Lewis Capaldi arrives, shoulders loose, hair tousled; his eyes are bright, steady and settled. A deep exhale follows. “This feels quite weird,” he says, right leg gently bouncing as he perches on the edge of a primrose-yellow accent chair. “I haven’t done something like this for a while.”

We meet in a downtown Chicago hotel bar, where there’s an understated sense of occasion: This is the Scottish singer-songwriter’s first in-person profile interview in almost four years. The low metallic rumble of the L train passes the window next to us at regular intervals. Capaldi, a preternaturally warm person, is telling Billboard U.K. how it feels to be back in the hot seat.

His nerves may feel palpable, but this is an artist gradually re-emerging into his element, back on tour and stepping onto the biggest stages of his career with a fresh purpose. Later this evening, he will head to the 23,500-capacity United Center as part of a sold-out North American headline tour, which has also featured shows at Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl — as well as a double-header at Denver’s Red Rocks Amphitheater — in support of his recent Survive EP (via Polydor), after the title track hit No. 1 in the U.K. last summer.

Capaldi is taking the current run in his stride. He’s committed to a new gym routine and has refreshed his wardrobe, donning an Adidas track jacket with an easy cool. Indie star Sam Fender, one of his closest friends, took him on a night out to New York City’s notorious Newcastle United supporters’ bar; Capaldi marked the release of new single “Stay Love” via a surprise fan event at Penn Station, with roses passed through the crowd. 

“Genuinely, this is the most fun I have ever had on tour. I feel like I have properly loosened up. And I have… locked in,” Capaldi begins. “Is that even the right phrase?!” 

Well, quite. He describes how he’s reduced a near-daily therapy schedule to one session a fortnight, while he “didn’t give a f–k” that his voice sounded “really croaky” at the Madison Square Garden show, as he felt so enamored by the gratitude of simply being present on stage. A few days after our conversation, he’ll go on to play a full acoustic show at Red Rocks despite technical difficulties, and remain relaxed and buoyant throughout. “I used to feel horrible when things started to go wrong,” he adds. “It was like I was existing inside my head.”

All of this perspective carries a deeper, almost full-circle significance as Capaldi returns to the Windy City. It’s nearly three years to the day since the 29-year-old last played here, at the 5000-capacity Aragon Ballroom. That night, before stepping out for the encore, Capaldi was overcome by a panic attack, “convulsing” as the episode escalated to the point where he felt completely detached from his own body. He returned to finish the set with support from fans, but the show marked not an immediate turning point so much as a stark realisation of where his health stood.

“Last time I was here in Chicago, I was undoubtedly at my lowest,” Capaldi recalls, tugging at the sleeves of his black crew jumper. “I was mentally f–ked and physically struggling with my back, too. It was killing me. Honestly, I look back now and I think, ‘Why didn’t you just stop?’”

In the thick of promoting his U.K. chart-topping 2022 LP Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent, while facing the reality of a recent Tourette’s Syndrome diagnosis, Capaldi was burnt out and fired up. As fatigue started to set in, the involuntary, jagged movements that define his condition (called “tics”) became more pronounced, as did the persistent nausea he was experiencing. Yet this health revelation only intensified public interest as Capaldi shared the news in an Instagram Live session; his fame continued to soar not in spite of the struggle, but alongside it.

After the incident at Aragon Ballroom, Capaldi pushed himself to finish a further 12 North American shows, plus a subsequent U.K. run of promotional underplay gigs, as planned. It would take until he reached Glastonbury Festival in June 2023 for things to unravel — and for this in-demand star to realize that he’d “been in f–king denial, and living a life of pain.”

During a prime sunset slot on the Pyramid Stage, broadcast live to millions of viewers at home, Capaldi had what he describes today as “a very public breakdown.” The performance saw him repeatedly chastise himself for losing his voice, while visibly battling intense vocal and physical tics. Throughout closer “Someone You Loved,” the audience belted the words out for him, as Capaldi accepted defeat, staring out into a middle distance. “Glastonbury, thank you so much,” he said as the performance concluded. “If I never get to do this again, this has been amazing.” 

Three years later, the footage – which frequently cuts away from the stage, leaving the full extent of what was happening largely unseen – remains a difficult watch, but also stands as a powerful example of collective compassion. For Capaldi, it spurred a self-administered intervention. “Looking back, anyone could see that I felt f–king dejected, disappointed, sad and just worthless that day,” he says. “But as soon as I got off stage, I was like, ‘I’m taking a break now.’ It felt like a weight had been lifted. People saw how f–king detrimental things can get.” 

