FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Songs from Albums Turning Twenty in 2026

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

 

Songs from Albums Turning Twenty in 2026

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IF not the very best…

year from the 2000s, 2006 did give us a few classic albums. I wanted to mark the best of 2006, as these albums will be turning twenty next year. A big anniversary, we need to mark these great albums. I have three more features in this run where I mark important anniversaries. Some might remember 2006 more fondly than me. I think that it was certainly a changeable time and there were some interesting new artists coming through. However, most of the albums I am including in the mixtape at the end are from bigger artists. Regardless of whether you remember these albums or were not really old enough to remember 2006, you will find much to appreciate here. I was a couple of years out of university when these albums came out, so I have find memories of many of them. Below is a full and eclectic mixtape featuring songs from the best albums…

2006 had to offer.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Eli

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

 

Eli

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THERE is a lot of excitement…

PHOTO CREDIT: Anthony H. Nguyen

around the release of Eli’s debut album, Stage Girl. That is out on 31st October. I am going to come to some recent interviews where we can learn more about this extraordinary artist. I am going to start out with an interview from Capital FM, and their My Life in 20. It is fun and insightful, and there are a few questions and answers that particularly interested me:

“20) What album could you listen to 20 times over and not get bored?

I’m gonna go with SZA's Ctrl. It’s the most absolute classic timeless album, especially for my generation I think. It was truly the first album I was proud to call my favourite.

19) What topic could you talk about for 19 minutes straight without notes?

The cultural impact and shift that is, was and will forever be 'Diet Pepsi' by Addison Rae.

18) What was the most important thing to happen in your life when you were 18?

I started to accept my mental health issues like OCD and depression. I also began to try, and fail, to work on coping with and managing them. It was a moment of clarity and fear but an important step in my mental health journey.

12) If you could live the life of any other person for 12 hours, who would you be?

Simone Biles. I wanna know what’s it like to fly.

7) Which of the seven deadly sins are you most guilty of?

Honestly, I don’t know what a seven deadly sin is and I even tried to google it but I am gay so that’s apparently a sin or something.

6) You can invite six people to your dream dinner party, who would you invite?

Ariana Grande, Mariah Carey, Nicki Minaj, J.Lo, Rihanna and Frances Whitney.

1) Who or what is your one true love?

Halloween is my one true love. Also Nathan Fielder and Alex Consani, strictly parasocial”.

The next interview I am going to source is from June. Eli released her Girl of Your Dream E.P. that month, so there was a lot of intertest in her unique and outstanding music. Although perhaps not as known in the U.K. as she is in the U.S. and especially in L.A., there is growing interest and exposure here. This “Massachusetts-to-LA transplant making music that sounds like it’s 2003” is being hailed as Pop’s new sensation. She has co-signs in the form of Addison Rae and Troye Sivan. The brilliant i-D spoke with Eli in the summer about her extraordinary E.P. and her burgeoning sound and career:

“She’s been hustling for a while. Eli spent a few years as a Vine kid, and dropped early tracks released under a different name (she signed to Zelig Records, home of King Princess, in 2023). At 24, she’s finally having her moment, even if some influences she’s pulling from were barely on her radar growing up. Like the aesthetics of Stacie Orrico (she doesn’t know who she is), or the sounds of Imogen Heap’s 2005 record Speak For Yourself. What is real, though, are her lyrics: inspired by her life in America’s coastal cities, run-ins with nepo babies who brag about screwing The Dare, embracing a DIY attitude, and a series of dumb men she’s since left behind. 
Eli writes and produces almost everything herself—albeit guided by the musical friends she lives with in East LA. She describes herself as “a Victorian woman trapped in 2013.” We called her up to talk about persona, pop girls, and why all of a sudden the world is ready for her sound”.

Tell me this lore. You’re from Massachusetts right? 

Yep, I grew up Catholic in suburbia. Now it’s Trumpville. I was itching to escape. I went to a scary public school and didn’t have friends. Singing online was my escape. That’s where it started—making music alone in my bedroom. Then I moved to New York for school for a bit.

What did you study?

A BFA in music. But it was during COVID. Then there was an abroad semester that I took. I went to Berlin for just five months. It was also still COVID, so not the rawest Berlin club experience. So I was like, “Okay, I’m out of New York now. I have a moment to evaluate who Eli is out of Massachusetts and New York. What am I trying to do?” Where do people go? Los Angeles.

When did you make the move?

2023. I was in love with a girl, so I impulsively moved back to New York for a year. That’s what “Marianne” is about. It was the craziest decision I’ve ever made. I could see myself staying here for five years, then I’m going to Italy. 

What’s LA done for your songwriting?

It’s been instrumental. It’s helped me understand the entertainment world. I’ve gone to the clurbs, I’ve gone to Tenants of the Trees, and left uncomfortable or pissed off enough to write a song about it. Everybody has their own journey, but there’s a lot of people who are kicking their feet up, yet they’re killing it. That’s [what inspired] “God Bless the BFA.”

I wanted to talk about the mood and the aesthetics of the music. Where did that come from?

I’ve heard the Disney Channel storyline of “Be yourself.” I’ve had therapists tell me to be myself. I have a lovely “Live, Laugh, Love” mom who has “Be Yourself” hung up all over the house. But I did not fully grasp what that meant until this past year. I realized how much I was running from as a queer person. After moving here and being around people that I love, for the first time I had the space to figure myself out. Now, everything has hit me artistically in all the right places. 

I wasn’t even consciously trying to make something really joyous. I was long inspired by pop girls. All of the artwork [for the EP] I made on my phone. I’ve been that girl in her bedroom, not going to class, just sleeping all day then waking up at 3 a.m. to go on YouTube to watch Ariana Grande. I was Stan Twitter adjacent. 

All your current songs are from an upcoming album called Stage Girl, right? What’s the vision?

I believe that singing is my calling—God put me here to sing. That’s what my mom told me growing up and it stuck. Not saying that I’m here to bring back singing…”.

I guess there will be more interviews with Eli around the release of Stage Girl. I am going to end with a recent interview from NME. If you have not heard the music of Eli yet then make sure you check it out, as she is astonishing. One of the most promising voices in Pop right now. As NME say in the top of their interview, “the 24-year-old singer delivers a dazzling audition for pop superstardom, bringing with her a heightened sense of self-awareness and authenticity”. Before sourcing from the interview, there are a couple of key observations. How Stage Girl promotes joy and really brings that to the fore. How there is going to be a mix of the best Pop of the '90s and '00s. Acts like TLC and Mariah Carey alongside Disney Channel stars of the '00s. Also, Eli is really putting singing key in the mix. In terms of the power and potential of the voice. It is a true singing album. Power, depth, emotion and layers to every song:

“In her childhood, Eli was a “living, breathing theatre kid” who never actually did musicals growing up in the small town of Norfolk, Massachusetts. “I kind of resented the part of my upbringing that wasn’t able to have that outlet,” she reveals, but also owns up to having it in “a weird internet way” as a former Vine star. She later went to New York to study a BFA at NYU – “this arts degree that I didn’t get, but I almost did,” she says cheekily – before releasing a string of singles under a different name and moving to LA.

Drawing from Y2K culture isn’t new by any means, but there’s a heightened self-awareness and authenticity with the way Eli does it in her music now that elevates it beyond nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It’s how she genuinely loves the “mismatched, disgusting, kitschy” outfits of the era or creates lyric videos that look like they were made on Windows Movie Maker, but does so with a nudge and a wink. Much of that comes through on the album’s two breakout singles – girlhood anthem ‘Marianne’ and the “cheesy, cheap piano”-led masterpiece that is ‘Girl Of Your Dreams’. Both have helped her find fans in some of the current pop scene’s leading names, including Troye Sivan, Doechii and Zara Larsson.

 

‘Girl Of Your Dreams’ was a practice in “instinctual” creation and “pure joy” that happened at the end of a long day in the studio when she and her collaborators (Mike White and Sean Kennedy, known for their work with former NME cover stars Chappell Roan and UPSAHL, respectively) had a bit of extra time. But as much as she works off instinct, ‘Stage Girl’ is also highly tuned and intentional – after all, it is only a 10-song record in an era of 40-song deluxe editions. “I’m a firm believer in cohesion and curation, especially on a debut album,” she says.

s Eli waxes lyrical about the ins and outs of both her brand of pop and her peers’, she stumbles upon a revelation. “This conversation is really honing in on the fact that I’m a fan, and you can be a fan and you can also be a star,” she muses. But, for that epiphany to really make sense, you’d need to view it through the lens of the fictional American Idol-style TV singing competition that the singer has created to accompany her debut album.

On YouTube, Eli has been documenting her path to becoming the next stage girl, from bedroom singer to live auditions. Through the series, Eli is unafraid to both poke fun at herself and live her truth, from a cheeky nod to her being an artist who happens to be trans (one of the characters she plays is named ‘Eliza Mann’) to her story as a “small town girl who’s terrified to leave her bedroom”.

It’s a universe that Eli’s growing legion of fans have bought into wholeheartedly as well, sharing their excitement about Stage Girl online and going to shows in character. “When I’m seeing them be like, ‘I’m the next stage girl’, and talk about how they’re gonna fit into Stage Girl, what their talents are and how they’re gonna audition, I’m still having trouble understanding that they’re real because that’s really crazy,” she says.

It might be hard for Eli to get her head around that reaction, but her imminent debut album should only escalate the enthusiasm around her. As she continues to grow, she’s enjoying exploring all the “joy, potential, worth and value” of her artistry, and has big plans for the future, like bringing her one-woman show, also called ‘Stage Girl’, to New York’s theatre stages, followed by Australia because “they stream my music, they’re killing it”.

I am going to end there. Stage Girl is definitely one of the most anticipated albums of the year. One of the most important debut albums of this year. With huge fans such as Doechii recognising the brilliance of Eli, she is going to have this upward trajectory. So many great times ahead of her! At the moment, there are a few mainstream Pop artists perhaps not at their best. Lacking a certain energy and originality. Artists like Eli are injecting something much needed. She is going to be this global megastar…

VERY soon.

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Spotlight Eli

FEATURE: Spotlight: Asha Banks

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Radhika Muthanna for Wonderland

 

Asha Banks

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THIS is an amazing young artist…

PHOTO CREDIT: Sophie Webster for NOTION

who many might know from her acting work. Asha Banks is a St Albans-born talent who began her career as a child actress in the West End. She played the lead role in the 2022 film, The Magic Flute, and appeared in the 2024 BBC series, A Good Girl's Guide to Murder. Banks’s debut E.P., Unite My Tongue, was released in March. This is someone who I think you should all follow. In terms of Asha Banks’s style and type of music, maybe Dream/Soft Pop. It is very much her own blend. I love her debut E.P. and I can tell she has huge passion for music. I know she will enjoy a long career. I want to get to a few recent interviews with Banks, where she talks about her music. Like I say with every artist who also is an actor, I think the disciplines from that feed into the music. They bring those skills and attributes into their songs. A certain ability and intuition that gives the music this distinct power and conviction. Maybe I am wrong, but you can see how music and acting naturally intertwine. In March, Asha Banks spoke with NOTION about starring in My Fault: London and releasing her debut E.P. It is interesting in the interview how she says she wants to act and sing. How she also wants to go into musical theatre. Someone who will grace the stage plenty of times in musicals and big productions:

“It’s foggy in LA, but Asha Banks is feeling bright and sunny. “I’m just so, so happy… I feel full.” She’s had a busy month: My Fault: London, her new film, was quickly followed by Untie My Tongue, her first EP.

The latter is full of songs exploring heartbreak and the end of the relationship “from its early stages to its ending stages”, encompassing a wide range of feelings. On ‘Shiver’, Asha asks an ex-lover, “Do you think about me as much as I think about you?”, while ‘Closing Time’ sees her contrasting the “sugar rush” beginning of a relationship with the realisation that “only one of us knows it’s closing time”. Fundamentally, the EP is about truth: telling it, asking for it, attempting to figure it out. “They felt like pivotal moments in a relationship,” Asha says now, “It was about telling a story.”

Having acted from a young age after being cast as young Eponine in the West End production of Les Misérables, Asha Banks is accustomed to telling other people’s stories, other people’s truths. What was it like to speak for herself, this time? “With acting, you’re bringing to life somebody else’s creative vision, which is beautiful and which I love doing. But it was really exciting and a different venture to kind of tell my own story. It’s daunting, but it’s also so exciting to me.” As the title of the EP implies, this is Asha’s moment to speak.

Songwriting, in fact, has long been a part of how she expresses herself. “I wrote my first song when I was six. My mum says it was called ‘Mummy Is My Darling’,” she laughs, “I loved writing songs about my family members and how much I love them. I think the next one was like, a song about my grandma.” She’s always been dependent on music, “in an emotional way”. “You can materialise something that’s happening inside you. That process really helps me. And it also resonates with other people, it can allow them to realise something about themselves.” With two shows at Omeara in London coming up, she’s excited to see those feelings reflected back at her on the faces of her audience: “I feel like I’ve met so many of my fans online, so it’s going to be so surreal to smile at people and give everybody hugs.”

Growing up, she was drawn to her parents’ favourite music – Joni Mitchell and Nora Jones from her mum, Jack Johnson from her dad – and she feels the influence, even now, of that confessional strain of writing. “There was this initial fear of being vulnerable, and the need to be very transparent, but once you let it out, it becomes beautiful.” Genre, too, is something she’s comfortable exploring without being boxed in by it. “It was about finding something that felt really true,” she says, “When we were writing the EP, we were trying not to think too much about the exterior world… we just wanted it to sound right, emotionally.”

