As the Red Clay Strays packed up to leave the sessions for their 2024 sophomore album, Made by These Moments, they were confident in what they’d just created. Still, they worried: Would a last-minute mishap mean they’d never get invited back to eminent producer Dave Cobb’s studio?

“We had just made our first record with him, and we were leaving, and [guitarist] Drew [Nix] spilled Coke all over [Cobb’s] freshly painted stairs,” recalls the band’s charismatic frontman, Brandon Coleman. “We were like, ‘You ruined it!’ ”

He needn’t have been concerned: Made by These Moments became the band’s full-length breakthrough, and The Red Clay Strays would soon return to Cobb’s Savannah, Ga., studio to record much of their new album, Grateful, out June 5 — and it would likely take more than just some spilled soda to slow the Alabama group’s momentum. After breaking out on TikTok with the 2022 single “Wondering Why,” the soulful country-rock ensemble has become one of the fastest-rising acts in the country world, with second-line billing at this year’s Stagecoach Festival and its first arena tour on tap. An impressive ascent — especially for a band that doesn’t even necessarily see itself as “country.”

How the band is classified, Coleman says, “doesn’t matter. I’ve always just said ‘rock’n’roll,’ because we don’t have any fiddles or anything like that. We’re just three electric guitars, bass, drums and piano.
“We’re definitely country boys with Southern heritage,” he continues, “but I just never really thought of ourselves as a country music band.”

“This new record is another step away from the country sound,” interjects bassist Andy Bishop, but “we always keep a toe in that country world.”

“So we can go to the CMAs!” Coleman responds.

Today, the band — which, as it happens, won vocal group of the year at last year’s Country Music Association Awards and group of the year at May’s Academy of Country Music Awards — is gathered in a nondescript Southern California office space as it prepares for its Stagecoach play later in the week. The members are known for their stylishness onstage, but over Zoom, they’re just a crew of normal dudes in their late 20s and early 30s, clad in T-shirts (Bishop’s Pat Benatar one takes the cake) and good-naturedly s–t-talking while still marveling at their hard-won success after years of playing to small audiences.

“We started out playing in barrooms,” Coleman says. “The barrooms just got bigger,” guitarist Zach Rishel adds. Either way, as drummer John Hall puts it, “I’m just sipping on Miller Lite.” (Keyboardist Sevans Henderson rounds out the group.)

The band’s unpretentious attitude has resonated with audiences and driven its rapid growth — because The Red Clay Strays haven’t only eschewed pageantry, but the industry machine writ large. “Born and bred in the red dirt clay of South Alabama,” as the band’s website proudly declares, its members remain based in their native Mobile. (Coleman: “What does it matter where you pay your bills?”) They keep the Nashville establishment at arm’s length, even if they mostly chalk it up to better weather and cheaper cost of living.

That outlook extends to its radio philosophy. The band has just one entry to date on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart — “Wondering Why” logged a week at No. 58 two years ago — which is actually one more than the Strays estimate they’ve had. “It’s ­never been a goal of ours to make a radio song,” Bishop says. “Look how far we have gotten with no radio play. We got a CMA [Award] with three country radio stations playing us, and one of them is our local radio station. People are bending over backward for radio, and especially in the day of social media, I don’t think you have to have it. Honestly, I think radio is dead.” (Coleman qualifies this somewhat: “We’re certainly not going to change to try to get on the radio, but if the radio decides to start playing what we’re doing already, then we’ll take it.”)

So, too, are the aesthetic boxes that once separated genres and subgenres. The Red Clay Strays hail from the storied country-rock lineage of the Allman Brothers Band and Lynyrd Skynyrd, who its members proudly cite as influences. But their taste goes far beyond that to revered country acts from Waylon Jennings to Tyler Childers, but also The Rolling Stones, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Ray Charles. “I found Nirvana when I was 13 and that changed my life,” Hall says. Then again, “When I was 13, top 40 country radio rocked.”

