At the 2021 Grammys, Beyoncé picked up four awards, bringing her total to 28 and making her the winningest woman in Grammy history.
At the 2023 ceremony, she will have nine chances to add to her total: The 41-year-old star is the top nominee for the 65th annual Grammy Awards, with all but one of her nods coming for her dance-heavy album “Renaissance.”
She leads a pack that includes Kendrick Lamar, with eight nominations; Adele and Brandi Carlile, with seven apiece; and Harry Styles, Mary J. Blige, Future, DJ Khaled and the producer and songwriter The-Dream, with six each, the Recording Academy announced on Tuesday.
The awards will be held on Feb. 5 at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles (the former Staples Center) in what the academy is hoping will be its return to something like normal operating procedure after two years of delays and complications caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Beyoncé’s nominations are in each of the three big all-genre categories — album of the year, plus record and song of the year for her single “Break My Soul” — as well as in the dance/electronic field and in R&B, where her tracks “Virgo’s Groove” (R&B performance), “Plastic Off the Sofa” (traditional R&B performance) and “Cuff It” (R&B song) were all recognized. She is also up for best song written for visual media for “Be Alive,” from the film “King Richard.”
Those bring Beyoncé to a career total of 88 nominations — tying Jay-Z, her husband, for the most received by any artist in the history of the awards. (Jay-Z, who had held the record with 83 nods, got five more this year, for contributions to “Renaissance” and DJ Khaled’s “God Did.”)
If Beyoncé takes three awards in February, she will match the classical conductor Georg Solti for the most Grammy wins by any artist. (She is already tied for second place in that race, with Quincy Jones.)
Despite the shower of nominations Beyoncé has received over the years, going back to her time in Destiny’s Child two decades ago, she has won only once in any of the four most prestigious categories: as a credited songwriter of “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” which took song of the year in 2010. Every other victory has been in down-ballot genre fields.
In what is sure to be one of the night’s major story lines, Beyoncé will once again face Adele in multiple contests, including album of the year (“Renaissance” vs. Adele’s “30”) and both record and song of the year (“Break My Soul” vs. “Easy on Me”).
The two women, both titans of contemporary pop with ardent fan bases, last squared off at the 2017 Grammys. That year, Adele’s “25” beat Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” in a closely watched contest for album of the year that fed into longtime complaints that the awards often fail to recognize Black musicians in the most prominent categories. Accepting the award, a tearful Adele said, “I’m very grateful and gracious, but my artist of my life is Beyoncé.”
This year’s other nominees for album of the year include Lamar, for “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers,” his return after five years; Styles’s “Harry’s House”; Lizzo’s “Special”; Carlile’s “In These Silent Days”; Mary J. Blige’s “Good Morning Gorgeous” (in its “deluxe” edition); Coldplay’s “Music of the Spheres”; Abba’s “Voyage,” the Swedish foursome’s first new album in 40 years; and Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti.”
“Un Verano,” a streaming blockbuster and the year’s best-selling album so far, is the first release performed entirely in Spanish to be up for album of the year. Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican star, is the top nominee at the Latin Grammys on Thursday, with 10.
For record of the year, which goes to the artists, producers and engineers behind a single track, “Break My Soul” and “Easy on Me” will compete against Styles’s “As It Was”; Lizzo’s “About Damn Time”; Doja Cat’s “Woman”; Lamar’s “The Heart Part 5”; Carlile’s “You and Me on the Rock,” featuring Lucius; Abba’s “Don’t Shut Me Down”; Blige’s “Good Morning Gorgeous; and “Bad Habit,” the breakout hit by the 24-year-old singer and guitarist Steve Lacy, who built his reputation as an innovator on the fringes of alternative R&B.
“Break My Soul,” “Easy on Me,” “As It Was,” “About Damn Time,” “Bad Habit” and “The Heart Part 5” are also up for song of the year, a songwriters’ award, along with Gayle’s “Abcdefu”; Bonnie Raitt’s “Just Like That”; DJ Khaled’s “God Did”; and Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well (10 Minute Version),” an expansion of a track that originally appeared on Swift’s 2012 album “Red,” which she rereleased as a fresh recording last years.
Source: New York Times