FEATURE: Second Spin: Little Boots - Working Girl

FEATURE:

 

 

Second Spin

 Little Boots - Working Girl

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AS a fan of…

the Blackpool-born Little Boots (Victoria Hesketh), I really like her three studio albums to date. I think that we will get a fourth soon enough. Her 2009 debut, Hands, is remarkable. As is 2013’s Nocturnes. In terms of critical acclaim it is her third, 2015’s Working Girl, that divided some critics. I am going to bring in a positive review alongside a more mixed one. Despite the fact there are a fair few producers on Working Girl, the writing, vocals from Little Boots and the overall sound is brilliant. It might be my favourite album of hers. One can feel a real sense of shift and evolution from her debut album to where she was on Working Girl. With strong tracks like Working Girl and No Pressure making sure the album gets off to a flying start, there are not that many dips in terms of quality. Maybe the second half is a little less strong than the first – though both are pretty balanced and have some really good songs on them. There is not a lot of biographical information regarding the themes of the album and the background. Instead, I found a 2015 interview from SPIN, where Little Boots spoke about the album. She explains how, on Working Girl, she sort of came full circle:

 “For years, Little Boots has chased total independence. Following a stifling creative relationship with her record label (they wanted the British Lady Gaga, she didn’t), the U.K. singer abandoned her deal with Atlantic Records midway through the making of her second LP, 2013’s Nocturnes. Now, Little Boots controls her own image and output — a perk of forming her own label, On Repeat Records, on which she’ll release her upcoming third album, Working Girl (in conjunction with Dim Mak in North America).

“I kind of got that feeling back like when you first start out,” she says over the phone from London. “I’ve come full circle and there’s no boundaries or rules I can break. It’s quite exciting and liberating.”

Born Victoria Hesketh, Little Boots has released two full length albums, both of which presented boundary-pushing ideas of what modern pop and dance music could be. Hands, released in 2009, preceded the wave of festival-tent EDM that eventually engulfed Top 40; follow-up Nocturnes repurposed fast-paced thumping melodies from electronica’s past, presaging present-day dance’s streak of ’90s-informed nostalgia. Working Girl feels like her most comprehensive self-portrait to date, a series of keyboard-pounding, strobing songs built around a common theme — what it’s like to be a woman in the workforce, as its title suggests — that Hesketh made totally on her own terms.

With total autonomy, the singer maintains that her mission remains the same: bridging the gap between accessibility and avant-garde. “I want to make up the most poppy music in the most weird way I can, so I’m just constantly trying to marry these two worlds of pop and rock,” she says. “You’re in this iffy place the minute you start making records thinking about pleasing others. That’s your downfall, that means something’s going wrong.] I’ve really learned to ignore all that outside noise.”

Little Boots does acknowledge, though, that while she’s going it alone now, she didn’t actually create Working Girl by herself. The album sports production from New York synth-wave artist Com Truise and suddenly in-demand Grammy winner Ariel Rechtshaid, their chime-heavy melodies providing billowing support for her controlled, breathy sighs. “I’m not very good at working on my own,” she says with a chuckle. “I need people, I need sounding boards. Go and look up all the best pop songs, all your favorite pop songs. I bet you there’ll be one in one hundred that was written by one person. Very few people absolutely do the whole entire things themselves, because you go crazy. You’ve got no cheerleader, no person who’s going to throw out the rubbish.”

Working Girl is undeniably a dance record — there are synthesizers ripped straight from the Depeche Mode’s finest moments, staggering hooks, C+C floor-filling drum machines, and truncated, stuttering xylophones all throughout its 13 tracks — and Little Boots admits that pulling all of the tracks together to tell a story proved difficult. “It’s all over the place, but it’s just reflective of me as a person,” she says. “I had this idea for a character of the working girl, and a world revolving for her or around her or about her. Sometimes it was me, and sometimes it wasn’t really, and I think maybe that got the songs to hang together production-wise. It’s quite a big job really”.

I think that Working Girl is a fantastic and satisfying album where Little Boots shows why she is one of our very best artists. I am looking forward to seeing if a fourth studio album does arrive. Before concluding, I want to balance reviews. The reason why I think Working Girl warrants a new spin is because some were more mixed. For example, this is what Drowned in Sound observed when they sat down with the album:

“Victoria Hesketh’s metamorphosis from lead singer of indie-poppers Dead Disco to wry electro solo act Little Boots may not have changed the face of music as we know it, but it was pretty savvy: a low key bellwether for the end of indie’s Noughties dominance, and the beginning of a decade where producer-led digital pop has pretty much been the only game in the charts.

But if Hesketh was the prophet for this new world, she didn’t exactly reap its rewards. Debut album Hands and attendant hit single ‘Remedy’ certainly did a hell of a lot more business than anything put out by the band she’d been in just a year before. But it wasn’t enough to make her a household name. She parted with Atlantic, and four years later the more sophisticated, less endearingly wonky Nocturnes failed to replicate its predecessor’s success, despite going some way to anticipate the revival of Nineties house on the top 40.

Like Nocturnes, third album Working Girl is far from tuneless. But it seems to have slightly unusual priorities. It is a pop nerd’s album, worked on by a bunch of interesting producers (Ariel Rechtshaid, Chris Carmouche, Grades, Com Truise, Jeppe Laursen, Jas Shaw) and clearly within the dance-pop oeuvre. But can it really be described as ‘pop music’ in its purest terms when it’s unwilling to seriously make a play for your endorphins, and its best moments are in fact the least poppy?

The wonky playfulness of yore is long gone; there's now an underlying coldness to Little Boots’ music, and the best stuff here is when she embraces that and doesn’t try and sound like a modern pop star at all. ‘Get Things Done’ rides in on a walloping, frisky bassline and has a strangely menacing chorus refrain – “we know how to get things done” – that vaguely recollects The Pet Shop Boys at their most imperious. ‘Taste It’ has a nervy, unsettling minimalism and almost feels like it could have slid onto the last Knife album if they’d been fractionally more welcoming about things.

The record, by-the-by, comes saddled with a concept. Working Girl is named after the 1989 Melanie Griffiths film of the same name, and the lyrics deal with the work and the work life. There is a lot of stuff in the artwork referencing late Eighties/early Nineties business fashion. There is certainly something interesting about it, but it’s also a bit hard to embrace wholeheartedly. Is it meant to be a kitsch joke? A nod to an increasingly revered era of music? It sounds in principal like it should be a fun wheeze, but this is not especially fun music.

One suspects that working with six different producers doesn’t help in making a coherent concept album, but the frustration is that Hesketh rarely grabs her own record by the scruff of the neck, doesn’t have the strength of personality to really sell whatever she’s selling to the listener. With her smooth, light vocals and classy but never ostentatious tunes, she feels like a distillation of a thesis about what good, intelligent pop should be without quite being it.

Housey tracks like ‘Real Girl’ and ‘No Pressure’ don’t want for hooks or sense of contemporaneity, but Hesketh’s cold, thin vocal never delivers them with great conviction - they do sound like hits, but hits for another singer. Little Boots is closer to her element when left of centre – the icy intensity of ‘Business Pleasure’ works immaculately, but it’s not in any way a future smash.

She hits enough gold to not seem like an irrelevance, but her goals are murky – a prophet whose predictions all came true, and is now unsure what’s left for her”.

To shift the focus towards the positive, I think AllMusic’s review is closer to getting to the heart of Working Girl. With so much quality on display, it is an album that offers so much:

“With a title inspired in part by the 1988 comedy-drama of the same name, Little Boots' third full-length album, 2015's Working Girl, showcases her trademark atmospheric '70s disco and '80s house-infused pop with ever increasing aplomb. A concept album, Working Girl revolves around Victoria Hesketh's (aka Little Boots') own journey from major-label fame with Atlantic Records in 2009 to independent success after founding On Repeat Records in 2013. The album follows Hesketh's equally conceptually minded 2014 EP Business Pleasure (all four tracks are included here) and finds her expanding upon that album's dual themes of creative transformation and professional empowerment. Working with a bevy of arty dancefloor-familiar producers including Simian Mobile Disco's Jas Shaw, Com Truise, and Chris Carmouche (Janelle Monáe, Major Lazer), Hesketh has constructed album of arch, laser-like sophistication, punctuated by moments of euphoric passion. Cuts like the title track, "Taste It," and "Real Girl" are languid, exotic anthems that balance Hesketh's thoughtful D.I.Y. feminist point of view with subtle cheekiness and a winking sense of camp. Whether she's singing about taking control of her creative process, her career, or even her sexuality, Hesketh imbues Working Girl with a confident swagger.

It's as if she's reimagined her herself as an '80s power suit-wearing heroine in a film about her life; a cinematic ice queen CEO commanding the boardroom in stilettos. As she defiantly coos on "Business Pleasure, "I'm not your girl in the machine/I won't give up on my daydream." Which isn't to say there aren't moments of red-hot passion on Working Girl. On the contrary, cuts like "Get Things Done" and the sparkling club anthem "Desire," are whip-crack funky and utterly infectious, bringing to mind Vogue-era Madonna. Ultimately, Working Girl plays like Little Boots' own biopic, a cinematic feminist synth-pop manifesto set to a pulsing Giorgio Moroder-esque soundtrack”.

Go and listen to the album if you have not already. Whilst it won some great press, it is a shame that some did not see the true strength and nuance of Working Girl. Despite the number of producers credited, the overall sound and consistency is good. It is definitely Little Boots’ voice and personality that comes to the fore. Working Girl debuted at number sixty-seven on the U.K. chart, selling 1,425 copies in its first week. With some new music out in the world (the track, Silver Balloons, came out a month or so ago), I have been listening back to her previous work. In a strong and fascinating career, I was compelled to re-explore Working Girl. To me, it is an underrated and solid album that deserves some…

FRESH respect

FEATURE: Groovelines: The Notorious B.I.G. - Juicy

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

 The Notorious B.I.G. - Juicy

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ONE of the most promising…

and finest rappers of his time, New York king The Notorious B.I.G. (Biggie Smalls) was killed in 1997 at the age of twenty-four. Tragic as his death was, we have some great and timeless music from him. Few debut albums are as strong and seismic as 1994’s Ready to Die. It is quite a haunting and (unfortunately) prophetic title. It is clear of the confidence and sheer size of The Notorious B.I.G.’s talent. His first single, Juicy, is a classic Hip-Hop tracks. On an album with genius cuts and some of the most moving and captivating music you will hear, Juicy is a highlight. There are some articles pertaining to this song that I want to utilise. In 2018, Rhino paid tribute to a hugely important song:

“24 years ago this week, The Notorious B.I.G. released the first single from his debut studio album, kicking off his career in – no pun intended – a big way.

Credited to Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. Biggie), Hunter McIntosh, Sean Combs, Pete Rock, Jean-Claude Olivier, and Samuel Barnes, “Juicy” was a song which effectively served as an introduction to the Notorious B.I.G., taking listeners through his life up to that point, including his struggles with poverty, his stint as a drug dealer, and his eventual rise to success.

Produced by Pete Rock, who was a little annoyed that he didn’t get the credit for coming up with the beat for the track, “Juicy” wasn’t just a big hit at the time, it continues to be viewed as a highly influential rap song. Indeed, it can be found on best-of lists compiled by Rolling Stone, Blender, Q, Pitchfork Media, and VH-1, so when you hear someone referring to “Juicy” as one of the greatest hip-hop songs ever, there’s no hyperbole involved. It really is”.

The story behind Juicy is an interesting one. Despite the fact it is a track from The Notorious B.I.G., there are a series of writers who helped put it together (including Sean Combs (Puff Daddy). This article provides more detail regarding the classic Juicy:

“Juicy” is one of iconic American rapper “The Notorious B.I.G.”’s (real name Christopher Wallace) most famous tracks. Available on the rapper’s debut studio album: “Ready to Die”, which was released in September 1994 by Bad Boy Records and Artista Records. It was written by a multitude of writers, one being Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs, who is known by his rap name “Puff Daddy” or “P. Diddy”.

The track consists of Biggie’s rise to fame, detailing his impoverished childhood and his lifelong dream of making it in the music industry as a rapper. Biggie opens up the track with these lines: “Yeah, this album is dedicated / To all the teachers that told me I’d never amount to nothin’ / To all the people that lived above the buildings that I was hustlin’ in front of”. The song seems to be Biggie’s message to all those who doubted him, and urges listeners that “you know very well / who you are”, which is sung in the chorus by an uncredited female singer.

There was, however, controversy in regards to the production of the track, with producer Pete Rock claiming that P. Diddy stole his idea for the song’s original beat after he heard during a visit. In an interview with American music magazine “Wax Poetics” in 2012, Rock explained the situation with the production of the track:

“I did the original version, didn’t get credit for it. They came to my house, heard the beat going on the drum machine, it’s the same story. You come downstairs at my crib, you hear music. He heard that shit and the next thing you know it comes out. They had me do a remix, but I tell people, and I will fight it to the end, that I did the original version of that. I’m not mad at anybody, I just want the correct credit.” In the recent years, Rock has recently stated in a podcast that he no longer has any hard feelings towards the situation, but just wished that he was credited.

The music video was uploaded to YouTube in September 2011, but was originally released in 1994. Directed by P. Diddy, and has over 214 hundred million views as of May 2019. It follows the story line of the song, featuring Biggie singing the track, a child actor playing him in his childhood while he hung posters in his room, at pool parties surrounded by men and women as well as singing on a rooftop. The video also has over 1.1 million likes”.

Prior to rounding off, there is a 2015 article from Medium. From humble and hard beginnings, Juicy is a declaration of intent. A message from a king-in-the-making to his peers and competition. Twenty-seven years since its release, Juicy still sounds so emphatic and mesmeric:

“Biggie Smalls is a hip hop legend, born and raised in Brooklyn, New york. He became one of the most influential figures in the East Coast hip hop scene in the early 90's. However, Biggie’s rise to fame was not an easy one. Christopher Wallace was a high school dropout who got involved with dealing drugs as early as 12 years old. His arrest record includes distribution of crack cocaine as well as weapon charges and other crimes. Yet, despite his rough childhood, he was still able to make a name for himself in the hip hop community through his stylistic rhymes and rap flow. Biggie’s song “Juicy” gives a description of his struggle to the top. He shares with the audience how thing’s can change when you move from the ghetto to the spotlight.

From the beginning you are able to tell he is sending a message to those who doubted his potential. He starts the song off by dedicating it to all the teachers who said he would never amount to anything. Following this he begins to name some of the artists who inspired him to follow his passion. “It was all a dream, I used to read Word Up magazine. Salt N’ Pepa and Heavy D up in the limousine”. He saw the life these artist’s had made for themselves through hip hop and became determined to do the same himself.

Biggie then proceeds to compare his new lavish lifestyle to that of his former. Which gives the listeners an idea of the dramatic change that has taken place in his life. “Born sinner, the opposite of a winner. Remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner”. This is an example of Biggie explaining that he remembers where he came from and the struggle he went through. Moving on to examples of where he progressed to, he uses rhymes such as, “I made the change from a common thief. To up close and personal with Robin Leach”. Robin Leach being famous for his show “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”. He uses more examples, like rhymes stating, “Lunches, brunches, interviews by the pool. Considered a fool ‘cause I dropped out of high school. Stereotypes of a black male misunderstood, and it’s still all good.” This is not only a statement about his change in lifestyle, but a message to the underprivileged black community.

The reason Biggie is describing his life from rags to riches is to inspire others who may be in the same situation to follow his example. “You know very well who you are. Don’t let ‘em hold you down, reach for the stars. You had a goal but not that many. ‘Cause you’re the only one, I’ll give you good and plenty”. He furthers this message by explaining the benefits of being able to give back to those who supported you through the hard times. “And my whole crew is loungin’. Celebratin’ every day, no more public housin’. Thinkin’ back on my one-room shack. Now my mom pimps Ac’s with minks on her back”.

One of the greatest Hip-Hop songs of all-time, the debut single from The Notorious B.I.G. will live on for generations. The Ready to Die album reinvented East Coast Rap. Celebrated and recognised as one of the greatest rags-to-riches songs we have ever heard, its impact, relevance and power will sustain and influence for so many more years. Even if you listen to it fresh now, Juicy is a song that leaves an instant impression! When it comes to the legendary and historic tracks of Hip-Hop and Rap, there is no doubt that Juicy stacks up…

ALONGSIDE the very best.

FEATURE: The Kate Bush Interview Archive: 1984: Richard Laermer (Pulse!)

FEATURE:

 

 

The Kate Bush Interview Archive

PHOTO CREDIT: Denis Oregan 

1984: Richard Laermer (Pulse!)

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I am winding this feature up…

pretty soon, as I feel I have included most of the best print interviews Kate Bush has been involved in through the years. American audiences became aware of Kate Bush when her debut, The Kick Inside, was released in 1978. It hardly did anything there. A single like Wuthering Heights was not embraced or understood. Perhaps too out-there or strange for American tastes, maybe there was an idea Bush would break America with The Kick Inside. The fact the album was not successful there explains why her albums were not released in the U.S. Buyers could get them on import but, in terms of her discography, America got very little from Kate Bush. Perhaps seen as ‘too British’ for America, things started to change by 1984/1985. 1985’s Hounds of Love brought Bush’s music to new American audiences and fans. Though the album did not receive huge acclaim from critics there, it did sell well, and she did visit the U.S. to do promotional duties. The interview I wanted to include is from Pulse! (it  was a tabloid magazine published by Tower Records which contained record reviews, interviews and advertising) in 1984. Chatting with Richard Laermer, Bush speaks about her records in America. This was a year before Hounds of Love came out. The Dreaming (1982) is a totally different album. I am surprised that it did pretty well in America. I have selected sections from the interview with Pulse! that are especially interesting:

 “Only two of my records have actually been released in America," Kate notes from her studio in Great Britain. "I was really pleased that there were so many people trying to get hold of the albums on import."

This sentiment is from a 25-year old lady who began writing songs at age 11. She says, "I didn't think I was going to do it for a profession. It was fun, something I really enjoyed. I spent most of my time create scenarios for songs. At 16 I had gotten to the point where my songs were presentable. That was after five years of writing ballads and slow songs like 'The Man With The Child In His Eyes.'"

Kate started recording her songs at that young age with the help of close friend David Gilmour [actually they weren't and aren't "close friends"], lead singer of Pink Floyd. Gilmour was so impressed with his pal's burgeoning talent that when she was 16 he introduced Kate and her vast collection of music to EMI.

"I signed a recording contract at 16. The hardest thing," Kate admits modestly, "was choosing the songs." Having stockpiled much more than an album's worth of songs, she was able to choose from the cream of the crop.

"Wuthering Heights," the first single, was a huge it in several European countries. "The story in 'Wuthering Heights' had been bugging me for about a month," Kate recalls, pondering on the lives on Emily Bronte's doomed lovers. "At the time I was recording the album, I began to down my thoughts on Cathy and Heathcliff and their incredible relationship. I really enjoyed the energy between those two."

And so did single buyers in England, pushing Kate Bush to superstar status her first time out. She toured the continent and Japan - where The Kick Inside still reigns as a national favorite - and returned six months later to record Lionheart, a quickly-produced recording that Kate now things [sic: thinks] harshly about: "I had only a week after we got back from Japan to prepare for the album. I was lucky to get it together so quickly. But the songs seem to me, now, to be somewhat overproduced. I didn't put enough time into them." She gave more time, and thought, to her 1980 release, Never For Ever, her first self-produced effort which, surprisingly enough, sported her first released single ("Babooshka") in the states and a big selling cult single in several American cities (the import "Army Dreamers").

The U.S. record buyer, however, ignored Kate until '82 when the rocker LP The Dreaming came out stateside in large quantities and suddenly the anonymity of a singer from Kent, England was reversed. That albums' hard sound proved to be her American kick-off, and due to the newfound saleability of Kate Bush, EMI quickly followed The Dreaming with a 1983 EP featuring some of her best material from the pervious four releases (called Kate Bush). Available only in the United States and Canada, this limited edition, with Kate dramatically poised in brass armor, was EMI's intended mode of bringing U.S. attention to Britain's singer elite.

Strength was her one motive when commencing work on The Dreaming, she says, explaining how for the first time she relied "on the power of the music" rather than sultry tunes and serene lyrics prominent in her previous albums. And the power in Kate Bush's music was an evolutionary process that is traced in the Kate Bush EP, fusing the new Bush force with those beautifics utilized in the earlier records.

"I was trying, in The Dreaming, to get myself up to the point I knew I was capable of," kate says of the search for power. "the Dreaming was my emotional image and I am thankful that I had good people to help with the dynamics."

In The Dreaming, she lends a topical theme to many cuts. "Sat In Your Lap," a punk influenced homage to pop Brit culture circa 1982, shows off Kate's feelings on knowledge and education: "Knowledge is something sat in your lap/something that you never have," because, in the singer's eyes, "the more you realize, the more you need to learn." But other parts of the record present a more maudlin view of things: The crazed "Get Out Of My House" was inspired by the horrors in Steven Kings The Shining and utilized several overlapping tracks that simulate madness. Kate sings about a house that takes over, a house possessed by devilish innards.

"When I'm writing a particular song," she says excitedly, "I can feel a character so strongly that perhaps I'm feeling the same." Well aware that her songs provide listeners with some extreme characterizations, she finds it "terribly important ... to make the person I am writing about come alive. Unless I can somehow live the experience I don't feel that I've achieved what I want to as a writer."

Kate is busy these days putting the pre-studio finishing touches on her fifth record. "I've been writing material for my new album - the songs are almost complete now," she said. "I hope to start recording in a couple of months when I've finished writing and tightening up the lyrics." As for the direction the record's music will take, she hasn't decided yet. She will venture to the U.S. later this year to promote it but not to tour. "It's a shame, but for now I don't see the possibility of a tour," she says with a sigh. "We can't afford to do it the way I'd want to." The way she wants to do it is right. For now she will wait and see the reaction to her newest product, and in the meantime hope that her American success continues to grow. About America, Kate is glad that video has made it to the forefront of entertainment. Having produced a clip for each single to date, on of her problems in not catching on here, she is well aware, has been the lack of video venues. These days most musically inclined cable channels carry Kate's work, both past and present. (According to ABC's 20/20, Kate was one of the ground-breakers in video production - years before MTV.)

On the twentieth anniversary of the Beatles' invasion, Kate said she only became "very interested in the Beatles about four years ago. I'd always liked their singles but only really started listening to their albums a little while ago. I think they are a great influence on any writer," she noted, "the quality of their work is something, I feel, every composer aspires to."

Specific songs have left their mark on Kate Bush: "So many records have left great impressions on me. It is always hard to just call them all to mind so quickly but to mention a few - "No. 9 Dream" by John Lennon: "I Am The Walrus" by The Beatles: "He's My Man" by Billie Holiday: "Best of Both Worlds" by Robert Palmer: "Really Good Time" by Roxy Music: "Tropical Hot Dog Night" by Captain Beefheart: "Montana" by Frank Zappa: music by Eberhard Weber, and "the Wall" by Pink Floyd (and pal David Gilmour)."

The first record this lady of music ever purchased was "They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-Ha" by Napoleon XIV. She was very young. Pondering the subject of when she got into music, said that, "I've always been into music. I was a child then and I think all children embrace music."

These days Kate finds she's too busy to get involved in pop culture. "Since I've been in the business I've had a lot less time to keep up with what's happening," she said regretfully. "I don't feel I have to 'keep up' as such, but I always love to hear good music and see new interesting bands."

But most of what she listens to these days is classical. "Very little contemporary - mostly old favorite records and Radio 4." Britain's quiet one on the dial”.

I love that last part where Bush talks about some of the music she listens to. It doesn’t surprise me that she was a big fan of BBC Radio 4 – though one might not have guessed by listening to The Dreaming! Though Bush has never received massive acclaim and acceptance in America, reading interviews where she was on the cusp of it is quite exciting! I don’t think she was every truly bothered about cracking America, though exposure in the country was definitely important. Perhaps now, as she was seen then, Kate Bush was a little too British…

TO resonate in America.

FEATURE: A Buyer’s Guide: Part Eighty: Marissa Nadler

FEATURE:

 

 

A Buyer’s Guide

Part Eighty: Marissa Nadler

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LIKE last time out with Def Leppard…

I cannot find a book relating to Marissa Nadler. Even so, I am recommending the four essential albums from the Massachusetts-based artist. With music that spans traditional Folk, Gothic Americana, and Dream Pop, there are also elements of Black Metal. It is a rare and original blend that is captivating! Before getting to those albums, an underrated gem and her latest studio album, here is some biography from AllMusic:

“American singer/songwriter Marissa Nadler blends traditional folk, Gothic Americana, dreamy pop, and noir-ish rock into an original musical framework. Her music is idiosyncratic, bearing a unique and imposing signature for its sparseness and interiority, yet it opens onto haunted vistas embraced by fans of genres ranging from indie folk to black metal. While her first two albums were celebrated for their skeletal instrumentation, it was 2007's Songs III: Bird on the Water that put her on the global map and drew the attention of musicians ranging from black metallers Xasthur to indie rockers Xiu Xiu. Her 2016 album Strangers represented an expansion of her songwriting as it moved away from primarily first-person confessional narratives to character-driven, episodic tomes. Meanwhile, she further tipped the balance from acoustic to more electric components including guitars and atmospheric synths for 2021's self-produced The Path of the Clouds, which included contributions from members of Mercury Rev, Black Mountain, and Lost Horizons.

