【Announcement】 As this marks the end of our group activities, please bear with me for a slightly longer message. My heart raced as I dedicated myself entirely to this group for two and a half years, prioritising it above all else. I was thrilled to be able to tell people, "I'm an artist." I caused my family so much trouble, constantly leaving for practice. I was utterly absorbed. I never skipped a single day; I truly loved BLACK DIAMOND. However, I have decided to part ways here. No matter how sincerely one approaches things, sometimes one's attitude or manner of involvement can be perceived in unexpected ways. Precisely because I felt there was still more I could do, there were moments that made me reflect on how I should be. Within any environment or situation, everyone holds slightly different perspectives. Precisely because of this, I resolved to accept everything and let go. I cannot say much more at present, but I hope conclusions and outcomes will emerge in the future ahead. For me, words are important in the sense of lyrics; they can become someone's hope for living, or they can be something that breaks things. 　 The songs I wish to sing are songs that can liberate someone's suffering, songs that can appeal to the world's injustices. In this era, a woman who can clearly express her own will is my ideal, and the artist I aspire to be. I want to decide my own way of life and my own message. Dreaming is also about facing reality head-on. It was my fans, colleagues, friends, and family who made me realise this. To guide this one life towards the form of happiness I believe in, I resolved to move on to the next stage. The slightly expensive red suitcase I'd bought new for overseas travel remained there, brand new. It felt as though God had told me to pack my nearly twenty years of passion for music into that suitcase and set off down a different path. To all the fans who came with such fervent passion, To my family who supported me, To my friends who cheered me on, To all the kind-hearted professionals who stood by me, To the members and teachers who shared the stage with me, honing our skills together – Each and every one of you was my most precious treasure. Thank you so very much. I would be delighted if you could support my new endeavours too.

Music helped open my narrow perspective on life & turned my world into 3D color. It changed my life & it’s important for me to pay that forward, which is what I’m doing with my Firework Foundation + Camp Firework, but barely 1 in 5 CA schools has a music/arts program.

Music has always been an important part of my life, and I think it’s safe to say that the same is true for @Springsteen. In this episode, we talked about the songs that’ve made a difference for us—and Bruce even brought out the guitar. Listen on @Spotify: 

When @Aaron_Dessner came into my life, I was ushered into his world of free-flowing creativity where you don’t overthink, you just make music. A song we wrote for his project @BRMadjv (which also features ⚡️Justin Vernon✨) is out! It’s called Renegade.