In writing so transparently about her real life, does she ever feel too exposed? “I feel like you’re kind of just forced to be completely honest, whether you want to be or not, because you have to just get over the fact that people are going to listen to it. Otherwise it’s not going to hit the same. The songs that everybody loves are the ones that are truthful.” And, she says, music gives her an outlet to feelings and experiences she wouldn’t otherwise know how to handle: “If I couldn’t write about everything that happens, it would probably swallow me whole.”

She is, however, also inspired by things that haven’t happened to her. ‘Feel the Rush’, another track on the EP, is written from the perspective of Noah, her character in My Fault: London. “It was a different approach. I hadn’t written about an experience that isn’t my own before. I wrote the song literally five days after I finished filming, so I was still very much in Noah mode. I know the character so well and it was a lovely way to [get] closure and finish the circle.”

There are a couple of other interviews I want to bring in. Back in February, Square Mile spent time with Asha Banks. This is someone who wants to do it all. In addition to this burgeoning and brilliant acting career, you can tell how much music means! In terms of how naturally it comes. I do think that we will see a string of albums from Banks. Unite My Tongue is a fantastic E.P. and a tantalising taste of this distinct and accomplished young songwriter:

“There’s another feather in Asha’s rather large cap: her songwriting. “Music is always my escape,” she tells me. She’s been making up songs since she was about six. Her repertoire has expanded from thirty-second songs about how much she loves her dog to her upcoming EP.

After a long day on a TV set, she’ll retreat to her bedroom and get writing. There are two guitars propped up by her desk, ready to go. Straight after filming My Fault: London wrapped, Asha recorded the six songs for Untie My Tongue. The first tracks ‘So Green’ and ‘Feel The Rush’ are already out. The remainder start streaming on 7 March. It’s already shaping up to be quite the year for Asha Banks.

Asha’s parents raised her on Joni Mitchell and Norah Jones. She’s always been drawn to guitar-led, writing-driven music, like Lizzy McAlpine and Bon Iver. Asha categorises her own sound as “indie folk slash pop. Music that feels earthy and folky and summery and floaty.” The bridge of ‘Feel The Rush’ layers up Asha’s vocals to create an ethereal, glittering sound. ‘So Green’ racked up 100,000 streams on Spotify within the first two months.

The real joy for Asha isn’t just watching the numbers go up and up, but being able to share her music with other people. She performed these songs live for the first time at Shoreditch Treehouse in December, and hopes to do many more shows around London. “Given my background in theatre, I crave the performance. Because it’s live, it evolves every time and you get to live with it for ages.” Watch this space.

It’s impossible for Asha to pinpoint which form of creativity calls to her the most. She can’t pick between theatre and film, or even acting and singing. She wants to do everything – and no doubt she will. “I’d love to do loads of different roles and play loads of different sort of characters and try loads of different things and different styles and different mediums. I really just love doing it all”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Rankin

As Asha Banks revealed to HUNGER, she is working on a new E.P. Her sophomore release, How Real Was It?, is out in November. I am excited to hear that. Infused with and influenced by Los Angeles, it might be a sunnier and bigger release than Unite My Tongue. Two E.P.s in a year shows how focused and prolific Asha Banks is as a songwriter:

“Ciarán Howley: Where to start? Let’s go back to the beginning — who were your biggest musical influences growing up?

Asha Banks: I’ve kind of realised recently that so much of my music taste just came from my parents. My dad was always playing Take That in the car, and my Mum loved Norah Jones, Joni Mitchell and Janis Ian. I didn’t really choose to listen to those artists, but they absolutely influenced me. And Jack Johnson — such a dad artist, right? I do wonder, like, if they’d been heavy-metal heads, my
career would probably have been completely different.

CH: 2025 is a big year for you — your debut EP Untie My Tongue arrived at the start and How Real Was It? lands in November. How does it feel to put out such raw, vulnerable work — and so much of it?

AB: It’s definitely a mix of daunting and exciting. The first time I released something, it was terrifying — it was mine, and then suddenly it was everyone else’s. But seeing how people connect with my songs is just the best part. I’ve played a lot of these songs live already, so I’ve had a glimpse of what people like, but hearing it all fully produced is such a different thing.

CH: What can we expect from the new EP? Is it a complete sonic departure or more of a natural progression from the first?

AB: How Real Was It? is definitely a natural progression. If the first EP was very present and in- the-moment, this one feels more reflective. Some of the songs I wrote at the same time as the first EP, and some I wrote in LA, which was my first time writing there. Just being in the sun made a massive difference — like, I swear it infiltrates the music. So a few songs have this sunnier feel, but it’s still rooted in my sound.

CH: So, what’s next for Asha Banks?

AB: I’ve got a headline show coming up at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in September, which I’m so excited for. My brother did shows there as a kid, and I was always jealous. Now I’ve finally put myself on that stage. And I’m in LA right now finishing the How Real Was It? EP and doing more writing. I’m also going on tour later this year. So, yeah — lots happening”.

I will leave it there. I was hoping to find a few reviews for Unite My Tongue. It deserved a lot more press and attention! However, when How Real Was It? is released in November, there should be some reviews up. This is an artist and actor who has big ambitions and you can see embarking on world tours and collaborations with huge artists. For now, she is looking ahead to the release of her second E.P. Banks has a couple of international dates before the end of this year and some great U.K. gigs scheduled for next year. Although she sounds so fully-formed and brilliant right now, the truth is that she is…

ONLY just getting started.

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Follow Asha Banks

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Songs from Albums Turning Twenty-Five in 2026

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

 

Songs from Albums Turning Twenty-Five in 2026

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I am getting near…

to the end of this run of features combining songs from incredible albums that have important anniversaries next year. I have four more to go after this. For this one, I am to the year 2001. Albums that turns twenty-five next year. 2001 was a pretty remarkable year for new music. In terms of there being this holdover and continuation of sounds from the 1990s mixing with the sounds of the 2000s. Genres diversifying and changing. In the mixtape at the end of this feature are sensational albums from the likes of The White Stripes, Björk, and The Strokes. It is a really interesting year for music. I have collated songs from the very best albums of 2001. As I keep saying, even if you are not old enough to remember the year or were not yet born, then you should still be able to connect with a lot of these albums. The mixtape shows what a strong year…

2001 was.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Aerial at Twenty: Ranking the Sixteen Tracks

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Aerial at Twenty

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton

 

Ranking the Sixteen Tracks

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IT may seem…

like sacrilege or wrong to see Aerial’s A Sky of Honey as nine separate tracks instead of a continuous piece, as Kate Bush would have wanted. The original Aerial, released on 7th November, 2005, had two discs. The second of the double album, A Sky of Honey, was separated into a run of tracks. A later release then had A Sky of Honey as a single flowing suite. I am obviously not going to include any audio with Rolf Harris on it. He was The Painter on the original An Architect's Dream and A Painter’s Link. His vocal was rerecorded by Bush’s son, Bertie. However, the nine tracks and moments on A Sky of Honey have their own personality and place. As do the seven tracks on the first disc, A Sea of Honey. A collection of songs that seem to summon images of the deep and water. The second disc about the lightness and expanse of what is above. Nature and the full scope and potential of the natural world explored by Kate Bush. In 2021, I ranked the seven tracks from A Sea of Honey, but I will expand on that. My ranking for A Sea of Honey will also be different. As Aerial turns twenty on 7th November, this anniversary feature is me ranking the sixteen tracks. You might disagree with the order – and I have changed my mind through the years -, so let me know how you would order things…

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SIXTEEN: The Painter’s Link

Track Number: Eleven

About:

“Versions

There is only one studio version of this song.

A live version appears on the album Before The Dawn.

Performances

The song was performed live as part of Kate’s Before The Dawn shows in London, 2014.

Lyrics

The painter:

It’s raining

What has become of my painting

All the colours are running

The chorus:

So all the colours run

So all the colours run

See what they have become

A wonderful sunset” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

FITEEN: Pi

Track Number: Two

About:

“I really like the challenge of singing numbers, as opposed to words because numbers are so unemotional as a lyric to sing and it was really fascinating singing that. Trying to sort of, put an emotional element into singing about…a seven…you know and you really care about that nine. I find numbers fascinating, the idea that nearly everything can be broken down into numbers, it is a fascinating thing; and i think also that we are completely surrounded by numbers now, in a way that we weren’t you know even 20, 30 years ago we’re all walking around with mobile phones and numbers on our foreheads almost; and it’s like you know computers…

I suppose, um, I find it fascinating that there are people who actually spend their lives trying to formulate pi; so the idea of this number, that, in a way is possibly something that will go on to infinity and yet people are trying to pin it down and put their mark on and make it theirs in a way I guess also i think you know you get a bit a lot of connection with mathematism and music because of patterns and shapes…

Ken Bruce show, BBC Radio 2, 31 October 2005” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

Standout Lyrics:

“Sweet and gentle and sensitive man

With an obsessive nature and deep fascination

For numbers

And a complete infatuation with the calculation

Of π”

FOURTEEN: Joanni

Track Number: Six

Review:

“The bad news is…well, there isn’t really any bad news, unless you were expecting K. Bush to take on W. Bush—the closest we get to war imagery is “Joanni,” a song about Joan of Arc. Instead, raising her family informs most of the record” – SLANT

Standout Lyrics:

“Elle parle à Dieu et aux anges

Dans ses prières

Venez Sainte Catherine

Venez Sainte Marguerite

Elle a besoin de vous de

Les voix, les voix du feu

Chantent avec ma petite soeur

Les voix, les voix, les voix”

THIRTEEN: An Architect’s Dream

Track Number: Ten

Versions

“There are two studio versions of this song. The original studio version, included on the album Aerial, features Rolf Harris as the painter. In the remastered version, released in 2018, his voice is replaced by Kate’s son Bertie’s, taken from a live performance of the song. 

A full live version appears on the album Before The Dawn.

Performances

The song was performed live as part of Kate’s Before The Dawn shows in London, 2014” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

Standout Lyrics:

“Curving and sweeping

Rising and reaching

I could feel what he was feeling

Lines like these have got to be

An architect’s dream”

TWELVE: Somewhere In Between

Track Number: Fourteen

Review:

“In contrast to the dark and unsettling The Ninth Wave, Bush’s second great song-cycle, Aerial’s A Sky of Honey, is glowing and blissful: a summer’s day condensed into 42 minutes of music. It includes the utterly gorgeous and, it has to be said, profoundly stoned-sounding Somewhere in Between, which perfectly captures dusk slowly settling” – The Guardian

'What kind of language is this?' Kate Bush sings, self-interrogatively, on the title track, the last of the album. It's a good question, to which she offers a partial answer on 'Somewhere in Between', which in ambition and content is where most of the songs on this album are suspended - somewhere in between the tighter, more conventional structures of pop and the looser, less accessible arrangements of contemporary classical and the avant-garde; somewhere, in mood and atmosphere, between the lucidity of wakefulness and the ambiguity of dream; between the presumed innocence of childhood and the desire for escape offered by the adult imagination; between abstraction and the real” – The Guardian

Standout Lyrics:

“Somewhere in between

The waxing and the waning wave

Somewhere in between

The night and the daylight

Somewhere in between

The ticking and the tocking clock

Somewhere in between

What the song and the silence say”

ELEVEN: How to Be Invisible 

Track Number: Five

About:

“In an effort to avoid dreary literary jargon, I’d like to applaud the unexpected delights that are Kate’s symbols. Take, for example, “How to Be Invisible,” with its “Eye of Braille/Hem of Anorak/Stem of Wallflower/Hair of Doormat.” Unorthodox, contradictory, and yet totally applicable to the socially invisible. Reading this piece, I physically felt the lines, “Take a pinch of keyhole/And fold yourself up/You cut along the dotted line/You think inside out.” I believe I have folded into myself before and, with self-loathing, “cut along the dotted line.” Haven’t we all?” – Living Life Fearless

Standout Lyrics:

“I found a book on how to be invisible

Take a pinch of keyhole

And fold yourself up

You cut along the dotted line

You think inside out

And you’re invisible

Eye of Braille

Hem of anorak

Stem of wallflower

Hair of doormat”

TEN: Prelude

Track Number: Eight

About:

“Versions

There is only one studio version of this song.

A live version appears on the album Before The Dawn.

Performances

The song was performed live as part of Kate’s Before The Dawn shows in London, 2014.

Lyrics

Mummy…

Daddy…

The day is full of birds

Sounds like they’re saying words

Credits

Keyboards: Kate

The Sun: Bertie” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

NINE: King of the Mountain

Track Number: One

Versions:

“There is only one official version of ‘King Of The Mountain’: the album version, which was also released as a single. However, there are a few unofficial remixes of the track, all issued in 2005 on bootleg 12″ singles.

A live version appears on the album Before The Dawn” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

Standout Lyrics:

“Another Hollywood waitress

Is telling us she’s having your baby

And there’s a rumour that you?re on ice

And you will rise again someday

And that there’s a photograph

Where you’re dancing on your grave”

Review:

“There’s my idea of taking a break and there’s your idea of taking a break. And then there’s Kate Bush’s idea of taking a break. The wandering enigma of British pop has been gone for twelve years. Which means the last time we saw Kate Bush was in the nineties – and let’s be honest, who can remember them?! (I can actually remember them very well, but that last bit scans rather nicely dontchathink?)