Raised in a small town in Massachusetts, Nadler took to painting first, a passion she continues to indulge, but her love of music drove her to become a proficient guitarist and songwriter. Her first two albums, Ballads of Living and Dying (2004, Eclipse) and The Saga of Mayflower May (2005, Eclipse) were largely acoustic affairs that featured her mezzo-soprano voice and guitar accompanied by banjo, bells, and penny whistle. On Songs III: Bird on the Water (2007, Peacefrog, Kemado), synthesizers were used for the first time, as were strings and harp. With 2009's Little Hells, the songwriter began opening up her sound to include percussion, pianos, Wurlitzer, and standard rock instrumentation. She toured almost constantly and garnered global acclaim for her recordings and performing. In 2010, she threw fans a curveball by appearing as the vocal chorus on Portal of Sorrow, from one-man black metal band Xasthur. Surprisingly, she was dropped by Kemado/Mexican Summer. Undaunted, she launched a successful crowd-funding campaign for her next recording.

In the early spring of 2011, Nadler released "Baby I Will Leave You in the Morning," the first single and video from the fan-funded, self-titled album; it was released in June on her Box of Cedar Records. Nadler issued a follow-up to her critically lauded eponymous album, The Sister, in May of 2012. Its arrangements dovetailed with those of its predecessor. Signing with Sacred Bones (distributed by Bella Union), Nadler issued the album July in February 2014, marking her first collaboration with engineer/producer Randall Dunn. It featured studio appearances from Eyvind Kang, Phil Wandscher, among others, and hit the Top 20 of the Billboard folk and Heatseekers charts.

She and Dunn then collaborated again on Strangers. Here, Nadler stepped out from writing mostly autobiographical songs and penned more character-driven narratives. The finished album appeared in May 2016. Throughout her 2017 tour of America, Nadler began writing numerous tracks centered on the tension that distance creates in relationships; although she penned three times the amount needed for a new record, most of the demos never came to light. Instead, she opted to write more concise tracks on the same theme, all in the week before heading into the studio. During her time at the House of Lux studio in Laurel Canyon, Nadler chose to work with accomplished female musicians -- bar one male saxophonist -- throughout the recording process, including such notable guests as Sharon Van Etten, Angel Olsen, and harpist Mary Lattimore. The resulting album, For My Crimes, arrived in September 2018 and hit number 24 on Billboard's Top Heatseekers Albums chart. Nadler returned in April 2019 with Droneflower, a collaboration with singer/songwriter Stephen Brodsky.

Following a third covers album, a set of demos (Unearthed), and an ambient album (moons), all self-released in 2020, her next solo album, the collaborative The Path of the Clouds, arrived on Sacred Bones in October 2021. Self-produced, it vastly increased the presence of electric components including distorted guitars and synths. Among its contributors were Lattimore, Bella Union label-runner Simon Raymonde (Cocteau Twins, Lost Horizons), Jesse Chandler (Mercury Rev, Midlake), and Amber Webber (Black Mountain, Lightning Dust)”.

In order to emphasis the brilliance of Marissa Nadler, I have narrowed down her discography to four essential albums you’ll want to own, an underrated record of hers, in addition to her latest release. If you need a guide to the spectacular Nadler, I hope my guides…

STEERS you right.

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The Four Essential Albums

Ballads of Living and Dying

 Release Date: 2004

Label: Eclipse

Producer: Myles Baer

Standout Tracks: Hay Tantos Muertos/Undertaker/Days of Rum

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=67608&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/1yPt3ErRIeD7dAqKIRzAUA?si=bFcqZyOSQFScoJAsFo0fBg

Review:

“Nadler is clearly savvy enough in her material to know that a true collection of ballads must include a body count, and the most obviously successful auld school example here is her arrangement of Edgar Allen Poe's poem "Annabelle Lee". As you might recall from junior high English, this is a classic tale of ill-starred love with a stretched-by-your-grave finale that fits the ballad form to perfection, and Nadler's melodic rendition here is flawless. And poor Annabelle Lee is not this album's only casualty; there's also "Virginia", which respectfully chronicles the death of Virginia Woolf, as well as dreamier, more ambiguous songs like "Undertaker" and "Box of Cedar" which certainly contain whispers of foreboding for their subjects.

Each song on the album comes lightly-dressed, usually borne along by little more than Nadler's voice, her fingerpicked guitars, and ornamental flourishes from the occasional accordion, autoharp, or blurry wisp of feedback. On "Hay Tantos Muertos", one the album's loveliest tracks, Nadler branches out from the strict balladic format, quoting lines from Pablo Neruda's haunting "No Hay Olvido" ("There Is No Forgetting") in a manner resembling a traditional Portuguese fado, and on "Days of Rum" she busts out a banjo and takes an enchanting turn at a Dock Boggs-style country blues.

It's worth noting that, aside from the Poe and Neruda quotes, all of these songs are original compositions rather than the traditional works they appear. Throughout the album Nadler writes and performs with a weathered maturity that belies her young age. In fact, several tracks ("Mayflower May", "Days of Rum", "Fifty-Five Falls") seem to be narrated from the perspective of older women looking back upon the adventures and mistakes of their youth. Also an accomplished visual artist, Nadler's lyrics showcase a perceptive eye and a genuine empathy for her creations; and when coupled with that intoxicating voice the resulting landscape is one you may want to get lost in for a century or two” – Pitchfork

Choice Cut: Annabelle Lee

Songs III: Bird on the Water

Release Date: 12th March, 2007 (Europe)/12th August, 2007 (U.S.)

Labels: Peacefrog Records/Kemado Records

Producers: Greg Weeks/Marissa Nadler

Standout Tracks: Diamond Heart/Silvia/Feathers

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=67615&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/5Hij7PrKCR3aqxyhuYjFAI?si=UvpCMJlbSniEsJ879RLxZw

Review:

“On Song III, Nadler ups the ante. These songs may have been written in her bedsit, but they are executed on this disc with the kind tiny grandeur they deserve. In some ways, listening to Nadler is akin to listening to Tom Rapp of Pearls Before Swine (she covered a track of theirs on a compilation disc a while back). There is a directness to her delivery and she never flinches from her material, yet she sounds out of this time and space at the same moment. Recorded by Greg Weeks in Philadelphia, Nadler surrounds herself with a small group of very attentive and sympathetic musicians. Weeks plays synth and distorted lead guitar parts; Helena Espvall sits at the cello; Orion Rigel Dommisse appears on mandolin and harp; and Otto Hauser lends a hand on percussion. At the center of every song is Nadler's guitar playing: fingerpicked, rhythmic, and full of a kind of forward movement that sometimes stands at delightful odds with the timelessness of her lyrics and singing voice.

On this 11-song set, ten are originals, and the lone cover is daunting: Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat," which adds new meaning to the songwriter's words and even Jennifer Warnes' excellent interpretation. The standout tracks -- though all are excellent, deeply moving and emotionally taut -- are "Feathers," "Diamond Heart," "Silvia," and "Mexican Summer." They talk of loss, death, grief, the brokenness in love, transgression, and the appearance of being able to move freely among these very strong emotions while becoming so informed by them: her world view and her heart's view are not only informed by them, but inseparable from them. Nadler has written a song suite here that fully articulates her strongest gifts: she never has to reach for notes, only to open her mouth and they pour like honey, slowly, purposefully, and look at the smaller entrances where her imaginative narratives enter the human being and root themselves there for lifetimes. There are no seams in this album, and to quote her lyric poetry out of the context from the music would be an injustice.

Song III is not to be compared with any of the recordings of her contemporaries. She falls for none of the traps, she communicates with a kind of gentle candor that is unsettling, elegant, and utterly graceful. This is music that is violent in its ability to shift the listener's attention toward it, but it is delivered gently, slowly, and purposefully. For those who have been seduced by the works of Buffy Sainte-Marie's Illuminations album, Tom Rapp's later solo work, the recordings of Bill Fay, late Current 93, Antony, Michael Cashmore, Leonard Cohen's early material, or the middle period records of Pearls Before Swine, this is certainly for you. For anyone looking for early Joni Mitchell or Joanna Newsom, search elsewhere. Disturbing, beautiful and unforgettable, Song III: Bird on the Water is among the most arresting recordings of 2007 thus far and sets a new high-water mark for this seemingly limitless songwriter. [The purchase of the CD comes with a coupon for an Internet download -- in 192 kps, MP3, or FLAC -- for an additional four-song EP which includes a stunning reading of Neil Young's "Cortez the Killer."]” – AllMusic

Choice Cut: Mexican Summer

Marissa Nadler

Release Date: 14th June, 2011

Label: Box of Cedar

Producer: Brian McTear

Standout Tracks: Alabaster Queen/Baby I Will Leave You in the Morning/Wedding

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=340734&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/0KlPu0R6HPLeApYeX6iMfP?si=V15zX_sJSQyBUR3KCrDpRA

Review:

“Puppet Master", the sixth song on the new album by Marissa Nadler, opens as a lonely country shuffle. Over a muted beat and a quiet circular guitar line, Nadler again pines for a lover who's left, something she's done about as well as any young American songwriter during the last decade. "Cobalt and sea, come back to me," she sings, her loneliness delivered like a ghost's whisper. "I'll never do you wrong." But 90 seconds in, "Puppet Master" takes an unexpected turn, adding vibraphone and transitioning to a near-waltz that suggests the Ronnettes, just slowed and simplified. Nadler's experience sublimates into a puppet's innocence: "Lately, all I want is you," she offers, sweetly and almost cheerily. "Puppet master, see me through."

Nadler volleys between mourning and flirting on "Puppet Master", the centerpiece of her first album for own label, Box of Cedar. It's a telling move, too: Her looks at love have grown increasingly intricate, subtle and-- most importantly-- realistic since her 2004 debut. Her songs are now much too considered to be only elegiac, too complex to be simply sad. That idea translates musically as well. Just like "Puppet Master", the best songs here make slight and unexpected detours. With the help of producer Brian McTear, the songs fit together naturally; whether above synthesizers or acoustic guitar, Nadler never sounds forced. "In Your Lair, Bear", for instance, is an opening masterstroke, a bold six-minute move that patiently rises over its duration. Drums, strings, electric guitars, and harmonies enter and exit in turn; Nadler's two characters use each other, seasonally wearing one another like amulets or accessories. "I took you home, and I crashed you," she sings at the end, subverting her general role as the one demolished by love. She assumes the power just to admit she's abused it.

Nadler's songs are frank, careful examinations of all the ways a relationship can grow cold. Her music sounds as somber as ever here, and her distant air remains one of the most absolutely haunting things you're likely to find anywhere near indie rock. But she's grown past solipsism to become more of a reporter on the battles she's seen. During "Alabaster Queen", she admits giving over to a someone who is nothing but trouble, excusing the "women wistful wanting" with a deliberateness that foretells how badly this will all end. For the emotional minefield "Baby I Will Leave You in the Morning", Nadler's protagonist preemptively asks for forgiveness before she hits the road, where she'll drink to sleep-- most likely, with another lover. She doesn't blame the despair of the gorgeously pained "Wind Up Doll" on the dead husband, and she doesn't badmouth the lover who doesn't reciprocate her eternal, exhausting feelings during "Wedding". She just shares those stories in songs that are as gorgeous as they are elliptical and intriguing.

Nadler's diligently expanded her reach as a writer and arranger during the past decade, culminating so far in the expansive sounds of 2009's Little Hells and the subtly twisting forms of this new eponymous album. But she's part of that caste of American songwriters who don't make music grand enough to be Joanna Newsom or Bon Iver, brazen enough to be Fleet Foxes. Rather, her contemporaries might be considered Richard Buckner, Doug Paisley, Alela Diane, and Bill Callahan-- really good songwriters who can get lost in the current indie climate, or, as Mike Powell wrote about Callahan earlier this year, folks who might "have nothing to add to the general conversation about music in 2011." These are writers sitting on terrific strings of records, yet remaining relatively unnoticed. Once again, though, Nadler has maintained and etched out yet another album of cold, stony truths about the ways we love, or fail to” – Pitchfork

Choice Cut: Puppet Master

July

Release Date: 10th February, 2014

Labels: Bella Union/Sacred Bones Records

Producer: Randall Dunn

Standout Tracks: 1923/We Are Coming Back/Desire

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=649338&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/329OjHQcoqyK6v8z5XeEMw?si=MYkxQqyeT2-jVRnUir3F7g

Review:

“Breakup albums aren’t typically joyful affairs. Add the always melancholy Marissa Nadler to the equation and you have a pity party waiting to happen.

That’s not to undermine the sheer eerie beauty of these sad songs. Her singing is so honest, restrained and touching, it’s impossible to imagine she recorded them without shedding a few tears. Hearing her forlorn soprano repeat “baby come back to me” against solemn strings, ghostly percussion and barely strummed guitar on “1923” is an emotionally draining but somehow cathartic experience.

As is the entire album. It digs into a moody blue groove early and rides that for 45 minutes of languid, blissful music, based in folk, but with strains of atmospheric country, sighing pop and an approach that combines the most ethereal aspects of the Cowboy Junkies and Mazzy Star. Nadler titles a song “Was it a Dream” which is what you’ll be wondering after this eleven track set winds its way to an end. Initially the tunes seem to melt into each other, but repeated spins reveal individual melodies that are wistful yet haunted and stick with you long after the final track is over.

Gloomy yet never glum, Nadler often overdubs her bittersweet voice, adding to the stark piano and guitar that underscore these heartbreaking and occasionally angry tunes. Those who need a soundtrack for a rainy night alone can take comfort in the pure reflective intimacy of this alluring and frequently enchanting album” – American Songwriter

Choice Cut: Was It a Dream

The Underrated Gem

 

For My Crimes

Release Date: 28th September, 2018

Labels: Sacred Bones (U.S.)/Bella Union (U.K.)

Producers: Marissa Nadler/Justin Raisen/Lawrence Rothman

Standout Tracks: For My Crimes/Blue Vapor/Flame Thrower

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/marissa-nadler/for-my-crimes  

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/6ypJE6tqKXC2kkgGbrVjo1?si=2aHnLka2TWOMbLCy7JBTrg   

Review:

“For My Crimes is a folk album, but it sees her bend the idiom to her will almost totally, to the point that ‘country’ or ‘folk’ feel like fairly abstract terms - there is just Marissa Nadler. If it lacks some of the obvious sonic punch of her other records then there’s subtler recompense. There are richly sepia strings artfully performed and arranged by Janel Leppin. There is immaculate production from Nadler, Lawrence Rothman and Justin Raisen that gives most songs and elegiac, wintry lustre but is also versatile enough to sees a close mic’d acoustic take on a metallic intensity on ‘Blue Vapor’, which builds to a thunderous full-band crescendo. And there’s a few celebrity friends on backing vocals. Angel Olsen, Sharon van Etten and Kristin Kontrol all pop up, albeit in fairly discrete form – everything feels subsumed by Nadler (you hear a backing vocal, odds are it’s a famous person). And a lot of hooks: ‘I Can’t Listen To Gene Clark Anymore’, ‘Blue Vapour’, ‘Dream Dream Big in the Sky’ and ‘You’re Only Harmless When You Dream’ all have huge, dreamy, ’50s sorta melodies.

Perhaps ‘For My Crimes’s real signature is the lyrics. I’m always going to have a softer spot for Nadler singing gothy songs about people dying. But there is a real impressive growth and maturity to her lyrical depictions here of doomed, mutually dependent, mutually destructive relationships (or perhaps it’s a concept album about a single relationship – the possibility is left open).

She borrows a fair amount from country: ‘Interlocking’ sees her talking about how "trouble's been followin’ me"; focus on the words and ‘All Out of Catastrophes’ is quite jovial, an almost funny song about the failure of a relationship ("In your sleep you called me Natalie - it was the nicest thing you said"), but she sounds almost nothing like the musicians she’s nodding to: they’re totally subverted by her wraithlike earnestness and the glistening dark spaces between the notes

And some time she just nails it with a perfectly lyric - in context, "you’re only harmless when you sleep" feel less about an abusive relationship than a painful one, but the chorus feels remarkably weighted with painful meaning.

This is not the best Marissa Nadler record, but it kind of feels like her most perfect, potentially the resolution of a subtle identity crisis that’s run through her music over the years. It’s almost hard to imagine what she’ll do next having arrived here. But the next destination is her problem – for now we have another immaculately dark stop upon the journey” – Drowned in Sound

Choice Cut: I Can't Listen to Gene Clark Anymore (ft. Sharon Van Etten)

The Latest Album

 

The Path of the Clouds

Release Date: 29th October, 2021

Label: Sacred Bones Records

Standout Tracks: Bessie Did You Make It?/The Path of the Clouds/Lemon Queen

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/marissa-nadler/the-path-of-the-clouds

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/5fIdNvEpra5JdAAIEEJRPz?si=x69-66W9TPW0da8eSqMLdQ

Review:

“As a child, Marissa Nadler was obsessed with Unsolved Mysteries. From 1987, the documentary series originally ran for almost 20 years and 600 episodes, focusing on strange cases of sudden disappearances. Those stories, of forgotten people and lives cut short, found their way back into Nadler’s life during the last 18 months – stuck at home during the pandemic, she dove headfirst into these other worlds that offered an escape from her own.

The result is the prolific singer-songwriter’s ninth album ‘The Path of the Clouds’, a record at once expansive and surprising lyrically and melodically. She nods to 1928 wilderness explorers Bessie and Glen Hyde on transportive opener ‘Bessie Did You Make It’, and pays homage to 1971 plane hijacker D.B. Cooper on the title track – yet there’s no twitchy interrogation of what he did or did not do; she uses the space instead to offer a salient meditation on what it means to take control of your own destiny.

Yet fiction doesn’t swallow us whole, with Nadler’s forthright vision for her own evolution as an artist still ambitious – all 11 tracks here are self-produced, and she’s enlisted collaborators including cosmic harp player Mary Lattimore, Mercury Rev member Jesse Chandler and multi-instrumentalist Milky Burgess (a recent contributor on the atmospheric score for Panos Cosmatos’ psychedelic horror Mandy).

There’s a determination with her new collaborators to move beyond the “ethereal” and “haunting” epithets that have followed Nadler for the last two decades, particularly felt here in the seductive bassline of ‘If I Could Breath Underwater’ and in defiant, menacing chords (yet it wouldn’t be Nadler at her best without delicate fingerpicking elsewhere too) on ‘Couldn’t Have Done The Killing’.

‘Elegy’ stands out for its quiet devastation, with Lattimore’s work elevating the ghostly into something altogether spellbinding, while the romance of ‘Lemon Queen’ swells with a distinct lack of reverb on Nadler’s voice and the warm twang of shimmering strings closing the album on a cinematic, mournful note. “Taller and taller / Over you,” she sings, leaving the question hanging in the air as to whether or not the person she’s speaking to is still in a place to hear this” – NME

Choice Cut: Elegy

FEATURE: The November Playlist: Vol. 2: Friendly Fire from The Only Heartbreaker

FEATURE:

 

 

The November Playlist

IN THIS PHOTO: Mitski 

Vol. 2: Friendly Fire from The Only Heartbreaker

__________

IN this weekly Playlist…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Holly Humberstone

there are new tracks from Mitski, Holly Humberstone, IDLES, Courtney Barnett, Confidence Man, Damon Albarn, Let's Eat Grandma, Kylie Minogue & Gloria Gaynor, Placebo, Little Mix, Beyoncé, Little Boots, Taylor Swift, and Avril Lavigne. If you need a boost to get you into the weekend, then I think that the songs below should help you out! It is a jam-packed week for music. Such a variety of new sounds, tones and flavours, there is something in there for everyone. In order to get your weekend off to a flyer, go and listen to the tracks listed below. They will definitely help to lift the mood and ensure that you end Friday with a real high and…

 IN THIS PHOTO: IDLES

SENSE of uplift.   

ALL PHOTOS/IMAGES (unless credited otherwise): Artists

__________

Mitski - The Only Heartbreaker

Holly Humberstone – Friendly Fire

IDLES – CRAWL!

PHOTO CREDIT: Jamie Heath

Confidence Man - Holiday

Let's Eat Grandma - Two Ribbons

Kylie Minogue & Gloria Gaynor - Can't Stop Writing Songs About You

Taylor Swift – All Too Well (10 Minute Version)

Placebo - Surrounded by Spies

Avril Lavigne – Bite Me

Gracie Abrams – The Bottom

Beyoncé - Be Alive (Original Song from the Motion Picture "King Richard")

Zuzu – Never Again

PHOTO CREDIT: Jenny Berger Myhre

Jenny Hval – Jupiter

Little Mix – No

MØ – Brad Pitt

Baby Queen – Wannabe

PHOTO CREDIT: Mia Mala McDonald

Courtney Barnett - If I Don’t Hear from You Tonight

Little Boots – Landline

Kojey Radical – Gangsta

Damon Albarn – Darkness to Light

PHOTO CREDIT: David Belisle

Beach House – Superstar

BERWYN – MIA

Marissa Nadler – Lemon Queen

Tate McRae – Feel Like Shit

Riton Presents Gucci Soundsystem  (Feat. Jarvis Cocker) - Let's Stick Around

Katelyn Tarver - Year from Now

Nilüfer Yanya  - stabilise

Laura-Mary Carter – Ceremony

PHOTO CREDIT: Audrey Steimer

Kate Bollinger - Yards / Gardens

Joss Stone – Never Forget My Love

Blithe – Experiment

Amber Mark – Softly

PHOTO CREDIT: Lily Brown

Buzzard Buzzard Buzzard - Yourself

Annalise Azadian – Deep Down

Shamir – Cisgender

Blu DeTiger – Blondes

FEATURE: Spotlight: Sarah Kinsley

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Sarah Kinsley

___________

THERE is a fair bit to discuss…

when it comes to New York artist Sarah Kinsley. Her E.P., The Fall, came out last year; The King arrived earlier this year. They are exceptional works that highlight an amazingly talented artist whose sound and vision is like nobody else’s. I would advise everyone to check out but of those E.P.s – in addition to the rest of Kinsley’s work. There are some articles I want to bring in to give us more information about the amazing Kinsley. I will also drop in a review for The King. First, DIY introduced her back in June:

“Hailing from NYC, she recently released her alt-pop-gem fuelled new EP ‘The King’, so we sent her over some qs to find out even more about her…

Describe your music to us in the form of a Tinder bio.
Free. Growing. Changing. Looking for another to be vulnerable with.

What’s your earliest musical memory?
Driving with my cheeks pressed against the windows of my dad's old car, alternating between my parents’ CDs and mine. That, or when I had just started learning the piano and would yearn to play more than just scales up and down everyday.

Who were some artists that inspired you when you were just starting out (and why)?
I think my music was an odd sort of synergy of a lot of artists and genres. I go through phases of music sometimes, but at the beginning, I was pulling elements from all sorts of inspirations. Carole King, and the way she became one with the piano. Ella Fitzgerald, in the ways her voice could just pour every drop of emotion out of you. Beach House, those synths, those goddamn synths! Cocteau Twins, that feeling of transporting to another world. Kate Bush, the goddess of production. At the start, I was pulled by all of these artists, in all directions. And I'd like to think that there's hints and specks of all of them somewhere in my music.

You live in New York! What do you think of the music scene there at the moment?
The music scene is slowly but surely coming alive again. It's an exciting time to be here. I think like the rest of the city and the people here, there's a wide sense of reawakening that's occurring all around in terms of music and entertainment and being able to experience live shows with strangers once again.

Are there any other artists breaking through at the same time as you that you take inspiration from?
I don't know if I can say we're breaking through simultaneously, but there are a great deal of underrated artists in my eyes whose music really deserves to be at the forefront of pop, or indie, or alternative. Lately, my musical heart belongs to Orla Gartland. I love everything about her recent music and the way she lets me scream and run and dance. I've been a follower of Yenkee for a while. Arlo Parks is so so incredible, although she's getting quite big now.. Nick Leng, Fenne Lily, Okay Kaya…

If people could take away one thing from your music, what would it be?
I'd hope people take away a feeling. A true, genuine, individual feeling. My biggest wish when I'm making music is that a record evokes something in you, it strikes something in your core, in your soul. That feeling is divine when it happens, it's like we're speaking directly to each other. And then suddenly the music is more than just me, it's more than an artist and an audience, it's a language, it's our little secret. So I really hope it just makes you feel something”.

There has (rightly) been a lot of excitement around Sarah Kinsley and her music. EUPHORIA.. spoke to her earlier in the year. In addition to highlighting the track, Karma, they also delved into her production talents and her use of the social media platform, TikTok:

“What’s the story behind “Karma”?

I like to think it’s a story of two worlds revealing themselves to me. The song was born out of a moment of frustrating writer’s block. Hardly unique, I think, just another voice memo of repetitive rhymes, things that have already been said. But there’s a moment where I finally reach this odd realization, where I’m combing through these two worlds. One of superstition, one of intuition. I was questioning big notions, fate, destiny, chances, choices. Wondering what our place is in any of it, or if there’s no control left to us, if everything’s meant to happen, if it’s all been decided already. And that inability to know, the terrifying truth behind superstitions, as scary as it was, was something I just wanted to dance to. Something I wanted to scream and cry to and move to. That’s what “Karma” was born out of.

Do you find that lyrics or melodies come to you easier when songwriting?

