Now that Kid Cudi has his long-awaited collaboration with Travis Scott out of the way, it looks like he’s setting his sights even higher for his next rap partnership. “The Scotts,” which debuted in the last week of April and earned Cudi his first No. 1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100 a week later, appears to have given the veteran rap crooner a taste of the top, so it’s only natural he’d want to return there as soon as possible. Maybe that’s why Cudi reached out to the “rap god,” Eminem, with a tweet asking for help yesterday.

Eminem certainly has plenty of experience hanging out in the Billboard top ten; earlier this year, he broke the record for most No. 1 albums in a row, and last year, he tied Jay-Z for the third-most Top 10 Hot 100 appearances. He surpassed that number in relatively short order with songs from his album, Music To Be Murdered By, which produced the high-speed hit “Godzilla.”

A few years ago, Cudi’s Em-signal might have met little more than ridicule from the notoriously prickly old head, who spent most of the two albums before Music To Be Murdered By railing against any rapper more than 10 years younger than himself. But Em seems to have loosened up lately, employing a few more melodic hip-hop artists on his latest project; late Chicago rapper Juice WRLD, who was known almost more for his singing as his rapping, appeared on the aforementioned “Godzilla,” so an Em verse on a Cudi song may not sound as out-of-place as it once might have. If Cudi received a positive response, it’s almost a sure thing we’ll all find out about it soon.

Listen to Cudi’s latest, “The Scotts” with Travis Scott, above.

Life around the world has changed for just about everybody during the coronavirus pandemic. While these times can be discouraging, Rhye believes it’s important to be open to finding beauty, and now he is trying to encourage that with his new single, “Beautiful.”

In addition to the song, which slots nicely into the subtly funky Rhye oeuvre, he is also presenting an endeavor called “A Beautiful Weekend.” The project has taken the form of a livestream of various video clips as “Beautiful” plays over them. Over the first ten hours of the broadcast (it went live at midnight ET), there has been footage of nature, kids enjoying time in the pool, empty city streets, and other scenes. As of this post, a panda eating bamboo is being broadcast.

Rhye says of the “A Beautiful Weekend” project:

“As we all share in this collective crazy moment that is quarantine, there are many ways to deal with the isolation, many ways we can truly fall into ourselves. For me, celebrating the beauty that is my partner has been a huge inspiration for me and a saving grace. Beauty is something we truly need to be open to in this moment. Find it in music, art, your loved ones, or yourself.”

Listen to “Beautiful” above.

Coronavirus has turned all touring musicians into housebound music fans. “I haven’t been home this long in 15 years,” Matt Berninger wryly confesses. When reached by phone earlier this week, The National frontman chatted a bit about what’s keeping him occupied lately, including a recently completed solo album, Serpentine Prison, produced by Booker T. Jones. But more than anything he’s been spending his quarantine time listening to familiar favorites. “I’m really gravitating to Willie Nelson for some reason. I’m finding so much comfort in his stuff. And Sufjan Stevens,” he says. “I find a lot of solace in Carrie & Lowell.”

As for me, I tell him I’ve been playing “Lemonworld” on a loop. One of the many highlights of The National’s great fifth album, High Violet — which turns 10 on May 11, an occasion marked with a new anniversary edition due out June 19 — “Lemonworld” is a tragicomic pop song spiked with dirty guitars, about a person who escapes home in order to spend time at a mysterious country getaway. I’ve always loved the song, but now the opening lines turn my blood cold:

So happy I was invited
Gave me a reason to get out of the city
See you inside watching swarms on TV
Livin’ and dyin’ in New York, it means nothing to me

That’s not the only song on High Violet that sounds like it could have been written last month. Apocalyptic imagery abounds in Berninger’s lyrics — the “swarm of bees” in “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” the emotionally zombified person who fears he will “eat your brains” in “Conversation 16,” the flood in “Runaway.” While Berninger doesn’t claim to have had any prescience about 2020 a decade ago, he’s not surprised that High Violet might have contemporary resonance for listeners.

“I’m listening to so much music and every third song I feel like was written for this very, very unique time that we’re going through,” he says.