So what on Emily Bronte’s misty earth has she been up to for the last twelve years? Well, I imagine she’s been raising a family and proba…yadda, yadda, yadda – who gives an arse? She’s got a new album coming out. She’s called it ‘Aerial’. And ‘King Of The Mountain’ is the first indication that it might be as ace as we hoped it would be.

For a while, I always thought that Kate Bush was taking the piss when she sang. Either that or she was celebrating her release from the mental asylum by screaming at passers-by, then softly informing them that she has a house on top of the hill that they simply must visit because the garden path is made of swords and the kitchen is run by the trees. Of course, that was then. Now, having actually listened beyond ‘Wuthering Heights’, I’d stick her up their with the very best. So apart from the remarkable voice, why do folk dig The Bush? Thankfully, some answers can be found in ‘King Of The Mountain’. Sort of. A slow-burning reggae groove, peculiar lyrics, electronic phasing, tribal pulsing and a shuddering, vintage vocal are all in there. She also talks of “the wind whistling” – which in a Kate Bush track, can only be a good thing. Thing is, the track doesn’t really go anywhere and if the lady herself wasn’t singing it could be considered terribly dull. Still, the pastoral princess returneth – Yeth!” – Drowned in Sound

EIGHT Sunset

Track Number: Twelve

Review:

“'A Sky of Honey' is music of pagan rapture - songs about acts of creation, natural or otherwise; about the wind, rain, sunlight and the sea. Sometimes it is just Kate alone at her piano, her voice restrained.

Sometimes, as on the outstanding 'Sunset', she begins alone and softly, but soon the tempo quickens and the song becomes an experiment in forms: jazz, progressive rock, flamenco” – The Guardian

Standout Lyrics:

“Who knows who wrote that song of Summer

That blackbirds sing at dusk

This is a song of colour

Where sands sing in crimson, red and rust

Then climb into bed and turn to dust

Every sleepy light

Must say goodbye

To the day before it dies

In a sea of honey

A sky of honey

Keep us close to your heart

So if the skies turn dark

We may live on in

Comets and stars”

SEVEN: Bertie

Track Number: Three

About:

“He’s such a big part of my life so, you know, he’s a very big part of my work. It’s such a great thing, being able to spend as much time with him as I can. And, you know, he won’t be young for very long. And already he’s starting to grow up and I wanted to make sure I didn’t miss out on that, that I spent as much time with his as I could.

So, the idea was that he would come first, and then the record would come next, which is also one reasons why it’s taken a long time (laughs). It always takes me a long time anyway, but trying to fit that in around the edges that were left over from the time that I wanted to spend with him.

It’s a wonderful thing, having such a lovely son. Really, you know with a song like that, you could never be special enough from my point of view, and I wanted to try and give it an arrangement that wasn’t terribly obvious, so I went for the sort of early music… (Ken Bruce show, BBC Radio 2, 3 November 2005)” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

Standout Lyrics:

“Sweet kisses

Three wishes

Lovely Bertie

The most wilful

The most beautiful

The most truly fantastic smile

I’ve ever seen”

SIX: A Coral Room

Track Number: Seven

About:

“There was a little brown jug actually, yeah. The song is really about the passing of time. I like the idea of coming from this big expansive, outside world of sea and cities into, again, this very small space where, er, it’s talking about a memory of my mother and this little brown jug. I always remember hearing years ago this thing about a sort of Zen approach to life, where, you would hold something in your hand, knowing that, at some point, it would break, it would no longer be there - Front Row, BBC4, 4 November 2005” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

Standout Lyrics:

“My mother and her little brown jug

It held her milk

And now it holds our memories

I can hear her singing

“Little brown jug don’t I love thee”

“Little brown jug don’t I love thee”

Ho ho ho, hee hee hee”

FIVE: Aerial Tal

Track Number: Thirteen

About:

“Versions

There is only one studio version of this song.

A live version appears on the album Before The Dawn.

Performances

The song was performed live as part of Kate’s Before The Dawn shows in London, 2014.

Credits

Keyboards and Vocals: Kate” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

FOUR: Prologue

Track Number: Nine

About:

“Versions

There is only one studio version of this song.

A live version appears on the album Before The Dawn.

Performances

The song was performed live as part of Kate’s Before The Dawn shows in London, 2014.

Cover versions

‘Prologue’ was covered by Göteborgs Symfoniker” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

Standout Lyrics:

“Oh so romantic, swept me off my feet

Like some kind of magic

Like the light in Italy

Lost its way across the sea…

Roma Roma mia

Tesoro mio, bella

Pieno di sole luce

Bali cozi bene, bene

Pianissimo

Pianissimo”

THREE: Aerial

Track Number: Sixteen

About:

“It would be fanciful to claim ‘Aerial’ as definitively club-friendly. A multi-faceted work ranging over reggae, pop, rock, flamenco, renaissance madrigal and icy synthetics, it’s too immersive, too elusive, too damned expansive to be entirely one thing. Yet a unifying ambience threads its way through the music. ‘Pi’ is chill-out prog, with murmuring electronics and a spacey synth wash. ‘Joanni’, with its trip hop indebted beats, squelchy funk groove and trippy strings, nods to the Bristol-centric sounds of ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ and ‘Man Child’. The beginning of ‘Somewhere In Between’, where the rhythm mimics drum’n’bass, could actually be Massive Attack, with Bush doing a guest turn a la Tracy Thorn or Liz Fraser.

These clues pave the way for the album’s climax, where things turn positively Balearic; albeit, Balearic, Devon-style. In the final 25 minutes of ‘Aerial’, Bush proves that she understands the key tenets of dance music, the upward arc, the competing tensions of build and release. We find her, in her mid-40s, blissed-out, ecstatic, rapturous, climbing to the top of world. As she sings as the album rushes towards its finale: ‘We become panoramic!

At first, the mood was slow, stoned, dream-like. Then the sultry ‘Sunset’ climbed towards a rattling flamenco climax, Mino Cinélu’s percussive power pushing the song ‘all the way up to the top of the night’, setting up the impossibly thrilling climax of ‘Nocturn’ and ‘Aerial’. Amid bells and birdsong, a new tension informed the music. Over an angry squall of guitar and a heavy artillery of bass and drums, Bush wailed about her ‘beautiful wings’ as the music pushed up and up.

It ended with frenzied chanting and what sounded like an explosion. Listeners to the ‘Before the Dawn’ live album might imagine Bush disappearing in a puff of smoke. In fact, she was hoisted into the air, black wings and all, airborne at last” – Disco Pogo

Standout Lyrics:

“All of the birds are laughing

All of the birds are laughing

Come on let’s all join in

Come on let’s all join in

I want to be up on the roof

I’ve gotta be up on the roof

Up, up high on the roof

Up, up on the roof

In the sun”

TWO: Nocturn

Track Number: Fifteen

About:

“Though the album was recorded elsewhere, ‘A Sky Of Honey’ is redolent of Bush’s second base, a cliff-top house on the South Hams peninsula in Devon, with its own boathouse and private beach. This feels like the locus of a suite which moves from a country garden to the shore, to the Atlantic, birdsong running as a thread through it all.

Having spent much of ‘Aerial’ murmuring through a beguiling sun-flecked idyll, Bush begins to shake us awake as the music climbs higher and the day extends. On ‘Sunset’ the sea turns honeycomb, reflecting the sky as the light begins to change. The music at first floats, then pauses, then surges, becoming a kind of Balearic flamenco. ‘Nocturn’ begins as an ambient chill-out track, reflecting a gentle, pastoral hedonism: ‘We tire of the city,’ purrs Bush. ‘We long for something more.’ Then the beat kicks in and the music begins to build. Bush finally lets fly vocally, switching between a keening sensuality and primal chanting. What’s happening? The sun is coming up, that’s what, and ‘all the dreamers are waking!’ It’s utterly electrifying.

‘Aerial’ strengthened the connection. In 2021, London-based DJ and producer Ranj Kaler reworked ‘Nocturn’, accentuating its Balearic tendencies. “I always loved that track, it had a real Café del Mar kind of feel to it,” he says. “I used to play the original a lot at the beginning of the night. With the remix, I wanted to capture that beachy vibe, going on a journey to the seaside and away from the city. Making it a bit funkier but keeping that melancholic feel.” Does Bush know about it? “I did send a message and I didn’t get anything back!” – Disco Pogo

Standout Lyrics:

“Could be in a dream

Our clothes are on the beach

The prints of our feet

Lead right up to the sea

No one, no one is here

No one, no one is here

We stand in the Atlantic

We become panoramic”

ONE: Mrs. Bartolozzi

Track Number: Four

About:

“Well, I do do a lot of washing [chuckles]. I’m sure I would never have written the song if I didn’t… You know, just this woman, in her house, with her washing. And then the idea of taking the water in the washing machine with all the clothes, and the water then becoming the sea… and I also think there’s something very interesting about clothes. They’re kind of people without the people in them, if you know what I mean? [Kate laughs] They all have our scent, and pieces of us on them, somehow.

Front Row, BBC4, 4 November 2005” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

“But the one track on Aerial that best bridges the divide between Bush's domestic and creative existences is the haunting piano ballad Mrs Bartolozzi, in which a housewife character drifts off into a nostalgic reverie while watching clothes entwining in her washer-dryer. It's also the one track set to polarise opinion among listeners, with its eerie, unhinged chorus of "washing machine ... washing machine". Bush acknowledges as much.

"A couple of people who heard it early on," she says, dipping a spoon into her avocado, "they either really liked it or they found it very uncomfortable. I liked the idea of it being a very small subject. Clothes are such a strong part of who a human being is. Y'know, skin cells, the smell. Somebody thought that maybe there'd been this murder going on, I thought that was great. I love the ambiguity” – The Guardian

Standout Lyrics:

“I watched them going ’round and ’round
My blouse wrapping itself around your trousers
Oh the waves are going out
My skirt floating up around my waist
As I wade out into the surf
Oh and the waves are coming in
Oh and the waves are going out”

FEATURE: Modern-Day Queens: Doja Cat

FEATURE:

 

 

Modern-Day Queens

PHOTO CREDIT: Dave Meyers

 

Doja Cat

__________

A couple of reasons…

PHOTO CREDIT: Greg Swales

why I am featuring Doja Cat in this Modern-Day Queens. Firstly, her phenomenal new album, Vie (French for ‘life’), gained critical acclaim. It is a fantastic album and is her fifth album. It comes two years after Scarlet. I really love the physical and digital covers for Vie. The aesthetic of the album is wonderful. I have been following Doja Cat for a while now, but this is the first album of hers where I have immersed myself. I will end with a  couple of positive reviews for Vie. Before that, there are some interviews that I want to get to. In August, NME reacted to an interview Doja Cat had with Zane Lowe about her upcoming album. I think that Vie might be among her best work, and it is definitely one of the best albums of 2025:

“Now, in a new interview with Apple Music 1’s Zane Lowe, Doja has shared her experience working with former fun. member and Bleachers leader Antonoff.

“I’m working with Jack Antonoff and working with a person that’s new in my life,” she told Lowe. “And so it’s the grappling with talking about something personal and creating something fresh, and then getting to know someone new, and then all of these things fell together really naturally.”

The musician has previously said that the album will be more of a “pop-driven” version of her previous LP ‘Scarlet‘. She went on to explain how the producer has helped in inspiring this sound, saying: “He’s just been such a wonderful person to work with,” adding: “But yeah, I think it’s just been nice to play.

“I really played through the whole thing … I think what I wanted to do was play with my voice in ways that are a little bit less unconventional. And so I’m shrieking a little bit on this album, and that’s been a lot of fun.”

In an interview with NME last year, Antonoff spoke about how he chooses which artists to work with: “If there’s ever something that sounds interesting to work on, I try to meet people and see if I can imagine doing things with them.”

“You know, the ability to make something with someone is so delicate that you could like someone, you could love their work, but it might not work. You just have to try and be very honest when it happens and when it doesn’t.”

“And I tend and intend to follow the things where I feel a lot of inspiration and excitement. It’s all kind of gut feeling, but yeah, it can be a bit awkward if it’s not there. Because you can’t really fake it.”

Doja went on to tell Lowe how events in her love life had shaped the record’s lyrical content. “There’s other things outside of myself that were inspiring me to write about these things,” she explained. “I had been in relationships that made me think about things in a different way, and I think naivety is a big part of this album too. I speak about rushing and love-bombing in a way.

“I think sometimes people don’t know that they’re doing it or they do, but giving excessive compliments and gifts right off the bat, that sort of thing,” she added. “I thought that was a really fun thing to write about.”

In April, Doja Cat began teasing her new era, which she confirmed was being titled ‘Vie’. Since then, she’s been steadily teasing the project, including the nostalgic pop tune ‘Jealous Type’. Earlier this month, she hosted a surprise album-listening preview party.

‘Vie’ will mark her first LP since 2023’s ‘Scarlet’, and while she hasn’t dropped a new album since, she did release a collaborative track with Jack Harlow titled ‘Just Us’ earlier this year, which was accompanied by a star-studded video featuring the likes of Matt Damon, John Mayer, PinkPantheress and Succession actor Nicholas Braun”.

To slightly detour, there is an interview from ELLE from the summer. Doja Cat was asked about the Met Gala, new music, and fronting Marc Jacobs’s pre-fall 2025 campaign. I think that Doja Cat is this modern-day icon who has this incredible music side but there is also her own style. I always think that Doja Cat would be an amazing actor, though there have been few opportunities put her way. She is this incredible all-round talent that I am excited to see where she heads next:

“When did fashion first become a way for you to express yourself as a performer?

