What can you shop for in Vienna that you can’t get anywhere else?

Custom-made shirts at Gino Venturini, one of the oldest shops in the city, just around the corner from St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Once you’ve been measured there, you don’t have to worry about anything anymore and your shirts can be shipped all over the world.

Vienna isn’t complete without…

Sacher cake. Although I personally am a huge fan of the Sacher cube with rum, it’s even juicier than the cake.

Do you have a hotel tip for us?

The new Mandarin Oriental. Everything is very well arranged, as we say in Austria. A great spa and a really good gym, which I use regularly. I always stay there during Eurovision rehearsals and show week. It feels like home.

How do you actually prepare for the shows?

We started two months ago. From Sunday to Wednesday I’m in Vienna for rehearsals and recordings, and from Thursday to Saturday I’m in Cologne for Let’s Dance. In between, I was also in Berlin to launch my fashion brand Orimei by Victoria Swarovski with About You. The last three weeks before the Eurovision Song Contest are really scheduled down to the minute, there’s hardly a free moment from early morning until late at night.

Did you always want to be on the big stage or did it happen by chance?

I wanted to sing. That was something I really wanted. At 13, I wrote an email to the producer of Jimmy Blue Ochsenknecht. It was very cheeky, with no demo, just signed “Victoria S.” He actually wanted to meet me, and we recorded a song right away.

Your first TV appearance was in a show by comedian Mario Barth.

I was 15 then. Mario Barth invited me after I sang for him. I spotted him in a supermarket with my mother, introduced myself, and just started singing in front of him. Completely spontaneously. Again, very cheeky, but he liked it. I was allowed to sing “One in a Million” on his show. That led to a record deal, and I became the youngest artist signed to Sony Germany. I went on a stadium tour with Mario, who was the opening act for David Guetta and Taio Cruz. I still finished my high school exams and then moved to Los Angeles for three years to pursue my music career.

You returned at 21 to join Let’s Dance. How did you react when you were asked?

Not as quickly as with Eurovision. I thought about it for a long time, whether it was the right format. I wondered what people would say about me, whether they had prejudices because of my last name. In the end, it was absolutely the right decision. I won the show, and—with a one-year break in between—eventually got the offer to host Let’s Dance. That was never my plan; I kind of fell into it. Today, I can hardly imagine a different life.

Katarina Barruk wants you to take everything you know about language, and put it aside for a moment. As an artist from the Lusspie region in northern Sweden who sings in a dialect spoken by fewer than 30 people, she’s asking listeners to feel first. Her music is written in Umé Sámi, which can currently be found on the UNESCO’s red list of critically endangered languages, and weaves a traditional vocal style called joiking (think: yoik, as it would rhyme with boyk) into the compositions. The twist? These emotional expressions can’t necessarily be translated.

A view of the Lusspie region in northern Sweden, where singer Katarina Barruk is from and the endangered Umé Sámi language is still spoken.

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Lusspie, also known as the Storuman, is a municipality roughly the size of Delaware, and all of its members carry something special. “The joik is what we call a traditional knowledge carrier—it’s one of our foundations,” she explains over a Zoom call this winter. “It’s our traditional way of making sounds, and it has also been a way of telling stories. When you joik something, you don’t joik around it, or about it. You joik it. You are on the inside looking out, not from the outside looking in on something.” It might be easier to think of joiking as a way of honoring people or landscapes through freestyle a capella, as opposed to conversing in a one-to-one conversation.

Her newest single, an acoustic version of the track “Dárbasjub Duv,” is a good way to practice falling into her sound. But her music has already been felt around the globe: on the stages of Iceland Airwaves festival, the Royal Albert Hall in London, the Roskilde Festival in Denmark, the Reeperbahn Festival in Germany, and Norway’s Øyafestivalen festival, to name a few. She’s also contributed her vocals to various art projects, from the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea to fellow Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara’s exhibition “Goavve-Geabbil” at the Tate Modern.

