STEREOGUM (INDIE & ALTERNATIVE MUSIC)

STEREOGUM

Aretha Franklin Plans Collabs With Elton John, Krispy Kreme

Aretha Franklin may be retiring from the stage — at some point — but she has no plans to stop making music.

In fact, Franklin is hard at work on a new album she hopes to have out in January, featuring collaborations with Stevie Wonder, Elton John (on a version of “Your Song”), Lionel Richie, and Yitzhak Perlman. “Lionel’s working on his piece, Stevie’s working on his piece; they’re both originals,” Franklin, who’s co-executive-producing the album, tells Billboard. “I’m working on a couple of things. I think there will be about 10 [songs] on it, maybe 11, but I’m thinking 10.” No title has been determined yet for the album, which will be Franklin’s first studio set since 2014’s Aretha Franklin Sings The Great Diva Classics and first to feature new material since Aretha: A Woman Falling Out Of Love in 2011.

Franklin plans to continue recording even as she acknowledges “winding” down her performing career, as she revealed earlier this year. “After 54 years of traveling and flying and all of that can be very tiring, and even the tour bus takes a lot out of you,” Franklin explains. “I’m not happy; I’ll put it like that. I’m not happy, exactly, about not doing something that you’ve been doing for 54 years that you really, really love. But there’s a warranty on everything. Nothing lasts forever.”
Franklin has not set an actual retirement date yet, but says it will become obvious that she’s slowing things down.

“I just won’t be traveling the way I used to or doing anything like I used to in terms of concerts.” she says. “It used to be five or six; I’ll only be doing one, maybe two — and maybe none. But I have other things I want to do. There’s a lot going on.”
In addition to the album, Franklin says she’s developing a food line with Krispy Kreme. “We’re going to be doing some kitchen testing over the summer, testing recipes and perfecting them,” 
she says. “That and the CD are more on the front burner.” Other projects include a continuing biopic, a possible museum of her artifacts in Detroit as well as a nightclub/restaurant.

Franklin will be honored in Detroit next week with the naming of Aretha Franklin Way in the city’s downtown on June 8. An all-star tribute is being held the following night at Detroit’s Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts, and Franklin will headline the inaugural Detroit Music Weekend with a free concert on June 10.

The Week In Pop

Halsey Doesn’t Want To Be A Pop Star, But She Made A Pretty Good Pop Album

Do you think Halsey will perform “Closer” on tour this year? Technically, the artist born Ashley Frangipane already had a signature song, 2015’s “New Americana,” a tune that unabashedly strived to become an anthem for millennials of the “high on legal marijuana, raised on Biggie and Nirvana” variety and at least mildly succeeded. But whatever success Halsey achieved with “New Americana” — which was heavily promoted by Apple Music, accrued nearly 40 million YouTube views, and helped her debut album Badlands debut at #2 with more than 100,000 copies sold in its first week — was dwarfed by her collaboration with pop’s reigning MOR-EDM doofuses the Chainsmokers. “Closer” ruled the second half of 2016, spending 12 weeks at #1. It is more of a generational touchstone than “New Americana” will ever be, barring some kind of late-breaking placement in an iconic movie scene. “Closer” will almost certainly be Halsey’s most famous song for the rest of her life, and it’s the albatross she carries into Hopeless Fountain Kingdom, her second album, out tomorrow.
Halsey is troubled by the persistent notion that she is a pop artist and not an alternative artiste, a reputation she recently chalked up to gender bias: “Kendrick [Lamar] has done a Maroon 5 feature, a Taylor Swift feature, and a Sia feature — which is more pop features than I’ve done. No one’s calling him a pop star… The lengths that Lady Gaga has to go to to maintain her cred as an artist of the counterculture are insane.” Halsey’s right that women usually have to work harder to be taken seriously as musicians of substance, which is deeply shitty and completely unfair. But her comments did not entirely make sense, partially because at this point in history many listeners take ambitious pop artists at least as seriously as “alternative” artists (see: Lemonade), and partially because Halsey largely does operate within the pop sphere, alt-modified though her music may be.
Hopeless Fountain Kingdom, for instance, finds her co-producing every song alongside a fleet of decidedly pop-oriented figures including Ricky Reed, Greg Kurstin, Lido, and Benny Blanco. These are people whose combined production history includes Adele, Meghan Trainor, Maroon 5, Twenty One Pilots, Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, Katy Perry, Ariana Grande, Sia, Fifth Harmony, Ellie Goulding, Jason Derulo, Kelly Clarkson… you get the idea. Thanks to Halsey’s involvement across the board, the lot of them landed on a remarkably consistent sound, dark and sleek and electronic in a way that hearkens to the various underground-borne bands who’ve toyed with pop tropes this decade. Purity Ring in particular stand out as a reference point, what with all the lurching 808 beats and sweeping waves of melodic noise and eerie tweaked vocal melodies, which is ironic because on Purity Ring’s latest album they seemed to be striving pretty hard to establish the kind of mainstream platform Halsey now enjoys (or, rather, doesn’t seem to enjoy that much).