Even in the beginning, I was always super visual, but I wasn’t good at styling for a long time. I definitely use clothing as a means of expressing different moods in a more campy and wild way. I think my fashion has become more sophisticated over the years, but it’s still out-there.

Is there a past look or style moment that stands out as your favorite?

I mean there’s so much, but I think one of the most inspiring moments for me was when I went to Schiaparelli’s couture show in 2024. I just remember how emotional that experience was. I mean, everything that Daniel [Roseberry, the artistic director of Schiaparelli] does is incredible. But I think that was just a very emotional show as far as the attention to detail, the light, and the way that it played off of the clothing.

Was there a particular piece from the collection that you especially loved wearing?

My favorite was definitely the pink jeans with the white T-shirt. I loved the little appliqués. It was just very comfy, but it was also very sexy, and I love anything that kinda rides low. I didn’t feel swallowed by the clothes, which can sometimes happen. It all felt right.

Do you think your style will become more girly and pop-inspired this summer?

I think in some sense, yes. But I’ve sort of been traveling toward things that felt quite a little bit more understated, sophisticated—things that have some accents in the deeper jewel tones. I really love smokier, sexier, sultrier colors, especially as far as my album rollout and the creative. It’s different from the campaign, but I think it’s nice before getting ready to [do the rollout] that I kind of step into something other than that”.

I want to come to an interview with The New York Times from last month. On Vie, she pushes herself to the max. For Doja Cat, “that means leaning into her pop roots and “doing what I know I know how to do”. It is a fascinating interview that I have taken some parts from. Giving you more insight into Doja Cat and the amazing Vie:

“A very online 29-year-old technology addict, the musician born Amala Dlamini is trolling, usually — but she means it, too. Trailed since her 2019 breakthrough by a string of these micro-controversies — the bouts of brutal honesty but also her stubborn, subversive allegiance to so-called racial chat rooms and edgelord T-shirt choices — Doja Cat appears to find personal and artistic fuel in sparring, especially when shadowboxing with the mirror.

On “Vie,” out Sept. 26, Doja Cat marries the sleazy side of ’80s synths and up-tempo R&B (Prince, Janet) with the confidence and visual bombast of glammy rock.

“I listen to so much good music, and when I do that, I beat myself up and think that my music should be better,” she said behind blackout shades at her home in Calabasas, Calif., in between heated rounds of Fortnite on the big screen. “I remember making all those songs for ‘Planet Her’ and ‘Hot Pink’ and being like, ‘I don’t wanna listen to this.’”

“I’m doing things that people like,” she thought in recent years, “and I’m glad that they enjoy it. But now, I am going to veer off the edge of the [expletive] cliff, and do whatever I want to do, and listen to my intrusive thoughts,” she added, “in order to make me feel like I’m doing something productive for myself and not just the brand.”

The resulting follow-up album, the rap-heavy “Scarlet” from 2023, was supposed to be a corrective. Darker, more personal and shot through with the defensiveness of an M.C. who was sick of her technical skills being questioned, the album was less successful than the two before it, but still went platinum and delivered a No. 1 single, “Paint the Town Red.” For Doja, even a swerve proved popular.

More crucially, though, “Scarlet” taught Doja Cat that the chip on her shoulder was permanent. “Not to diminish it, but it was a bit of like, I just need to get this out — it was a massive fart for me,” she said of her attempt to be taken more seriously. “I thought fixing that would entail making music that was more visceral or more emotional or maybe more angry or more sad. And I enjoyed performing it onstage, but it didn’t get me all the way there. So I want to return back to what I know.”

And what Doja Cat knows are old-fashioned hits.

On “Vie,” her fifth album, out Sept. 26, the pop star is strutting back into the broadest of tents and hitting a split in a bedazzled leotard. Marrying the sleazy side of ’80s synths and up-tempo R&B (Prince, Janet) with the confidence and visual bombast of “cock-rock” glam — think Mötley Crüe, Poison, Kiss, “not that I even really listen to them, necessarily” — songs like “Take Me Dancing” and “Jealous Type,” the album’s lead single, are unabashed and unpretentious, even if they pull from a deeper reference bucket than the sparkly surface lets on.

“It’s overtly sexy and it becomes kind of silly, which is likable and fun,” Doja said. “I just always want to keep that sense of fun, but I never want to be too goofy.” She cited Nina Hagen, the German cabaret-punk throwback, as another inspiration — “a hot girl who isn’t trying to just be a hot girl,” Doja explained. “She has layers to her.”

Featuring production for the first time by the pop polymath Jack Antonoff, alongside Doja Cat’s go-to lineup of lesser-known studio hitmakers (Y2K, Kurtis McKenzie), “Vie” — French for life — is very much “a continuation of ‘Planet Her’ and ‘Hot Pink,’” she said. “I’m doing what I was perfecting in the beginning. I’m doing what I know I know how to do.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Chantal Anderson

The recording process for “Vie,” on the other hand, found Doja “more openhearted” when it came to “making music that other people can enjoy, she can enjoy, and it not being so heavy,” McKenzie added, noting that Doja once again wanted to show off her voice and perform the role of pop star. “‘Scarlet’ allowed her to miss that.”

The pair had never met before collaborating on the album, which started as a vague idea about R&B songs — or maybe the intersection between punk and jazz — at Brad Pitt’s Miraval Studios in France near the end of last year.

There, though, Doja hit on a theme lyrically, inspired by the cartoonish version of French romance — “the mustaches with the rose in the mouth,” she said. “I wanted to embody it in sort of a tongue-in-cheek way,” but also earnestly: “As a daughter of a single mother taking care of two kids, romance is something that I feel is my life lesson because it’s not something that was ever really there.”

She has long considered herself a sex writer. “Like that’s my whole thing,” Doja said. “I have floggers and whips all over my walls.” But “Vie” is different, she added, “because I’m talking about not only my own sexuality, but his.” (Having most recently been linked to the actor Joseph Quinn, Doja Cat said she is “just having fun” and “allowing things to happen,” while noting that she both loves men and loves “bullying men.”)

“I’m doing what I was perfecting in the beginning,” Doja Cat said of her new album. “I’m doing what I know I know how to do.”

The matching musical palette, Antonoff said, was a side of the ’80s that could be considered the opposite of yacht rock — “you’re not being tasteful,” he explained. “It’s a little bit more in that ‘4 a.m., driving around the dark’ kind of zone.”

For Doja Cat, the choice was as much physical and visual as it was musical. “I know who I am and how I want to perform,” she said — all out and in-your-face. “I wanna move, I wanna dance.” In preparation for bringing the full spectacle of “Vie” to audiences around the world this fall and through next year, she has been working out harder than ever, taking ’80s fitness to the max. “It’s an excuse to look great,” she said.

As for the songs, Doja is “a lot more” forgiving now than she has been of her own music, especially in the recent past. But it’s a process. “Do I wanna listen to it? No, I turn it off still,” she said. “But I can appreciate it”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Chantal Anderson

I will end with a couple of reviews for Vie. One of the best albums of the year in my view, The Guardian said that Vie finds a softer and more openhearted Californian artist who has not lost the fun and mischief. Vie is an album of balances and varying emotions. We hear both the sugar and the spice:

“Is this just another troll? Doja Cat’s new album is titled Vie – French for “life” – and the original artwork (changed at the last minute) features the 29-year-old Angeleno surrounded by roses, ever the picture of congeniality. Doja has become known, in recent years, as mainstream pop’s master agitator: she tells her superfans to “get off your phone, get a job and help your parents with the house”, disavows her own hits before they’ve even left the upper echelons of the charts and is totally unapologetic about what can be described, charitably, as edgelord behaviour. Doja’s 2023 album Scarlet – a prickly, antagonistic record designed to prove her bona fides as a rapper – seemingly shut the book on her time as a pop hit-maker with a bracing, refreshing meanness.

So there is precedent for the notion that Vie’s lead single Jealous Type – a piece of slick, cinematic 80s pop of the kind Doja used to toss off with abandon – was a fake-out. It’s not exactly that: Doja’s fifth album does find her returning to the sugary, aerodynamic well of her 2019 LP Hot Pink and 2021’s Planet Her. This time around, it feels as if she and producer Jack Antonoff have found a more comfortable middle ground between the gloss of that world, which she’s criticised over and over again, and the desires of the brilliantly snarky fire-starter who tore her way through Scarlet.

Hearing the push-and-pull between those sides of Doja is enormous fun. AAAHH MEN! is like a sinister take on Chic’s Le Freak, its blown-out, sleazy strut a perfect soundtrack for Doja’s conflicted internal monologue: do I want to take a guy home for sex, or just to lambast him? It’s hard to tell which she’s leaning towards: “I have too much tolerance / You ugly and fine as shit / And if I had more common sense / Then I would grab my ride and dip,” she raps, clearly relishing the opportunity to trifle.

More often, it’s a sweeter side of Doja taking hold, although rarely the uncomplicated sexpot of early singles such as Say So. On Silly! Fun! she raps with flustered abandon about being in love for the first time over the kind of dazed, lovesick production that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Chappell Roan record. When she raps “I’m in love” or “let’s have kids,” the final word of each phrase is sung by a disembodied backing vocal, like she wouldn’t dare say it out loud – a charming, canny detail. Doja has said she probably wouldn’t listen to this music herself, but she’s locked in nonetheless, applying the same detail to frothy pop songs as she does to one-liners such as: “He ain’t hungry for money / I told him: ‘Come eat the rich.’” (See seventh track All Mine.)

Can a leopard change its spots? That seems to be the question Doja is trying to answer musically and lyrically across Vie. She is smart enough not to give any clear answers, ending the album with Come Back, a glowing, bitter love song that shares a strand of its DNA with Donna Lewis’s I Love You Always Forever. “I’m pleased I ain’t the bitch you was hopin’ for / If we keep this up and you hold my doors / And you take my bag, and you hold me more / I don’t think that would make up for the hope I lost,” she raps, weariness coating every inch of her voice. There’s no trolling here – just an earnest relationship postmortem, set to production that’s so twinkly and lovesick it would make even Carly Rae Jepsen blush. A leopard can’t change its spots, but maybe Doja Cat can”.

Even though some have stated how there is Pop pastiche on Vie and there is a sense of it being unfocused at times, I would disagree. I think that it is a solid work that showcases her brilliance. She even received criticism for the album cover. I think that it is a standout and striking cover. Rare in a year when there have been precious few memorable album covers! This is what NME wrote for their four-star review of Vie:

“If 2021’s ‘Planet Her’ is a sparkling fantasy world of glossy pop and alien allure, then Doja Cat’s fifth album ‘Vie’ is meant to be its “masculine” musical sister: an intimate, sensual ride threaded with zappy synths and funk bass. The album rarely feels assertive in a traditionally male-coded way; instead, it thrives on texture, groove and vocal fluidity, creating a seductive, immersive experience that refuses to sit still. Doja’s metamorphic vocal delivery – shifting from fluttery falsettos to animated rap scratches – is the glue, scratching, spinning and looping over the beats like a turntablist teasing vinyl.

Early missteps highlight the album’s tension between intention and execution. Considering the album’s ’80s inspirations, the lead single ‘Jealous Type’ is a cliché interpretation with shimmery, upbeat melodies paired with romantic despair, making it feel like a weak introduction to the album. Similarly, ‘Couples Therapy’ and ‘Stranger’ slow momentum, offering quality production but little that compels movement.

But these minuscule slips are overshadowed the moment ‘Gorgeous’ blasts through your speakers – when groove, sensuality and clever playfulness reach full force. It exudes debonair confidence, making you want to slink around the world like you’re Jessica Rabbit. ‘All Mine’ demonstrates Doja’s vocal dexterity, her high, jazzy, bluesy register floating above the beat before she cuts back into it like a DJ spinning vinyl. In ‘Take Me Dancing’, the album’s sole feature SZA arrives as a cameo rather than a crutch, lending a multigenerational joy reminiscent of Cameo’s ‘Candy’ and ‘Word Up!’ but never overshadowing Doja’s command of the track. Across these songs, she proves that her vocals are both instrument and performer – seductive, playful and endlessly inventive.

Throughout ‘Vie’, Doja doesn’t lean into brute masculinity in the way you’d think; instead, seizing dominance through feminine-coded moves like jealousy, seduction, and emotional manipulation. She’s still authoritative, just cloaked in softness rather than swagger. There’s a glimpse on ‘Lipstain’, which is a perfect snapshot of women’s playful, biting power as she snarls over the nostalgic beat: “Every girl’s a queen, but I’m the boss / We gotta mark our territory for them dogs, girl.” But when she finally flirts with trendy casual misandry on ‘AAAHH MEN!’, she taps into something closer to true attack-dog masculinity, battling with the push-and-pull of being attracted yet repulsed by the male species.

Doja’s production choices amplify this effect. Powerful ’80s-style synths, slapping basslines and occasional modern 808s combine to keep the album moving and engaging. ‘Acts of Service’, ‘Make It Up’ and ‘Silly! Fun!’ layer lush, bluesy chords over warped synths to create sultry, body-forward grooves. By the cinematic closer ‘Come Back’, it feels like the credits rolling on an ’80s coming-of-age film: reflective, glimmering and full of resolution after a kaleidoscopic journey through love and desire.