Barruk’s music is a portal to the larger Sámi community, which spans a region known as Sápmi, including the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Kola Peninsula in Russia. Some, but not all, are involved in the ancient practice of reindeer herding, guiding the animals into the mountains during the harsh winters, where the lichen they graze on hides underneath the trees, and easing them back into the valleys come warmer weather. This Indigenous community has a number of Sámi languages that stretch across borders, but Umé Sámi is one of the least spoken. “I grew up in an activist family,” she says. “My father has been at the forefront of the Umé Sámi language. He’s a teacher, and he has also done a lot of research and work to revitalize it—he wrote the Umé Sámi dictionary.” Holding this piece of printed history in 2018 is one of Barruk’s key memories. “There were so many Umé Sámis who wanted to learn it,” she says. “I loved having that book in my hand—I just cried because it was all of the familiar words in one place. I had never had anything like that, with all of them, in my whole life.”

Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl Halftime Show—or rather, the Bad Bunny concert surrounded by a couple hours of football—was a feat. Not only was the show almost entirely in Spanish (remember when Benito was first announced as the performer, and said that Americans had four months to learn Spanish? He meant it!). But throughout the 12 minutes of groundbreaking live TV, he managed to nod to cultural references big and small that showcased the cultural prowess of Puerto Rico and greater Latin America. As in, yes, he had Ricky Martin and Daddy Yankee and Karol G up there perreando in his casita. But he also had Toñita, the owner of a tiny Brooklyn bar, on stage serving him a shot (presumably of rum?) in a miniature recreation of her Caribbean Social Club; when Gaga appeared for the sole portion of the performance in English, she wore that blue dress by Luar, the label from American-Dominican designer Raul Lopez. It’s a testament to the creative excellence of Latinos, both throughout Latin America and the greater diaspora. And it was crying-in-Spanish amazing.

We clocked the references that might mean something to fellow travelers: The places you can visit, the tacos you can eat, the nail tech you can actually book with, and the cultural references that tell a greater story of Puerto Rico, to get you ready for the trip you’re definitely booking after that performance, right?

(Read more about how the rise of Latin American music is driving travelers to the region here.)

The Coco Frio stand

During “Tití Me Preguntó”, Bad Bunny quickly stops at a Coco Frio cart—a quintessential fresh coconut water street stand common across Puerto Rico, from which actual chilled coconuts are sold. The Coco Frio stands are usually at street corners close to the beach or in front of colorful shops on beaches like Luquillo, in Old San Juan, and along roadsides like Route 3.

(Find our full guide to the best beaches in Puerto Rico here.)

The domino game

Whether you’re in Brooklyn, Miami, San Juan, or Rincón, a domino table anchored by “viejitos,” or “little old men”, is what turns a street into a hangout spot; a bar into a place you can stay a while. Some people call the game the Danza de los Viejitos (the “dance of the old men”). As it intensifies, the phrase “la mesa se calienta” (the table heats up), and the energy and competitiveness picls up, even among friends. While you’ll find this scene in many places, it leaves us craving a trip to Miami’s famous Domino Park.

The fabulous nail tech

Also during the performance of “Titi Me Preguntó”, Bad Bunny passes celebrity nail tech and LA nail stylist Johana Castillo of @masterweenay—spotlighting the Latina-led beauty industry. On the island (and in many Puerto Rican communities elsewhere), your go-to salon is another neighborhood gathering spot, the place to chismear (gossip).

The piraguas stand

Bad Bunny stops at a wooden piragua stand, common on the island for serving shaved ice topped with tropical-fruit-flavored syrup. (If you looked closely at the glass syrup bottles on the cart, they were labeled with flags from places like Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Colombia.) You’ll find piragua at the beach and in town plazas across Puerto Rico. In Old San Juan, go to the Castillo San Felipe del Morro; on beaches like Isla Verde, spot them specifically between San Juan Water Club and El San Juan Sonesta.

