Music Community Plans Protest to Condemn Sexual Violence

Protest flyers are seen taped on an Indiana Avenue utility pole March 31, 2022. Organizers hung multiple flyers around campus to spread word of Saturday’s event at the East Studio Building. Some of those flyers have been torn down and defaced with offensive writing.

Since January, Jacobs School of Music students have been pushing for more in-depth conversations and tangible solutions after an Indiana Daily Student investigation detailed a sexual misconduct case.

Students have attended town halls, conversed with faculty and staff and posted on social media to express their fears and concerns. In internal conversations, the university often stifled conversations, citing the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and barred students from discussing the specifics of the case. 

Now, those dismayed students are asking for more. 

At 5 p.m. Saturday, students and the music community are gathering at the East Studio Building to protest and demand answers from their institution. Within their list of demands, they are asking for the university to condemn sexual violence, better protect survivors and forge a safer community. 

The IDS investigation, which prompted the protest, describes how music student Chris Parker was should have been expelled or charged by police, or both, when he breached his suspension stemming from a sexual assault. The university did not follow these terms of his suspension, which are detailed in a document obtained by the IDS. He was allowed back as a student twice after that. Organizer and alumna Abby Malala said the university needs to follow through on the promises they make in their policies.

"It's very important to us that if a survivor is told that certain action will be taken that that promise to them follows through," she said.

Parker is a starting point for much larger conversations about sexual assault and how the university handles Title IX investigations and sanctions, she said. After the stunting of previous conversations, Malala hopes the university recognizes how infuriated students are about what she calls a "miserable miscarriage of justice."

Read more here.

Melissa B. Goes Down In History To Host First-Ever Single Release Party On The Metaverse

Melissa B. is an award-winning singer/songwriter and known for her outstanding performance of the national anthem at Barclays Center during the Celtics vs Nets Game. She is a USA #1 Billboard R&B / Pop charted artist, speaker, and actress. She stunned everyone with her amazing vocals before the game and left the audience in awe.

She is hosting the first-ever single release party in the Metaverse on 2/22/22 at 7 PM EST. To RSVP click here.

“Physical” is a straight-up R&B cut with a smooth dance groove in which Melissa B. is giving you that feel good R&B tune. This R&B tune is about connecting with your lover, giving her the love and attention she deserves. This song is a combination of mechanical instruments and Melissa's beautiful, melodic voice.

Melissa B. - Physical - Virtual Single Release Party

Join us on February 22

Melissa B. is doing the very first every "Virtual Single Release Party" in the Metaverse.

This is the first of its kind and you will be a part of history with Melissa B.

This release party you will be able to interact with others on your Laptop, iPhone, Android, and or VR Headset ( Oculus).

“Physical” is the new song written by B. Howard, produced by B. Howard, Kyle Beatz & engineered by Grammy recipient Michael Ashby who was responsible for recording Cardi B.’s song “Bodak Yellow”.


“Physical” is available on Beatify, the first fair-trade blockchain streaming platform and all other streaming platforms released through Amada Records.

RSVP and the day of the event emails will be sent out with the private link.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Visit her Website and follow her movement on Instagram and purchase her new single on SongWhip.

To help you get a sense of how vague and complex a term “the metaverse” can be, here's an exercise to try: Mentally replace the phrase “the metaverse” in a sentence with “cyberspace.” Ninety percent of the time, the meaning won't substantially change. That's because the term doesn't really refer to any one specific type of technology, but rather a broad shift in how we interact with technology. And it's entirely possible that the term itself will eventually become just as antiquated, even as the specific technology it once described becomes commonplace.

Broadly speaking, the technologies that make up the metaverse can include virtual reality—characterized by persistent virtual worlds that continue to exist even when you're not playing—as well as augmented reality that combines aspects of the digital and physical worlds. However, it doesn't require that those spaces be exclusively accessed via VR or AR. A virtual world, like aspects of Fortnite that can be accessed through PCs, game consoles, and even phones, could be metaversal.