Capaldi walked backstage to find his parents crying, while his band was also visibly upset. He instead had a very calm, almost detached reaction, leaving the site immediately to head to Glasgow to see some childhood friends at a pub. Though much of that trip home now “feels like a blur,” he remembers looking at his phone and seeing that he’d made national headlines, while his Instagram DMs became flooded with fans expressing concern. 

In hindsight, for Capaldi, the fallout from months of physical strain had become a question of pride. Already a homegrown star by this point, it was the international success of Broken by Desire…, which debuted at No. 14 on the Billboard 200, that caused demand to outstrip the initial rollout plans. “When I got my Tourette’s diagnosis, I thought to myself, ‘Oh well, just carry on. This is life now,’” he says. “I wanted to finish the tour, almost as a badge of honor, and then get to Glastonbury – but I probably should have never been up there in the first place.”

Mid-sentence, Capaldi knocks the table for emphasis, unknowingly spilling his glass of water. “You could drive yourself crazy thinking about it all,” he says. “But things happened exactly the way they were supposed to happen.”

There was a point at the turn of the decade when Capaldi’s grip on British pop culture felt inescapable. He’d been inclined to agree. “I feel like in the U.K., you walk out your front door and there’s a chance I might be there,” he says. “It’s almost like I’m part of the furniture!”

Having been lifted from relative obscurity – playing pubs around West Lothian before his manager stumbled upon his SoundCloud page – Capaldi’s rise was meteoric. His 2018 breakout single “Someone You Loved,” an Adele-sized gut-punch of a pop megaballad, topped the Billboard Hot 100 and spent seven weeks at No. 1 in the U.K. It is now the nation’s most-streamed song ever, and stands at No. 6 on the global all-time Spotify rankings, higher than any track by streaming-era heavyweights like Taylor Swift and Drake.

This fairytale-like story continued. When Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent arrived a month later, it became the U.K.’s biggest-selling album of the year, a feat it would repeat in 2020. Its author was showered with accolades, ranging from a Grammy nomination (song of the year) to two BRIT Award wins. He became an ever-present fixture at red carpet events, with a self-deprecating personality that felt refreshing among other rising stars who were arguably more hesitant to say, or even be, much of anything at all. 

Anchoring it all was that voice — raw, bruised, heartfelt and unflinching, digging up long-buried feelings and reshaping them with grace. No amount of studio polish can account for how Capaldi can break your heart with a whisper or lift it with anthems of emotional tenacity, all steered by that thick, unmistakable Scottish accent.

Critics were largely unanimous in their response to the record, pointing to its run of slow-burning tracks as somewhat repetitive, with one outlet stating it had “no subtlety, originality or range.” Capaldi had his right to reply on social media, where he became an early adopter of TikTok. In the majority of his clips, he poked fun at the sentimentality of his own music — dimples deepening as he laughed — by embracing its excesses.

Few acts could rival Capaldi for his irreverence and marketing nous, but the level of exposure soon came at a cost. “People wouldn’t always engage with the music. They’d come up to me in the street and say, ‘You’re my favourite TikToker!’,” he recalls. That tension only intensified in the run-up to Broken By Desire… for which promotion was amplified by high-profile commercial tie-ins (Deliveroo, Tinder) and a Capaldi-branded pizza range sold in British supermarkets. But there was a creeping sense that the deliberately absurd spectacle risked overshadowing the songs themselves, a trade-off that became harder to ignore.

“I was doing so much content, and that very quickly became commodified. A lot of the second album roll-out was based around doing a funny video to go viral,” Capaldi says. “I became so exhausted from putting on the whole, ‘Oh, I’m so f–king silly’ thing. I felt like I was playing up to other peoples’ ideas of me.”

There was a moral conundrum, too, tied to his own everyman appeal and how it was being shaped and used. “It sometimes felt a bit like, ‘How can we get money out of this? How can we f–king sell, sell, sell?’”

Out of “not wanting to upset others”, Capaldi won’t be drawn on specific campaigns or product releases, but he is forthright in explaining how he believes he has “not treated the fanbase in the way that I probably should have.” He continues: “There was maybe an element of trying to extract too much from people. I have very confused feelings towards that time.”

This came to a head with the 2023 Netflix special How I’m Feeling Now, he says, reflecting: “I look back at things, and I think there’s a lot of s–t I wish I hadn’t done.” He adds that while he doesn’t necessarily “regret” it, the documentary became deeply tied to his private life. Over 96 minutes, it shows Capaldi battling exhaustion, imposter syndrome and creative frustration, alongside intimate scenes at his childhood home with his parents.

