concert

It’s easy to get caught up in the idea that good gifts require you to break the bank. Don’t fall for that trap.

Great gifts don’t require deep pockets; they require you be intentional and to pay close attention.

Is your best friend obsessed with making their home smell good? Consider gifting them premium incense sticks that have been hand-rolled in a nearly 200-year-old shop in Kyoto, Japan. Does your little brother go to concerts every weekend? Give him a pair of earplugs that not only look stylish, but protect his hearing. Does your boyfriend love trying new hot sauces? Get him a bottle of El Chilito, which is a sister-owned, family-run brand.

On this Gift Guide list, you’ll find gifts that are $40 and under (not including shipping costs) for everyone on your list because it’s intentionality and thoughtfulness that count.

Editor’s note: If you make a purchase using some of our links, the L.A. Times may be compensated. Prices and availability are subject to change. In some cases, listed websites may use location-based pricing.

What’s the opposite of a victory lap?

One answer arrived this year in the form of “Music, Fashion, Film,” Charli XCX’s bracing follow-up to 2024’s Grammy-winning “Brat.” An emotionally complicated dance-pop album about the relationship between power and vulnerability, “Brat” struck a nerve in a weird cultural moment and finally brought Charli the kind of stardom she’d been openly seeking for ages. In the LP’s immediate aftermath, the English musician hungrily scooped up the spoils of her success — playing Coachella’s main stage, starring in a highbrow mockumentary, soundtracking Hollywood’s latest take on “Wuthering Heights.”

Yet “Music, Fashion, Film” wonders what it all meant. It’s a digitally enhanced rock record — probably 2026’s best thing-with-guitar — that cycles through thoughts on ambition and trend-chasing before landing with a moving sense of serenity on the idea that everybody dies and takes their accomplishments with them.

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“No One Lasts Forever” is the album’s final track, and Sunday night that was also Charli’s closer at Inglewood’s Kia Forum, where she headlined the second of two shows over the weekend.

Structurally, the concert bookended songs from “Brat” (for which she was accompanied by prerecorded tracks) with stuff from “Music, Fashion, Film” (for which a scuzzy live band backed her up). There were stray oldies too, including “Constant Repeat,” which she introduced as one of the first songs she wrote about her husband, George Daniel — “even though it’s not exactly truthful,” she added — and the landmark hyperpop cut “Vroom Vroom.”

She also did “House,” a spooky goth-folk song from “Wuthering Heights” that had her writhing on the stage in the white-hot heat of a single spotlight — a sex kitten turned scream queen (or perhaps vice versa). And she brought out Adéla, the Slovakian singer famously booted from the reality show that created Katseye, to do her viral hit “Nicole Kidman,” which is just one of a handful of rough-edged pop hits this year that demonstrate “Brat’s” lasting influence.

Indeed, what was illuminating about the middle of the show — basically a half-hour-long club night with strobes cranked happily to here’s-the-seizure-you-ordered — was seeing how very un-tired Charli’s fans are of being pulverized by songs like “Club Classics,” for which she donned her Superman’s-cape sunglasses, and “Guess,” during which pairs of underwear rained down on the audience in a nod to the music video for the song’s remix with Billie Eilish.

Charli had opened with the new album’s “Rock Music,” in which she declares that “the dance floor is dead”; here, her sarcasm fooled precisely nobody.

My favorite part was the home stretch of tunes from “Music, Fashion, Film”: “Camera,” a startlingly frank confession of her movie-star aspirations; “Magic Metal Montana,” a deeply tender ode to her friend and collaborator A.G. Cook; “SS26,” a jittery electro-punk jam about “walking on a runway that goes straight to hell.”

I love the strange emotion in these songs — the feeling that you might as well say what you want because the only thing more embarrassing than taking a risk is not taking one.

At some point, Charli lit up a cigarette and waved it around like someone who’d discovered a critical truth. What were they gonna do — make her end the concert early?