I have never been an FBI agent. Never conducted an investigation. Never worn a wire or served a warrant or spent a winter in a field office where the heating runs four hours behind the interrogation schedule. I was a congressional staffer. Then a political appointee. Then a different kind of political appointee. Then the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which is also a kind of political appointee, except the furniture is nicer and the jet is mine. I run the building. I would like to tell you about the jet. It seats fourteen. It costs sixty million dollars. The interior was refurbished during the Bush administration and the procurement file describes the upholstery as "heritage cognac." I know this because I requested the file. Not for oversight purposes. I wanted to know the name of the color so I could describe it at dinner. Heritage cognac. It smells like a law firm that has never lost. I spend a lot of time in that smell now. I think it is the smell of having arrived somewhere that was never meant for you, and noticing that nobody has asked you to leave. Washington to Philadelphia is a hundred and forty miles. Amtrak runs it for forty-nine dollars. I flew the Gulfstream on May 10th because Alexis wanted to see George Strait. The suite was thirty-five thousand. Maybe fifty. I don't track numbers below six figures. The flight crew stayed on past eleven. Overtime. Security too. Someone will calculate the cost per mile of flying a sixty-million-dollar aircraft to cover a distance shorter than most Uber rides. That someone will not be me. I was in the suite. The suite didn't have a calculator. It had George Strait. The Bureau told reporters Alexis was "an invited guest of the performers." Representatives for George Strait and Chris Stapleton did not confirm this. They were never going to. But the FBI said it, and under my leadership, when the FBI says something, that is the evidentiary standard. I run the building. The building said it. It's true. Her protection detail is where the budget gets interesting. Twenty-four-seven coverage. SWAT-certified agents. Field officers drawn from multiple Bureau offices nationwide. Two armored SUVs at minimum. Hair appointments. Musical appearances. A blowout in Nashville required four agents in a parking lot for ninety minutes. The annual cost is roughly one million dollars before overtime, vehicle maintenance, and incidentals. The Bureau cites "hundreds of credible violent death threats" as justification. One person has been arrested. His name is Alden Welch Ruml, twenty-six, from Massachusetts. He sent emails. He faces five years. One emailer. One million dollars a year. Four SWAT agents per errand. A quarter of a million dollars in federal protection per verified threat. For context: the average FBI field office spends less annually on its entire confidential human source program. Informants embedded inside drug cartels, counterterrorism cells, organized crime families — the people whose testimony sends other people to prison — cost the Bureau less to keep alive than it costs me to ensure my girlfriend arrives at a salon escorted by men trained to rappel from helicopters. One of my officials suggested we conduct a formal threat assessment. A review. The kind of paperwork the Bureau has generated for seventy years whenever a protection decision requires justification. He had been with the Bureau for nineteen years. He asked in the hallway, in front of staff. I berated him. Not quietly. He stopped asking. He stopped asking. That phrase is going to recur in this document. I want you to notice it each time. Now. Alexis Wilkins is a country singer. I should mention this. She has released eight singles and one EP titled *Grit*. She has zero chart appearances. Her most-streamed song has five hundred and two thousand lifetime plays on Spotify. Taylor Swift accumulates that figure in approximately eleven minutes. A full-time country music journalist at the industry's leading independent publication stated that he had never heard of Alexis Wilkins before I started dating her. She has no active tour. She has never headlined a festival. Rolling Stone cited a forty-eight percent increase in her streaming numbers after we became public, which the same journalist clarified was "a forty-eight percent increase from virtually nothing." This is the person for whom the FBI fields a million-dollar annual protective detail. I want you to hold those two facts together — the streaming numbers and the security budget — and understand that they do not represent a miscalculation. They represent a value system. Her protection is not proportional to the threat. Her protection is proportional to her proximity to me. That is the formula. Proximity to the Director equals resources from the Bureau. I have applied it consistently. I have applied it to everyone. Which brings me to the people who are no longer here. I have removed over fifty career officials since January. Twelve have filed suit. Marshall Yates — my Congressional liaison, formerly the director of something called the Election Integrity Network, which existed to challenge the 2020 results — personally called field offices to compile names. Everyone who worked a case involving the President. Six thousand names were requested by the White House. The acting director before me was asked who he voted for. When he started supporting the President. Whether the FBI had tried to "put the president in jail." He was told the President hasn't forgotten. Three hundred counterterrorism and counterintelligence agents have been reassigned to immigration enforcement. The unit monitoring Iran — Iran, which operates proxy militias across four countries and maintains an active assassination program targeting American officials on American soil — was gutted. Six federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia have resigned or been pushed out rather than participate in the prosecution of the previous FBI Director, James Comey, whose crime was investigating the President and whose punishment is being investigated by the institution the President gave me as a gift. I am prosecuting the last Director for doing his job. I am doing this from a fifty-thousand-dollar suite while a sixty-million-dollar aircraft idles on the tarmac outside. Nobody in the building finds this ironic. The ones who would have found it ironic are gone. They stopped asking. My Deputy Director is Dan Bongino. He has never worked a federal case. His career before this was conservative talk radio. He receives the President's Daily Brief every morning — CIA product, NSA intercepts, the full intelligence take of the United States government — and he obtained his SCI clearance after I waived his polygraph. The FBI's own guidelines state that polygraphs are a "preliminary employment