It also translates to a digital economy, where users can create, buy, and sell goods. And, in the more idealistic visions of the metaverse, it's interoperable, allowing you to take virtual items like clothes or cars from one platform to another. In the real world, you can buy a shirt from the mall and then wear it to a movie theater. Right now, most platforms have virtual identities, avatars, and inventories that are tied to just one platform, but a metaverse might allow you to create a persona that you can take everywhere as easily as you can copy your profile picture from one social network to another.

Read more here.

Anais Mitchell's Watershed Moment

“Watershed,” the closing track on indie-folk songwriter Anaïs Mitchell’s first solo record in 10 years, is a reflection of where her life has taken her. Despite releasing her last collection, Young Man in America, in 2012, she’s stayed notoriously busy throughout that timeframe. Her 2010 studio album, Hadestown, was transmogrified into a full-blown Broadway musical, and it won eight Tonys in 2019, including Best Musical and Best Original Score. The following year, she gave birth to her second child. She also formed an indie-folk supergroup, Bonny Light Horseman, alongside two fellow folk mainstays: trusted collaborator of Taylor Swift and The National Josh Kaufman, and Fruit Bats frontman Eric D. Johnson.

That’s why “Watershed” chronicles Mitchell’s journey: It explores the trek for discovering one’s purpose in life, and how that experience can feel gradual and imperceptible. “The tallest summit you look up to, someday it’s gonna look small to you,” she sings. “There’s a new one coming into view.”

“That word kept coming back to me because I found myself at a watershed moment in my life,” Mitchell tells MTV News. “But I felt like, ‘Oh, I’m looking back and seeing everything in my rearview mirror. There’s this new terrain, and I don’t know quite what it is, but I’m at a moment where I can see it.’ You don’t get that many of those moments in a lifetime, but they come at different times.”

The prolific folk artist didn’t intend to take a break from solo music for a decade. But that’s exactly why she didn’t make a solo record for this long: She didn’t actually take a break. Mitchell became preoccupied with other projects, and she enjoys dedicating her energy to one endeavor at a time. After finishing up her work on Hadestown, Mitchell retreated to a “weird, old church” in Hurley, New York, to create her new self-titled album, out Friday (January 28), alongside her closest friends and collaborators. The list includes her Bonny Light Horseman bandmate Kaufman, The National’s Aaron Dessner, and strings savant Nico Muhly. That sense of companionship is palpable through the music.  On songs like “On Your Way (Felix Song)” and “Brooklyn Bridge,” she’s surrounded by rich arrangements and warm performances, courtesy of her close creative partners.

Mitchell spoke with MTV News about what it was like returning to solo music, how Broadway and the indie-music realm are both similar and different, the musical and non-musical inspirations behind her new record, and more.

MTV News: How are the worlds of Broadway and indie-folk music different?

Anaïs Mitchell: I think a lot of people had this experience in the pandemic, but I went to a private space that I hadn’t been in a long time. I had a very dramatic exit from New York City. We were living in Brooklyn, I was nine months pregnant with our second baby, and when the pandemic hit New York, I just didn’t want to give birth in the city. So we fled [to Vermont]. It was one day, we took our only kid out of school. Then we didn’t have a car. We had given up our car because we didn’t need it, so I was like, “We’re buying a car! Let’s go buy a car so we have an escape vehicle.” Then the next day, Broadway shut down and I was like, “We’re out of here.”

I was a little bit shielded from the public eye [of Hadestown] because I’m the writer. People were so focused on our incredible actors that it didn’t feel like I was the figurehead of that show, but it did feel like a lot of public time. It was all a learning curve for me; I had never done that before, where you go to a new opening of a musical or play. There’s a red carpet and you have to look good and get your picture taken, and then it shows up on the internet. It was fun and exhilarating [to go to Vermont] and just be like, “Wow, no one can see us now. We’re just in the middle of nowhere.”

MTV News: With Hadestown, you got to be behind the scenes, but you have a Tony now. Does it feel like having a bigger audience has changed your writing process?