The Villas Tacos LA

It’s not only Puerto Rico getting the spotlight: All Latino excellence, the entire barrio, is on display. The taco stand in the show is an homage to an actual taqueria in Los Angeles’s Highland Park, named Villas Tacos, with owner Victor himself actually at the grill as Benito walks past.

The boxers

A quick glimpse of two boxers, one wearing Puerto Rican-flagged shorts, is a nod to the boxing culture of Puerto Rico—a sport deeply rooted in the island’s culture (as in Cuba, it’s not uncommon for travelers to seek out a match or even take a boxing class while visiting). This is a deeper cut: In his song “NUEVAYoL,” Bad Bunny samples the voice of Puerto Rican boxing legend Felix Tito Trinidad, who says, “The best in the world, Puerto Rico.”

The pink casita

There’s no chance you missed the pink house that Bad Bunny and his squad was performing on top of: Also a staple of his recent tour, the set, styled as a traditional Puerto Rican home, hosted loads of celebrity guests—acting as a sort of “party de marquesina”, known as a casual, intimate house party held in a borinquen’s home or garage. A drive through any long-standing Puerto Rican neighborhood will show you similar-looking, colorful and cozy homes.

“Lisbon is the city of fado,” says Portuguese singer Carminho. “You have to experience it when you’re there.”

Carminho, who recently collaborated with Rosalia on the song “Memória” and released her latest album “Eu Vou Morrer de Amor ou Resistir” at the end of 2025, knows a thing or two about the Portuguese music tradition known as fado. “I started to practice while in my mother’s belly—she’s a singer, and she owned a fado house in Lisbon, and my brothers and sisters and I were all surrounded by fado.” Though Carminho’s first performance was at the age of 12, her mother says she started singing somewhere around age four.

The melancholic sound of the genre, whose early 19th century roots continue to grow in the country’s modern music scene, is best experienced in a cozy fado house, or fado bar, where the singers croon with zero amplification (it’s all natural acoustics here). The songs, often about lost love or nostalgia, are moving even if to guests who don’t understand the language. “Fado is it’s own language,” Carminho says.

Within Portugal, fado has had its ups and downs in popularity, but the genre is finally seeing a new era embrace its sound with vigor. “When I started performing, my friends didn’t want to listen, and the generation before them was even less interested. In some ways fado was tied to the old Portugal—with political issues, with the dictator—but about 15 years ago, people began to understand that the music itself was stronger than the preconceptions people had about it.”

It was, specifically, the 2008 crisis that spurred this change, Carminho says. “People were trying to understand how to survive when they lost their jobs or didn’t have money to pay their houses, and many people began small businesses based in the identity of Portugal,” says Carminho. “It was a way to recuperate our pride. We realized our gold was within the richness of our culture, and then began a boom in Portugality, and fado was part of that.”

Suffice to say, if you’re headed to Portugal and spending any time in Lisbon, listening to fado in a dimly lit taverna is a special experience to be had—one that embodies the spirit of Lisbon past and present. Some fado houses are more formal, with an entire dinner served upon white tablecloths, and a well-orchestrated run of show led by a renowned group of performers who sing between tables. Others are more spontaneous, marked by close quarters, low ceilings, Portuguese comfort food, and the possibility that a famous singer may drop by unannounced—or even invite a member of the audience up to sing. Wherever you go, just remember a few house rules: “You don’t speak when a fadista is singing,” first and foremost, says Carminho. You may want a reservation, especially at the big and well-known spots, but there are also low-profile fado houses where you can just show up, have a drink, and see what happens. (It never hurts to have your hotel concierge call ahead and confirm if a reservation is needed.) Smaller houses may be cash only.

Below, Carminha shares her favorite places to experience fado in Lisbon—from the informal to the buttoned up, with a few trips down her own nostalgia lane.

R. dos Remédios 139, 1100-453 Lisboa

“Mesa de Frades is the fado house where I’ve spent the most years singing. I sang for eight or nine years in that fado house before I started my career. I had the most beautiful nights there when I was just amateur. It’s in one of the most characteristic neighborhoods in Lisbon called Alfama, and it has this authenticity to it.