‘Vie’ proves that Doja Cat remains pop’s ultimate shapeshifter, offering an album that moves, seduces and entertains on its own terms. Now using nostalgic power-pop as her vehicle, Doja’s voice – morphing, scratching, fluttering and crooning – drives it with full throttle, keeping every track alive. It’s intimate, playful, and downright fun, and once it gets its tenterhooks into you, it won’t let go”.

Another reason why Doja Cat makes it into this Modern-Day Queens is because she turns thirty on 21st October. Many happy returns to her! With a brilliant album out and plenty of tour dates booked for next year, it is an exciting and busy time. Go and follow Doja Cat and listen to Vie. She is no doubt a modern-day queen and idol. Someone who inspires so many others and stands out from her peers. This truly amazing artist is going to keep putting out great music…

YEARS from now.

_________

Follow Doja Cat

FEATURE: Beneath the Sleeve: D’Angelo and The Vanguard – Black Messiah

FEATURE:

 

 

Beneath the Sleeve

 

D’Angelo and The Vanguard – Black Messiah

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THIS album…

PHOTO CREDIT: Greg Harris/Courtesy of the artist

is one of my favourites from the 2010s. D’Angelo and The Vanguard’s Black Messiah was released on 15th December, 2014. Rather than this being a project credited to D’Angelo alone, this was his first with The Vanguard. Maybe like Prince and his New Power Generation. There is no denying the brilliance of Black Messiah. All three albums D’Angelo released – 1995’s Brown Sugar, 2000’s Voodoo, and 2014’s Black Messiah – are works of genius. It took a long time for Black Messiah to come together. The songs feel loose and natural, but they are so detailed and intricate. Reaching number five on the US Billboard 200, the album was hugely acclaimed. Universal praise. So many people excited to see D’Angelo put out an album fourteen years after his previous one. You can buy the album on vinyl. With most of the music written by D’Angelo and Kendra Foster co-writing some of the songs (Q-Tip contributed to two songs), there are some tracks where the music was co-written by others (Questlove writes on a couple of tracks). It is Black History Month in the U.K. In future features, I am going to focus on Black British artists and music. However, now, I wanted to spend some time with Black Messiah for Black History Month. It does seem that D’Angelo is working on a new album, so we may not have to wait too long to get a follow-up to Black Messiah. I am going to get to some features and reviews around the album. Before that, there are a couple of interviews that I want to highlight.

I am moving to this interview with Red Bull Music Academy. They spoke with D’Angelo about Black Messiah and some of the influences that go into it. I think this album is one of the masterpieces of the century. One that will be discussed and played decades from now. I think that it is D’Angelo’s best album. Flawless:

“D’Angelo revolutionized soul music like few others. As part of the Soulquarian movement, and friend and collaborator to Questlove, Lauryn Hill and Raphael Saadiq, D’Angelo continued the legacy of Marvin Gaye and Prince, while fusing it with an off-kilter beat flourish akin to that of J Dilla. With his first album Brown Sugar, D laid the cornerstones of his take on modern R&B and slow jams: low slung, lazy, and hazy love songs that tipped a hat to everyone from Curtis Mayfield to Al Green, Sam Cooke to Jimi Hendrix, and Sly Stone to James Brown, all while maintaining his own raw, gospel-steeped sensuality.

But it was his follow-up Voodoo that cemented his reputation as an iconic artist, earning him many awards, including two Grammys, and multi-platinum sales across the board. D’Angelo has had his fingers over multiple classic albums, including LPs from Common, Slum Village, Q-Tip, BB King, Roy Hargrove, The Roots, Method Man: the list goes on.

Renowned for going deeper into arrangements and songwriting than almost anyone, D’Angelo has dedicated his life to the pursuit of the sweetest musical moments. That much is obvious on first listen to his newest album, Black Messiah. Released on December 15th, 2014, it came nearly 15 years after the release of Voodoo. In this exclusive interview conducted earlier this year, Chairman Mao and Torsten Schmidt asked D’Angelo to delve into the influences and inspirations behind his new album.

When did you first hear Prince?

I was five years old. “I Wanna Be Your Lover” had come out, and it was a big hit. When that album came out, it was just huge. He really, literally, was the talk of the town. Everybody was wondering, “Who is this guy? Is he a guy? Is it a girl?” No one really knew who it was. I remember we had the album, and my brothers were just enamored by this guy. They told me, “He plays everything, he writes everything, he’s singing everything,” so I was hooked from then on. I learned how to play every song on that album, note for note, at five years old.

Out of all the Prince songs, why did you decide to cover “She’s Always In My Hair”?

Because I was really going through that at the time. I mean, aside from it being one of my favorite Prince B-sides of all time, that’s exactly how I was feeling. Ahmir and I, we’re Prince junkies. We’re always playing Prince’s music in the studio. Not knowing that we’re going to cover it or anything – it just ended up like that.

There’s a generation of kids who learned about Joni Mitchell through Q-Tip. Out of that whole world - the Carly Simons, the Joni Mitchells, whatever - is there anything that really speaks to you?

I got hip to Joni Mitchell through Prince. I found out that Prince was a huge Joni Mitchell fan, so I listened to some of her work. My favorite Joni Mitchell album is Blue. Her lyrics, her purity as an artist… she’s very significant.

You mentioned gospel. We have Joni on the other hand, you have the soul there. Somehow, there’s country in the middle. Is there any country that really touches you?

Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. I think a lot of it does, though, because it’s very close to gospel and the blues. It’s kind of like the holy trinity of what everything is based upon – blues, gospel and folk music. Country is a great amalgamation of those three”.

Rolling Stone ran a deep interview in June 2015. Sort of looking back on the album but also delving into the songs and the lead-up to it, it is this genius album from an artist like no other. For anyone who has not heard it, I would recommend that you investigate:

“D’Angelo, who turned 41 in February, is clearer on what pushed him to finally release the LP: He had lyrics that dealt powerfully with police violence and black despair, and the protests in Ferguson made him realize it was time. “I was like, ‘Man, I gotta fucking contribute. I gotta participate,’ ” he says. “And I’m done trying to be a perfectionist about it.”

But in the rush, he released only a portion of the album he envisioned. So even as a June tour looms, he’s back in the studio now to try to finish what he’s hoping will be an expeditious follow-up, working with leftover tracks from the same sessions. His gear is in his preferred room, the way he likes it: his custom-made electric guitar, a vintage drum machine, a bass, a gleaming black piano; and in the far corner, a fabric tent where he likes to huddle when recording vocals (“my little tepee,” he calls it). On the floor are boxes from his vinyl LP collection, heavy on gospel vocal groups.

D’Angelo grew up in Richmond, Virginia — his father, a preacher, was mostly out of his life by the time he was nine. But the church loomed large in his upbringing — a child prodigy, he was backing the choir on piano each Sunday at age five. His initial musical fascinations were gospel and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, until he heard Prince: “It was love at first bite.”

The interview continues a couple of days later in a private room booked by his high-powered manager, Kevin Liles, in an exclusive cigar club, the Grand Havana Room. D’Angelo shows up cheerfully at midnight for a 9 p.m. appointment, looking freshly showered and caffeinated. This time, he wears a Kangol cap at a jaunty angle and a shirt that says ‘AFRO PUNK.’ We talk until the club shuts down, then drive aimlessly in an Uber looking for a new location. He makes small talk, big-upping an HBO documentary on Fran Lebowitz and expressing the desire to buy a Pono, before finally coming up with a destination: the studio, once again.

People were wondering if you were ever going to release a new album. Was that a question in your own mind, though?

No one knew what the fuck! [Laughs] But for me, it wasn’t a question, not at all. I had a little anxiety of how it would be received, but I knew it was coming.

The song “Back to the Future (Part 1)” feels like a reintroduction to the world.

When I wrote it, I envisioned it being the first thing people would hear, because it kind of tells the story of where I’ve been: “So, if you’re wondering about the shape I’m in/I hope it ain’t my abdomen that you’re referring to.” It was kind of like me answering some questions, without really being asked. Not just for everybody, but also for myself.

The trippy strings on that song have a “Sgt. Pepper’s” vibe.

Wow, thank you! The Beatles are a major influence for everybody, but when I was writing that song, I was very heavy into them — I was fucking around and doing covers of my favorite Beatles songs, experimenting with shit like that. I also really was digging America Eats Its Young at the time, which was one of the only Funkadelic albums that utilized strings.

The “Charade” lyrics — “All we wanted was a chance to talk/’Stead we only got outlined in chalk” — got a lot of attention for their timeliness.

It just shows how ongoing this shit is, because I wrote that even before the Trayvon Martin thing happened. It’s crazy that we’re still in the streets protesting the same shit. That song was just about the state of society in general — when I say, “A chance to talk,” that means a chance to come to the table and exercise rights that are supposed to be ours already. Me and [co-writer] Kendra [Foster] were reading a lot of [James] Baldwin around that time.

How did you end up with such a richly layered album?

The best way to describe the process is very much like a sculpture. You’re just constantly chipping and chipping away at it. I’ll work on something for a minute, and, once I feel like I’m starting to fixate on it, I put it away and go to another one. I jump around a lot. I play pretty much everything on all of the songs, and after I’m done with the blueprint, then I’ll bring in my guys. Or there are times when it’s just me and Ahmir [Questlove], and he’ll come up with the drum pattern, and I’ll sit around and write the music. Then when Pino comes in on the bass, he can mirror my left hand on the keys in such a way where it’s hard to tell the difference even amongst ourselves.

Can we attribute the delay of the album, ultimately, to your substance issues, or was it much more complicated than that?

The shit that happened in my personal life didn’t help, but it wasn’t just about that. There were moving parts — management changes, record-company changes. Virgin Records went defunct, and before that, they went through personnel changes. Back in the day, the executives actually gave a fuck about music — that’s the biggest change. The music business is a crazy game, especially for somebody like me who is really a purist about the art. Trying to balance the pressures of commercialism, it’s a tightrope. It’s a fine line between sticking to your guns and insanity.

What was the label hoping for?

The label wanted a Voodoo part two. At one point, after Voodoo, I was early in the process of working on new music that would eventually be on Black Messiah, and I let the label know where I was at with it. The music was pretty ahead of the curve, and they weren’t ready for that. They had these young college kids coming in as A&R, trying to tell me, “You should get so-and-so to produce this track, or you should get so-and-so to spit 16 on this.” I remember walking out of a meeting like, “Fuck you, fuck this!” The biggest factor in all of it was money. They cut off funding, and I had to go on the road to generate money on my own to fund the recording.

What has the course of your friendship with Questlove been through all of this?

For the most part, it’s just love. There were peaks and valleys — we’re brothers, and brothers fight. When Dilla died, it hit all of us. [Editor’s note: Voodoo collaborator J Dilla died in 2006, of complications from lupus.] It scared the shit out of me, actually, enough that I really felt my own mortality. I think Ahmir was afraid for me at that point, and sometimes when you feel like that, I guess you don’t quite know how to express it, and there was silence. I just had to go through it and get to the other side of it. And thank God I did.

Ferguson aside, how did you know the album was done?

It was time. Everyone was in the streets, so we sat down with the team and did some soul-searching and decided to put it out. But if it were left entirely up to me, it wouldn’t have come out. I had to get out of my head. Because there were so many songs that I wanted people to hear.

Were you originally thinking of, like, a 36-song triple-LP thing?

It wasn’t that long! [Laughs] But it was longer than what Black Messiah ended up being. What I’m working on now is like a companion piece. I hope people receive it that way. It’s part of the same vision.

The political songs got the most initial attention, but there’s a lot of other things going on there.

Well, a lot of the songs that people didn’t hear really take on those themes even more directly than the songs that are on Black Messiah.

So you could have hit people with something that was kind of like . . .

Almost like a beating over the fucking head [laughs].

There’s rarely a lead vocal by itself on this album — you surround your voice with harmonies. What is that about for you?

I grew up teaching parts to choirs, and I love a whole group of voices singing as one. When I was young, I had an “aha” moment in church. There was a thing called testimony service, and somebody would sing a song, and everyone else would join in, finding a note where they fit. During one of those, a light went on in my head. In that moment, I heard everything — Parliament, the Staple Singers, Curtis Mayfield, Prince — in there. That sound came out of the slave ships, straight from Africa, like in 12 Years a Slave when they’re singing “Roll Jordan Roll.” That’s why that shit resonates. I can just think about that and get chills. So when I got my first four-track recorder and started multitracking my own voice, that was the first thing I aspired to reproduce.

What’s your general feeling about race relations? How much optimism do you have?

I’m an idealist. So in that respect I’m very optimistic. At the same time, awareness is the biggest thing we’re missing. When I say “we,” I mean us as black folk.

When I was coming up, popular tastes bent toward consciousness — the Rakims of the world, and the Public Enemys, and the Boogie Down Productions. Discovering Malcolm X was trendy. So if there’s things in the world you want to change, you first have to make those changes within yourself. I hate to sound like a Hallmark card, or like “Man in the Mirror,” but that really is the truth [laughs].

What do you want the next few years of your career to look like?

I want to do what Yahweh is leading me to do. Do I know fully what that is? No, I don’t. I’m trying to keep myself open, my heart open, to receive and to know what that is. But I do want to put a lot of music out there. I feel like, in a lot of respects, that I’m just getting started”.

