FEATURE: The Lockdown Playlist: International Women's Day 2021 Playlist

FEATURE:

 

 

The Lockdown Playlist

IN THIS PHOTO: Kelis 

International Women's Day 2021 Playlist

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EVEN though it is not…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Madonna/PHOTO CREDIT: Michel Linssen/Referns

International Women’s Day until 8th March, I wanted to get ahead and put together a Lockdown Playlist with songs from phenomenal women past and present (it is actually two playlists; such was the wealth of brilliance I had to include!). It is impossible to include all the women who have made an impression on me; though I wanted to cover as many artists as possible. You will be familiar with a lot of the artists below - but there may be some that you are fresh to. I hope that radio stations around the world dedicate a sizeable proportion of time to female artists on 8th March. I grew up around so many wonderful women of music; inspired by their voices and incredible tracks. To honour great women past and current, this special Lockdown Playlist contains…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Anna Calvi/PHOTO CREDIT: Eva Pentel

SO much tremendous music.

FEATURE: An Early Temperature Check: Early Mercury Prize Nominees Predictions

FEATURE:

 

 

An Early Temperature Check

IN THIS PHOTO: Arlo Parks’ debut album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, was released earlier this year to huge critical acclaim/PHOTO CREDIT: @arloparks

Early Mercury Prize Nominees Predictions

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MAYBE it is a bit early…

to start predicting which artists will be nominated for a Hyundai Mercury Prize later in the year. If you are new to the ceremony and which albums are eligible, here is some guidance from the Mercury Prize website:

“The Hyundai Mercury Prize promotes the best of UK music and the artists who produce it. This is done through the celebration of the 12 ‘Albums of the Year’, recognising artistic achievement across a range of contemporary music genres.

It is the music equivalent to the Booker Prize for literature and the Turner Prize for art.

The main objectives of the Prize are to recognise and celebrate artistic achievement, provide a snapshot of the year in music and to help introduce new albums from a range of music genres to a wider audience.

General

1.1 All forms of contemporary music from Great Britain and Ireland are eligible for the Mercury Prize.

1.2 Albums only qualify for entry.

1.3 The album must have a digital release date between Saturday 20 July 2019 and Friday 17 July 2020 inclusive (although entries must be received by 20 May 2020). Entries received after 20 May 2020 will not be considered for the 2020 Mercury Prize”.

It is quite timely bringing up the Mercury Prize as, last week, it was announced the BRIT Awards and Mercury Prize would change its eligibility criteria. Rina Sawayama was not shortlisted for a Mercury Prize last year for her debut album, SAWAYAMA. She has brought about important change for the Mercury Prize and BRIT Awards. This BBC article reveals more:

“A pop star who was told she was "not British enough" to enter The Brits and the Mercury Prize has won a reversal in the awards' eligibility rules.

Rina Sawayama was told she could not compete for the prizes last year, because she was not a British citizen.

The singer, who has lived in the UK for 26 years, has now won the right to compete, after meeting award bosses.

IN THIS PHOTO: Michael Kiwanuka with the Hyundai Mercury Prize 2020 Album of the Year at the Langham Hotel on 24th September, 2020 in London (he won for his third album, KIWANUKA)/PHOTO CREDIT: Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for the Hyundai Mercury Prize 

Under new rules, artists who have been resident in the UK for more than five years qualify for the main prizes.

Sawayama holds indefinite leave to remain in the UK, but retains a Japanese passport to maintain ties with her family, including her father, who live in her country of birth.

As Japan does not allow dual citizenship, she cannot have a British passport. That led to her critically-acclaimed debut album, also called Sawayama, being ruled ineligible for last year's Mercury Prize.

"It was just heartbreaking," she told BBC News.

"I think a lot of immigrants feel this way - where they assimilate and they become part of the British culture... and to be told that we're not even eligible to be nominated is very othering”.

I am looking ahead to the Mercury Prize, as I know it will be held and we will be able to get the artists and audience together! A lot of fabulous albums will arrive between now and when the middle of July (when the cut-off point is). I am not going to do these in chronological order but, taking albums that were released after the cut-off last year in July to now, there are some albums that I think are contenders for the Mercury Prize. I am going to revise this feature in June - but I want to make some early predictions now…

 IN THIS IMAGE: The cover for slowhai’s latest album, TYRON

Slowthai’s TYRON is one of this year’ s biggest albums. I think it is a strong contender for a shortlist inclusion. Here is what NME wrote in their review:

“Because, yes, there is a cloud hanging over ‘TYRON’. Every interview preceding its release has found Slowthai sifting through the fall-out from his appearance at NME Awards in early 2020. You know the story by now: he was named Hero of the Year at the London bash, seemed a little worse for wear, made grubby remarks to comedian Katherine Ryan and got into an altercation after an audience member shouted that he was a “misogynist” (Ryan later said on Twitter that “he didn’t make me uncomfortable” and told Slowthai, “I knew you were joking”).

The rapper, who nonetheless apologised to Ryan, told VICE last September that he saw the ensuing social media firebomb as in-keeping with the classism that he’d faced throughout his career: “A lot of the people who were so quick to speak badly of me were people who, the whole time I’ve been doing well, have stereotyped me. ‘It’s a matter of time ‘til he does something’, you know?” With the album’s muted second half, he chips away at the caricature to reveal a timeworn but true self-portrait.

On the woozy, acoustic guitar-led ‘push’, he shares a vivid image from a simpler time: “Meet me at the back of the bus / Beep-beep with my hat and my gloves.” Groovy album highlight ‘focus’, with its booming beat, plaintive piano and chopped-up backing vocals, aches with the admission: “No-one I can lean on so I’m limping with a walking stick”. Yet on the same track he also remembers what really matters: “I miss my brothers; I miss my fam as well / Everybody else can go and fuck themselves”.

Arlo Parks’ debut studio album, Collapsed in Sunbeams, is a remarkable work from one of the greatest artists in the country. I love her album and music, and I feel that Collapsed in Sunbeams is guaranteed a place at the Mercury Prize table! I would be shocked if it were omitted. Critics were hugely impressed by Parks’ debut. This is what The Guardian remarked:

“The lyrics, meanwhile, tackle distinctly 21st-century anxieties. An lot of pop in recent years has attempted to deal with body image, mental-health issues or problems with sexual identity; so much so that you don’t have to be a terrible cynic to make out the sound of boxes being ticked. That isn’t the case here: Parks writes with a diaristic tone that suggests lived experience rather than a self-conscious desire to tackle the burning issues of the day. She has a great turn of phrase – “wearing suffering like a spot of bling”; “the air was fragrant and heavy with our silence”, “shards of glass live in this feeling” – and a desire to be, as she puts it, “both universal and hyper-specific”.

If you were minded to nitpick, you might suggest that she’s rather better at the latter than the former, that the broad brushstrokes lean a little on self-help platitudes of the “you gotta trust how you feel inside” variety. Her real skill lies in observing small, telling details: the depressed friend whose overload of makeup leaves her looking “like Robert Smith”; the “artsy couple” she watches arguing in the street on Caroline, “strawberry cheeks flushed with defeated rage”; or in the sudden switch to a blunt, colloquial tone. “You know when college starts again you’ll manage,” she counsels a friend struggling to live at home on For Violet. “I wish your parents had been kinder to you,” she tells an ex whose struggle with her sexuality scuppers their relationship”.

Mogwai scored a number-one this week with As the Love Continues. It is a terrific album from the Glasgow band (and it is their tenth studio album), and I feel that the positive reviews and strength of the album means it is more than worthy of being on the Mercury Prize shortlist. I want to bring in The Quietus’ view of Mogawi’s stunning new record:

“The record is underpinned by the simplistic, lax drum grooves, rock beats played at medium tempos without much variation, taking the pulse of psych or dance music and transposing it to a washy post-rock haze. This gives a lot of space for them to try some weird sounds and variations: electronic bleeps on ‘Here We, Here We, Here We Go Forever’ or the sweeping strings of ‘Midnight Flit’ stir up a whole spectrum of emotions using totally different palettes, anchored by the common pulse. At the edge of all of these, the sound is sometimes a little distorted, wobbly or unclear. They’ve employed a little noise rock before on vintage tracks like ‘I Love you, I’m Going to Blow Up Your School’, but previously always as an assault; now it’s become a little flourish.

This lands them with a record that’s impressively cohesive and outright weird at times, flirting with all the styles the’ve worked with over the years. The temptation for Mogwai has been to make smoother, calmer music recently, more in line with their soundtrack work. This record seems to fly in the face of that. But they’ve clearly learned a lot from their moody soundscapes, even if they break from the ambience by employing the cut and thrust of their earlier rock work, retaining momentum, lending urgency to these ideas and texture”.

Released in August 2020, Kelly Lee Owens’ Inner Song is a fabulous album that should be included in this year’s Mercury shortlist. I adore the Welsh Electronic artist’s latest album. This is what The Guardian noted when they sat down with the album:

“Delayed to show “solidarity” with record shops threatened by Covid, Kelly Lee Owens’s second album finds the banging techno DJ venturing further into the realm of electronic pop. The digitals are still on point. Arpeggi’s creepy retro-futurism recalls Boards of Canada and earlier electronic experiments in Germany in the 1970s.

But when Owens was on tour with Four Tet, Kieran Hebden urged her to stop hiding her singing voice under a bushel. Now some actual songs – such as the resolute, sad banger On, or L.I.N.E. (Love Is Not Enough) – find the Welsh musician in full coo. The sweetness is deceptive: L.I.N.E. weighs up the compromises people make in relationships; solitude, she concludes, beats warping your essence.

Owens’s is not the only voice elevating this album: Welsh legend John Cale contributes to the brooding Corner of My Sky. Alongside relationship breakdown and the death of her grandmother (the coolly arpeggiating Jeanette), climate apocalypse gets a workout too. The writing of Melt! predates the news that the Greenland ice sheet lost 1m tonnes of ice per minute last year, but its union of ominous digital bubbling and thumping dancefloor nous makes for a deadly and timely tune”.

In October last year, Róisín Murphy launched her fifth studio album, Róisín Machine. There are a couple of Irish acts I am highlighting for Mercury consideration this year – the prize has not included that many Irish artists through the years. The energy, innovation and passion through Róisín Machine makes it a sure-fire award-worthy album! This is an album that received so much love across the board. I want to borrow from a positive review in Pitchfork:

““Incapable” is brittle, its Eurodisco rhythm sharpened into snaps and claps. Murphy unloads a history of emotional distance. She knows all about that warm Moroder/Summer swoon: “I get that there’s a sensation/Though I don’t know what it means.” She can’t feel love. “I should try and play my part,” she reproves herself, but alas, all she’s ever felt is a feverish chill. And this is what it sounds like, percussion prickling like goosebumps, when your damage hardens into a visage. She falls through a trapdoor into full disco fever. “Narcissus” marries Greek myth and a dance beat better than Xanadu ever did: Its pools of rippling strings evaporate into prance music for chatterbox Echo and selfie-obsessed Narcissus, characters familiar to anyone who’s ever waited in line for a nightclub powder room.

Disco fuels another gem: “Murphy’s Law,” a shimmering ode to a lack of self-control that she sings in a register as deep as the groove. The song is not a cover of Cheri’s insouciant 1982 boogie standard of the same name, and it is also not “Bad Girls,” though it definitely shares some DNA, but it is as good as either of them. The nerve! And one more: “Jealousy,” shorn of more than half its original 12" length, starts in thrall to that destructive emotion and stays there. “Jealousy!” she chants, as if demanding her own humanity, while the track surmounts a second great buildup, bookending “Simulation” as if to say the real drama is always human. After all the triumphs and tragedies of trying to connect to herself and other people in the dark, she finds a role she was born to play: succinct dancefloor truth-teller, a character smart enough to see the worst about herself and clever enough to make it irresistible. Róisín Murphy aims her tracks at the stars. With Róisín Machine, she’s become one”.

I am going to omit (unintentionally) a few great British and Irish albums that will be among the runners when the Mercury Prize shortlist is named in the summer. I assume that it will be similar to last year, in the sense that albums need to be submitted by May and the eligibility date runs from July last year to the middle of this July. Debut albums make the Mercury Prize more varied and interesting. I think that new artists deserve the award more than most. Beabadoobee’s Fake It Flowers is a great album that should be nominated. The twenty-year-old was born in the Philippines (and is based in London), so she should be eligible for inclusion after Rina Sawayama’s campaign. NME were glowing when they reviewed Fake It Flowers:

“Opener ‘Care’ has a dreamy start but that lasts scarcely 20 seconds before a jackhammer of a chorus clatters in. That force similarly decimates ‘Dye It Red’, ‘Worth It’ and, most notably, ‘Charlie Brown’, where the ferocity of Nirvana’s ‘In Utero’ explodes with Bea’s  own unbridled rage – it’s fierce enough to leave Snoopy a shaking, snivelling mess.

To her credit, she’s unafraid to embrace the cliche of being born in the wrong generation. Last year, Bea told NME quite bluntly that she “wants to live in the ‘90s” – and why the hell not? The orchestral overtones to the Smashing Pumpkins-sized ‘Sorry’ hark back to a time when rock bands were unafraid of spaffing production budgets, while the grunge-pop chorus of ‘Together’ is Elastica-sized chorus for a new generation. To pillage the past for inspiration is not uncommon, but few enjoy their joyride as much as Bea does.

The sonic evolution is bolstered by lyricism that traces her ability to communicate emotions bluntly – largely about the ups and downs of romance. Spiteful ripostes run through ‘Further Away’ (“They say the moon’s far away but your brain’s further”), but the make-up on ‘Horen Sarrison’ is sweet in a way that only young love can be, as the lush sounds of Blur’s ‘The Universal’ swell in the background; “You are the smell of pavement after the rain / You are the last empty seat on a train”. On ‘Charlie Brown’ she confronts the periods of self-harm that she endured, towering above but never forgetting those days”.

Even though there is just under five months’ worth of albums to come that could be included in the Mercury Prize’s shortlist, there have been plenty released since July that have caught my eye. SAULT were not nominated for UNTITLED (Black Is). That was released in June last year. Maybe it was not put forward for consideration by their label; it was a big omission. They followed that up with UNTITLED (Rise). Not a lot is known about the band as they do not do much press; people do not know who they are. They are, we know, a British band (so they should be eligible). The Guardian highlighted how amazing UNTITLED (Rise) is:

“Straight away you realise you’re in the presence of something special. The first three songs function as brilliantly constructed dance tracks and keep messing with the listener’s emotions. Strong features beats spiked with explosions of dubby echo, an intricate mesh of Nile Rodgers-ish guitar and a terrific breakdown inspired by Brazilian batucada percussion. You could take its lyrics as straightforward paeans to dancefloor transcendence – “we’re moving forward tonight … we want better tonight” – but, as a later, noticeably more caustic track puts it, you know they ain’t, particularly in the light of what follows. Fearless is supremely funky, but the flurries of disco strings don’t communicate excitement so much as anxiety, the words shifting from defiance to something more troubled: “And it hurts on the inside.”

I Just Want to Dance, meanwhile, really is a paean to dancefloor transcendence, but it never allows you to forget what the song’s protagonist might be attempting to escape: the sound is claustrophobic and clattering, the words demanding “why do my people always die?”. There’s a great, jarring moment where the whole thing skids to a halt – like someone hitting the stop button on a turntable – before grinding back to life, the beat temporarily, disorientatingly out of time.

From its fierce opening salvo to its deceptively mellow conclusion – the sweetness of Little Boy’s piano-led melody, vocal delivery and children’s choir countered by the righteous anger in its lyrics – Untitled (Rise) hardly yields highlights because the quality never wavers: whoever’s involved, it feels like they’ve been galvanised to the top of their game. It manages to be as lyrically unflinching as the music is compelling – not the easiest balance to achieve, as acres of terrible protest songs historically attest. You’d call it the album of the year if its predecessor wasn’t just as good”.

The Cribs released their wonderful eighth studio album, Night Network, back in November. Solo artists have won the Mercury Prize most over the past five years, though Wolf Alice did win in 2018 for Visions of a Life. They might be releasing another album this year, so they may well be on the shortlist once more! Wakefield’s The Cribs are high in my mind when it comes to albums that will be shortlisted for a Mercury Prize this year. CLASH had this to say when they reviewed Night Network:

“In many ways, eighth album ‘Night Network’ – their first since the finalisation of their management divorce – is a love letter to their fans, an unrelenting series of indie rock bangers built to be heard live, loud, and in your face. Curiously, though, it opens with the coy, palatial doo-wop harmonies of ‘Goodbye’, a song that doubles as a two fingered salute to their ex-management team, and a riposte to music industry machinations.

‘Running Into You’ is the point where the album truly begins, with its shuddering chords and yearning vocals. ‘Screaming Into Suburbia’ is practically a mission statement writ anew, while ‘Never Thought I’d Feel Again’ is consumed by the release, the sheer relief they must have felt going back into the studio again.

It’s a head-long rush of supreme indie rock, unashamedly adding pop elements to their underground heroes. As the ride progresses you’ll pick out Motown stompers and slick 70s pop moves, while ‘Under The Bus Station Clock’ has a touch of soul to it. ‘In The Neon Night’ feels like a Beatles homage in place, while ‘She’s My Style’ could even be a B-side to the ‘Men’s Needs…’ era.

The sound of a band resurgent, ‘Night Network’ will have you falling in love with The Cribs all over again. Tapping into their core sounds and core values, it finds the band emerging from their legal troubles triumphant, relishing the vitality of being able to make music together, in the same room, at the same time. An invigorating experience as punk as it is poetic, it’s a fantastic ride from start to finish”.

Working Men’s Club’s eponymous debut album is another that I think is a shoo-in for a shortlist nod. It would be great to see the young band honoured for their debut. This is what Loud and Quiet wrote in their review of Working Men’s Club:

“Syd Minsky-Sargeant, Working Men’s Club’s bracingly outspoken teenage frontman, will not entertain the idea that his outfit are a Manchester band, despite forming there at music college. You wonder whether he’s protesting too much; the spectres of The Fall and of peak New Order hang heavy over this ten-track debut on Heavenly, regardless of the fact that the band cut their teeth in Calder Valley community hubs like Hebden Bridge’s Trades Club and Todmorden’s Golden Lion. There is, in fairness, now a stronger connection with Sheffield, with Ross Orton handling production duties and Moonlandingz guitarist Mairead O’Connor part of a new four-piece lineup that confirms Minsky-Sargeant as the group’s lynchpin.

Working Men’s Club is an album born of personal and political tumult, and it speaks to the singularity of their leader’s musical vision that it feels so cohesive, given the clashes of egos between himself and former members of the band and also taking into account that his lyrics wander – sharply, specifically furious one minute (‘Cook a Coffee’ takes scathing aim at the BBC’s Andrew Neil) and frustratingly unoriginal the next (‘Be My Guest’’s “Let me out, let me scream out!” is teenage angst 101). The record is scored through with a brooding urgency that breathes new life into well-worn influences, particularly on early single ‘Teeth’ and the foreboding post-punk maelstrom of ‘A.A.A.A.’. There’s subtle variation to the central palette of dark synths and clanging guitars; both opener ‘Valleys’ and ‘John Cooper Clarke’ flirt with doomy disco, whilst ‘Outside’ and closer ‘Angel’ hint at stylistic restlessness – slower in pace, broader in scope.

