One of America’s most beloved and long-running competition shows, Dancing With the Stars, begins its 35th season on Sept. 15 and 16 on ABC and Disney +. Though every season brings a new slate of stars — including Ciara Miller, Julia Stiles, Amber Glenn and Jenna Dewan for this fall’s cast — Dancing With the Stars has had one constant over the last 17 seasons: music director Ray Chew.
Chew, leading a 14 piece band, has played an instrumental role in modernizing the music of the show, taking it from a classic ballroom feel to one that reacts in real time to pop culture trends. He’s led his crew of musicians through a recreation of hit Broadway musical Wicked, a night of TikTok viral hits and just about every genre, tempo and style.
To pull it off is no easy feat. DWTS is shot in real time, and the music director tells Billboard his average show day begins at 3:30 AM, and doesn’t end until the show wraps that evening. Throughout the week, his team is also racing against the clock to create arrangements for songs the choreographers are picking in real time, a process he lovingly refers to as “unbaking the cake,” or trying to sleuth out each element of the song so that his musicians can rework it in a matter of days.
Meanwhile, the show’s music supervisor, Nancy Severinsen, is working to clear the rights for the songs, which, as Chew explains, doesn’t always work. “To clear one song, it could have two writers, [or] it could even have seven publishers,” Chew explains. “You got to contact everybody, and everybody’s not waiting around on their phone to be contacted. Some of the music clearance happen right up until the last minute.” He notes that even on the Wicked night they have to rework their original plans to satisfy the vision of the original rights holders of the music.
Still, Chew takes it all stride — he knows how to work under the pressure of live TV. He got his start in the band for Saturday Night Live back in the 1980s, and then has gone on to music direct everything from the Grammy Awards, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Miss Universe, the Emmys, the BET Awards, American Idol, Showtime at the Apollo and more. Dancing With the Stars, however, he says is like a “unicorn” for live TV.
As using live musicians becomes increasingly less common, the dance competition is a bright spot, which one of the largest, if not the largest, live bands on screen today. “It’s a blessing,” Chew says. “It’s a blessing.”
To discuss how the show comes together every week, and the important, but little understood, role that music directors hold, Chew joined Billboard’s music industry podcast On the Record.
Watch the episode on YouTube, or read an condensed and edited version of the conversation below.
Billboard: Can you walk me through the timeline of a week on Dancing With the Stars?
Ray Chew: Our show day is Tuesday. Wednesday is when we get our assignments. Now, it would be great if we could get in front of this a lot more, but we can’t because it’s a contest. We don’t know who may or may not be on the show. So, yes, they may know what they want to do, but we may not know that they’re going to do it. So Wednesday, I get the assignment. I take a song, a very popular song, and I have to deconstruct it. The process I actually call “unbake the cake.” I have to figure out what’s in that sauce, what’s in that gravy, what makes that really move and tick. Why do people love it? What’s that signature sound that you can’t be without? Nobody’s handing us these ingredients. We have to go in and figure out what’s in that song. Is there a special sound in there? A special synthesizer? What’s happening? And in particular, the vocal. So for the vocalist, we have to do what we call vocal shaping. All right, so if we have a song that is very popular, you don’t want to be out of character. You’ve got to meet the character. Sometimes it’s in all the nuance.
So my prep week starts on Wednesday. We get the song list on Wednesday. At the same time, we have to deconstruct the song. So, 16 songs, right? You have to go through them one by one. That takes hours and hours of work, just trying to take one song and figure out what’s going on in there. Now we have to start doing arrangements for those songs, and that takes days. So we have Wednesday, Thursday and Friday to prepare everything we need to do, and then Saturday we have a full-band rehearsal.
On Saturday we have our band—the singers, musicians, everybody—assembled in the ballroom. We have to go through all the songs and make sure that everything is correct. We also have to make sure our audio team hears all the things, because a Frank Sinatra song is not going to sound the same as a Katy Perry song.
How have you seen the show evolve since you got started with it?
Well, the audience has certainly gotten a lot younger and a lot more engaged. I think when I started with the show, it had already been running for 10 years, so it had a very established audience, and it was really a ballroom-type sound with a very traditional presentation. When I came in, I think it was at a turning point where they really wanted to contemporize this stuff. We had to say, “Hey, man, we’ve got to talk to a younger audience. We’ve got to do some songs that are younger and bouncier and have a different thing.” And we’ve evolved into that completely now.
You guys are now also airing Dancing With the Stars on streaming services. Does that impact how the run of show goes on the day of?