Capaldi says the only time he has watched How I’m Feeling Now back is when he had to sign off on the edit; seeing himself reckon with his Tourette’s diagnosis onscreen was upsetting enough to not want to revisit it. He recalls reshooting the final scene – set to look forward to his future as an artist – because the first version was “really depressing,” reflecting the wider mental state the film captures. Over time, what began as a more straightforward tour documentary evolved into an unfiltered portrait of an artist under pressure.

“Maybe if I’d known that, I probably wouldn’t have done it,” he says of the change in the film’s direction. “Also seeing my parents featured in it in such a big way… I don’t love that. Looking back on it, I think up until that point, I’d been quite protected. People didn’t know much about my day-to-day life; I wasn’t putting personal stuff on social media.” 

Capaldi’s vulnerability throughout the documentary created an access point for people who might not have been previous fans of his music. The response continues to be “overwhelming”; he speaks of the frustration of not being able to individually help all those who have reached out to him via message, while also acknowledging that he activated a conversation around neurodivergence and grief while at the beginning of his own recovery. 

As we broach this subject, he leans forward across the table, and starts talking 10 to the dozen about his reluctance to be seen as a “mental health poster boy.” He adds that a second Netflix documentary centered around the journey to Glastonbury 2023 was scrapped, following some “difficult discussions” about its proposed content and the eventual outcome of Capaldi’s performance at the festival.

As such, during his break, he began to ask himself bigger questions. What did he want out of his career? Why was it so important to succeed? Capaldi thinks he found the answer in starting to live for himself. “‘Authenticity’ has become a buzz word and I feel like not everything has to be out there,” he says. “I just don’t care to deal at that altar anymore, you know what I mean?”

In many ways, the past few years for Capaldi have been centered around finding the fun and mystery in music again; to remember what songwriting is to him beyond trying to top his previous milestones. He credits this mindshift change in part to a tight-knit circle of artist friends, naming them one by one while holding up a finger for each as he goes: Sam Fender, Grian Chatten [Fontaines D.C.], Niall Horan, Bradley Simpson [The Vamps], Ed Sheeran. 

Capaldi owns a house in north London, where he lives in close proximity to Fender and Chatten. The trio, who jokingly dub themselves “The Syndicate,” have been spotted holidaying in County Mayo on the west coast of Ireland and supporting each other at their respective headline shows. They regularly send each other new music, Capaldi says, with recent favourites including ascendant Dublin rockers Bleech 9:3, singer-songwriter Aaron Rowe, also from the Irish capital, and Scottish folk act Jacob Alon.

In October 2025, Capaldi headed to Newcastle to support Fender and Chatten at the Mercury Prize ceremony, for which they were both nominated, with the former ultimately winning for his opus People Watching. Seeing two of the most important people in his life recognised for their artistic ambition had a motivating effect on Capaldi, reinforcing the value of creative risk-taking.

“[Sam and Grian] talk about music as art – and I know this sounds f-king mental coming from someone who is also a musician – but they really f–king care about everything they’re putting out,” Capaldi says. “It is so inspiring. What they have instilled in me is to really take time [in the studio], and start properly giving a f–k about what I’m saying and what the songs sound like.”

Capaldi says he is “happy and secure” enough to admit he’s “unsure” what his future looks like. Survive was released to “clear the decks” of previously recorded material, allowing him to move forward without a fixed plan. He has yet to begin work on a new album, but he wants to work with new collaborators, be involved in “every single aspect of the production,” and “not compromise” on the recording process. “I feel the most confused and lost I’ve ever been in my career. But it’s a really good thing; I feel like I have absolutely no idea what the f–k I’m doing.”

He continues: “Around the second album, I became so hyper-focused on chasing a hit record that I was just doing s–t on the fly and handing off songs to producers. I don’t want to phone in anything ever again. The people who listen to my music deserve better; I deserve better.”

A triumphant comeback campaign started with a surprise appearance at Glastonbury last summer, where Capaldi returned to the Pyramid Stage to deliver a full set and finish where he’d left off two years earlier. “I cannot overstate the importance of that day and what it’ll mean to me for the rest of my life. If that hadn’t gone well, I don’t know what situation I’d be in; but it did, and I showed up for myself,” he says.