For The National, High Violet signifies a pivotal moment in their history. Formed in 1999, they spent their first several years in the shadow of flashier New York City bands as they struggled to find their own voice on their first two albums. In 2005, they became a critical darling with Alligator, and then 2007’s Boxer made them a popular indie favorite. High Violet represents the period when The National finally became a mainstream act. Suffused with a musical grandiosity that blows far past its more introverted predecessors, High Violet debuted in the top 5 in the US and UK and permanently ushered them to headliner status in large theaters and arenas.

Looking back, Berninger says the making of the record was fueled by an anxious desire to not slide back into obscurity.

“High Violet did feel like, ‘Oh, we can maybe be any kind of band.’ We were always trying to learn how to be a band at all,” he says. “Every single thing we did, it was live or die. If we didn’t make some kind of a splash with that record, it did feel that we would die on the vine.”

In the following interview, Berninger talks about the making of the record, and gives his takes on some of High Violet‘s most loved tracks, including “Lemonworld,” “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” and “Terrible Love,” which he admits the band might have screwed up for the original studio version.

What is the significance of “Lemonworld” for you personally?

That’s one of my favorite songs. That song was a struggle to figure out how to get it right for whatever reason. Every time we cooked it, it didn’t taste right. Somebody said to me we had 80 versions of the song; I think we probably had 20 actual different versions. We probably worked harder on that song than any single song, and I don’t even know if we ever figured it out right.

To me that song could have been written about this health crisis, and people fantasizing about escaping the city.

There are a lot of National songs that are about escape and about feeling on the outside and watching it from afar. There are two or three songs on every record that are about that. “Lemonworld,” specifically, it’s sort of a weird garden of Eden. It’s a place of freedom and silliness and sexiness and flowers and alcohol and nature and all that stuff. I guess whenever I think of “Lemonworld,” I think of an Italian Villa or something with lemon trees and all that kind of shit.

Our basic desires for connection, desires to be understood, and desires to be heard and seen or to escape, I think artists are always writing about it. And so when something like this happens, good art just resonates.

As a songwriter, do you think about how context changes what songs mean to the listener?

Certainly. That happens a week after the record is finished, I hear a song differently. I think songs evolve the way we evolve. The song I go back to over and over is “Famous Blue Raincoat.” I probably have to say it’s my favorite song, Not that I listen to it the most. It’s just the one that evolves the most for me. I’m trying to figure out the relationships in that song all the time.

You mentioned how hard it was to get “Lemonworld” right. Would you say High Violet was one of the most difficult albums for The National to make?

Yes. I mean, they’re always really hard and there’s always a lot of anxiety. There’s also a lot of joy. But there was so much pressure and so much emotion and people had so much invested in every sketch. Aaron and Bryce, they would name songs after people’s kids. They did that because they knew I would have to go work on a song called “Cora,” because Cora is [our engineer] Nick Lloyd’s kid. I don’t know if “Cora” ever turned into a song.

I felt like we were depleted when we started making that record. I got a really bad sinus infection and then my eardrum ruptured when I flew home to Cincinnati for my grandmother’s funeral. And then when I came back, I couldn’t hear in one ear. And so we had to stop and start. But I remember it being artistically really satisfying. I feel like we saved most of our conflict for the art. We were fighting to make the songs work and nobody would give up, which is good. That’s why we did so many versions of “Lemonworld.”

You were described at the time as the dad of the band. Do you feel like that was true?

Yeah. Maybe because I’m older, I’m a little more assertive or something. But there was a role that I played, which I didn’t necessarily like playing.

I remember interviewing the band around the time that Trouble Will Find Me came out, and it seemed like by then you had learned how to live more comfortably as a band after the High Violet experience.

Yeah. I still sometimes think, I can’t imagine five more different people. Like, having brothers in the band and all that stuff comes into it. And tribalism and egos and fear of having to go back to real jobs. When you start getting attention for something, when that dream comes true, becoming famous for making art, the idea of losing it is terrifying. You just have to keep making the dream stay true.

“Bloodbuzz Ohio” was the breakout hit from High Violet. Did it seem like the album’s big song when you made it?