“Latin America and Latin music, in particular, has had the benefit at different stages in history of being the most famous ‘exotic’ music of the world. What Cuba had with the Cha-Cha-Chá and Brazil had with samba, you can now see today in different ways with Puerto Rico’s reggaeton and Mexico’s music. Colombia is also investing a lot in being a music tourism powerhouse,” he says.

And then there are today’s “gig trippers”—that is, travelers who craft their itineraries around concerts and festivals, as much as they do around greater music lore. And the opportunities to travel for both festivals, and individual shows on arena tours, will be plenty in 2026.

Mexico is gearing up for Vive Latino this spring, the largest festival in Mexico City dating back to 1998, which focuses on Latin rock. Chile, which has recently been in the pop-music spotlight with the ascendance of beloved internet baddie Paloma Mami, is home to Viña del Mar International Song Festival, the oldest and largest music festival in Latin America. In November, Argentinian producer and DJ Bizarrap—whose viral internet series, BZRP Music Sessions, is equivalent to Latin America’s COLORS—was tapped by the NFL to perform for the league’s inaugural game in Madrid, Spain (he was accompanied by none other than the godfather of el perreo, Daddy Yankee). Not to be outdone, Bad Bunny will be starring in this year’s Super Bowl—and no, he will not be singing in English.

With increased interest in LatAm countries, local music fans and artists are welcoming of visitors with one request: be respectful when you arrive.

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Even the smaller and perhaps less expected Latin American nations are seeing the benefits and joining the music tourism movement and actively promoting themselves in this space. Belize, for example, hired Sound Diplomacy in 2022 to create a tourism plan designed solely around its musical history. The minuscule nation of 400,000 residents—comfortably snuggled along the Caribbean coast, and traditionally known for its barrier reefs and scuba diving excursions—is banking on the growing trend of music tourism to get on more would-be travelers’ radars. Though Belize has never been heralded as a bastion of commercial musical success, and lacks an obvious superstar to rally around, they have a rare form of musical currency: Garifuna. The style of dance, drumming, and storytelling originated from the Afro-Caribbean Garifuna diaspora in and around Belize, and has been designated as an intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO. It’s now a potentially wealthy resource and point of touristic interest.

It is not just the flurry of new events and venues that is driving jazz forward in Lebanon, it is also a shift in the approach to the musical style. “After the Civil War, there was a rigidity in the scene, a sense that you had to mimic American standards to be good,” Hosn says. “Today, musicians are far more innovative, often incorporating local sounds and instruments.” One of the first to do this was the iconic Ziad Rahbani, a Lebanese musician who began mixing elements of jazz into his pieces in the early 1970s; his 1973 play Sahriyyeh (“An Evening Party”) is often cited as one of the first major works in which Western jazz harmonies were merged with Arabic melodies.

Today, musicians are drawing on Rahbani’s legacy. “Through experimentation with fusion styles I found I could alleviate the dissonance of the quarter tone in oriental music [as the maqam-based musical traditions of the Arab world and eastern Mediterranean is referred to] by using the jazz harmonic motion,” musician Lucas Sakr explains. “It makes the oriental music far more digestible for wider audiences.” Sakr also incorporates a range of traditional instruments, including the oud, buzuq, qanun, nay, and violin. In these pieces, maqam-based melodies (part of traditional Middle Eastern music) float above extended jazz chords and modern grooves, the rhythm section adjusting carefully when quarter tones appear. Sakr’s work has earned international recognition, even leading to a highly competitive scholarship to study jazz at HEMU Lausanne.

Sawma also experiments with various styles with his fusion trio band, Bonne Chose. “Our band blends jazz, psychedelic rock, dream pop, and synth wave,” he tells me. Sawma is also part of a ‘Fuzz Jazz’ trio that performs each Wednesday at Centerstage, a Beiruti house in Achrafieh that functions as an experimental music room and bar. “Each week we invite one additional musician—often from outside of the jazz world—to improvise with us,” Sawma says.