Define early; better yet, define late.

“For me, performance can’t be everything,” Miley Cyrus declared on Friday night, and you had to admire her choice of setting: onstage at the Hollywood Bowl in front of approximately 18,000 people who’d turned up precisely to see her perform.

A star since her teenage days on the Disney Channel’s “Hannah Montana,” the 33-year-old musician and actor was maybe half an hour into the first of two sold-out concerts at the iconic hillside amphitheater — a place close to Cyrus’ heart, as she explained in a videotaped intro recalling a gig she and her fiancé, Maxx Morando, caught last year by the French band Air.

“I step into wine, which soaks onto my boots,” she said in the dramatic black-and-white clip. “I don’t mind stained leather — it only adds to their character.”

Cyrus’ shows were billed as part of the rollout of her latest album, “Bass Persuades,” which came out in September (and which found her dropping her last name to go simply by Miley). Yet the two-night engagement is really meant to mark her grand return to the stage after she said a few years ago that she’d sworn off touring because it was too harmful to her mental health.

Is “grand” the right word for a comeback as equivocal as this one? Despite all the hype surrounding this weekend’s concerts, Cyrus spoke again and again Friday about how much less space for performance she has in her life these days than she used to; she talked repeatedly about her quest to balance her fans’ emotional needs with her own.

At one point, after singing a couple of numbers on a small B-stage about halfway up the bowl, she walked through the crowd back to the main stage, gripping and grinning the entire way. Then she described the toll her trip had just taken: “I appreciate each of you guys reaching out and touching me, and me getting to feel you. But I do want to say — it is a lot for me,” she said. “It is a little bit overwhelming.”

In an era of parasocial pop stardom, the radical honesty of Cyrus’ approach — her clear-eyed appraisal of the relationship that binds an idol and her audience — was kind of a thrill to behold. The problem was that her singing for the most part wasn’t.

As she described being overwhelmed, her band slowly revved up her song “Wrecking Ball.” It’s one of the great power ballads of the last 25 years, with a chorus as cathartic as any in modern pop; Cyrus, the showbiz lifer, surely understood the payoff she was building toward. Except when the moment arrived, she inexplicably dodged it, skipping the song’s first chorus and soft-pedaling the second — an anticlimax for the ages.

Indeed, Cyrus let the audience and her backup singers handle vocals for many of her biggest hits, among them “The Climb,” “Party in the U.S.A.” and “We Can’t Stop”; during that last one, she twerked for a second, evoking memories of the infamous 2013 MTV performance that briefly scandalized a nation.

She sang more heartily in songs from “Bass Persuades,” which would’ve been better news if that tuneless mishmash of bleary synths and dated club beats weren’t one of the year’s least likable pop records. (This month Variety reported that, after debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, the album took the biggest fall in chart history in its second week of release.)

The paradox of Cyrus’ career at this stage is that she wants to do the thing that nobody wants her to do — “Bass Persuades” is just the latest in a string of crummy LPs — and doesn’t want to do the thing that everybody wants her to do. Truly, her bad taste should be studied: On Friday, she welcomed Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips to the B-stage for a duet on “Karen Don’t Be Sad,” from the miserable psych-rock record they made together in 2015. Naturally, Cyrus said it was her favorite of her albums.

One highlight of the show was Cyrus’ tribute to her late godmother, Dolly Parton, whom she memorialized with a rendition of “Jolene” and with a funny and touching account of the time Parton tried unsuccessfully to get Cyrus to sing with her at the Bowl.

I also found myself moved near the end of the night by Cyrus’ performance of the only keeper on “Bass Persuades” — a dreamy little love song called “Let’s Get Married” for which Morando joined her onstage. As he played drums, she ran her hand tenderly over his chest before laying her head on his shoulder; the moment reminded me of that goofy intro video about the Air concert, which she likened to a bubble containing only the two of them.

“That’s how it feels when we’re together,” she said. “I think I’d live in that bubble.”