It’s funny whenever I approach this question. I seem to answer it differently every time. It depends on the moment. Sometimes there’s a story that’s yearning to be told. Some sort of experience, an epiphany that can only be contextualized through language. But sometimes that same feeling, that epiphany, has the opposite sort of arrival. The emotion is so strong that it can only be appropriately born through melody, through the limitless possibilities that melody gives us. So I guess, both.

 What do you think is the biggest lesson you learned when creating your EP, The Fall?

The EP in its creation was an entire act of learning how to fall. Of being vulnerable with myself in silence and in music. It was exhausting at times, really, and endlessly frustrating. Vulnerability is such a fleeting moment. It’s incredibly hard to capture, let alone fully submerge yourself into. Writing with the intent to be vulnerable was definitely something I learned, although I’m not sure if I can say it’s a lesson I’ve fully learned quite yet. It’s something that has to be nourished, I think, and lived with. I don’t know if I’ll ever know it fully, but I think I’m on the path to getting there. That’s something that’s really stuck since the EP. I’ve been trying to keep it with me ever since then and it’s undeniably a part of “Karma” and new music on the way. Falling into myself and my thoughts is an endless love, as fleeting as it may feel.

Who are some artists that influence you that we might hear in your future music?

Fleetwood Mac. Cocteau Twins. ABBA. Arlo Parks. Carole King. Kate Bush. Beach House. Recently I’ve been told there are many hints of Maggie Rogers or Chloe x Halle, Mitski, Phoebe Bridgers. My idols. They’re all just absolute geniuses in my eyes”.

Prior to coming to a review for the incredible E.P., The King, I wanted to source an interview where Kinsley discusses it. Guitar Girl Magazine featured a stunning Alt-Pop artist who explored her E.P. more and was asked if there was a particular song from The King that meant the most:

“You recently released a new EP, The King. Share with us a little about the album — inspiration, songwriting and recording process, and what fans can expect?

It’s the ultimate tribute to youth. The EP was a storm of lyrics and harmonies that came out right before and after I turned 20 last July. I was terrified of the new decade, THE decade of a lifetime, to let go of the past peripheral of innocence and blissful teenage ignorance. Everything was spinning and changing and I needed to create something for myself, or rather, for the essence of myself I was leaving behind.

The songwriting process came as it always does for me: in bursts and blossoms of inspiration. I’d be sitting by my window, driving in fields, feeling my feet in the sand, staying up to watch the sun, dancing in the rain. Lyrics came and went, and the ones that were the truest seemed to stick with me. I think the process really began to weave itself together across songs as I continued to live life up to that day of turning 20.

The recording process was the greatest thing I’ve ever done. Four of the songs were produced right here in my bedroom, either at my parent’s home or here in New York. “Karma,” sparkling synths in the summer, came so freely. That song was so perfectly simple and delicate and had such potential to grow beyond just indie pop. “Over + Under,” as I hit my furniture and cups on my table. That was the most exciting song to produce — I was creating sounds that were entirely my own. No one could recreate exactly what or how I had done it. “I’m Not A Mountain” was days spent in front of a microphone, layer after layer of improvising the violin and viola parts as I was recording. “Caught Up In A Dream,” elegant and raw, just me, a mic, and a grand piano. “The King” was an incredible experience that I was lucky to have with producer Jake Aron. Two days, ten hours each, in his studio in Brooklyn, experimenting with sounds, doubling vocals, and bouncing ideas off of one another as the song grew and grew and only got bigger. I loved every bit of the process of making this EP.

Is there a particular single that speaks to you?

It would be sacrilegious to choose just one. They all speak for me, these singles on the EP. They collectively tell this journey, this path to becoming the King. I love the way each track is aligned and placed on the record, especially “I’m Not A Mountain.” She lies at the middle of the album, undoubtedly at the centerpiece of the whole. That song is probably the most raw, most intimate I’ve ever been in music. It’s a cry of release, of accepting doubt and pain and flaw and selfishness and everything that makes me not a mountain, but human. I really love having that song placed in the center of the EP.

What message do you want to convey to listeners through your music?

My biggest wish when I’m making music is that a record evokes something in you, it strikes something in your core, in your soul. That feeling is divine when it happens, it’s like we’re speaking directly to each other. And then suddenly the music is more than just me, it’s more than an artist and an audience, it’s a language, it’s our little secret. The thing is though, I’m not sure what that message exactly is. I think that’s the beauty of it. We listen to this music and live our lives to it, and interpret it as we choose to. Maybe that’s the message – that the music makes us truly alive, it lets us come into that exact nature and core of who we want to be”.

There is a final interview that I am keen to include. Prior to that, NME’s review of The King is worth quoting. Even though it is quite a short work, there is so much intimacy, emotional and impact throughout the five songs:

“It’s an emotionally affecting reality that the New York-based Sarah Kinsley confronts on ‘The King’ EP, an immersive collection of indie-pop songs that evoke how momentous it feels to stand at the edge of adulthood. The sublime title track – which the singer-songwriter and producer has previously said captures “everything about what it means to turn 20” – draws from the exact moment where fear turns to clarity: as she sings of ageing and irreversible change, her crushingly beautiful voice warmly hugs the lilting melody, as though she is comforting herself. But the optimistic pre-chorus – “So tell me/Before we get older/Let’s do everything” – suggests hope, not self-pity.

The rest of the EP’s songs share a similar kind of generous intimacy. Kinsley is direct and visceral in her storytelling, she unearths quiet revelations that are threaded together by her own crisp production. ‘Over + Under’ is a personal disclosure of desire: “I think of you as the wind catches onto the breeze/Pulling me/You are the ocean of endless possibility”. As she delivers, her vocal shifts between a whisper and a gentle timbre, swirling and multiplying into layered harmonies, indulging in its own malleability.

Hypnotising and majestic, the piano-led ‘I Am Not A Mountain’ is elevated by ripples of dramatic strings, while Kinsley’s delicate playing is filled with cinematic swells and classical inflections. But it’s on the flickering ‘Karma’, the EP’s most upbeat cut, where the music gets more idiosyncratic; lyrically, Kinsley wonders if she’s ever going to figure things out, and she finds ways to make her home studio set-up – here, she makes sounds from inanimate objects such as light switches and glasses – sound swaggering and enormous. It’s an offering of casual magic.

‘The King’ is a brief effort that clocks in at little over 20 minutes long, but it’s meticulously crafted and, at times, oddly euphoric. Kinsley morphs the EP’s short timespan into a genuinely moving reminder that, even in times of uncertainty and confusion, a new beginning is something to be cherished”.

Just prior to wrapping up, there is an interview from The Forty-Five that adds new layers and dimensions when it comes to explaining and spotlighting the music of Sarah Kinsley. She is both modern and classic. Someone who embraces TikTok and new Pop artists, Kinsley also has a love of Classical music and its disciplines:

“In an age where producers at any age can access the sonic equivalent of the Library of Alexandria from the comfort of their bedroom, Kinsley found renewed pleasure in sampling organic sounds: “I got obsessed with the fact that no one else could make that sound. You can hit your table or you could hit my table, but the way that you hit it isn’t the same. This sound is completely mine.”

Hitting a table is a deceptively simple way of describing Sarah Kinsley’s music, when she produces polyrhythmic tapestries driven by feeling, with lush textures that gently unfurl. There are clear influences and comparisons – a Fleetwood Mac-style drum fill opens ‘Karma’ and ‘Over + Under’ swoons among synth beds like Maggie Rogers, with the raw vocal power of Sharon Van Etten – but Kinsley manipulates sound to the point where it’s completely hers; in one instance, sampling her voice until it glides just like a violin. Her new EP, ‘The King’, doesn’t stick to one style but the songs remain connected through subtle threads, with a stadium-ready heart on their sleeve.

It’s where the rigour of classical music and theory meets an unabashed love of pop music. Raised on her parents’ U2 and Abba cassettes, Taylor Swift, and the odd Hannah Montana CD – “I honestly think a lot of indie-pop has taken inspiration from those!” – Kinsley used her classical piano training to compose huge orchestral pieces, alongside an occasional Natasha Bedingfield cover. There were years of “failing miserably”, enduring hours of “incredibly boring music theory” but it only made her fall harder: “Having so much passion to love and hate certain parts of something, drew me to it even more.”

Kinsley doesn’t hide this passion out of false modesty. Using TikTok as her virtual venue, she dances to her latest tracks, imbued with an infectious and refreshing excitement for her own creation. “I’m glad that it feels refreshing and not so weird to see me going through an out-of-body experience on my phone!” she says in relief. “I get embarrassed when friends watch my videos in front of me but when I made ‘Over + Under’, I just couldn’t stop moving to it – like it was touching different parts of my mind. Why would people release music that they’re not head over heels in love with?!”

The sweeping period pieces share the same sensibility as Kinsley’s music, intricate narratives vigorously yearning for something in the “oceans of endless possibility”. Just like these particular sentiments only communicated via film, Kinsley has feelings that can only be expressed through music: “I was writing this song where I was mad at someone and jealous that they could live such an easy life, while I was stuck with all the hurt they’d given me. I talked about it with people but I didn’t feel like that conversation was really done until it became music,” she says. “Until it was expressed as something independent from me”.

Go and follow the sensational Sarah Kinsley. With some remarkable work under her belt and a growing fanbase, she is an artist to look out for. Even though it is early days in terms of her career, things look very bright. The N.Y.C. artist is someone who is going to be…

A big star of the future.

_____________

Follow Sarah Kinsley

Official:

https://www.sarahkinsleymusic.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/sarahkinsleyd

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/sarahkinsleyd

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/@sarahkinsleyd

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/c/sarahkinsley

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/34A8vV1MCxGpA14KspqQuC?si=p0ahdSTmSrOHyHb-WYr3sA

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/sarahkinsleyd

FEATURE: The Lockdown Playlist: MOBO Awards 2021 Nominees

FEATURE:

 

 

The Lockdown Playlist

IN THIS PHOTO: Cleo Sol is nominated in several categories, including Best Female Act

MOBO Awards 2021 Nominees

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EARLIER today…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Dave has been nominated in multiple categories, including Album of the Year for We’re All Alone in This Together

the nominees for this year’s MOBO Awards were announced. It is a fantastic line-up of incredible Black talent. I am going to finish off with a Lockdown Playlist that includes material from the artists nominated. In addition to providing a rundown of which artists are nominated in each category, The Guardian gave a summary and overview of some of the talking points from the shortlisted names:  

“Dave, the rapper who topped the charts this year with his emotionally rich sophomore album We’re All Alone in This Together, leads the nominations at the 2021 Mobo awards, which acknowledge the best Black music in the UK, Africa, the Caribbean and beyond.

Dave is nominated for album, song and video of the year, plus best male act and best hip-hop act. Drill rapper Central Cee has four nominations, capping a breakthrough year in which he released two Top 10 hits, Commitment Issues and Obsessed With You.

Four artists score three nominations each: rappers Ghetts and Little Simz, soul singer Cleo Sol, and Arlo Parks, the singer-songwriter who won this year’s Mercury prize and the Brit award for breakthrough artist.

The UK’s rap scene is represented strongly elsewhere, with the best male act nominees all rappers – AJ Tracey, Central Cee, Ghetts, Headie One and Potter Payper join Dave – and Shaybo and rapper-singer Bree Runway appearing alongside Little Simz in the best female act category, alongside singers Sol, Parks and Tiana Major9.

For the first time there is a separate category celebrating drill rap alongside grime and hip-hop, in the year the genre scored its first UK No 1 single – the remix of Tion Wayne and Russ Millions’ Body, which is nominated for song of the year.

The event will also celebrate the best of African music, reggae, jazz, gospel and R&B/soul in distinct categories, plus actors, media personalities, producers and international acts. The ceremony will take place on Sunday 5 December”.

To acknowledge and nod to the incredible acts who are in the running for MOBOs on 5th December, below is a selection of songs from the nominees. I am excited to see who wins Album of the Year and Song of the Year; such is the calibre of the music included! What I know, from looking at the award categories, is that, within, we have some artists who are going to be…

 IN THIS PHOTO: As one of Britain’s greatest young artists, Little Simz is predicted to win big at the MOBO Awards/PHOTO CREDIT: Vicki King

FUTURE legends.

FEATURE: Revisiting... Mac Miller - Swimming

FEATURE:

 

 

Revisiting...

 Mac Miller - Swimming

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IN this feature…

I am looking back at albums from the past few years that are either not played as much as they should be, or they are worth reinvestigating. Whereas I re-evaluate an underrated album for Second Spin, this feature is a refresh of the great albums that were lauded at the time of release but are not discussed as much as they should. The late Mac Miller released Swimming in 2018. It gained mostly positive reviews and was the final album released during his life (he died in 2018; Circles was put out in 2020). Although critical reviews were stronger for Circles, Swimming is a phenomenal album that hinted at what could have been. It is a shame that we lost such a talent so young! I really love Swimming. It was my introduction to Mac Miller. It made it all the more heartbreaking when we learned of his premature death. Throughout Swimming, Miller’s break-up with Ariana Grande is documented. Rather than it being an attacking or negative album, there is a lot of realisation, self-love and recognition. Not just about his behaviour; the situation and loss was quite great. Critics noted how these themes were explored through his previous album, The Divine Feminine (2016). I really think we could have seen Miller growing as an artist and reaching a peak in years to come. One can hear so much promise and brilliance on Swimming. It is an album that newcomers can approach. One does not need to be affiliated and familiar with Miller’s work to appreciate Swimming.

Although there were a couple of mixed reviews and some positive ones (four-star) that hinted at some weaknesses, most of the reception for Miller’s 2018 album, Swimming, was positive. I remember when the album came out and hearing singles like Self Care. Not having heard too much about Miller’s music prior to that, I was compelled to explore more and dive into Swimming. In their review, NME wrote the following:

“Opening with the lilting ‘Come Back To Earth’, Miller dives straight into a bold new sonic stratosphere. All gorgeous layered vocals accompanied by trickling piano lines and gauzy synthesised sounds, it’s a world away from the frat rap of his earliest releases. Instead it borrows from the shimmering instrumentals of his previous record, combining them with trippy beats. This new sound is pushed even further in the following track ‘Hurt Feelings’, a brutally honest response to the controversy surrounding the rapper over the past months. “I’m always saying I won’t change, but I ain’t the same / Everything is different, I can’t complain” he lackadaisically raps over sultry beats and restrained backing vocals. It’s reserved and relaxed.

Yes, the album sometimes merely ambles. The sluggish ‘Small Worlds’ drags on and ‘Wings’ is a sleepy, stumbling block midway through the album. But Miller also soars here. ‘What’s the Use’ is a funk infused banger, and the string laden ‘2009’ is a triumph. And then there’s ‘Ladders’, a buoyant radio ready bop, which sees his bars skitter across glorious brass lines and earworm riffs.

‘Swimming’ isn’t what you would have expected from Miller when he first started dropping mixtapes over a decade ago, but that doesn’t matter. This album shows his growth as both an artist, and as aa person who’s had to deal with the most private aspects of their life being publicly dissected. It’s a stellar – if somewhat overlong – artistic statement”.

I am going to finish off in a bit. There is one other review that I want to highlight. The Guardian point out how Miller had grown between album releases - and how he has adapted his music to reflect some criticism that it faced in the past:

“It is not hard to imagine why Miller was in dire need of a reality check. Before he had turned 20, his first album, Blue Slide Park (2011), became the first independently distributed debut to top the Billboard charts since 1995. Clearly, popularity wasn’t a problem for the Pittsburgh native, but acclaim was a different story. Miller’s narratives didn’t venture far beyond the realm of dorm parties, and his fairly pejorative “frat rap” designation spoke not only to the demographics of his fanbase, but also to a much broader shift in hip-hop’s audience.

His marked creative improvement since then may have demonstrated an ability to learn from criticism, or maybe he just grew up; regardless, over the past five years, Miller’s music has become exponentially better, not to mention weirder. His rhymes got tighter and the beats trippier, often under his production alias, Larry Fisherman. He sang as much as he rapped on The Divine Feminine (2016), an intoxicating exploration of the ways we are transformed by love. He had never sounded more at ease with his place in the world – but, as he rapped a couple of years earlier, “the good times can be a trap”.

Swimming seems informed by a similar sentiment. Where The Divine Feminine probed the spaces between people, Swimming focuses on Miller. His fifth official album is an ambling 13-song journey towards self-acceptance, one that does not end in triumph. Instead, it embraces the possibility that he’ll never have it all figured out. And, mostly, Miller seems fine with that.

On the lead single, Self Care, co-written by Dev Hynes of Blood Orange, Miller’s loping sing-song sounds weary and unconvinced as he croaks, “Hell yeah, we gonna be all right” over watercolour synth washes. But halfway through, the beat switches to woozy space-funk, and light peeks through the clouds: “I got all the time in the world,” he proclaims. “Plus I know it’s a beautiful feeling, in oblivion.” He pulls at the word “oblivion” like chewing gum.

Swimming, as a whole, drifts by at the same leisurely pace – it is a patient record in sound and concept. Gentle orchestral arrangements occasionally forgo percussion, as on the swelling opener, Come Back to Earth, on which Miller elaborates on the album title: “I was drowning, now I’m swimming.” Those six words gesture towards an entire story, and Miller’s writing is at its best in this simple, suggestive mode. On Wings, a spacious neo-soul slow burner punctuated by the occasional sigh of a violin, Miller’s sung hook – “These are my wings” – feels all the more vast in its understatement.

Hints of The Divine Feminine’s warm mid-tempo funk surface throughout: What’s the Use glides along at a balmy stepper’s groove, and the standout track, Ladders, steadily climaxes into ecstatic horns – it’s the kind of song that could fill a wedding dancefloor. However, even the brightest moments on Swimming feel measured, informed less by outright happiness than by the lightness of being. Optimism coexists with regret and intoxication alternates with clarity: one moment Miller is radiating top-of-the-world confidence, and the next, he is accepting that the wise man knows that he knows nothing.

In other words, it’s an album that feels how getting older feels: relinquishing the ideal of perfection and learning how to live with yourself as you are. “Every day I wake up and breathe / I don’t have it all, but that’s all right with me,” Miller sings on 2009, accompanied by gorgeously sparse keys, delicate finger-snaps and the occasional downbeat clatter of snares.

There is no grand conclusion to be arrived at, no windfall of sudden self-actualisation. Instead, Swimming ends with a serene shrug: on So it Goes, over muted guitars and a spacey synth drone, Miller sings those three words like a mantra before being swallowed by a wall of sound. Somehow, it feels like a happy ending and an acceptance of whatever is to come”.

I will continue doing this Revisited…run for a couple of months more. There are some strong albums from 2018, 2019 and 2020 (and a few from this year) that I have been listening to where we do not hear much from them wider afield. Maybe Mac Miller’s Swimming is spun on some stations. The song and sound quality is such that it is broad and accessible. It is a shame if people missed this album because they assumed Miller was reserved for a particular audience or age demographic! Swimming is an album that ranks alongside the best of 2018. It is a reminder of the talent that the Pittsburgh-born rapper…

LEFT behind.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: The Iconic Shots: ‘The Pink Leotard Shot’, 1978 (Gered Mankowitz)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: The Iconic Shots

PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz 

‘The Pink Leotard Shot’, 1978 (Gered Mankowitz)

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THIS Kate Bush series…

is less about me writing and more about the potency of various images. For the first of this series, I am looking at Gered Mankowitz’s work. His first session with Kate Bush was in January 1978. One of the most iconic shots of Kate Bush might very well be my favourite. I have called the shot at the very top ‘The Pink Leotard Shot’. There were a few shots of her in that leotard, but it the pose and composition above that is the most arresting. I love Mankowitz’s recollections of the sessions where Bush wore that pink leotard:

“In those days I was working out of a studio in Great Windmill Street in the heart of London’s Soho.  For this first session with Kate I had decided to use a wonderful piece of distressed canvas as a background; it had once been used as the floor of a boxing ring in the gym below us, and its coarse texture seemed a perfect contrast to Kate’s youthful beauty.

I purchased some leotards, tights, leg-warmers and scarves, and placed them in our rather inadequate dressing room, which was actually a curtained-off corner in the studio. When Kate arrived, she disappeared behind the curtain with the make-up artists and stylist.

Kate emerged in the pink leotard.

She looked beautiful, and I knew that we were going to have a fantastic session. She settled in front of my Hasselblad camera without a care in the world. Kate did not have much experience of working with a professional photographer, and I felt that it was important to try and guide her through the process. She had a natural instinct and seemed to understand immediately how much the camera loved her.

After shooting several test Polaroids, I was happy with the lighting, and Kate was delighted with the look. We shot throughout the afternoon, with Kate in both the pink outfit and a green version. After about twenty rolls of film, the first shoot was over and I felt certain that we had achieved the objective and produced the portrait that would launch her”.

If one gets a copy of The Kick Inside (Bush’s debut album of 1978) from Japan, the cover features a photo from that session (it is similar to the photo I have highlighted but not the exact shot). It was going to be used as the cover for her debut single, Wuthering Heights, but was nixed. That is because the same image was circulated…though it showed Bush’s nipples. It could have been cropped and used, though the photo was out there and being displayed by the press and shown in public. It is a shame that there was that controversy and obsession (from some) on the wrong aspect of the image. I feel the pink leotard shot should have been used as the cover for the U.K. version of The Kick Inside. What could have been if this iconic photo was seen more widely. Mankowitz spoke with The Big Issue in 2014 and discussed that shoot and eye-catching image:

“The one picture that in a way is inescapable is the pink leotard Wuthering Heights picture. It’s one of those pictures that become iconic and represents so much, and that doesn’t happen very often. It has a life of its own and it has energy. I think it’s a beautiful portrait of a very beautiful young woman.

The Big Issue: There has been discussion over the years whether her sexuality was being exploited – depending how it’s cropped, it’s quite graphic…

Gered: It didn’t occur to me at that time that [the nipples visible in the full-length shot] would be a problem. I know that it was pretty edgy for the late ’70s but it wasn’t sort of discussed or thought about a great deal. That was how she looked and I wasn’t going to say to her “I think you should cover up”.

She looked absolutely gorgeous. I’m looking at a cropped version of it now and it still has all the power that it did then. Her breasts might have been titillating to a few young boys but her beauty and her serenity, her stillness are what really make this a special photograph.

She used her sexuality throughout her performance

She certainly knew what she was doing, that’s how she came out of the dressing room, looking like that, and there was no attempt by anybody to make her look like that. That’s what she looked like and I don’t think it’s exploitative at all. I think it’s very, very beautiful.

I’m the photographer and I took that picture, and I don’t see how I could have exploited Kate Bush. She was in control of it.

But she used her sexuality throughout her performance – look at the Babooshka video or any of the records and promotional videos and stills, certainly in those first three or four years of her career she was a very sexual person and I think that came across in the way she moved, looked and the way she sang.

For me that makes any discussion or debate about whether the picture was ‘exploitative’ redundant. She wasn’t like Miley Cyrus trying to draw attention to herself through her sexuality. She’s a very strong woman and as a strong woman you know that she’s aware of everything that’s around her and I completely reject any possibility that the pictures were exploitative, it reflects her beauty and her power and serenity, and her comfortableness with it.

IN THIS PHOTO: Gered Mankowitz 

The Big Issue: It’s such a direct portrait, you feel like you know her, her face looks so open but she’s not giving anything away, it gives you chills still to look at it now.

Gered: It often is the case that in the beginning when an artist makes a really profound impact it’s often their first moments that are sort of welded into the public consciousness and that’s one of the most gratifying things. Going back to my favourite image, I’m incredibly proud and thrilled to have been associated with Kate Bush at this early stage. It’s fantastic to hear you say that [above] about it”.

To start off a run of features that highlights the very best photos of Kate Bush, I wanted to start with one from the very start of her career. Such an expressive, mysterious, nuanced and beautiful image,! Even though Gered Mankowitz is the one who got the shot, I feel Bush’s natural ability to project these great looks and expressions should be credited. As we can see in the 1978 shot that should have been used for Wuthering Heights, she looks…

SO natural and gorgeous.

FEATURE: Inspired By… Part Thirty-Nine: Alicia Keys

FEATURE:

 

 

Inspired By…

Part Thirty-Nine: Alicia Keys

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ON this occasion…

I wanted to include the amazing Alicia Keys in Inspired By… The U.S. icon is an artist who not only makes incredible music. She also influences so many others. Since her 2001 debut, Songs in A Minor, Keys has been at the top of her game. Her upcoming album, KEYS, is to be released next month. It is a double album. I wanted to mark that by producing a playlist of songs from artists who are influence by her. Before that, here is some biography about the amazing Keys:

“Singer/songwriter and pianist Alicia Keys became an international star in the early 2000s with her sophisticated mix of classic and contemporary R&B. Behind the number one pop hit "Fallin'," her first album, Songs in A Minor (2001), sold more than 50,000 copies during its first day of availability and eventually moved over ten million units worldwide, thus setting the stage for the then-20-year-old's lengthy career. Since collecting five Grammys for her debut, Keys has continued to refine her signature sound, specializing in aching love ballads and feel-good motivational anthems, appealing to an audience far beyond her R&B base without being overtly pop. Her subsequent studio albums through the 2000s and 2010s, namely The Diary of Alicia Keys (2003), As I Am (2007), The Element of Freedom (2009), Girl on Fire (2012), and Here (2016), all reached number one or two on the Billboard 200 and produced crossover hits such as "You Don't Know My Name" and "No One." Moreover, she earned routine recognition from the Recording Academy with ten additional Grammy Awards. Keys started her third decade of activity with Alicia (2020), an LP that strengthened her reputation as a keen collaborator with Miguel, Ed Sheeran, and Khalid among the contributors.