In the following months, he went to see Oasis, Radiohead and McFly perform live – describing all three gigs as “the best night of my life” – while also making a cameo in Taylor Swift’s “Opalite” video, and embarking on a U.K. and Ireland arena tour, during which he began to shift his focus away from monitoring his tics on stage. The latter marked a significant step for Capaldi, who had previously cancelled dates amid severe health anxiety, including at times to undergo medical checks.

As he has settled back into touring, there have been musical legends who have remained firmly in his corner. Among them is Elton John, who has offered his support in private, as well as seminal songwriter David Gray, who wrote Capaldi a personal letter of encouragement. Those kind gestures have formed a steady foundation as he continues to navigate his next steps, and he’s keen to “pay it forward” and support other artists battling adversity, having reached out to Lola Young amidst the intense scrutiny the singer faced last year as her profile rapidly rose.

“Lola is amazing, she’s incredible,” Capaldi says. “I sent her a big message where I was like, ‘Look, you don’t need to reply to this, but I know how you’re feeling.’ When I went away, there were a lot of people reaching out to me; I didn’t get back to everybody, but it meant a lot. Everyone talks about the ‘duty of care’ that is required from labels, but I think we also have a responsibility as artists to share that support.”

The United Center show later in the evening will reveal an artist who seems looser and more liberated as he bathes in the glow of the crowd. On a yearning “Something in the Heavens,” Capaldi’s falsetto can be an almost unbearably intimate instrument to listen to, leaping from gentle to piercing in a single note, while a reworked version of “Pointless” is both desperately sad and beautiful at once, like a bloom pushing through concrete. Soft, exquisite lighting illuminates the tenderness with which this music is being relayed on stage. 

As his live pull continues to surge, an extensive summer run lies ahead, including a two-night takeover of London’s 65,000-capacity BST Hyde Park, but in Chicago the focus is firmly on immediacy. “I’m very excited to be back in this city and playing the gig you all deserve. It’s all uphill from here,” Capaldi says, his words landing like a promise he knows he can keep.

Portraits by Lane Dorsey for Billboard U.K.
Live photography by Thomas Falcone

Two years ago when someone recommended that Lindsey Stirling reach out to ARKAI, a New York-based electroacoustic string duo, Stirling was immediately on board with the idea. The legendary genre-blending violinist primarily worked with producers who came to writing sessions with set backing tracks and were too nervous to recommend changes to her violin melodies. She rarely got to work with other string players.

“I was so excited to collaborate with someone who spoke my language,” Stirling says to Billboard about ARKAI. “We did a writing session, and afterwards, I was like, ‘That was so fun.’ My little string heart was exploding.”

ARKAI — which is made up of violinist Jonathan Miron and cellist Philip Sheegog — was equally as excited to work with Stirling. The two instrumentalists, who met as students at Juliard and have been making music together for almost eight years, looked up to Stirling for a long time.

“Lindsey Stirling is an icon for the string community, because she showed us all what’s possible,” says Miron. “She showed us how we could take the old instrument, this violin, and bring it into mainstream sensibilities.”

The synergy between the three musicians was instant, and in the two years since they’ve met, they’ve continued to cultivate it. ARKAI and Stirling regularly get together for writing and jam sessions. Last year, ARKAI joined Stirling on her “Master of Tides” cruise, a multi-day music festival at sea.

Most recently, the trio performed at the Gold Gala, an annual event that brings together leaders from across industries to honor Asian Pacific and multicultural trailblazers. During their set at the Gold Gala, ARKAI and Stirling debuted original music on stage for the first time — a reimagining of ARKAI’s song “High Noon,” off their Grammy-winning 2025 album Brightside.

Billboard sat down with Stirling, Miron and Sheegog to talk about their Gold Gala performance, what it’s like working together and what the trio is most excited for next.

You all just performed at the Gold Gala. What did it mean to you to take the stage at an event all about celebrating API identities?

Jonathan Miron: The Gold Gala is kind of like the Met Gala for the Asian community. So to get invited and to be featured at an event like that was a dream come true. Philip and I kicked off with a medley of iconic Asian soundtracks, and then Lindsey joined us on stage, and that was our first performance ever with Lindsey playing an original song. All these things coming together — we are still pinching ourselves, it was a crazy experience.

And to look out into the audience, they were honoring people like Eileen Gu, and Jet Li. These are people we’ve seen on the screens. These are people we’ve seen kick ass at the Olympics. It’s unbelievable. And for us to be able to share our own music with these people is really an incredible honor.