Mitchell: I don’t think it’s changed my writing at all. I feel like I’m only capable of writing what passes through my heart. I know what you’re talking about though because a lot of folks on my social media are from Broadway. I notice this because when I post something about Broadway, everyone is like, “We like that!” And then I’m like, “My folk band made a new record,” and it’s just crickets! It’s not entirely like that, but I’m aware that a lot of folks did come from that world.

But they’re not worlds apart. It’s storytelling through music, and that’s what happens on Broadway, and that’s what happens with songwriting for Bonny Light Horseman and also this record. These stories happen to be my own ones. This album is not larger than life. It is life-sized. The songs are all me singing them. I’m the speaker in the song, which is a sort of rarity for me.

MTV News: How does writing for Broadway differ from writing a traditional album?

Mitchell: Hadestown began as a stage show before that studio record came out in 2010. There was this early Vermont, DIY community-theater version of the thing. It was pretty abstract, but it was a theatrical event, not just a concert. The intention was always for it to be an opera or a musical. It wasn’t a loosely affiliated collection of songs that then became adapted. But the grad-school part of learning how to write Hadestown, what works for the music world doesn’t cut it for the theater. The audience needs there to be results at the end of the songs, like a revelation or a decision that gets made. You go from A to B. That is how the story moves along and the characters move along. So I think writing folk songs or pop songs is very circular. You set up a thing, then you return to the chorus, and there’s this beauty in the roundness of it.

MTV News: What were some of the musical or non-musical inspirations behind this record?

Mitchell: Returning to my childhood home, a lot of stuff came out of that. I was living in my grandma’s house. I had this new baby. I found a box of my old journals from high school and college. I read a bunch of them. I burned some of them because they were so embarrassing. I found these letter correspondences between my grandma and me. I had a lot of memories of that house and what it was like being a child there. It feels cliché to say it, but it was a powerful time for me to return home. There was a lot in my rearview mirror. You know how it is when you’re in the place where you grew up and you run into your English teacher from ninth grade or your friend’s mom. There’s this meeting of the minds where you’re like, “I’m a grown-up now.”

It’s amazing how some objects hold so much power, like these journals. Or this one dress or mirror in my grandma’s house, and I remember my grandma getting dressed in this mirror. All these objects feel like a portal through time, these chairs, these spoons, the garden, the smells and sounds of the place you grew up. It’s really deep and bypasses your conscious mind. It goes right to the heart.

MTV News: You have so many albums under your belt now. How do you think your self-titled record fits within the broad landscape of your discography?

Mitchell: I think I’m the last person to know! I never listen to my old records because I can’t handle it. It’s a more mysterious and intuitive thing than being like, “I’m gonna try to do something like this.” But I would say there are a few things that made this process really different. The way that we made [Bonny Light Horseman] was very live and field recording-ish in a way. Half of the record we recorded at this artist residency. We were in this room in Berlin with the mics set up, and we’d be like, “Hey, someone’s in the hall! Hey, it’s one of [folk group] the Barr Brothers! Will you come in and play drums on this track?” That’s the way in which it felt like a field recording. Josh [Kaufman] is very good at capturing a live moment. He’s very focused as a producer, but he’s got that Jedi thing where it feels like you’re just hanging out, but he’s chasing a sound and a feeling. He shines in the world where the music shines and catches a vibe. I didn’t know that’s what I wanted for this, but it quickly became clear that that’s how we were going to make this record.

MTV News: What’s one thing that you hope people take away from this album?

Mitchell: As a songwriter, I have more and more interest in what the intersection is between what feels true for me, and where that intersects with what is universal and mythical. I hate to even say it. I don’t want to make a mom record, but these things are real for me. I hope it speaks to people who aren’t in my particular life phase. I’d love it if it would speak to people at different places.

Grace Cummings Won't Tell You What She Means

Grace Cummings makes songs that sound like she’s ripping them raw from her throat. The Australian singer-songwriter wails and howls and shudders; this is intense, intricate folk music that seems physically taxing, as if she’s fighting to drag each ragged syllable out of her mouth. Her voice is the main event. There’s an urgency inherent in her shaking vocals, the sense that, between lyrics about Stetson hats and Townes Van Zandt, she is desperately trying to tell you something. But when asked what any of the lovely, lilting songs on her new album, Storm Queen, actually mean, she refuses to answer. “Good try,” she says with a laugh.