On Grateful, its second album for the Los Angeles-based RCA, the band amalgamated all those influences into its most ambitious creative statement yet — even if the sessions were “very low intensity, very chill,” according to Bishop. Religious themes pervade the album’s lyrics (and the band’s marketing around it) and bleed over to the music, which is supplemented throughout with backup gospel singers. Despite that, “I wouldn’t say we’re a religious band,” Coleman says. “We make music about our life, and God is a big part of our life, so he’s in our music. We’re not trying to be anybody’s worship leaders or spiritual leaders or anything like that, because we’re just dudes playing music.”

But as its platform has grown, and scrutiny of the band has increased, its members have become aware of what the public thinks — not just of its religious leanings, but its political ones, too. In October, the act released the studiously apolitical “People Hatin’,” a well-intentioned plea for Americans of all stripes to tone down incendiary rhetoric. (Sample lyric: “All this arguing is aggravating.”) The song ignited internet backlash, with some criticizing the band for bringing politics into music and others directly linking the song to the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk the prior month.

“Everybody said it was a Charlie Kirk song, but we wrote that song in April last year,” Coleman says. “Everybody in the band, we all have different opinions politically and all that, but we’ve been a band for over 10 years. It wasn’t going to be released first [from Grateful], and we decided we should put it up first, after Charlie got shot. But that’s not why we wrote the song. The song was written because of issues that we’ve been dealing with for a while now.”

If The Red Clay Strays seek a big tent, they’re pitching one themselves. The band will play its biggest headlining shows yet when it hits more than 30 American arenas from August to November, including its first play at New York’s Madison Square Garden. “It’s all kind of scary,” Bishop admits, “and we just hope people show up to these shows, or we’re going to be playing in empty arenas.”

“When you don’t have a plan,” Coleman reassures him, “you don’t panic when the plan goes wrong.” Bishop promises a “big production” with a custom-built stage, hefty lights and screens and an expanded touring band (“I think half of all our income this year is going to it”) and deadpans, “We’re selling out.” Says Coleman: “I won’t be wearing jumpsuits, though.”

But before any of that, the band will honor the fans who have gotten them this far with the Red Clay Strays Fan Fest in Rexford, Mont., in late June. “It’s in the middle of nowhere, on the border of Canada and Montana, and it’s one of our favorite places to be,” Bishop says. “We usually like to spend a week or so a year just literally doing nothing but hanging out [there]. We wanted to show that to other people.”

“We’ve always liked the idea of trying to give back to the fans somehow or another, and this is just our first sling at it,” Coleman says of the five-day event, which will feature headline performances by The Red Clay Strays, Lukas Nelson and St. Paul & The Broken Bones, as well as “Strays With Stories,” an evening of intimate performances and stories by the band. “Who knows how it’s going to turn out.”

Playing arenas from coast to coast and attracting fans to remote, rural Montana just three years after breaking out on TikTok? Seems like, for The Red Clay Strays, things are going to turn out just fine.

This story appears in the May 30, 2026, issue of Billboard.

Among Drake’s historic week on Billboard’s charts (dated May 30), he becomes the first artist ever to pass 400 career hits on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, upping his count to a staggering 402 appearances.

Notably, Drake has held the mark for the most Hot 100 visits since early 2020.

Before that, only two other acts claimed that honor going back to 1964.

The Hot 100 launched with the edition dated Aug. 4, 1958, and Elvis Presley, fittingly, assumed the throne with the most entries just more than six years later, after the likes of Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash and Fats Domino traded first place over that early sample size.

On the Hot 100 dated Oct. 10, 1964, Presley debuted the double-sided single “Ain’t That Loving You Baby”/“Ask Me,” giving him an advantage in total hits of 45 to 43 over Domino. The King of Rock n’ Roll would then have the most appearances at every checkpoint through the ranking dated Feb. 19, 2011 — a stretch of 46 years, four months and one week.

