Iconic singer Gladys Knight, the "Empress of Soul" is heading out to some Texas venues on a 2026 tour. She'll stop in Austin at the Paramount Theatre on Sunday, March 1, 2026.
In San Antonio, the Tobin Center in San Antonio just announced that Knight will also be stopping in San Antonio at the H-E-B Performance Hall the next day, March 2. Knight's Ticketmaster calendar also shows dates in Houston on February 20, Fort Worth on February 22, and El Paso on March 5, but the San Antonio and Austin tickets will be sold on different platforms.
Knight was first known for performing with her family band, Gladys Knight & the Pips, and later breaking into a solo career. With the Pips, she led the famous songs "Midnight Train to Georgia" and "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," opened for Diana Ross and the Supremes, and won three Grammy Awards.
In her solo career, she won four more Grammys — including one for No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hit "That's What Friends Are For" with Dionne Warwick, Elton John, and Stevie Wonder — and acted in both film and TV over more than four decades.
Knight's last studio album, Where My Heart Belongs, was released in 2014.
Tickets for the Austin show go on sale Friday, December 19, at 10 am via austintheatre.org.
As winners of the Tiny Desk Contest, Cure for Paranoia will record their own Tiny Desk concert and go on tour.
Few, if any live recording studios or musical web series have the cultural sway of NPR's Tiny Desk, and a Dallas band is poised to make an impactful debut. Cure For Paranoia, an alternative hip-hop project by rapper Cameron McCloud and producers Tomahawk Jonez and Jay Analo, has won the high-stakes annual Tiny Desk Contest for 2026. They'll record their official Tiny Desk show "soon," the announcement by NPR says.
Winning the concert also means Cure for Paranoia is going on tour. The only Texas stop will be at Emo's Austin on June 24.
Tiny Desk is known for platforming both niche and majorly successful artists — NPR posted a new Foo Fighters set on YouTube today, May 13 — for stripped-down sets that are literally played behind the desk of former All Things Considered director Bob Boilen. (Fun fact for Austinites: Tiny Desk was created because folk artist Laura Gibson was disappointed with the sound at her South by Southwest show in 2008, and she wanted a redo.)
Most artists who appear on Tiny Desk more than 15 years later are already well-known, at least in their specific circles. But the Tiny Desk Contest, which launched in 2015, helps a growing group of newer, unsigned artists get their foot in the door. Contestants record one video of them performing a single song behind a desk, and a jury of radio staff and musicians choose their favorite.
In their audition video, Cure for Paranoia gathered 11 musicians around a truly tiny desk in front of Dallas' gigantic eyeball statue. They played the song "No Brainer," a frenetic track that starts with clever boasts and turns of phrase about mental illness and identity, then becomes a criticism of racism in the United States.
McCloud, a pre-school teacher, is known independently of Cure for Paranoia for rapping to his social media following about politics and current events. Some of those lyrics made it into "No Brainer." He says he started the group because he found that music was more helpful than medication for coping with bipolar depression and paranoid schizophrenia.
Alex Marrero, host of the Austin-based KUTX show Horizontes, was one of the judges this year. He was impressed with the visuals in Cure for Paranoia's audition.
“When this popped up, I immediately felt something different," he wrote in a blurb for the announcement. "It just jumped out. The visuals were super cool and creative, BUT I could still totally envision them bringing the heat behind the Desk.”
Madison McFerrin, jazz vocalist and daughter of the famous singer Bobby McFerrin, was one of the musical judges.
"Cure For Paranoia’s energy is infectious, fresh and distinctly theirs — exactly what you want in a Contest winner!" she wrote.
McCloud's post on Instagram announcing the group's win has only been up for three hours at the time of this article's publication, and it already has more than 8,000 likes. The YouTube audition has garnered 74,000 views.