Over a Zoom call from Australia, Cummings looks at the carpet and the dark studs of polish on her nails. A guitar leans against the wall next to her. A knot of hair trembles above her forehead when she giggles. It’s morning in Melbourne, the city that’s had the strictest coronavirus lockdowns in the world, and the government is grappling with another wave of restrictions as the Omicron variant surges. Cummings seems tense, folded on a chair, sometimes pressing down absent-mindedly on the tattoo of a rose blooming on her bicep.

It’s not that there’s no backstory to Storm Queen, she notes — the themes and through-lines are clear to her, but those connections are so intensely personal that only she could make them. She wants the record to resonate with people beyond her intentions or scope. “The things that I like about all the music that I love is that, if it’s good, it sounds like it’s written just for me,” she says. All art is like that, she believes, or should be.

Cummings released her first official album, Refuge Cove, in 2019, but she considers Storm Queen to be her real debut. That previous record was more of a collection of songs she’d pieced together after Eric Moore from Australian indie label Flightless Records and the psych band King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard reached out; he asked if she had an album, and she sent in a group of songs. Storm Queen, out today (January 22), is the only project she crafted intentionally as a cohesive record, a prospect she found more energizing than pressured. She describes the writing process as “like a little wave,” tracing an idea until she finds its center.

Cummings doesn’t have a process for getting her voice to the staggering, stunning tone that comes through in her songs, perhaps most notably on “Heaven” and “Freak.” The studio environment feels natural to her, she says, and she tries to minimize the thoughts in her head as she records, taming her impulse to analyze. She centers on fully inhabiting a feeling. There’s no structure to her songwriting process, either – “I’m really not good at, and sometimes pretty fiercely against, trying to get something out that isn’t there,” she says. “Or trying to perfect something. Unless it’s happening, it’s not going to happen.”

She doesn’t start with emotions in her songs; emotion is what comes after everything else, she says. She thinks and writes in images, and chases the feeling that follows. On Storm Queen, many of those images revolve around cowboys, like the Stetson hats in “Heaven” and the country tune she alludes to in “Storm Queen.” “What a cowboy is to me is almost what a unicorn is to me,” she says. “It’s this magical creature, this thing that nobody actually is. It’s a picture of freedom, getting on your horse and just fucking riding.”

It’s not a coincidence that she became so enchanted with that picture of freedom. She doesn’t classify the record as a “pandemic album” — “I don’t really want to give the pandemic any more fucking attention,” she jokes — but she wrote most of the songs during lockdown not long before she recorded the project. She kept tweaking the lineup afterward, stashing five songs here, adding others there. She wrote the title track about a week before recording; at her shows, she likes playing songs that are fresher, when the meaning still reverberates. Some of the songs were composed right after brush fires swept through Victoria, just before the pandemic set in. The sky was gray; the air felt boiling hot. She couldn’t go outside because the smoke was so thick. Looking out the window in front of her piano, she felt divorced from reality. “It was like I wasn’t a part of any kind of world that was real,” she says. “It was just too much. And also too boring.”

The real world, the natural world, has long been a comfort for her. She grew up as the youngest of three kids, with lots of imaginary friends, collecting gum leaves and rocks out of the garden. Her mother would hear Grace wake up at 3 a.m. and talk to her collection of foliage and stones. She listened to Neil Young and Bob Dylan and The Beatles; when she was 8, she painted her bedroom wall with lyrics to “Here Comes the Sun” and “I Am the Walrus” next to a peace sign. She used to lie under a blanket-covered table in her room and listen to music, writing the lyrics she heard on the underside of the table. It was a way to stake her claim on the songs she loved, saving little scraps that felt like they were just for her.