Working Men’s Club is nothing we haven’t heard before, but the sheer force of Minsky-Sargeant’s conviction makes it difficult to resist”.

There are half a dozen other albums I want to list/nominate as potential inclusions in the Mercury Prize shortlist. Fontaines D.C. were nominated last year for their debut, Dogrel (they lost out to Michael Kiwanuka’s KIWANKUA). I feel their sophomore album, A Hero's Death (released last July), might get them a second nod in as many years. Maybe not quite as brilliant as their debut, I still think A Hero’s Death is deserving of serious recognition! One of the many five-star reviews for the album came from The Guardian:

“That sense of freedom is what gives the album its range: it can be scary and bewildering to do whatever you want, but fulfilling, too. There’s an admiring nod to “freaks who dare live life not as a climbing stair”, and a brilliantly economical (self?) portrait of a man resisting his public perception: “Snowman coal’d / Pigeonholed / Cooed to death / Pilgrim soul.” Sometimes the freedom is evoked wordlessly: the snotty joy in the way Chatten lets vowels roll round his throat in Living in America, almost gargling them. Their influences are perhaps living in America, too: you can variously detect the pallor of early Interpol, the swagger of early Strokes, vocal harmonies from doo-wop or the Beach Boys, and, on I Was Not Born, an update of I’m Waiting for the Man.

Where the band really pull themselves together is the title track, their best song yet. Steadily chucking out pearls of wisdom like basketballs at an arcade, Chatten is now a dad, uncle, brother, teacher and pal rolled into one, the sort of man that all boys and girls need throughout their lives. His mantra, “life ain’t always empty”, is the bedrock of this exceptional album: sometimes empty, yes, but not always. With poetry suffusing both lyrics and music, Fontaines DC capture being young in all its excitement and challenges, its confidence and despair: those years where it feels like you’re trying to find a foothold with your hands. It’s not easy, but then what great album, or life, ever is?”.

Bringing it back to new albums and, earlier this month, Ghetts released the sublime Conflict of Interest. The incredible MC and Grime artist is a veteran of the game, but I think he has released his finest work with Conflict of Interest. Rap and Grime are not genres that have fared overly-well regarding Mercury Prize wins. I feel that might be threatened later this year. The Forty-Five had their say regarding one of 2021’s biggest albums:

“His versatility in tone and topic extends to the music: rich instrumentation swoops in to lift the genre’s usual minimalism. Piano, bass guitar, strings, and horns sit happily among grime surroundings, and complement Ghetts’ cinematic writing. Yet the understated tracks hold the greatest power. ‘Hop Out’ pairs starker beats with a moving and conflicted recollection of schoolboy car theft. The cold urban rush of ‘Proud Family’ counters warm lyricism about fatherhood, ghostly guests linger on the spectral backing of ‘Autobiography’, and answerphone messages on ‘Dead To Me’ frame the lost contact of a once-close friend. All the while, despite its Dickensian scope, Ghetts’ writing stays sharp and sophisticated: “I ain’t phoned to say a change gon’ come, that’s what Sam sung.”

‘Conflict Of Interest’ is Ghetts’ wee small hours moment as much as it is his major label bigtime. Either way, he keeps his cool: the record’s expansive soundscape and storytelling deserve several long listens, yet its fresh outlook hints at an exciting future for grime. Fame and nostalgia pose no threat to an artist able to embrace conflicting identities. “You see when I feel cornered, all I do is think of before / I drive back to the house I struggled in,” he says, and Ghetto, Ghetts, and Justin are all in the car together, riding in harmony”.

I think we will see more bands on the 2021 shortlist compared to recent years. I am not sure what will happen between now and July; there will be a lot of tremendous British and Irish albums that could change my views! I do think that Shame’s second studio album, Drunk Tank Pink, will be in with a shot of shortlisting. Released back in January, the South London band are deserving of one of the biggest music awards in the British calendar. NME were keen to have their say:

“Shame’s debut was defined by the dark humour and snark that formed the very spine of the record. That tone is dialled back somewhat on ‘Drunk Tank Pink’, but there are still some laughs to be had. “This is the last time, Acid Dad!” roars the frontman on the chorus of ‘Water In The Well’, a song with a B-52s groove that references the band’s trip to rural Scotland for peace and quiet, when they were unexpectedly presented with a techno party led by producer Makeness’ dad.

This is massive leap on from ‘Songs Of Praise’ – ‘Drunk Tank Pink’ is more ambitious and more accomplished than its predecessor, showcasing a band brimming both with ideas and the confidence to pull them off.

As with the pink room Steen wrote much of the record in sounds, there’s an oddly comforting claustrophobia here. ‘Great Dog’ – the shortest song on the album and a frenetic, scuzzy punk rollicker – is underpinned by a needling guitar drone that’s uncomfortable and urgent, almost made inaudible by the wall of sound around it. ‘Harsh Degrees’ batters the eardrums in a similar manner, sounding like it’s on the brink of collapse as Eddie Green and Sean Coyle-Smith’s guitars do discordant battle with each other”.

The penultimate album I want to mention is Sleaford Mods’e eleventh studio album, Spare Ribs. Showing no dip in quality after all these years, Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn have, perhaps, released their greatest album. Rolling Stone remarked the following when reviewing Spare Ribs:

“Spare Ribs, the Mods’ 11th LP since they formed in 2007, is a veritable a la carte menu of outrages. Sick of hipsters who fetishize the blue-collar existence? Check out “Nudge It,” which kicks off with Amy Taylor of Amyl and the Sniffers growling “Gimme, gimme,” then descends into a clattering evisceration of “fucking class tourists.” Tired of crooked, elitist politicians who only care about their pockets? Pop on “Short Cummings,” a sneeringly obscene takedown of Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to the prime minister of the United Kingdom. On the verge of murdering your entire family in a lockdown-induced haze? You’ve got “Top Room,” which “talks about the daily ordeals of dealing with lockdown at home, having everybody at home every day,” according to Williamson. It also contains the lyric “I think I want something to come out of my phone that ain’t there,” which is an all-too-accurate take on social media malaise.

Written partly during lockdown, the record features some of the least-annoying songs about the pandemic recorded since the initial outbreak in 2019. And that’s heavy praise, considering some of the truly treacle-shellacked tracks that oozed into the zeitgeist last year. In addition to “Top Room,” there’s also “Glimpses,” which touches on how the world stood still when the pandemic first hit (“The air’s got space and glow in clouds now”), and “Out There,” which homes in on the bleak, empty bizarreness of early quarantine days. “You kind of half expect Tom Cruise to be running around the corner at any point,” Williamson said of the deserted streets and the dystopian quality of the era. That track also aims the finger at conservatives who seem to always blame foreigners for their myriad problems. “Although [Covid] obviously came from a foreign country, I think it’s a bit deeper than that,” Williamson said. “But there seemed to be this view that immigrants were bringing it over, which is just stupid.”

Cue up this acerbic romp through society’s various and sundry ills the next time you feel the towering tidal wave of universal anger descending — which will be, likely, in about five minutes”.

Normally, when it comes to the Mercury Prize, you have a selection of mainstream acts, new artists and a range of genres. There is always a Jazz inclusion and albums that people consider to be ‘outsiders’. I have not really named any so far…and it may be the case that obvious examples come to light later in the year regarding genres like Jazz and those that do not normally earn a Mercury Prize win. In terms of an album that is deserving of inclusion on the shortlist but might be an outside bet is Anna B Savage’s A Common Turn. Released back in January, this is a fantastic album from the London artist. CLASH made some interesting observations when they reviewed the acclaimed A Common Turn:

“Over the last five years, Savage has built things up from the ground again to rekindle her passion for music and for herself. “I started to like myself again,” she explains in a press release, and ‘A Common Turn’ openly explores this vulnerable five-year period with authenticity and poise. The overarching theme of birds poetically binds her myriad of experiences together, revealing highs and lows, arduous journeys but also bright, joy enriching colours – just like birds.

‘Corncrakes’ channels Laura Marling style acoustic guitars with Savage’s melancholic lament on her experiences with self-doubt: “I don’t know if this is even real / I don’t feel things as keenly as I used to.” The most impressively produced track on the album ‘Dead Pursuits’ carries this theme of self-doubt to Savage’s own creative process as an artist. Dynamics are then utilised intuitively in ‘Baby Grand’ to convey a motif based around a relationship – its accompanying music video allows for an even more poignant experience.

Savage fuses her classical upbringing with electronic elements in the boldly experimental track ‘Two’ before ‘A Common Tern’ – which also boasts an impressive accompanying video – marks one of the most important moments of the album. It explores Savage escaping toxicity, both with her partner and the toxic relationship she’d built with herself, which coincides with a sighting of the titular common tern that offered a form of grace and freedom from her struggle.

Internal experiences with sexual pleasure are recounted in vivid detail in ‘Chelsea Hotel #3’. The album’s final two tracks ‘Hotel’ and ‘One’ allow William Doyle’s production inputs to come to the fore, rounding off proceedings with nods to Phoebe Bridgers and Anna Calvi.

This is a gem of an album. Personal, honest and highly emotive, it tackles big questions; but most of all, it dares to be vulnerable. ‘A Common Turn’ is undoubtedly one of the most notable releases of 2021 so far, marking a very impressive and well-earned return to music for Anna B Savage”.

It is a way until we get to the Mercury Prize deadline and we learn which dozen albums have been shortlisted. I have mooted some possibilities. I think a few of them at least are definitely going to be included among the riders. There is over four months’ worth of albums to come, so things are going to change. Looking at albums due between now and July, and I think there are some that could be included in a future Mercury Prize shortlist prediction feature: Jane Weaver’s Flock, Royal Blood’s Typhoons, Squid’s Bright Green Field, and Wolf Alice’s Blue Weekend among them! I wanted to look forward to a music award show that will look very different this year compared to last year. I will be curious to see who is shortlisted in the summer as the Mercury Prize inclusions always throw up…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Anna B Savage

SURPRISES and twists.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Tash Sultana

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Ian Laidlaw for NME

Tash Sultana

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AS their fantastic…

album, Terra Firma, came out on 19th February, I think it is a good time to laud the magnificent Tash Sultana. The twenty-five-year-old Melbourne native (who identifies as non-binary and uses ‘they’/’them’ pronouns) released the celebrated Flow State in 2018. Terra Firma has picked up some great reviews and, to me, it is one of this year’s strongest albums. I would encourage people to buy the album, as Sultana is one of the most eclectic and strongest musicians in the world:

“Tash Sultana release their second album on Lonely Land Records, via Sony Music. The follow up to the critically acclaimed Flow State from two years ago, Terra Firma is a 14 track album.

Returning to earth after the dizzying heights of success, Terra Firma is the sound of a more content and grounded Tash. Spiritually, the album finds the artist reconnecting to their roots, reminding themselves who they are and what it means to be human. Musically however, its 14 tracks take root into far-reaching sonic territory. Almost every note on Terra Firma was once again composed, arranged, performed, engineered and produced by Tash. But to kick-start a new era, the solo star – for the first time – opened themselves up to collaborators, starting with a 10-day writing session with fellow ARIA-winning Australian musician Matt Corby and producer Dann Hume (Courtney Barnett, Amy Shark, Angus and Julia Stone)”.

I am going to bring in a couple of reviews for Terra Firma to round off. Before then, a couple of recent interviews caught my eye. I am intrigued by Tash Sultana. One suspects that they would rather not be promoting and doing the media rounds; as we are isolated and the pandemic is not going anywhere, they seems more open to interviews. I love how laidback they are. Their music, though, is so layered and nuanced. One can hear an album like Terra Firma and go back again and again to discover new things.

It is not surprising that Tash Sultana is so accomplished. Having picked up the guitar as a very small child, they then progressed to busking and has been honing her chops for years now. I think they are going to be a huge star of the future. With each release, we can see more of their genius and incredible songwriting. Sultana’s voice, reported to be around six octaves, allows them so much flexibility as an artist. It is one of the most versatile and stunning voices I have heard in a long time. It is exciting seeing where Sultana will head in years to come. With such a strong album out, I just had to include Tash Sultana in Spotlight! I want to quote from an NME interview from late last year. We got to hear how Sultana was handling lockdown and how their second alum was coming along:

“Sultana is seeing the upsides of lockdown. Without it, they would have been juggling an overseas tour with wrapping up and releasing ‘Terra Firma’. Now, with dates cancelled, and “an extension for the album, which is fucking great”, Sultana can focus on one thing at a time. “I’ll be spending until July finishing this thing off. Hang with my partner, my dog and go to the studio. I needed to learn how to slow the fuck down.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Dara Munnis

The album title ‘Terra Firma’ itself hints at Sultana’s newfound groundedness. “Terra firma is the ground, the earth, you put your feet on it to remember where you are, what you’re from,” they explain. “It’s a reminder that we are only human at the end of the day. Part of one big system and no one really knows the answers to how and why.”

When restrictions do ease, domestic touring will likely be first to fire back up. “But actually leaving the country or being allowed into another one?” says Sultana. “It’s going to take a while. I don’t reckon that anyone’s going to be playing gigs in 2020. It’s all good for people to give the green light on bringing the gathering thing back but it’s the fear among people. It will take a bit of time for people to not be scared anymore of big crowds.”

Sultana wanted to help to keep their fans active and positive. They’ve got other #iso tips, too. “I’ve done some pretty intensive work on myself for the last little while,” they say. “When you’re anxious, that’s a very high arousal state so you want to combat that with something that’s very low arousal every day, maybe once, maybe twice, could be 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Practicing piano is a low arousal for me, or scales on the guitar.

“For people feeling anxious and shit, this is the perfect time to learn an instrument or start drawing or painting. Mental stimulation is important. Social stimulation is important! So we can’t see each other much but you can get on the phone. Imagine dealing with this 100 years ago? That would have been really fucking hard.”

When things normalise, unsurprisingly, Sultana has a plan. “I don’t go out and I don’t have beers but, my god, I’m gonna go out and have a fucking beer when this is finished. Like, I actually will actually go out. I will have a beer”.

I am pleased that Sultana might get to play some gigs very soon. As things are better and less bleak in Australia right now, it would be encouraging to see live music swing back. There will be a definite hunger for Tash Sultana in their homeland. As we learn from an interview from The Guardian from a few weeks back, the road to stability and success has been a tough one for Sultana:

“Eight years after the Australian singer strummed and sung their way out of a seven-month-long drug-induced psychosis; seven years since becoming a solo busking sensation on Melbourne’s Bourke Street Mall; five years after a bedroom performance of their psychedelic-reggae song Jungle clocked a million YouTube views in five days (it’s now had more than 94m); 2.5 years since becoming the first artist without a debut album release to sell out three dates at London’s Brixton Academy; and a year after slipping an engagement ring on their girlfriend’s finger during a Maldives holiday, Sultana is revelling in a groundedness that saturates every note of their dreamy sophomore album, Terra Firma.

“I’m just being and experiencing and loving and trying to be better at everything I do – trying to be kinder, trying to speak nicer, think nicer, play better, sing better, organise better … and that just applied across to the music side of things and that became Terra Firma.

“Terra Firma is a projection of my earth, my universe – so it’s the story of how I’ve gotten to being 25.”

As the story goes, Sultana’s grandfather gave them a guitar at the age of three. By 13, they were using a fake ID to play open mic nights around Melbourne, turning up at school “smelling of cigarettes and beer”. Teachers warned: “Your grades are slipping, you’re not going to amount to anything”, but despite a psychotic breakdown, Sultana finished year 12 and took to busking with their one-person band set-up (electric guitar, RC-30 loop station, milk crates and trolley) and a work ethic that before long saw them land a manager, release their first EP, Notion, stun Australian festival crowds, and score two songs in Triple J’s 2016 Hottest 100 (including Jungle at No 3).

Word was spreading about the diminutive, barefoot multi-instrumentalist with a six-octave range (trying to sing along to Sultana’s songs is an exercise in humility) who could send crowds ballistic with layered looping, Hendrix-esque guitar solos, panpipe beatboxing and acrobatic leaps. Sultana played Coachella in 2018, four months before releasing their debut album, Flow State (named for the trance they slip into while performing), which won an Aria for best blues and roots album.

The road to stardom was peppered with burnout, a loss of privacy and mental health struggles. In late 2017, Sultana hit the reset button, writing on Instagram: “I thought I was going to die from the shadow my mind cast.”

With the help of a therapist, naturopath, yoga and surfing, Sultana turned to sobriety and a supplements regime.

These days, Sultana says: “I’m just a bit of a loner – I socialise when I want to or when I need to. When I go out and see people and their eyes start rolling to the back of their heads, I just smokebomb and leave and go to bed. I’m convinced that nothing good happens after midnight.”

Covid willing, Sultana is playing Womadelaide in March and Bluesfest in April, and has European dates booked later in the year, although the musician concedes those have a “slim to none” chance of going ahead. “The kicks in the gut don’t hurt so much any more. You almost expect nothing, so that when things do happen, you’re just, ‘Wow!’ It really happened!’”.

I will bring things to a close very soon. First, I want to show how the media have been responding to the terrific Terra Firma. This is what DORK had to offer when they sat down when they heard the album:

“The title directly translates as ‘firm ground’ and perfectly situates Sultana in their career right now. Having transformed from busker to in-demand performer, it inspires a need to return to earth after the dizzying heights of success. ‘Crop Circles’ shows this effortlessly as honeyed vocals melt into the smooth instrumentals to create an unwinding, relaxing melody. Sultana builds layer upon layer in multi-dimensional jams like ‘Coma’, creating a truly hypnotic wall of sound.

Playing with a combination of soul, funk, RnB, folk, rock, and hip hop, ‘Terra Firma’ is a true mix: “Aretha Franklin meets Bon Iver meets John Mayer meets whatever,” they explain. To describe ‘Terra Firma’ as an effortless listen is to ignore the deeper significance of the philosophical questions, as it asks: “But where’s the wisdom? Where’s the knowledge?”

With such depth, it’s an album that both reveals and rewards”.

I have been listening to Terra Firma a bit, and I am finding so much comfort and strength from the album. It is such a stunning album. I am sure I will be coming back to it throughout the year. Even though Tash Sultana is amazing through Terra Firma, I think they will get stronger as the years go by.

I want to bring in another positive review for Terra Firma. It is an album that has been getting a lot of love and affection:

“For an artist that developed much of their sound on an instantly recognisable diet of guitar licks and loops, Sultana embraces a broadening of their sound here. “Crop Circles” goes jazz and welcomes that full band sound that now accompanies the traditional solo artist when playing live. With its horns and jazz piano, “Crop Circles”, is an early but completely welcome highlight. Meanwhile, “Greed”, an obvious commentary on wealth distribution in society, features a couple verses of near rap delivered bars. That’s all before the chorus is sung in Sultana’s trademark slinky styling.