I didn’t get to attend the Gold Gala, can you tell me more about the song you performed and why you wanted to debut it there?

JM: The song is called “High Noon,” and it’s off of our recent Grammy-winning album [Brightside]. So we have the version that Philip and I created together. But when we were in the studio with Lindsey in New York, we were like, “Maybe there’s a world where Lindsey would want to hop on one of our existing songs.” Philip and I were already planning on putting out a deluxe version of the album with some amazing collaborators, and we were like, “Well, Lindsey would absolutely slay on ‘High Noon.’”

PS: The original version, as many of our originals are, is like a massive cinematic IMAX experience. It’s explosive drums and huge synth walls and then our violin and cellos are screaming on top. But the melodic hooks were the things that we thought were the core, the DNA, of the song — something that can be translated. And so we asked, “What would happen if we kind of pulled [the hooks] a little bit towards Lindsey’s aesthetic? Make it a little bit faster, a little bit more dance pop-infused, a little more electronic-infused.”

It’s the combination of our two worlds. Hopefully when a fan listens to it, they say, “That’s Lindsey, but it’s also ARKAI, and it’s the two together.” It feels like a really great first thing that we’ve now put out into the world at this performance, and now we’re just really excited to see how people respond to it.

What is it like composing music all together?

Lindsey Stirling: It is unlike any other process I’ve ever done. Usually you’re working with guys that have tracks or maybe they’re playing piano. But there’s something about the reverberation of strings together that actually makes your heart swell. Maybe I’m totally biased, because I’m a string player, but we’ll just start jamming, and it’s so fun because we’re not locked into a tempo. We’re just playing, we’re feeding off of each other’s melody. And we record the whole thing, so we’ll go back and find the parts we love and then we’ll turn them into refined melodies. It’s so fun to write with them. I would do it any chance I get.

PS: Since Jonathan and I, for the last almost eight years, we’ve been a duo, we basically have only written with each other. We write, arrange and produce all of our own music, so we know each other inside and out at this point. We know how each other think, our tendencies and how we play. But now we’re adding in another creative voice, who is at the same time very similar because Lindsey is a string player and we speak that same language. But she also has her own unique vocabulary, style, melodic and rhythmic tendencies and sensibilities. And so throwing that new element into the creative mix that we’ve been working in for years at this point, I think that was really, really fun, because it keeps you on your toes.

Is “High Noon” a one-off or the beginning of more recorded music from you three as a trio?

LS: We’re gonna definitely do more together. We are doing some tour dates this summer in select cities throughout the U.S., so we’ll get to perform it more together. And we actually worked on some music for my album that will be coming out hopefully next year. I would love to have their voices on it.

I always kind of wondered, when you hear a violin baked into a track, would you be able to differentiate mine from somebody else’s? And it’s so true that we really all three — not only does the cello have its own voice — we all play very differently. We have a different way of expressing, we play different kinds of melodies. Everybody has their own voice and I’m excited to not only have “High Noon” to release this year, but also, next year, another track.

You all fuse classical sounds with more modern ones and in doing so, you show younger audiences that there are so many possibilities with string or other classical instruments. What does it mean to you all to introduce new generations to these worlds?

LS: For me, it’s always been really important to give people that kind of an option. I remember when I was a kid, there wasn’t much to play. It was classical music and maybe fiddle music, and there wasn’t really any other option. I remember I never wanted to perform at the talent show, because I was like, “Everyone will be bored.” So now, I would love for kiddos to feel like they could play something that maybe feels a little bit more contemporary, and they can be cool.

I also really hope that it goes beyond just string players. I hope that by being authentic and outside of the box, that people realize that whatever they do, they can they can reinvent themselves, they can step outside the lines — whether it’s being a feminist in a society that doesn’t support that or it’s sharing your poetry that’s really different. I just hope that everybody feels like they don’t belong in a box.

JM: It means everything to me and Philip. We feel so lucky to have had someone like Lindsey to look up to. She really did show us what’s possible. When we started doing our own thing, we were like, “You know what? If Lindsey can do it, maybe we can do it as well.” And I think that’s what we hope to leave with with young people, young musicians. And exactly like Lindsey said, it really translates across so many different disciplines and professions — this idea that it’s okay to think outside of the box and do your own thing. I would argue that now more than ever, society is going to require that out of people. With automation and AI and all these different things, we’re going to need new ideas. We’re going to need people doing different things, and that’s how you stand out. And so what we hope is that maybe our stories can inspire a new generation of trailblazers.