Not for us. But two seasons ago — or three seasons ago, during the pandemic — we had to reconfigure everything just to get the show presented at all, because everybody had to be in different quadrants. We couldn’t be in the same space. It was a lot, even just trying to get the show going. That’s when they started doing the streaming. Now that we have a dual package to present, the streaming doesn’t necessarily impact what we do. We do what we do, and then they stream it.
On the day of the performance, what is that timeline like for you?
Well, it starts with the night before. I have to go to bed at 9 o’clock, which is totally against my whole body. But it’s because I have to get up at 3:30. Then we have to be on set at 5 or 5:30 sometimes, I have to allow time because you never know. You’re expecting no traffic at 4 in the morning, but you never know. We have our entire music team, which is 14 musicians and singers, and we’re expected to be on. When I say “on,” I mean it has to sound as live and as great as it can. You can’t say, “well, we’re waking up and we know we’re going to get it going.” No, you get it going. You’re going at 5:30.
We start at 5:30. We do a rehearsal of some of the revisions they may have wanted. They’ll tell us, “Hey, I need a little of this over the weekend,” so we have notes, and we’ll start with that. Then the dance teams come in at 7. We’ll do a camera block with them until about 12, and then at 12 we take a lunch break. We do a dress rehearsal from 1 to 4:30, and then we go on air live at 5:30.
It seems like a luxury in TV today to get to work with 14 musicians — live musicians — week after week. I could imagine some productions just wanting to cut costs and be like, “well, a master recording is good enough. We’ll just license that.” Have you seen TV shows change over time in their willingness to hire live musicians?
This is the dinosaur. Well, I don’t want to say dinosaur — It’s a unicorn. We’re a unicorn because I don’t see any other show that do this. Some of the other shows continue to have live music, but it’s not 14 musicians. All credit goes to the fact that there’s an appetite for this sound. The audience is loving it. When I went to the Dancing With the Stars convention, the fans were coming up to me. I was like, “wow, this is beautiful.”
The comment I got most was, “We love what you do,” because anybody can play a master recording. We hear that all the time. We’re bringing a different life to the song.
Have you ever had a musician who you’ve covered on the show reach out to you and say thanks, or that they loved the cover you performed on the show?
Yeah, I’ve had that a lot. We did Janet Jackson week, and Janet Jackson also made a video appearance, but the producers of that project are Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. They’re very special. I know these guys, and I was like, I am not going to not make — by the way, I give the same attention to everything, but I was like, “you know what? I know these guys are watching, so let me make sure every little thing that I can think of is as good as possible.” The good news is that they contacted me afterward. Jimmy Jam said, “Hey man, you did us right on that stuff.”
As far as months go, September takes on a lot of meaning. The link between the end of summer’s dog days and the beginning of autumn’s embrace, it marks a distinct period of transition for many of us each year.
It’s no surprise, then, that a number of different artists have had something to say about the ninth month on our calendars. For many of them — whether it’s James Taylor, Daughtry or, of course, Earth, Wind & Fire — September represents nostalgia, reflection and memories as vivid as the fall leaves soon will be. For others, it’s a time to look forward, such as on the lyrics of Frank Sinatra’s ode to aging, “The September of My Years,” while others might prefer to skip the month entirely, like on Green Day’s “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” written about the death of frontman Billie Joe Armstrong’s father.
“I think it’s something that just stayed with me — the month of September always being that anniversary,” he told Howard Stern in 2019. “When things happen like that when you’re that young, it’s almost like life starts at year zero.”
So as the final third of the year gets underway, Billboard is making a list of our favorite tracks, named after, inspired by and dedicated to September. No matter what month No. 9 means to you, be it beginnings, endings or something else entirely, there’s something here for you to put on repeat for the next 30 days.
Check out the best September songs by Fiona Apple, Neil Diamond, Dinah Washington and more below.
The world lost one of its most versatile, captivating performers when Tim Curry died on Wednesday (Aug. 25).
The English singer-actor passed away at the age of 80 in his Los Angeles home, about 14 years after he suffered a major stroke that resulted in his use of a wheelchair for the rest of his life. His longtime manager, Marcia Hurwitz, confirmed the news to Billboard in a statement praising his “curious, expansive mind and generous, gentle heart, both of which remained open and filled with anticipation until his final breath.”
But while Curry is no longer with us, fans will always have his illustrious resumé of iconic roles in film and theater to remember him by — many of which feature memorable musical numbers performed with a combination of charisma, comedic timing and booming baritone vibrato that was entirely his own. The three-time Tony nominee also enjoyed recording music independent of his acting projects, releasing three studio albums of both cover songs and originals. His most successful LP, Fearless, reached No. 53 on the Billboard 200 in 1979, and he even scored an entry on the Billboard Hot 100 back in the day — but more on that later.