I am going to end with a couple of reviews. Bearded Gentlemen Music provided their take on D’Angelo and The Vanguard’s Black Messiah and, in the process, argued why R&B motors. Perhaps not as regarded in 2014 as it is now, it is s genre that has had to fight for attention. Most people would call D’Angelo Neo-Soul, though Black Messiah is R&B and Hip-Hop:

“When I read the news that D’Angelo would soon be dropping his “long, long-awaited” album I was in shock, literally. My brother had died the night before. The fact that I had been anxiously awaiting this album for years didn’t matter. I was dazed, drained, and devastated. How could I possibly care about D’Angelo?

This was the state of mind that I began streaming Black Messiah on Spotify, a couple days later, on the night it dropped. I listened to it in the dark, sitting on my parents couch, watching lights blink on their Christmas tree until they were just one big blur of neon color. I listened to it again, and again, until the sun came up. Then I listened to it one more time.

I don’t remember a lot from December 2014. I lost a few weeks there. As is expected when you go through a death in the family. But the important things stick out in my mind. This album really helped me take my mind off shit. For instance, I remember dancing to D’Angelo’s, “Back To The Future,“ with my girlfriend on Christmas morning like we didn’t give a fuck. That song has a groove that doesn’t make sense on paper. It’s the sort of thing you might not even realize is great to dance to unless you try. The bass just pedals one note. It has a little hop to it, too. The kind of hop you’d expect from old jump blues musicians like Cats and The Fiddle or Louis Jordan.  But every once in a while, it just slides…like Vroom!

And before you know it, it’s “back to the way it was.”

Like all of D’Angelo’s best work, this song pulls it’s inspiration from a lot of other sources. The most notable here, might be Nas’, “Represent.”  The two songs share a key, a very similar in orchestration and arrangement, and even though they have two completely different grooves–on account of the bass line–their beats are so similar that it’s difficult to tell them apart.

This isn’t the only song on Black Messiah that has striking similarities with other classics. For example, compare the mighty riffage on, “1000 Deaths” to that of Funkadelic’s “Hit It & Quit It.”  Or notice how, “Really Love,” is a pea from the same pod as Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine.”  Then there’s the gorgeous closer, “Another Life,” that has more than it’s share of parallels with both The Delfonics’, “Over and Over,” and Luther Vandross’, “Never Too Much.”

I’m not sure if D’Angelo is doing this on purpose. It’s far more likely that this stuff is just a part of his DNA. In any case, it never comes off as thievery–Black Messiah transcends it’s influences. Perhaps the best example of what I’m talking about is, “Sugah Daddy.” The song already feels like a classic to me.  Compare it, first of all, to Stevie Wonder’s “Sir Duke,” another song that also pays homage to early swing jazz. Also notable are the vocals which evoke Ella Fitzgerald and Fats Waller. It has a piano that could have been played by Thelonious Monk, a drum beat that’s a dead ringer for A Tribe Called Quest’s “Oh My God,” and body percussion that sounds a little familiar as well.  Yet somehow it belongs in it’s own category. It’s a style of music that’s never existed before–neither jazz, hip-hop nor R&B–but somehow all of them, too

It’s worth remembering that this album is a little over a month old now.  In other words, this is also old news. You’ve hopefully already heard Black Messiah, and also wrapped your head around it. As B.G.M.’s Michael White said in December, “To give (Black Messiah) a full review (now) a mere couple days since it’s release would be crass, considering it took nearly fifteen years for this to arrive”.

I am ending with a thorough review from The Line of Best Fit. When I bought Black Messiah in 2014, it had been a long time since I had heard Voodoo, so I was not sure what to expect from D’Angelo. I was going in with no expectations or references, and I was stunned the first time I heard it. Black Messiah is definitely one of my favourite albums ever:

“The intervening years were strange for D’Angelo: he had some brief and bizarre run-ins with the law; he experienced a near fatal car accident in 2005 (fucked up on booze and cocaine he flipped his Hummer off the road and stuck it into a fence in the middle of Virginia one night, breaking every rib on his left side in the process); he was twice in and out of rehab struggling with drink and drug addiction, and at least appeared to be suffering from a case of chronic writers block, among other things. And so, the beginning of the new century – the Internet, two American-led wars, a black president, the capitulation of hope and an entire Kanye West discography - happened in D’Angelo’s notable absence.

With this in mind, D’Angelo could have been forgiven for making an album that comes off somewhat confused about its place or purpose in the modern world, either straining to play catch up or limp with nostalgia. Except it’s neither of these things. Black Messiah is emphatic; it’s pertinently weird and beautiful and possessed; its rage is masterfully concentrated, its critique is devastatingly pointed.

Black Messiah wasn’t supposed to drop in 2014. It turns out D’Angelo rushed the release date in response to the nationwide protests and rioting sparked by a grand jury’s failure to indict officer Darren Wilson for shooting dead Michael Brown in Ferguson earlier this year - which lends Black Messiah, an album that is really a decade and a half overdue, the feeling of in fact being right on cue. On “The Charade”, D’Angelo reflects on the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and deconstructs the notion of a “post-racial” American society. The charade is, among other things, the judicial system, the law, the police force, the Obama administration; the charade is the very idea of America and its infinite star-spangled possibilities. On the hook, in a solemn, muffled drawl barely legible underneath the cacophony of droning guitars and sharp snare licks which appear at times to imitate the cracks and bangs of live ammunition, D’Angelo sings: “All we wanted was a chance to talk/’stead we only got outlined in chalk/Feet have bled a million miles we’ve walked/Revealing at the end of the day, the charade”. There’s more anger and distortion on “1,000 Deaths”, where D’Angelo and The Vanguard break out into pure destructive abstraction - funk derailed, vocals drowned in noise. “1,000 Deaths” is the negative imprint of the “The Charade”, a simmering, brutal and industrial assault against the charade. The explosive, nightmarish close to the track recalls the freakish clamour that breaks out in Eugene McDaniel’s protest song, “The Parasite (For Buffy)”. It’s the sound of American cities burning: “It’s War/That is the Law!” There’s a sense of instability, a barely contained chaos, twitching and reverberating across tracks like “1,000 Deaths”: the wild intensity of the crowd; the multitude choked by thick walls of tear gas, clenched fists and picket signs piercing through poison smoke.

Not everything on Black Messiah is so fiercely charged with socio-political commentary. However, that doesn’t mean it necessarily fades; rather, it assumes a different form altogether. D’Angelo cultivates a space - a sonic ‘landscape’, to use his words – in which the particular and the universal bleed imperceptibly into one another, so that it’s hard to dissociate the private, individual body from the collective, social body and vice versa. If sections of Black Messiah are about scenes of protest and riot, others might well about fucking against the backdrop of a riot. Solidarity and struggle form the two main overarching themes on Black Messiah; D’Angelo made this clear enough in the album’s liner notes. But they’re themes D’Angelo and The Vanguard weave intricately into the leather tight fabric of what are ostensibly inward looking love songs (the flamenco-inspired “Really Love” and “Betray My Heart”, for example): What’s love without the struggle and the ugliness; what’s solidarity without love and empathy? Etc. etc. There is often even a nice duality at play in D’Angelo’s lyricism, a sort of narrative entanglement. On the track “Till It’s Done (Tutu)”, he addresses the collective on issues like global warming through what appears to be an intimate exchange between two estranged lovers: “Do we even know what we’re fighting for?” D’Angelo sings, “Destinies crippled and thrown about on the floor”. “It’s [Black Messiah] about all of us”, D’Angelo writes in the liner notes. In this sense, Black Messiah is about the search between bodies for a true collective, social body; it’s about the need to reestablish a type of connection that has absolutely nothing to do with technology and everything to do with people.

However, it’s the instrumentation and D’Angelo’s vocal performance that really steal the album. Musically Black Messiah sort of unfurls itself, drip by drip, seductively, inexorably, at the point where the violent meets the sublime, the destructive meets the ecstatic. It flows like a sheet of bubbling, molten hot lava, moving slowly and implacably across the landscape. Technically, it’s a near alchemic distillation of arrangements and textures, complex patterns and compositions, plucked from an array of genres and recalling decades of music history: Sly and the Family Stone, Curtis Mayfield, Funkadelic and Eddie Hazel’s “Maggot Brain”, Prince, Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, J Dilla, and perhaps even shades of Yeezus. At times, D’Angelo’s vocals are lucid and delightfully crisp, delving confidently into vintage soul and funk on tracks like "Sugar Daddy"; at other times, it’s submerged by surging waves of feedback or battered by an aggressive hailstorm of percussion. On the "Prayer", D’Angelo’s sings a kind of drunken, woozy lament, pounded by thudding drum sequences and backed by sparse bells tolling omens of grave portent. D’Angelo whistles his way through “The Door”, a blues inspired piece inflected with the lazy twang of guitar slides: it’s rocking chairs, spittoons, and ceiling fans; it’s the stroke of midnight...It’s eternally the stroke of midnight on Black Messiah.

Given how immaculate this album is, it would be nice to hear from D’Angelo more often. But then again, in an age and an industry that demands a consistent, uninterrupted outflow of product, there’s something decidedly refreshing about his jangled hiatus, self-imposed exile, or whatever it is you want to call it. Black Messiah is an album totally devoid of gimmicks and there was no orchestrated hype in the build up to its unexpected release - no videos, no singles, and minimal publicity. This thing generated its own buzz. Black Messiah is quite clearly the result of years of patient and meticulous refinement, when D’Angelo had seemingly all but disappeared from music. D’Angelo dealt with his demons outside of the limelight, at his own pace and on his own terms, and you can feel them being exorcised and cast out all over Black Messiah. Yes, fourteen years is a long time to wait between records. But, when the end product is this good, it might just be worth the wait. D’Angelo might even allude to it himself: “Can't snatch the meat out of the lioness' mouth/Sometimes you ‘gotta/Just ease it out”.

For Black History Month, I did want to explore D’Angelo and The Vanguard’s Black Messiah. One of the greatest ever albums in my view. It turns eleven on 15th December. I hope that we get another D’Angelo album soon enough, as he is this unique genius who has this perfect run of albums. It is tough competition, though I still maintain that…

THE epic Black Messiah is his very best.

FEATURE: Groovelines: No Doubt - Don't Speak

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

 

No Doubt - Don't Speak

__________

ONE of the biggest albums…

of the 1990s turns thirty tomorrow (10th October). No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom was the third album from the band, and it reached number one in multiple countries. In terms of its sales, it is this massive success. No wonder when you consider the songs featured. Included are Just a Girl and Sunday Morning. The most successful and the best-known is Don’t Speak. It was released as a single on 8th November, 1996 but, as the album it came from is thirty tomorrow, I want to focus on Don’t Speak for this Groovelines. Written by Gwen Stefani and Eric Stefani, Don’t Speak became the most widely played song on American radio in 1996. It hit number one on Billboard's Hot 100 Airplay chart, and stayed there for sixteen non-consecutive weeks, which was a record at the time. This video, where No Doubt spoke from the set of Don’t Speak, is worth a watch. I want to start out with a feature from Independent from 2010. They shone a light on Don’t Speak and its creation:

“When Gwen Stefani walked into the Anaheim house she shared with her brother and bandmates, she heard Eric Stefani playing a tender piano figure that stopped her in her tracks. The pair immediately set about writing the song that would become "Don't Speak". Gwen gushed out some lyrics: "I can see it all in an eye blink/ I know everything about how you are/ I can understand exactly how you think/ Between you and me, it's not very far." The verses celebrated Gwen's long-standing relationship with her bassist, Tony Kanal. It was a pretty, if lyrically unexceptional, love song; unusual for a band more noted for an energetic ska-pop. Melodically, though, it sounded like a hit. "The vibes were there, the chorus was almost exactly perfect," said the band's guitarist, Tom Dumont.

When Stefani and Kanal's relationship hit the buffers, it demanded a review of their new song. "Eric and I went into the garage, stubbornly and very irritated about the situation, and sat down and rewrote the verses and lyrics," Gwen said. "Don't Speak" went through various overhauls, some at the behest of their producer, Matthew Wilder, and each more lachrymose than the last. "It used to be more upbeat, more of a Seventies rock-type thing," said Gwen. "[When] Tony and I broke up... it turned into a sad song." Dumont's Spanish guitar solo was spliced together from six different studio takes. "I was thinking about how any true classical players would've hated the way I did it," he said. "I played it with a pick – a huge no-no”.

As was typical of the 1990s, and perhaps now, that if an artist released a song that sounded different to what they did before or what the fans expected, then they would be attacked for it – regardless of how great the track was. That was true for Don’t Speak. Many fans felt that No Doubt betrayed their Ska roots. That they were creating this sugary commercial Pop. In years since, people have recognised how incredible the song is. I also don’t think its lyrics are simplistic. They are powerful and honest. If they were too elaborate or complicated then it would take away from the emotion and effectiveness of the song. That Independent article featured these words: “Mere words cannot describe how abysmally gutless and sugar-smothered it is," ran the review in 'Kerrang!' "No Doubt suck badly”. Last year, American Songwriter looked at the meaning behind Don’t Speak. Its lyrics took a little while to crystalise. However, when you listen to them now, you can feel and sense the emotion in Gwen Stefani’s voice. She means and feels every word:

“Gwen Stefani dared to get candid on this track. Her honesty becomes all the more impressive when you realize the subject of this song was in the room with her when she recorded it. “Don’t Speak” was written in the midst of her breakup with bandmate Tony Kanal.