The album, even with its highs like “Beyond the Pine”, “Sweet & Dandy” and “Willow Tree ft. Jerome Farah”, does at times leave you feeling like you’re listening to the same song on repeat. This isn’t to say it’s a negative. If anything it proves the consistency of Sultana as an holistic artist. But, despite the across-the-board quality of Terra Firma, the lack of noticeable style change across the majority of the album does detract from the listener’s ability to enjoy the album continually from cover to cover”.

Now, taking what I just said with a grain of salt, the tracks on Terra Firma that do break away in sound – like all five and half minutes of “Coma” – could go down as some of Sultana’s all time great songs. With its wandering, almost Bon Jovi “Wanted Dead or Alive” sound in the opening four minutes, before a cataclysmic crescendo, “Coma” is almost certain to become a fan favourite once live shows return.

With much of the Tash Sultana we’ve come to know and love protruding prominently throughout Terra Firma, there’s enough quality and licks of pure class to make you wonder just how far the Tash Sultana juggernaut could go”.

If you have not discovered the music of Tash Sultana, seek them out and explore what they have put out so far. I hope that they get to come to the U.K. when things are safer – Sultana has a pretty healthy fanbase here. I shall leave things there…but I was eager to spotlight an artist I have been following for a couple of years now. Listening to Tash Sultana’s music and one can hear so much…

FIRE, soul and passion.

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Follow Tash Sultana

Official:

https://www.tashsultana.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/tashsultanaofficial/

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/tashsultanaa

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/tashsultanamusic

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdXHuzr3AS3iyPxKSBK15oQ

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/6zVFRTB0Y1whWyH7ZNmywf?si=j_q0k6QESO-1z1mZFkDoIQ

FEATURE: Future Masters: The Ongoing Cultural Impact of The Beatles

FEATURE:

 

 

Future Masters

 The Ongoing Cultural Impact of The Beatles

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THERE have been a couple of recent…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Harry Hammond/V&A Images/Getty Images

bits of news related to The Beatles (John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr) which has caught my eye. The band formed over sixty years ago…and it is amazing that they are still resonating as wide and hard as they do! It is testament to the incredible songwriting and universality of the songs that means new generations are falling for the world’s greatest band. Later in the year, we will finally get to see Peter Jackson’s film/documentary, The Beatles: Back: it will rewrite some misconceptions about those fraught recording sessions around the time of Let It Be. I think there is this feeling that the band were so divided and tense – one of the reasons why they called it quits in 1970. Whilst there is some truth to that, actually, there were talks of another albums (after they recorded Abbey Road); a feeling that things could continue. The film will show the band laughing and bonding, in addition to laying down some timeless tracks! Before coming to the main crux of the feature, fans of Paul McCartney’s lyrics have something to be excited about come November. The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present looks set to be a fascinating tome:

“In this stunning, intimate self-portrait from one of the greatest songwriters of all time, Paul McCartney traces his life from boyhood to the present day through the lyrics to 154 iconic songs, together with captivating commentary and never-before-seen photographs, drafts and letters.

'More often than I can count, I've been asked if I would write an autobiography, but the time has never been right. The one thing I've always managed to do, whether at home or on the road, is to write new songs. I know that some people, when they get to a certain age, like to go to a diary to recall day-to-day events from the past, but I have no such notebooks. What I do have are my songs, hundreds of them, which I've learned serve much the same purpose. And these songs span my entire life.'

PHOTO CREDIT: Penguin Random House 

In this extraordinary book, with unparalleled candour, Paul McCartney recounts his life and art through the prism of 154 songs from all stages of his career - from his earliest boyhood compositions through the legendary decade of The Beatles, to Wings and his solo albums to the present. Arranged alphabetically to provide a kaleidoscopic rather than chronological account, it establishes definitive texts of the songs' lyrics for the first time and describes the circumstances in which they were written, the people and places that inspired them, and what he thinks of them now. Presented with this is a treasure trove of material from McCartney's personal archive - drafts, letters, photographs - never seen before, which make this also a unique visual record of one of the greatest songwriters of all time.

We learn intimately about the man, the creative process, the working out of melodies, the moments of inspiration. The voice and personality of Paul McCartney sings off every page. There has never been a book about a great musician like it”.

I am sorely tempted to buy the collection, as it would provide me an insight into some of those early songs with The Beatles. I think that all of the band were great songwriters - though I have always gravitated towards McCartney style and variety. I know quite a bit about his work with The Beatles. We will get some unique insight into these treasured songs when the book comes out. Not only is there still a massive appetite for The Beatles and songwriters like Paul McCartney; they are still making a huge impact on musicians and people decades after they split.

This takes me to an interesting bit of news. There is now an option for one to study a Masters in The Beatles at the University of Liverpool. The BBC explains more:

“Fans of The Beatles are being invited to study for a master's degree in the Fab Four at the University of Liverpool.

Students on The Beatles: Music Industry and Heritage MA course will learn about the group's influence on popular music and culture, its programme leader said.

Dr Holly Tessler said it was "unique" because it explored the band's legacy.

There is also a focus on heritage and tourism in Liverpool and the UK, she said.

The course - which starts in September - is aimed at people "currently working, or considering pursuing a career in, the music and creative industries", said a university spokesman.

According to the course description, students will be able to visit sites in Merseyside which featured in the group's early years.

Dr Tessler, a Beatles expert, said she was "absolutely delighted" to bring formal study of the Beatles to the University of Liverpool's Department of Music and Institute of Popular Music.

"What makes this MA unique is its focus on The Beatles in a future-facing way, considering the legacy's influence on the music and creative industries, in popular culture, and within heritage, culture and tourism in the 21st Century," she said”.

Students of the postgraduate qualification will also consider how the band's influence could be replicated in different places, industries and contexts around the world, the university said.

It's not the first time a Beatles MA has been offered in the city”.

I know there are current options at universities to do dissertations on The Beatles, but the fact there is now something more comprehensive shows that the band have this cultural impact and legacy that is enormous! Not only can one study the music and the influence the band have had; they will also get a history and cultural lesson about society in the 1960s. I think that, now more than ever, the importance of The Beatles is clear. I feel that that there is so much to learn and treasure. The fact there are new projects coming out regarding the band – in addition to that Paul McCartney lyrics book – shows their genius is still burning bright. It will be interesting to see whether any other artists will get the same treatment regarding courses specifically about them. Maybe there are few that have the same reputation as The Beatles, but I think it is fascinating having specific bands and artists optioned as a Masters. I am looking forward to the Peter Jackson project at the end of August, and I know we will see new books, documentaries and projects regarding The Beatles for decades to come. Now that The Beatles are being honoured by a university in their home city, there will be new fascination and discovery regarding the iconic band. There are fewer higher salutes…

THAN that.

FEATURE: Vinyl Corner: Talk Talk - The Colour of Spring

FEATURE:

 

 

Vinyl Corner

Talk Talk - The Colour of Spring

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I want to bring in a couple of reviews…

for Talk Talk’s third studio album, The Colour of Spring, in a bit. Released on 1st March, 1986, I was wondering whether there would be a thirty-fifth anniversary release for the album – the anniversary is here, so I guess not! I cannot see any special editions, though it would be interesting to see if there is one out there (let me know). In terms of the music, The Colour of Spring was a break from the synthesised Pop of the band’s earliest albums. There was an emphasis on guitars, pianos, and organs. There is a more natural sound through the album. Whilst that may have surprised some fans in 1986, I think it was a needed evolution for Talk Talk and it works really well through The Colour of Spring. I would encourage people to buy The Colour of Spring on vinyl because it is such a fantastic album. Life’s What You Make It, and Living in Another World are two of the best songs Talk Talk ever created. Talk Talk would follow The Colour of Spring with the genius Spirit of Eden in 1988 – perhaps the finest album they ever put out. Because Talk Talk formed in 1981, I wanted to mark forty years of their formation alongside thirty-five years of one of the best albums of the 1980s. I think that The Colour of Spring is a good starting place if you are new to Talk Talk. One might say to go back to the start, though I think there is an accessibility to The Colour of Spring that has made the album so enduring. The Colour of Spring became the band's highest-selling non-compilation studio album - reaching the top-twenty in numerous countries, including the U.K. (where it reached number-eight and stayed in the charts for twenty-one weeks).

I will wrap things up soon enough, but I want to source a couple of reviews for the mighty and beautiful The Colour of Spring. This is what AllMusic wrote in their review:

“With It's My Life, Talk Talk proved that they could pull off an entire album of strong material. With The Colour of Spring, they took it one step further, moving to a near-concept song cycle, following the emotional ups and downs of relationships and pondering life in general. Musically, they built on the experimental direction of the previous album with interesting rhythms, sweeping orchestration, complex arrangements, and even a children's chorus to create an evocative, hypnotic groove. Though the songs were catchier on the earlier efforts and the ambient experimentation was more fully achieved later on, The Colour of Spring succeeded in marrying the two ideas into one unique sound for their most thoroughly satisfying album”.

I do like how there was this marked shift between 1984’s It’s My Life, and The Colour of Spring. The band – Mark Hollis, Lee Harris ands Paul Webb at the core – are phenomenal throughout, and I especially love Hollis’ vocal performances on The Colour of Spring. When Classic Pop wrote when they reviewed a simply marvellous album:

“The watchword for album three is ‘organic’. “That whole synth side – get it in the bin!”, Hollis told interviewer Jim Irvin in 1997 about its change of direction. He was similarly combative about synthetic instruments a decade earlier, no doubt angering Electronics And Music Magazine as he proclaimed to their journalist: “I absolutely hate synthesisers. If they didn’t exist, I’d be delighted.”

The band were happy to excise all vestiges of synth-pop from their sound and The Colour Of Spring would become their biggest-selling album. It sits at the apex of the melodic, conventional songwriting approach of their first two albums and the more experimental ambience of remaining efforts Spirit Of Eden and Laughing Stock. The perfect midpoint, in fact, and often underappreciated amid the remarkable affection in which those last two LPs are held.

As would become de rigueur for Talk Talk, the album was painstakingly assembled in the studio with a huge array of guest musicians. At their most focused, Hollis and co-writer Friese-Greene would be in the studio in 12-hour shifts, six days a week, during sessions that lasted nine months.

Texturally, piano, organ and guitar dominate as the band imbue a more natural musicality into lyrical preoccupations with pastoral themes. Hollis namechecked classical composers Debussy, Satie and most prominently Bartók throughout recording sessions, with all contemporary influences given short shrift.

A Tomorrow Never Knows for the 80s, Life’s What You Make It is built on an unwavering rocking 10-note piano riff that continues throughout the whole song. As the track ebbs and flows, stunning piano and guitar solos flash into the mix while that underlying riff continues beneath, the skeleton of an iconic anthem-in-the-making. Band manager Keith Aspden was concerned the album lacked a hit, so Hollis and Friese-Greene answered the challenge with this. Job done.

On the haunting April 5th, Hollis loses himself in almost wordless reverie. There’s an abrupt change of pace for the pulsating Jean-Paul Sartre-inspired Living In Another World, with Winwood whipping up a maelstrom on Hammond. Mark Feltham – later to work with Oasis – supplies bluesy harmonica. There’s a gritty defiance to the percussive Give It Up and Hollis brings his love of Bartók to bear on the striking intro to Chameleon Day, which morphs into an echo-drenched piano ballad boasting one of the singer’s most dynamic performances; hushed whisperings one minute, gut-wrenching roars the next”.

I am a relatively new fan of Talk Talk – having discovered them properly a few years back -, but I really love The Colour of Spring and how it impacts you. With all eight tracks written by producer Tim Friese-Greene and Mark Hollis, there is not a weak or wasted moment on the album! It does not matter whether you are a huge fan of Talk Talk or are fairly new to the band. One should grab a copy of The Colour of Spring, put the needle down, and immerse themselves in…

SUCH a wonderful album.

FEATURE: One for the Record Collection! Essential March Releases

FEATURE:

 

 

One for the Record Collection!

Essential March Releases

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ALTHOUGH the first couple of months…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Arab Strap/PHOTO CREDIT: Kat Gollock

of 2021 have been a little quiet regarding new albums, things are picking up. That is not to say there has been a lack of great albums so far this year; it is just that there have been ups and downs regarding the consistency of albums coming out. As we look ahead to March, I wanted to highlight great albums arriving that you will want to own. I will start by suggesting albums worth owning that are released on 5th March. I would suggest people pre-order Arab Strap’s As Days Get Dark, as the songs that have been released from it so far are terrific. The Scotsman sat down and reviewed the album:

“For evidence that Arab Strap are older, wiser and utterly unrepentant, listen no further than opening track The Turning of Our Bones, with its stealthy, gothic guitar, squalling saxophone, ominously circling strings and synth handclaps forming a seductive backdrop to Moffat’s narrative “about resurrection and shagging.”

The dynamic created by Moffat’s eye-watering poetry and Middleton’s atmospheric soundtracks is more expertly wrought than ever. Heady disco strings soundtrack Fable of the Urban Fox’s parable on racism. Another Clockwork Day’s catalogue of online porn (“wearing nothing but a new postcode”) is teamed with pastoral picking and mournful melodica (is there any other kind?) Tears on Tour ponders the triggers for teardrops from raw, uncomprehending bereavement to “the Muppet movie, Frozen, Frozen 2” over some surprising Mark Knopfler-style burnished blues guitar.

One album that I am really excited about is Jane Weaver’s Flock. I think everyone should pre-order a copy, as Weaver’s music is among the most interesting and memorable out there. It is shaping up to be one of 2021’as finest albums:

“Flock is the record that Jane Weaver always wanted to make, the most genuine version of herself, complete with unpretentious Day-Glo pop sensibilities, wit, kindness, humour and glamour. A consciously positive vision for negative times, a brooding and ethereal creation.

The album features an untested new fusion of seemingly unrelated compounds fused into an eco-friendly hum; pop music for post-new-normal times. Created from elements that should never date, its pop music reinvented. Still prevalent are the cosmic sounds, but Flock is a natural rebellion to the recent releases which sees her decidedly move away from conceptual roots in favour of writing pop music. Produced on a complicated diet of bygone Lebanese torch songs, 1980's Russian Aerobics records and Australian Punk.

Amongst this broadcast of glistening sounds is The Revolution Of Super Visions, an untelevised Mothership connection, with Prince floating by as he plays scratchy guitar; it also features a funky whack-a-mole bass line and synth worms. It underlines the discordant pop vibe that permeates Flock and concludes on Solarised, a super-catchy, totally infectious apocalypse, a radio-friendly groove for last dance lovers clinging together in an effort to save themselves before the end of the night.

The musician’s exposure to an abundance of lost records served as a reminder that you still feel like an outsider in this world and that by overcoming fears you can achieve artistic freedom. Jane Weaver continues to metamorphise.

Bonus CD features new and exclusive versions from Jane Weaver’s studio. It comes with CD and Rough Trade exclusive LP Version only”.

Another big release that is coming out on 5th March is Kings of Leon’s When You See Yourself. If you are a fan of the band, go and pre-order their upcoming eighth album. As the band explained in an interview with NME from last month, they wanted to make sure they got the album right and were not rushed:

“Kings Of Leon frontman Caleb Followill has suggested that the band’s forthcoming new album ‘When You See Yourself’ will be their most “personal” record yet in terms of its lyrics.

The Tennessee four-piece will release their latest LP on March 5, nearly four-and-a-half years on from 2016’s ‘Walls’.

Followill and his drummer brother Nathan have now previewed ‘When You See Yourself’, which had its original release date delayed last year due to the coronavirus pandemic, in a new interview with The Sun.

“The decision to put it out now was our answer to the fact we aren’t able to tour right now. Hopefully by summer we can make the shows we are booked to play,” Nathan said.

“People can’t see live shows right now, so the next best thing is new music for them to listen to. Putting it out was our way of saying ‘thank you’ to our fans for their patience.”

Speaking about the album, Caleb said that he and his bandmates made use of the extra time to put the finishing touches to the record, saying “we weren’t rushing it out”.

“We got to make sure we were happy with everything and go back to critique little things we wanted to hear in there,” he said.

In terms of the lyrics, Caleb suggested that ‘When You See Yourself’ is the band’s most “personal” album yet, saying: “I try to write and convince myself that I’m writing about something else but a vein of my personal life flows through these songs”.

Jumping to 19th March, and Loretta Lynn’s Still Woman Enough arrives. The Country legend is preparing to release her fiftieth album. As this Pitchfork article explains, it is a hugely important album:

“Loretta Lynn has announced the new album Still Woman Enough, which arrives on March 19 via Legacy. Marking her 50th studio album, the 13-song collection celebrates women in country music and includes new compositions along with reinterpretations of songs from throughout Lynn’s catalog. The album also features appearances from Margo Price, Tanya Tucker, Reba McEntire, and Carrie Underwood. Check out the music video for “Coal Miner’s Daughter Recitation” below and scroll down for the cover art and tracklist.

“I am just so thankful to have some of my friends join me on my new album. We girl singers gotta stick together," Loretta Lynn said in a statement. “It’s amazing how much has happened in the 50 years since ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter’ first came out and I’m extremely grateful to be given a part to play in the history of American music”.

Make sure you pre-order the album, because it is primed to be full of gold and wonderful collaboration. Rough Trade provide more details:

“The American music icon's 50th studio album (excluding her 10 studio duet collaborations with Conway Twitty), Still Woman Enough celebrates women in country music. From her homage to the originators, Mother Maybelle Carter and the Carter Family (via her cover of "Keep On The Sunny Side") through a new interpretation of her very first single, "I'm A Honky Tonk Girl," Loretta Lynn acknowledges her role in the continuum of American country music with a special collaboration with Reba McEntire and Carrie Underwood ("Still Woman Enough"), and duets with Margo Price ("One's On The Way") and Tanya Tucker ("You Ain't Woman Enough"), sharing the musical torch with some of the brightest lights and biggest stars in contemporary country music. The album premieres 13 new Loretta Lynn recordings, intimate and electrifying performances of a career-spanning selection of songs illuminating different aspects of her repertoire. The collection is centred around Loretta's original compositions - from new songs like "Still Woman Enough" (which shares its title and attitude with her 2002 autobiography and was cowritten with her daughter, Patsy Lynn Russell) through fresh interpretations of classics including "I'm a Honky Tonk Girl" (her first single, originally released March 1960), "You Ain't Woman Enough" (the title track for her first #1 Billboard Hot Country Album in 1966), "My Love" (from 1968's Here's Loretta Lynn), "I Wanna Be Free" (1971) and a deeply emotional "Coal Miner's Daughter Recitation," commemorating the 50th anniversary of the release of her signature song (October 5, 1970) and album (January 4, 1971)”.

Finishing off with albums from 26th March, and there are a few that are well worth some pennies. I am looking ahead to the release of Evanescence’s The Bitter Truth. I want to bring in an interesting interview from Rolling Stone where the band’s lead, Amy Lee, discussed her life and her band’s new record:

“I’m not going to rush,” says Lee, 38. “I’m just trying to live in the moment, feeding my soul with the music.”

When the band began making a concerted effort to work on new material last year, their one rule was that there would be no rules. They began with a wealth of material and inspiration, along with a couple decade-old songs that finally feel ripe for release. Since August, when her U.S.-based bandmates took tour buses to join her in Nashville (guitarist Jen Majura has remained in Germany), they’ve been powering through the rest of the album.

