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For the multi-skilled artist and performer Vanessa Williams, music was always the art form that fused and combined her multiple talents. But her creative journey began with her supportive parents, both of whom were music teachers, themselves. Her parents also sang together in the local Westchester Baroque Choir. There, they would bring baby Williams to rehearsals and set her up in a playpen. As the story goes, at one of those rehearsals, all the adults looked around at one another, thinking the organ key had stuck as a note continued to ring out. But they soon realized it was just the young Williams imitating what she’d heard with her voice.

As she got older, Williams would retreat to her bedroom while her parents practiced, and she’d watch Disney or Wild Kingdom. She later played piano and French horn and her brother played the oboe and baritone saxophone. The two weren’t allowed to quit playing instruments until, at least after they’d graduated high school. Until then, it was the orchestra and the marching band. But it’s this foundation that has helped to lead Williams to her extraordinary, diverse entertainment career—one that continues with her forthcoming string of shows at the 54 Below Diamond Series stage in New York City. For the performances, Williams will play six intimate concerts from December 13-18, including her many hits, her work on Broadway, and personal storytelling.

Atlanta-based musician-lawyer-entrepreneur Gabriella Logan—aka Guitar Gabby—has an engine that’s always humming. This is doubly interesting since Gabby used to build and break apart cars in her youth. The artist, who founded the growing musical collective known as The TxLips Band, works as an advocate, teacher, consultant, and more, striving to empower communities and grow collaborative possibilities wherever she travels.

If Midas turned everything he touched into gold, Gabby turns what she engages with into another avenue on the creative roadmap. Gabby works, connects, and builds. Her latest achievements include partnerships with Netflix for acting and music roles in films like The Harder They Fall and Wendell and Wild (the main character’s look was also based, in part, on Gabby). For Gabby, there’s always more on the horizon.

Country star Mickey Guyton doesn’t want the moment to pass. In fact, she doesn’t want it to be a moment, at all. Equality and representation—these aren’t fads. Or, at least, they shouldn’t be. And Guyton is focused on—and is watching—how the country world, specifically, approaches the dearth of Black and brown faces in the genre. With the social progress made in 2020 and subsequent years in the wake of the tragic murder of George Floyd, there has been an increased awareness from mainstream music gatekeepers to ensure equal opportunity for those who traditionally have not been afforded those opportunities that many white male artists have enjoyed in the past. But as 2020 becomes 2022 and beyond, it might be easy to fall back into old norms. Guyton prays this won’t be the case. In a way, she’s the Patron Saint of Representation in today’s country world. Guyton, who had doors slammed in her face, jokes made at her expense in her budding career has, more recently, had the last laugh. But breaking through wasn’t easy. It’s an emotional, powerful story, which she details on the new Audible Original series, Origins.

Harry Connick Jr. didn’t waste any time. When the New Orleans-born songwriter and performer found out about the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing global lockdown in 2020, he got to work. Thankfully for the award-winning artist who has sold millions of albums, he has his own home studio. It was there that he began playing, recording, and honing tracks for his upcoming Christmas album, Make It Merry, which was announced Friday (November 18) and is set to drop later this month on November 26, exclusively via Apple Music. Connick Jr. is also set to undertake a holiday tour, beginning November 18.

When the world shut down two years ago, the legendary artist fired up his studio equipment and recorded the vast majority of each track, one by one, laying down his own versions of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear,” “Jingle Bells,” and more with his signature cozy croon.

Even from his early days, David Portner, the de facto frontman for the acclaimed Baltimore-born experimental pop group Animal Collective, felt music was “like a different world.” It was something that presented a portal into something new, a dichotomous realm where he could absorb sounds solo, or with others around, engaging in the experience inwardly or outwardly. It has also provided Portner a way of life, a way to pay bills and a means to a massive creative output.

From the beginning, he was looking to participate in songs. He asked his parents for piano lessons at three years old. He also received records from older siblings that provided their own specific windows into new things. Today, these various pathways continue, both stretching and colliding in the artist’s orbit as well as in his own mind as he creates music that at times bounces and bashes, and at others smoothens and mollifies. Animal Collective, which released its latest LP, Time Skiffs, earlier this year, more recently released music for the score of a new film, The Inspection. But for Portner, each of these works marks another step forward in his constant artistic journey.

Dolly Parton can take a compliment. It’s just that she doesn’t always want to. In today’s age of political division and social media obsession, the songwriter and performer has become one of the few people, it seems, that nearly every person on the planet appreciates. She’s regularly compared to saints and angels. She’s beloved for her songs like “Jolene,” “I Will Always Love You,” and “9 to 5.” She’s an actor, a sight for many sore eyes. But she’s also just a human being. And she says when she hears the multitudes of hyperbole her fans and onlookers tend to offer her on the regular, it can be off-putting or jarring. Even “scary.” It’s odd territory, indeed. Parton grew up dirt poor in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. She headed later to Nashville seemingly a split second after graduating high school, and she’s been making hay there ever since. She’s generous and charitable. A woman of faith, she’s kind and honest, too. But at the end of the day, she’s a person. Just like any one of us.

Ever since he was 12 years old, Corey Crowder has played golf. Today, the songwriter and performer says, he is “somewhere between horrible and professional.” He laughs, the chuckle of anyone who’s held a club often, who knows the mired feeling of imperfection, of struggle. And of making hits. It’s a similar laugh he gives when talking about the craft of songwriting, too.

Angel Olsen is looking for a cat-sitter. She released her latest LP, Big Time, on June 3, and was hitting the road in a few weeks for a big summer and fall tour to support the record, her first since Whole New Mess in 2020. She had many dates ahead of her—so many, in fact, that her manager joked about recording her verbal agreements so she can’t exact revenge later for the many stops. (Olsen laughs when sharing this detail.) But what’s not a laughing matter is that she needed to find someone to watch her cat as she traveled with Sharon Van Etten and Julien Baker for their Wild Hearts Tour. Olsen, who is a genre unto herself, breathy and moody as a singer, poignant and beautiful as a performer, has high expectations for whoever will watch her feline.

Chris Daughtry, frontman for his acclaimed namesake rock group Daughtry, remembers being young and belting out lyrics—loudly—in his bedroom. The albums would blast, and he’d sing along, in love with music and the possibilities it offered his brain. He’d wonder, “How is Chris Cornell doing that with his voice?” He’d learn dips and surges from Live’s Throwing Copper. He’d dive deep into Alice in Chains’ Dirt. Thankfully, for the then-young Daughtry, his parents didn’t mind. He laughs about it now, wondering what must have been going through their heads while their son screamed “the devil’s music.” But their encouragement—or, at least, their lack of discouragement—set the foundation for the wildly successful career he would later embark on. For Daughtry, his life in music is both about the journey and its discoveries. Today, with the new label he’s founded, Dogtree Records, and the debut album under that imprint, Dearly Beloved (2021), Daughtry is rejuvenated, looking for fresh sounds and all that’s new in the world. He’s also bringing in his long love of acting, action, and comic books. In other words, he’s pouring as much of himself into his work as he ever has.