It started with a little mandolin sketch from Padma Newsome, almost like this little folky thing. Maybe I was drawn to it because we had just come off tour with R.E.M., and we watched them do “Losing My Religion.” I feel like it was written really fast and kind of easy. And then Bryan started playing the beat, and it suddenly went from sort of a nice little bouquet of flowers into this big, muscular tree. And that’s when we were like, “Holy fuck. This thing is big!”

That’s another song with apocalyptic imagery. A “swarm of bees” is almost biblical.

There’s always some sort of nature that invades the urban or domestic world in my songs. Either that or some sort of destruction. And it’s just a fear of death, right? I think I like to flirt with suicide, flirt with the apocalypse, with total romantic devastation. Everything. Just like look into the center, look into the darkness, look into the abyss. Because with rock ‘n’ roll, you’re never going to get hurt. The way you get closest to and understand life is to look at your own potential lack of it.

One of the best songs on High Violet is “Terrible Love.” I remember seeing you guys play it on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon and thinking it was the greatest music that The National had ever made up to that point. And then the album came out, and it seems like you purposely took the grandness out of it. What was the thinking there?

Well it’s funny, because when we played it live on Fallon, we realized we’d fucked up the record version. We were like, “Holy shit!” And then we listened to the record version and were like, “Yeah, we should’ve cooked that.” But I do think there was a sense of trying to make things uglier. Maybe to hide the ambition. Maybe we were embarrassed by the ambition of it all. “Love” is a real dangerous word to use in the song. If you don’t use it right, it sounds canned.

We spent a lot of time getting those shitty sounding guitars. The way we were describing what it should sound like, they were not musical terms. We wanted it to sound like wet pine or wooly, or more like sludge and more like tar, more like saltwater. It was like, “Make it sound more like lemons.” And then we had to figure out what the hell that meant. So a lot of times we were adding lemons, and adding fuzz, and adding whatever. We tried really hard to make it sound like we weren’t trying.

When I heard the original album version, I assumed that you were skittish about sounding too much like U2.

I’m a huge Guided By Voices fan. The notes are a little flat, or a little sharp, and they haven’t figured out the bridge yet. Early versions so often have surprising honesty. It’s like seeing a picture of somebody with zits on their face. You kind of get to know them a little better. They’re not all airbrushed yet.

I think I was always really trying to make things sound worse. That wasn’t always smart. And “Terrible Love” is a great example of that. I don’t know if that one’s particularly my fault. I think we were all like trying to push it that way.

“Sorrow” was given a new life when The National played it for six hours straight during an art installation in 2013. Did playing it so many times in a row change your perception of it?

That song really grew on us all. You would think that we get sick of playing it again after playing it, I think, 105 times. But that experience sort of made us appreciate that song. When you do something like that over and over again, it’s a real mind fuck. Every line of it, you start to hear something new every time it comes around.

I remember writing most of that song in one field somewhere. I don’t know where the fuck I was. And I remember thinking like, “Oh, this is really something that means a lot to me.”

Is it unusual for you to write a song that quickly?

It used to be. “I Need My Girl” was written really fast. “About Today” I remember was just … done. But it used to be a real slow process of building a song and putting the words together, and finding the lines that would bounce off each other the right way. I just write less consciously now. It spills out faster. It’s no better, it’s just there’s a lot more. And then I go back and throw 75 percent of it away and cherry-pick that. But I write really fast. Songs like “Not in Kansas,” I’ll write in an hour and then maybe come back the next day and finish it in an hour.

I love “Not In Kansas” because of how loose it is, and all of the references you pull in. It reminds me of a Dylan song.

I mean, Dylan is such a master of that, of taking you to 500 places, rooms, roads, rivers, just inside his head, inside his soul, on a motorcycle. It doesn’t matter. He’ll take you all those places in such beautifully bizarre, just free-associative language.

What did you think of “A Murder Most Foul”?

I have not listened to the whole thing. [Laughs.] I just wasn’t in the mood to be taken through the assassination of JFK. It’s just like, “Fuck man.” But I love Maximalism. That’s just great. I like breaking the form and saying a 15-minute single is cool. But I haven’t absorbed it all.

I know you’re planning to release a solo album and have other projects in the works. But in terms of The National, have you started thinking about the next LP?