So, in honor of a truly irreplaceable figure in entertainment, Billboard is looking back at Curry’s best musical moments. From his performances in The Rocky Horror Picture Show to Muppet Treasure Island, his own recorded music and more, keep reading to see our favorite of the legendary star’s numerous forays into music below.
With Hazel Eyes, Sam Smith charts a fresh, emboldened emotional hinterland. Across the London-born singer’s four previous albums, the question of who exists beyond that distinct, aching, soulful voice has loomed large.
Smith initially built a career, after all, on the strange alchemy of writing about heartbreak from largely hypothetical pain; they penned 2014 global smash In the Lonely Hour before ever experiencing a breakup. The albums that followed gradually filled in the blanks – desire, growth, personal identity, sex – though with the sense of an artist discovering themselves and testing out what they want to say to the world. In the process, they have scooped billions of streams, five Grammy Awards and seven Billboard Hot 100 top 10 hits — and with 2023 Kim Petras collab “Unholy,” became the first openly nonbinary artist to top the chart.
At times, Smith’s fifth full-length effort gets closer than ever to answering that question. The dual muses across Hazel Eyes become figures in a wider romantic mythology; even when their partner, the (hazel-eyed) fashion designer Christian Cowan, or their newly adopted home of New York City enters the frame, lyrically, the 34-year-old avoids rendering them literally to instead focus on capturing the feelings they inspire.
Until now, Smith “didn’t understand what my heart was for,” they tell us on the title track; “To Be Free,” the record’s searching and graceful closer, reckons with harbouring shame and maintaining a public persona, only to realise that patient, requited love can offer an escape from performing different versions of the self.
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The latter track lent its name to Smith’s U.S. concert hall residencies last year, which included 24 sold-out nights at Warsaw in Brooklyn and will head to Manchester’s Albert Hall (Sept. 3-4) and the London Coliseum (Sept. 8-19) for a further 10 shows next month. In the states, Smith was joined onstage by a plethora of pop luminaries, including Ed Sheeran, Hozier and Sienna Spiro. Yet for all its starry cameos, the run featured minimal stage production in order to zone in and illuminate the sheer force of Smith’s vocal, with little to distract from it after the pop-baiting campaigns of their past two records (2020’s fairly tepid Love Goes, and its expressive if uneven 2023 follow-up Gloria).
While it was enlivening to hear Smith stretch beyond the soft-focus piano pop balladry of their earlier work, particularly on the slinky, trop-pop-influenced chart hit “How Do You Sleep?” or the disco-fied “I’m Not Here to Make Friends,” Hazel Eyes finds them returning familiar textures with a newly exploratory ear. Its sound is pared back to the hallmarks of their earlier output but within that palette, Smith makes room for subtle surprises, weaving flourishes of country guitar into “When He’s Gone” and teaming up with seminal Canadian indie songwriter Feist on multiple tracks, whose influence feels particularly pertinent throughout the emphatic storytelling of “Moondance.”
As Hazel Eyes adds another layer to Smith’s story, its title itself an ode to Cowan and the pair’s recent engagement, here’s every track from the new record ranked.
Uber-prolific Australian band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard has released nearly 30 albums since its 2012 debut — in other words, the band isn’t known for the drawn-out studio perfectionism that often stymies musicians.
But with Alien Metal, its 28th studio album — and first in 14 months, an eternity in the Gizzverse – King Gizzard did something out of character: It took its time.
And with good reason. Out today (Aug. 14), Alien Metal is arguably the biggest swing in a catalog full of them, as the sextet best known for wild, garage-meets-psych-rock ditched its guitars in favor of a hulking Eurorack, a type of modular synthesizer developed in the ’90s that all of its members could play simultaneously. The band began trotting the rig out for “rave shows” in late 2024, and affectionately named it Nathan; after a quiet touring year, it returns to the road, presumably with Nathan in tow, for its second annual Field of Vision camping festival outside of Denver this weekend, and four New York City shows later this month.
Alien Metal isn’t completely without precedent in King Gizzard’s catalog — the band has been incorporating electronic sounds into its music for the last several years, including on the 2023 electropop album The Silver Cord — but with the album’s pummeling, high-BPM tracks, King Gizzard ventures further onto the dance floor than it ever has.
According to the band’s Stu Mackenzie, as King Gizzard’s members began to conceive the album, they thought, “We’ve already done a few [electronic] things which were interesting to us. Let’s lean into the tropes a little bit more with this one — but also, let’s see if we can create something that feels like we made it, and that feels like it has its own DNA.”