PS: The name “ARKAI” actually comes from a Greek word that means “leaders.” And that was something that when Jonathan and I first started out, that’s what we wanted to be in the in the world of string players, and the classical world writ large. But we see ourselves just as the latest links in the chain, a chain that goes back to Lindsey and her contemporaries, which then goes back another chain to the pioneers before that. It’s this endless chain and our greatest hope is that in a couple years, we’ll see some other young group who comes up and says, “Because I saw what you were doing, I had the courage to write.” And I just echo everything that both Jonathan and Lindsey said, it’s so much more than music.

Speaking of being trailblazers, ARKAI, congratulations on winning your first Grammy! What do you think winning the award is going to change for you?

PS: To the haters who are going to hate, hopefully, it just shuts some of them up. In some ways, there are always going to be barriers and roadblocks and gatekeepers who have their own opinions, but our hope is that it is a sort of stamp of approval that shows people are willing to listen to you. Our hope is that it helps people to have the conversation, to be open minded, to be like, “Okay, we don’t exactly know where to put you in in our boxes, right? You’re outside the box, but you’ve got this stamp of approval, so we’ll listen to you.” And then hopefully, through that, they then discover something that they weren’t expecting.

JM: We got interviewed right after the Grammy, and one of the things I said was that I really hope that for people who have faced rejection — we have been shunned from different rooms — that this is a moment to see what is possible when you follow your heart and you take risks.

I hope that it’s just another indication of what is possible. Philip and I are indie musicians, we’ve built everything pretty much from the ground up. Lindsey is the same. And so this is just an indication to anybody out there that, if you have a vision for something, a passion for doing something, if you put your heart into it, you can achieve anything.

You three have spoken so in depth about taking risks and being trailblazers in your styles of music. With the risks you’ve taken and their payoffs in mind, what is something you are excited for in the next year?

LS: Personally, I’ve been writing a lot of music lately, and writing music, ironically, has always been really hard for me. I’ve always really struggled with self negativity. And it’s been really exciting that, for the first time ever, I’m not doing that. I’m enjoying the process, as everyone always tried to tell me I can and that I don’t have to be so hard on myself. I don’t know what clicked. Maybe the years of therapy have finally actually set in. Maybe it’s the meditation. I don’t know what clicked, but I’m so happy right now, just in general.

I don’t even have the fruits of the labor yet, I can’t even see if anyone likes anything I’ve written. But it doesn’t matter. I’m really just happy and I’m enjoying the journey, not just the destination. And so it makes me just really excited for not only this chapter, but what this chapter is going to bring with with my new music. Mostly I am so happy to be happy.

JM: Music is this incredible language. It’s this universal language. It’s how Philip and I met, it’s how we connected with Lindsey. I speak for myself, and I think Philip feels the same way, but we feel so lucky to do what we do, because we get to connect with people. I’m just so excited to be able to take that to the next level — whether it’s connecting with Lindsey and creating a new track that will move people or touring around the world.

I had a friend once that said to me, “There is no other job in the world like what you guys do where people stop everything that they’re doing in the day and just be in present and listen. And I think it’s just it’s the most beautiful thing, because we can get so overwhelmed with all the the noise in the world. So to be able to come down to the most essential thing, which is connection through music, is such a gift. And I just can’t wait to do more of that.

PS: One thing that I’m excited for is just to see how our music evolves by bringing in incredible collaborators. Because, as I mentioned earlier, essentially, up until this point, Jonathan and I, we have been solely working and writing together. We’ve been allowing our sound to mature and evolve. But now I feel like we have reached that with our record last year. Now this year, we’re collaborating already with so many incredible people, and putting all these new ingredients in the dish, and we’re getting inspired in different ways and pushed in different ways. I’m excited in a year’s time to look back and say, “Wow, there were ideas and worlds that we didn’t even know were going to be open, but through collaboration, we were able to find that.”

In the depths of lockdown, when Jacqueline Springer read the Victoria & Albert Museum’s advert for the role of Curator Africa & Diaspora: Performance, it struck her as a “chorus of realisation.” For the London-raised creative, whose illustrious career spans music journalism and broadcasting, lecturing, programming and event coordination, the role felt like a rare alignment of her academic study and curatorial practice, bringing those strands together within a single space.

Speaking to Billboard U.K. over video call, Springer recalls spending “over a fortnight” on the application as she revisited the lessons she has gained from over a decade spent teaching about representation and sociological theories with music media. The successful candidate would be given the space to rethink how narratives surrounding Africa and its diaspora are collected, interpreted, and staged within one of the world’s most influential cultural institutions. Energized by the possibilities this would entail, Springer knew she had to take the chance.