These initiatives have continued despite a series of recent upheavals, including the pandemic, ongoing economic turmoil and, most recently, Israel’s strikes accompanying a new period of regional conflict. “We have faced many challenges,” Naiim explains, “especially when it comes to finding grants to run Jazz Week. Most NGOs and grant providers have different priorities because of all the issues facing Lebanon.”

Last year, the society received no funding at all for Jazz Week, according to Naiim. The community still found a way to put on the events, however. “Some venues kindly provided free entry by securing external funds or using their own resources, while others offered reasonable prices for our guests.” In the end, the 2025 iteration of Beirut International Jazz Week managed to host a record-breaking 30 performances.

For Naiim and others, this persistence reflects a broader determination to ensure the longevity of Lebanon’s relationship with jazz. “Jazz is all about finding ways for wrong notes to sound good,” Hosn says. “The new styles in Lebanon honor that tradition, reminding us that from every dissonance, something beautiful can emerge.”

But then there have been the local covers. Starting in March, during the Oceania leg of her tour, Lipa began adding a destination-specific song to each show. And in many cases, she’s also invited the local artist who wrote them to join her on stage.

In Melbourne, the cover was “Rush” with Troye Sivan performing beside her; in Chicago it was “Ain’t Nobody” by Chaka Khan, with Khan in the flesh; and in São Paulo, it was “Magalenha” with Carlinhos Brown. (My favorite was from Lima, where she played “Cariñito”—which was my wedding song when I got married in Peru.) Some were international hits, with a friendly reminder of the artists’ roots, while others served as a launchpad for fans well outside the city to encounter new songs via clips that circulated of each concert. Now that the tour has ended—with her final show in Mexico City on December 5—we’ll miss the guessing game that came to precede each performance, with audiophiles wondering which song would be chosen to pay homage to cities she visited. But hey, we’ll always have the song lists.

Fellow Brit Charli XCX joined Lipa on stage in London to sing “360.”

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For the past century the Opry has been Music City‘s crucible for forging country music myth and legend. In 1945 at the Opry, formerly called the WSM Barn Dance, Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys introduced American listeners to the genre that would come to bear the group’s name. In 1959, following an introduction by Johnny Cash, a 13-year-old Dolly Parton made her Opry debut at the Ryman Auditorium, the program’s longtime downtown home before moving in 1974 to the Grand Ole Opry House, north of the city.

“Fans Buying Tickets” The ticket window at the Fifth Avenue entrance to the Ryman, where fans could buy tickets for $3.00. Ryman Auditorium, March 8-9, 1974. Photograph by Jim McGuire

Grand Ole Opry Archives

Nashville became Music City with the Opry as its voice. But when familiar names like Anderson introduce new talent like Foster, whose career is steeped in nostalgia and tribute, the transition feels more like the renewal of tradition than an evolution. The Grand Ole Opry can still feel like a club with a very specific type of member. I am a native Tennessean and lifelong lover of country music. Going to the Opry always feels like a homecoming, even if the place never exactly felt like a home for someone like me, a queer Gen Z Taiwanese woman. But its original mission—to bring country music to new listeners—thrives within Nashville’s next generation of venues and museums, which are creating inclusive spaces that counter the Opry’s exclusivity.

Over the past five years, more than 100,000 new residents have moved into the Nashville area. Many have brought with them a fresh vision of what country music can mean. Inside one of the RNBW Queer Music Collective‘s biweekly music nights, disco balls and swathes of rainbow fabric surround young, fun, and queer fans of country music. Hosted at East Nashville’s Lipstick Lounge, one of the 38 remaining lesbian bars in the United States, RNBW’s packed queer music nights paint LGBTQ+ country as not the margin but the center. I stopped by a show later the same month as the Opry’s anniversary extravaganza and bumped shoulders with a country crowd that felt unlike any other I’d ever found myself in. Cowboy hats sat atop dyed hair and wolf cuts; trucker hats and muscle tees were worn by more than just the men; and for once, I didn’t feel like I was the minority—or that a human existed who didn’t belong there. The collective was founded in 2016 by queer music executives Emily and Jamie Dryburgh at a political moment when the rights of the queer community were increasingly being threatened by Tennessee’s passage of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. Just across from the Ryman, which is still going strong as one of Nashville’s most iconic concert venues, and a five-minute walk away from the Country Music Hall of Fame, the four-year-old National Museum of African American Music shines an overdue spotlight on the Black artists who have long been integral—but too often overlooked—in shaping country’s sound. The museum’s 1,500-strong collection spans five centuries of African American music, from its West African origins via slave ships to the political roots of hip-hop.

