff.” Working with Mac gave me permission. His whole angle was that my voice was built to sing the type of music we were writing, and we really leaned into it. Before we knew it, we had a big collection of songs and we were like, what do we do now with it?

You said that when you were writing with Mac, he literally had a bag of songs that he had written?

There was a point where we wrote together for four days in a row. We’d written a bunch of songs in the first few days, but on the fourth, we were both burned out. We stopped for a coffee, and when we came back, Mac said, “You know what? Let’s see what’s in my publishing company.” And he pulled up this Nashville Music Week swag bag that he had next to him. He unzips it, and inside are sheets and sheets of yellow lined paper with lyrics on them. He starts pulling them out and saying, “Oh yeah, this one.” He plays it to me. It’s “Mary in the Moonlight” [on the album]. He was like, “Yeah, it works. That can be for the project.”

He just kept doing that. There were hundreds of songs in that bag. He picked out songs from there that he thought worked with what we were doing. And I would voice memo them and take them home to demo them. I spoke with Lise about it when I was with her a couple of weeks ago in Nashville, and she said, “That’s where he put his songs. He would write them and then put them in his bag.

Did any real-life experiences inspire any of the songs?

Yeah. I only learned this a couple of weeks ago when I was with Lise. Mac was from Lubbock, Texas and apparently there’s a Mac Davis Day there. They’d asked him to perform there, and he played a pretty big show. Afterwards, he said, “Can you guys get me a limousine back to the airport?” The limo arrives and it’s a hearse being driven by an 18-year-old kid. Mac is like, okay.

He gets in the back of this hearse, and just before they get to the airport, the kid pulls over and says, “Mr. Davis, how do you do it? How do you get out of here?” Mac was like, “Well, I wrote songs, worked hard, persevered, and with a little bit of luck, I managed to get out. The kid was like, “I can’t even whistle. I’m never going to get out of this town. I’m going to die in this town driving a hearse.” And then he carries on to the airport. Mac was like, “That’s a good idea for a song.” And that became the title track of the album. I just love the poetry behind the story.

It’s a powerful, heartbreaking song.

Yeah, and it resonated so much with me because I’m from a similar place. Most people I went to school with will spend their entire lives in the town, regardless of any hopes to get out. A lot of people are trapped in these small towns.

You and Mac discussed doing a duets album?

Yeah, it was a pretty serious discussion. We were talking to a couple of record labels and very nearly signed it to Warner. The two of us had gone in and met with their whole team, and they were super into the album. I had never got my head around quite how [a duets album] would work in the studio, but Mac was so in love with the idea of getting these songs out. I guess he would have sung some songs, and I would have sung some. Whether we would have dueted, I don’t know.

For whatever reason, we got caught in a shuffle and the entire team was [let go], and the album never signed up there. Then the same thing happened at Capitol. It would have been interesting.

It’s interesting that you ended up at Sun, because your voice does reminds me of Roy Orbison at moments. How did that happen?

It feels very serendipitous. My band [The Chevin] was with Capitol and Caroline at the time, so we were working with a bunch of people there who are now at Primary Wave. I was with Primary Wave as a songwriter with my band for many years, and became very close to a lot of the team over there. When they acquired Sun and relaunched it as a label they were already familiar with the album, and with Mac’s connection to Elvis and my natural sound, it felt like a perfect fit. It didn’t take me very long to say yes. The idea of being a Sun Records recording artist was not something I’d ever thought was possible a few years ago.

Was Mac still alive when you began recording these songs?

Yeah. When we first wrote the songs and came up with the idea of putting it together as an album, I think we both had conversations to make this a very richly produced record with strings and tympanies and everything thrown in there. So, a real throwback to the stuff of the ‘60s that Elvis and Roy Orbison and people like that were making. I demoed the songs as we were writing them, and he would voice memo stuff to me or share chats. I would record them and interpret them my way and record them with just acoustic guitar and vocals and then send them back to Mac. We would tweak things. That’s how we got the demos together that we shared with labels.

After the label signings I mentioned didn’t work out, I released a solo album, my first, Love Kills, which was very much influenced by the stuff Mac and I were working on. It’s got that very similar sound. Then COVID happened, and then Mac passed away. We never really got the chance to flesh out the idea [of where to go next].