“The energy was just amped,” Lee says. “We were in there on fire. Now, the guys are back at their homes, and I am wading through the aftermath of all the music, piecing it together and finalizing the record.” In some ways, she says, lockdown has been a blessing: “The upside of this time is that I’ve had to buckle down and focus. Even on the days that I don’t want to, I come out here and I go, ‘Let’s do this. Let’s finish the album.’ ”

Every rock era has been defined by how few women have been able to break through to the mainstream, and Lee felt isolated even as her operatic mezzo-soprano became one of rock’s definitive voices. At one radio show, a DJ introduced the band by admitting that he had “jacked off” to the Fallen album cover, a close-up of Lee’s face. After the first song and a few minutes of simmering rage, Lee called him out. At another show, she interrupted her performance to confront a few members of the mostly male audience who were chanting “Show your tits.”

It took until this year for Lee to feel comfortable expressing her opinion on politics, speaking out in interviews against Donald Trump and the police killing of George Floyd. On “Use My Voice,” released as a single this summer, she makes it clear she’s no longer willing to stay quiet: “Drown every truth in an ocean of lies,” she sings. “Label me bitch because I dare to draw my own line/Burn every bridge and build a wall in my way/But I will use my voice”.

One of the smaller bands releasing a new album in March is The Antlers. Green to Gold is an album that I am thinking about pre-ordering the album. It is sounding like it’s going to be magnificent:

“Highly anticipated record from New York's act The Antlers, their first new music in seven music. Perhaps what distinguishes Green to Gold from the rest of The Antlers’ canon is its arrival at a kind of quiet normalcy after a number of rather anxious records. Conceived and written almost entirely in the morning hours, Green to Gold is the easily their most luminous record to date.

Following 2014’s Familiars,it looked unsure as to whether there would even be another Antlers album, after the onset of singer and primary songwriter Peter Silberman’s auditory problems. Affecting his left ear, it was a condition that left him struggling to cope with commonplace noises. He was subsequently diagnosed with lesions on one of his vocal cords, requiring surgery for their removal and vocal therapy to retrain his voice to sing. Following a relocation to upstate New York and the 10th anniversary tour of 2009's 'Hospice', Silberman was rejuvenated and rediscovered the impulse to create new Antlers music. Of Silberman’s unique vocals, The Guardian wrote “His multi-octave voice is as intense as Jeff Buckley’s or Anohni’s, but it’s vulnerable without being precious or cloying”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Pooneh Ghana

I am going to finish up by recommending people pre-order tUnE-yArDs’ sketchy. If you do not know about tUnE-yArDs, they are an American, Oakland, California–based music project of musician Merrill Garbus, with long-time collaborator, bassist Nate Brenner. Make sure you pre-order sketchy:

“Tune-Yards’ last release I can feel you creep into my private life, was a self-reflexive question mark at the end of a decade of outspoken, polyphonic indie music. From 2009 to 2018, Tune-Yards (both Merrill and her partner and collaborator Nate Brenner) released four critically acclaimed albums, travelled the world relentlessly to play live shows, and composed the psychedelic score to Boots Riley's surrealist cinematic masterpiece Sorry To Bother You. "We had really been non-stop hustling," Merrill reflects. "And when we're hustling, we're complicit in all of the systems that I really don't believe in."

Interrogating these systems and her role within them had left Merrill feeling heavy with grief and lost about how to move forward. The duo pressed on, inspired by the Beastie Boys Book and Questlove’s Creative Quest, and began jamming daily for hours in their home rehearsal studio “like athletes”. They ditched computer screens for live instruments (Merrill on drums, Nate on bass) and before long full songs started to emerge.

Unlike the lyrical introspection of previous outing I can feel you..., on sketchy. Merrill balances self-inspection and reflection with bombastic rallying cries, reminiscent of the furious tones of early days Tune-Yards. The result is a colourful and joyous record with lyrics that cut to the bone. "I started remembering that people come to us to be entertained, to move, to feel joy. And together, I think, we can wake up”.

Although the rate of album releases will increase as we go into spring and summer, there are some really good ones due in March! I think that there may be some new additions and changes, as one cannot predict whether all of the albums announced will be released on the date published. They are correct as of the time of writing this feature (23rd February). If you were unsure which albums are worth snapping up next month, then I hope that the guide above will…

POINT you in the right direction.

FEATURE: A Buyer’s Guide: Part Forty-Four: Chaka Khan

FEATURE:

 

 

A Buyer’s Guide

Part Forty-Four: Chaka Khan

___________

AHEAD of her sixty-eighth birthday…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Chaka Khan performs at ChicagoFest in 1981 (the year before she quit Rufus to devote herself full-time to her solo career)/PHOTO CREDIT: Chicago Sun-Times

on 23rd March, I wanted to feature the inimitable and legendary Chaka Khan in A Buyer’s Guide. I think she is one of the greatest Funk and Soul artists who has ever lived. Her twelfth studio album, Hello Happiness, was released in 2019; Khan is showing no signs of slowing down! She is also in the running for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year. Before running down the essential works of Chaka Khan, here is some Wikipedia background to a musical icon:

“Yvette Marie Stevens (born March 23, 1953), better known by her stage name Chaka Khan, is an American musician, singer and songwriter. Her career has spanned nearly five decades, beginning in the 1970s as the lead vocalist of the funk band Rufus. Known as the "Queen of Funk", Khan was the first R&B artist to have a crossover hit featuring a rapper, with "I Feel for You" in 1984.[2] Khan has won ten Grammy Awards and has sold an estimated 70 million records worldwide.

With Rufus, she achieved four gold singles, four gold albums, and two platinum albums. In the course of her solo career, Khan achieved three gold singles, three gold albums, and one platinum album with I Feel for You. She has collaborated with Ry Cooder, Robert Palmer, Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, Guru, Chicago, De la Soul, Mary J. Blige, among others. In December 2016, Billboard magazine ranked her as the 65th most successful dance artist of all time. She was ranked at No. 17 in VH1's original list of the 100 Greatest Women of Rock & Roll. She has been nominated for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame three times as a solo artist and four times as a member of Rufus featuring Chaka Khan; the first time in 2012 as a member of Rufus”.

If you need a guide to Chaka Khan’s music and which albums are worth buying, then I hope that this feature can help out. Take a look below and revel in the brilliance of a titanic artist who we hope will be making music…

FOR a long time yet.

____________

The Four Essential Albums

 

What Cha' Gonna Do for Me

Release Date: 15th April, 1981

Label: Warner Bros.

Producer: Arif Mardin

Standout Tracks: We Can Work It Out/Any Old Sunday/And the Melody Still Lingers On (Night in Tunisia)

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=111878&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/6elTNQdWmobPp0QGEPwPMc?si=iR0NVCUWR6WENc79lmNEPw

Review:

“As a vocalist, Chaka Khan is the one of the very few who often doesn't need great material to prosper. Thankfully, on What Cha' Gonna Do for Me that isn't the case. Teaming again with Arif Mardin, slowly but surely the two began to craft an even more successful and innovative sound. This effort not only bests the work before it, but it is Mardin's most fulfilling production since 1974's Average White Band. The cover of "We Can Work It Out" gets a brash and funky Stevie Wonder-style arrangement, with Gregory Phillanganes doing great synth work. The biggest hit here is the melodic title track and has Khan's patented mix of sexiness and intelligent phrasing. The best song here, "I Know You, I Live You," displays the brilliant bass and drum team of Anthony Jackson and Steve Ferrone, whose innovation all but rendered Rufus obsolete. Their pounding yet refined sound is also on "We've Got Each Other," a hooky and propulsive duet with Khan's brother Mark Stevens. The ambitious and much loved "And the Melody Still Lingers On (Night in Tunisia)" had Mardin and Khan creating pithy lyrics that paid homage to '40s jazz legends as well as all other subsequent musical geniuses. The track features a clavitar solo from Herbie Hancock, Dizzy Gillespie, and an "excerpted" solo break from Charlie Parker. Throughout What Cha' Gonna Do for Me, Mardin seems to get amazing vocals from Khan and has he certainly had fun playing with her voice. What Cha' Gonna Do for Me is arguably the best effort of their partnership” – AllMusic

Choice Cut: What Cha' Gonna Do for Me

Chaka Khan

Release Date: 17th November, 1982

Label: Warner Bros.

Producer: Arif Mardin

Standout Tracks: Tearin' It Up/Slow Dancin' (ft. Rick James)/Twisted

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/1081764

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/7ndE9iVFDmgIRey7SyZv3G?si=0dVu625NRnOJjpu9aa5eBw

Review:

“An excellent album from Chaka Khan, mixing tingling uptempo tunes with her characteristic soaring, glorious vocals. "Got to Be There" reached number five on the R&B charts, but it actually wasn't the album's high point. That was the marvelous "Be Bop Medley," which later led hardcore jazz purist Betty Carter to proclaim Khan the one female singer working outside the jazz arena with legitimate improvising credentials” – AllMusic

Choice Cut: Got to Be There

I Feel for You

Release Date: 1st October, 1984

Label: Warner Bros.

Producers: Arif Mardin/Robbie Buchanan/John Robie/Russ Titelman/David ‘Hawk’ Wolinski/James Newton Howard/David Foster/Humberto Gatica/Joe Mardin

Standout Tracks: This Is My Night/My Love Is Alive/Through the Fire

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=42018&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/08yanJqA75TPyDowCXvvPU?si=qs2sZWoJT1uG66zPBng89Q

Review:

“Lost (albeit understandably) amid the title track’s meteoric impact were nine other fantastic songs. “This Is My Night,” the album’s opening shot, is a compelling tune, filled with the excitement of promises to be fulfilled by the subsequent songs. Any album as dominated by dance tracks as I Feel For You is usually brought to an unqualified dead end by its obligatory ballads, but both “Stronger Than Before” (one of the only latter day Bacharach-Bayer Sager ditties that doesn’t sound like warmed over Christopher Cross) and “Through The Fire” (recently sampled and Chipmunkesized a la Cam’ron’s “Oh Boy” on Kayne West’s “Through the Wire”) are legitimate high points in Chaka’s solo career. The album’s most confounding track, “Chinatown,” falls into that odd territory between sincerity and parody. The lyrics, a pre-Lost in Translation attempt to turn Eastern mysticism into the language of romantic inconclusiveness, document just about every corny cultural stereotype imaginable (as when she calls her indifferent lover “some crazy Fu Manchu”—and I sincerely hope that I’m wrong in my interpretation of “eyes that I can’t see, they stare me down”). But Chaka, former Black Panther, belts it like the final verse of “Home.”

Finally, the stuttering, acid-tongued “Caught In The Act,” what with its venomous jilted-lover lyrics and incongruous Speak & Spell synth riff, reconciles Chaka’s drive for pop-crossover success and slavish genuflection to Mother Jazz (her follow up album Destiny would include another tasty electro-jazz funk riff with “Tight Fit,” as well as the unabashedly Down Beat-baiting “Coltrane Dreams”). Al Jarreau’s High Crime LP (also released in 84) covers this same territory, most notably in the now standard “Sticky Wicket.” But where Jarreau’s buttery voice tends to expose the jazz-pop hybrid’s inherent blandness by only adding another layer of aural lubrication, Chaka’s angry rasp holds the listener down by the nape of their neck like fly paper. Which she does in every track on the album and which is why, rockists be damned, I Feel For You is a true pop touchstone” – SLANT

Choice Cut: I Feel for You

CK

Release Date: 22nd November, 1988

Label: Warner Bros.

Producers: Russ Titelman/David Frank/Chaka Khan/Prince/Chris Jasper

Standout Tracks: Soul Talkin’/Eternity/I’ll Be Around

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/Chaka-Khan-CK/master/111897

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/7sCnguNPlXb67fQEdgWaIN?si=Sb8qw9ooQmSe4oPGtsGOoQ

Review:

“A first-class release, despite the fact that it didn't pack the normal commercial punch. But it had excellent production, many outstanding selections, and uniformly dazzling, booming, triumphant vocals from Khan. She currently speaks with disdain about the record business, and it's probably due to the relative failure of great records like this to break out and really enjoy the success they merit that's disillusioned her” – AllMusic

Choice Cut: Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I'm Yours)

The Underrated Gem

 

Chaka

Release Date: 12th October, 1978

Label: Warner Bros.

Producer: Arif Mardin

Standout Tracks: Love Has Fallen on Me/Life Is a Dance/I Was Made to Love Him

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=109436&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/2lvaLIoEg3hwL2dybu6zTC?si=HrDdo6NuTjen5OzPqhAB6A

Review:

“Still very much an integral part of Rufus, Chaka Khan set the charts on fire with her debut solo release. The first single was the R&B chart-topper "I'm Every Woman," an Ashford & Simpson track with Khan lighting up the lyric with her tantalizing vocals. "Life Is a Dance," the second release, doesn't quite compare to its predecessor, but it still made the R&B Top 40. The sentimental ballad "Roll Me Through the Rushes" is poetically engaging, and despite never being released as a single, it became a mainstay of radio. Although Khan had much credibility from her association with Rufus, this album demonstrated that the dynamic vocalist could hold her own ground alone” – AllMusic

Choice Cut: I’m Every Woman

The Latest Album

 

Hello Happiness

Release Date: 15th February, 2019

Labels: Diary/Island

Producers: Switch/Sarah Ruba

Standout Tracks: Don't Cha Know/Like Sugar/Ladylike

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=1500088&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/1QRhPsupQCDlD9EwTWumSA?si=_JQcqw5KRaWhaIu8NOqUHw

Review:

“The album arrives at an interesting juncture in Khan’s career. In 2016, still reeling from the death of her friend Prince, Khan, along with her sister, checked into rehab to treat an addiction to painkillers, stating she “knew it was time to take action to save our lives”. That sense of clarity permeates the album’s title track, where Khan joyously sings “Music makes me say goodbye sadness, hello happiness” over an elastic bass line and chunky synths. She struts around the melody before finally letting go with a sky-rocketing cry of “Wanna dance, wanna dance” that makes the song feel sweaty. That sensation continues into the throbbing, disco-tinged Like a Lady, while the irresistible funk of lead single Like Sugar cleverly creates pockets of space for Khan’s rip-roaring vocal interjections to fade in and out, as if she’s having so much fun dancing she forgot to step up to the mic.

The album sags, however, when the production starts to encroach on the star. Don’t Cha Know is essentially an instrumental, with darting sonic textures, samples of crowd noise and a screeching central riff that drowns everything else out. The otherwise enjoyable Too Hot, in which Khan purrs her way through a lyric about feeding her hunger, is constantly interrupted by a juddering synth that sounds like it crept in from a different, less interesting song. Thankfully, Hello Happiness returns to what it does best.

The closing Ladylike is the album’s quietest moment, with a simple guitar riff and distant percussion carrying a song that effortlessly reminds you of Khan’s influence, on everyone from Whitney Houston to modern R&B practitioners such as Ella Mai. It ends, as it should, with Khan front and centre” – The Guardian

Choice Cut: Hello Happiness

The Chaka Khan Book

 

Chaka!: Through the Fire

Authors: Chaka Khan/Tonya Bolden   

Publication Date: 30th April, 2004

Publisher: Rodale Press

Synopsis:

“Rolling Stone compared it to melted caramel, and Miles Davis compared it to his horn.

Chaka Khan's scorchingly soulful voice first dazzled most of us back in 1974 with Rufus and "Tell Me Something Good," and most recently in her Grammy Award-winning performance in Standing in the Shadows of Motown, singing "What's Going On?" with the Funk Brothers. Over the years, she's had twelve number-one hits and nine number-one albums. Over one hundred appearances on the Billboard charts. Nineteen Grammy nominations and eight Grammy wins. Her achievements in the music industry are legendary, and like her twenty albums, they're well-known to the public.

But the private side of Chaka, the story of what fame and fortune have cost her-- and taught her-- hasn't been told before. In Chaka! Through the Fire, Chaka Khan gives us the whole story of the woman behind the diva and reveals her high and low points. A happy early childhood in a loving, creative home was shattered by escalating fights between her parents. When they finally split, Chaka's father disappeared without even a goodbye, leaving Chaka bewildered, bereft, and blaming her mother. She reconnected with her dad in her teens, finding that he was as liberal and permissive a parent as her mother was strict. Chaka started experimenting with drugs and joined the Black Panthers. Soon after, she fronted for a band called Rufus.

They hit it big with "Tell Me Something Good," and Chaka's stardom was launched. But life on the road was grueling, and as the years went by, the pressures grew. Chaka turned to alcohol and drugs to numb the pain of failed relationships, the guilt of leaving her kids to be raised by Grandma, the resentment she felt about the exhausting demands of her career. It wasn't until things got very bad that she started to see the patterns. All the things she had suffered through in her childhood and swore never to do to her kids-- well, she was doing them.

That's when she began the work of turning it all around. These days, she's still a musical powerhouse, but she's making sure there's time for family, too. She's drug-free. She's started her own record label and has also started a foundation to help women and children in need. Remarkably, Chaka has remained a true wild child despite all the changes: a fiercely independent woman who never compromised her spirit.

Chaka Khan is one of the foremost vocalists of our time and has won recognition in many music genres. She has received countless awards and has worked with some of music's biggest talents, including Miles Davis, Prince, and Dizzy Gillespie. She currently resides in London and Los Angeles.

Tonya Bolden is a magna cum laude baccalaureate of Princeton University. In addition to the many books she has authored, she has also collaborated on Eartha Kitt's Rejuvenate! and contributed text to Diana Ross's Diana Ross: Going Back” – Amazon.co.uk

Buy: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Chaka-Through-Fire-Khan/dp/1579548261/ref=sr_1_1?crid=19702B6P9U92R&dchild=1&keywords=chaka+khan&qid=1613565792&s=books&sprefix=chaka+%2Caps%2C172&sr=1-1

FEATURE: Fruit Underneath My Red Shoes: Kate Bush’s Eat the Music

FEATURE:

 

Fruit Underneath My Red Shoes

Kate Bush’s Eat the Music

___________

HERE is a song I have sort of looked at before…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in a promotional photo for Eat the Music in 1993

but not really gone into any depth. When I discussed the 1993 Kate Bush film, The Line, the Cross, the Curve, I did mention Eat the Music and how brilliant its visuals are. The Red Shoes remains a very underrated album; there are wonderful songs like Eat the Music that do not get that much focus. I hardly hear it played on the radio – that is a shame when you consider its quality. From the Kate Bush Encyclopaedia, one can learn more about Eat the Music:

“Song written by Kate Bush. It was originally released as the lead single for The Red Shoes in the USA on September 7, 1993, while everywhere else in the world Rubberband Girl was released. In the UK, a small handful of extremely rare 7" and promotional CD-singles were produced, but were recalled by EMI Records at the last minute. A commercial release followed in the Summer of 1994 in the Netherlands and Australia, along with a handful of other countries. The song's lyrics are about opening up in relationships to reveal who we really are inside”.