Alicia Augello Cook was born in Hell's Kitchen in early 1981. Raised by her Italian-American mother, she enrolled in classical piano lessons at the age of seven and began writing songs four years later. An education at the Professional Performing Arts School helped develop her vocal skills, and at the age of 16 she graduated as the class valedictorian. Two Columbias loomed on the horizon: Columbia University and Columbia Records, both of which extended offers. Although she attempted to make both options work, Keys found it difficult to juggle academic and professional commitments and chose to focus exclusively on her music career. Assuming the stage name of Alicia Keys, she began working with Columbia and contributed a song to the Men in Black soundtrack, but disputes with the label resulted in her contract's termination.

Keys bounced back by aligning herself with Clive Davis, the president of Arista Records, but work on her debut album stalled when Davis was ousted from the company in 2000. Davis soon formed his own label, J Records, and welcomed Keys into the fold with an aggressive publicity campaign (including an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show). Driven by the number one pop hit "Fallin'," Songs in A Minor was released in June 2001, debuted at the top of the Billboard 200, and rose to platinum status in ten countries. It featured a second Top Ten hit, "A Woman's Worth," and netted Grammys for Best New Artist and Best R&B Album, plus Song of the Year, Best R&B Song, and Best Female R&B Vocal Performance, all for "Fallin'." Keys didn't experience a sophomore slump with her follow-up. The Diary of Alicia Keys arrived in December 2003, entered the Billboard 200 at the top, and yielded the Top Ten singles "If I Ain't Got You," "Diary," and "You Don't Know My Name." She again won Grammys for Best R&B Album, Best R&B Song (for "You Don't Know My Name"), and Best Female R&B Vocal Performance ("If I Ain't Got You"). Additionally, "My Boo," a chart-topping duet with headliner Usher, took the award for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. Keys subsequently published Tears for Water: Songbook of Poems and Lyrics.

A live CD/DVD package, Unplugged, was issued in 2005 and kept Keys' streak of number one releases intact. She then took on acting work, starring in both Smokin' Aces and The Nanny Diaries in 2007, before issuing As I Am that November. Her fourth consecutive number one project, it was highlighted by the chart-topping "No One," which won her two more Grammys in the R&B field. ("Superwoman," released late in the album's promotional campaign, won Best Female R&B Vocal Performance the next year.) As 2009 drew to a close, Keys returned to the top of the singles chart with the hook on Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind" (which also won two Grammys in the rap field), and in December released her fourth studio album, The Element of Freedom. Although it narrowly missed the top of the Billboard 200, it went platinum like all of her previous full-lengths, while it became her first number one album in the U.K. "Try Sleeping with a Broken Heart" and the Drake collaboration "Un-Thinkable (I'm Ready)" went Top 40 in the U.S.

During the next two years, Keys married producer Swizz Beatz, gave birth to a son, collaborated with Eve on the single "Speechless," appeared on Kanye West's all-star track "All of the Lights," and went on a brief tour celebrating the tenth anniversary of her debut album. She also wrote and co-produced "Angel" for Jennifer Hudson. In 2012, she appeared on albums by Emeli Sandé (Our Version of Events) and Miguel (Kaleidoscope Dream) before she released Girl on Fire, her fifth studio album and first for RCA. Issued that November, it featured her husband, as well as Sandé, Salaam Remi, Jeff Bhasker, Frank Ocean, and John Legend, among the collaborators. In the U.S., it became her fifth number one album and went gold, and also won that year's Grammy for Best R&B Album. Her second live recording, VH1 Storytellers, was issued in June 2013. Keys' recorded activity during the next year involved a collaboration with Kendrick Lamar, as heard on the soundtrack of The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and a pair of socially conscious solo tracks, "We Are Here" and "We Gotta Pray."

After Keys and Swizz Beatz welcomed a second son, Keys released another single, "28 Thousand Days," and appeared in the second season of Empire, for which she recorded "Powerful" with series co-star Jussie Smollett. The following May, Keys released "In Common" as a prelude to her sixth studio album and made her third musical guest appearance on Saturday Night Live. A few months later, she began a stint as a coach on The Voice and contributed "Back to Life" to the soundtrack for Queen of Katwe. Here, led by the biographical single "Blended Family (What You Do for Love)," arrived in November 2016 and peaked at number two on the Billboard 200. In April of the following year, Keys quietly released an EP called Vault, Vol. 1, consisting of previously unreleased material and new versions of earlier songs.

In early 2019, in conjunction with her hosting duties for the 61st Grammy Awards, Keys issued the single "Raise a Man." This was followed by an appearance on a remix of Pedro Capó's multi-platinum hit "Calma," and additional singles such as "Show Me Love" (featuring Miguel) and "Underdog" (co-written by Ed Sheeran). After she hosted the 62nd Grammy Awards, Keys finished her seventh proper album, Alicia. Two more singles, "So Done" (featuring Khalid) and "A Beautiful Noise" (featuring Brandi Carlile) preceded its September 2020 arrival. The LP debuted at number four on the Billboard 200 and became Keys' eighth Top Ten record in the U.S.”.

In order to highlight the incredible and ongoing influence of Alicia Keys, the songs below are from artists who either cite her as important or, in some way, have a bit of Keys inside of them. As you can see from the songs, Keys has influenced…

SO many greats.

FEATURE: Modern Heroines: Part Seventy-Five: SZA

FEATURE:

 

 

 Modern Heroines

 PHOTO CREDIT: Nathaniel Goldberg/Trunk Archive

Part Seventy-Five: SZA

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BECAUSE there was a period…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Blair Caldwell

where SZA (Solána Imani Rowe) was not giving interviews, there is not as much current interview material than I would like. That said, there is plenty online that gives information about the incredible artist. Her sole studio album to date, Ctrl, was released in 2017. Arriving after several E.P.s, it is one of the greatest and most important albums of the past decade. I will drop in a couple of glowing reviews for that album in a minute. I think that SZA is already an artist who commands an enormous amount of respect. She will definitely go down in history as an icon; someone who has compelled and moved many people. Her phenomenal music proves she has the talent to be in the industry for decades. Before sourcing some interviews, I want to show some of the reviews for Ctrl. Listen to the album if you have not heard it before. AllMusic held a lot of love for a truly remarkable debut album:

“Solana Rowe's proper debut album, due to its title, invites comparisons to Janet Jackson's 1986 personal and commercial breakout. It's an individual statement, however, one distinct from even the contemporary likes of Kehlani's SweetSexySavage. Placed beside only Z, its three-year-old prelude, Ctrl is the work of a considerably less-inhibited songwriter. Rowe likewise truly fronts these frank songs that wield power as they lament lonesomeness, insecurity, and inertia. She neither projects slight wisps nor obscures herself inside swirling synthesizers, yet she oversells not a single thought.

 On screen, a slight shrug from her would probably devastate an expectant admirer. In the slow-motion hip-hop soul of "Doves in the Wind," featuring a hectoring verse from fellow TDE artist Kendrick Lamar, Rowe schools inapt and inept male behavior, offering intimate counsel and acerbic derision in a uniquely offhanded style. As assured as she is in this mode, she's not too proud to test a partner ("Call me on my bullshit, lie to me and say my booty gettin' bigger even if it ain't"), express personal dissatisfaction ("All alone still, not a thing in my name"), or plainly grieve ("Do you even know I'm alive?"). The production crew here is almost completely different from the one involved on Z, with TDE regular Tyran Donaldson (aka Antydote and Scum) the lone holdover, present on seven tracks. For every overdone trap trick, there's a couple of sly wrinkles, like the thick, chiming groove in "Go Gina," where Rowe brilliantly illustrates a specific kind of fatigue ("Picking up a penny with a press-on is easier than holding you down") and the woozy, decayed synthesizer line in the Travis Scott-assisted single "Love Galore," ideal for a song about rekindling a dead-end affair. This is a marked improvement, a distinctive statement, and an indication of more great work to come”.

I think so many people are asking whether there will be another album soon simply because of the impact and brilliance of Ctrl. It is the creation from a woman who is a role model and hugely importance voice in music (and a wider political and social sphere). Consequence had the following to say about the mighty SZA’s Ctrl:

“SZA’s lyrics across the slow-simmering album resonate well beyond the confines of a diary or a recording booth to remind scorned lovers who have considered suicide — okay maybe just arson or posting a few incriminating texts — when the sorry’s are no longer enough, to say all of the things that end up left unsaid at the demise of relationships. That post-YOLO approach to the creative process first surfaces on “Supermodel”, the smoldering Scum-produced revenge jam that conjures N.E.R.D.’s “Run to the Sun” and finds SZA speeding off of a cliff in a vehicle with no brakes by the opening statements: “I been secretly banging your homeboy/ Why you in Vegas all up on Valentine’s Day?/ Why am I so easy to forget like that?” If ever there were occasion to drop a bomb on an R&B track, this one might be it.

SZA dodges an ex lingering in her shadow on the Travis $cott-assisted second single, “Love Galore”. The Cam O’Bi-produced “Doves in the Wind” places the pussy on a pedestal and nearly reprises Kendrick Lamar’s “head is the answer” refrain from post-Butterfly gem “Untitled 4”. Pulling the cards of serially disrespectful men, the song — though clearly about the yams — is more a PSA to the scrubs of the world that still do not get how sacred the female body is. All of this is sewn up with a roundabout reference to Kendrick’s m.A.A.d. City as SZA riffs on the theme from ’90s sketch comedy show Mad TV. Doubling down on lead single “Drew Barrymore”, SZA takes listeners inside the female body to sing from the perspective of her perceived imperfections against a well-produced track that plays with a nod to early ’90s grunge. By “The Weekend” and “Go Gina”, SZA’s affection for the slow-burning body roll classics popularized by artists like Guy and Keith Sweat and perfected by R. Kelly is pretty clear. Once “Broken Clocks”, the criminally short James Fauntleroy feature “Wavy”, and “Pretty Little Birds” have run, SZA has put all of her cards on the table, taken a deep dive into a web of complicated feelings, and come up with a seamless release.

PHOTO CREDIT: Elizabeth Wirija 

Working with a dedicated team of producers, including Bekon, Antydote, and Carter Lang, SZA makes what may ultimately be the most important statement of the project with genre-bending, atmospheric production that openly challenges the music to evolve. To live indefinitely outside the lines, on the edge where artists do not play it safe and the academy’s categorical boxes no longer exist.

Concerned with elevating the genre to something that is completely her own, SZA trades in the kind of alchemical magic that can only be derived from the intersection of youthful indiscretion, sincerity, and naïveté in her approach to the stylistic pillars of R&B. Somewhere between the house built by Frank Ocean’s monotone and falsetto and Migos’ signature trap cadences, SZA’s unique manipulation of language in performance moves far afield of clever euphemisms and the temporary high of rap entendres or gospel runs to focus on the deliberate deconstruction of words. Her approach to song structure is one that accommodates bespoke production and the angsty weight of her statements. Practically sounding out her thoughts, she gives tangible shape to emotion and establishes a clear respect for the craft of delivery.

This approach elevates otherwise quirky, multi-tonal, sarcastic, and sometimes nasal observations about growing pains to polysyllabic works of art. Her statements are punctuated by the wise observations of her mother and grandmother, who act as spirit guides eager to dole out advice and look back upon the highs and lows of their youth.  With Ctrl, SZA proves that the cult following that ballooned with the release of her 2014 mixtape, Z, was not some flash in the pan, but a deserved wellspring of attention from an adoring fan base whose faith in what she had yet to produce helped to produce the project that could eventually stand as the best thing she has ever done”.

I am going to get into interviews. I love reading interviews with SZA. She is such a compelling and interesting person. I will start with one from Wonderland. from summer of last year. Among other things, SZA discussed working with her musical hero, Pharrell Williams:

“Born in St. Louis, Missouri, and raised in Maplewood, New Jersey, Solána Imani Rowe is no stranger to the isolation many of us are facing during coronavirus social distancing measures around the world. “I didn’t have any siblings that lived with me, all my siblings are 10 years apart, and when you don’t have any friends or playmates there’s a lot of room to get weird,” says SZA.

“Sometimes I was taking up sculpture, or doing martial arts on my own, or going to the library by myself and looking up UFOs and séances, then coming home and summoning s**t in the basement. When I left my house and tried to talk to people in the regular world they were so off-put by me, like, ‘What’s wrong with you? Why you acting like this?’ I think it had to do with only child syndrome, plus being in a random suburb, and being one of the only black families in our five-block radius.”

Her self-confessed weirdness is partly what connected SZA to one of her biggest heroes: Pharrell Williams. From taking a 4am train to Manhattan “on a school day” to watch him arrive at the Good Morning America studios, to interning at his Billionaire Boys Club clothing company and ending up in N.E.R.D.’s 2009 video for “Everyone Nose”, SZA has been manifesting making music with Pharrell for years. And, on Super Bowl weekend in February 2020, it finally happened. “I wanna jump up and down every time I think about it,” says SZA.

PHOTO CREDIT: Blair Caldwell

However, this wasn’t actually her first experience with him in the studio. “The first time he was in the room with Rihanna and stunting for him is how I lost “Consideration”. Rihanna’s like, ‘B***h, I’m taking this song and there’s nothing you can do about it, but I’m gonna do it justice!’” she recalls. “Consideration” is, of course, on RiRi’s 2016 album, ANTI, with SZA featuring.

It would have made it on to Ctrl had she listened to the advice of Top Dawg Entertainment president, Punch. “Punch gave me strict instructions not to play anything from my album, but I wasn’t about to go in there, to a room with [him] and Rihanna, and play the flops. I’m playing “Drew Barrymore” and I’m playing “Consideration”. I’m playing everything I have!” she laughs. “But Punch says, ‘I’m telling you, do not do this,’ so we agreed that I wasn’t gonna do that. Then I walk in, Pharrell is sitting there drinking wine, and I guess my hands just slipped and I played my album. I played Ctrl.”

SZA thought that session, coupled with another for Ariana Grande that she felt she blew, had ruined her shot of working with the super-producer forever. Thankfully she was wrong and spent a week writing and recording with N.E.R.D. in Miami. “He asked me to do something on a beat, in front of everybody, and I normally record in a room by myself all the time. This was him, Chad [Hugo] and like five other people. So I go into the studio, I lay my crystals down on the floor in a grid and I just start f**king snapping. I’m snapping anything […] I was trying so hard, but not at the same time; it was weird. So then I go over to DJ Khaled’s house to record on the beat once our session’s over. Ty Dolla $ign randomly comes over and we’re making s**t, and then I play it for P and he’s just f**king with me the way I dreamed he would be f**king with me. He ended up extending the session for an extra three days and at the end I was just like, ‘You don’t know how much you mean to me in the realm of black, suburban, weird kids. You validated me in the world for thinking differently and dressing differently, and feeling differently, and that’s priceless.’ I’m damn about to cry right now just thinking about it.”

SZA spent her childhood listening to Justin’s old band, NSYNC, as well as other boy bands like LFO, Backstreet Boys and Hanson. “I don’t know why, but I was very much an “MMMBop” person,” she says. “I loved that boy band energy. It was intoxicating.” Her diverse musical tastes — including everyone from Ella Fitzgerald to Jamiroquai, Björk to Limp Bizkit — all play a part in SZA’s own unique sound, and why she doesn’t want to be categorised within the one genre of R&B. “Nobody does that to white people at all, ever. No one ever does that to Adele or Justin Bieber when they’re wholeheartedly singing R&B. Or Björk, where nobody’s sure what the f**k she’s singing, but it’s energy and nobody’s concerned.”

“It’s like the only genre that we’re allowed to own is R&B and soul, and even then you might get bumped outta that category by somebody with fairer skin and a better marketing team. But I can’t pretend it’s not exciting to see someone who isn’t black execute so exceptionally well. It’s mystifying; the soul is an energy. Like Nai Palm from Hiatus Kaiyote, she’s a f**king force to be reckoned with. She’s one of my favourite voices of soul right now, next to Ari Lennox. R&B is too fickle.

 I spent too much time growing up on just as much Imogen Heap, and listening to Comfort Eagle by Cake and vibing for people to call me a ‘queen of R&B’. Why can’t I just be a queen, period?”

As we wrap up our chat, talk turns back to our present way of quarantine living and the effect that it’s having on our mental health. Currently living with her best friend Amber, who was her college roommate, plus her dog and a bunny rabbit gifted to her by a former neighbour, SZA isn’t completely on her own — but she is learning how to be alone with herself.

“It’s definitely hard for me because I’m always with somebody and it’s crazy to not have the option to go out and do anything. But that’s when you have to get used to yourself. I realised I don’t enjoy spending time by myself, then I was like, ‘Do I not like myself?’ And I was like, ‘No b***h, you don’t like yourself for a host of reasons and you’re trying way too hard for people that are already your friends to like you because you don’t like yourself.’ So right now I’m learning how to spend time with myself… You can’t waste time pretending or trying too hard. Everyone who doesn’t like you wasn’t gonna like you anyway”.

Late last year, SZA released the magnificent single, Good Days. It was an exciting and much-celebrated song from her. It is definitely a song that is still in my mind. Billboard spoke to SZA around the release of that song. She was also asked about championed good mental-health. It is interesting learning how she keeps herself afloat and uplifted:

“I know you're a huge advocate of mental health, especially for the Black community. How have you been able to protect your mental health during the pandemic as SZA, Solana and each persona that you are?

I don't separate myself, definitely. I just been outside. I'm definitely a good-natured, therapy kind of person. I hit the forest, or I hit the park, or I do a lot of walks, a lot of exercises. Sitting still and meditating is a component for me, but it's not my key component. I need to be outside amongst trees, and among anything nature-based. I'll drive really far to get there and I don't mind. I don't mind dragging whatever I have to drag.

I actually went with my parents on the Delaware River. We kayaked six miles. I did nine miles by myself. We never camped out as family before -- and you know as Black people, that's really important. Hella tree activity. [Laughs.]

Have you seen a spike in your creative activity, with you being outside as often as you have during the pandemic?

Absolutely. I just feel crunchy when I don't get outside, or even when I'm in heavy [traffic] areas -- like a fancy part of New York City -- and there's not enough trees in your area. I really had to go out of my way to find that moment, because it was bringing me down. It was super-weird, and making my music feel weird, because I was like, unsure of myself. You're really just bouncing yourself off an indoor wall all the time. It's just not normal.

You already can't bounce off of people because of COVID, so that has everything feeling crazy. Your music is super-eternal -- and the first time people hear it, it's when it's public, and that's super weird for me. That's never happened to me before. I don't know. It's super weird, but being outside helps. It breaks that monotony and that cycle. 

Do you have any positive affirmations you tell yourself on the daily to stay afloat mentally?

My granny used to tell me, "Just do your best, and when you do your best, that's all you can do." It's super simple, right? That's not enough, but usually, it kicks in when I've done something, and I'm asking myself, "Have I done this in a way that's adequate -- or did I actually do my best, and really try to put my foot in this s--t and take this as far as it can go?"

I fluctuate between "I'm filled with love and kindness," "I'm peaceful and at ease" and "I'm well and I'm happy," but I also do, "May I be filled with love and kindness," "May I be well," "May I be peaceful and at ease," and "May I be happy." I just keep it simple.  I guess speaking stuff out loud has strength that I've been trying to learn, 'cause I feel like I'm kind of negative on myself. So I've been trying to say more positive and random things aloud at random moments. 

CTRL has spent 191 weeks on the Billboard 200, and still remains inside the top 40. Have you sat back and thought back the impact this album has made on your life?

I just had no idea that anybody would like it this much, or that it would be anything like this. Because to me -- I wish I had more time to perfect it, or get it the right way. I never listen to my music. It's like, I'm listening to it back on the four-year anniversary for the first time -- 'cause I'm gonna listen to it, since I'm not on tour. It's very interesting. I just wonder how other people hear it, and I don't know.

I'm just grateful that God put me in a position to touch or be of service to other people even if I don't understand it. The ways I think I can be of service are not adequate, so this is a cool way that's really unbeknownst to me. I have no idea of the effects or how or why people connect to it the way they do. I'm just grateful to be around.

 Even after the success you've gotten with your new singles "Hit Different" and "Good Days," are you still critical of yourself musically as much as before?

No, definitely the same. It's the same, if not more. It's so interesting. With "Good Days," I had learned that it wasn't meant to be a single. It was a song that I threw at the end of "Hit Different," because I liked it. The fact that it became a single, or even that random TikTok thing, -- [it] was not a song that I was working on, it was a song that I posted mad long ago. It was a snippet of a bunch of stuff that I was working on with Rodney Jerkins and we ended up making a bunch of songs.

I don't know. It's like my trajectory is out of my hands. All I can do is stay creative, try to be honest, do work and not be lazy. So I'm trying to be my best. That's all I can do -- my literal best. If I hear a song, now I wanna make it the best song that it can be. I might be overanalyzing that, but we'll see when it comes out.

With the "Good Days" visual on the way, you think you can rank you top three favorite videos of yours?

I can't do it in order, but the "Supermodel" video had the little Black girls and the fairy energy. It was exactly what my mind was thinking conceptually. I love the "Love Galore" video, except when Travis [Scott] dies at the end. He was really mad at me for that. It wasn't my decision. It was supposed to be [based on] the movie Misery. I don't know. I would probably say "Hit Different / Good Days." Those three I really like.

Which female artists would you say you've been checking out as a fan on the hip-hop and R&B side during the pandemic?

I listen to a lot of stuff that's not just hip-hop and R&B. But in that specific spectrum, I love Tiana Major9. She's so crazy. Lots of vocalists. I love Fousheé. I love Jean Dawson. Dawson is a dude. Go look at his music video, it has like a s--t ton of views. It's on YouTube. He's Black, but it's also like some punk s--t. It's tight -- it's super tight.

You know, [I've also been listening to] a lot of rap. A lot of Don Toliver. I'm obsessed. I've been listening to all the girls. Of course, Summer [Walker], Kehlani, and Ari [Lennox]. Those are my favorites, but I love all these new ones coming out. I think it's a beautiful time for music. Kota [The Friend] is [dope] too”.

I am going to finish off by bringing things more up to date. Back in July, SZA was featured by Vogue. Last year, I think SZA said she was going to stop doing interviews. Luckily., she did come back with new music and has done some press too. At such a strange time, it is interesting to hear from her and what she is up to. SZA spoke about directing her music, climate change, in addition to how she keeps and open and focused mind when creating new music:

“I use the anniversary of CTRL as an opportunity to cry and reflect every year,” says American singer-songwriter SZA, 30, of her four-time Grammy-nominated debut, which she released in 2017. “I never imagined I’d make it this far.” It’s this candour and vulnerability that fans love and, ultimately, it’s fuelled the Missouri-born, New Jersey-raised star’s musical growth and distinctive ethereal sound, keeping her high in the charts four years on.

The musical landscape irrefutably changed in 2020, ushering in a time when artists’ schedules ground to a halt. And in 2021, it’s safe to say that SZA’s making up for lost time. In between jumping on tracks with fellow superstars Doja Cat and Megan Thee Stallion, SZA placated her fans’ desperate pleas for new material by quietly dropping the video (that she also directed) for smash-hit single Hit Different. Featuring American singer Ty Dolla $ign and British musician Jacob Collier, it sent social media platforms into a tailspin and served as her first solo release since her highly acclaimed album. This was closely followed by Good Days, a global smash charged with a declaration of hopefulness — a message needed now more than ever. It quickly earned the musician a spot in the top 10 on the US Billboard Hot 100 Chart back in January.

How do you keep a clear and open mind when making new music?

“‘What the hell am I going to talk about now?’ [is what I first thought when making the new album]. I try to give the music what it needs, not what I want it to ‘try’ to be. That’s the only way to do a good job. And it’s not something that I’ve mastered a lot of the time. It’s about trying to detach and reattach to self and to sound.”

The videos for your singles Hit Different and Good Days gave the world a chance to see your directorial vision. What was the inspiration behind both and can we expect more of this?

“I’m a novice – I’m trying things I’ve always wanted to do as we did with the creative for the In Bloom virtual concert. I’m excited to shoot my next video and elevate each experience the more I learn.”

You started the year on a great note with the success of your latest singles. What are you focused on at the moment?

“I want to make music I love – that’s all I’m focused on immersing myself in right now. I’m trying to maximise my love of self because I know that’ll permeate into everything I do.”

Climate change and being kinder to the planet is something you’ve been vocal about, especially within Black and Brown communities. How would you encourage younger generations to get involved?

“If you’re unsure where to start, begin by helping these communities any way you can, such as sponsoring your local garden, planting trees, volunteering to clean or writing to your local officials. And try to work with grassroots organisations rather than large corporations.

“A lot of cities face redlining and difficult economic circumstances directly stemming from systemic and environmental racism. For example, the current water crises in Memphis, Tennessee, and Flint, Michigan, are preventable. Officials could take action right now and make the necessary safety adjustments. It’s all about urgency and attention. Just give back because the people are the planet, and we all need one another”.

An artist who I really love - and I feel she will go down as one of the all-time greats - SZA is a modern-day legend. I am looking forward to seeing what comes next in terms of an album. She has recently revealed that her November live dates will be her last before a new album. It is exciting that we might well get a new SZA record next year. Many people have been waiting to see what comes next for the modern icon. One can feel and sense a real evolution on Ctrl from her E.P.s. Since 2017, SZA has grown even stronger. Such a phenomenal and accomplished artist! If you need convincing as to how good she is, then the proof is…

IN the playlist below.