So you had to make that decision on your own?

I had the demos for such a long time. I’d listened to them and shared them with people who also loved them, including the team at Sun and Primary Wave. I struggled with the big sound that we had originally wanted to create.  It seemed to me that the strength of the album was in the songwriting and also letting my voice be front and center — not hiding it in a million instruments which is what I tend to do usually when I produce my stuff.

The first couple of days in the studio I thought, “Let’s experiment and see how much bigger we can make the tracks.” Every time I laid something, especially drums, felt too heavy handed. Even the bass at times. It was process of figuring out what was necessary. Bit by bit, we worked through it. At some point I landed on Springsteen’s Nebraska as a reference point — another album where the demos led the way sonically. So, that seemed to make sense here as well.

You have some interesting featured singers on the album, such as KT Tunstall. How did those come about?

Like I said, when Mac and I wrote it, the idea of duets was something that we’d spoken about — whether or not it was dueting with each other, we knew we wanted duets in there. I’ve never done duets before, so it was fun to start thinking about that. KT had also released a record [with Suzi Quatro] on Sun, and I had heard the project. KT really loved “Lost to the River” on Out of This Town and was like, “I really, really want to sing this song.” I hadn’t thought of it as a duet, but I shared it with her, she threw her voice on it, and it sounds awesome.

Then, with Cassandra Lewis [who is featured on “Everyone But Me And You”], I had met her a year previous at a music conference, saw her perform and loved her voice and her style. And Jaime Wyatt was recommended to the project. She brought a very different tone, and I love the layer she added to “Never Thought I’d See You Again.”

Has Lise heard the finished album and given you any feedback?

Lise loves it. She was around when we were working on the record at their house in L.A., and she would pop her head in and say, “I like that song,” or, “I like that sound.” I know from talking to her, that Mac talked with her a lot about the project. She’s very much a part of the whole thing and was from the beginning. She’s really thrilled that it’s finally coming out. Also having Mac’s voice on one of the songs is pretty special.

Tell me more about that one.

So, Mac would send me voice memos of songs, and one of the memos he sent was, “I Wanna Make Love.” Thankfully, there’s technology in the last couple of years where you can pull the vocal out of a recording like that. We used a company called AudioShake, sent them the track and got back this immaculately clean .WAV of Mac’s voice. It’s absolutely mind blowing. We loaded it into the computer and built the track around it. I was thrilled that we could have Mac on the project.

You’re going to go on tour now?

I’ll do a few dates to start. I’m in L.A. at the moment. I plan to start there. Then, we’ll do London, New York, Nashville, Austin, a bunch of other cities, and we’ll go from there.  

I read that you have pretty broad musical tastes?

A lot in life doesn’t really make sense when you’re a kid, but half my family is Italian, so my grandma and my mother, played a lot of opera around the house. A lot of Puccini, and I grew up hearing a lot of opera. I always liked the melody and the singing and how theatrical it was and stuff. Then on my dad’s side he always played a lot of Americana — Tom Paxton, Jackson Browne, Springsteen and the Eagles.

Whenever we were on a car drive that was what was playing. I hated it as a kid. Because you hate your parents’ music when you’re eight years old or whatever. I remember loving Queen. Then a couple of years later, I really fell in love with it. Whatever I try, I don’t think I can ever get away from the opera and the Americana influence. They’re just in me at this point.

Is The Chevin still together?

No, we went on hiatus in 2014. We’ve released little bits and pieces since, but we hit a touring wall. And then I jumped into a million other things, and we’ve not got together since. We keep threatening to make another record, and we’re technically still signed to the label who said they would release it, but we have to find time.

Have you thought about what’s next once you’re done promoting the album?

I’m going to be working on a new record pretty much straightaway as soon as this comes out. I have an idea for what I’d like to do. It’s in the same vein as this one, but we’ll see. It’s kind of all I know how to do at this point.

After facing a week of backlash from folks across the internet, Betty Who would like to clear the air around her recent appearance on the Made It Out podcast.