With some great bass work from John Giblin, some top valiha work from Justin Vali and Paddy Bush, and some fantastic brass injected into the song, I love how exotic and exciting Eat the Music is. The third track on The Red Shoes – after Rubberband Girl, and And So Is Love -, we got so much variation and life. Rubberband Girl opens The Red Shoes with panache; there is something more emotive with And So Is Love, before Eat the Music gives us some groove and carnival. It is a Baila (a form of music, popular in Sri Lanka and among Goan Catholics) song that sits between two softer tracks on the album – Moments of Pleasure follows Eat the Music.

Some reviewers were not keen to hear Eat the Music when it came out, as they felt Bush made a bit of a mess with the food metaphors; the imagery was a little clumsy and basic. I like lines line “Does he conceal/What he really feels?/He's a woman at heart/And I love him for that/Let's split him open” and “Like a pomegranate/Insides out/All is revealed/Not only women bleed”. We definitely get a lot of fruits thrown into the mix (blender?). Mixing emotional and romantic imagery with fruit imagery, it is a really interesting song. I must admit that I am not sold on every line, but one cannot help but get caught up in the beautiful sound of the track! The video is bright, colourful and joyful…and I think The Red Shoes is one of Kate Bush’s most interesting periods. Whilst the album is not one of her finest, she was still very experimental - and we get these wonderful songs like Eat the Music. I definitely think that it is worthy of some fresh ears and inspection. My favourite lines might be “Take a papaya/You like a guava?/Grab a banana/And a sultana/Rip them to pieces/with sticky fingers/Split the banana”. Even though Eat the Music only reached ten in the US Alternative Airplay (Billboard) chart, I think it is a great song that could have fared well in the U.K. Rubberband Girl was released here instead.

In an interview with Future Music in 1993, Bush went track-by-track on The Red Shoes and talked about Eat the Music:

“This track, laden with trummpets andl light percussion, has a very Latin American feel which actually stems from the music of Madagascar. "It uses a small guitar called a 'caboss' which is one of the instruments Paddy (Bush, Kate's brother) discovered and brought back with him. He's very into ethnic music of all kinds and has always contributed a lot of ideas to the albums - he helped bring in some authentic players and the track started off with bass guitar which was then replaced by an acoustic bass - but that sounded a bit too Latin. The horn section's real, of course."

The decision not to release this track as the first single from the album represents one of the few times Kate has been influenced by outside opinions in this respect -the interest in Rubberband Girl winning out in this case”.

Although there are stronger songs on The Red Shoes, Eat the Music is a treat that offers a lot of delight and vivid imagery. I want to leave with another incredible passage from the song: “All emotion/And with devotion/You put your hands in/What ya thinking?/What am I singing?/A song of seeds/The food of love/Eat the music”. If you have not heard Eat the Music or have sort of avoided The Red Shoes, give the song a good listen (also make sure you watch the video). Bush would come back after 1993 with 2005’s Aerial: an album where she seemed renewed and re-inspired. If The Red Shoes was a slight dip in quality and consistency, one could definitely still find gems. Eat the Music proved that Kate Bush was still delivering unique, unusual and simply…

 ALBUM PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush

BEAUTIFUL songs.

FEATURE: Modern Heroines: Part Thirty-Four: Zara Larsson

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern Heroines

Part Thirty-Four: Zara Larsson

___________

FOR this part of Modern Heroines…

I am taking some time to spotlight a major Pop artist who I feel will continue to rise. Zara Larsson achieved national fame in Sweden for winning the 2008 season of the talent show, Talang (the Swedish version of the Got Talent format). In 2012, Larsson signed with the record label TEN Music Group and subsequently released her debut compilation recording, the extended play, Introducing, in January 2013. I am going to talk about her upcoming album, Poster Girl, and bring in a couple of fairly recent interviews. Out on 5th March, Poster Girl is going to be one of the biggest Pop albums of this year. NME provide more details:

“The record, which follows the Swedish pop star’s 2017 album ‘So Good’, is set to land on March 5 via Black Butter.

The new album follows Larsson’s recent single ‘Talk About Love’, a collaboration with Young Thug.

“‘Talk About Love’ is about that phase before two people work out what they are to one another,” Larsson explained of the new track.

“That specific window is so beautiful and fragile, as soon as you start asking ‘are we doing this?’ or ‘how do *you* feel?’, for some people that ruins the magic. ‘Talk About Love’ is savouring that moment before you have to decide”.

If you are not a big fan of mainstream Pop, I would say to give Zara Larsson a chance. She is far stronger than many of her peers; her music is not reserved for a narrow market – one does not feel like she is marketing for streaming hits and popularity.

So Good was an album that won praise with many critics. Released in 2017, it was the sophomore album from Larsson. This is what AllMusic wrote when they assessed the album:

“Living up to its title, So Good -- the sophomore set from Swedish singer Zara Larsson -- arrived after a two-year promotional rollout that followed the release of her debut, 2014's 1. Her slow climb toward the upper pop strata occupied by Rihanna, Sia, and Tove Lo -- the artists whose vocals Larsson most closely echoes -- began in 2015 with the quadruple-platinum number one single "Lush Life," an effective dose of tropical pop that rides the surf with a playful whistle and undeniable bounce. Quickly following with the skittering staccato of MNEK duet "Never Forget You," Larsson scored another hit. Two subsequent album highlights -- the bass-blasted "Ain't My Fault" and "I Would Like" -- provided additional examples of her strong voice and confident attitude. By the time fifth single -- the Ty Dolla $ign-featuring, Charlie Puth-penned title track -- arrived in 2017, a third of So Good had been unveiled. Despite the significant time gap, So Good remains a tight vision full of romantic drama, youthful abandon, and a strong sense of female empowerment. "TG4M" ("too good for me") basks in the sun with a piña colada in hand, part of a Girl's Only weekend with Daya and Hailee Steinfeld, while the WizKid-featuring, Stargate-produced "Sundown" invites Sia to the moonlight island party.

When the party ends, the uplifting "What They Say" provides a comforting shoulder to lean on. Amongst the feel-good party jams, heartfelt surprises provide more emotional sustenance. "Make That Money Girl" is a slow-builder that turns the bad gal toughness of Rihanna into a girl power anthem with a message that demands self-reliance and vision, going so far as reminding listeners that "you can be the next female president." When Larsson delves even deeper, the results are refreshing. Album closer "I Can't Fall in Love Without You" is a beautiful sendoff. Set to Jesper Nordenström's piano accompaniment, the track is a sweeping and heartfelt expression, the most vulnerable and pure on So Good. Fun and engaging, Larsson made one of the better pop albums of 2017. Like contemporaries Daya, Steinfeld, Bebe Rexha, and Dua Lipa, Larsson delivers polished R&B-influenced pop gems that shine bright like diamonds while maintaining a too-cool-for-school factor that helps to distinguish her from the bubblegum”.

I want to bring in a few interviews, as it provides some detail and background on Zara Larsson. I think she is one of the most interesting and original artists in the mainstream right now. From what we have heard from Poster Girl, the album is shaping up to be pretty strong and broad.

I want to quote from TIME and an interview they conducted in 2019. They highlight the fact that Larsson is more than a Pop star. She is a role model:

“But as she’s grown up at the center of attention, Larsson, 21, has made one thing clear: she’s about much more than just dance music. She’s an outspoken feminist who promotes sexual health without compromising her fun-loving image. She started out by speaking candidly in blog posts and on social media when she was younger. Last fall, she signed on as a face of Durex for an AIDS prevention campaign.

“I would definitely like to think of myself as a role model,” Larsson says. “Again, I’m a person; I’m not perfect, but I don’t think anyone expects me to be,” she adds, recognizing that existing in such a public space means making mistakes. “Ruin My Life” received some criticism upon its release from fans who didn’t think the message tallied with Larsson’s progressive image. But Larsson sees it differently. “I don’t want to encourage people to stay in a relationship… that isn’t good for you, but I think we’ve all been there at least once,” she reflects. It wasn’t her first experience with negativity on social media, either, as she has been subject to online abuse in response to expressions of her feminism”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Erik Henriksson

I would advise everyone to check out Poster Girl when it arrives. As we learn from HELLO, there is quite a variation and sonic/emotional spread on the album:

"I feel that this album has a lot of everything in there. Some beautiful ballads, some sassy songs: the vibe is very fun and dance-friendly. It’s a bit more grown-up, naturally, as my last album was when I was a teenager and now, I’m a young woman. So, it’s me writing about life, and life is high and low, a lot of emotions are there. I think my focus, in general, is probably love. I like to write about that, but in a sexy way."

Zara first discovered music at the age of five, when her mum gave her one of Carola Häggkvist’s albums, she is a huge musician in Sweden. "She is a-ma-zing, my first biggest idol. She sings in Swedish, too, so I could understand what she was saying, rather than Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Beyoncé – and all of the others I also listened to."

Zara’s first break came when, aged ten, she won Talang (2008), the Swedish version of Britain’s Got Talent. "I was so nervous, but also excited, as it was my first time being on a big stage. It went by very quickly, unfortunately, because it’s not like The X Factor, where you are on there every week. It was the audition, the semi-final and the final."

Her life pretty much went back to normal after the competition, until she released Uncover in 2013. "It became really successful. I think some people thought, 'Wait, that’s the girl from the talent show?'. So I think it did help me, because it’s a fun story and connects me to something, but it was also the first time I felt that I had really done something, and it wasn’t just a show”.

I am going to wrap things up soon. First, I want to source from an in-depth interview NME published recently. It is likely that Zara Larsson would have been introduced to new listeners. I have been listening to her music a lot more. I think that she has a long and very successful career ahead of her. Poster Girl is shaping up to be an intriguing album:

“If you didn’t already think that Larsson is head over heels in love – she recently said “it’s just not legal to feel this good” – ‘Poster Girl’, her third album, would seem to make it pretty plain. The record begins with the blissful shimmer of her 2020 single ‘Love Me Land’, on which she sings: “Never thought I would love again / Here I am, lost in Love Me Land.” Other highlights include the soulful bop ‘I Need Love’ – “like an addict needs a drug,” she purrs – and ‘Need Someone’, which features the wonderfully self-assured couplet: “I’m happy I don’t need someone / I’m happy, but I want you.” The penultimate track ‘FFF’ turns out to be shorthand for “falling for a friend”.

Still, Larsson politely deflects my suggestion that ‘Poster Girl’ is a kind of concept album about entering into a joyous new relationship after a break-up. Back in August 2019, amid internet rumours that she’d split from her boyfriend, the model Brian Whittaker, Larsson shared an Instagram meme that read: “When you get your heartbroken but it’s OK because the street’s been waiting for you to be single again.” Later that month, she confirmed to People magazine that she was indeed “single right now”.

It has been a pretty busy and illuminating past five years for the modern Pop icon. That said, there have been peaks and troughs regarding success and chart positions:

It didn’t take long for international success to follow. Appearing on the cover of NME in late 2016, she told us in no uncertain terms: “I want as many people as possible to go to my concert.” In 2015 and 2016 she sent no fewer than six singles into the UK Top 20, including the skittering ‘Never Forget You’, a duet with London singer MNEK; the club-ready Tinie Tempah collaboration ‘Girls Like’; and the utterly irresistible ‘Lush Life’, one of the best pop songs of the decade. Then, in 2017, she partnered with Clean Bandit for the chart-topping dance banger ‘Symphony’. It still ranks among both acts’ career highlights, Larsson’s emotional vocals adding some red-blooded grit to Clean Bandit’s precision-tooled beats.

Since then, Larsson’s chart positions outside of Sweden haven’t been as sky-high – her last four singles didn’t crack the UK top 10 – but her pop star stock remains premium. “And at this point I just want people to hear my new music and I want to stop being so scared of how it’s going to go,” she says. “Because honestly, what could go wrong? That I sell one album. If that happens, I’ll make another one – that’s how I see it now. And that’s how I’ve been seeing it the whole time I was growing up in this industry.

“But because my first [global] album was ‘So Good’ – literally! – I felt pressured, I really did. And then eventually, I was like, ‘Nah, you can’t keep going on like this because the longer you wait to release this album, the less people are gonna care anyways. So just fucking release it because it’s great, it’s fun and it’s my form of escapism.”

Larsson spoke about writing and working alongside women; how there is this sexism and there is a division in perception when it comes to multitalented men and women:

Larsson co-wrote songs for ‘Poster Girl’ with singer-songwriters Julia Michaels (who’s American) and Kamille (British), and says that she never wants to be the only woman in a songwriting session. But to this day she’s never worked with a female producer – something she finds “so sad”. Part of the problem, she says, is the way the music industry legitimises a certain brand of male bravado. “I’ve met guys who are like: ‘I’m a producer, I’m a photographer, I’m a stylist, I’m an investor, I’m a director, I’m a lighting guy’,” she says. “And everyone’s like: ‘Yeah man, yeah you are!’ And it’s like, how can you really be all that? But when a girl says she’s a producer or good at making beats, people won’t even believe her.”

Larsson says she’s in a fortunate position compared to many female artists, because her international label, Epic Records, is headed up by a woman, Chair and CEO Sylvia Rhone. “I fucking love Sylvia and I feel like she understands me,” Larsson says. “But it’s very rare to have a woman, especially a woman of colour, sitting in a boss’s chair. And the difference is, from my perspective, that she’s just less like a baby.”

Her disarming frankness makes me laugh. “No, honestly! I’ve dealt with so many men in this industry – executives – that you just need to baby a lot,” Larsson continues. “But when a man says ‘I don’t want that to happen’ and walks out of the meeting, people don’t call him a baby. They call him ‘passionate’. Eugh”.

I shall tie things up now but, ahead of the release of her third studio album, Poster Girl, I wanted to promulgate the music of Zara Larsson, as she is going to keep gaining traction and produce great music. Whilst there are a lot of generic and rather manufactured Pop artists around right now, Zara Larsson is a fascinating artist…

DOING things her own way.

FEATURE: Music Technology Breakthroughs: Part Eleven: Digital Music Streaming

FEATURE:

 

 

Music Technology Breakthroughs

PHOTO CREDIT: @wesleyphotography/Unsplash

Part Eleven: Digital Music Streaming

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THIS is more of a software/digital breakthrough…

 PHOTO CREDIT: @zarakvg/Unsplash

and one that might divide people. In previous features, I have talked about streaming sites and how there needs to be an overhaul of how they pay artists and how they run. I am not going to concentrate on one streaming site. Instead, I wanted to highlight the evolution of music streaming and how it has changed the industry. I am going to end with some positives, as there are a lot of problems and issues with streaming. We still buy physical music, but I think streaming and digital music offered people a world of sounds they might have not otherwise have experienced. There are issues regarding payment and how artists are compensated but, for me and so many other people, one can access so much music! It has made my listening tastes broader and more adventurous. Whilst I have an issue with how artists are paid, it would be hard to have a modern climate where there was not streaming. It seems romantic having to buy every album we want to listen to and paying for every single. I think that many people would listen to music less and discover far fewer artists if they had to pay quite a lot for every album and release. Whilst not a perfect system, streaming was a logical and necessary evolution. I want to bring in an article that charts the early days of file-sharing and music streaming:

“Before the invention of the iPod, there was the late 1980s creation of the MP3 -- “a means of compressing a sound sequence into a very small file, to enable digital storage and transmission.” And although it’s far from the only audio file format available today, its introduction prompted a larger conversation about the digital transfer and consumption of music.

That was seen as an opportunity by Shawn Fanning, John Fanning, and Sean Parker -- the people who invented Napster: “a simple, free peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing service,” and perhaps the first of its kind to have a household name, which rose to multi-million usership by 2001, the same year the iPod was unveiled. Dann Albright of MakeUseOf hypothesizes that its alignment with the market penetration of MP3 players could be a major factor contributing to Napster’s rise to fame. Plus, it was free. Apple didn’t unveil the iTunes Store until 2003, and even then, each song cost $0.99. Sure, it came with a price tag -- but it was legal”.

I want to go into more depth regarding the history and development of digital music by sourcing from MIXDOWN. Whilst the earliest streaming and file-sharing days were exciting and a real breakthrough, there were legal issues:

“Way back in 1999 when the Y2K bug had everyone gripped in a vice of fear, a peer-to-peer music sharing website by the name of Napster started gaining traction amongst American college students, who used the online service to share MP3 files of songs amongst one another for free. One of the most notable features of Napster was that it provided a platform for music lovers to not only download albums for free, but also gain access to rare live versions, alternate cuts, and demo versions of their favourite artists. While this was celebrated amongst impoverished music lovers and students alike, institutions began to take note and started blocking Napster from their online networks; however, many students found a way around this, with a reported 61% of online traffic from college servers coming directly from MP3 file sharing.

After the demise of Napster, it was evident that while free peer-to-peer music sharing was an extremely contentious practice within the music industry, online music sharing was certainly a direction worth exploring. In 2003, Apple launched the iTunes Store, an online music library to be used in conjunction with their flagship MP3 player, the futuristic (albeit antiquated by today’s standards) iPod. Users were able to download a full catalogue of music for the mere price of $0.99 per song, proving iTunes to be a viable business model and somewhat of a step forward from Napster. While online piracy services such as Frostwire and Limewire were still available to the public, you practically had to give your computer a terminal illness from all the malware and viruses on the services just to download a single Radiohead song, which led to more and more people flocking to Apple’s iTunes service.

In 2005, music streaming services were again flung to the forefront of public attention with Pandora. By fusing the streamlined interface of iTunes with related musical characteristics, Pandora created an online service which recommended new music based on a user’s listening history, allowing users to bookmark artists and discover new acts. While it certainly took a while to gain traction, Pandora influenced several modern streaming services including Spotify, and by 2013, the website had over 200 million users, demonstrating its influence to the modern world of streaming.

The mid-to-late 2000’s also saw the rapid rise and fall of MySpace, a social network which provided indie musicians with a platform to stream their music to interested users for free. While the company would soon fade to obscurity in 2009 with the rising dominance of Facebook, MySpace played a huge role in launching the careers of several UK indie acts, including Lily Allen and Arctic Monkeys. These days, MySpace has rebranded itself solely as a music streaming service, though it is somewhat overshadowed by more prominent music streaming sites. These prominent streaming services are almost impossible to avoid given their dedication to advertising, another facet of the industry that contributes to the increasing popularity of such sites”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: @fixelgraphy/Unsplash

Spotify is probably the most-modern and used streaming platform we have today. Launched on 23rd April, 2006, one feels that the next few years will see a new site that irons out the problems regarding payment; focuses on compensating artists and songwriters and creating this fairer platform. Whether you are pro or against streaming, as this feature explains, it offers us so much choice – that can have its negatives in addition to positives:

“Most streaming platforms offer up an astonishing library of songs, albums and playlists. All of these songs can theoretically be played by every user at one time over the internet, no matter where they are, and no matter what device they are using. From a technical standpoint, streaming works by sending (or, well, streaming) information from a server to an individual player. The actual song exists on the server as a raw file. Raw files are huge and detailed, so they have to be compressed in order to travel over the internet instantaneously. When the stream reaches your device, it will decode the compressed information using an app or plugin.

Because the raw files are compressed for transmission, some argue that music streaming is lower quality than other formats like CDs, vinyl records, or even digital downloads. This is broadly true. Spotify’s default streaming quality is 160 kbps. A regular MP3 file is normally 320 kbps (the same as Spotify’s optional “high quality streaming” setting). CDs are usually 1,411 kbps.