FEATURE: Vinyl Corner: John Coltrane - Blue Train

FEATURE:

 

 

Vinyl Corner

 John Coltrane - Blue Train

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IT is rare that…

I go back to the 1950s for Vinyl Corner. John Coltrane is one of the most influential and important Jazz artists and composers that ever lived. Whilst albums like A Love Supreme (1965) are more famous and talked-about, I wanted to spend time with 1958’s Blue Train. Even if you are not a Jazz fan or do not know the work of Coltrane, Blue Train is an album that I would recommend people get on vinyl. The album was recorded in the midst of Coltrane's residency at the Five Spot as a member of the Thelonious Monk quartet. The album’s personnel include Coltrane's Miles Davis bandmates, Paul Chambers on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums. Aside from I’m Old Fashioned, Coltrane wrote all of the compositions. Recorded in 1957 at Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, Blue Train is set in the Hard Bop style of the time. Coltrane would break new ground with 1960’s (aptly-named) Giant Steps. Before concluding, it is worth putting in a couple of reviews that better contextualise Blue Train and explain its brilliance. AllMusic noted the following:

“Although never formally signed, an oral agreement between John Coltrane and Blue Note Records founder Alfred Lion was indeed honored on Blue Train -- Coltrane's only collection of sides as a principal artist for the venerable label. The disc is packed solid with sonic evidence of Coltrane's innate leadership abilities. He not only addresses the tunes at hand, but also simultaneously reinvents himself as a multifaceted interpreter of both hard bop as well as sensitive balladry -- touching upon all forms in between.

The personnel on Blue Train is arguably as impressive as what they're playing. Joining Coltrane (tenor sax) are Lee Morgan (trumpet), Curtis Fuller (trombone), Kenny Drew (piano), Paul Chambers (bass), and Philly Joe Jones (drums). The triple horn arrangements incorporate an additional sonic density that remains a trademark unique to both this band and album. Of particular note is Fuller's even-toned trombone, which bops throughout the title track as well as the frenetic "Moments Notice." Other solos include Paul Chambers' subtly understated riffs on "Blue Train" as well as the high energy and impact from contributions by Lee Morgan and Kenny Drew during "Locomotion." The track likewise features some brief but vital contributions from Philly Joe Jones -- whose efforts throughout the record stand among his personal best. Of the five sides that comprise the original Blue Train, the Jerome Kern/Johnny Mercer ballad "I'm Old Fashioned" is the only standard; in terms of unadulterated sentiment, this version is arguably untouchable. Fuller's rich tones and Drew's tastefully executed solos cleanly wrap around Jones' steadily languid rhythms. Without reservation, Blue Train can easily be considered in and among the most important and influential entries not only of John Coltrane's career, but of the entire genre of jazz music as well”.

Before wrapping this up, this website wrote about the one hundred greatest Jazz albums. As someone who knows a little about John Coltrane but not a lot about the background to Blue Train, the review provided some useful insights:

“Many people hear that in the music of "Blue Train"; the beauty that comes from an open hearted sharing of release; blues on the point of transcendence of the oppression of the world.

There was work with Thelionious Monk that exposed John Coltrane to the pianist's radical approach. Miles Davis was able to welcome him back into his quintet in December of that year; they were to go on to make the transition to modal music with "Milestones" and "Kind of Blue".

Experimenting with new harmonic ideas was exactly what was encouraged in the Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk environments, with Miles especially an encourager and mentor. It was Miles who bought John Coltrane a soprano saxophone as a gift and suggested he should work on playing it. It was visiting Blue Note to find recordings by the great clarinetist and soprano sax player of an earlier era, Sydney Bechet, that had brought John Coltrane into contact with Alfred Lion and the hatching of the idea of an album for Blue Note. And it was with Miles Davis that John Coltrane was encouraged to develop further musically. As he recalled, he found it "easy to apply the harmonic ideas I had... I started experimenting because I was striving for more individual development."

The title track, "Blue Train" is based around a short minor blues theme that shifts to major when John Coltrane opens up with his liberating eight chorus solo. It is not too simplistic to say that it captures that sense of the opening out to possibilities that his change in direction in life had brought. In an emblematic way it encapsulates everything that came to be felt about John Coltrane as a centre of black pride and optimism that oppression would be overcome; what led Miles Davis to say on John Coltrane's death in July 1967: "Trane's music…..represented, for many blacks, the fire and passion and rage and anger and rebellion and love that they felt, especially among the young black intellectuals and revolutionaries of that time…. It was that way for many intellectual and revolutionary whites and Asians as well… Trane' s death made me real sad because not only was he a great and beautiful musician, he was a kind and beautiful and spiritual person that I loved. I miss him, his spirit and his creative imagination……"*

Lee Morgan, just nineteen, plays an explosive trumpet solo, better than his somewhat disjointed efforts on the "Blue Train (additional take)" track. Curtis Fuller on trombone plays with bluesy intensity. Kenny Drew contributes a snakey, low down blues piano solo before the return to that unforgettable harmonized minor horn theme. It is a great start to a great album.

The next track, "Moment's Notice" is more uptempo yet continues the distinctive hamonization. And later, "Lazy Bird", said to be a variation on Tadd Dameron's "Lady Bird", is swinging and uptempo with space for fine solos by Lee Morgan, Curtis Fuller, John Coltrane and then Kenny Drew. These compositions are important since they are the first recorded example of one of John Coltrrane's greatest innovations, the experimental use of a cycle of thirds; the so called "Coltrane changes".

In the ii-V-I chord progression that is at the heart of jazz, the movement of the root notes is in minor or major seconds (a semitone or whole tone movement). John Coltrane discovered chord substitutions that gave root note movements of a major third (four semitones) or a minor third (three semitones), the so called "giant steps". There is speculation that he may have discovered this in the bridge to the Richard Rodgers and Lorentz Hart song "Have You Seen Miss Jones" where the sequence BbM7, GbM7, DM7, GbM7 occurs, the only known jazz standard to have this cycle of major thirds. John Coltrane would later expand on this idea in the compositions "Giant Steps" and "Countdown", a reworking of Miles Davis' "Tune Up". The long and short of this is that "Blue Train" is seminal in John Coltrane's development, the first time he had explored this most lasting of contributions to modern jazz.

"Locomotion" is high tempo upfront bop with charactersistic interspersed runs from John Coltrane.

The only ballad on the album, the Jerome Kern / Johnny Mercer standard "I'm Old Fashioned", is a place for John Coltrane's quieter, more conventional side to be showcased. What stands out is the complete control of his instrument and the wonderful timbre he had achieved by this time. None of this is accidental. He had worked long and hard to perfect this, working with the instrument makers Selmer to achieve exactly the sound he wanted. He was playing a Selmer Mark VI at this time, fitted with a 5-star medium metal Otto Link mouthpiece and a No. 4 Rico reed; a heavy combination that would have taken tremendous energy to blow successfully.

So, while there is little surprise in claiming "Blue Train" as a great jazz album, it is very clear that there is much more to its importance than its reputation as John Coltrane's 'only Blue Note'”.

For anyone who loves music that digs deep and provokes myriad emotions, Blue Train is a tremendous album. One of the greatest albums in any genre, go and check it out. Even if you can’t get the vinyl, it is well worth listening to. I think vinyl is the perfect form for the album. The beautiful, mighty, epic, stirring and amazing Blue Train is…

A wonderful thing.

FEATURE: Inspired By… Part Thirty-Eight: Sade

FEATURE:

 

 

Inspired By…

PHOTO CREDIT: Patrick Demarchelier

Part Thirty-Eight: Sade

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WHEN considering artists…

who have inspired others and have that legacy, some might not consider Sade to be among the most important. As an artist, she was very much in a league of her own. Even though her voice and talent cannot easily be matched, she has influenced other artists through the years. I am going to come to a playlist of artists who either cite her as an influence or one can tell that they incorporate some of her sound and essence into their own music. Before then, and as I normally do, AllMusic provide some background:

“Since debuting with the Top Ten U.K. hit "Your Love Is King" (1984), Sade have remained, across four ensuing decades of intermittent activity, shrewd synthesists of classic jazz, cutting-edge R&B, and mature pop. Although they're known most for stylishly seductive ballads, including the international hits "Smooth Operator" (1984), "The Sweetest Taboo" (1985), "No Ordinary Love" (1992), and "By Your Side" (2000), they've also recorded poignant songs regarding slavery, immigration, parenthood out of wedlock, and everyday struggles, often through Sade Adu's third-person narratives. From Diamond Life (1984) through Soldier of Love (2010), breaks between Sade albums have increased in duration from a year-and-a-half to a decade, but each return has been warmly greeted. All six of Sade's albums have entered the U.K. Top 20, placed within the U.S. Top Ten, and in both countries have achieved platinum status. Additionally, Sade are four-time Grammy winners, having invalidated the Best New Artist curse with subsequent wins for "No Ordinary Love," Lovers Rock, and "Soldier of Love." Seven years after the latter took the award for Best R&B Performance, they returned with contributions to the soundtracks of A Wrinkle in Time and Widows.

Sade are named after singer and songwriter Helen Folasade Adu. Born in Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria, Adu moved with her mother and brother to southeast England outside Colchester at the age of four. A lover of early-'70s soul, Adu tentatively became involved with music after enrolling at Saint Martin's School of Art to study fashion, when friends asked her to help with their group's vocals. After she finished her course work in 1981, she joined the band Pride and into 1983 toured the U.K. with the act. Their gigs eventually featured a mini-set during which Adu was granted the spotlight, backed by some of her bandmates on intimate jazz-inspired material. These segments, specifically "Smooth Operator" -- composed by Adu and the band's Ray St. John -- drew attention from label representatives. Adu was pursued as a solo act, but she signed with Epic after demanding to bring along some of her partners in Pride: bassist Paul S. Denman, keyboardist Andrew Hale, and saxophonist and guitarist Stuart Matthewman.

The London-based quartet made their recorded debut in February 1984 with the controlled yet expressive ballad "Your Love Is King," which soon entered the U.K. singles chart and the following month peaked at number six. Another single, the down-but-not-out soul anthem "When Am I Going to Make a Living," preceded the July release of the full-length Diamond Life. Produced by Robin Millar, the album was written primarily by Adu and Matthewman in tandem, finished off with a cover of Timmy Thomas' 1972 hit "Why Can't We Live Together." Reinforced with the number 19 U.K. single "Smooth Operator," Diamond Life -- itself falling just short of the top spot on the U.K. albums chart -- became one of the biggest mid-'80s debuts. In the U.S., it was issued on Epic subsidiary Portrait in early 1985 and reached number five that June, with "Smooth Operator" doing most of the heavy lifting as a crossover smash that climbed to number five on the pop and R&B charts and topped the adult contemporary chart. Diamond Life eventually went quadruple platinum in the U.K. and U.S. and earned sales certifications in several other territories.

Sade continued to gradually refine and expand their cosmopolitan mix of jazz, R&B, and pop, and continuously decelerated their writing and recording process. Working again with Robin Millar, they started recording their second album around the time Diamond Life was distributed in the U.S., issuing it internationally that November as Promise. On its way to international multi-platinum success, Promise topped the U.K. and U.S. pop charts, led by "The Sweetest Taboo," which went Top 40 U.K. and peaked at number five in the U.S. the week after the band won Best New Artist at the 28th Annual Grammy Awards. Shortly thereafter, "Never as Good as the First Time" strengthened their hold on urban and adult contemporary radio.

Despite a gap of nearly two-and-a-half years between full-lengths, Sade remained a major commercial force with third album Stronger Than Pride. This time, production was handled by the band with help from Mike Pela and Ben Rogan, established Sade associates who played comparatively minor roles beforehand. Carrying some of the band's airiest arrangements and deepest rhythms -- exemplified respectively by the title song and "Paradise," two of its four singles -- the album climbed to the third spot on the U.K. and U.S. charts. A longer studio-release break ensued and was broken in October 1992 with Love Deluxe, produced by the band with Pela. More electronic and atmospheric than the band's previous albums, it entered the Top Ten in the U.K. and missed the top of the U.S. chart by two slots. "Feel No Pain," "Kiss of Life," and the pulsing trip-hop precursor "Cherish the Day" all charted, but the LP's biggest single was easily its first, "No Ordinary Love" -- it hit number 14 in the U.K. and U.S. and won another Grammy award, this time for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. The song had a lingering effect strong enough to keep the parent release on the Billboard 200 for almost two years.

The band responded in kind with their longest hiatus to that point. In 1996, Matthewman resurfaced as a co-writer and co-producer on Maxwell's Urban Hang Suite, thereby beginning a lasting close association with the album's maverick namesake. Later that year, Matthewman, Denman, and Hale released Sweetback, titled after the name of their new side project. Maxwell, Amel Larrieux, and Bahamadia were among the guests on the album, a stylistic successor to Love Deluxe that went a little farther out with no concern for hitmaking. Toward the end of the decade, Sade reconvened to record their fifth album, Lovers Rock. Distinguished by some dubwise rhythms and a greater emphasis on Matthewman's acoustic guitar, the LP cracked the U.K. Top 20 and was yet another number three U.S. hit upon its November 2000 arrival, supported with "By Your Side" (number 17 U.K. pop, number 75 U.S. pop). The Recording Academy awarded it Best Pop Vocal Album at the 44th Annual Grammy Awards. Following a customary album-promoting tour, the band appeased fans in February 2002 with Lovers Live. A second project from Sweetback, Stage [2], followed two years later.

In December 2009, "Soldier of Love" ended a period of silence during which Adu raised her daughter and was honored with an OBE (Order of the British Empire). The song's stark, swaggering theatricality made it feel like more of an event more than any other Sade re-entry. An album of the same title was released the following February, entering the U.K. chart at number four and the U.S. chart at the top. The song made the band Grammy winners for a fourth time, again taking the award for Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. A 2011 catalog release, The Ultimate Collection, summarized the band's discography and included a handful of previously unreleased songs. Seven years passed before Sade released new recordings, both of which were made for soundtracks: "Flower of the Universe" for Disney's A Wrinkle in Time, and "The Big Unknown" for Widows”.

The amazing Sade has enjoyed her own successful career, though she has also made an impression on so many other artists. Below is a list of those who you can tell have been affected and inspired by her. It shows that, even though she has not released music for years, her influence and importance…

REMAINS so strong.

FEATURE: Remember the Time: Michael Jackson’s Dangerous at Thirty

FEATURE:

 

 

Remember the Time

Michael Jackson’s Dangerous at Thirty

___________

ON 26th November…

 Michael Jackson’s eighth studio album, Dangerous, turns thirty. In terms of his best-loved albums, Dangerous fares quite low. I feel Thriller (1982) and Off the Wall (1979) will always be the most respected. Bad (1987) comes close – though many critics felt it was a weak response to Thriller. Dangerous was the penultimate studio album from Michael Jackson. His final, Invisible, was released in 2001 (eight years before he died). I think one reason why some critics gave it a mixed review is because of the length. In an age where C.D.s were becoming more popular, artists were filling them up. It was a strange thing where they could not leave any space. Because of that, there were some over-long and unfocused albums. I don’t think that Jackson’s Dangerous suffers because of length. I feel the production is not as good under Bill Bottrell, Bruce Swedien, Michael Jackson and Teddy Riley. Quincy Jones’ production on albums like Thriller is a reason why it is so memorable. That said, Jackson was looking to take a new direction. His albums prior to that didn’t lack toughness and edge. They were quite focused on love. Even though he had explored paranoia and betrayal, Dangerous delves more into these themes. Perhaps that was motivated by press intrusion and his growing fame. More socially conscious – and exploring a broader range of themes -, Dangerous is grittier than anything he put out before. Still containing Pop hooks and big choruses, there are more underground sounds being brought to the fore.

Whether some critics took shots at Dangerous because of Jackson’s persona and ego or whether they disliked him breaking away from Pop and Disco, some of his best tracks are on Dangerous. Black or White and Remember the Time are classics of the 1990s. In all, nine (of the fourteen album tracks) different songs were released as singles. With Jackson co-writing most of the tracks, one can definitely hear his lyrical voice coming through. There has been reappraisal of Dangerous since its release. Many critics have named it as his best album. Personally revealing and with a social conscious, some have linked the album to stars like Lady Gaga and Nine Inch Nails – artists who, in their own way, were inspired by Dangerous. Whilst the album is top-heavy – the final six tracks on the album are among the weakest -, cuts lower in the order like Will You Be There and Dangerous are really interesting. To mark thirty years of Dangerous, I want to bring in a couple of reviews first. In fact, there is one feature from Pitchfork, published in 2016, that gives great depth regarding Dangerous and its history. I would recommend people read it in full. I have selected a few sections:

“On the night of November 14, 1991, 500 million people scattered across 27 nations simultaneously watched Michael Jackson grab his crotch 17 times. He simulated masturbation, shattered car windows with crowbars, and unleashed the primal screams expected from a man who owned publishing rights to the Beatles catalogue. Then he turned into a black panther. The video ends with Bart Simpson striking a B-Boy pose in a Michael Jackson shirt, and ordering Homer to “chill out, homeboy.” It shattered all previous viewing records on Fox.

The $4 million, 11-minute unedited telecast of “Black or White” ranks among the Smithsonian-worthy artifacts of ’90s pop monoculture—up there with Nirvana trashing their instruments at the ’92 VMAs, the premiere of “Summertime” after The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and Hillary Clinton hitting the Macarena at the ’96 DNC. No one ever had more juice than Jackson did at the time, and it’s difficult to imagine that anyone ever will again.

With “Black or White,” Jackson lashed out at his public perception. In the interim since 1987’s Bad, he’d grappled with both outlandish rumors (buying the Elephant Man’s bones, sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber) and some that drew blood (allegations of bleaching his skin). The innocent popcorn-eating Michael of Thriller was gone, but calling him “Wacko Jacko” was slander. He wanted us to know he was a man, an eccentric sure, but an adult with deeply rooted beliefs.

Released only five months before the LA Riots, the Rodney King beating and murder of Latasha Harlins almost certainly factored into Jackson’s increasingly political slant. “Black or White” articulated a utopian vision of a post-racial future while acknowledging the sins of contemporary bigotry.  He demands equality, shouting that he “ain’t second to none.” He growls, “I ain’t scared of no sheets” (presumably Klansmen). Its hook offers his dream of a color-blind society, echoing Martin Luther King.

But this was Michael Jackson, not O’ Shea. Being King of Pop meant the need for mass appeal. The “Black or White” video exists as a microcosm of Dangerous itself. It potently affirms Jackson’s manhood, offers passionate screeds against racial strife, gang violence, and a parasitic American media. This is the album as multi-media spectacle, a precursor to Lemonade, with accusations of infidelity substituted for videos of Macaulay Culkin doing air guitar windmills to a Slash guitar solo and lip sync rapping about turf wars.

The lone #1 single from the 32-million selling Dangerous, “Black or White” spent seven weeks atop the Billboard charts. Directed by John Landis (“Thriller,” National Lampoon’s Animal House) the first quarter of its video reveals Jackson’s mischievous child-like streak, with Culkin towing out Spinal Tap-sized speakers, amplifying the volume to “ARE YOU NUTS!?!,” and shredding so hard that George Wendt gets ejected into the stratosphere screaming “Da Bears.”

It blends into his idealistic visionary side that wanted to heal the world through philanthropy and moonwalking. There is pop locking with Balinese dancers, rain dances with Native Americans, folk dances in front of the Kremlin, and the serenade of a Hindu goddess on a freeway. This is the magical Michael Jackson of our early memories—the man with the graceful dance moves and lithe falsetto that seemed celestially ordained (masking a notoriously intense perfectionist streak). Faces of all races harmoniously morph into one another, the most cutting edge FX that 1991 had to offer.

In the third section, boy becomes man: Jackson struts through a wall of flames, Henley shirt open, screaming at his enemies like a mad king. It gives way to Culkin rapping in shades and oversized gold chains, which is just as well considering that this is the man who actually spit the bars. Jackson’s embrace of hip-hop not only aligned him with the popular sound of black (and white) youth culture, it adds an aggressive masculinity unseen in his catalogue, and ultimately paved the way for the late period Biggie therapy session.

 Of course, in the final section, Jackson turns into a black panther. You understand that meaning. So did millions of parents in Tipper Gore America, who flooded Fox and its local affiliates with phone calls, forcing Jackson’s team to re-cut and sanitize the video.

A quarter century later, it seems absurd that Michael Jackson smashing a few windows before turning into a Jungle Book character could be cause for mass protest, but you have to remember how adored and family-friendly Michael Jackson was. My parents only owned two records: Thriller and *Bad. *So until I was 9 years old, I listened to those two almost every single day of my life, and honestly I didn’t really need anything else. Michael Jackson was my entire conception of music. Millions more could say the same thing.

So when he dropped “Black or White,” it was shocking. If he was previously pop’s Peter Pan figure, Jackson had suddenly adopted a more carnal streak, but even here it was cartoonish. If the adult world looked dull and stifling, Jackson’s imagination offered a hope that it was possible not to wind up like George Wendt, bloated on a couch with a bored housewife. You could hang out with Macaulay Culkin, dance on top of the Statue of Liberty, and if all else failed, you could transform into a panther and bounce.

Imagine being Teddy Riley in 1991. You’ve gone from humble origins in Harlem to inventing New Jack Swing; you've produced multiple hits for your own band Guy, Bobby Brown, and Keith Sweat (“I Want Her”). Then late one night, you get a phone call from Michael Jackson telling you that he needs you to produce his new album—in effect making you the new Quincy Jones. All before your 24th birthday.

Before Riley headed west, Jackson had labored on* Dangerous* for over a year to varying degrees of success. Something always seemed off. Bad might have been the last album before hip-hop became the de facto soundtrack of urban culture. 1988 changed everything. Public Enemy, Rakim, and Big Daddy Kane left the competition sounding effete and timid. Gang wars and the crack epidemic continued to inflame inner cities. Songs like “Smooth Criminal” seemed obsolete.

Meanwhile Jackson’s sister Janet had recently delivered a hard-stomping R&B-pop classic in 1989’s Rhythm Nation 1814. Its influence on her older brother was so great that he even asked Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis to produce Dangerous. Out of loyalty to Janet, they turned him down. According to his engineer, Bruce Swedien, Michael was searching for something “very street that young people would be able to identify with.”

He wasn’t alone. His longtime competition Prince sought to re-connect in a similar fashion, forming the New Power Generation with rapper, Tony M. Released just one month before* Dangerous*, the purple one’s Diamonds and Pearls* *exists as a companion piece, documents of blurring eras. As ’80s pop gave way to ’90s hip-hop, they sought to find their place in the re-configured landscape. Except while Prince predictably constructed his own insular unit, Jackson looked outwards to Riley, the hottest producer of the moment.

If that seems obvious today, it wasn’t at the start of 1991. Many mainstream artists still saw hip-hop as a passing fad or stereotyped it as nihilistic and violent. Jackson needed to walk the fine line between disposable bubblegum rap like Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer, and alienating longtime disciples with something too radical.

After preparing grooves in Q-Tip’s Soundtrack Studio in Queens, Riley flew out to the Neverland Ranch to meet the master. There was a tour of the trophy room, the carousel, and the zoo, and then after they talked late into the night, Jackson put Riley on his personal helicopter and had him flown to the Universal City Hilton, a short distance from the San Fernando Valley studios where they recorded Dangerous. Riley began work the next day.

Jackson established nerve centers at Record One and Larrabee Studios, just a few miles down Ventura Blvd. The latter had the SSL mixing console that Riley needed to make the tracks slap, and despite his pop reputation, Jackson wanted his new songs as hard as humanly possible. Engineers remember Jackson demanding that they play the New Jack Swing songs so loud that your ears bled. He invariably blew up a pair of headphones each session.

Dangerous has its flaws. The ballads on the back (non-Riley) half of the album could pass for gospel renditions of Celine Dion schmaltz. Despite its noble message and Jackson’s statement that it was the song he was most proud of writing, “Heal the World” is essentially “We Are The World Pt. 2.” The theme from Free Willy, “Will You Be There” offers a sweet sentiment, but it’s not exactly “I Believe I Can Fly.” “Gone Too Soon” falls into that same category of beautifully intentioned crooning that ultimately sounds like a dentist office doxology, especially when contrasted with the brilliant funk of the first side.

If nothing else, they display the full range of his sharply targeted social consciousness, one that encompassed environmentalism, the AIDS pandemic, and every other affliction that still plagues the globe. In that sense, Dangerous might be Jackson’s most complete album, spanning dance music to dark nights of the soul. It’s a portrait of a persecuted genius, desperate to stay relevant, burdened with guilt and rage, lashing out at villains and offering inspiration to allies—always making it seem effortless.

In an interview given shortly after the release of Dangerous, Jackson said that his goal was to do “an album that was like Tchaikovsky’s ‘Nutcracker Suite.’ In a thousand years from now, people would still be listening to it…. Something that would live forever.” He’s been gone for over half a decade, but I still think about this quote every time I walk past that sound stage—considering the possibilities that Michael Jackson unlocked in every song, the infinite magic that he could create out of an empty room, the orphic visions of one of our final myths”.