On the Feb. 26, 2011-dated Hot 100, the Glee cast debuted six songs, boosting its total to 113 and passing Presley’s then 107. The troupe from the Fox TV favorite — thanks to its unique multimedia presence and rapid, supersized release model — would stand as the act with the most appearances through the end of the decade, even with the ensemble having last charted in 2013, totaling 207 entries, and the show having wrapped its run in 2015. Ultimately, the act reigned with the most charted titles for a stretch of nine years and one month.

(The Glee cast recorded two notable covers of Presley classics — “Blue Christmas” and “A Little Less Conversation” — although those tributes didn’t reach the Hot 100, so he didn’t quite help them topple his total.)

On the March 21, 2020, Hot 100, Drake seized the baton, outpacing the Glee cast with an assist from another superstar name: That week, “Oprah’s Bank Account,” with Lil Yachty and DaBaby, debuted, marking Drake’s unprecedented 208th entry. (“You get a record!”)

As of the latest Hot 100, Drake has boasted the most total appearances for six years, two months and one week running.

(Can Drake overtake Presley’s 46-year-plus streak of leading all acts for the most career Hot 100 hits? If no one gets in his way, check back around, give or take, August 2066.)

In 1983, Frank Sinatra sued celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley after learning she was working on the book His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra, only to drop the case within a year. Seventeen years later, a judge threw out litigation from the estate of David Ruffin over the 1998 NBC miniseries The Temptations. And in 2018, an appeals court said actress Olivia de Havilland could not sue FX over her portrayal in the Ryan Murphy series Feud: Bette and Joan.

These are just a few among scores of cases that have failed over the decades in trying to challenge unauthorized biographical works about celebrities, largely due to First Amendment free speech protections. Experts tell Billboard that Billy Joel would likely meet the same fate if he brought legal action over the unauthorized biopic Billy & Me.

The project, announced by Variety last week, tells the story of Joel’s early career through the eyes of his first manager, Irwin Mazur, and early collaborator Jon Small. But Joel himself has not given his blessing — and he has publicly stated that the movie should not be made.

“Since 2021, the parties involved have been officially notified that they do not possess Billy Joel’s life rights and will not be able to secure the music rights required for this project,” says Joel’s spokesperson, Claire Mercuri, in a statement shared with Billboard. “Billy Joel has not authorized or supported this project in any capacity, and any attempt to move forward without it would be both legally and professionally misguided.”

If he made good on that not-so-subtle threat, what would Joel’s legal options be? He could theoretically sue the filmmakers in New York or California under state-level laws that protect that right of publicity — that is, a person’s right to control their name, image and likeness. Such a lawsuit could be brought before the movie’s release if Joel wanted to seek an injunction stopping it, or afterwards in pursuit of damages for alleged harm.

Right of publicity laws have been invoked in many previous celebrity biopic lawsuits, typically without success. There are two key reasons for this. First, the bulk of states that have right of publicity statutes limit this protection to commercial products, such as the use of one’s face on an advertisement or merchandise, and exclude artistic endeavors like movies. Second, courts have routinely found that a filmmaker’s First Amendment right to free speech overrules an individual’s right to control their story.

“The legal rule is no one has a monopoly on historical facts,” says Elizabeth Seidlin-Bernstein, a media lawyer at the firm Ballard Spahr. “No one has veto power over the making of a biopic about them. The First Amendment protects that kind of expression.”

While a right of publicity lawsuit would thus face long odds for Joel, there is another type of legal action that could also be available to him after the movie comes out: a defamation lawsuit.

“If there are significant mischaracterizations or untruths that potentially harm the reputation of a subject of a film, there could potentially be defamation claims,” says Tal Dickstein, an entertainment litigator at Loeb & Loeb.

Whether Joel has any legal recourse for defamation will depend on the specific content of Billy & Me, which for now remains unknown (the script is not yet done, per Variety). There are also First Amendment barriers to the success of defamation claims for public figures like Joel; in order to win this sort of legal action, a celebrity must show that a lie was told with actual malice, meaning the teller knew it was false or recklessly disregarded the truth. “It’s a high bar,” explains Dickstein.