Five years on, we speak mere weeks before the April 18 opening of The Music Is Black: A British Story, the inaugural exhibition at V&A East – the V&A Museum’s new site in Stratford, east London, an area considered the birthplace of grime. In originating her role with the V&A, Springer has been pivotal to the development of this new immersive exhibition, which frames Black British music as a central force in shaping the U.K.’s wider cultural identity.

“Some people may think that this exhibition is just about the history of Black British music, which it isn’t,” she explains. “Their mind may go straight to the mid-1970s’, or if they like jungle and drum ‘n’ bass, the mid-’00s. But you have to travel through the preceding histories to get there, which are complex. They overlap. They show inhumanity; they show inventiveness. You have to strip it all back in order to get that messaging across.”

Encompassing 125 years of history, The Music Is Black: A British Story maps the impact of British colonialism and how migration has influenced the cross-cultural richness of modern music. It houses over 220 objects, drawing on photographs, paintings, prints, stage outfits and more, honouring trailblazers like Janet Kay, Dame Shirley Bassey and Steel Pulse alongside contemporary voices such as Little Simz and Sampha. It also examines how the sounds and styles forged within Black British music have been reinterpreted by acts like The Rolling Stones and The Beatles, moving through genres from reggae and lovers rock to blues and Afrobeats.

In reframing that history on such a scale, the exhibition seeks to redefine where that musical legacy begins, and who it belongs to. Springer describes how she spent years travelling across the country to gather her research, which included discussions with the family of the late Charlie Watts – the Rolling Stones drummer was an avowed jazz fan and record collector – and a trip to Birmingham to examine the Gun Quarter’s historical role in the arms trade and its links to the transatlantic slave trade.

With its grand opening approaching, Springer discusses her research process for the exhibition, how the industry has responded, and what it means to be engaging new audiences with the work of an institution as iconic as the V&A.

When you began working on this project a few years ago, how did you first envision the exhibition looking? And how did that change over time?

It has changed over time, but the ‘rail tracks’ of it were always quite fixed. We begin in 1900, when the age of invention, which had really invigorated the previous century, starts to shift rather than stop. It moves into mass media: print remains dominant, then radio arrives, then television. Cinema becomes a popular form, but it’s also used by news, especially during the world wars, and that intersection has always interested me.

My work in academia, over ten years across Syracuse, Westminster, and Fordham, has consistently been about media: how it treats people, what it communicates, and how representation is constructed. How do you depict someone who is northern, or gay, or poor? These building blocks come from pre-existing histories, shaped by a country’s wealth, its sense of itself, and how it’s seen by others. That then filters into society – how people are ranked, how they rank others – and how those views are reinforced and exploited through print, cinema, radio and broadcast.

That thinking feeds directly into the exhibition. It’s about how we view other cultures, languages and musical forms. Jazz, for instance, was initially dismissed as unserious or disruptive; blues was seen as lesser; gospel emerges from a Bible imposed on enslaved people. These judgments are tied to race, class and power, and to how “acceptable” culture is defined.

So the process has been about tidying that up – making a big, complex idea digestible. It’s moved from something quite bold and conceptual into something people can actually walk through, listen to, and understand. As audiences engage with it – through music and other senses – it becomes a way of deepening their understanding of musicality and the African diaspora. And that’s come through collaboration, both within the V&A and with external partners.

To what extent is this exhibition shaped by trust and your relationships, as opposed to formal research?

By getting the role, you’re entrusted to know what you’re doing, and an interview demands that there’s a test, in many respects, to see if you’re best for the job. I come from a background in print, music journalism, broadcast journalism, but also lecturing to university students, and also independently curating events. So I already spoke to people – people who are interested in the topic, but not necessarily how it’s presented, until they see elements that they can understand.

And that’s definitely the case with students. You know, I used to teach for three hours at a time, so I always activated or interspersed my lectures with content, empirical evidence that they could see. If we’re talking about the World Wars, they had newsprint that they could actually see how the enemy was produced and represented.

In relation to the research that I was going to undertake for the exhibition, that same approach applies: making sure that what I present is grounded, visible, and something people can engage with and understand.

How do you present underground scenes that may have been preserved through community memory rather than in art or writing?