Why she’d prefer to be considered a peer of, like, BANKS and Phantogram instead of a pop A-lister is beyond me, but considering the alt-pop scene’s cultural associations, it’s not surprising Halsey has a business arrangement with Urban Outfitters. Nor is it shocking, given the basic ’90s nostalgia conferred by “New Americana,” that Hopeless Fountain Kingdom boasts a mostly illegible Romeo And Juliet motif: The album begins with the Shakespeare play’s opening monologue, the video for lead single “Now Or Never” heavily alludes to Baz Luhrmann’s modernized 1996 movie version, and the promo campaign involves an elaborate network of Twitter accounts for star-crossed lovers Luna and White Nite (from the House of Aureum and House of Angelus, respectively). What may surprise you is how rewarding Hopeless Fountain Kingdom turns out to be whether or not you’re invested in all that baggage. It may not be the masterpiece Halsey imagines it to be, but it’s a major leap from Badlands.
Stylistically, the leap is not so major. There are still traces of Lorde’s youthful goth and Lana Del Rey’s modernized high-drama classicism and, on occasion, Taylor Swift’s brightly bursting melodic instincts. The Weeknd co-wrote advance single “Eyes Closed,” and it definitely reflects his nihilistic cutting-edge R&B impulses. Cashmere Cat had a hand in closing track “Hopeless,” a colorful computerized dirge of the Imogen Heap variety that would have fit in just fine on his own new album. (It actually reminds me quite a bit of his own Weeknd collab, “Wild Love.”) Despite the dense conceptual framework, the songs are mostly character portraits about falling in and (mostly) out of love, our narrator vacillating between defiant confidence and paralyzing self-doubt. In other words, she’s using the same palette as ever, she’s just using it better.

Nowhere does this function more effectively than on the album’s first proper song, “100 Letters.” It’s warmer than your average Halsey track, a glimmering neon sunrise detailing her sigh of relief after sidestepping a toxic relationship, delivered with such poise that even lines like “I find myself alone at night unless I’m having sex” don’t brick. The chorus is spectacular, like Swift and Perry mended fences and melded “Blank Space” with “Teenage Dream.” Also excellent is “Strangers,” the duet with Fifth Harmony’s Lauren Jauregui, on which the two proud bisexuals strike a lamenting-lost-love pose against a backdrop of rippling Drive soundtrack ’80s revivalism. Like “Closer,” these are songs about the wreckage of a bad romance, but they’re both way more stylish than any Chainsmokers song, and they reveal dimensions beyond that song’s fuck-you-but-also-please-fuck-me M.O.

Elsewhere we get a straightforward go-for-broke piano ballad (“Sorry”), a contagious retro soul sample-flip (“Alone”), some Evanescence-worthy bluster that goes full Kanye when the suddenly omnipresent Quavo shows up (“Lie”), one track that mercifully stops sounding like Elle King and turns back into a Halsey song (“Heaven In Hiding”), a Destiny’s Child-inspired interlude inflected with classical strings (“Walls Could Talk”), another interlude that sounds like a spooky Disney song (“Good Mourning”), and a monumentally sick windchime-laden electronic quicksand pit built around the phrase, “Motherfucker don’t play with me” (“Don’t Play”). It’s a lot, and we haven’t even gotten to the lyrics, which are either Halsey’s Achilles heel or her greatest strength.

She deals in melodramatic proclamations such as “I’m standing in the ashes of who I used to be” and “You and all your friends all hate me” and “Everywhere I go I’ve got a million different people trying to kick it, but I’m still alone in my mind.” If such lines scan as self-loathing Tumblr poetry, that also means they’ll probably connect more directly with the fervent audience of emo pop heads Halsey was already cultivating before “Closer” came along. She’s at least self-aware enough to laugh at her own folly sometimes: On “Bad At Love,” all that personal dysfunction manifests in an entertaining laundry list of relationships gone awry — the guy whose kisses taste too much like whiskey, the guy who wants to put her in a domestic prison, the girl who got too into drugs. And on “Lie” she submits, uh, “I gave you the messiest head/ You give me the messiest head,” which I’m pretty sure is supposed to be a double entendre.
So, yeah: Hopeless Fountain Kingdom is less than profound yet better than average. The lyrics are too shallow to tweet with a straight face, the concept is too convoluted to comprehend, and the aesthetic does not advance current trends so much as it reshapes them in Halsey’s image. But that image is distinct — a personality strong enough to, along with her gift for hooks and taste for widescreen grandeur, hold this project together. The longer I analyze it, the less it holds up to scrutiny, but when I press play I am caught up in this album’s adolescent reverie. Perhaps in spite of her own pretentious intentions, Halsey came away with a really strong, self-assured pop album, and that’s an accomplishment worth taking seriously.