Years ago, Cummings saw a van Gogh painting at an exhibit and felt it was also made for her. She knew that it was of the artist’s doctor, the swirled strokes forming a man slouched over a table in despair, but she felt such a connection to the artwork, the exhaustion, pity, and pleading in the doctor’s eyes. “The look in his eyes is like, ‘Come on, Vincent,’” she says, her voice heavy. “It was almost like he was saying to me, ‘Come on, Grace.’” She stood in front of the painting for 45 minutes, she says, unable to walk away from the desperation frozen on the canvas.

That sense of anguish reverberates throughout Storm Queen. “What do you write about if it’s not pain and pleading and love and death and all that shit?” she asks. There are moments on the record when the emotion cracks through and overpowers. She recorded the title track last, and finished writing it five days before; “I wanted it to be really ugly and quite jarring,” she says. She captured the first take live with a guitar player and brought in a saxophone player. As he played, Cummings sat on a stool and watched him. “I just lost my mind,” she says. “I had this thing in my head when I was writing it, and I described to him how I wanted him to play and what I wanted it to feel like, and he just did it so perfectly.”

She forgot that her mic was still on, and she started laughing because she was so thrilled with the sound. On the last track of the album, if you listen closely enough, you can hear the band whooping as she finished the take; she only realized that as she played the record over and over again during mixing and mastering. She doesn’t know how to describe the experience of listening to her songs over — “I’m sure there’s a German word for it,” she jokes — but the sensation of reaching back to a past self haunted her. She could chart her growth in the recordings, the progress she’s made. She thinks she’s getting better at saying what she means.

How Years and Years of Hookups Led Olly Alexander To Make Night Call

Recovering from a breakup isn’t easy, even if the relationship wasn’t romantic. Early last year, Olly Alexander told fans he’d be pursuing Years & Years as a solo venture after fronting the synthpop band, alongside instrumentalists Emre Türkmen and Michael Goldsworthy, for over a decade. Following years of creative disagreements, Alexander became free to fully explore his lifelong aspirations of major pop stardom, no longer seeking his bandmates’ approval. But having full creative control has come with unforeseen, mainly self-inflicted pressures for the 31-year-old musician, whose new album, Night Call, drops today (January 21). “I have a big fear of failure, I realized. If anything goes wrong, it’s really on my shoulders,” Alexander tells MTV News. “It’s been a real journey, but I’m so grateful. I love making music and being Years & Years.”

The band’s split was a long time coming, as initial chats about parting ways occurred during the making of 2018’s Palo Santo. “We couldn’t agree on a direction. It was a bit of a struggle,” explains Alexander, who created many of its tracks based on his own vision, separately from Türkmen and Goldsworthy. After an “intense” discussion about Years & Years’s future as a band, they decided to remain intact for Palo Santo’s release and subsequent tour, which ran through late 2019. Alexander then quickly began working on what would become Night Call, but following the pandemic’s onset, he wasn’t sure how the band would function together logistically, let alone creatively. “We’d had a decade together, and it was really clear people wanted to do different things,” he says, noting that “multiple honest conversations” led to the decision to separate. “It’s a relationship coming to an end, so it was tricky at times, but it definitely happened as amicably as it could’ve.”

Goldsworthy will continue playing alongside Alexander for future Years & Years live performances, while Türkmen, who just welcomed his first child, will independently work as a songwriter and producer while focusing on family. There’s no bad blood between the ex-trio, though based on who’s been granted an advance listen of Night Call, their bonds have clearly shifted. “Mikey has, and he said he loved it. Thanks, Mikey,” Alexander says with a giggle. “I don’t think Emre has. He might have to wait until the release.”

Despite holding complete autonomy over Years & Years’s musicianship, crafting Night Call was no easy feat for Alexander. Before landing the album’s angle, he wrote, recorded, and scrapped nearly 20 songs created with a wide range of collaborators. “I didn’t feel connected to it, and it just didn’t hit right,” he says. In early 2020, after a half-decade hiatus, Alexander returned to acting, portraying 18-year-old Ritchie Tozer in Channel 4’s streaming record-breaking It’s a Sin, a miniseries about five gay men whose lives are impacted by the rising HIV/AIDS epidemic after moving to London in 1981. Despite its heart-wrenching subject material, Alexander walked away from the experience feeling inspired by the blissful ’80s pop music on its soundtrack, from Pet Shop Boys to Blondie. “We all had so much fun shooting these big party scenes. That’s when the characters felt the most powerful and confident, and all that music is so good,” he details. “I really had to go through the process of remembering the pure joy that should be at the core of the music I want to make.”

