Live Blog: The 2019 Grammy Awards
This is NPR Music's live blog of the 2019 Grammy Awards. The telecast of the awards show is scheduled to run from 8:00 until 11:30 p.m. ET. We'll be here the whole time, updating this post with every award or performance.
11:44 p.m. And, in the night's final moments, Kacey Musgraves wins the night's top honor, Album of the Year — her fourth trophy of the evening — for Golden Hour. There was some speculation that Brandi Carlile's nomination for album By The Way, I Forgive You might cause a vote split between the two roots-rooted artists, but Musgraves' idiosyncratic work seems to have elevated her above some formidable competition, including the Kendrick Lamar-curated Black Panther: The Album, Janelle Monáe's visionary Dirty Computer and Cardi B's breakout Invasion of Privacy. Musgraves seems more shocked than anyone. --Andrew Flanagan
11:42 p.m. It's beginning to sink in just how shocked America still is by Childish Gambino's "This Is America" — because he's swept three categories, including one of the night's biggest prizes in Record of the Year, in what really is a surprise to me. His producer Ludwig Gorannson accepts on his behalf, saying the song "calls out injustice, celebrates life and reunites us all at the same time." Then, in the spirit of the song, he shouts out the name of one of the many contributors, 21 Savage, who remains under dentention at the hands of ICE since his arrest one week ago in Atlanta. "You should be here tonight," Gorannson says in reference to 21. It's just a reminder that everything at the heart of that song is and remains the state of America.
Goransson, himself a big winner tonight, won Grammys in association with "This Is America" as well as his score for Black Panther. --Rodney Carmichael
11:35 p.m. For a lot of folks in music, 2018 was the Year of Aretha. So it's no surprise that three singers — Yolanda Adams, Fantasia, and Andra Day — are paying tribute to her on the Grammy telecast. (Both Adams and Fantasia sang at Franklin's extraordinary homegoing service in Detroit in August.) Singing "Natural Woman," the three are stadning on a small platform away from the main stage as images of Franklin flash by. How is this so much smaller, and lesser, than Diana Ross' birthday bash?