We don’t talk that much about albums. We all have folders filled with ideas, and then we’ll start sending things back and forth. We’ll have it 60 to 75 percent cooked and then we’ll be like, “Oh, we should probably go into the studio.” That’s the way The National kind of always works.

Whenever we say, “Let’s make a plan,” it just creates a deadline or anxiety or some sort of abstract stress in the future. So we just stopped making plans. And as soon as we stopped making plans, these records started coming faster and songs started happening faster. It’s a weird thing. But we are talking all the time and we really miss each other. We all really, really have learned to love performing. We’re healthier, and we’re just nicer to each other in general and we’re better. We’re a better band than we were 10 years ago for sure. We’re a better band than we were when we made High Violet. And so we have no plans to fucking take it for granted or fuck it up.

The High Violet 10th anniversary reissue is out on June 19 via 4AD. Get it here.

The WWE Universe hasn’t seen Roman Reigns on TV since March. Reigns was scheduled to face Goldberg for the Universal Championship at WrestleMania 36 but pulled out of the match shortly beforehand as the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the country. Many people assumed the reason behind Reigns backing out of the event and all subsequent WWE shows being taped during quarantine was due to his potential status as an immunocompromised person, having been diagnosed with leukemia twice in his life. Reigns took to Instagram a few weeks ago to deliver a message to his fans that really didn’t clear up the why of the whole thing.

Now Reigns has come forward to fully explain his decision. Speaking with TMZ, the future Hall Of Famer said the following about his health:

“A lot of people, they think that it was based off of my heath and the history of my fight against leukemia. Talking to my doctors and stuff, I actually am fine and my immune system is good. The drugs that I take to fight the leukemia, they don’t attack your immune system. Not everybody knew because I’ve been trying to keep it private in this crazy world.”

So Reigns wasn’t concerned for his health, what made him decide to stay home? One word: Fatherhood. Reigns continues:

“We just had newborn twin boys. They’re eight weeks old. I had to make a decision for them… It’s my family, it’s my children, they are my legacy. No matter what I do in this world, my children are gonna be the ones to represent my name and carry our name forward. So I had to make that choice for them, to protect them being so young.”

Reigns said he is currently in “daddy mode” and doesn’t have a return date in mind, but he did mention he has been watching the product, commenting:

“It’s weird to see the show in front of no one. It’s strange, because we sell the atmosphere.”

While we don’t know when to expect Reigns back inside a WWE ring, at least we know he and his family are healthy, and that’s what matters most right now.

James Gunn is a busy man, insomuch as anyone in the entertainment business can be considered “busy” right now. The filmmaker is not only writing and directing the Jared Leto-less The Suicide Squad, he’s also doing the same for Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3, one of the better sub-franchises in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The DC former is further along with an earlier release date (August 6, 2021 — for now) than the Marvel latter, but on Twitter last night, Gunn offered a promising GotG, Vol. 3 update.

“Writing a first draft of a screenplay is like a zebra. I knew a guy once who had a pet zebra. It was pretty tame, he’d pet it and nuzzle it, feed it carrots and stuff. I said, ‘What is it, just like a horse?’ He told me no,” Gunn tweeted. “He said he had to interact with the zebra every single day for an hour, or else it would go back to being completely wild. That’s what a first draft is like for me. Staying in the groove. I have to write every single day for a few hours, or else the screenplay goes back to being an untamed thing, and I feel like I have to start all over again.” When asked by one of his followers if the first draft he was referring to was Guardians, Gunn replied:

Gunn previously assured Marvel fans that “right now the plans with Vol. 3 are also exactly the same as they were before coronavirus,” which, coupled with his tweet above, is promising. And if a zebra joins the Guardians in Vol. 3, now you’ll know why.

(Via Twitter/James Gunn)

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In-person concerts aren’t really happening right now, but fortunately, Taylor Swift has a recorded show in the vault, and she’s ready to share it: Today, Swift announced her “City Of Lover” concert special, which is set to air on ABC on May 17.

She tweeted this morning, “Excited to announce the City of Lover Concert! We filmed my show in Paris in September and thought it’d be fun to share it with you. May 17 at 10p ET on @abcnetwork and available the next day on @hulu and @disneyplus!”