You and me, we used to be together
Every day together, always
I really feel that I’m losin’ my best friend
I can’t believe this could be the end
It looks as though you’re lettin’ go
And if it’s real, well, I don’t want to know

The lyrics about losing a best friend during a breakup hit home for Stefani and her bandmates–especially Kanal. Around this era of their career, Stefani couldn’t help but write about the end of her relationship.

“I was like, ‘Fu**, I can’t keep writing about the same thing. But I gotta write about what’s in my head, and that’s the only thing on my mind,’” Stefani once said of this track. Elsewhere she added, “Eric [Stefani] and I went into the garage, stubbornly and very irritated about the situation, and sat down and rewrote the verses and lyrics.”

Don’t speak, I know just what you’re sayin’
So please stop explainin’
Don’t tell me ’cause it hurts
Don’t speak, I know what you’re thinkin’
I don’t need your reasons
Don’t tell me ’cause it hurts

The iconic chorus of this No Doubt classic is evocative of all of that irritation. You can feel how desperate Stefani is in the chorus. She begs Kanal to not break her heart. I don’t need your reasons / Don’t tell me ’cause it hurts, she sings”.

I am going to end with part of an interview last year, where Gwen Stefani spoke about the impact and importance of Don’t Speak. Before that, I want to come to Insounder and part of their feature. Despite the song’s lyrics and subject, Gwen Stefani and Tony Kanal had this strong and healthy friendship. And they do to this date. As Tragic Kingdom is thirty, many people will be discussing its biggest single. A song that is a true fan favourite:

“There is a playful undertone to the whole thing, if you really watch the exchanges between band members, it kind of looks like they were having a great time filming it. Although, some reports say that the band were about to break up before doing the clip and that they filmed it as a sort of therapy.

However, Gwen and Tony continued to have a positive relationship, both professionally and personally, and continued playing together for years to come. In fact, Stefani later wrote a song about her relationship with Kanal, aptly named "Cool". They aren't the first band that has survived breakups, written songs about it and continued to have a professional career (looking at you Fleetwood Mac). It seems to be a recurring motif in the music business.

However, it must take its toll, and it certainly says something about the maturity of the relationships in the band that they could get through it. Tony once said: "travelling around the world and you’re doing press in all these different countries, and every single question that you have to answer is about the breakup. You do that for a couple years, and it could drive anyone crazy [...] The fact that we got through all that stuff and we persevered through all that is a real testament to our friendship”.

When The Guardian took readers questions and put them to Gwen Stefani, she was asked about Don’t Speak. It is clear how much it means to her. Thirty years after people first heard it, Gwen Stefani must be asked about it all of the time. It was definitely one of the defining tracks of my high school years:

“Did you think Don’t Speak would become such a huge hit? Troy_McClure
I absolutely had no idea. It didn’t even represent what we were doing, because No Doubt were such an uptempo, live-energy band. Even the guitar solo has no business being in that song. The original version was written by my brother [Eric, keyboards], who lived at my grandparents’ house; after they passed away, it became the band house. He’d stay up all night eating peanut butter sandwiches, drinking milk and smoking cigarettes and go: “Oh, I wrote this last night.”

Then I ended up rewriting the lyrics and changing the whole song because Tony [Kanal, bass] broke up with me. It’s crazy, but that song really is the heartbeat of who I am and changed everything”

Tomorrow, we celebrate thirty years of Tragic Kingdom. Its third single, Don’t Speak, took on a life of its own. It is amazing to think that Don’t Speak was not allowed to appear on the Billboard Hot 100, since a physical single was not issued in the U.S. However, this colossus of a track did top the Billboard Hot 100 Airplay chart for four months. Such was the brilliance and impact of the song. To this day, it is still widely played. Those critics who slated the song and felt that it was weak or No Doubt had sold out. The fact Gwen Stefani holds Don’t Speak so close to her heart shows…

HOW wrong those critics were.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Songs from Albums Turning Thirty in 2026

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

 

Songs from Albums Turning Thirty in 2026

__________

WE are now…

in 1996 for this run of features where I collate albums celebrating big anniversaries next year. Those greats that turn thirty. 1996 was a tremendous year, so there are going to be a lot of wonderful albums in the mix. This was a year when I was at high school, so I would have heard or bought a lot of the albums. It is one of the best years of the 1990s for music. Thirty years alter and these albums stand up and still sound remarkable. Genius albums from Fugees, Manic Street Preachers, DJ Shadow and Fiona Apple in the pack. Even if you were not around or old enough in 1996 to remember these albums, you will know most of them. I hope that you enjoy this mixtape that collates the very best…

OF 1996.

FEATURE: Long Live the Queens: Showing Admiration for Some Truly Incredible Women

FEATURE:

 

 

Long Live the Queens

IN THIS PHOTO: Emma-Louise Boynton

 

Showing Admiration for Some Truly Incredible Women

__________

IT seems to be a personal challenge…

IN THIS PHOTO: Jess Davies/PHOTO CREDIT: Rhiannon Holland

to those in power to make the world as awful as possible. There is genocide and violence across the world. Our world leaders not doing anything and, worse than this, facilitating it and also arresting and supressing those who protest (peacefully) against it! I am finding myself becoming angrier and angrier at men in position of power. In terms of the most awful things happening in the world right now, through to the ongoing cases of violence, abuse and sexual assault, it not only applies to men. It does vastly apply to men, mind. Although people say that not all men are the same, what is clear that the majority of the horror and injustices in the world is created by men. I am finding myself more and more complex by amazing women. Rather than this being a random feature or a reaction to the way men are destroying so much and abusing their power, I instead wanted to show respect and affection for some of the many women who inspire me. Or those that I am in awe of. This is sort of related to a feature I am going to write about The Trouble Club very soon.  I have written about them a few times before and, in every feature, I say how amazing the women who speak are. Drawing from various fields, including business, the media and entertainment, I leave each event affected and enriched. Such enormously compelling speakers, there have been so many examples of coming away from various events and them changing my life in very real ways. The most recent example is when hearing Candice Brathwaite speak at St Marylebone Parish Church on 2nd October. It was possibly the most memorable event I have ever been to in over two years as a member!

In front of a packed and hugely energetic, receptive and impassioned crowd, it was a sensational evening. One that left impressions on me. Brathwaite is a British author and advocate who has made a significant impact with her work on motherhood and diversity. Manifesto was released last year. Such a captivating and incredible person, so much of what she said for The Trouble Club will not only will stay for me, but everyone else was at the event! I am in a position where I need to move, am embarking on a new project and at a bit of a crossroads. Candice Brathwaite’s words and sheer energy and fire hit deep and will definitely help me navigate challenges ahead. I left St Marylebone Parish Church stunned and uplifted at the same time. Stylist spoke with Candice Brathwaite in promotion of Manifesto:

“Manifesting is taking things from my dream life and moving them into reality; it’s trusting the vision and making it tangible.”

Talking to author, podcaster and speaker Candice Brathwaite is such a breath of fresh air, especially when discussing manifesting and wellness, subjects that have become synonymous with a particular type of woman. Usually, when you hear about manifestation, it’s coming from a person who is white, middle class, thin, ‘traditionally pretty’ and able-bodied.

It’s for this exact reason that Brathwaite has written her new book, Manifesto – not only to close that gap but to show people that manifesting can be for everyone, and not just those to whom the universe has already been kind.

Over Zoom, Brathwaite tells me that she had to go through hearing about wellness and manifesting from people who simply didn’t look like her or experience the world as she does. “It felt like no one had considered what manifestation looks like for people who feel as though they’re on the fringes of society. It’s all well and good a pretty, thin white woman telling you that you can live your dream life, but they’re born into a body of privilege, so they’re already ahead of the start line.” The author adds that there are so many women who look like her or exist in marginalised communities who won’t engage with manifestation because it’s not fronted by someone who looks like them.

But Manifesto isn’t just here to close a gaping hole in the manifestation world; it’s also a “love letter to my readers and a gift back to the people who have supported me for so long”. When people read and close the book, Brathwaite hopes it will spark some self-reflection. “So much of manifestation is rooted in how little you value yourself and that you believe you don’t deserve a better life,” she says.

Brathwaite’s latest book isn’t only for those who already have an interest in manifestation. As someone sceptical of manifesting as a practice, Manifesto opened my eyes to self-reflection and gave me a lot to think about. Brathwaite writes beautifully, brilliantly and with so much humour and personality that you can’t help but feel it’s as though the author herself is reading to you.

In an early section of Manifesto, Brathwaite talks about ASKfirmations and mentions that a big one for her is to reach a position within herself to be able to deliver keynote speaking events. In the past couple of weeks, the author was the keynote speaker for the Black Ballad Weekender, giving readers a real-life and live ASKfirmation that’s delivered in its power. “I’ve always wanted to have a career like Brené Brown or Mel Robbins, and I can completely see myself selling out stadiums around the world. But how am I going to do that if I’m scared to stand up and talk to 10 people? I knew I had to face this fear and I’m over the moon with the progress,” explains Brathwaite.

A key part of manifesting is remaining unrealistic and letting go of logic, according to Brathwaite. “Logic feels to me like this thing that’s been designed to make people come to a standstill in their life. There’s always this barrier stopping them. So, in my household, I always say, ‘Don’t let small logic rob you of big magic.’” The author wants readers to try to lean out of their logical brains and lean into manifestation. “Nothing about my life makes logical sense. The situation I was raised in – the violence, the poverty – to where I am now. If we had to put that in black and white, I was an absolute non-starter.” But Brathwaite approaches her life and her career with an “absolute, hardcore and unwavering faith that there is a way this can be done”.

Not to connect everything to The Trouble Club, but I will be mentioning someone who is about to appear for them, in addition to someone who I think would be a dream guest. In addition to an amazing campaigner and author who spoke for them recently. Someone who I have been following for years now and inspires me all of the time is Carly Wilford. I have interviewed her a couple of times, but I would love to revisit her career very soon. It is her passion for music and her sheer drive that affects me. Whilst Candice Brathwaite has opened my eyes and mind when it comes to manifesting and the hurdles she has faced (and how her husband being her agent/manager has been a needed and wonderful move), Carly Wilford has influenced me in a different way. Seeing reels and photos of her around the world and the joy she is bringing to so many. Her insane talent and passion. One of the world’s best and hardest working D.J.s, she is also an incredible Dance artist. It is her drive and enthusiasm that really gets into my heart and pushes me as a journalist. Taking on new projects and expanding my horizons. I have admired her work for many years now. You can check out her official website here.  She has had such a varied career, but she attacks everything with dedication and focus. As a D.J., in a male-dominated sector, she is this loved and incredibly talented D.J. whose brilliance and work ethic has affected me. I hope there are new interviews coming with Wilford. In 2023, nexus.radio spoke with this incredible human. I wanted to source some extracts from their feature and interview:

“During the lockdown, Carly Wilford dove into the world of music production, and in no time, she emerged as one of the most exciting newcomers in the dance music scene. Making her debut on Toolroom with the electrifying house track “Generation X,” Carly has continued to impress, consistently dropping a series of releases that showcase her talent with undeniable flair.

Unsurprisingly, Carly Wilford became a music maven with a keen sense of the industry, drawing from her diverse experiences in various realms. From her roots in radio broadcasting to steering her own meditation.

The latest from Carly finds her debuting on remixes with “Give You Up,” out on November 24 via Adesso Music. And she’s not hitting the brakes after just one remix. In her own words, “I’m about to release my remix that comes out in January. I’ve got a tune coming out and then a song on Armada, which is very cool. So yeah, they’re the labels that I work with closely. Apart from that, I’m busy in the studio working on those,” the DJ teased.

Earlier this year, Carly Wilford secured her spot among the 2023 Top 101 Producers globally, as unveiled by 1001Tracklists during this year’s Amsterdam Dance Event. This prestigious list honors artists who have played a crucial role in shaping the sonic landscape of the electronic music scene over the past year. Enjoying substantial support from Radio 1, Carly kicked off the Dance Stage at the recent Radio 1 Big Weekend in Dundee and graced the BBC Radio 1 Dance stage at the iconic Glastonbury festival.

But Carly’s journey hasn’t been a walk in the park, navigating the challenges of a male-dominated industry and confronting her own battles. When asked when she last had a good cry, she answered, “I always love a good cry. I’m quite good with happy tears. But also, I’m alright with crying. I think you need to. Sometimes, it makes you feel like a good release. [So], probably last week.” Despite the hurdles, her unwavering determination and compassionate spirit have elevated her to a position where she’s become an inspiration for thousands”.

Jess Davies is someone who I have mentioned and written about a few times this year. I saw her speak for The Trouble Club earlier in the year. She was discussing her book, No One Wants to See Your D*ck: A Handbook for Survival in the Digital World. It is a book that affected and shocked me. In terms of the statistics and information. The online world has opened women and young girls up to a whole new level of violence that follows them into their homes, schools and workplaces. Jess Davies writes about the ways in which girls and women are vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Davies shared her own experience. She has been the recipient of a lot of abuse and threats online. She is on social media and highlights the extent of misogyny and how technology and A.I. makes it easier for women to be abused and exposed. Her Instagram is full of shocking statistics and truths. How the online world especially is making it hugely dangerous and vulnerable for women and girls. In a recent post, Davies shares how she was “Invited to the Foreign Office to interview a policing representative (can’t tell you who yet!) for the launch of a new government initiative to tackle male violence against women and girls. The video will be shared next month so I can’t say too much yet but I’m looking forward to sharing what can only be a positive step in helping better protect women across the globe”. She is someone who is incredible inspiring to me and so many others. As a campaigner, she is constantly highlighting some harsh facts and realities. Experiences she and so many women face. As I said, she is the recipient of abuse and attack online, though she continues to speak up and out. Her book is one of the best of the year. She is this phenomenally strong human being who I have unlimited respect for.

