When Cher created some memorable live-TV chaos by forgetting to present Record of the Year at the 68th annual Grammy Awards Sunday night, executive producer Ben Winston immediately spoke into host Trevor Noah‘s earpiece. ”You’ve just gotta get up and bring her back,” Winston recalls telling Noah, who grabbed a microphone and explained the situation. Cher made her way back to the stage, only to announce the winner as Luther Vandross, who died in 2005. “I promise you, we had briefed her, and I promise you, what she had to do was in the prompter,” says Winston, who enjoyed the mess. “If I could go back in time, I’d want that to happen again. She’s happy with it. She had a great time. You want a bit of anarchy.”
In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Winston goes deep on the making of this year’s jam-packed Grammy Awards and its many superstar performances. To hear the entire podcast episode, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above. Some highlights follow:
Justin Bieber didn’t need much time to rehearse his performance. Each Grammy performer gets 90 minutes of rehearsals, but Bieber was happy with his self-looped performance of “Yukon” after a single run-through .”He came to the stage, he did it once,” says Winston. “It was brilliant. We are seven minutes into his hour and a half rehearsal. And he goes, ‘How’d it look to you? You happy with it?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, my God. It looked beautiful. I loved it.’ And he went, ‘Okay, fantastic. See you Sunday!’” Bieber started to leave; Winston asked him to do it once more so the camera operators could at least learn the song. He obliged, and that was it — 15 minutes total. Biebs’ shirtless look wasn’t necessarily planned out, Winston adds: “I don’t think he decided what the outfit would be until he walked on stage.”
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Lady Gaga flew in from Japan the morning before the show, which left no time to rehearse with dancers — a situation that inspired the show’s minimalist, band-focused performance, with a hard-hitting rearrangement of “Abracadabra” from producer Andrew Watt. “If she’d been in L.A. it would’ve been a hundred dancers and this big thing,” Winston says. “But actually it drove this creative that was so amazing. There was one point a few weeks before the show that we thought we might have to lose her from the show, ’cause she just was like, ‘I just don’t see how I can.’ So it was amazing that not only did she do it, but I think she brought one of the most iconic performances. I think she was really proud of that performance because it was so from her and her team’s genius mind.” Her under-mask close-ups were captured with a camera on a robotic arm, which may have been a first for an awards show.
The show’s producers decided to embrace the fact that Bad Bunny couldn’t perform. The NFL’s exclusivity window meant Bad Bunny was barred from performing within weeks of his halftime show. Winston’s solution: own it. “Trevor and I were on a FaceTime a few weeks ago and we were sort of one-upping each other with ideas,” he says. They landed on having Noah goad Bad Bunny from the floor while a marching band played his music around him. “Maybe he did break his contract,” Winston jokes. “But who cares? It was great fun.”
Bruno Mars rearranged “APT” days before the show. The opening number was originally planned as the studio version of the Rosé collaboration, but when Winston sat with Mars and his band the Hooligans during rehearsals, Mars played him a new arrangement. “He was like, ‘If it’s a Grammy’s open, I don’t think we should go like the pop version. I think it should have a bit more aggression, a bit more energy.’”
Sabrina Carpenter’s live bird was a last-minute addition. The dove wasn’t part of Friday’s rehearsal. “Eric Cook, who’s our amazing co-EP, came to me and said, ‘How would you feel about a request from Sabrina Carpenter’s team that she’d like to add a live bird to the performance?’” Winston recalls. “At that stage, when you’re dealing with everything… you’re just a bit like, ‘Sure. Add it.’”
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Lauryn Hill took charge of her In Memoriam tribute. The 11-minute performance honoring D’Angelo and Roberta Flack was far more ambitious than originally planned —Winston had imagined Hill simply playing her D’Angelo collaboration “Nothing Even Matters” into “Killing Me Softly.” “The original ask was four, four and a half minutes,” Winston says. “She came back with, ‘I’ll do it, but I want to pay real tribute to these two icons.’” Hill reached out to the performers, organized the arrangements, and insisted on a poignant shot of D’Angelo’s abandoned keyboard. She also was “genuinely early, every time.”
The Best New Artist medley went from five performers last year to eight this year — and Winston isn’t eager to do it again. The show’s most technically demanding sequence featured all eight Best New Artist nominees performing back-to-back, moving throughout the arena with no breaks. “I think we’ve got away with it technically — I’m not convinced we can do it again,” says Winston, who is thinking of breaking the medley into two segments next year. “We are an inch away from it not working. Maybe it’s not worth taking the risk.”
Winston says artists weren’t discouraged from talking about politics in their speeches. “These are beautiful, creative people who feel things,” Winston says. “Their job is to feel things and make you feel something. It would be odd if they went up on stage and said, ‘I wanna thank the sound engineer, I wanna thank my publicist… Of course they’re gonna have something to say. That’s why they’re artists.”
Winston literally shrugged when asked about Donald Trump’s threat to sue Trevor Noah. Noah joked during the broadcast that Trump wants Greenland because he misses Epstein Island, prompting the president to call the show “virtually unwatchable” and threaten legal action on the basis that he never visited the island. “I dunno,” Winston says.
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Winston says finding a new host will be difficult — and he’s not sure a traditional stand-up comedian would work. Trevor Noah is departing after six years, and Winston is uncertain about the path forward. “It’s really hard in that room to play comedy — it’s an arena,” he says.
Harry Styles didn’t know about the “Where’s My Husband” meme until Winston told him about it. When Styles came out to present Album of the Year, Raye’s “Where’s My Husband” played — a nod to the way fans have been using the song over clips of Styles. “It was going really viral a couple of weeks ago,” Winston says. “I sent him a few of the videos and we had a laugh about it.”
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