She also made the announcement on Good Morning America, saying in a video message, “Hey Good Morning America, it’s Taylor. Just wanted to say hi. Hope everybody is doing well and everybody’s happy and healthy and staying safe. So I played this concert in September called ‘The City Of Lover Show’ and it was in Paris. It was so much fun. It was actually a show we put together just to celebrate the Lover album coming out, and we filmed it! So that is going to be airing on ABC on May 17th, and the next day, it will on be on Hulu and Disney+, so I’m really excited about it. And again, sending my love to you guys and hope you’re well.”

The show was filmed on September 9, 2019 at the L’Olympia Bruno Coquatrix in Paris, and the 16-song setlist included the live debuts of multiple Lover songs.

This news comes after Swift unsurprisingly decided to postpone her scheduled shows for 2020, writing, “I’m so sad I won’t be able to see you guys in concert this year, but I know this is the right decision. Please, please stay healthy and safe. I’ll see you on stage as soon as I can but right now what’s important is committing to this quarantine, for the sake of all of us.”

La La Land director Damien Chazelle has a new miniseries, The Eddy, out on Netflix today. The show focuses on a jazz musician and his Paris club, the titular The Eddy. Netflix’s summary of the show reads, “The owner of a Paris jazz club gets tangled up with dangerous criminals as he fights to protect his business, his band and his teenage daughter.”

Naturally, then, music plays a huge element in the show’s make-up, and the soundtrack, which is also out now, features original songs written by Glen Ballard. At the end of the tracklist are covers of some of those songs, one of which is by St. Vincent, who offers a rendition of the title track.

St. Vincent croons on the slow and jazzy ballad, which sounds crafted for a smoky club (appropriately so). The track shows off St. Vincent’s otherworldly versatility, as sultry jazz joins experimental pop, straight-up rock, and other musical styles on a long list of things she does well.

St. Vincent isn’t the only noteworthy name to guest on the soundtrack: Jorja Smith previously shared her rendition of “Kiss Me In The Morning,” a more upbeat and equally jazzy number.

Listen to St. Vincent and Smith’s The Eddy songs above.

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We know there’s plenty of TV these days…. but Netflix has some really good stuff coming this week. By really good, we mean Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini covering up James Marsden’s murder good. That’s right, Dead to Me‘s second season is here, and the ladies have a whole new bloody mess to clean up except this time, the FBI’s on their tail. And Jerry Seinfeld is back for a new comedy special that’s good because, well, it’s Jerry Seinfeld.

Here’s everything coming to (and leaving) Netflix this week of May 8.

Dead to Me: Season 2

Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini return to cover up another murder (and deliver some cliff-hanger-heavy drama) in Dead To Me’s second season. The comedy’s just as dark, and the performances from Applegate and Cardellini are just as mind-blowing but somehow, the show’s able to mine even more interesting storytelling from the offbeat friendship of Jen and Judy as they navigate new truths and familiar messes.

Jerry Seinfeld: 23 Hours to Kill

Jerry Seinfeld returns for his first true, straightforward comedy special in awhile with this Netflix stand-up routine. It’s a pleasant enough hour, filled with Seinfeld-esque humor about the hassle of socializing — oh the irony! — and the funny hangups of married life. Fans will enjoy it. Non-fans will probably still want to watch just to have something to pass the time with. Speaking of, here’s a terrific chat we did with Seinfeld about the special … over Zoom, because that’s how we live now, Jerry.

Here’s a full list of what’s been added in the last week:

Avail. 5/4
Arctic Dogs

Avail. 5/5
Jerry Seinfeld: 23 Hours to Kill

Avail. 5/6
Workin’ Moms: Season 4

Avail. 5/7
Scissor Seven: Season 2

Avail. 5/8
18 Regali
Chico Bon Bon: Monkey With a Tool Belt
Dead to Me: Season 2
The Eddy
The Hollow: Season 2
House at the End of the Street
Restaurants on the Edge: Season 2
Rust Valley Restorers: Season 2
Valeria

And here’s what’s leaving next week, so it’s your last chance:

Leaving 5/15
Limitless
The Place Beyond the Pines