Nolan Feeney

The young Hawking was quite the charmer, as this new clip shows

Featuring collaborations with Ed Sheeran and Miguel, Tough Love shows off the British soul singer's talents in a new way

When Jessie Ware broke through with “Wildest Moments,” two things were immediately clear to anyone who followed the song’s muffled, echoing instructions to “Listen listen listen!” First, that volatile couples everywhere had a new anthem. Second, that Jessie Ware had a voice: elegant and intentionally unflashy, but still plainly capable of holding its own alongside her contemporaries. That’s part of why it’s a little shocking to hear the 30-year-old Brit admit she only recently stopped feeling self-conscious about it.

“I was scared about showing more of my voice,” Ware says of her sophomore effort, Tough Love, out now. “I couldn’t have written this album before. I didn’t feel confident enough.” What a difference a few years makes. Nearly everything about Tough Love is bolder than her 2012 debut, Devotion, from the edgier production (courtesy of one of pop’s biggest producers) to her vocals (whose power is no secret this time around) to her collaborators (hungover sessions with “Adore” crooner Miguel and a spontaneous Ed Sheeran collaboration dot the credits). Just listen to the soaring “Say You Love Me,” and it’s clear fans are dealing with a new and improved Jessie Ware. Finally, the singer jokes, she’s “letting it all hang out.”

The turning point, Ware says, occurred while working with “Stay With Me” songwriter James Napier, who co-wrote the album’s blistering torch song, “Pieces,” and begged her not to hold back. “I remember Jimmy being like, ‘I want to hear you Jessie, I want to hear you sing,’” she recalls. “‘You let it rip in shows! Why can’t I hear that?’” Ware worried she was screaming bloody murder until she played the song for the xx’s whisperer-in-chief Romy Madley Croft, who gave her an unlikely confidence boost. “I was like, ‘Oh God, how is this going to go down with the queen of subtlety and understated vocals?’” Ware says. “She was like, ‘I’ve been waiting for you to have a song like this.’ It really reassured me.”

Just like her debut, Tough Love drew some inspiration from a wedding. Ware wrote “Wildest Moments” after she and her best friend got into a fight at one and didn’t speak for weeks. (“I wrote a pretty good song out of it, so I’m glad we had that fight!” she says. “We’re still best friends.”) The slick electro thump of Tough Love‘s “You & I (Forever),” meanwhile, was inspired by how long it took Ware’s high school sweetheart, whom she married in August, to pop the question. (Ware herself walked down the aisle to Sade’s “Your Love Is King”; fans have gotten in touch to say they play her song “Valentine” at their weddings, which Ware notes is actually a terrible choice — the very first line is “So you will never be my lover or my valentine.”)

Part of the album’s electronic heft comes from Katy Perry and Kesha hitmaker Benny Blanco, who co-executive produced Tough Love with Sam Smith producer Two Inch Punch under the name BenZel. Word of their collaboration left fans wondering if Ware was pursuing a more club-friendly sound, which wasn’t totally out of the question, given her early work with electronic act SBTRKT and “Imagine It Was Us,” a dancefloor workout that was tacked on to the U.S. release of Devotion. Though Ware says she was inspired by Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky” when recording the Dev Hynes disco jam “Want Your Feeling,” making dance songs was never the plan. Part of the reason Blanco and Two Inch Punch work under the name BenZel — and pretended for a long time that the project was actually a group of Japanese school girls — was to put some distance between the duo’s work and Blanco’s Top 40 success. “Everyone was like, ‘She’s trying to crack America! She’s going to have a big ol’ hit!’” Ware laughs. “Benny was never that for me. He knows what kind of artist I am.”

Still, Ware says she and Blanco fought often in the studio about the direction of the new songs. She balked whenever the material veered too far into pop territory; Blanco told her to “f-ck off” and pushed her to stop hiding in her own songs. Listening to the album, it’s clear Blanco’s influence rubbed off — and that Ware is still adjusting to the change.

“I think what Benny wanted was for more people to hear me, and if that meant having more of a direct chorus, then so bloody be it!” she says. “I don’t feel like a pop star.” With Tough Love, she may not have a choice for much longer.

Recent reports of the artist's arrest are a hoax

The famous and elusive street artist Banksy has parodied Johannes Vermeer’s famous Girl with a Pearl Earring in a new painting in the English city of Bristol. The artist posted a picture of the work, reportedly titled Girl with a Pierced Eardrum, to his website.

The painting, photographed from different angles on the site, features an outdoor alarm box as the woman’s earring, the BBC reports. Banksy previously graced Bristol with the painting Mobile Lovers earlier this year.

Read next: You Can Now Afford To Buy a Work of Art by Banksy (Sort Of)

Verifying the lack of a pay gap is difficult, however

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who was criticized earlier this month for saying women should not ask for raises, said Monday that his company pays men and women equally.

“I checked that it is something that we are enforcing,” said Nadella, who has apologized for the earlier remarks, at a presentation in San Francisco, Reuters reports. “We are in fact in good shape. Men and women get paid equally at Microsoft.”

Nadella’s statement is difficult to verify, as Microsoft does not make its pay structure public. Nadella’s comments also seem to contradict data from the site Glassdoor, which reported — based on a very small sample of employees who voluntarily shared their salaries — that men seem to earn more than woman doing the same job. According to its figures, male senior software development engineers earn around $137,000 a year, while women with that title earn around $129,000 a year.

“We have made some progress,” Nadella said during the presentation. “We have a lot more to do.”

[Reuters]

A security official alleges there are links between gangs and local law enforcement

Federal police in Mexico have taken over 12 towns in the state of Guerrero after authorities learned of possible connections between local law enforcement and organized crime.

National Security Commissioner Monte Alejandro Rubido said at a Sunday press conference that the links were uncovered during an investigation into the disappearance of 43 students in the town of Iguala last month, Bloomberg News reports.

Earlier this month, Guerrero prosecutor Iñaky Blanco said that the gang Guerreros Unidos had worked with area police and killed 17 of the missing students. Mass graves were discovered in the area in early October, but remains in the first grave didn’t belong to any of the missing students.

More than four dozen people, including members of Iguala police and various alleged gang members, have been detained on suspicion of kidnapping the missing students.

[Bloomberg News]

The 1980s dance party arrived early

From Russia with love: the previously teased Taylor Swift song “Welcome to New York” was supposed to arrive in full on iTunes at midnight Tuesday, but thanks to time zones, as one astute Tumblr user pointed out, midnight came a little early overseas — and so did the song.

Swift says she named her album 1989 after the year of her birth because she was inspired by the decade’s pop music sounds. It showed on the Jack Antonoff collaboration “Out of the Woods,” but it’s even more obvious on “Welcome to New York,” which finds T-Swift dusting off cheesy synthesizers and a retro drum-machine beat as she sings of self-reinventing in the city that never sleeps. The lyrics are about as earnest as any fresh-off-the-bus New York transplant, but the song’s got enough pep to warm the frigid Grinch heart of at least one jaded New Yorker this season as they trek through snow and trash in search of a peppermint latte.

More importantly, “Welcome to New York” is the first 1989 track we’ve heard that features Swift doing something other than repeating the words of the title over and over again in the chorus.

Listen to the track here. 1989 comes out Oct. 27.