Sam Smith, Beck Dominate Grammy Awards 2015

While only nine Grammy Awards were presented over the live ceremony’s three-and-a-half hours, the pre-ceremony featured plenty of surprises, including Aphex Twin‘s Syro winning in the Best Dance/Electronic Album category and Jack White pocketing a pair of awards, one for Best Rock Performance thanks to “Lazaretto” as well as an unlikely victory in the Best Boxed or Special Limited Edition Package for his role as art director on The Rise & Fall of Paramount Records, Volume One (1917-27).

The late Joan Rivers won a posthumous Grammy as her Diary of a Mad Diva took the Best Spoken Word Album category. “Weird Al” Yankovic won his fourth career Grammy as Mandatory Fun succeeded in the Best Comedy Album, the satirist’s first win in the category since 2004. Elsewhere, Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament (and Eddie Vedder, using his pseudonym “Jerome Turner”) won Best Recording Package for their Lightning Bolt.

Max Martin was named Producer of the Year on the strength of his work on Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off,” Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse” and Jessie J, Ariana Grande and Nicki Minaj’s “Bang Bang,” just to name some of his Grammy-eligible singles. Remarkably, despite a two-decade run as one of pop music’s greatest producers that dates back to the Backstreet Boys’ “Quit Playing Games With My Heart,” the win marked Martin’s first ever Grammy.