requirement." My lawyers reclassified him as a Schedule C political appointee. Experts said that's not how the statute works. The experts are career officials. Career officials are the previous administration's furniture. I am redecorating. Nikole Rucker is my personal assistant. She arrived at the Bureau on January 20th without a security clearance of any kind. She was physically escorted into the Director's suite because the door requires a clearance she did not possess. By February she was in London, seated across from a Western allied intelligence service, notebook open, pen moving. She used to work for Stephen Miller. The White House says she does not share operational details with him. I am told this is technically accurate in the way that most technically accurate statements are technically accurate. The polygraphs are still running. Just not for my people. We administer them now to career staff. The questions have changed. We ask whether they've criticized me. Whether they've spoken to a reporter. Whether they've expressed doubt about the direction of the Bureau. The machine measures stress. Under my leadership, stress has been reclassified as disloyalty. Disloyalty as a security risk. A security risk as grounds for termination. Fifty people have traveled this chain. Twelve are suing. The rest stopped asking. I run the building. In February a New York Times reporter named Elizabeth Williamson published details about the protective detail. I opened a preliminary inquiry. Federal stalking charges. We searched our databases for her information. The Department of Justice reviewed the file, found no legal basis, and terminated the inquiry. Called it retaliation. The Times' executive editor called it "a blatant violation of Elizabeth's First Amendment rights." I do not retaliate. I respond to threats. A journalist publishing accurate reporting about my personal use of public resources is, by my definition, a threat to operational security. My definitions are the ones that govern inside this building. I wrote the organizational chart. There is a framed copy on my wall. It has one name at the top. The Atlantic published a separate story. Excessive drinking. Frequent absences. Staff forcing entry into my home because I could not be reached. I filed a two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar defamation lawsuit. At my budget hearing, Senator Van Hollen cited the allegations under oath. I told him the only person slinging margaritas on the taxpayer dollar was him — in El Salvador, with a convicted gang-banging rapist. Fox News subsequently noted that public records do not support either characterization. But the line worked. That is the difference between evidence and performance. I have always understood which one this building rewards. In 2023, before any of this, I said the following on national television: "Chris Wray doesn't need a government-funded G5 jet to go to vacation. Maybe we ground that plane." I meant every word. We should have grounded his plane. So mine wouldn't invite the comparison. I sell merchandise. "Fight with Kash." T-shirts, hats, a children's book. The profits go to a foundation I started. The brand benefits from my position as Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is not a conflict of interest. A conflict requires two competing interests. I have one interest. It has never been healthier. I told the Senate that the FBI cannot meet its mission with a five-hundred-million-dollar cut. I requested twelve billion. Two billion more than last year. In the same period I spent a million on my girlfriend's security detail, fifty thousand on a concert suite, flew a sixty-million-dollar aircraft to cover a distance shorter than most commutes, waived background checks for three political appointees with no law enforcement experience, reassigned three hundred counterterrorism agents to check green cards, gutted the unit tracking Iran's assassination program, and opened a federal investigation into a newspaper reporter for the crime of publishing a newspaper. I told Hannity: "We are going to protect not only me and my loved ones but every American that is threatened." I meant the first seven words. The rest was institutional boilerplate. The kind of thing you say when the camera is on and the sentence needs to land somewhere that sounds like it includes other people. I run the building. Now I want to tell you about the water. The week before the concert I went to Pearl Harbor. The USS Arizona. A VIP snorkel. Nine hundred sailors and Marines are entombed in that hull. They have been there since 1941. The oil still leaks. It rises to the surface in small dark rainbows that break apart when you swim through them. The water was warm. Very clear. I could see the outline of the ship's superstructure below me, the geometry of a vessel that sank with its crew inside, and I remember the water temperature was perfect and the sun was on my back and my detail was on the shore and nobody in the water asked me to justify my presence above nine hundred dead. Recreational swimming at the Arizona is prohibited. The National Park Service said they were not involved. The Navy could not identify who authorized the outing. The logistics were coordinated by military email. A former government diver spoke to reporters anonymously. He said the access was unusual. He said it raised safety and security concerns. He spoke anonymously, the article noted, "for fear of retribution." A man who dives for the government is afraid to describe, on the record, how I swim. That is the climate. That is the building I run. A nineteen-year veteran stopped asking. Fifty career officials stopped working here. Three hundred counterterrorism agents stopped tracking the people who want to kill Americans. Six prosecutors stopped prosecuting. A government diver stopped talking. A reporter found her name in a database. And the oil keeps leaking from the Arizona, eighty-four years after the hull settled, surfacing in thin iridescent films that nobody is assigned to monitor because I reassigned them. I have never been an FBI agent. I have never conducted a federal investigation. I have never built a case or flipped a witness or spent a night in a surveillance van waiting for someone dangerous to make a mistake. But I have flown a sixty-million-dollar jet to a George Strait concert. I have watched the show from a suite that cost more than most Americans earn in a year. I have swum above nine hundred dead sailors in water so clear I could see their ship. And I have ensured, through the systematic removal of everyone who might object, that no one in the building will tell you any of this is wrong. The oil surfaces. It always surfaces. It has for eighty-four years. I run the building. The building doesn't ask questions anymore.