That forced King Gizzard to operate well beyond its comfort zone, and helps to explain the patience making the album required. “We definitely scrapped more material for this record than we ever have, which was not something we expected to do,” Mackenzie, 35, says over Zoom from his native Melbourne. “It needed to congeal — it needed to set.”
Still, the band held onto its aggressively DIY ethos for Alien Metal, with its members modding out the Eurorack themselves and recording their experiments in their own Melbourne warehouse studio space, with “rats running along the floor and s–t.” As Mackenzie puts it, “We’ve just been doing this s–t ourselves, man. This is some f–king truly mad scientist, making explosions in the bathtub-type stuff.”
But while King Gizzard recorded the album over “a good couple years,” true to form, the restlessly creative band worked on several other projects concurrently. “Whole records were formulated and thought of and expanded on and recorded — and, you know, completely abandoned,” he reveals. “Maybe they’ll turn into something eventually.”
Plus, Alien Metal might not be as dissimilar from King Gizzard’s other output, anyway. “There are certain parallels with a lot of the heavy metal stuff we’ve done to techno, and to some of the more krautrock-ish, hypnotic, longer stuff that we’ve done,” Mackenzie says. “Maybe there is a thread with King Gizz and dance music that isn’t so far away.”
You and King Gizzard have been dabbling with dance music in recent years, from The Silver Cord to your “rave tours” with Nathan the Eurorack, to Mango Sticky Rice, the batch of modular ambient recordings you made on your own and released late last year. How did all these strands coalesce and inform Alien Metal?
King Gizz has been experimenting with electronic music in certain capacities for quite a long time, whether that was what we were doing with Silver Cord or whether it was what we were doing in a different way with 2021’s Butterfly 3000 [and its companion set of remixes Butterfly 3001], or with the rave tours, or [2022’s] Made in Timeland. Certain things that we’ve done have felt, to varying degrees, [like] “rock band making electronic music,” which is not like something that I think is even bad — it’s actually something that I think is quite interesting. But it is not what we were trying to do with this record. And it meant that this record needed more development than we thought it would.
It’s quite challenging to write songs, in the traditional sense, with this equipment, and I don’t think it’s what it’s good at or built for, but that therefore became interesting [to us]. Trying to figure out how to do six-person improvisational electronic music with [this] hardware — all the Eurorack stuff with f–king patch cables on the outside, just nightmare tech stuff — is all wrapped into the story as much as any of the [band’s prior] recording projects are.
That context is what we arrived at Alien Metal with. It’s like, “What are we doing here with this record?” That’s something that we are always trying to find when making a record: What’s its sort of personality, you know? That’s why naming a record can be so powerful early on, because you stop calling it “it” and you start calling it Alien Metal. It takes on its personality, and you start to follow its footsteps. You start to follow its rhythm.
So you named it before you were finished with it?
We don’t always [do that], but we usually do. It actually helps, at least me, with finishing things, because you have a North Star. You have a purpose, and it makes the decision-making a little easier.
When it comes to writing, what limitations did this equipment present, compared to your typical instrumentation — and how did those limitations open up new creative possibilities?
With the hardware stuff and the Eurorack stuff, it’s not so much about limitations as it’s endless. It’s actually insane how many sounds you can get out of these boxes. It’s f–king amazing, and if you’re creative about the patch you’re making, you can do truly wild s–t. That is a big challenge in the sense of what kind of sounds you want to work with. We had to spend time figuring out what we were wanting to do that was exciting to us, and that involved a lot of learning. Like, this s–t is some mad scientist s–t. But it’s cool. I feel like I understand music in a different way — and I certainly understand voltage in a different way. And math, there’s a lot of math in this stuff too, and some science.
The other thing that’s quite interesting about it is this format, the Eurorack, it’s like the patch cables on the outside, you build modules and you piece together a synth or voices or whatever — but everyone makes something different, and I can understand my patch, but I can’t necessarily rationalize why any of the other guys made the patch that they did. It’s this window into someone’s creative process. It’s actually a super visual window, with all the cables hanging out on the outside. I’ve fallen in love with that as just an expression in itself.
King Gizzard is still doing rock shows. What has the cross-pollination been like? How, if at all, has this impacted how you view your guitar-based music?
It’s made me have a different kind of appreciation for the guitar, and also acoustic or unsynthesized, organic instruments. With this patch-from-scratch mentality of Eurorack stuff, you have to build everything from the ground up. To make something resemble even a bassline is a lot of patching, and then it might actually sound quite boring, and then you hear somebody play a bass guitar through an amp, and you’re like, “Man, that sounds awesome!” You just pluck an acoustic guitar string and listen to the decay and the way it fills the room…
I think about sound now in a way that I didn’t think about sound [before]. I thought about music, and notes and melody and harmony and stuff. But it forces you to think about things at a much more rudimentary level, because ultimately all this thing is doing is sending voltages to things. You just have to think about it on a more atomic level, a more cellular level, a more granular level.