MILEY Cyrus broke down in tears on stage at the Hollywood Bowl as she paid an emotional tribute to her late “aunt” Dolly Parton.

The Wrecking Ball hitmaker, 33, halted proceedings at the Los Angeles venue for a heart-wrenching monologue in which she said she and the country music icon are “eternal”.

Miley, who rebranded herself with a new name after Dolly’s tragic passing, aged 80, in August, took to the stage for her Bass Persuades gig.

Just five songs in, she took a seat and referred to the I Will Always Love You singer’s death and said: “Me and Dolly, we are eternal.

“Nothing in this life could ever tear us apart.

“And I am going to see her again, and I can’t f**king wait because I miss her,” before dabbing her eye with a tissue.

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Disney Channel alum Miley added: “Some of the greatest music that we have today was written, produced, performed by my aunt Dolly.

“This is one of those songs,” before the band started to play Jolene as the sixth song in her set.

One fan confessed on TikTok: “Now I’m crying”.

Another put: “Miley was the first person I thought of when I heard about Dolly”.

A third added: “And now I’m bawling over Dolly Parton again”.

Miley kicked off her 18-track show with song Orbit, and wrapped with Flowers.

Fan favourites The Climb, We Can’t Stop and Party In The USA also featured.

After dolly’s passing, she said she no longer wants fans to call her by her full moniker and revealed the change on social media.

She now appears to have dropped “Cyrus” completely from her stage name.

Dolly sadly passed after battling health issues.

Miley later penned a heartfelt tribute to her “Aunt Dolly” on Instagram, saying that the late singer “would want me to feel it, write a song about it, and then continue on and be strong.”

Dolly had first gotten close to Miley’s father, Billy Ray Cyrus, 65, after the success of his 1992 country hit, Achy Breaky Heart.

The pair toured together that same year, and Billy asked the I Will Always Love You hitmaker to be Miley’s godmother.

Rumors have circulated that Dolly, who did not have children of her own, left behind the rights and royalties of her hit track, Jolene, to Miley.

However, The U.S. Sun confirmed that no court filings related to Dolly’s will or official plans for what will happen to her $650 million fortune have been made yet.

It is unclear when Billy Joel will perform again.

The 77-year-old singer has to take “a series of tests” before being able to tour again, he told the Hollywood Reporter in a health update following his 2025 brain disorder diagnosis.

“I’m not allowed to drive,” Joel said in the interview published Thursday. “And I can’t do performances because what the neurologist told me, every time you do a show, it’s like you’re getting a concussion.”

Joel canceled concerts in May 2025 after revealing two months before that he had a brain disorder known as normal pressure hydrocephalus, or NPH, which causes physical and mental issues.

“This condition has been exacerbated by recent concert performances, leading to problems with hearing, vision and balance,” Joel said in a statement on his Instagram in May 2025. “Under his doctor’s instructions, Billy is undergoing specific physical therapy and has been advised to refrain from performing during this recovery period.”

NPH is a brain disorder in which excess cerebrospinal fluid accumulates in the brain’s ventricles, according to the Alzheimer’s Assn. It can cause cognitive issues, difficulty walking and the loss of bladder control. Those suffering with NPH often walk with a wide stance and their bodies bent forward as if they were trying to maintain balance on a boat — a feeling that Joel described while on Bill Maher’s podcast “Club Random” on July 21, 2025.

Other symptoms include mild dementia that involves short-term memory loss, a lack of interest in daily activities and difficulty completing routine tasks.

NPH is one of the few causes of dementia that can be controlled or reversed with surgical treatment, usually involving the placement of a shunt.

It is unclear whether Joel underwent the procedure, although the “Uptown Girl” singer initially postponed his concerts in March 2025 after undergoing unspecified surgery and physical therapy.