The success of music streaming has proven that listeners do not necessarily prize quality over quantity and convenience. The sheer number of songs available, and the ease of finding and listening to them is the real appeal. And it’s become so popular, that the whole industry has had to reorganise around it: in 2019, streaming numbers topped a trillion for the first time in history, and in March, it was estimated that 80% of revenue from recorded music was generated by streaming”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: @justdushawn/Unsplash

One can look online and discover articles that discuss the drawbacks of streaming and how it is not a perfect system. I am going to end with some positive notes. Though I understand that streaming and music-sharing is a breakthrough and huge shift from listening to music purely through physical devices, we are a few years off of seeing a balanced and ethical market. NPR highlighted issues with streaming sites in a feature from 2019:

“It's tough to recall a time when listening to music — and making it — wasn't completely synonymous with streaming. The idea of filling an iPod up with carefully selected digital files almost feels like a distant memory, though it wasn't that long ago that these kinds of players, and the digital library of songs you built through them, embodied the future of music. (For what it's worth, Apple still sells one.) These days, streaming services offer music fans a tantalizing premise: Instant, limitless access to music from all over the world and across history, for a small monthly fee. Or for free, as long as you're cool with advertisements cutting into the experience.

But beyond these contractual idiosyncrasies, the bedrock structure for streaming services' royalty payouts tilts the entire system towards those who, in some ways, need it least. Spotify and Apple Music's model for determining who gets what from their services is known as "pro rata," which means that rights-holders are paid according to market share; how their streams stack up against the most popular songs in a given time period. The people who hold the rights to the most listened-to tracks, then, stand to make the most. "The 'pro rata' model is perceived as being inherently objective and fair, however, it doesn't take into account different user behaviors," says Will Page, Spotify's Chief Economist. "Arguably, it does produce an efficient outcome in that every stream is worth the same and it is relatively cost-efficient to manage."

PHOTO CREDIT: @briant_raw/Unsplash 

As a consequence, streaming isn't just changing consumption habits, but how people write music altogether — with songs becoming shorter and shorter, for instance. The independent distributor CD Baby's DIY Musician blog suggests that if musicians want to optimize their music for the streaming age, they might want to explore changing the structure of their song to have the chorus hit listener's ears first, in the vein of Post Malone's "Better Now."

Advocates also point to Bandcamp as an alternative model that's beloved by the people who use it. On it, artists and their labels can directly upload their songs, and fans directly support artists they love, follow their work, and post gushing odes about their favorite tracks. Unlike Spotify and Apple Music, the service not only enables listeners to stream songs, but also allows both artists to set the price for their work and listeners to name a price to own the songs. It has an editorial arm, Bandcamp Daily, where music fanatics dish about under-the-radar artists and scenes (on Bandcamp) flourishing around the world, and newsletters that keep you abreast about what your favorite label's just released, and digital tracks and vinyl records that your friends have been into lately.

IMAGE CREDIT: Bandcamp

Compared to a behemoth like Spotify, Bandcamp is not unlike a city's independent record store compared to a Best Buy (at least, back when it even stocked music) — a place that attracts a more engaged listener. "I think if you're a fan, knowing that your money is going directly to the artist and supporting them, there's something really awesome about that, and that's probably what inspires people to pay more for something online," says Garcia. But realistically, Bandcamp doesn't do the numbers that Spotify does, in both subscribers and revenue. "Bandcamp, you can see each and every single penny where it came from and where it went," Krukowski says. "So financially there's absolutely no mystery at all. Of course, the numbers are radically different. Spotify at this point is an important part of our music income, and Bandcamp is not yet”.

Compared to the other musical breakthroughs I have covered, there are more problems and arguments associated with streaming. Starting off with relatively simple file-sharing way back, we now have sites like TIDAL and Spotify that offers anyone a huge library of music. I think that the format will improve through the years and problems that exist now will be addressed asnd rectified – including charging everyone who wants to stream music; ensuring that more money is given to artists and songwriters. The reason I wanted to highlight music streaming is because I have not only discovered many new artists through this method, but I have also connected with a lot of older music. I do like buying physical music but, as that can be expensive if you are a major music fan, streaming allows us all to expand our horizons. It is very convenient and accessible. Whilst it will never replace physical music completely, it is clear there is a demand for digital platforms and digesting music this way. Whether you love it or hate it, streaming and digital music has transformed the industry and out listening habits. If the platform bosses can act regarding their payment structures and address concerns that have been raging for years, then I think there will be less scrutiny and criticism around. For the sake of artists, songwriters and music lovers everyone, let us hope that they...

GET there sooner rather than later!

FEATURE: When I Was Older: Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry and the Music Documentary

FEATURE:

 

 

When I Was Older

IMAGE CREDIT: Apple TV + 

Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry and the Music Documentary

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THERE has been a lot of activity…

 IMAGE CREDIT: Hulu

over the past year regarding music documentaries and biopics. Andra Day stars in The United States vs. Billie Holiday, whilst there are plans for an Amy Winehouse biopic. I think there are others in the pipeline – including Madonna’s biopic, which she will direct -, and it will be interesting to see how the biopics fare with critics. It can be hard capturing the artist’s truth and making the film accessible and popular. If one were to be too graphic or open, then that means it could be censored or some audiences would balk. I do think that some biopics hold back because the artist’s life is pretty unconventional or, to some, controversial. When a music biopic is done right it is naked with the facts but it does not sensationalise or needlessly push itself in a provocative manner. Music documentaries are not immune from getting the balance wrong when it comes to honesty vs. commercial appeal. A great music documentary stays in the mind and teaches us more about an artist. I was moved by the reaction to the Framing Britney Spears documentary. I have been a fan of hers since the start, and the news developments regarding guardianship and how her finances are being handled is heartrbreaking. I am going to bring in a couple of reviews for the new documentary, Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry. Huge stars from Taylor Swift (Miss Americana) to Lady Gaga (Five Foot Two) have had documentaries about them produced. The tabloids and social media can misrepresent an artist or, often, that artist does not feel comfortable being so open with the media and fans online.

What has come from the Britney Spears documentary and subsequent reaction is how she was mistreated and the sort of sexism she had to endure. Arguably, Billie Eilish is one of the biggest artists in the world. A Pop innovator and inspirational figure, the nineteen-year-old from Los Angeles has a massive future ahead. Whilst it is not as shocking or revealing as the Britney Spears documentary, it is a balanced and honest look at one of the most original and interesting artists of our age. I want to bring in bits of a review from The Guardian regarding Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry:

“These are not myths; as captured in RJ Cutler’s mesmerizing and generous Apple TV+ documentary The World’s a Little Blurry, Eilish did, indeed, spend these supersonic teenage years at her family’s modest house in Los Angeles; she and Finneas do compose their music in his bedroom with such organic sibling telepathy it seems almost too casual to be the omnipresent dark-pop hits Bad Guy or Bury a Friend. But over the course of nearly two and a half hours, The World’s a Little Blurry offers a fascinating rejoinder to any cynicism that this could be image maintenance for a teenage superstar. The verité-style documentary, filmed from late 2018 through Eilish’s Grammys sweep in 2020 (11 awards, including album of the year), observes an enviably talented and more enviably self-possessed young woman handling the twin rocketships of superstardom and adolescence with astounding awareness, if not always control.

The trust afforded to Cutler (The War Room, The September Issue) by Eilish’s family – mom Maggie Baird and father Patrick O’Connell, both near-constant presences – is evident. The camera roves through the family home, dropping in on family arguments (Maggie and Finneas, and then Eilish, arguing over the latter’s reluctance to make an “accessible” hit) and Eilish’s bedroom the morning of her Grammy nominations. The film glides on the always-magnetic juxtaposition of superstardom weirdness with relatability – Eilish DM-ing her idol, Justin Bieber, posting to her millions of Instagram followers, selecting her signature baggy couture outfits for tour; Eilish studying for her driver’s permit, complaining about her family’s lame cars, or groaning when her father compares new music to a Duncan Sheik song.

It also includes all the promises of authenticity we’ve come to expect from modern music documentaries: quiet moments, the stress of touring, the vertigo of rapid-onset fame, work process competency porn. But whereas Taylor Swift’s Miss Americana, released last year on Netflix, often felt like a meticulous, if entertaining, propaganda project, The World’s a Little Blurry portrays an artist for whom the idea of “authenticity” is both artistically important and for filming, passé.

Its strongest element, aside from Eilish herself, is the generosity and empathy afforded to the experience of fandom. Eilish, so devoted to Bieber as a 12-year-old that Baird considered putting her in therapy, speaks fluently of the hyper-intense adoration lobbed at her by millions, predominantly teenage girls. When she breaks down for a full 30 seconds upon meeting him, in one of The World’s a Little Blurry’s best scenes, it may as well be any one of the crying, alight faces in her crowds. The chasmic emotion, the consuming devotion for your artistic heroes, the way it makes even the darkest recesses of your brain feel temporarily OK – that, for Eilish, her fans, and viewers, is strikingly real”.

In another review, this is what Will Gompertz observed and noted for the BBC:

“There is archive talent show footage, in which we see a very young Billie singing, Finneas providing harmony, her mum playing the guitar, and her dad on the keyboard. Maybe it is with the benefit of hindsight, but brand Billie appears to have been something Maggie and Patrick had envisaged from day one: a star not so much born as conceived by her parents.

Both children were home-schooled and shown how to write and produce songs. They encouraged them to make music together, which they duly did, with Finneas's bedroom acting as their HQ.

"My family is the reason I'm the way I am" Billie says, over a clip showing her at around two years old sitting on a piano stool next to Finneas as their mother excitedly announces off-camera "your first duet!"

Everything seems pretty laid back and really tense at the same time. The dream has become reality. Billie's career is taking off, record execs are sitting on Finneas's bed as he plays them a backing track while his little sister, sitting cross-legged at the end of the bed, sings while looking at the lyrics on her smartphone.

Nobody says much, but everything you need to know about the music business is captured in that one scene.

PHOTO CREDIT: Apple TV + 

Billie comes across as a lovely, caring person, with her own physical and psychological challenges to overcome. She has the courage to share some of her darkest thoughts and fears in her songs, she is an artist wearing her heart and soul on the sleeve of her record.

There is a foreboding sense in this film of we've seen all this before, it is Act One of a three-act story.

You can't help but think of the recently released Britney Spears documentary, she was a talented teenager who had a lot of parental input but whose life and mental health suffered under the pressure of fame and expectation.

Turning a person into a product works for just about everybody except for the artist. It is the epitome of a Faustian pact, with an important exception: it is rarely the teenage prodigy who does the deal.

Billie Eilish: The World's A Little Blurry is a refreshingly candid, intelligent documentary, if a little a long, which leaves you wondering if a life of relentless celebrity and trying to please everybody but yourself is actually a good plan.

You wonder exactly whose dream is coming true?

I found it sad rather than uplifting, but the music is exceptional and so is the woman making it”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Apple TV + 

The documentary comes ahead of an autobiography in May that is going to make for fascinating reading. Eilish also has some songs ready for a new album. Following from the remarkable 2019 debut, WHEN WEALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO?, I think that we will get other compelling music documentaries through this year. It can be difficult putting out a documentary as it can be quite exposing or create some negative reaction. Music and interviews can only tell so much, so documentaries like Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry are informative and have an element of objectivity – in the sense the artist can have control and rewrite some misperceptions. I am looking forward to seeing what comes next and whether we will get other big artists putting out their stories in the form of documentaries. I feel this year is going to be one of the biggest for Billie Eilish. With a documentary, autobiography and possible second album due, she will go from a superstar to a global megastar! Where biopics can be disjointed and false and some documentaries can be a little self-serving, redacted or empty, with Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry, Eilish and RJ Cutller…

GOT the balance right.

FEATURE: Too Good to Be Forgotten: Songs That Are Much More Than a Guilty Pleasure: The Offspring - Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)

FEATURE:

 

 

Too Good to Be Forgotten: Songs That Are Much More Than a Guilty Pleasure

The Offspring - Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)

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I need to start every one of these features…

by saying that I do not buy into the notion that there are ‘guilty pleasure’ songs. The reason I started this feature is to defend songs that have been labelled as guilty pleasures. I think that everything is valid - and one should not feel embarrassed about anything. One song that I have seen appear on lists of guilty pleasure songs is The Offspring’s Pretty Fly (For a White Guy). It definitely divided people at my school when the song arrived in 1998. I think there was this rise in Pop-Punk bands that were not quite serious; whose songs were not as gritty and real as Grunge and Alternative acts that recently ruled. Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)  is the fourth track from the Californian band’s fifth studio album, Americana (1998). It was the first single from the album. It The song peaked at number fifty-three on the US Billboard Hot 100; number-five on the Billboard Hot Mainstream Rock Tracks chart and number-three on the Billboard Modern Rock Tracks chart. The song also reached number-one in ten countries. I will bring in an article that takes a closer look at the music video for the song – one that seemed fine back in 1998 but, in 2021, it might be problematic if a band put out something similar! I am not a huge fan of The Offspring, though I fondly remember the Americana album. In frontman Dexter Holland, they had a charismatic frontman who could write interesting songs. I like The Kids Aren't Alright, and Why Don’t You Get a Job? To me,  Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)  is the band’s best track.

It is a shame the Americana album did not get better reviews. I think it is an album that has some really strong singles, but the rest of the album is a bit patchy. This is what AllMusic wrote when they reviewed the album:

“With integrity intact and a hearty combination of poppy punk and wit throughout, the Offspring's fifth album is a raucous ride through America as seen through the eyes of a weary, but still optimistic, young kid. Riffs on political correctness, '70s radio fodder, and suburban disquiet are spread thick on Americana. If the band's targets seem a bit simple and predictable, its music rarely is. The SoCal roots aren't played to a fault, the blend of salsa and alterna-rock sounds natural, and the Offspring pretty much laugh at their culture, as well as themselves, the entire time. Best track is "Pretty Fly (For a White Guy)," which manages to bridge Def Leppard and Latin hip-hop (and the musical timeline they represent) and, in the process, disrobes Middle America's average white teen's quick fascination with and instant disposability of a once-regional heritage. With Americana, the Offspring are merely contributing their part”.

If you have dismissed Pretty Fly (For a White Guy) or thought it was a bit of a joke song, I would recommend you listen again! It does have humour, but I also think that it is a strong song that does not sound too dated.

I think a lot of my old school friends who disliked Pretty Fly (For a White Guy) back in 1998 have softened to the song now. If one takes it as a bit of a novelty song or something not taking itself too seriously, I think you can enjoy The Offspring’s smash. The band were not really trying to be hardcore or as reputable as a lot of other Rock and Punk bands. I want to source from a Kerrang! article that provides us with some facts and figures regarding The Offspring and their best-known song:

“0.09

The video’s White Guy is portrayed by actor Guy Cohen, who ended up being chosen for the role after Offspring frontman Dexter Holland’s first choice, Seth Green, was unavailable. Green had played a similar role in the teen comedy Can’t Hardly Wait that summer. Cohen ended up going out on tour with the band and coming out during that song, doing silly dances to rapturous response. ​“I do The Running Man, I do the Roger Rabbit, I get down on the floor and freak the ground – oh man, people just explode!” he told Spin. Check out this live performance from 1999 featuring Cohen really going for it, as well as a lot of focus on Higgins X‑13, the band’s touring backup singer and percussionist and unofficial fifth member.

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While Dexter, Noodles and guitarist Greg K have been with the band consistently for three and a half decades, they’ve been through a few drummers. Original drummer James Lilja left in 1987 to become an oncologist. Last year he was on trial for malpractice, when a juror had a heart attack, and Lilja saved his life. This led to a mistrial ruling, as the jurors would find it hard not to be biased. This is Ron Welty, the Offspring’s second sticksman, who joined at just 16 years old and spent another 16 with the band before leaving in 2003 to start his own band, Steady Ground. Atom Willard of Rocket From The Crypt, Angels And Airwaves and Against Me!-fame joined for four years, and in 2007 current drummer Pete Parada, formerly of Face To Face and Saves The Day, took over.

1.17
The ​‘Give it to me, baby’ vocals are performed by Nika Futterman and Heidi Villagran. Futterman is now a successful voice actress who has worked on pretty much every big deal animated show out there, including voicing Asajj Ventress in Star Wars: The Clone Wars.

1.30
The target of the song, as Dexter told Spin, is young men who ​“are from, like, Omaha, Nebraska – regular white-bread boys, but who act like they’re from Compton. It’s so fake and obvious that they’re trying to have an identity. I wanted to write a song where people in high school would go, ​‘I know exactly who this guy’s talking about: so-and-so in third period.’ And he’ll like it too. That’s kind of the beauty: making fun of people who don’t know they’re being made fun of.”

2.21
The sun-soaked technicolour look of the whole video was at the time something of a trademark of director McG, best known for making the two Charlie’s Angels films. McG was also briefly the frontman of Sugar Ray, a band he went on to direct videos for, as well as Sugar Ray and Korn. He made Terminator: Salvation, This Means War and The Babysitter, and executive-produced The OC (the first season of which is untouchably good).

2.35
Barely shown at any point in this video is bassist Greg K, who formed the band with Dexter in the early ​’80s after the two of them met doing cross-country together in school. Greg does very few interviews and is the most reclusive member of the band, which may explain the lack of close-ups”.

There are a lot of people who dislike Pretty Fly (For a White Guy) and feel the song is a guilty pleasure – if they decide to listen to it at all! I think it is a track that is funny, catchy and has a great chorus. The video might appear a bit too raunchy or un-P.C. now, but I feel it is the perfect visual for a goofy song that documents a bit of a hopeless loser. Rather than pick away at Pretty Fly (For a White Guy) and be too harsh, put the song up and…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Columbia

PUMP it up loud.

FEATURE: Live and Kicking: The Continuing Excellence and Importance of Later... with Jools Holland

FEATURE:

 

 

Live and Kicking

The Continuing Excellence and Importance of Later... with Jools Holland

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I have said before how it is a shame…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Jools Holland with Arlo Parks

there are not many music television shows around! Once was the time when there was quite a selection for the music fan. I guess, with streaming and the fact we can see music videos online, there is less necessity. I think that it is a relief that we have one long-standing music show in the form of Later... with Jools Holland. The fact that it has been running since 1992 shows that there is an appetite for a good and broad music show! During lockdown, it has been a portal for those who want to experience live music. Even though the format of the show has had to adapt for the pandemic, as Music Week write, the series has been a real lifeline:

“Fifty-seven series in, and Later… With Jools Holland has become more important than ever.

The show returns on BBC Two at 10pm on Friday (February 19) with Arlo Parks as the main guest picking favourite moments from the archive, along with performances by Kings Of Leon and Sleaford Mods.

“It's always been a very popular show with our audience, and actually even more popular this past year,” Jan Younghusband, BBC Music TV head of commissioning, told Music Week. “It's one of those situations where, by not being able to do it as normal, it has been really entertaining and interesting having guests using the archive, alongside live performance and introducing new talent.