What are the biggest dance touchstones for you and the rest of the band?
If you asked [bandmate] Joey [Walker] this question, he would like be so excited, and he would want to tell you about everything that had a big impact on his life. I would love to give you such a deep answer, but the honest truth is, for me, my entry point is as much the equipment as anything. I’ve just become obsessed with this format of synthesizer and thinking about sound in this new way — and that’s what I listen to. I get home, and when my kids go to bed, I turn on my synth, and I’m just trying to understand why when I plug the jack into this socket, it does this, and why when I plug the jack into the socket next to it, it does that.
One aspect that hasn’t changed here compared to some of your previous albums is the world-building: There’s references to an “astral blacksmith” and a “mortician,” and one song’s lyrics declare, “We don’t wish death — but we will kill for the steel.” What can you tell me about the lore of Alien Metal?
I would love to get into this s–t. But do you know what? I’ve found that recently, over the last couple of years, I say things I don’t even agree with. I would hope that people can experience this album at face value — or dig in. That’s my hope here. The lyrics don’t have to be the centerpoint, either.
This is the third straight year with only one new King Gizzard album, compared to some years in the past where you’ve released anywhere from two to five projects. Last year’s Phantom Island was an ambitious orchestral project, with a corresponding orchestral tour. Are you settling into a less frequent release schedule — and what’s the next frontier you want to conquer?
We’ve got two sort of ideas. Not even ideas, but we have two records that are like three-quarters finished at the moment, which is a bit silly and does happen sometimes. We definitely have slowed down in finishing records. If you had have asked me this when I was younger, like in my mid-twenties, I probably would have had a bit more fire; I was more desperately ambitious, maybe. I’m happy to let things take their needed amount of time, at the moment. That might be one record a year right now; maybe there’ll be a couple in quick succession coming up. I don’t know. There was a stretch, toward the start of King Gizz records, where we were doing two a year. We weren’t thinking about it super hard, but if one wasn’t done, we’d just f–king make one. As you get older, doing stuff like that is harder.
Your touring schedule is more limited this year compared to previous years, but you’re celebrating the release of Alien Metal with your second annual Field of Vision festival outside of Denver, and you’re heading to New York City later this month for a run of four shows. What can you share about those gigs, and what’s next for the band’s touring?
There was something about the last Field of Vision that was just so special on so many levels. It felt magical, it felt unreal, in a lot of ways. So yeah, excited to get back there. Next year, we are also returning to more of a normal, busy touring schedule. But this year we have been quiet on the touring level — besides a bit of COVID period there, it’s got to be the quietest that we’ve ever been. We’ve been busy with life, and also just making music. We’ve been on home soil a lot lately, which is cool. Family, life — the ship of life doesn’t stop sailing.
At this point in their careers, Stray Kids have turned topping the Billboard 200 into something of a tradition. Since signing with Republic Records in the U.S. in 2022, every one of the octet’s Korean albums — Oddinary, Maxident (both 2022), 5-Star, Rock-Star (both 2023), ATE, HOP (both 2024), KARMA and DO IT (both 2025) — has debuted at No. 1, making them the first act in the chart’s history to open on top with their first eight charted releases.
Released via JYP Entertainment and the REPUBLIC Collective, THIS & THAT is out today (Aug. 7) to mark the group’s ninth swing to extend that historic streak in the States, while having a higher international profile than ever. After headlining Governors Ball in New York before a reported 45,000 people earlier this summer, Stray Kids are set to become the first international male act to hold their own concert at Tokyo’s Olympic-sized National Stadium later this month before headlining Brazil’s Rock in Rio in September, and launching their STRAYCITY festival series across North, South and Latin American countries.
The Kids’ latest era began in late June, when the group announced a new album and world tour, with the single “RUN IT” dropping 48 hours later. The song traces SKZ’s path from humble beginnings in Seoul to taking on the world stage, refusing to settle and promising to sprint towards their next goal. With the arrival of THIS & THAT, that ambition remains in clear focus with K-pop tracks that speak to hustle culture, loyalty and nostalgia while immersing themselves in new sounds, genres and vocal techniques.
From new singles like “This & That” and “RUN IT” to impressive B-sides that dive into R&B, rock and beyond, here is Billboard‘s ranking of every new track — not counting the “Festival Version” reprise of the title track that closes the set — from Stray Kids’ THIS & THAT album below.