There’s a lot of chatter about the 13 languages on this album—Ukrainian, Sicilian, Arabic, Mandarin—but your work as the conductor relies on a very different type of communication. How do you “speak” to the orchestra?

What people see of composing—the hand gestures—is like a sign language. Certain movements have certain meanings, like when you beat down, that’s the downbeat. Depending on if the music is in two or three or four, there are different patterns that the conductor does. The first job of the conductor is to keep time in that way. But then there’s a whole interpretive aspect of it where you work with musicians, you talk about what you’re doing. You talk about the sound, how you want to shape it, how you want to phrase it. There is a sort of interpretive dance going on as well, because the conductor is interpreting what they want in the music through their movement. That is the goal. Conducting an orchestra is a complicated and interesting thing to do, because there is a lot happening at once.

Is it a universal language?

The physical thing is universal, like, downbeat is always down in every part of the world. There are certain ways of working that are different based on the culture. Orchestras may respond better to certain dynamics in certain parts of the whole. But, you know, just like the written sheet music is universal, the movements are also kind of universal as well.

You’ve worked across many genres. Can you tell us about global influences and musical traditions that appear on this album?

A large part of the album goes into traditional music from Portugal or Spain, like fado or flamenco, which is not where I come from. So I can’t speak to that with any authority, although I enjoyed taking part in it. There are other things that I think are more familiar to me, for example, in “Mio Cristo piange diamanti,” which is written as an aria. When you know Italian opera, you can really hear that this is an aria, in the way it’s written. The form is really interesting. It’s not like any pop song in the way it’s built, but much more like a scene in an opera. I think that’s maybe my favorite song on the album. It’s just so wonderful and so beautiful, both the lyrics and the way she sings it.

It’s also where Roan first experienced drag herself. The story goes that Roan’s gay uncle drove Roan 160 miles from Willard to Kansas City to see her first drag show at age 18. At first, Roan was overwhelmed by the show’s vulgarity, but then she embraced it. Drag is now the basis of the Chappell Roan aesthetic–campy, vulgar, maximalist, unashamed. It was something unfamiliar in her small town of Willard. And it changed her life.

This experience sounds familiar to many Kansas City residents.

“With Kansas City folks, it’s a lot of small town gays whose gifts maybe weren’t always valued or encouraged in their small town,” says Lance Pierce, who is himself from a small town, and is now the owner of the queer bar Q Kansas City. “Then they came to Kansas City and found their people. I think that’s Chappell’s story as well.”

Pierce opened Q this past February in Kansas City’s Westport neighborhood. While Q has all the sparkly glitz you’d expect in a fun queer bar, it also has elements that feel designed to comfort the anxious. There are no mirrors, save for those in the bathrooms, as well as a debrief room meant for clubgoers to be able to collect themselves in a quiet space that is not also a bathroom. “As fabulous as the gay community is, it can be very overwhelming to feel like you’re performing all the time,” says Pierce. “Everyone can use a breather.”

It’s easy to imagine places like Q or Hamburger Mary’s making it easier for someone who grew up isolated from a queer community to blossom here in the presence of one. Someone, for instance, like Roan—who in 2023 told the Springfield News-Leader, “My whole goal with this whole thing is to give kids in the Midwest who don’t have a queer space to go to, maybe my show can be that and they can dress up and feel safe and know that everyone else is dressing up with them and their queer friends are around them.”