I have to say, you’re wrong. People keep things. I just think that the performer populace and the fandom [of certain scenes], have just not been approached to actually say, “Can we share this?” You know, we’ve now got the Museum of Youth Culture [in London], and you’ve got young people throwing their material at them. But you’ve also got some people who are institutionally-averse who may say, “How are you going to look after my things?” And, also the vast majority of artists that were approached never thought the V&A would ask them. 

Artists retain their own experiences, and many of them have retained a lot of their personal ephemera. [This process] was about tailoring that ephemera in a way that it looked elegant. Rather than asking for specific objects, I asked artists to consider [their journeys], and then I came back to them. My approach was to ask them if they could identify an item that actually testified to their ability to make music. So it’s not necessarily an instrument, it could be anything – and then their explanation would help me work out where that item would knit with another. 

One of the things that was so surprising to me was that the vast majority of artists, when I asked them that question, they said, “I’ve got some sales discs” – that’s an institutional calculation of your commercial value, that’s a response to the art you make. We have Joan Armatrading’s handwritten chord book. We have a handwritten musical score by an opera singer called Peter Brockway, it’s beautiful material. We’ve got [singer] Junior Giscombe’s glasses; he was encouraged to take them off so that he could break America. You’ve got some of those big moments, but you’ve also got these beautiful moments that show how people actually work and mobilize together.

What did it take to build and deepen trust with those prospective donors who were initially “institutionally averse”?

Firstly, I’ll tell you that musicians keep secrets; I would trust them with a secret even more than some of my good friends! [When speaking to artists], I would reaffirm the reputation of the V&A, and then let them know how precious this exhibition is to me. I mean, the V&A recently had an exhibition on Fabergé eggs [Fabergé in London: Romance to Revolution, 2022] – they’re so expensive! There were security guards in situ alongside the objects, not just in the room.

But whether it’s a Fabergé egg or [Lovers rock artist] Janet Kay’s stage clothing, these are classed as museum objects. We don’t see them just as a dress or a record disc, they’re covered by Government Indemnity insurance; they are precious objects, and they allow us to tell a story to the public. Formal loan agreements are signed and there’s a robust process to it.

Were there conversations with artists that shifted your understanding of their work?

I think JME is a quiet storm. You know, he is often referred to as “Skepta’s brother” or the co-founder of Boy Better Know, but he knows his own value. I met him at an event through my best friend, who works for ITV and reads the news. So I said, “JME is over there, he looks like he doesn’t want to be disturbed. Can you take your famous face over there to reassure him?”

That warmed him up a little bit; he’s a reluctant participant when it comes to being a celebrity, but we worked to get his guard down. I told him about the exhibition and he said, “Well, you can have a Super Nintendo. I used to make music on it; that’s how you make beats if you don’t have any money but you’ve got an inventive mind.” When you look back over the course of the exhibition – the creation of the wax cylinder all the way to PinkPantheress deciding through TikTok that she’s going to make short songs – you think about the inventiveness of people, and how much of it has born through through socio-economics. 

Pirate radio was born of a desire for musical autonomy. The national broadcaster says, “We’re not playing jazz” in the early 1920s; “We’re not playing rock ‘n’ roll” in the early 1950s. So you listen to pirate radio, and then by the 1970s, [Dread Broadcasting Corporation] DBC and others start to broadcast illegally, because the music is still there. So you constantly find the way in this exhibition through which Black people have insisted on having their rights.

How do you feel the exhibition will set a precedent for what V&A East represents going forward?

This is a landmark exhibition because of its breadth. But it has to attract a younger audience, many of whom feel that unless they go with school, they don’t go to museums. They see museums as a place where they’re forced to go on a day trip when they probably want to go somewhere else – we’ve all been there, where the structure of a school trip can take the delight out of things and feel like a chore. 

Talking to young people and showing them how self-expression is an extension of your identity, that it is just like the words that you type into your phone, is important; your creative calling can be your absolute joy. You have to open the door and tell them, “This museum is yours forever.” The exhibition falls into that, because that’s what music is – it’s art and it’s forever. 

In many respects, the exhibition complements the overarching ambitions of this museum. It will become a beautiful memory after nine months, but hopefully, like a good lecture at university or school, it lives on with you like a little nugget of inspiration.

Beyond visitor numbers or positive press coverage, what would success look like for this exhibition? 

I just want people to leave the exhibition, if possible, thinking with awe. People who make music walk among you; you may be sat next to them on the bus, they may be sat opposite you on the train. Think how incredible it is to live under the same sky as somebody who makes music that makes you feel better about yourself.