In a statement published to their Instagram Stories on Wednesday night (Aug. 27), the Australian pop singer said that after some reflection, she regretted what she said on the show. “In recent days, I’ve taken time to sit with the conversation around my gender and sexuality. I recognise that the language I used poorly articulated my experience and unintentionally reinforced ideas that were harmful or dismissive, particularly toward the lesbian community,” they wrote. “That was never my intention, and I’m truly sorry. Everyone’s journey is deeply personal, and I shouldn’t have spoken in ways that generalised or spoke for others.”

The comments in question came when Who was asked about how a person’s sexuality can evolve over time, and two fellow pop singers — Fletcher and JoJo Siwa — who came under speculation earlier this year after they both announced their romantic relationships with men while still identifying as queer. “It shouldn’t be illegal for you to fall in love,” Who said on the podcast. “It’s kind of like, now we’ve come so far, that our community is so strong, that now it’s like a crime to be straight.”

Who also used noted pop star Reneé Rapp, who is a lesbian, as an example of fluid sexuality. “Reneé Rapp is like, ‘You’ll never catch me dating a man,’” she explained. “Like, ‘Go off, queen. I love that for you!’ But I also hold space for her in 10 years if she goes, ‘Oops, I met the love of my life and it’s this man, I didn’t mean to.’ It’s like, that’s OK!”

Many users online accused Who of spreading lesbophobic information about queer relationship dynamics, particularly reinforcing the myth that lesbians simply “need to find the right man.” One such critic was fellow queer pop singer King Princess, who talked about Who’s comments on her own TikTok on Tuesday. “Date a man, it’s not a big deal. But why are you on a podcast talking about it? It’s not an interesting narrative,” she said. “We live in a country where our rights are being stripped from us every day, and you think it’s important to get on a podcast and talk about how hard it is to be in a heteronormative relationship? Diva!”

In their statement, Who clarified that her intention in going on the Made It Out podcast was to “discuss my own journey” as a bisexual and nonbinary person, and not to project her personal experience onto others. “I understand there is so much nuance in this conversation, and in other people’s lived experiences, that my comments did not reflect,” she wrote. “I also recognize that I’m coming from a place of privilege, and I never meant to contribute to prejudice against the community.”

Closing out her statement, Who reiterated that the LGBTQ+ community as her “home,” and promised fans that “I will do better” in the futre.

JD Vance can’t resist a good love story. Despite his and Taylor Swift‘s political differences, the vice president offered words of congratulations after finding out about her recent engagement to Travis Kelce.

While speaking to USA Today at the White House on Wednesday (Aug. 27), Vance expressed that he’s rooting for the happy couple, who announced their plans to get married the day prior. “I’m a romantic when I see two people who are in love getting married,” he began.

“I just wish ’em the best, and I congratulate ’em,” Vance continued. “I hope they have a very long and healthy and happy life together.”

That said, the former senator also remarked that he thinks “by and large, people want politicians to focus on politics, and they want celebrities to focus on whatever it is that made them famous, whether it’s singing or dancing or acting.”

Ironically, Donald Trump has focused his energies on pop cultural figures such as Swift — people whom Vance probably wouldn’t consider to have a place in politics — countless times throughout his two presidential terms. Taking a particular interest in the Eras Tour headliner over the past year, he’s done everything from mock Swift for getting booed at the 2025 Super Bowl to declaring on Truth Social, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,” although he did also share words of congratulations after hearing about her engagement to the Kansas City Chiefs tight end.

“Well, I wish them a lot of luck,” the twice-impeached POTUS said during a cabinet meeting on the day of Swift and Kelce’s announcement. “I think he’s a great player, I think he’s a great guy, and she’s a terrific person, so I wish them a lot of luck.”

The leader of the free world and his second in command are far from the only people who have chimed in on the famous couple’s engagement. After the pair shared photos of Kelce’s romantic rose-garden proposal and Swift’s enormous diamond engagement ring, they were met with an overwhelmingly positive response from friends and fans — and even some critics, Megyn Kelly included — online.

“I am not a Taylor Swift fan for many reasons, but I respect the empire she has built,” the Megyn Kelly Show host wrote on her website following the news. “With Taylor Swift being an American billionaire who is not even 40, I think it is great that she finally found love. I really do. I am rooting for them. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the person she ultimately decided to settle down with is a real man, is a football player, is a tough guy who doesn’t really take a lot of s–t from people.”