After tiring of writing about herself, the British singer-songwriter asked the public to share stories to inspire her music – and they responded in their thousands

‘This project has changed my whole thinking,” Thea Gilmore says of her new endeavour, The Echo Line. “What am I getting from it? All of humanity.” Disillusioned with the numbers-chasing music industry and wanting a break from her personal songwriting after releasing 22 folk-orientated albums since 1998, the 46-year-old is “putting people back at the centre of it. I’ve said enough about me.”

Community building has been key to the Oxford singer-songwriter’s work since debut Burning Dorothy, released when she was just 18, through to her 00s breakthrough albums Avalanche and Harpo’s Ghost all the way to her most recent studio album, 2023’s Thea Gilmore: a body of work that has won Gilmore admiration from Bruce Springsteen, Richard Thompson and collaborator Joan Baez.

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© Photograph: Carsten Windhorst

© Photograph: Carsten Windhorst

© Photograph: Carsten Windhorst

3Arena, Dublin
Several unannounced guests feature on the first European date of the rapper’s sold-out benefit tour, including video messages from Mark Ruffalo and Cynthia Nixon

“We’d like to thank Ed Sheeran for organising this concert,” offers a member of Kneecap, one of several unannounced guests who have turned up for the first European date of Macklemore’s Free Palestine tour. It’s a characteristically two-fisted approach to the matter in hand from a band who have seldom shied away from controversy, but it has more than a grain of truth in it.

The events of the last six weeks are quite something, and perhaps not what Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, had in mind when he led efforts to pressurise Sheeran to remove Macklemore from his summer US tour, after the rapper made a speech about Palestine on stage at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium. Macklemore was duly removed from the tour, but the rapper saw his profile rise dramatically as a result – in fairness, he was hardly unknown, but his biggest hits are a decade old – while every other artist on Sheeran’s tour quit in solidarity. Sheeran’s tour limped on amid much opprobrium, while Macklemore was able to translate the publicity into a tour of his own, in noticeably bigger venues than he played on his last European tour, with proceeds donated to organisations assisting Palestinians. Dublin’s 13,000-capacity 3Arena is sold out, as is every other date on the tour.

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© Photograph: Zoe Rain

© Photograph: Zoe Rain

© Photograph: Zoe Rain

Carnegie Hall, New York
After winning over gen Z, the cult indie rocker makes the historic venue swoon with introspective anthems and a Michael Jackson cover

More than 68 years after Leonard Bernstein’s first-ever Young People’s Concert, Carnegie Hall was yet again overrun with youthful energy on Sunday night. The occasion was the first of two sold-out performances from gap-toothed indie-pop scion Mac DeMarco, whose adoringly parasocial cross-genre fanbase has been one of the few in 2010s indie to continue an increasingly aged-down trajectory. There was many a parental chaperone next to their beaming teens, while a group of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed post-adolescents sitting behind me – having travelled all the way from Wisconsin for the occasion – audibly Googled: “Where to find Mac DeMarco after the concert” and quizzed each other on whether they’d lay a smooch on The 1975’s devilish frontman Matty Healy if given a chance.

“I can’t believe how fancy this place is for Mac,” one of them marveled – and it has indeed been a strange trajectory for DeMarco, who emerged from the shores of Vancouver in the early 2010s resembling a party-hardy modern-day Pigpen and with an aural suitcase stuffed with lovely guitar-warbles, stained with nicotine and carrying the faint stink of cheap brew. His early live sets were equally prone to Limp Bizkit covers and spontaneous audience makeout sessions; the 2014 docu-short Pepperoni Playboy was replete with scenes of new-indie-money dirtbag opulence, as DeMarco and his ragtag group drank champagne out of lobster shells and went cliff-diving amid a nonstop tour schedule.

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© Photograph: Adela Loconte

© Photograph: Adela Loconte

© Photograph: Adela Loconte

From Wichita Lineman to MacArthur Park, he penned masterpieces. As the great hit-maker resurrects his lost songs, he recalls writing for giants – and the night Richard Harris stripped off and disappeared

‘Flat for 50 miles,” recalls Jimmy Webb, remembering the desolate stretch of Oklahoma that inspired his classic song, Wichita Lineman. “Nothing out there except endless railroad tracks and telephone poles. Then suddenly there’s a guy at the top of one of the poles. He’s got his phone, he’s talking to somebody and then … whoosh! He goes by. I never saw him again, but I never forgot him.”

Webb immortalised the unknown telephone worker’s solitude (and imagined conversation with a distant lover) with a 1968 smash hit for Glen Campbell. “But you wouldn’t believe what some people thought it was about,” chuckles the songwriter, now a chatty, self-effacing 80-year-old, video-calling from his kitchen in Long Island. “One guy who wrote to me thought it was about a football lineman, and a woman thought the young man in the song gets electrocuted because ‘the Wichita lineman is still on the line’.”

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© Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images

© Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images

© Photograph: Michael Putland/Getty Images

Spotify told investors its rollout of QR code verification to ensure Family Plan members live in the same household is not a "crackdown," just a routine improvement.

Meanwhile, Madonna wins seven awards and British singer Sienna Spiro named Best New Artist