“It still has the same DNA, but the ability to add these archive choices has been very profound. We've been able to seek out some great performances that haven't been seen for a long time – quite extraordinary things. It's added a whole new layer to the programme. One day, we'll all be back in the studio, but I'm sure we will keep that element going, bringing deep archive to the audience.”

These six episodes are a bonus run for Later…, which will then return for another series in May.

The main guests for this latest series include Arlo Parks and Moses Boyd (who appeared together on Music Week’s cover last year), along with Tom Jones, Laura Mvula, Years & Years’ Olly Alexander and, for an edition tied in with Comic Relief, Lenny Henry. Other artists set to perform include Music Week cover star Rag’N’Bone Man, Peggy Seeger, Pa Salieu, Wolf Alice and Dry Cleaning.

“There are some very exciting young stars coming through,” said Younghusband. “In the tradition of Later…, there's always been the pop star at one end of the room and the brand new person you've never heard of at the other end of the room.

“Rag’N’Bone Man started off with us, now he’s a big star. The BBC likes to feel that, by nurturing talent, they come up through radio and television. Later… With Jools Holland has had an enormous role in the debuts of so many of the great talents that we have.”

Last year’s guests on the show included Christine And The Queens, Dizzee Rascal, Ellie Goulding, Gregory Porter, Guy Garvey, Michael Kiwanuka, Robert Plant, Sam Smith and Celeste, alongside performances from Laura Marling, Fontaines DC, Declan McKenna, Koffee, The Lathums and Joesef.

While it obviously helps that people are stuck at home, ratings have been strong for Later… in the past year, including a record result of 4.56 million viewers for Jools’ Annual Hootenanny on New Year’s Eve. The programme featured new and archive performances from artists including Celeste, Roisin Murphy and Ella Eyre.

This current bonus series shows the BBC’s commitment to live music, according to Younghusband.

“It has never been a more challenging and catastrophic time for our industry,” she told Music Week. “We felt that what we should try and do is make more live music happen. So we added this February run of six episodes, and then there will be a further run of six in May.

“Right now, we're in a very serious time and our audience is locked down at home. We want to make sure that we're doing our job by bringing them great music, young talent and the stars of the moment, which is what the show does”.

As Jools Holland’s music series turns thirty next year, I hope there will be other shows commissioned. I think there is a great demand for live performance and spotlighting of great new artists. Watching Later... with Jools Holland and you get an experience and buzz that you cannot get from YouTube or streamed gigs. I look forward to a new series in May and I know that so many people have been lifted by Later... with Jools Holland. It is great that the success and popularity of Later... with Jools Holland continues, but it makes me wonder why there are not calls for alternative music shows – given the fact that there is clear demand for the format. Maybe this is something that will be rectified post-pandemic. Ever since the ‘90s, I have been watching the series and discovering so many great artists. I think I found The White Stripes through Later... with Jools Holland – or was alerted to the fact they were seriously good live performers at least! Now that we do not have Top of the Pops or Saturday morning music shows on television, Later... with Jools Holland remains a survivor and treasured show. Let’s hope that there is many more years left in Later... with Jools Holland. It is now, as it always was, a wonderful…

TELEVISION institute!

FEATURE: The Lockdown Playlist: Thirty-Five Years of the Manic Street Preachers

FEATURE:

 

 

The Lockdown Playlist

IN THIS PHOTO: James Dean Bradfield, Nicky Wire and Sean Moore 

Thirty-Five Years of the Manic Street Preachers

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WHILST I have been doing a lot of…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Manic Street Preachers in 1993 (with Richey Edwards, bottom left)./PHOTO CREDIT: David Tonge/Getty Images

birthday Lockdown Playlists, this one is more to do with an anniversary. As the incredible Manic Street Preachers formed in 1986, I thought I would celebrate thirty-five years of the Welsh legends with a career-spanning playlist. Before then, I want to bring in a Wikipedia article regarding the band and their success:

“Manic Street Preachers are a Welsh rock band formed in Blackwood in 1986. The band consists of cousins James Dean Bradfield (lead vocals, lead guitar) and Sean Moore (drums, percussion, soundscapes), plus Nicky Wire (bass guitar, lyrics). They are often colloquially known as "the Manics". They form a key part of the 1990s Welsh Cool Cymru cultural movement.

Following the release of their debut single "Suicide Alley", the band was joined by Richey Edwards as co-lyricist and rhythm guitarist. The band's early albums were in a punk vein, eventually broadening to a greater alternative rock sound, whilst retaining a leftist political outlook. Their early combination of androgynous glam imagery and lyrics about "culture, alienation, boredom and despair" has gained them a loyal following and cult status.

With their debut album, Generation Terrorists, the Manic Street Preachers proclaimed it would be the "greatest rock album ever", as well as hoping to sell "sixteen million copies" around the world, after which they would split up. Despite (or due to) the album's failure to meet this level of success, the band carried on with their career. The group became a trio again after Richey Edwards disappeared in February 1995. The band went on to gain critical and commercial success despite his absence. Edwards was legally "presumed dead" in 2008.

Throughout their career, the Manics have headlined several festivals including Glastonbury, T in the Park, V Festival and Reading, won eleven NME Awards, eight Q Awards and four BRIT Awards.They have been nominated for the Mercury Prize in 1996 and 1999, and have had one nomination for the MTV Europe Music Awards. The group has reached number 1 in the UK charts three times: in 1998, with the album This Is My Truth Tell Me Yours and the single "If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next", and again in 2000 with the single "The Masses Against the Classes". They have sold more than ten million albums worldwide”.

Because one of the world’s great bands are marking thirty-five years together this year, this Lockdown Playlist is a selection of their best songs. If you need a reminder of how great the Manic Street Preachers are, then I know the tracks below will…

REFRESH the memory.

FEATURE: The Whole Story: That Difficult Second Novel: Reimagining a Kate Bush Greatest Hits Collection

FEATURE:

 

 

The Whole Story: That Difficult Second Novel

Reimagining a Kate Bush Greatest Hits Collection

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THIS is a feature that sort of comes…

hot on the heels of other ones I have written regarding Kate Bush and greatest hits collections. Later this year, The Whole Story celebrates its thirty-fifth anniversary. That was the first collection of her best songs and it followed the success of 1985’s Hounds of Love. I have argued before that radio stations tend only to play Bush’s singles and the bigger hits. We occasionally hear some lesser-played songs but that tends to be very rare. I am looking forward to The Whole Story’s anniversary, as it will be good to highlight an album that I would urge people to buy. So many terrific songs are on that album, and I wonder whether there will be a revision or reissue closer to the anniversary in November. Rather than a simple reissue of that album with no additions, it would be great to see a collection of Kate Bush’s songs that do not get a lot of airing. Rather than it being a selection of deeper cuts, combining some of those rare tracks with some better-known ones would be perfect. I am not sure whether it would see like a follow-up to The Whole Story or an entirely new album, but I think there should be a reimagining where we get a twelve-track album or songs that are brilliant but get less exposure. Kate Bush did put out an album of rarer tracks in 2018, but these were mostly B-sides and covers. There are so many album tracks that I would like to see on an album. It would not technically be a ‘greatest hits’ collection; maybe a reversion of the remastered albums in 2018, where we got to hear these songs that are beautiful but very people know about. I am going to present my idea of a new The Whole Story; perhaps a ‘difficult second novel’ or a cult classic..

Feel It

Album: The Kick Inside

Release Date: 17th February, 1978

Producer: Andrew Powell

Label: EMI

The Wedding List

Album: Never for Ever

Release Date: 8th September, 1980

Producers: Kate Bush/Jon Kelly

Label: EMI

And Dream of Sheep

Album: Hounds of Love

Release Date: 16th September, 1985

Producer: Kate Bush

Label: EMI

Reaching Out

Album: The Sensual World

Release Date: 16th October, 1989

Producer: Kate Bush

Label: EMI

Watching You Without Me

Album: Hounds of Love

Release Date: 16th September, 1985

Producer: Kate Bush

Label: EMI

The Kick Inside

Album: The Kick Inside

Release Date: 17th February, 1978

Producer: Andrew Powell

Label: EMI

Symphony in Blue

Album: Lionheart

Release Date: 12th November, 1978

Producer: Andrew Powell

Label: EMI

Among Angels

Album: 50 Words for Snow

Release Date: 21st November, 2011

Producer: Kate Bush

Label: Fish People

Pull Out the Pin

Album: The Dreaming

Release Date: 13th September, 1982

Producer: Kate Bush

Label: EMI

Rubberband Girl

Album: The Red Shoes

Release Date: 1st November, 1993

Producer: Kate Bush

Label: EMI

How to Be Invisible

Album: Aerial

Release Date: 7th November, 2005

Producer: Kate Bush

Label: EMI  

Houdini

Album: The Dreaming

Release Date: 13th September, 1982

Producer: Kate Bush

Label: EMI

FEATURE: Groovelines: Gil Scott-Heron - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

Gil Scott-Heron - The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

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I want to bring in a few articles…

regarding this song, as I can not do it true justice on my own. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is a glorious by Gil Scott-Heron. Scott-Heron first recorded it for his 1970 album, Small Talk at 125th and Lenox. A re-recorded version, with a full band, was the B-side to Scott-Heron's first single, Home Is Where the Hatred Is (from his album Pieces of a Man (1971). As the album turns fifty very soon, I wanted to spotlight a truly incredible piece of music.  The song's title was originally a popular slogan among the 1960s’ Black Power movements in the United States. The song was inducted to the National Recording Registry in 2005. I am going to source from a few articles that tell us the story of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and why it remains so important and powerful. If you have not heard the Pieces of a Man album, I would advise you to seek it out. This is what AllMusic said when they tackled it:

“Gil Scott-Heron's 1971 album Pieces of a Man set a standard for vocal artistry and political awareness that few musicians will ever match. His unique proto-rap vocal style influenced a generation of hip-hop artists, and nowhere is his style more powerful than on the classic "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." Even though the media -- the very entity attacked in this song -- has used, reused, and recontextualized the song and its title so many times, the message is so strong that it has become almost impossible to co-opt. Musically, the track created a formula that modern hip-hop would follow for years to come: bare-bones arrangements featuring pounding basslines and stripped-down drumbeats. Although the song features plenty of outdated references to everything from Spiro Agnew and Jim Webb to The Beverly Hillbillies, the force of Scott-Heron's well-directed anger makes the song timeless. More than just a spoken word poet, Scott-Heron was also a uniquely gifted vocalist. On tracks like the reflective "I Think I'll Call It Morning" and the title track, Scott-Heron's voice is complemented perfectly by the soulful keyboards of Brian Jackson. On "Lady Day and John Coltrane," he not only celebrates jazz legends of the past in his words but in his vocal performance, one that is filled with enough soul and innovation to make Coltrane and Billie Holiday nod their heads in approval. More than three decades after its release, Pieces of a Man is just as -- if not more -- powerful and influential today as it was the day it was released”.

Not to mangle a great piece of writing, but Medium documented the origins of The Revolution Will Not Be Televised and the events leading up to its creation. The beginnings occurred at a time of racial struggle and injustice in the United States:

“When Gil returned to campus in September of 1969, the school was on the verge of revolt. As a rural school, too far away from urban unrest, Lincoln University didn’t experience the explosive rage blowing up on other black campuses such as Howard University or Morgan State. But there was plenty of anger directed at the conservative school administration, which looked down on political demonstrations and some of the free-form creativity taking place on campus. The school had started admitting female students only the year before, and some of the older students and faculty were still resentful at the changes taking place on campus. But Gil and his friends kept pushing for even more change.

Among them was Carl Cornwell, a student who occasionally jammed with the Black and Blues, a band fronted by Gil. He was also a member of a jazz quintet that played a lot of contemporary music by Herbie Hancock and McCoy Tyner. Called the Harrison Cornwell Limited after Cornwell and trumpeter Joe Harrison, the group had originally included Brian Jackson, until Gil snatched him away to play with the Black and Blues. Cornwell, whose father taught at Lincoln, grew up in town and was imbued with the school’s pride and heritage. But once he became a student, he saw firsthand that the college was lacking essential services and wasn’t responsive enough to the needs of students.

At midnight one Friday in November 1969, at the end of a rehearsal, Cornwell’s group was packing up their instruments when drummer Ron Colbert started having an asthma attack and his inhaler wasn’t helping him catch a breath. The group walked to the school infirmary but it was closed. So they took Ron back to his room. By the time the ambulance arrived, it was too late. “He died in my arms,” remembers Cornwell. “I’ll never forget it.”

The tragedy could have been avoided if the infirmary had been staffed and open around the clock. Colbert’s death brought to a head some issues that had been simmering for years: Gil’s neighbor in his freshman dorm had died of an aneurism that had gone untreated after being detected, and several students had had their medical problems misdiagnosed by the campus doctor.

When Gil returned on Sunday night from a weekend in New York City, he quickly found out about Ron’s death and decided to take action, demanding adequate medical facilities. The student body united around the demands, especially after the administration started to claim that Colbert may have been getting high, though there was no evidence that the young man used drugs.

I would advise people to check out the full article. I wonder whether there will ever be a T.V. series or short around The Revolution Will Not Be Televised; one that uses the song as a central focus and features events in politics and society from late-1960s America. Perhaps there has been something produced; I think the political events of the late-1960s and how they resonated with people like Scott-Heron is fascinating.

“By 1970, Gil had written a few dozen poems that worked as song lyrics, most of them political and social commentary such as “Brother,” “Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?” and one song that will define him forever. That spring, he and Brian and some friends were sitting around watching TV one night in one of the dorms when a news report came on about a demonstration. The newscasters started talking about how many people were taking part. “We said, ‘People ought to get out there and do something; the revolution won’t be televised,” Gil later recounted. “A cat said, ‘You ought to write that down.”

Over the next few weeks, Gil started writing down lyrics in his notebook, and he and Brian started paying more attention to what was actually being shown on television. They noticed the commercials, and the friends commented to each other on the insidiously persuasive power of ads for everything from toilet cleaner to breakfast cereal. The contrast between the commercials and the demonstrations in the streets could not have been more glaring: one was on TV, and the other was live. When he was finished writing, he titled the poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”.

Whether you consider The Revolution Will Not Be Televised to be an epic performance poem or a song, I feel it is one of the most potent and fascinating recordings in history.

I want to source from an article from Open Culture. We get a n interview exert from Gil Scott-Heron where he discussed The Revolution Will Not Be Televised:

“One might think Scott-Heron’s classic spoken-word testament “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” speaks for itself by now, but it still creates confusion in part because people still misconstrue the nature of the medium. Why can’t you sit at home and watch journalists cover protests and revolts on TV? If you think you’re seeing “the Revolution” instead of curated, maybe spurious, content designed to tell a story and gin up views, you’re fooling yourself.

But Scott-Heron also had something else in mind—you can’t see the revolution on TV because you can’t see it at all. As he says above in a 1990s interview:

The first change that takes place is in your mind. You have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move. The thing that’s going to change people is something that nobody will ever be able to capture on film. It’s just something that you see and you’ll think, “Oh I’m on the wrong page,” or “I’m on I’m on the right page but the wrong note. And I’ve got to get in sync with everyone else to find out what’s happening in this country.”

If we realize we’re out of sync with what’s really happening, we cannot find out more on television. The information is where the battles are being fought, at street level, and in the mechanisms of the legal process. “I think that the Black Americans are the only real die-hard Americans here,” Scott-Heron goes on, “because we’re the only ones who’ve carried the process through the process…. We’re the ones who marched… we’re the ones who tried to go through the courts. Being born American didn’t seem to matter.” It still doesn’t, as we see in the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and so many before them, and in the grievous injuries and deaths from unconstitutional, military-grade police escalations nationwide since”.

I am going to wrap up soon but, just before, I wanted to highlight an essay by Marcus Baram. It helps answer misconceptions about the song and why The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is such a timeless poetic work – a mandate that could be applied to society today and how there is still huge inequality:

“In the song, Gil recites advertising slogans for some of America’s most famous brands-- Coca-Cola, Listerine, Hertz, Dove, Exxon--totems of the consumer culture of the 1950s and 1960s which had inculcated themselves into the country’s mythology and folklore. And he name-checks popular TV shows and movie stars—“Green Acres,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” Natalie Wood, Steve McQueen--the demigods of America’s popular culture. His voice dripping with sarcasm, Gil mocks their triviality and insignificance because when the revolution comes, “black people will be in the street looking for a better day,” because “there will be no highlights on the 11 o’clock news.” He continues: The revolution will not go better with Coke The revolution will not fight the germs that cause bad breath The revolution WILL put you in the driver's seat The revolution will not be televised WILL not be televised, WILL NOT BE TELEVISED The revolution will be no re-run brothers The revolution will be live Long before he stepped into a recording studio, Gil already saw the poem as a song, a classic 12-bar blues track. And the next year, when he worked on his first album, “Small Talk at 125th and Lenox,” he recorded the lyrics to the poem, accompanied by congas and bongo drums, in front of a small group of friends sitting on folding chairs in a studio in midtown Manhattan.

 It was later re-recorded with a full band, including his pal Brian Jackson on flute, as the B-side to his 1971 single, “Home Is Where The Hatred Is” for an album produced by Bob Thiele, who had also worked with John Coltrane and poets like Jack Kerouac. The song and the album were an early example of a creative work going viral, decades before the launch of Twitter and Facebook. It didn’t get much airplay on radio, due to its incendiary lyrics, but it spread by word of mouth in black neighborhoods around the country, in campus coffee shops and nightclubs in West Philadelphia, Harlem, Watts, Chicago’s South Side, and Atlanta. Poet Nikki Giovanni remembers seeing Gil perform the song at a store in Harlem and feeling encouraged that his voice--strong, black, political, poetic--was out there, shaping the minds of his generation. The song became an anthem for a revolutionary era, honored as one of the top 20 political songs in history, and compared to Allan Ginsberg’s “Howl” and Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Later, it became recontextualized and distorted into a message that became the medium again as a slogan on T-shirts and endless headlines that misunderstood the original meaning of the song. In a bitter irony, Gil himself allowed the song to be coopted and used in a TV ad for Nike back in 1994, a decision he always regretted. At the time he was battling a drug addiction and desperate for money, so he accepted director Spike Lee’s request to let rapper KRS-One transform the lyrics into an ode to basketball to help sell the sneaker giant’s new Air Jordans. Until his death in 2011, Scott-Heron was alternately proud of the song’s power and resonance but also frustrated by the way its meaning had been consistently misunderstood by many listeners who took the song’s title literally, that the revolution won’t be aired live on television. But what Gil meant in the song, and it’s obvious from hearing the lyrics, is that you have to be active, you can’t be a passive participant in the revolution. When the revolution happens, you’re going to have to be in the streets. If you want to make change in society, you have to get off your ass and take action. You just can’t sit on your couch and watch it on TV”.

Just ahead of the fiftieth anniversary of Gil Scott-Heron’s Pieces of a Man album (it was recorded in April and released later in the year), I wanted to dissect an incredible musical work. It is sad that, in some ways, society and relations have not progressed since the late-1960s; how there is still  such injustice. Of course, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is not only inspired by racial injustice but, as we are still living in a time where there is such horror and a lack of progression, one cannot help but extrapolate various words and lines from the track and apply them to the here and now. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised is a remarkable work that, over fifty years since its introduction…

MOVES and inspires all the senses.