Compared to the sound and excellence of Thriller and Off the Wall, I can see why there was some sense of blowback against Dangerous. It was so heavily promoted and hyped as this enormous album (and the album cover did Jackson no favours!). Maybe the sheer weight and sense of expectation caused some to grade down an album which, in actuality, has some of Jackson’s greatest moments. I actually want to source Rolling Stone. They reviewed Dangerous at the start of 1992:

“The booklet for Dangerous begins with a short prose poem by Michael Jackson describing the release the singer feels while dancing: “Creator and creation merge into one wholeness of joy” until “there is only … the dance.” It is Jackson’s version of William Butler Yeats’s “How can you tell the dancer from the dance?” and a revealing introduction to the first album in four years from this generation’s best-known and bestselling superstar.

Dangerous might seem to be a chance to separate this dancer — the “eccentric” Michael of the chimps, the Elephant Man bones, the hyperbaric chamber — from his dancing and singing, which remain among the wonders of the performance world and, lest we forget, were the real reason we paid so much attention to Jackson in the first place. According to this plan, we must consider Dangerous on its own terms and listen without images of llamas and Macaulay Culkin dancing in our heads.

But of course this polarity between Jackson’s on- and off-stage lives is exactly what makes him so fascinating, and the triumph of Dangerous is that it doesn’t hide from the fears and contradictions of a lifetime spent under a spotlight. This edge of terror electrified Thriller‘s Jackson-penned break-through cuts “Billie Jean” and “Beat It” but was diverted into an unconvincing nastiness in 1987 on Bad. It also drove the “controversial” segment of the “Black or White” video, but this tension is presented much more effectively on the album itself.

Teddy Riley replaces. Quincy Jones as Jackson’s primary collaborator on Dangerous, an inspired selection that is the key to the album’s finest moments. Riley — the producer of groundbreaking tracks by Bobby Brown, Keith Sweat and his own combo, Guy — is the godfather of New Jack Swing, which merges hip-hop beats with soul crooning and has dominated the R&B charts in recent years. This choice clearly represents Jackson’s pursuit of a more contemporary sound, an attempt to come to grips with the changes that have swept pop music since Bad — most significantly, rap’s successful attack on the mainstream. Riley’s work on Dangerous is reminiscent of Jackson’s solo album Off the Wall (1979) and that record’s distillation of disco to its perfect pop essence. Riley’s tracks don’t offer the revolutionary genre-busting of Thriller, but they dramatically illustrate the versatility of his style. Instead of the cocksure strut of a New Jack classic like Bobby Brown’s “My Prerogative,” the stacked layers of keyboards on Dangerous shift and percolate, varying textures over insistent, thumping rhythm tracks.

The aggressive yet fluid dance grooves Riley helped construct — and his emphasis is on writing grooves, not traditional songs — prove a perfect match for Jackson’s clipped, breathy uptempo voice. The fit is especially striking on the songs dealing with women. Exactly half of Dangerous is concerned with affairs of the heart, and Jackson’s greatest fears are brought right up front — there’s not a single straightforward love song in the bunch. Instead we get betrayal in “Who Is It” and repressed lust in the titillatingly titled (and determinedly heterosexual) “In the Closet.” Even “Remember the Time,” the most lighthearted musical track on the album, tells of a blissful romance only to ask, “So why did it end?” The tense, stuttering beats mirror these anxieties compellingly Riley’s melodies may seem secondary, but he carefully plants unshakable hooks in the least likely places — a jittery rhythm track in “Can’t Let Her Get Away,” a snaky, unexpected bridge in “In the Closet.”

There’s nothing on Dangerous as anti-female as Bad‘s “Dirty Diana,” but Jackson’s persona is much more assertively sexual than the accused victim in “Billie Jean.” He stalks and preens in “She Drives Me Wild.” “Give In to Me” flirts with something more disturbing as Jackson sings, “Don’t try to understand me/Just simply do the things I say” in a grittier, throaty voice while Slash’s guitar whips and soars behind him. Neither this slow-burn solo nor the Stones-derived riff on “Black or White” offers the catharsis of Eddie Van Halen’s blazing break on “Beat It,” but they demonstrate that what seemed like a stunning crossover fusion in 1982 has now become an established part of the pop vocabulary.

Less impressive are the ballads on Dangerous, where Jackson turns to more global concerns. He has always had a weakness for sappiness, and over the years his delivery has grown increasingly constricted on slower numbers. “Heal the World” is a Hallmark-card knockoff of “We Are the World,” while the grandiose “Will You Be There” never catches fire. “Keep the Faith,” with its power-of-positive-thinking message, is looser and sets off fireworks with a call-and-response gospel coda. It’s easy to overlook, though, because it immediately follows “Will You Be There,” and both tracks feature the Andrae Crouch Singers; the sequencing of Dangerous often clusters similar songs in bunches when a more varied presentation would have been stronger.

“Jam,” the album’s opener, addresses. Jackson’s uneasy relationship to the world and reveals a canny self-awareness that carries the strongest message on Dangerous. “Jam” features a dense, swirling Riley track, propelled by horn samples and a subtle scratch effect, and includes a fleet rap by Riley favorite Heavy D. Though it initially sounds like a simple, funky dance vehicle, Jackson’s voice bites into each phrase with a desperation that urges us to look deeper. He is singing as “false prophets cry of doom” and exhorts us to “live each day like it’s the last.” The chorus declares that the miseries of the world “ain’t too much stuff” to stop us from jamming. To Jackson, who insists that he comes truly alive only onstage, the ability to “Jam” is the sole means to find “peace within myself,” and this hope rings more sincere than the childlike wishes found in the ballads”.

Ahead of its thirtieth anniversary on 26th November, I wanted to highlight an album that is among my favourites. Whilst Bad will always be my favourite because it was the first Michael Jackson album I heard as a child, I remember when Dangerous came out, as tracks like Black or White dominating music T.V. and radio. It was an exciting time. Thirty years since it came into the world, Dangerous still stands up. Even if the production sounds a little dated and there are one or two tracks that could have been cut, a fearless, hard-hitting, varied and tough album from Jackson in 1991 still resonates today. There is no denying that Dangerous is…

A fantastic album.

FEATURE: Revisiting... Jamila Woods - LEGACY! LEGACY!

FEATURE:

 

 

Revisiting...

 Jamila Woods - LEGACY! LEGACY!

___________

EACH song on…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Bradley Murray

Jamila Woods’ LEGACY! LEGACY! has such an interesting story and inspiration. You can find out about the tracks and what influenced them in this article. Unlike Second Spin, where I go back and pick an album that is underrated or was pushed aside, Revisiting… is specifically me looking at the last three years and albums that were played at the time but are not featured much now. It is a shame that an album as potent, important and astonishing as Jamila Woods’ second album is not in focus as much now as it should be. Following her incredible 2016 debut, Heavn, LEGACY! LEGACY! took her to new heights. To be fair, this was an album that received enormous and universal acclaim (but did not get spun much on radio). It is baffling why that was! The tracks are incredible and provide lessons and revelations. I hope that people pick up on LEGACY! LEGACY! and its sheer brilliance. Before I come to reviews in 20 19 that proves critics were absolutely awestruck by Woods’ masterpiece, this VICE interview featured Woods discussing the album and its themes. I have selected some portions of the interview where we discover more about LEGACY! LEGACY! and its intentions:

“Much has been said about the ways gentrification threatens to erase the neighborhood's rich history, but according to the Chicago singer, her next album, LEGACY! LEGACY!, won't let that happen. "There's a way to celebrate Black artists the way Beyoncé is celebrated, and it starts with how that looks in education," she tells me. Woods has become a fixture in the Chicago R&B scene after collaborating with Chance the Rapper on both 2015's Surf, his collaborative experimental album, and his mixtape Coloring Book the following year. Macklemore even tapped the singer for the outro of "White Privilege II" where she closed the song singing: "Your silence is a luxury." By the time she recorded her debut album, HEAVN, Jamila Woods was known for using her words when the world is often speechless.

For a minute, we reflect on Nipsey Hussle (who was gunned down in Los Angeles's Hyde Park neighborhood two weeks prior to our lunch), and why it seems as though, for most, the legacy of Black artists only begins when their lives end. For the past few years, Woods has been wrestling with how to prevent the legacy of individuals like Nipsey from disappearing. To that end, she decided to pay homage to a different Black creator on each of the album's 13 tracks, summoning the energy of poets, musicians, and writers whose fingerprints can be found all over her stirring resistance songs. The track-list reads like a roll call, with names like "ZORA," "EARTHA," and "MILES" marking themselves present. It's an example of the magic that happens when the careers of Black people are given the grace of eternal life.

Woods's work often reads like a manifesto on Black life, and her background in poetry, which she started writing and reading while growing up in Chicago's Beverly neighborhood, is partly to thank for that. "I always wished I knew a second language, and this is it," she tells me. "I found it in poetry."

Though she's been busy readying her upcoming album for release, she still works part-time at Young Chicago Authors, an arts education program that nurtures local talent and counts Noname, Chance the Rapper, and Woods herself as notable alumni. She says LEGACY!'s theme originated out of a writing prompt she assigned to her poetry class: Each student was expected to write their own version of a well-known poem. Then she challenged herself to do the same.

"I wrote a cover of Nikki Giovanni's 'Ego Trippin,'" and then Kevin Coval, who's a poet I work with at YCA, asked me to do a cover of his poem about Muddy Waters," she tells me in between bites of cornbread. "That's how I wrote the Muddy song."

According to Woods, writing songs based on the work of your muses isn’t the difficult part—it's narrowing down the list. Woods had to let go of some of her heroes in order to create the 49-minute album. Literary giants like Toni Morrison and Lucille Clifton are absent, even though Woods attributes the directness of her songwriting to the way those writers use language.

She says the title of the album came to her at a dinner last year, where she encountered a collage inspired by a 2007 poem from Chicago museum co-founder Dr. Maragret Burroughs, and which included the words "LEGACY! LEGACY!"

"This is the prime moment for you to think / And get to work / And identify what you will leave as your legacy / For you to be remembered by."

Woods doesn’t limit her interpretation of the past to cultural icons. In fact, she spends much of LEGACY! exploring her own family lineage through the lens of her literary and musical heroes' ideas. "My mom is really into genealogy and piecing together our family tree," she says. "She's told us her great-great is a woman named Sarah who was a slave in South Carolina. We also took a DNA test that traced our family back to Cameroon." The harsh reality for most Black Americans is the erasure of their family tree because of the slave trade—or the complicated history the results do provide.

On LEGACY!, the singer references her "great-greats" a handful of times, using their stories as a reminder to stay strong and resilient in the present day. Woods centers her mother and grandmother on "GIOVANNI"'s hook, providing glimpses of the ways the Black women in her world armed her with tools to shield herself. "I’m protected / Joycetta prayed on me / Momma burned sage for me / None of that can take the energy away from me," she sings.

Growing up, Woods says she didn’t always think the reiki techniques her mother taught her were cool. But as she got older, her mom's rituals became a sanctuary when she felt out of place in predominantly white settings. "I talk about it on 'ZORA' too,” Woods says. "My mom would always say, 'Imagine white light around yourself.' It's like a bubble of protection."

Elsewhere, Woods debunks the trope of the "angry Black woman," berated for displaying any emotion besides a smile—while acknowledging that when you're navigating the world as a double minority, the anger you experience can often feel inherited. "It's like you want to be me / You trying to provoke me / This shit hereditary / The pressure rising in me," she sings on "BASQUIAT."

"Anger and stress has literally created high blood pressure in people throughout time," she says. She's talking about the correlation between discrimination and health conditions like diabetes and hypertension in the Black community—a phenomenon public health researcher and professor Arline Geronimus has described as "weathering."

Her rage is most obvious on "BASQUIAT" and "BALDWIN," their spurts of paranoid percussion and the skepticism in her voice marking a stark departure from the dreamy optimism of HEAVN. "BASQUIAT" is a deliberate provocation, with a hook that mimics a 1985 interview with the painter, captured in last year's Basquiat: Rags to Riches documentary. "Are you mad? / Yes I’m mad / What makes you mad? I don’t fucking know," she sings.

"[The interviewer] is like, 'What makes you angry?' and [Basquiat] pauses for a minute and says, 'I don’t remember,' Woods says. "It felt like in that moment, he was denying that annoying white dude's access to his interior emotional space, almost as if he didn’t want to be that vulnerable with him."

Woods's relationship with anger is one she still seems to be working through. "A lot of times people will say, 'Your music is political, but it's not angry'—like that's a compliment. It rubs me the wrong way that not being angry is a compliment to a Black woman. I have an aversion toward anger, but I feel it. I don’t think it looks or sounds the way people expect it to”.

One only needs to read a few reviews of LEGACY! LEGACY! to understand the impact it made back in 2019! I think that people need to explore it. So many of its magnificent tracks have not been played a lot or have passed people by. NME wrote a five-star review of one of 2019’s very best. This is what they offered:

 “The title and the track names are a celebration of the Chicago musician’s heroes; an ode to historical black artists that came before her. Jean-Michael Basquiat and novelist Octavia E Butler appear alongside critic and writer James Baldwin as well as Zora Neal Hurston, Sun Ra and Eartha Kitt. The free-spiritedness of the album is grounded by Woods’ lyrics, as she recites on ‘ZORA’: “Must be disconcerting how I discombob your mood / I’ve always been the only, every classroom, every home / Kiss of chocolate on the moon, collard greens and silver spoon / Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes you can’t stick unto me / My weaponry is my energy / I tenderly fill my enemies with white light.”

Fusing together alt-pop, progressive R&B, ‘60s Northern Soul, the album showcases an eclectic range of style. Over 13 joyful tracks that radiate happiness and double as protest music that’s cerebral and pensive, Woods’ words possess the most weight, soaring above the instruments, lithe and often jazzy. Her lyrics are evocative, cutting through the rhetoric with double entendres and metaphors that showcase her poetic skills. On ‘SONIA’, she sings, “My great, great granny was born a slave / She found liberation before the grave / Who You tellin’ how to behave? / Oooh, I’m trying to forgive but I can’t forget.”

Features are scarce on the album. Chicago contemporary SABA shines on ‘BASQUIAT’: his bars a reminder that he is one of the more exciting talents in hip-hop right now. New York rapper Nitty Scott steals the spotlight, though, with her visceral, feminist bars on ‘SONIA’ that ooze confidence: “My abuela ain’t survive several trips around the sun / So I could give it to somebody’s undeserving son / This pussy don’t pop for you, booty don’t bop for you / Never owe none, belong to no one.”

Like history repeating itself, the album closes with ‘BETTY (for Boogie)’, a re-worked house edit of the first track leaving us with an irresistible urge to dance. Quite frankly, ‘LEGACY! LEGACY!’ is one of the albums of the year. It’s a confident and self-assured project that affirms Woods’ own place alongside the historical greats she praises”.

To finish off, AllMusic were among the many who extolled the strength and incredible of an album that will stay with you. I cannot over-emphasise how good LEGACY! LEGACY! is!

“Jamila Woods conceptualized her second solo album after an exercise she presented to her poetry class at Young Chicago Authors. The students were assigned to choose a poem and "cover" it, as Woods terms it, by putting their individual spin on it. Woods took part with Nikki Giovanni's "Ego Tripping (there may be a reason why)," and was then asked by YCA artistic director Kevin Coval to do the same with a piece he wrote about Muddy Waters. This evolved into LEGACY! LEGACY! The liner notes list "Ego Tripping" and a Waters interview with other texts, clips, documentaries, and a painting, all of which are either by or about the prominent artists and activists -- predominantly black and all of color -- Woods honors here. Each song is titled after its catalyzing figure and is brilliantly threaded with references, but Woods also connects their experiences to her own and those of her immediate bloodline. Racism and its side effects, from theft of culture and land to willful distortions and ignorance of black achievement, weigh heaviest on Woods' mind, yet her voice maintains a sweetness, unfurling like ribbon over the rhythms. Vulgar rebukes such as "Shuddup muthaf*cka, I don't take requests" are expressed with enough grace and melodicism to be as quotable and whistle-able as "I tenderly fill my enemies with white light" or "Take a picture if you want me quiet."

Just like HEAVN, Woods' debut, LEGACY! LEGACY! is a modern R&B album recorded in Chicago, mostly with Chicagoans. There's more from Saba and Nico Segal, HEAVN collaborators who respectively add a tailwind-generating guest verse and beaming horns. Three-quarters of the songs, plus a garage-flavored remix of "BETTY," are dynamic Slot-A productions, covering sci-fi electro-soul of numerous shades and chunky hip-hop with elements of post-bop jazz, sometimes with an electric quartet. There's evidence his work was custom built, like when the keyboards burble and blare out of "Miles," evoking the namesake trumpeter's early-'70s dates, and the moment a sampled Geoff Barrow/Adrian Utley one-off elbows its way into "MUDDY," resembling the grit of Electric Mud (an LP recorded in Chicago with Chicagoans). This galvanizing declaration of pride, support, and discontent will no doubt inspire covers itself. Every public library should have at least one copy”.

In other parts of this feature, I will look at great albums from last year, earlier this year, 2019 and late in 2018. It is because, at the time, certain albums get great reviews and are celebrated. Soon enough, they are either put aside or not as studied and kept aflame as they should. So far, I have featured Nadine Shah, Thundercat, and now Jamila Woods. Her world-class second album is as relevant now as it was upon its release on 10th May 2019. If you only do one thing today, then make sure it is to…

HEAR this album!

FEATURE: Rock and Roll: The Titanic Led Zeppelin IV at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

 

Rock and Roll

 The Titanic Led Zeppelin IV at Fifty

___________

ONE of the best albums…

of all time turns fifty on 8th November. I have written about Led Zeppelin IV before but, as it is coming up for that milestone, I wanted to step in one more time and talk about an album that is not only celebrated by fans and critics. In 1971, it was an album where Led Zeppelin shot back at doubting critics. It is one that I really love. I am a big Led Zeppelin fan and, whilst Led Zeppelin II might be my favourite of theirs, I hold a whole lotta love for the 1971 masterpiece. It was a golden period for the band. If you have the likes of Robert Plant, John Bonham, John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page in your ranks, when things click and come together, the results are magical! Their fourth studio album is sensational and filled with utterly amazing songs. It was produced by guitarist Jimmy Page and recorded between December 1970 and February 1971; mostly in the country house Headley Grange, Hampshire. Led Zeppelin IV is one of the biggest-selling albums ever. It is also one of the best-regarded and most-famous. To mark its fiftieth, there are a few articles/reviews that I wanted to drop in. In terms of the band performances, everyone is at their peak here. More consistent than later albums like Physical Graffiti (1975),l Led Zeppelin IV is both tough and nuanced. There are songs like Rock and Roll that are direct and insatiable, whereas we get tracks such as Misty Mountain Hop that are more pastoral and acoustic. The band switched from the mostly Rock and Blues sound of Led Zeppelin II in 1969 to incorporating more acoustic elements into Led Zeppelin III the following year - something that was met with disapproval from those who prefer Zep raw and ragged!

There are those who say, technically, the band’s fourth album is untitled. That is true. Whether you call it Led Zeppelin IV or prefer Untitled as a title, it was another stunning album in a year with more than its fair share (take Joni Mitchell’s Blue for example!). The album is sequenced so you get a balance of sounds and genres. No one side is too heavy or lacking in punch. Both sides end with epic songs. The first finishes with Led Zeppelin’s signature song, Stairway to Heaven. The album ends with When the Levee Breaks. There is so much intent and power running through these songs. Musicianship that beggars belief!  You can buy Led Zeppelin IV from HMV or Rough Trade. It is an album that had a fascinating history, story and recording process. Before I come to the reviews, there is an article from Louder Sound that takes us into the creation of one of the most acclaimed albums ever:

“On a bitterly cold morning in January 1971, guitarist Jimmy Page, 26, singer Robert Plant, 22, bassist/ keyboardist John Paul Jones, 24, and drummer John Bonham, 22, arrived at Headley Grange, Hampshire, to find the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio already waiting for them in the driveway.

With them was a young engineer by the name of Andy Johns, brother of Glyn, who had worked on the first Zeppelin album, piano player Ian Stewart, formerly piano player and jack-of-all-trades for the Rolling Stones, and known to all and sundry as Stu, along with a small road crew.

Plant and Page, in the grip of an intense and productive creative union, fell into that group of artists whose muse was susceptible to their surroundings. The damp, cool manor, with its bleak history, surrounded by the bare winter trees, affected them quickly.

“Most of the mood for the fourth album was brought about in settings we had not been used to,” Plant later reflected. “We were living in this falling-down mansion in the country. It was incredible.”

In late October 1970 Page and Plant had returned to Bron-Yr-Aur, the idyllic cottage halfway up a mountain in south Snowdonia. It was here that earlier in the year they had conceived many of the songs for Led Zeppelin III. As before, they sat around the cottage hearth with a decent log fire burning and played and sang. They already had a backlog of half-finished songs and fragments of ideas. Among them was a lilting Neil Young-influenced piece titled Down By The Seaside and two semi-acoustic tunes, Hey, Hey What Can I Do and Poor Tom.

In December they booked initial studio sessions at Island Studios. The Basing Street location was becoming the most in-demand studio in London and they had recorded much of III there. Page, though, was also looking to record on location with The Rolling Stones’ new mobile recording unit.

“We started off doing some tracks at Island, then we went to Headley Grange,” he recalled. “We took the Stones’ mobile . It was ideal. As soon as we had an idea we put it down on tape.”

 The group began to settle in at Headley Grange, Page and Plant revelling in the atmosphere which was so different from the sterile surrounds of a normal studio. It was the idyll of the early 70s; gentleman rockers at large in the country, gear set up for extended jams, and some sedate – by Zeppelin’s Herculean standards, at any rate – recreation on hand.

The sessions for the fourth Zeppelin album continued to develop organically. They were still drawing liberally from Page and Plant’s blues influences and were increasingly drawn towards the folk sounds that had either enthralled, enraged or confused those listening to Led Zeppelin III.

John Paul Jones had used a mandolin on That’s The Way on III, and he brought it to the Grange. Page was sitting around downstairs late one night and, “These chords just came out. It was my first experiment with the mandolin. I suppose mandolin players would laugh, because it must be the standard thing to play those chords, but possibly not with that approach. It did sound a little like a ‘let’s dance around the Maypole number’ but it wasn’t purposely like that.”

Plant had written the lyric for The Battle Of Evermore after reading a book on the Scottish wars. But he felt the tune needed another vocalist to act as a foil and so the band called on ex-Fairport Convention singer Sandy Denny to provide a rare cameo.

“It’s really more of a playlet than a song,” says Plant. “After I wrote the lyrics I realised I needed another completely different voice as well to give the song full impact. So while I sang the events in the song, Sandy answered back as if she was the pulse of the people on the battlements. Denny was playing the town crier urging people to throw down their weapons.”

At Headley Grange, Plant sang a guide vocal, leaving the response lines for Denny to insert later. Denny noted Plant’s prowess as a vocalist on the session: “We started out soft but I was hoarse by the end, trying to keep up with him.”

The richness of the Bron-Yr-Aur sessions was also apparent. Although Page and Plant had written The Battle Of Evermore on the run at the Grange, other songs that took the same remit of acoustic guitar, mandolin and traditional influence had begun in Snowdonia. Going To California was written there and recorded later at the Grange. Other, more random factors were at work, too. Like the old black dog that used to hang around the Grange’s kitchen.

Bonham’s work on every track was superbly applied, and no more so than his dropping off the beat at 4 minutes 17 seconds into Misty Mountain Hop, the album’s nod to the medicinal properties of good, strong weed. Elsewhere on the album, Jones had an electric synth riff that the band were unable to nail until Bonham laid down a can of Double Diamond (much maligned and now forgotten workingman’s brew), picked up two drumsticks in each hand and, as Jimmy Page remembers, “just went for it. It was magic. We had tried different ways of approaching it. The idea was to get an abstract feeling. We tried it a few times and it didn’t come off until the day Bonzo did that.”

In a nod to John’s genius, the band decided to call the song Four Sticks. “It was a bastard to mix,” says Andy Johns.

More than any other Led Zeppelin album though, before or since, the fourth album, would become both glorified and then later vilified, before coming full-circle latterly to be glorified again for one track: Stairway To Heaven. Destined to become one of their two most famous songs (just ahead of Whole Lotta Love), we all know this one.

Still consistently voted one of, if not the, most popular and most widely known rock songs in history – kind of like Bridge Over Troubled Water and Bohemian Rhapsody all rolled into one – it has become the National Anthem of rock music”.

There are albums that receive near-perfect scores across the board. It is reserved for a special few. The Beatles’ Abbey Road might be one. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours is another. Led Zeppelin IV can be added to the club! This is what the BBC wrote in their 2007 review:

“Recorded at Headley Grange in Hampshire, Island Studios in London and Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, Led Zeppelin IV is the album that put Led Zeppelin into homes around the world, acting as a successful marriage of the hard rock from their second album with the folkier meanderings of their third. It is an album that demonstrates their subtlety and restraint as much as their stadium-filling grandstanding and it confirmed their superstar rock status.

The actually untitled album (it was also known as Four Symbols or The Runes Album), a chart-topper on both sides of the Atlantic, captures the group’s schizophrenia perfectly. On the one hand, they wallop away through genre-defining rock standards such as “Rock And Roll”, “Black Dog” and “Misty Mountain Hop”; yet on the other, they are gentle and restrained on the folk mysticism of “Going To California” and the Sandy Denny co-sung “The Battle Of Evermore.”

