mood

Lil Nas X says he feels “less fear in my heart” as he opens up about receiving treatment for bipolar disorder and moving forward from the mental health episode that landed him in hot water with law officials last year.

The Grammy winner (real name Montero Lamar Hill) addressed last year’s events in a video Wednesday morning on Instagram. Lil Nas X, 27, informed fans that he has been in a rehab program “for a few months,” spending time with family in Atlanta and with friends in Los Angeles. Since last year’s incident, the singer said he has been focused on “trying to ground myself down to Earth and get out of my head.”

Lil Nas X was hospitalized and arrested in August after he was seen strolling in only his underwear and white boots through Studio City, eventually shedding those items as the night progressed. The singer received treatment at a nearby hospital for a possible overdose but was accused of assaulting police officers.

He was charged with four felony counts: three counts of battery with injury on a police officer and one count of resisting an executive officer. Police accused the singer of assaulting the officers who were trying to take him into custody. Lil Nas X pleaded not guilty to all those counts.

In Wednesday’s video, Lil Nas X explained that he has also started seeing a therapist and psychiatrist to help address his mental condition — one he initially refused to accept. The singer, smiling and standing against a blue sky in his video, told fans that he was hesitant to take medication that would help address his bipolar disorder and joked that living with mental illness would add more to his plate: “I mean I’m already Black and gay…I’m like already living life on extreme hard mode.”

According to the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance, bipolar disorder is a treatable mental health condition marked by extreme changes in mood, thought, energy and behavior. Manic episodes, marked by elevated changes in mood or behavior, are a symptom of the condition. People with a bipolar disorder diagnosis more commonly experience depressive episodes.

Lil Nas X spoke candidly about his diagnosis months after a Los Angeles judge in April granted the “Industry Baby” and “Old Town Road” singer’s motion for diversion, ordering the musician to enter a two-year mental health program. TMZ reported at the time that the musician would be cleared of his four felony counts if he complies with treatment and commits no other crimes.

The singer assured fans on Wednesday: “I’m doing better, I’m feeling better, I’m creating freely and there’s less fear in my heart and I’m just like smelling the roses.”

He also reflected on his career thus far — he quickly ascended to fame in 2019 with his viral hit “Old Town Road” — and teased that new music is on the way. Lil Nas X concluded his video by thanking fans for their support and for “holding it down.”

“I love you, and all I wanna do is continue to try to make you proud and make myself proud,” he said. “Let’s go dreamboy, let’s go.”

“The Listeners,” which premieres Friday on Starz, began unusually as a story written by Jordan Tannahill as the basis of Missy Mazzoli‘s 2022 opera, also called “The Listeners” (libretto by Royce Vavrek), which he turned into a 2021 novel, which became a 2024 BBC television series, also written by Tannahill. Starz has cut its original four episodes into five, which means that they end in odd places, but given its controlled, glacial pace, shorter might be better.

Tannahill’s inspiration is an unexplained phenomenon reported in the real world — though exactly how real it is is open to interpretation — generally called “the hum,” where people experience a low but persistent background noise inaudible to others. (It isn’t tinnitus, or any diagnosable medical condition.) One such sufferer is Claire (Rebecca Hall), a high school literature teacher with a husband, Paul (Prasanna Puwanarajah) and a teenage daughter, Ashley (Mia Tharia), with whom she gets along well. We begin on an up note, Claire and Ashley singing along to Richard and Linda Thompson’s “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight” as they drive to school (she also has Nick Drake on her phone). And then the 1970s British folk rock gives way to a less pleasant auditory landscape, as the hum appears, bringing on headaches and nosebleeds and affecting her concentration and mood, her work and family.

Any condition can be isolating from those who don’t share it, and Claire gets some relief when she’s approached by a student, Kyle (Ollie West), who also hears it. They go investigating possible sources of the sound — wind turbines, a radio telescope — and wind up eventually at something like a support group for hum-hearers run by Omar (Amr Waked) and Jo (Gayle Rankin). There is some sketchiness in their past, including a changed identity, and they like to keep the group on a tight rein, but the breathing exercises and visualizations seem pretty standard, and more benign than, say Scientology, and the suggestion that one may tame an affliction by embracing it is pretty reasonable. Claire’s mistake here is not to get a signed parental permission slip, as it were, or enlist a chaperone, and her growing closeness with Kyle (not romantic, not sexual we are assured) will cause them trouble, cost Claire her job and mess up her marriage. She makes some insufficiently careful decisions, but those around her tend to overreact. This is very much a story about listening and not listening.

Directed by Janicza Bravo and photographed with great intention by Jody Lee Lipes, it has the studied look and tempo of a 20th-century art film. (It is always great to look at.) I was reminded of Antonioni’s “Red Desert” and Bergman’s “Persona,” psychological studies of women going to pieces, but also, thematically, of Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” with its characters driven to what looks like madness by private bulletins from the ether, pushing them away from family and toward others who are getting the same message. No aliens here — not a spoiler — though I might have liked that ending more than this, which in its own way seems to drop from space.

You can look for metaphors and social comment here — there are references to conspiracy theories and industrial noise pollution and such — but it seems to me to operate most effectively as a beautifully rendered mood piece and character study, and, certainly in the case of Hall, whose story this is, a platform for some exquisitely subtle acting.