Midnights is a wild ride of an album and I couldn’t be happier that my co pilot on this adventure was @jackantonoff. He’s my friend for life (presumptuous I know but I stand by it) and we’ve been making music together for nearly a decade HOWEVER…

I’m so excited that we can finally share The Chromatica Ball film with the world. This film chronicles a time of immense creativity…the fashion, the dance, the music. Revisiting the tour leaves me speechless the way we had each other—you all showed up for music and art in a big way, and with a level of excitement and freedom that I will never forget. Stadium after stadium. Sold out crowds. The deafening singalongs. Chromatica was colorful revenge. The chaos of it all became pure energy and life. With a texture best experienced live. "STRUT IT OUT, WALK A MILE SERVE IT ANCIENT CITY STYLE" Self-acceptance is a theme that cuts through all my songs. I believe it is always possible to dig deep and find your greatness. Self-discovery is an art. Self-love is a practice. I love you monsters more than I can say. See yourself in every vocal, every fabric choice, the choreography, every image… Here’s the truth—no matter where life or my career has taken me, my time with you always is a path back to a very powerful part of myself. In a stadium filled with YOU it came to life. Thank you for that feeling 🙏 🖤 I hope you will feel seen when you watch this film. And know that I edited it carefully to honor you.

My favorite part about writing is that first spark of an idea. It can happen at any time, for any reason. The idea for the Opalite music video crash landed into my imagination when I was doing promo for The Life of a Showgirl. I was a guest on one of my favorite shows, @TheGNShow. For those of you who aren’t familiar, it’s a UK late night show where Graham Norton (the insanely charismatic and lovable host) invites a random group of actors, entertainers, musicians, etc to be on his show and we all sit there and chat like it’s a dinner party. They even serve wine. Anyway. I remember thinking I got ridiculously lucky with the group I was paired with. Cillian Murphy, Domhnall Gleeson, Greta Lee, Jodie Turner-Smith, and @LewisCapaldi. All people whose work I’ve admired from afar. When we were all talking during the broadcast, Domhnall made a light hearted joke about wanting to be in one of my music videos. He’s Irish! He was joking! Except that in that moment during the interview, I was instantly struck with an *idea*. And so a week later he received an email script I’d written for the Opalite video, where he was playing the starring role. I had this thought that it would be wild if all of our fellow guests on the Graham Norton show that night, including Graham himself, could be a part of it too. Like a school group project but for adults and it isn’t mandatory. To my delight, everyone from the show made the effort to time travel back to the 90’s with us and help with this video. You might even recognize some friendly faces from The Eras Tour. I got to work with one of my favorite people in the world, Rodrigo Prieto, again! I had more fun than I ever imagined - Made new friends, metaphors, and fashion choices. It was an absolute thrill to create this story and these characters. Shot on film. The Opalite video is out now on Spotify & Apple Music.

SKIMS is coming to NYC! To kick things off, the legendary The Rockettes gave us the best welcome with an exclusive performance outside the iconic Radio City Music Hall for my @SKIMS Pop-Up Shop at Rockefeller Center. Thank you so much to my best friend Allison Statter and her Blended Strategy team for working with us and helping to bring this idea to life! See you soon! 45 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY At Channel Gardens Open May 16-29 Mon-Sat: 10AM-8PM Sun: 10AM-7PM

When I was writing the Fortnight music video, I wanted to show you the worlds I saw in my head that served as the backdrop for making this music.  Pretty much everything in it is a metaphor or a reference to one corner of the album or another. For me, this video turned out to be the perfect visual representation of this record and the stories I tell in it. Post Malone blew me away on set as our tortured tragic hero and I’m so grateful to him for everything he put into this collaboration. I’m still laughing from getting to work with the coolest guys on earth, Ethan Hawke and Josh Charles (tortured poets, meet your colleagues from down the hall, the dead poets). I still can’t believe I get to work with the unfathomably brilliant Rodrigo Prieto on cinematography and my team of dream collaborators: Ethan Tobman (production design), Chancler Haynes (editor), Anthony Dimino (1st AD), Jil Hardin (producer) and Dom Thomas (executive producer). Parliament aced the VFX as always. Joseph Cassell, Lorrie Turk and Jemma Muradian made these tortured looks come to life. The entire crew made this a dream to shoot. Thank you to everyone involved and everyone who has watched it!!