Welcome to the brand new episode of the Billboard Pop Shop Podcast, your one-stop store for all issues pop on Billboard‘s weekly charts. You can at all times rely on a full of life dialogue in regards to the newest pop information, enjoyable chart stats and tales, new music, and visitor interviews with music stars and people from the world of pop. Casual pop followers and chart junkies can hear Billboard‘s senior director of charts Keith Caulfield and deputy editor, digital Katie Atkinson each week on the podcast, which may be streamed beneath on Billboard.com or downloaded in iTunes. (Click here to listen to the previous Tuesday’s edition of the show on Billboard.com.)
On the most recent Pop Shop Podcast, Nile Rodgers is our particular visitor! The music legend — famed for producing everybody from Madonna to David Bowie and Duran Duran, in addition to his personal chart-topping music together with his group Chic — joins the present to debate his new album with Chic: It’s About Time. (Listen to our dialog, beneath.)
The set is fittingly titled, because it comes a bit greater than 26 years after the discharge of the final Chic album, CHIC-ism in 1992. The long-awaited new effort, which was first introduced in 2015, will probably be launched on Sept. 28 by way of Virgin Records/UMe.
It’s About Time is the most recent installment in a profession renaissance for Rodgers, who discovered a brand new era of followers in 2013, courtesy of his work with Daft Punk on its Random Access Memories album and the set’s hit singles “Get Lucky,” “Lose Yourself to Dance” and “Give Life Back to Music.” The album topped the Billboard 200 chart, and Rodgers’ work on the challenge earned him his first three Grammy Awards. Since then, he’s been a tireless street warrior, enjoying concert events across the globe with Chic, and likewise discovering time to file and collaborate with a bevy of visitor stars for the It’s About Time album. Artists starting from Elton John and Lady Gaga to Mura Masa and Hailee Steinfeld are featured on the set, which Rodgers says is the primary album in a two-part assortment, the place the story will proceed on a second album, tentatively due subsequent February.
“This is the most self-indulgent album I’ve ever done in my life. I don’t normally make records like this because I don’t have the power to say ‘this is how it’s gonna go and I’m gonna tell this really big story.’ So now that I do, I can do it my way and this is happening my way exactly. And I just hope people get it and like it and understand it. It’s a geeky record, and a very idealistic record.”
So, what’s the idea of the two-part album? There’s a disco, the apocalypse, and… Lady Gaga.
He describes the idea of the challenge thusly: “Right now the world just seems like we don’t know where the hell we’re going, everything is all over the map, politics… and you know people are saying the wackiest stuff so what I do is I paint a picture of an apocalypse. We go to a disco one night and we are in there partying having the time of our lives and then when we walk out, boom, everything’s like blown up and it was almost as if the disco was our bunker that protected us from the radiation and the destruction. So now us few people that are left have to fix it all.”
And what music closes out the It’s About Time album – the primary installment on this two-part challenge? Nile Rodgers and Chic protecting their traditional “I Want Your Love,” that includes Lady Gaga on vocals.
Why does the set finish with “I Want Your Love” and Gaga? Well, Rodgers reminds us: “The first album should leave you scratching your head thinking, ‘Oh, what’s gonna happen?’”
“Every album that I’ve ever made, that I’ve ever controlled, is a film. And because this film has two parts, I have to leave you with this sort of cliffhanger. ‘How does the next part start?’ ‘Where do they pick up?’”
Fans will be capable of discover out the place the story ends presumably as early as Feb. 14, 2019. That’s the date Rodgers is concentrating on for the discharge of the following album.
Also in our dialog with Rodgers, he talks about what occurred to his beforehand introduced file cope with Warner Bros. Records, how the primary iteration of the It’s About Time album was “scrapped,” and what his Chic accomplice Bernard Edwards — who died in 1996 — would take into consideration the brand new album.
Plus, on prime of the chat with Rodgers, the Pop Shop group dives into information about Paul McCartney, Drake, Mac Miller, and Kanye West and Lil Pump’s viral hit “I Love It.”
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