Alexander looked inward to find it. Once the pandemic hit, he found himself isolated and missing his once-active sex life, so he decided to write songs about his steamiest fantasies. He was interested in capturing the near-infinite outcomes of hookups, “from terrible, and you really regret it, to mind-blowing,” he says. “You meet someone you connect with for the rest of your life to someone you never see again, but you had a good experience.”

A gloriously upbeat, club-ready ode to queer hookup culture, Night Call celebrates the intricacies of falling in lust with a stranger, from pure physical desire to the unintended consequences that can follow, inspired by the musician’s own life. “Sex and hookups were a part of my late teens, early twenties. Figuring out what I liked, what I didn’t like, the kind of guys I wanted to have sex with,” he recalls. “I didn’t figure any of that stuff out, by the way.”

Alexander’s sexuality has always been present in his music, but Night Call cuts including its title track, “20 Minutes,” and “Muscles” are laden with intimate details of his erotic outings — a far cry from the first time he used masculine pronouns to reference a lover on 2014’s “Real,” an early single. He attributes the increased lyrical vulnerability to simply striving to have more fun while songwriting, working with a small group of familiar co-writers and producers, and drawing inspiration from George Michael’s groundbreaking ’90s cruising anthems “Fastlove” and “Outside.” He sought to highlight aspects of LGBTQ+ romance that aren’t always present in mainstream pop culture. “I remember hearing [those songs] when I was younger and not fully getting the references at first but being so intrigued,” he explains. “I really wanted to put that into my own music, and be that bold in whatever way I want to be.”

The immense impact such tracks can have on shaping the views of Alexander’s queer listeners, especially young ones, isn’t lost on the performer. “When I listen back to Night Call, I hear the inherent fucking paradox of what it is to love someone. Desire is inherently full of conflict,” he says, knowing the album will likely mark some of his fans’ first times hearing about gay relationships and sexual encounters in a positive light. “I hope queer people listening feel like I was at least being honest about my own feelings, and that it’s OK to be honest about your own, too. We don’t ever really get the script for this stuff.”

While many came before him, Alexander arguably laid the groundwork for mainstream queer artists who’ve hit the scene since Years & Years debuted in 2012, thanks to his pursuit of the larger-than-life dreams he’s held since childhood. His prospects of mega-stardom didn’t always align with his ex-bandmates’ indie-pop vision, but since going solo, he’s been able to call every shot for the first time in crafting the Night Call era and its promotional cycle. “It’s not like I have this grand plan anymore, but I know a few things. I want to be as queer as possible in anything I do, and if I think it’s gonna be fun, then I’ll do it,” he says of accepting recent opportunities to host BBC’s slightly controversial 2022 New Year’s Eve special and collaborate with “the angel of [his] life” — Kylie Minogue — on a remix of lead single “Starstruck” and bonus track “A Second to Midnight.” (“Nothing can go wrong when Kylie is there. She sprinkles joy and happiness everywhere.”)

Beyond Night Call, options for Alexander’s future career moves are seemingly endless. He’s already started thinking about Years & Years’s next album, and recent recognition from legends like Minogue and Elton John means the door is wide open for collaborations. (“I’ll do anything connected to Rihanna.”) His critically-lauded performance in It’s a Sin has also sparked a creative itch for more acting work. Looking to combine his talents, he’s been conceptualizing a Twin Peaks-esque series centering queer characters for him to star in and soundtrack with original music. (“But now I’ve really got to do it, because I’ve put it out there.”) Whatever’s next for the multi-hyphenate, it’s clear Alexander’s in control. “I have random plans and ideas,” he says with a laugh. “I still don’t really know what's gonna happen, but it’s gonna be gay.”