FEATURE: The February Playlist: Vol. 4: The Last Man on Earth Standing on Shattered Ground

FEATURE:

 

 

The February Playlist

IN THIS PHOTO: Wolf Alice 

Vol. 4: The Last Man on Earth Standing on Shattered Ground

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THE final weekend in February…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Nick Cave & Warren Ellis

has gifted treats in the form of some seriously big songs. Not only are there new tracks from Wolf Alice, Nick Cave & Warren Ellis, The Horrors, Greentea Peng, Wyvern Lingo, Green Day, The Offspring, Chloe x Halle, Leon Bridges/Keite Young, Zara Larsson, Julien Baker, Noname, Marianne Faithfull (with Warren Ellis), Maxïmo Park, Alice Cooper, Novelist, and NewDad. We also have songs from Sarah Close, Pop Smoke, Jade Bird, Ben Howard, Nils Frahm, Becca Mancari, Cosmia, and Baby Queen. It is a busy and exciting week for new music. If you require some kick and energy to get you into the weekend, then I think this week delivers the goods…

 IN THIS PHOTO: The Horrors

IN spades.

ALL PHOTOS/IMAGES (unless credited otherwise): Artists

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PHOTO CREDIT: Jordan Hemingway

Wolf Alice - The Last Man on Earth

Nick Cave & Warren Ellis - Shattered Ground

The Horrors - Lout

Greentea Peng - Nah It Ain’t the Same

Green Day - Here Comes the Shock

Cautious Clay – Roots

Leon Bridges, Keite Young - Like a Ship

Kero Kero Bonito - The Princess and the Clock

Chloe x Halle - 80/20

Zara Larsson - Look What You've Done

Coach Party - Everybody Hates Me

The Offspring - Let the Bad Times Roll

PHOTO CREDIT: Alysse Gafkjen

Julien Baker – Heatwave

Maxïmo Park – The Acid Remark

Alice Cooper – Hail Mary

Novelist – Wagwan

Wyvern Lingo – There’s a Place

Pop Smoke – AP

PHOTO CREDIT: Mikey Massey/Hyperbeast

Cosima – BACKSEAT DRIVERS

Baby Queen – These Drugs

PHOTO CREDIT: Ali Cherkis

Half Waif - Party’s Over

Sinead Harnett - Last Love

Millie Turner - Concrete Tragedy

PHOTO CREDIT: Laurie Barraclough

Wyldest – Wilting

PHOTO CREDIT: Jamie Moore

NewDad – Slowly

Cariss Auburn – Daydream

Sarah Close – Forgive or Forget

Jade Bird - Open up the heavens

PHOTO CREDIT: Jake Michaels

Real Estate - Half a Human

Dropkick Murphys - Middle Finger

Lindsay Munroe - Need a Ride

Maisie Peters – John Hughes Movie

PHOTO CREDIT: Graham Tolbert

Flock of Dimes - Price of Blue

Bobbi Arlo – FEEL IT

Madison Beer – Blue

Ben Howard – Far Out

Tiana Blake – Interruption

Issey Cross - Boys Make Promises

Josie Man – Cuts & Bruises

Architects, Mike Kerr – Little Wonder

Charlotte Sands – Special

Aleyna Tilki - Retrograde

Noname - Rainforest

PHOTO CREDIT: Rosie Matheson

Marianne Faithfull (with Warren Ellis) - She Walks in Beauty

Bizzare x Giggs - BADMAN

PHOTO CREDIT: Mustafah Abdulaziz for The New York Times

Nils Frahm - O I End

Becca Mancari - Annie

PHOTO CREDIT: Brantley Gutierrez

Dinosaur Jr. - I Ran Away

Lydia Luce - Never Been Good

FEATURE: The Lockdown Playlist: Nigel Godrich at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Lockdown Playlist

Nigel Godrich at Fifty

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I like doing birthday Lockdown Playlists…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Nigel Godrich with Ultraista (with Joey Waronker and Laura Bettinson)

as it allows me to focus on the work of a particular artist and open my eyes to their brilliance. Today, I am celebrating one of the greatest producers in the world. Nigel Godrich is fifty on 28th February, so I wanted to salute a producer who I first discovered from listening to Radiohead’s OK Computer back in 1997. I am going to end with a playlist of songs that Godrich has either produced, assisted, mixed, engineered, performed or worked on. Before then, I want to bring in some Wikipedia information about the great man:

“Nigel Godrich was born in Westminster, London, the son of Victor Godrich, a BBC sound supervisor, and Brenda Godrich. He was educated at William Ellis School in North London, where he shared classes with his friend and future Zero 7 member Henry Binns. Godrich began playing guitar, inspired by Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa. He became interested in sound engineering and studied at the School of Audio Engineering. After graduating, Godrich became a junior staff member at the Audio One studio complex, working primarily as a tea boy.

After the closure of Audio One, Godrich became the house engineer at RAK Studios, where he became a tape operator for producer John Leckie, with whom he worked on albums by Ride and Denim. In 1995, Godrich left RAK to work with Binns on electronic dance music at their collective Shabang studio.

 Godrich first worked with Radiohead when Leckie hired him to engineer two songs for their 1994 EP My Iron Lung. The band nicknamed him "Nihilist", approving of his efforts to take their sound in new directions. He went on to engineer Radiohead's second album The Bends (1995), working under Leckie as producer. When Leckie left the studio to attend a social engagement, Radiohead and Godrich stayed to record B-sides; one of the songs intended for a B-side, "Black Star", was instead included on the album. In 1995, Godrich produced Radiohead's charity single "Lucky", plus the B-sides "Bishop's Robes" and "Talk Show Host", released on the "Street Spirit (Fade Out)" single.

Radiohead invited Godrich to produce their third album, OK Computer (1997). Working in improvised studios without supervision, he and the band learned as they went, and credited the open process with the record's success. In 2013, Godrich told the Guardian: "OK Computer was such a big thing for me because I was given power for the first time. Some of these incredibly intelligent and insightful people said 'do what you want' to me so I worked my arse off for them and together we did something that represents where we all were at the time. And it stuck for some reason. People got it, so that changed my life.”

Godrich has produced every Radiohead studio album since, and won the Grammy Award for Best Engineered Non-Classical Album for Hail to the Thief (2003). Godrich's father died during the recording of Radiohead's ninth album, A Moon Shaped Pool (2016); Godrich wrote: "Making this album was a very intense experience for me. I lost my dad in the process. Hence a large piece of my soul lives here in a good way”.

To nod to a legendary producer on his fiftieth birthday, here are some remarkable songs that Nigel Godrich has played a part in. As an innovator, mixer, engineer., musician and producer, I think that he is one…

OF the finest of his generation.

FEATURE: Second Spin: Mariah Carey - Butterfly

FEATURE:

 

 

Second Spin

Mariah Carey - Butterfly

___________

I wanted to feature…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Frank Micelotta/Hulton Archive

Mariah Carey’s sixth studio album, Butterfly, here because it still gets a lot of stick from some quarters. The follow-up to the phenomenal Daydream of 1995, Butterfly is a terrific release. I don’t think one needs to be a Mariah Carey fan to appreciate the songs and the variety throughout the album. Released on 16th September, 1997, Butterfly contained Hip-Hop and Urban Adult Contemporary sounds plus  some softer and more contemporary melodies. Mariah Carey worked with many fantastic Hip-Hop producers and rappers such as Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs, Q-Tip, Missy Elliott and the Trackmasters. With the latter acts producing most of the album, Butterfly deviated from the contemporary sound of Carey's older work. I like how Butterfly is sort of symbolic in its title: the artist coming out of her cocoon and turning into this bright and liberated wonder. Pushing away from the Pop sound of her earliest albums, Carey was utilising R&B and Hip-Hop more – to great and hugely memorable effect right through the album. During her marriage to Tommy Mottola, Carey had little control over the creative and artistic steps she took on her albums. After their divorce midway through the album's conception, she was able to reflect her creative maturity and evolution in the album's writing and recording. With terrific singles like Honey, and Butterfly, I think Carey’s sixth studio album is one that deserves more attention now. It got some great reviews in 1997, but there are some sources that have been unkind towards it.

I want to bring in a feature from Essence from 2017. They marked twenty years of Butterfly in 2017. We hear from collaborators Da Brat, Stevie J, Krayzie Bone and Mariah Carey herself. I want to bring in some sections that caught my eye:

“Of course she’s technically “pop,” in the purest sense of the word. With ten platinum studio albums, 34 Grammy Nominations, countless Billboard hits and a slew of other record-breaking achievements, she is undoubtedly one of the most popular and prolific artists of all time.

But she didn’t choose that. It was kind of inevitable, right? Her voice alone —its palpability, its singularity— primed her for a career of singing chart-topping hits. She couldn’t help it.

It’s the other connotation of “pop” that doesn’t quite fit and feels more determined —the one that makes you think of bubblegum— light, generic, lacking substance or burden. The kind of label we give to artists who can create anthems, but rarely get intimate. That’s where Mariah gets off the train.

To not define (or to not at least offer a careful disclaimer) when calling Mariah “pop” is to ignore her legacy of delivering masterfully written music that’s personal, profound and soulful —the antithesis of the typical pop music formula. While songs like “Love Takes Time” and “One Sweet Day” from her earlier albums hinted at Carey’s desire to go deeper, it was 1997’s Butterfly that solidified the rhythm and blues quotient in her music and presented her as a vulnerable and self-reflective artist ready to break free.

With Butterfly, she created a classic. More than a branding tool, the butterfly became synonymous with Carey, and for a good reason. The imagery of a vibrant, spirited thing with incomparable beauty and an unpredictable wingspan, was the perfect mascot for Carey’s unprecedented range as a musician and an artist —her dynamic voice, so striking and distinct, it could only be something crafted by the Divine. Not to mention the butterfly’s process of becoming —its life cycle, its transition while cocooning, the stages of egg, caterpillar and then butterfly— served as an idyllic symbol for a woman on the brink of emerging.

Stevie J: “She was just being herself [when we worked together]. She was married at a young age, so you know she had really began to find herself and the woman she wanted to be. It’s a great thing for a woman when she gains her independence, so I didn’t really see anything other than just her being a happy, spirited person. We would have our Cristal and our wine and just be writing smashes.”

Da Brat: “Once she broke away from the cocoon, she spread her wings and flew on her own. She was ready to handle her own life. The ‘Honey’ video showed her escaping from an island. ‘Butterfly’ (the song) is self-explanatory. She came into herself. The album was soulful because that’s who she was. Behind all the glam, she was hood, still a kid, knew all of the lyrics to all rap songs… and just wanted to express herself in her own way. Her words are her truth. ‘Breakdown,’ just listen to the words. She joined forces with her favorite hip-hop homies who she knew she had great creative chemistry with and soared even higher.”

With the exception of “The Beautiful Ones,” a remake of Prince’s song, Mariah wrote or co-wrote each track on Butterfly. Carey’s former manager and American Idol judge, Randy Jackson reportedly stated that out of the “Big 3” (Whitney, Celine and Mariah) Mariah is the only one who also writes her own music. And according to her collaborators she really, really writes.

Stevie J: “When you have someone with that type of writing ability… Her pen game is lethal.”

Da Brat: “When MC works, she likes to write together with the producer or artist she’s collaborating with. She starts humming melodies, we throw ideas in the pot, different scenarios, rhymes, ad-libs, harmonies and then a masterpiece is crafted.”

Mariah: “I love writing, sometimes more than singing. There’s something about it. I love poetry.  I love writing melodies. I love collaborating with other writers. When I’m not doing it, I don’t feel like myself.”

Even though it received mostly positive reviews upon its release, there were some more mixed and negative ones. This is what NME wrote in their review:

“Or maybe not. Still, we're not a million miles away from that sort of downward-spiralling, because Mariah's seventh album is a bruising diary of personal despair. Like Spiritualized's 'Ladies And Gentlemen...', it's a graphic depiction of a collapsing relationship.

You see, Mariah may have sold enough records to buy a lifetime's supply of platinum-coated elephants, but in the past year she has suffered a much-publicised divorce, as well as being the focus of some intense speculation regarding the nature of her relationship with 'pop genius' Sean 'Puffy' Combs. Needless to say, as a result 'Butterfly' is 65 minutes of gruelling angst.

Still, for an album that will doubtless propel Mariah ever nearer to that magic 100 million mark, it contains some truly great scenes. During 'Babydoll', we find Mariah alone and paranoid in her hotel suite in the early hours of the morning ("I'll have a little more wine/And I'll try to drink you/Out of my head"), while minutes later she's forgetting all about her marriage and getting frisky with a stranger on, er, 'The Roof' ("I couldn't bear to let you go yet/So I threw caution to the wind").

By this point, we're naturally reeling under the sheer weight of it all, and counting our blessings that the soundtrack to this emotional extremity is so reassuringly bland. Let's face it, in Jason Pierce's hands this would have been the most traumatic record of all time. Luckily, with the aid of Puffy and the odd Prince cover, most of Mariah's traumas are washed away in a stream of anaemic synthesisers and medium-paced ballads.

Which is why this album will sell approximately 1,000 times more copies than 'Ladies And Gentlemen...'. And why it's not that bad being Mariah Carey - even if your life is falling apart”.

I think I must have heard Butterfly when it came out in 1997. I liked Daydream in 1995, and I was hooked on singles like Fantasy. I was not a huge Mariah Carey fan prior to that, but I had new respect for her when her sound developed and shifted. I think Butterfly is a great album that deserves a lot of praise.

In a more positive review, this is how AllMusic reflected on an album that is seen as an R&B classic:

“Upon its release, Butterfly was interpreted as Mariah Carey's declaration of independence from her ex-husband (and label president) Tommy Mottola, and to a certain extent, that's true. Butterfly is peppered with allusions to her troubled marriage and her newfound freedom, and the music is supposed to be in tune with contemporary urban sounds instead of adult contemporary radio. Nevertheless, it feels like a Mariah Carey album, which means that it's a collection of hit singles surrounded by classy filler. What is surprising about Butterfly is the lack of up-tempo dance-pop. Apart from the Puffy Combs-produced "Honey," Butterfly is devoted to ballads, and while they are all well-crafted, many of them blend together upon initial listening. Subsequent plays reveal that Carey's vocals are sultrier and more controlled than ever, and that helps "Butterfly," "Break Down," "Babydoll," and the Prince cover, "The Beautiful Ones," rank among her best; also, the ballads do have a stronger urban feel than before. Even though Butterfly doesn't have as many strong singles as Daydream, it's one of her best records, illustrating that Carey is continuing to improve and refine her music, which makes her a rarity among her '90s peers”.

Butterfly debuted at number-one at the US Billboard 200 selling 236,000 copies in the first week after its release. It maintained that position for one week and remained in the top-twenty for twenty-one weeks; it stayed in the chart for fifty-five weeks. Butterfly was certified five-times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), denoting shipments of five-million copies. It is one of the most successful albums of the 1990s so, if you ignored it when it came out or were not really aware of it, then check out Butterfly. Breakdown (ft. Krayzie Bone and Wish Bone) is my highlight, perhaps, but I love Honey, My All, and Babydoll. Spend some time and spin an album that is considered…

A classic from the 1990s.

 

FEATURE: The Dreaded C-Word: Has the Idea of the Concept Album Died Out?

FEATURE:

 

 

The Dreaded C-Word

 Has the Idea of the Concept Album Died Out?

___________

WHILST there have been some terrific albums…

released through the years, there have been some changes and declines that are worrying. Not to say that the concept album has been a big thing through the ages and has really slumped. I do feel that we saw more concept albums in the 1970s and years gone by. In 2004, The Streets released the majestic A Grand Don't Come for Free. is a Rap opera and concept album that follows the story of its protagonist's relationship with a girl named Simone, alongside the mysterious loss of £1,000 from his home (the eponymous ‘grand’). I think the concept had a bad reputation when it was done a lot by Prog-Rock acts as they went on for ages and were quite pretentious. I think there have been some concept albums over the last few years, but it is quite rare to hear them that often. When done right, a concept album can provide so much drama, cinema and wonderful moments. Rather than put together a selection of songs without a unifying theme, it is interesting when there is this story and overarching thread. Not that it is a pure concept album, but I was interested to hear news about Kacey Musgraves’ upcoming album. Rather than it being a straight or commercial album, as we can see from this article in The Line of Best Fit, Musgraves has combined modern politics with ancient tragedies:

“Kacey Musgraves, who won four Grammys in 2019, two of which were album awards for Golden Hour, hasn't released new music since featuring on Troye Sivan's updated version of "Easy" in December last year, but in a new interview with Rolling Stone, Musgraves reveals some information about her new album set for release later this year.

PHOTO CREDIT: Eric T. White 

Musgraves has been working with producer Daniel Tashian, and revealed to Rolling Stone that she was inspired by tragedies after listening to Bach’s "Komm, süßer Tod, komm selge Ruh", which led her to think about Greek tragedies, Romeo and Juliet and the classic three-act narrative.

She said, "This last chapter of my life and this whole last year and chapter for our country - at its most simple form, it’s a tragedy. And then I started looking into why portraying a tragedy is actually therapeutic and why it is a form of art that has lasted for centuries. It’s because you set the scene, the audience rises to the climax of the problem with you, and then there’s resolve. There’s a feeling of resolution at the end. I was inspired by that."

Having been inspired by that structure, Musgraves started to group her 39 songs written over the past few years into acts, which allowed the album to take shape. She told Rolling Stone, "It’s crazy because you have to just wait on it. You can’t ask for it."

After grouping the songs, she realised she needed another song to represent the "crescendo of the climax".

Musgraves added of the track styles, "I mean, looking at the list of songs, we have some that venture into, like, a Bill Withers land. We’ve got that synth stuff that we always loved. And we’ve got some Eagles or America territory. There’s a little bit of a dance vibe."

The singer/songwriter and Tashian went back and forth in the interview on ideas for a song called "Star-Crossed". Tashian said he was looking for an "epic kind of feeling", while Musgraves threw out words including "Anthemic", "ballad", and "uptempo, sad dance song". Later in the piece, it's revealed that Musgraves is considering getting Carlos Santana to play on the song”.

I am a fan of Kacey Musgraves’ work, so I will be interested to see what comes out. I am not sure whether we will see great concept albums coming in the future or whether the format will cease to exist. The BBC wrote about concept albums to check out that are not mad and pretentious. There are some classics that refute the notion that the concept album is ridiculous and overblown. I think a concept album can be loose and does not have to be very prescriptive and precise. Listen to The Wall by Pink Floyd or The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, and they are very different. Whether it is an album with a general concept that allows for a larger subject to be explored or we have an album that tells a story with chapters and distinct beats, I think that there is definite scope and promise. I am not sure what Kacey Musgraves will do in terms of her concept and how the album unfolds, but it should give inspiration and ideas to other artists. In any case, I feel that a lot of artists and albums are pretty unambitious and do not really grab you. Despite the fact that the concept album gets a bad rap, if it is done right and has an interesting angle, then I feel it can rank alongside any other album. Even though the phenomenon is not as widespread as it was decades ago, I feel there is…

STILL life left in the concept album.