It is on their anthem, “Stairway To Heaven”, however, that both strands come together in perfect accord. Starting as a recorder-driven acoustic folk ballad, it culminates in its closing minutes as a full-on, much emulated rock classic, with Robert Plant’s vocals and Jimmy Page’s guitar both approaching career-bests. Led Zeppelin IV also demonstrates the singular talent that was drummer John Bonham – the blues driven “When The Levee Breaks” is one of the most heavily sampled drum tracks of all time.

With immaculate playing (multi-instrumentalist John Paul Jones’ contributions are not to be underestimated, either), a mystically obscure sleeve, and a remarkable range of tunes, Led Zeppelin IV, is still, for many, the best example of the group’s craft. Robert Plant thinks so himself. He has been quoted saying, simply: "the Fourth Album, that's it”.

To end things, I am going to source a review from AllMusic . They recognised the diversity and sheer quality of the 1971 classic from Led Zeppelin:

“Encompassing heavy metal, folk, pure rock & roll, and blues, Led Zeppelin's untitled fourth album is a monolithic record, defining not only Led Zeppelin but the sound and style of '70s hard rock. Expanding on the breakthroughs of III, Zeppelin fuse their majestic hard rock with a mystical, rural English folk that gives the record an epic scope. Even at its most basic -- the muscular, traditionalist "Rock and Roll" -- the album has a grand sense of drama, which is only deepened by Robert Plant's burgeoning obsession with mythology, religion, and the occult. Plant's mysticism comes to a head on the eerie folk ballad "The Battle of Evermore," a mandolin-driven song with haunting vocals from Sandy Denny, and on the epic "Stairway to Heaven." Of all of Zeppelin's songs, "Stairway to Heaven" is the most famous, and not unjustly. Building from a simple fingerpicked acoustic guitar to a storming torrent of guitar riffs and solos, it encapsulates the entire album in one song. Which, of course, isn't discounting the rest of the album. "Going to California" is the group's best folk song, and the rockers are endlessly inventive, whether it's the complex, multi-layered "Black Dog," the pounding hippie satire "Misty Mountain Hop," or the funky riffs of "Four Sticks." But the closer, "When the Levee Breaks," is the one song truly equal to "Stairway," helping give IV the feeling of an epic. An apocalyptic slice of urban blues, "When the Levee Breaks" is as forceful and frightening as Zeppelin ever got, and its seismic rhythms and layered dynamics illustrate why none of their imitators could ever equal them.

[Led Zeppelin launched a massive, Jimmy Page-supervised reissue campaign in 2014, where each of their studio albums was remastered and then expanded with a bonus disc of alternate versions (in the case of the super deluxe editions, they were also supplemented by vinyl pressings and a massive hardcover book). The supplemental disc for Led Zeppelin IV is constructed as a mirror image of the finished album, comprised almost entirely of alternate mixes and instrumentals. "The Battle of Evermore" and "Going to California" belong to the latter category, consisting of nothing but the acoustic guitar and mandolin parts from the finished track, while the rest of the record is devoted to alternate mixes from various sources. Occasionally, a distinction leaps out -- there's a notable lack of swampy, cavernous echo on "When the Levee Breaks," perhaps a few more keyboards on the midsection of "Stairway to Heaven" -- but generally these mixes are leaner, tighter, and not all that different from the finished version. A song or two feels slightly different -- "Misty Mountain Hop" jumps a bit as it seems to groove a little bit stronger -- but by and large this disc shows that as a producer, Page not only knew where he wanted to go but he knew how to get it right the first time.]”.

A happy fiftieth anniversary to the magnificent Led Zeppelin IV. They would follow the album with 1973’s Houses of the Holy. Whilst not quite as strong, it is another wonderful album when the band were very much without competition (one could argue The Who and The Rolling Stones rivalled them, but I would disagree!). Fifty years in the world and Led Zeppelin IV remains this mind-blowing album that is played widely and adored. What better excuse do you need today…

TO spin a classic?!

FEATURE: Crowdbusting: Kate Bush and Electronic Music

FEATURE:

 

 

Crowdbusting

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in an outtake from the cover shoot for 1985’s Hounds of Love (with her dogs, Bonnie and Clyde)/PHOTO CREDIT: John Carder Bush 

Kate Bush and Electronic Music

___________

GIVEN the fact that…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush with a Fairlight CMI in 1982

in the last few weeks, there have been excited news stories regarding cover versions of Kate Bush songs, it is unsurprising I am talking about her pioneering influence. Australian artist Tina Arena recently covered This Woman’s Work (from 1989’s The Sensual World) live; a Grunge cover of Wuthering Heights (from 1978’s The Kick Inside) has surfaced. New mediums like TikTok have brought her music to new ears and ages. I am returning to 1985’ss Hounds of Love again, as I came across a great article from DJ, where Ben Cardew discussed Bush’s influence on Electronic music and her adoption of that sound. He cited Hounds of Love as the first album where she experimented with the genre fully. I would say that The Dreaming (1982) has Electronic vibes. I guess, in the context of the time, Hounds of Love is the first album where she really explored a new direction. In future features, I want to discuss Bush’s musical impact; how she has influenced legions of musicians with particular albums and songs. The article states that, whilst we can hear synthesisers on earlier releases, Hounds of Love embraced new technology and trends:

“‘Hounds Of Love’ wasn’t the first album on which Kate Bush explored the world of electronic music. There were dashes of synthesizer on ‘Oh To Be In Love’ on her debut album ‘The Kick Inside’, with the synth also peeking through on three songs on her follow up, ‘Lionheart’. But Bush really opened up to the possibilities of electronic music on her third studio album, ‘Never For Ever,’ in which she rocketed away from the orchestral pop of her first two records in favor of something more eccentric, embracing electronic instruments such as the Fairlight, the Prophet 5 synth, and the Minimoog, after apparently being introduced to a wealth of new technology by Peter Gabriel. The Fairlight would feature heavily on Bush’s next record, 1982’s ‘The Dreaming’, a bewildering, maximalist gem that Bush would later call “mad.”

 But it was on ‘Hounds Of Love’, released in September 1985 after a lengthy gestation period, that Bush perfected the combination of music and technology, the avant and the popular, to create an album so perfect it seemed to fall from the sky. The genesis of ‘Hounds Of Love’ dates back to 1983, when Bush decided to build her own studio in the barn behind her family house.  She kitted it out with the most up-to-date equipment, including a LinnDrum machine and the Fairlight CMI, which she used to compose most of her new album. Working in her own studio gave Kate Bush freedom, with the recording of ‘Hounds Of Love’ taking place over two liberating years, allowing her to dream up a mind-boggling mixture of progressive pop, song cycles and unlikely instrumental choices, all presided over by her new sampling toy.

Even today, ‘Hounds Of Love’ remains one of the most perfectly poised electronic music records, an album where digital technology and acoustic instruments blend into an entirely seamless cyborg mix, with technology employed as a means to an end, rather than as a destination in itself. If ‘Hounds Of Love’ is overlooked as a pioneering electronic album, then maybe that’s the point: It flourishes as a beautiful whole, a gorgeous work of art that doesn’t call attention to its composite parts or the hard labor behind it.

‘Hounds Of Love’ is quite the opposite of many early electronic music records, where the electronics were designed to draw attention to their new glittery selves and show off the world of machine possibilities. On ‘Hounds Of Love’, everything is subsumed into the music. For Bush, the Fairlight was a new “tool” for writing and arranging, as she explained to Option magazine in 1990, “like the difference between writing a song on a piano or on a guitar.”

The use of the word ‘tool’ is critical: The Fairlight was important for what it did, not what it was. And what it did was to open up Bush’s world to a new range of sonic possibility, as she explained to Option like a proto-Matthew Herbert: “With a Fairlight, you’ve got everything: a tremendous range of things,” she said. “It completely opened me up to sounds and textures and I could experiment with these in a way I could never have done without it.”

What is perhaps most striking about ‘Hounds Of Love’ is that, rather than settling down into a new electronic habit, Bush used her new digital equipment in a number of different ways, depending on the song’s demands. ‘Running Up That Hill,’ the album’s gorgeous opening song, uses a subtly propulsive, rolling tom pattern on the LinnDrum (the work of Bush’s collaborator and then romantic partner Del Palmer) that lays alongside cello samples from the Fairlight, which Bush manipulated to create both the main riff and backing strings.

Music Radar called this one of the 40 greatest synth sounds of all time in April 2021 and it is hard to disagree, the synth both tender and idiosyncratic, while slightly lost in the ether, the perfect accompaniment to the song’s gorgeously dreamy melody. It’s a remarkable achievement that on a song that features one of Bush’s strongest vocal melodies, the synth line is equally iconic, a vital component in one of Kate Bush’s biggest hits. The well-named ‘Under Ice’ has another brilliant synth sound, its chilling tone strangely reminiscent of the glacial eskibeat tones that grime pioneer Wiley would favor two decades later.

Elsewhere, ‘And Dream Of Sheep,’ which kicks off the conceptual song cycle that takes up side two of the record (‘The Ninth Wave’), uses layers of sampled noise — notably gull cries and disconnected voices — to add an extra unsettling aspect to the music, while ‘Mother Stands For Comfort’ offsets samples of breaking glass against electronic notes that pulse like fading lunar distress signals, creating an atmosphere of creeping unease. ‘Hello Earth’ is even more baffling: Musician Michael Berkeley related in a 2005 piece for The Guardian how Bush wanted the song’s chorus to recreate the orthodox singing / chanting from the film Nosferatu, in a way that would both relate harmonically with the song and sound somehow collaged, the kind of bafflingly precise studio instruction that suggests a musician at the height of her invention.

Best of all, though, is ‘Cloudbusting,’ the second single to be released from ‘Hounds Of Love’ and a brilliant example of how electronic music technology — and particularly the Fairlight — enabled Bush to open up her sound, as the proto-sampler replaced the piano as Bush’s main compositional tool. “It [the Fairlight] gives me much more control over arrangements, particularly,” Bush told MTV in 1985. “And it effects so many different areas. As soon as I start writing now, I’m working with a sound that is sparking off a particular atmosphere.”

‘Cloudbusting’ is a song that bursts with melody, sound and atmosphere, a bewitching combination of sonic sources, including two drummers, a string sextet, four backing vocalists, treated vocal samples, synth riffs and the sound of a steam engine. It could have been an abject mess, but Bush — with the help of the Fairlight’s sequencing tools — creates a sound that is utterly pop in its execution and utterly un-pop in its make-up, a pop song put together by a melodic genius hopped up on the sonic possibilities that a sampler can bring. It seems incredible that still, after ‘Hounds Of Love’, people could dare to claim that the synthesizer would kill music, when the album proves so definitively that electronic music can hothouse musical inspiration into wonderful new possibilities.

The influence of Kate Bush on electronic musicians is there for everyone to see. Rave producers loved to sample Bush’s idiosyncratic melodics, and there is a whole generation of British ravers who will be forever unable to think of ‘Cloudbusting’ without imagining chart-troubling rave duo Utah Saints, who swiped its chorus for their UK hit ‘Something Good’.

Björk, Big Boi and Aphex Twin are some of Bush’s most high-profile musical fans — Big Boi once called her “my favorite artist of all time” — while pretty much anyone who was anyone in British music attended her live residency in London in 2014”.

The Fairlight CMI can be heard on 1980’s Never for Ever, though I feel it was from Hounds of Love where we more explicitly detect synths and Electronic sounds. Critics in the U.K. were blown away by Hounds of Love in 1985. The Dreaming is quite a dark and hard-going album in places. Although there is plenty of scope and ambition on Hounds of Love, Bush’s palette is different. It is a more accessible album in a lot of ways. Her astonishing production is key. Moving away from the piano more and embracing the new technology and kit she installed at her specially-built studio at home, this was an album that could easily fit into the 1980s, yet it sounds nothing like other Electronic artists at the time. Think of some of the Electronic albums of the mid-1980s or Pop from Madonna. That was not what Bush was doing sound-wise. Even though Hounds of Love was enormously impactful in 1985 and has been hugely inspiring on Electronic artists (and so many  others) since then, it is unique and original. Hounds of Love’s Art Rock elements also compelled many artists (St. Vincent has cited it as an album that made an impression on her at a young age). I think Kate Bush’s role in evolving Electronic music is undervalued. She is certainly one of the pioneers. Even though, as I say, The Dreaming saw her step into that world, Hounds of Love as a full exploitation and exploration. Thirty-six years after the album was released, artists are still being influenced by it. From the more commercial songs on the first side to the wild and epic suite of songs, The Ninth Wave, Bush’s mastery and production is exceptional! Thanks to the illuminating and fascinating DJ article for highlighting something that, until now, I sort of knew but did not fully appreciated. Through her career – but especially on 1985’s Hounds of Love -, Kate Bush took Electronic music…

TO new places.

FEATURE: The Lockdown Playlist: We Are Stardust, We Are Golden: Joni Mitchell Jewels

FEATURE:

 

 

The Lockdown Playlist

IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell in 1968/PHOTO CREDIT: Jack Robinson/Getty Images

We Are Stardust, We Are Golden: Joni Mitchell Jewels

___________

I may repeat myself…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell in 2020/PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Mazur/VF20/WireImage

when it comes to Joni Mitchell here. As her seventy-eighth birthday is today (7th November), I felt it was only right to put together an assortment of Mitchell’s best tracks. There are so many gems and jewels to choose from! I am going to select my favourite from her. Before that, and to provide some biography about one of the greatest songwriters ever, AllMusic have us sorted:

“Among the singer/songwriters who emerged in the wake of Bob Dylan in the 1960s, none were as adventurous, incisive, or influential as Joni Mitchell. A veteran of the folk music circuit of the '60s, Mitchell first came to prominence as a songwriter, composing the '60s standards "Chelsea Morning," "The Circle Game," and "Both Sides Now." By the time Judy Collins brought the latter into the Billboard Top Ten in 1968, Joni Mitchell signed with Reprise, partially upon the advocacy of ex-Byrd David Crosby, who would wind up producing her debut, Song to a Seagull. Mitchell wound up as part of Los Angeles' folk-rock scene but it often seemed as if she operated upon its fringes, working from a different musical and personal aesthetic, relying on a series of alternate guitar tunings and writing from a stark personal perspective. These qualities came into sharp relief when she started to produce herself on Clouds, a 1969 LP which won the Grammy for Best Folk Performance, setting the stage for her 1971 masterpiece Blue, an album that has served as the cornerstone of introspective singer/songwriter music since the '70s. Mitchell expanded her horizons quickly after she signed with Asylum for 1972's For the Roses, working with a collective of smooth L.A. studio musicians on Court and Spark, the 1974 album that turned into her commercial breakthrough thanks to the Top Ten single "Help Me" and its sequel "Free Man in Paris." From there, Mitchell embraced jazz fusion and worldbeat on such revered albums as The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira. Mitchell's momentum slowed as she moved to Geffen in the early '80s but her restlessness didn't wane, as she reckoned with new wave on 1982's Wild Things Run Fast and 1985's Dog Eat Dog. Mitchell moved back to Reprise or 1994's Turbulent Indigo, which earned her a Grammy Award for Pop Album of the Year. Her musical output slowed considerably at this point -- almost ten years separated 1998's Taming the Tiger and 2007's Shine, her last two albums of original material -- but her legacy not only loomed large, it grew as listeners and artists caught up to the innovations she pioneered throughout her career.

Born Roberta Joan Anderson in Fort McLeod, Alberta, Canada, on November 7, 1943, she was stricken with polio at the age of nine; while recovering in a children's hospital, she began her performing career by singing to the other patients. After teaching herself to play guitar with the aid of a Pete Seeger instruction book, she went off to art college and became a fixture on the folk music scene around Alberta. After relocating to Toronto, she married folksinger Chuck Mitchell in 1965, and began performing under the name Joni Mitchell.

A year later the couple moved to Detroit, Michigan, but separated soon after; Joni remained in the Motor City, however, and won significant press acclaim for her burgeoning songwriting skills and smoky, distinctive vocals, leading to a string of high-profile performances in New York City. There she became a cause célèbre among the media and other performers; after she signed to Reprise in 1967, David Crosby offered to produce her debut record, a self-titled acoustic effort that appeared the following year. Her songs also found great success with other singers: in 1968, Judy Collins scored a major hit with the Mitchell-penned "Both Sides Now," while Fairport Convention covered "Eastern Rain" and Tom Rush recorded "The Circle Game."

Thanks to all of the outside exposure, Mitchell began to earn a strong cult following; her 1969 sophomore effort, Clouds, reached the Top 40, while 1970's Ladies of the Canyon sold even better on the strength of the single "Big Yellow Taxi." It also included her anthemic composition "Woodstock," a major hit for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. Still, the commercial and critical approval awarded her landmark 1971 record Blue was unprecedented: a luminous, starkly confessional set written primarily during a European vacation, the album firmly established Mitchell as one of pop music's most remarkable and insightful talents.

Predictably, she turned away from Blue's incandescent folk with 1972's For the Roses, the first of the many major stylistic turns she would take over the course of her daring career. Backed by rock-jazz performer Tom Scott, Mitchell's music began moving into more pop-oriented territory, a change typified by the single "You Turn Me on (I'm a Radio)," her first significant hit. The follow-up, 1974's classic Court and Spark, was her most commercially successful outing: a sparkling, jazz-accented set, it reached the number two spot on the U.S. album charts and launched three hit singles -- "Help Me," "Free Man in Paris," and "Raised on Robbery."

After the 1974 live collection Miles of Aisles, Mitchell emerged in 1975 with The Hissing of Summer Lawns, a bold, almost avant-garde record that housed her increasingly complex songs in experimental, jazz-inspired settings; "The Jungle Line" introduced the rhythms of African Burundi drums, placing her far ahead of the pop world's mid-'80s fascination with world music. 1976's Hejira, recorded with Weather Report bassist Jaco Pastorius, smoothed out the music's more difficult edges while employing minimalist techniques; Mitchell later performed the album's first single, "Coyote," at the Band's Last Waltz concert that Thanksgiving.

Her next effort, 1977's two-record set Don Juan's Reckless Daughter, was another ambitious move, a collection of long, largely improvisational pieces recorded with jazz players Larry Carlton and Wayne Shorter, Chaka Khan, and a battery of Latin percussionists. Shortly after the record's release, Mitchell was contacted by the legendary jazz bassist Charles Mingus, who invited her to work with him on a musical interpretation of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Mingus, who was suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease, sketched out a series of melodies to which Mitchell added lyrics; however, Mingus died on January 5, 1979, before the record was completed. After Mitchell finished their collaboration on her own, she recorded the songs under the title Mingus, which was released the summer after the jazz titan's passing.

Following her second live collection, 1980's Shadows and Light, Mitchell returned to pop territory for 1982's Wild Things Run Fast; the first single, a cover of the Elvis Presley hit "(You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care," became her first chart single in eight years. Shortly after the album's release, she married bassist/sound engineer Larry Klein, who became a frequent collaborator on much of her subsequent material, including 1985's synth-driven Dog Eat Dog, co-produced by Thomas Dolby. Mitchell's move into electronics continued with 1988's Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm, featuring guests Peter Gabriel, Willie Nelson, Tom Petty, and Billy Idol.

Mitchell returned to her roots with 1991's Night Ride Home, a spare, stripped-down collection spotlighting little more than her voice and acoustic guitar. Prior to recording 1994's Turbulent Indigo, she and Klein separated, although he still co-produced the record, which was her most acclaimed work in years. In 1996, she compiled a pair of anthologies, Hits and Misses, which collected her chart successes as well as underappreciated favorites. A new studio album, Taming the Tiger, followed in 1998. Both Sides Now, a collection of standards, followed in early 2000.

Two years later, Mitchell resurfaced with the double-disc release Travelogue. She announced in October 2002 that this would be her last album ever -- she'd grown tired of the industry. She told W magazine that she intended to retire. She also claimed she would never sign another corporate label deal, and in Rolling Stone blasted the recording industry for being "a cesspool." By the time Travelogue appeared a month later, Mitchell had simmered down and her plans to call it quits had been axed. Numerous compilations and remasters appeared between 2002 and 2006, culminating in the release of the independent Shine in 2007. In 2014, Mitchell helped compile her first box set anthology, Love Has Many Faces: A Quartet, A Ballet, Waiting to Be Danced, which featured remastered versions of 53 songs from her back catalog, all dealing with some aspect of love and relationships. A box set of unreleased recordings chronicling her early folk years called Joni Mitchell Archives, Vol. 1: The Early Years (1963-1967) arrived in October 2020”.

To mark the approaching birthday of a true icon, this Lockdown Playlist is an assortment of phenomenal tracks from one of the finest artists the world has ever seen. Many happy returns to Joni Mitchell. Since the late-1960s, her music has influenced others and compelled so many of her peers – that will continue for generations more. Here is a playlist that highlights why Mitchell is…

A true genius.

FEATURE: Station to Station: Part Twenty-One: Charlie Hedges (BBC Radio 1)

FEATURE:

 

 

Station to Station

PHOTO CREDIT: @charliehedges 

Part Twenty-One: Charlie Hedges (BBC Radio 1)

___________

ONE of my favourite…

shows on BBC Radio 1 is Charlie Hedges’ Dance Anthems. Serving up some classic Dance cuts, it is essential listening! It is on at 01:00, so many people might not be able to tune in live. Listen to episodes on the Sounds apps. I love Hedges as a broadcaster, and I feel that her selections and knowledge of Dance is infectious. As she also presents BBC Radio 1’s Live Lounge with Rickie and Melvin, there is much to appreciate about a remarkable broadcaster (follow her on Instagram if you can). h She is someone who deserves more time and space on the station. There are a few older interviews with Hedges that I want to bring in – when she worked for other radio stations. A successful and celebrated club and international D.J., she is a world-class talent who, as I suggest, should get even more airtime on BBC Radio 1. She has had a successful career and worked for different stations. I am interested to see where her radio career goes. There are some reference articles that are worth highlighting first. Her Wikipedia page gives us a brief overview of Charlie Hedges’ career development and background:

“Hedges hosted the breakfast show at Kiss for ten years with Rickie Haywood-Williams and Melvin Odoom. The trio are known as Rickie, Melvin and Charlie. In November 2018, it was announced that they would move to BBC Radio 1 to replace Charlie Sloth in the mid-evening slot. Their new show debuted on 1 April 2019. On 20 April 2021, it was announced that the trio would be moving to the mid-morning slot prevuously occupied by Clara Amfo, who would takeover the early evening slot from Annie Mac.

In September 2020, it was announced that Hedges would replace MistaJam as the host of Radio 1's Dance Anthems on Saturday afternoons. Hedges took over the following month.

DJ

Hedges has performed DJ sets at various clubs and festivals. In 2014, Hedges released a single titled "Best Night OML" with vocals from JB Gill. In 2016, Hedges released a single titled "Kaleidoscope" on Armada Deep featuring vocalist Sonny Reeves”.

As we can tell from the P.R. company who represents her, Hedges’ role on BBC Radio 1 is much more than (her as) a Dance music host. She has been with the station for a couple of year. In that time, made a huge impression:

“In April 2019, Charlie joined Radio 1 with Rickie and Melvin for their brand-new evening show which features random conversations, hilarious phone-ins and interviews. She went on to host Dance Anthems, the biggest dance show in the UK. And now, two years after she joined the station, Charlie is transitioning to daytime as one of the hosts of  Radio 1’s Live Lounge. Kicking off in September 2021, Charlie, Rickie and Melvin will be bringing listeners a Live Lounge full of good vibes and good tunes every day.

Making such an impression at the station, Charlie has covered for both MistaJam and Scott Mills and featured alongside Greg James on the breakfast show’s emotional Festive Feeling segment, which saw her travel around the country to surprise listeners with money-can’t-buy gifts.

Charlie started her career at KISS in 2005 and her infectious energy soon saw her co-present the breakfast show. She became the UK’s youngest ever breakfast DJ and was there for a recording-breaking fifteen years, pulling in the station’s highest ever reach of listeners, making it the biggest commercial breakfast show in the UK at the time and winning a Gold Sony Radio Award.

On 28th February 2020, Charlie Hedges and Eddie Craig released a brand-new track, ‘You’re No Good For Me’, with dance label Spinnin’ Records. It’s already had plays on KISS FM, as well as Dance Anthems and Party Anthems on BBC Radio 1. In September 2021, Charlie will be releasing two remixes - Rudimental and Hardie Caprio’s ‘Ghost’ and Welshy’s ‘All For You’.

When she’s not on the radio or making music, you’ll find Charlie watching female boxing, researching the latest fashion trends and DJing at some of the biggest clubs, events and festivals including Boardmasters, Bradford Live Festival and The Loft in Newcastle.

Charlie is down-to-earth with a wicked sense of humour and a cracking laugh. She’s the sort of person you instantly feel at ease with. In fact, moments after meeting her you’ll find yourself laughing away like you’ve been best mates for years – just one of the many reasons we’re thrilled to be working with her”.

It is a very exciting time for a multi-talented D.J. and broadcaster who has so much passion and drive to offer! Charlie Hedges’ knowledge and curated mixes have drawn me to BBC Radio 1. I am a big fan of Club and Dance music, but I especially love the classics. If you need a dose of the best anthems from the genre, check out Hedges’ show!