The surgery took place just weeks after the crooner lost his balance on Feb. 22, 2025, while performing “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Conn.; however, it is unclear if the tumble and subsequent surgery were at all related to the NPH diagnosis he revealed to the public that May.

For now, Joel reports that he is “OK” and the diagnosis is “not that serious,” per his THR interview. Neurologists have warned the singer, however, about the risks involved in performing, including that the lighting and sound can cause stress in the body.

“And [neurologists] said, ‘Well, you really shouldn’t be doing that right now.’ So they have to test me further to see if I can go back and do performing again, which I would like to be able to do,” he said.

Times staff writer Alexandra Del Rosario and former assistant editor Christie D’Zurilla contributed to this report.

Halfway through her very sold-out concert Tuesday night at the Greek Theatre, Ella Langley pulled up a stool near the front of the stage and told us she wanted to “be kind of normal for a second, if that’s all right witcha.”

Life has been pretty un-normal lately for the 27-year-old country singer from small-town Alabama, whose smash “Choosin’ Texas” set a new record last month for the longest stay of all time atop Billboard’s Hot 100. The chart achievement only bolstered talk that Langley is due to clean up when Grammy Award nominations are announced next month — welcome chatter, no doubt, for a striver who grew up, as she said at the Greek, determined to get exactly where she’s gotten.

Yet Langley’s success has brought with it some darkness, including accusations from armchair experts on social media that “Choosin’ Texas” — a monster hit that people keep saying they’ve never heard — owes its impressive stats to an act of record-biz chicanery. More ominously, Langley called off a concert in Oklahoma last week due to what she called a “serious security threat.”

Then former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem got involved in Langley’s business when she tried in a tweet to pit the singer against Kacey Musgraves after Musgraves hosted the Senate hopeful James Talarico at a show in Dallas. (Langley, who’s been circumspect about voicing her political opinions, appeared to un-tag herself from Noem’s post, which is objectively hilarious.)

So you could empathize with Langley — empathize more than with other country singers longing for the good ol’ days — as she straightened up on that stool to do “Somethin’ Simple,” a winsome ditty from this year’s double-platinum “Dandelion” LP. “While I’m living the dream,” she sang, “all I’m dreaming about is slowing down just a little.”

This acoustic section of Tuesday’s gig, the first of two at the Greek, was by far the best part of the night; Langley also brought out her two openers for a pair of stripped-down duets in “Dreams,” the deathless Fleetwood Mac classic, which she sang with Laci Kaye Booth, and “Strangers,” her soulful power ballad with Kameron Marlowe, who gladly disregarded that unspoken rule about not showing up the headliner who hired you.

Loose, chatty, surrounded by friends and bandmates, Langley here was just a musician playing music; I can’t say whether she attained the normalcy she said she was looking for, though I’d buy that this is more or less what she gets up to on the back porch she sings about missing in “Somethin’ Simple.”

The problem with the rest of the concert — the parts with the lights and the videos and the goofy stage business involving a guy with a keytar and a cigarette — was that it demanded a level of star power that Langley simply doesn’t possess (or anyway isn’t interested in deploying).

On record, she summons a coolly detached quality that plays intriguingly against arrangements lush with romantic pedal steel; there’s something hard to pin down about the emotion of tunes like “Be Her” and “Choosin’ Texas,” in which the narrator sounds almost alienated from her own heartbreak.

If somebody wants to make a case that Langley’s beautifully dead-eyed love songs represent the purest embodiment of Gen Z’s post-pandemic social dysfunction — well, I’m all ears. (Great look too: very Linda Ronstadt meets Stevie Nicks.)

But onstage the lack of affect just felt flat, not least when she’d dole out the kind of canned banter between songs that would make anyone resent the mechanics of stardom. The performance posed an interesting question: How much (or how little) charisma is required to support a branding infrastructure as robust as Langley’s? At the Greek there were ads for her jeans and her sunglasses and her energy drink, and there were more merch stands than I’ve ever seen at the venue. Every one of them was jammed.