The fact that the Billy & Me filmmakers have not bought Joel’s life rights is not independently a legal issue. It is true that many Hollywood production companies prefer to get a subject’s authorization before greenlighting a project. But Seidlin-Bernstein says this is not so much a legal requirement as a sort of “insurance policy,” since life rights agreements typically include a release of all possible claims one could bring in the future, and often a promise of access or participation from the subject.

Dickstein similarly tells Billboard that the concept of a life right is “more of a contractual restriction than a free-standing intellectual property right.” He says that in addition to helping filmmakers avoid risk, these agreements also can be valuable in prohibiting a subject from inking a film or book deal with someone else.

The Billy & Me filmmakers are thus legally free to make a Joel biopic sans life rights, albeit without the valuable upsides that would come with his buy-in. With Joel’s approval, the movie will also likely be lacking in another important element: his music. Joel retains ownership of his catalog, meaning he’d have to grant approval for Billy & Me to dramatize the production or performances of Billboard Hot 100 chart-toppers like “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” or “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

This is likely why, as reported by Variety, the movie’s plot will be Joel’s origin story before the release of his breakout hit “Piano Man” in 1973. Writer and producer Adam Ripp told Variety that the film takes place during Joel’s time in his early 1960s band The Hassles and “features the cover songs performed by them during that era.”

“As such, characterizing Billy & Me as ‘legally and professionally misguided’ does not accurately reflect the nature of the project nor the legally obtained rights underlying the production,” Ripp said in his statement. “The film is based on Irwin Mazur and Jon Small’s firsthand experiences and Irwin’s legitimate right to tell his own life story and perspective regarding the events depicted in the film.”

In a statement to Billboard for this story, Joel’s spokesperson Mercuri said, “At no time has Billy Joel even suggested that he would seek to enjoin this proposed film. Instead, he has made clear that his music will not be licensed and he has not authorized those associated with the proposed film to depict him visually or vocally and he reserves his rights to protect his valuable state law rights.”

Summon Chief Keef, and Sosa appears. Days after Katy Perry attempted to “summon Mr. Keef” on TikTok, she was spotted hanging out with the Chicago drill pioneer, as footage of the link-up hit social media on Wednesday night (May 27).

For those who may not recall, Katy Perry and Chief Keef were engaged in an infamous beef in 2013 on Twitter at the time surrounding Sosa’s “Hate Bein’ Sober” single featuring Wiz Khalifa and 50 Cent.

“Just heard a new song on the radio called ‘I Hate Being Sober’ and I have serious doubt for the world,” the pop star wrote in 2013.

Chief Keef, who was still a teenager at the time, aggressively clapped back with a NSFW message.He later threatened to “smack” the pop star.

Katy Perry eventually apologized, and all was well from there on out. “I’m sorry if I offended you. I heard a lot of people guesting on the song & didn’t even know it was you in particular,” she tweeted at the time. Sosa also apologized for how he handled himself in his reply.

The interaction lived on in internet history over the years, before the two met up more than a decade later on Wednesday night. Footage emerged of the two hanging outside in a parking lot with their teams. Sosa was wearing a green jacket and jean shorts, while KP sported a black leather top and matching pants.

It appears they headed inside to the studio, as Perry posted a TikTok dapping up Sosa and writing, “Legendary link up.” The video was soundtracked by the pop star’s 2013 track “Legendary Lovers” featuring new vocals from Chief Keef, who appeared to bless the remix.

“Legendary Lovers” originally landed on Katy Perry’s 2013 Prism album, but was included on her The Ones That Got the Plays compilation, which arrived earlier in May and debuted at No. 117 on the Billboard 200. The LP contains songs from her sophomore album One of the Boys through 2020’s Smile, and she threw in her 2025 “Bandaids” single.

Watch the clip of Katy Perry and Chief Keef reuniting below.