There are a couple of old interviews that I need to source, to give a bit of background. It is interesting where Hedges came from and the sort of career she has enjoyed so far. EXPOSED featured Hedges back in 2015. They asked her about the sort of venues she has played as a D.J., in addition to what her inspirations are:

“You’ve got some incredible venues under your belt – Space, Ibiza; Gashoulder, Amsterdam; Ministry of Sound, London. What was the maddest crowd?

They were all great! But when I played at Space, Ibiza, for the opening party, you’ll usually have a DJ on the mic who will tell everyone to sit down and when the track drops, everyone gets up and jumps. I don’t even use a mic but the crowd arranged it between themselves in the middle of my set – it was insane!

In terms of other artists, who is your biggest inspiration?

I’ve got a few in terms of inspiration but someone who has really helped me out is Steve Aoki. I played with him at Pacha last year in Ibiza and I’ve met him loads of times now, so I consider him a friend, and he’s really helped me out a lot – if I need any advice then I’ll just go to him. As a performer, he is definitely up there, he’s not just a DJ, he knows how to bring the party, he’s got the whole package without a doubt. Michael Woods is up there as well.

When you aren’t performing or presenting, how do you chill out?

Eat everything. I love eating. I literally love my food. I do like going for a run when I can, and I should make more of an effort to go on runs really but I’m just too busy sometimes.

If you weren’t doing music/radio, what would you be doing?

I would be finding a way to do it. I studied for a journalism degree and that was my back up. If I couldn’t directly get into the music industry or radio, I thought I could maybe get in by writing. Even as a kid, there was nothing else I wanted to do, I don’t know what else I’d wanna do, except open a Mexican house music restaurant obviously!”.

Before wrapping up and letting you explore Charlie Hedges’ work, The Student Pocket Guide chatted with the D.J. back in 2016. At the time, she was working with Kiss FM. It is fascinating to learn how she worked her way through the ranks and got to where she was then:

“You’re currently DJing alongside presenting radio station Kiss FM. What made you decide to give DJing a go?

I’ve always wanted to be a club DJ from day one and I knew working in radio would give me an amazing platform and chance to get into the world of DJing and making music. I love talking (obviously!) and the radio side to my life is so much fun, I love them both!

How did you work your way up the ladder to land in the highly successful position you’re in now?

So, aged 13 I applied to be a freelance journalist/assistant for a local magazine called Naked Tongue in Essex, they gave me the job just for the cheek of asking as it was a magazine aimed at over 25’s. In my school lunch breaks I’d then make lists of celebrities I’d ideally like to interview and then I’d track down their PA’s online. Before I knew it I was interviewing some great people who were kind enough to give a 13-year-old a chance, my interviews were getting published in the magazine and one of the guest interviews was with a Kiss DJ at the time. How that came about is a great story too but I’ll keep it short, basically my Dad is a London black cab driver and picked one of the presenters up in his cab, Dad being Dad he talked them into letting me interview them and the rest leads on from there!

From that day onwards I kept in touch with the breakfast show presenters at Kiss and used to come up for work experience every few months. Timing-wise, it’s crazy how things happened as I finished college and a week before I started uni to study for a BA in Journalism at Harlow College I got a call from the presenters on the breakfast show at the time asking if I wanted a job as a runner/tea maker. I took the job – I used to get into Kiss at 4:00am, work on the breakfast show and watch and learn everything I could behind the scenes until the show finished at 9am,then I would drive to uni until 6/7pm and did this for 3 years until I graduated with my BA in Journalism. Like I mentioned, I’d always wanted to be a DJ and radio presenter but knew it would always be good to have a backup plan but in the same field, hence why I studied for the journalism degree. I loved to write too, still do today – I’ve still got a pen to paper daily diary haha!

After my degree I was offered a full time job at Kiss and in the background I taught myself to DJ. I’d practice at Kiss whenever a studio was free, using YouTube and Googling DJ tutorials to pick up on the basics and then I practiced every single day until the time came probably 6 months to a year later when I was ready to give a club a go. I can remember my first gig to this day, it was in a small bar in Bexleyheath Kent. Before I had a management team I’d get myself club bookings and gigs all over London and the outskirts, celebrity parties too by contacting promoters direct – to be honest, I had no real organisation going on so I was moving forward but not in a structured way; I had worked with a few management teams until people were recognising me as a DJ and not just the girl that presents the Kiss breakfast show.

Since starting with my current management team (Fresh Artistes) I am now organised, I have clear goals and I’m moving towards these goals at an incredible pace.I’ve got some amazing projects already on the go and there’s a whole heap of new ones on the way too; things are really coming together and for the first time ever I know I’m with the right people who are working with me because they 100% believe in me.You guys wouldn’t believe how much that means to me, I now have gigs all over the UK and around the world coming up over the next year, and this is where I am right now!

You’ve DJ’d in some major festivals, including V, Wireless, and the Isle of White Festival. What’s been your personal favourite?

I have honestly loved them all, it’s very hard as a DJ to pick your favourite as every gig comes with new and exciting memories and lessons too.But I have to say I did love playing Isle Of Wight Festival last year, I played in the Big Top Tent just before Paul Oakenfold and the tent was heaving, there was a heavy metal band on before me and so going from this to house music was a big change up, I’ve never been so proud seeing a tent the size of that fill up within 10 mins of me playing, I’ll remember that set forever.

Is it tough being a female DJ in a profession largely dominated by males?

I think it’s tough in any profession to be honest whether dominated mostly by males or not. Everybody in every job, in every office/workplace faces challenges in life, that’s what life is all about: being set challenges and having to overcome them. I’m not saying it’s been easy but then what fun would that have been if it was?
Tell us a secret about yourself.
I have a blanket that I had from the day I was born…I still have it haha”.

I love Charlie Hedges’’ broadcasting work. She is an amazing D.J. and one of the biggest and most important names on BBC Radio 1. It would be great to think that she would have more shows and airtime on the station in 2022. Such a wonderful and authoritative talent, I have loved the Classic Dance Anthems show. Let’s hope that we hear the amazing Charlie Hedges on the radio…

FOR many more years.

FEATURE: A Buyer’s Guide: Part Seventy-Nine: Def Leppard

FEATURE:

 

 

A Buyer’s Guide

Part Seventy-Nine: Def Leppard

___________

IT is only recently…

that I have got into and started to explore the back catalogue of Def Leppard. The legendary Sheffield band formed in 1977. I was keen to highlight their best albums in this edition. Before getting there, AllMusic help out with some background and biography:

“In many ways, Def Leppard were the definitive hard rock band of the '80s. There were groups that rocked harder, but few captured the spirit of the times quite as well. Emerging in the late '70s as part of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, Def Leppard gained a following outside of that scene by toning down their heavy riffs and emphasizing melody. After a couple of strong albums, they were poised for crossover success by the time of 1983's Pyromania, and skillfully used the fledgling MTV network to their advantage. They reached the pinnacle of their career with 1987's blockbuster Hysteria, then had another big hit, 1992's Adrenalize, that defied the mainstream turn toward grunge. After that, the band settled into a pattern of touring exhaustively and releasing an album every few years, maintaining a steady audience and occasionally surprising fans with an album, like 2008's Yeah!, that harked back to the sound of their glory days.

Def Leppard originated in a Sheffield-based group that teenagers Rick Savage (bass) and Pete Willis (guitar) formed in 1977. Vocalist Joe Elliott, a fanatical follower of Mott the Hoople and T. Rex, joined the band several months later, bringing the name Deaf Leopard with him. After a spelling change, the trio, augmented by a now-forgotten drummer, began playing local Sheffield pubs, and within a year the band had added guitarist Steve Clark to the lineup, as well as a new drummer. Later in 1978, they recorded their debut EP, Getcha Rocks Off, and released it on their own label, Bludgeon Riffola. The EP became a word-of-mouth success, earning airplay on the BBC.

Following the release of Getcha Rocks Off, 15-year-old Rick Allen was added as the band's permanent drummer, and Def Leppard quickly became the toast of the British music weeklies. They soon signed with AC/DC's manager, Peter Mensch, who helped them secure a contract with Mercury Records. On Through the Night, the band's full-length debut, was released in 1980 and instantly became a hit in the U.K., also earning significant airplay in the U.S., where it reached number 51 on the charts. Over the course of the year, Def Leppard relentlessly toured Britain and America, playing their own shows while also opening concerts for Ozzy Osbourne, Sammy Hagar, and Judas Priest. High 'n' Dry followed in 1981 and became the group's first platinum album in the U.S., thanks to MTV's strong rotation of "Bringin' on the Heartbreak."

As the band recorded the follow-up to High 'n' Dry with producer Mutt Lange, Pete Willis was fired from the group because of his alcoholism, and Phil Collen, a former guitarist for Girl, was hired to replace him. The resulting album, 1983's Pyromania, became an unexpected blockbuster, due not only to Def Leppard's skillful, melodic metal, but also to MTV's repeated airing of "Photograph" and "Rock of Ages." Pyromania went on to sell ten million copies, establishing Def Leppard as one of the most popular bands in the world. Despite their success, they were about to enter a trying time in their career. Following an extensive international tour, the group reentered the studio to record the follow-up, but producer Lange was unavailable, so they began sessions with Jim Steinman, the man responsible for Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell. The pairing turned out to be ill-advised, so the bandmembers turned to their former engineer, Nigel Green. One month into recording, Allen lost his left arm in a New Year's Eve car accident. The arm was reattached, but it had to be amputated once an infection set in.

Def Leppard's future looked cloudy without a drummer, but by the spring of 1985 -- just a few months after his accident -- Allen began learning to play a custom-made electronic kit assembled for him by Simmons. The band soon resumed recording, and within a few months, Lange was back on board; having judged all the existing tapes inferior, he ordered the band to begin work all over again. Recording sessions continued throughout 1986, and that summer, the group returned to the stage for the European Monsters of Rock tour. Def Leppard finally completed their fourth album, now titled Hysteria, early in 1987. The record was released that spring to lukewarm reviews, with many critics claiming that the album compromised Leppard's metal roots for sweet pop flourishes. Accordingly, Hysteria was slow out of the starting gates -- "Women," the first single, failed to really take hold -- but the release of "Animal" helped the album gather steam. The song became Def Leppard's first Top 40 hit in the U.K., but more importantly, it launched a string of six straight Top 20 hits in the U.S., which also included "Hysteria," "Pour Some Sugar on Me," "Love Bites," "Armageddon It," and "Rocket," the latter of which arrived in 1989, a full two years after the release of Hysteria. During those two years, Def Leppard's presence was unavoidable -- they were the kings of high school metal, ruling the pop charts and MTV, and teenagers and bands alike replicated their teased hair and ripped jeans, even when the grimy hard rock of Guns N' Roses took hold in 1988.

Hysteria proved to be the peak of Leppard's popularity, yet their follow-up remained eagerly awaited in the early '90s, as the band took a break from the road and set to work on a new record. During the recording process, however, Steve Clark died from an overdose of alcohol and drugs. Clark had historically battled alcohol, and following their Hysteria heyday, his bandmates forced him to take a sabbatical. Although he did enter rehab, Clark's habits continued, and his abuse was so crippling that Collen began recording the majority of the band's guitar leads. Following Clark's death, Def Leppard resolved to finish their forthcoming album as a quartet, releasing Adrenalize in the spring of 1992. Adrenalize was greeted with mixed reviews, and even though the album debuted at number one and contained several successful singles, including the Top 20 hits "Let's Get Rocked" and "Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad," the record was a commercial disappointment in the wake of Pyromania and Hysteria. After its release, the group added former Whitesnake guitarist Vivian Campbell to the lineup, thus resuming Def Leppard's two-guitar attack.

In 1993, Def Leppard issued the rarities collection Retro Active, which yielded another Top 20 hit with the acoustic ballad "Two Steps Behind." Two years later, the group released the greatest-hits collection Vault while preparing for their sixth album. Slang arrived in the spring of 1996, and while it proved more adventurous than its predecessor, it was greeted with indifference, indicating that Leppard's heyday had indeed passed, and they were now simply a very popular cult band. Undaunted, Leppard soldiered on, returning to their patented pop-metal sound for Euphoria, which was released in June of 1999. Despite the success of "Promises," the record failed to produce any additional hits, resulting in a return to adult pop balladry on 2002's X. The two-disc Rock of Ages: The Definitive Collection arrived in 2005, followed in 2006 by Yeah!, a strong collection of covers.

In 2008, the guys released their ninth studio album, Songs from the Sparkle Lounge, which debuted at number five and was supported by a lucrative summer tour. Material from that tour helped make up the bulk of 2011's Mirror Ball: Live & More, a three-disc live album containing a full concert, three new studio recordings, and DVD footage. Another live album followed two years later: Viva! Hysteria found Def Leppard running through their 1987 blockbuster in its entirety on the first disc, and a collection of early, rarely played material on the second. In 2015, the band released Def Leppard, their 11th studio album and first collection of original music since 2008.

In February 2017, the group issued And There Will Be a Next Time, a live album culled from the Def Leppard supporting tour. Later that year, a Super Deluxe Edition of Hysteria came out in celebration of the record's 30th anniversary. Further repackagings continued in 2018 with a box set of their '80s albums titled The Collection, Vol. 1 and The Story So Far: The Best of Def Leppard, a multi-disc set that included the band's first four studio albums and various rarities. The next year saw the release of The Collection, Vol. 2, a set of their '90s records, and The Story So Far, Vol. 2: Hits & B-Sides, which picked up where the first volume left off with material from the band's '90s run and beyond. Def Leppard continued to tour on a regular basis and played a Las Vegas residency, then in 2020 issued a collection of their first two albums plus a live set and BBC sessions titled The Early Years 79-81”.

To acknowledge and salute the long and successful career of Def Leppard, here are are their four essential albums to seek out; one that is underrated and warrants more time, in addition to their latest studio album. I could not find a book to recommend (so I shall leave that bit out this week). If you are new to Def Leappard and need a guide, I hope that the suggestions below…

ARE of use.

________________

The Four Essential Albums

 

High 'N' Dry

Release Date: 6th July, 1981

Labels: Vertigo (U.K.)/Mercury (U.S.)

Producer: Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange

Standout Tracks: High 'N’ Dry (Saturday Night)/Bringin’ on the Heartbreak/You Got Me Runnin'

Buy: https://www.amazon.co.uk/High-N-Dry-Remastered-VINYL/dp/B07Z76LPGJ

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/2FC50FeHFVmksOYX1cymxr?si=d9X48zjtRIulnPD7D-nLlQ

Review:

“During their formative years in the late 70s, Leppard – alongside Iron Maiden and Saxon – became one of the hottest properties to emerge from what Sounds journalist Geoff Barton dubbed the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (aka NWOBHM): a new breed of grass-roots, UK hard rock outfits who loved the anthemic cut and thrust of classic 70s rock icons such as Thin Lizzy, Led Zeppelin, and UFO, but also the attitude and raw aggression of punk.

Inevitably, these influences fed into the DNA of Leppard’s On Through The Night: a no-nonsense studio capture of the live set they’d honed through 18 months of solid gigging, which they banged out with a Ramones-esque intensity with the help of Black Sabbath/Judas Priest producer Tom Allom.

A series of positive reviews (including one from Rolling Stone suggesting that “they not only respect their elders, they’ve taken cues from their new wave peers too”) confirmed Leppard were on the right track, but the band realized they still needed to step up a gear to connect on an international level.

Accordingly, the Sheffield quintet turned to a new producer, South African-born Robert John “Mutt” Lange, whose credits included The Boomtown Rats, The Motors, and, most recently, AC/DC’s influential, multi-platinum-selling Back In Black. Known for his meticulous approach to his craft, Lange’s input would soon have a significant effect on the course of Def Leppard’s career, but his disciplined methods initially forced his new charges to adapt quite dramatically.

“It was almost like army discipline, but he got great performances out of everyone that we’d never have got otherwise,” vocalist Joe Elliott recalled in 2014. “Mutt Lange was a great captain, a great leader. We were rudderless and he gave us a direction, which was what we desperately needed.”

During the course of the High’n’Dry sessions at London’s Battery Studios, the band and their new producer painstakingly dissected, rearranged, and even significantly re-wrote the material they’d prepared, but the resulting album was all the better for it.

Indeed, High’n’Dry proved to be the record where Def Leppard’s distinctive, arena-slaying sound first materialized. Their new-found confidence and verve was apparent, whether they were piling into high-octane anthems (“Let It Go,” “You Got Me Runnin’,” “On Through The Night”) or mastering complex set-pieces such as the edgy “Another Hit And Run” and the beautifully crafted, widescreen ballad “Bringin’ On The Heartbreak,” which segued into an ambitious “Layla”-esque instrumental coda, “Switch 625” – udiscoverrmusic.

Choice Cut: Let It Go

Pyromania

Release Date: 20th January, 1983

Labels: Vertigo (U.K. and Europe)/Mercury (U.S.)

Producer: Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange

Standout Tracks: Rock Rock (Till You Drop)/Photograph/Too Late for Love

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/release/393266

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/5ab6RIlAGwbVAacV1JIr2d?si=Yb4qu-aBQEmPvFizm-t43g

Review:

“While Def Leppard had obviously wanted to write big-sounding anthems on their previous records, Pyromania was where the band's vision coalesced and gelled into something more. More than ever before, the band's songs on Pyromania are driven by catchy, shiny melodic hooks instead of heavy guitar riffs, although the latter do pop up once in a while. But it wasn't just this newly intensified focus on melody and consistent songwriting (and heavy MTV exposure) that made Pyromania a massive success -- and the catalyst for the '80s pop-metal movement. Robert John "Mutt" Lange's buffed-to-a-sheen production -- polished drum and guitar sounds, multi-tracked layers of vocal harmonies, a general sanding of any and all musical rough edges, and a perfectionistic attention to detail -- set the style for much of the melodic hard rock that followed. It wasn't a raw or spontaneous sound, but the performances were still energetic and committed. Leppard's quest for huge, transcendent hard rock perfection on Pyromania was surprisingly successful; their reach never exceeded their grasp, which makes the album an enduring (and massively influential) classic” - AllMusic

Choice Cut: Rock of Ages

Hysteria

Release Date: 3rd August, 1987

Labels: Phonogram (Europe)/Mercury (U.S. and Japan)

Producer: Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange

Standout Tracks: Women/Animal/Love Bites

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=31048&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/1ja2qzCrh6bZykcojbZs82?si=ByCMAljTQuKXS9J-Pyr7xw

Review:

“Def Leppard did release their goal of seven singles from Hysteria and, in the American market, the first six went in the exact sequence of the album’s first side. The opener “Women” seems, in retrospect, a curious choice being it is not nearly as strong as some of the other tracks and that was reflected in its modest chart success. “Rocket” followed, as a lyrical sequence of old record titles, built on a strong drum shuffle rhythm. The arrangement was forged by lead vocalist Joe Elliot and included a quasi-psychedelic middle section laced with many sound effects and backwards masking.

“Animal” was the third single released and became the band’s first Top 10 hit on both sides of the Atlantic. In total, the song took over two and a half years to get right, the most difficult of their career. Like many songs on the album, “Animal” contains well produced layered guitar riffs by guitarists Steve Clark and Phil Collen and musically, it is the closest extension to Pyromania and signaled to many long-time fans that the band was truly back. Still, at this point album sales were lagging behind those of the predecessor and it looked like Hysteria may actually lose money.

Then came the huge, chart-topping hits. “Love Bites” was written by Lange as a near-country song and transformed to a power ballad for Def Leppard. It was the cross-over hit that the band had long wanted and opened them up to a pop audience like no song before. “Pour Some Sugar On Me” was written last, when much of the band (but not Lange) thought the album was completed. It originated from a hook by Elliot and was built like a rap song along with Lange. The ultimate success of “Pour Some Sugar on Me” sent sales of Hysteria through the roof as it sold nearly four million copies during the single’s run on the charts. The first side concludes with another charting single, “Armageddon It”. The tongue-in-cheek joke title came from a literal studio conversation when Lange asked Clark “Are you getting it?” To which Clark replied “I’m a-gettin’ it” – Classic Rock Review

Choice Cut: Pour Some Sugar on Me

Euphoria

Release Date: 6th June, 1999 (U.S.)

Label: Mercury

Producers: Pete Woodroffe/Def Leppard

Standout Tracks: Back in Your Face/Goodbye/Paper Sun

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=31157&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/7EAgGLOZoYNm5P5rF5IjV2?si=JVFAjY3RSmytZvwC-avkQw

Review:

“Even though Slang successfully revitalized Def Leppard, it didn't become a huge hit, which was a disappointment, considering that the band adjusted their sound to fit the times. Taking that into account, Def Leppard set out to make a classic Def Leppard album with Slang's successor, Euphoria. And, surprisingly, that's exactly what they've delivered. From the outset, it's clear that Euphoria finds the band returning to the glam-inflected, unabashedly catchy, arena-ready pop-metal that made them stars -- and it's also clear that they're not concerned with having a hit, they just want to make a good record. For them, that means returning to the pop-metal formula that made Pyromania and Hysteria blockbusters, even if they must know that this signature sound no longer guarantees a hit at the close of the '90s. It is true that this approach means Euphoria sounds out of time in 1999, but it's a tight, attractive album with more than its share of big hooks, strong riffs, and memorable melodies. There are a couple of slow moments here and there, but no more than those on Hysteria, and the best songs (particularly the opening triptych of "Demoltion Man," "Promises," "Back in Your Face," plus the jangly Beatles-esque "21st Century Sha-La-La Girl") are worthy additions to an already strong catalog. But what's best about Euphoria is that it's utterly not self-conscious. Def Leppard feels free to try straight pop, appropriate Gary Glitter riffs, or play straight metal, without caring whether it's hip or commercial. That doesn't mean Euphoria is a classic, but it does mean that it's their most appealing effort in over a decade” – AllMusic

Choice Cut: Promises

The Underrated Gem

 

Yeah!

Release Date: 23rd May, 2006

Labels: Mercury/Island (U.S./Canada)

Producers: Def Leppard/Ronan McHugh

Standout Tracks: 20th Century Boy/Rock On/10538 Overture

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=31180&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/2XWi9UGkoa4bnObVeMGn8K?si=N3GM1zIiRtq4uNbtqUbyeQ

Review:

“Def Leppard have a huge chip on their shoulder about being lumped in with the U.K. and U.S. hair-metal bands of the Eighties. To set the record straight, they’ve recorded this album of covers of songs by their real heroes: people like David Bowie, T.Rex and the Kinks, as well as lesser-known Seventies rockers such as Sweet and John Kongos. Happily, Yeah! is their most convincing album in fourteen years, which proves their point. Standout tracks include a straightforward cover of David Essex’s “”Rock On”” and an amped-up take on the Faces’ “”Stay With Me,”” in which Phil Collen seems to conjure Rod Stewart. The only real misstep is a flat rendition of Blondie’s “”Hanging on the Telephone”” (coincidentally the only American group on the album). None of the arrangements veer far from the originals, but they don’t need to — it’s good enough to just hear the band having fun and to see where all the Hysteria came from” – Rolling Stone

Choice Cut: No Matter What

The Latest Album

 

Def Leppard

Release Date: 30th October, 2015

Labels: Bludgeon Riffola/Mailboat (U.S.)/earMUSIC (Europe)

Producers: Ronan McHugh/Def Leppard

Standout Tracks: Let's Go/Man Enough/We Belong

Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=905339&ev=mb

Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/68zsPqS53fVtv9jUU2GZPz?si=o3TlMakEQ82uZplJ8SWLDg

Review:

“A hard core turn comes next with “Man Enough” a song that taps into the band’s inner Queen and sounds nothing like they’ve ever done before. It’s got a great opening Rick Savage bass line that resonates throughout and after a few listens expect this to get stuck in your head.

If their ballads from the mid-1980s remain relevant today then add “We Belong” to the mix because this is exactly why the ladies come out in droves. You’re all that I am/You’re all that I see/The Keys to the kingdom waiting for me. Yeah, guys can step aside; the women will sop this one up. Add in vocal duties by guitarists Phil Collen and Vivian Campbell and Def Leppard just added another element to their repertoire.  Another ode to the ladies follows with “Invincible” but with a little more rock flare.

“Sea of Love” again changes the band’s direction and brings a little bit of everything. It’s got dynamic vocals from Elliott and some crushing guitar chords brought to you by Collen and Campbell who trade back and forth all album long just like they’ve done now for nearly 25 years. “Energized” marks the halfway point and is one of those songs that sounds like Def Leppard but it doesn’t.

Hard driving rock introduces “All Time High” before the song melts into a more modern rock persona and “Battle of my Own” starts off with the acoustics before the band opens up nearly two minutes in. “Broke ‘n’ Brokenhearted” finds the Def Leppard we all know and love with a classic chorus hook. “Forever Young” isn’t a bad song it just doesn’t stand out much and gets lost because the final three cuts bring the album home.

Certainly somewhere a father/daughter dance opened to a Def Leppard song but the country infused “Last Dance” is certain to be played at weddings in the future. It’s more ballad than ballad if you can believe that and might not please the hard rockers but is thoughtful and so well written musically and check out these pretty moving lyrics: Do you remember when we used to dance/Lighting up the universe, living life for what it’s worth/Took a chance.

“Wings of an Angel” puts an end to the slow stuff immediately with some slamming guitars at the front and competes with anything on radio today. Will it translate into a crossover from the band’s oft played 80s hits on classic rock radio? No, but their loss. Finally, “Blind Faith” keeps the modern rock touch with Elliott showing as much vocal range as he’s done on any album” – Drew’s Reviews

Choice Cut: Dangerous