Emma Barnett will soon be a guest for The Trouble Club (on Thursday, in fact). The former host of BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour (she stepped down in 2024), Barnett is now a presenter on the Today programme. One of my favourite broadcasters, she is someone I am also very envious of. Late last year, she spoke with Kate Bush. After releasing Little Shrew (Snowflake) and raising money for War Child, she was asked about the song and the video for it (which she directed). She was also asked about new work and whether we would see music in the future (which Bush said was a distinct possibility). I want to source from an interview with The Times from earlier in the year. Emma Barnett spoke about, among other things, “raw deal we give working mums and dads”. Barnett’s new book shines a light on the true nature and reality of maternity leave. Its highs and joys, but also its challenges and frustrations:

“We meet the day before her 40th birthday; she spent the previous weekend celebrating with her husband at the Newt, a blow-the-budget hotel in Somerset. Of their rare time without sprogs, she says: “I just want to talk to Jeremy. I find the constant interruption of thought and conversation really hard at times.” Later in the year she’ll host a proper party to celebrate 20 years with Weil, whom she met while studying history and politics at Nottingham University.

In the past she has written powerfully about enduring the pain caused by endometriosis and her struggles to conceive both children. She suffered a miscarriage and underwent five rounds of fertility treatment before her daughter arrived in 2023. “I was elated. I just couldn’t believe that she was here,” Barnett says. “I was just in sheer disbelief-slash-gratitude-slash-in-love. I really felt like something I didn’t think would happen had happened.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Sane Seven

Amid personal agonies, professionally, her thirties were triumphant. She worked as an editor at The Daily Telegraph while juggling roles as a presenter on LBC and later BBC Radio 5 Live. In 2021, aged 36, she became the youngest host of Women’s Hour while also co-presenting Newsnight (a stint that ran from 2019 to 2022). Last May she moved to Today. “The canvas on which you can do things on the Today programme is a very strong place for what I do,” she says.

There must be rivalries between her and her male co-presenters, Amol Rajan, Nick Robinson and Justin Webb, I say. “Well, there must be, yeah,” Barnett says witheringly. Clearly she is not about to spill the tea to me. She speaks highly of Mishal Husain, who left Today and the BBC in December: “Her interviews have been rightly praised as forensic… she had an amazing run.” Husain, now 52, took on Today when her sons were at primary school and spoke last year about how the early mornings worked well with family life. “As long as you are disciplined with your sleep. I would come home, have a nap and be with them after school,” Husain said.

There’s minimal socialising with her colleagues due to brutal shift patterns; although, while on maternity leave, she went to Webb’s house and recalls changing her daughter’s nappy on his kitchen table.

I mention that I’ve only just learnt that 41-year-old Rajan is a father of four. “Oh, he’ll tell you, don’t worry!” Barnett says, grinning. “His tea etiquette is a disgrace. He has three teabags left in and three sweeteners. It’s some kind of hot, weird milkshake. But he’s not getting a lot of sleep, so we definitely bond over that.”

After her 3.15am alarm goes off (plus a 3.21am back-up), she reads the news in the car to the BBC studios off Regent Street while listening to the dance band Faithless or other “quite hardcore music”. For maternity leave her Spotify playlist included Stormzy, Lizzo and Pink Martini.

As a proud Mancunian, loving music is in Barnett’s blood. She grew up as an only child in a Jewish family in Broughton Park, a smart suburb of Salford, with her father, Ian, a commercial property surveyor, and her mother, Michele. After leaving the private Manchester High School for Girls, where she was known as “Commitment Carol” due to her love of signing up for everything, she headed to Nottingham and then Cardiff for a postgraduate diploma in journalism”.

I am going to end with another interview from The Times, where someone I respect hugely chatted with Caitlin Moran (another incredible woman whose writing and words have inspired and influenced me). Emma-Louise Boynton is a writer, broadcaster and creator of the award-winning, sell-out live event series and media platform, Sex Talks. Sex Talks is a live series and podcast at The London Edition focused on opening up honest and frank conversations on sex, gender, and the future of intimacy. Boynton is an incredible interviewer. Her book, Pleasure: It’s Yours to Own, is out next May. I have previously written about how her recent interview with Munroe Bergdorf was amazing to watch. The connection and bond between them. How she interacts with her guests. A woman’s right advocate and broadcaster, Emma-Louise Boynton recently spoke with Megan Jayne Crabbe at Second Home Spitalfields for “an intimate and inspiring evening to celebrate the launch of her new book, We Don’t Make Ourselves Smaller Here , a powerful call for women to reclaim space, power, and self-worth”. Boynton recently spoke with Sophie Gilbert about her new book, Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves:

“ELB: The title Girl on Girl, at first intended as a joke, came to feel deeply appropriate as your research went on. Can you tell us about that shift?

SG: The phrase captured two linked harms: culture teaching women to hate themselves, and to be suspicious of other women, a breaking of sisterhood replaced by an individualist “girl-boss” ethos. I didn’t plan for porn to be so central, but the deeper I went the more it underwrote shifts in power, aesthetics, and behavior from the 70s onward — sometimes negatively, sometimes in productive ways.

ELB: You consciously resist memoir. Editors nudged you to add more of “you,” but you hold the book as history. Why keep yourself mostly out, especially when women writers are often steered toward confessional writing?

SG: It wasn’t a choice so much as it was a failure. I have written about myself in the past. I’m not afraid of doing it. I love reading personal writing. I feel like women who are able to be completely fearless on the page do a service for all of us, because they write down just these ways of being that otherwise we might never be in touch with. But every time I kept writing myself into the text it just was so bad: it was cringy, or it wasn’t getting at the point.

In the end I felt strongly that this was a history book. Women’s cultural history is rarely treated as capital-H History but I wanted to give it that weight. Small personal moments remain, but they’re not the point.

ELB: Let’s talk beauty and the body: the 90s/00s didn’t invent the beauty myth, but they re-engineered it. How did reality TV and the early internet narrow the ideal and normalize transformation as obligation?

SG: Reality TV shifted fame from talent to visibility. If you opened up your life, and crucially your body, to the cameras, you could be rewarded. The ideal was extremely narrow: thin, white, often blonde, hyper-groomed, the Paris-Hilton silhouette turned from aspiration into expectation. Around it grew a full “makeover logic,” where improvement was never-ending and public: there were only a couple of dozen makeover shows in 2004, and by the end of the decade there were more than 250. The message was simple: your body is a project, and it’s your job to keep renovating”.

Sonder & Tell spoke with Emma-Louise Boynton last year about Sex Talks and “breaking stigmas in the sex space and what it takes”. Boynton revealed her advice: “In starting or facilitating conversations around taboo topics you have to be willing to get things wrong and then own that and learn from your mistakes”:

“What is your mission with Sex Talks?

My mission is to spark more open and honest conversations around these typically taboo topics – sex, gender, intimacy – and remove the shame that so many of us feel about our relationship to our bodies. So, out of the pain and shame that surrounded my relationship to my body, has come my proudest achievement to date: Sex Talks.

Building a brand around taboo topics like sex can be challenging. What are your tips for starting safe, open conversations?

I think the notion of emotional safety, which is what I think we’re talking about here, is a tricky one because feeling emotionally safe is a subjective experience – it means something different to everyone. Nonetheless, the important thing for me is approaching every conversation from a position of curiosity and never judgement, being mindful to always use inclusive language and ensuring that a diverse range of voices are continually being included in discussions.

To state the obvious, I’m a posh, white woman, which gives me a specific and somewhat limited perspective and body of experiences when it comes to the broad range of conversations we have at Sex Talks. It also means I have blind spots. And that’s inevitable, we all have blindspots. But what I hope is then obvious in the way I curate and run Sex Talks is that I am always looking to reflect a range of voices and experiences in discussions by way of my interviewees. That, I think, is the key thing when it comes to starting conversations around topics we don’t typically discuss openly.

I also recognise that I’m going to make mistakes and there are going to be shortcomings, not least because you can never represent every single position and viewpoint in one conversation. But I am always prepared to throw my hands up and admit when I get something wrong, and that is also key. In starting or facilitating conversations around taboo topics you have to be willing to get things wrong and then own that and learn from your mistakes. So, stay curious, stay respectful and seek to constantly be learning from people outside of your bubble world.

Are there any storytellers you admire for the way they’re engaging with sex?

This is such a great question, I’ve never been asked this before. Over the summer I, like seemingly everyone else I know, became enthralled by Miranda July’s latest novel, All Fours. I found it refreshing for many reasons, chief amongst them that we seldom read, or watch or hear about the sexual desires and passions of women in that pre-menopausal stage of life. Ours is a society that puts such a premium on youth that we tend unconsciously, sometimes consciously, to desexualise people as soon as they’re above about 40, women in particular, which is ludacris.

Our relationship to sex changes and evolves as we get older – often I think in quite beautiful ways, as we get more comfortable in our bodies and shrug off some of those pesky layers of shame that get stuck to us from a young age – and this is something to celebrate rather than shy away from.

July’s protagonist, from whose perspective the book is written, is consumed by her sexual desires and relatable in how delusionally she projects these desires onto the object of her fancy (Davey). Despite the fact her chaotic nature grows grating at times, I felt genuinely thrilled reading about a woman so alive in her sexuality, and so selfish in her pursuit of carnal lust. As author, Elise Loehnan, writes in On Our Best Behaviour, while women are trained for goodness, men are trained for power, but in All Fours our protagonist isn’t even pretending to be good. She is prioritising her pleasure, her needs, her wants above everything and everyone else. However problematic you may find this (and I did, often) I think we need more flawed female protagonists who are sexual and desirous entirely for themselves, rather than for the gaze of others.

For everyone who has read All Fours, I have to also admit that I found the tampon scene probably the most erotic literary scene I’ve read in so long. And they didn’t even fuck”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Dan Kennedy

I am ending with a new interview from The Times, where two incredible women were in conversation. Caitlin Moran was speaking with her heroine. Burke has a new memoir coming out, where she frankly and openly discusses her childhood. A Mind of My Own is out later in the month:

“There isn’t a hint of self-pity in Burke — not now, as we’re chatting, or in the book. Children, I often observe, are incapable of self-pity — they don’t have the perspective to know what they’re missing out on.

“But I knew I could be self-pitying,” Burke says, cheerfully. “I didn’t remember my mother at all. I didn’t miss her — because I didn’t know her. But I knew I was supposed to. I knew that if I turned on the waterworks — started crying, ‘I miss my mummy! My mummy’s dead!’ — I’d get some sweets or some chocolate just to calm down the tears.”

This lack of a mother became painfully apparent in the second incident that stopped Burke’s constant hunt for food: when an ice-cream van parked up on the estate and “a Cockney woman I’d never seen before suddenly appeared and shouted, ‘I’ve had a win on the bingo! Who wants an ice cream?’ ”

Considering this the best day ever, Burke and her friends ran over to the van, all screaming, “Me, please!” Burke was so delighted at the prospect of an ice cream “that I beamed at her with all my might”.

The bingo winner looked at Burke, then said, “Oooooh! Ain’t you ugly?”

Around the van, all the children started laughing hysterically — at Burke.

“My world stopped,” Burke writes.

It’s a truly awful anecdote to read. It’s on page 51 of the book — by which point, Burke has already been told she has “thin hair”, that she’s “fat”, that she “talks too much”. She is, at the time, eight. As a reader, you feel a desperate desire to travel through time, pick up that little girl and take her somewhere better.

“I can still remember that prickly feeling,” Burke says now. “It was a stand-out moment of, well … cruelty. But I can remember dealing with it quickly — and not crying. I just thought, ‘I’ve got to make everyone laugh more than they laughed at me”.

Kathy Burke is someone who I would love to see speak for The Trouble Club! She would be a hugely popular guest! Burke is someone I have admired for years. Someone who, in her memoir, discusses going from an Islington childhood to national treasure status. She is an incredible talent and this phenomenal person. So much love for her around the world. Someone I am constantly in awe of. Her Twitter feed is one I would recommend everyone to check out. She is always honest and real! At such a retched and frightening time for humanity, where men in power are causing untold evil, I am more and more drawn to these simply amazing queens. Phenomenal women whose work and words are providing inspiration, strength and hope at a very bleak time. Even though I have spotlighted a few of my favourite women, there are so many more. Through the worlds of music, politics and beyond. They are providing guidance, strength and brilliance at a time when me and so many others need it. For that, I want to…

THANK them for that.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Lionheart at Forty-Seven: A Blue Symphony: Inside an Underrated Album

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Lionheart at Forty-Seven

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in an outtake from the Lionheart cover shoot in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz

 

A Blue Symphony: Inside an Underrated Album

__________

IT is hard to passionately…

write about an album when even its creator is kind of cold towards it. Not that Kate Bush has dismissed it altogether. She sort of said she was not happy with her first three albums. Not entirely, anyway. That would be 1978’s The Kick Inside, Lionheart (1978) and 1980’s Never for Ever. Perhaps her growing and not completely in control of the sound of those albums. I do think that Lionheart has been overlooked by almost everyone. Even though 1979’s The Tour of Life was also called the Lionheart Tour, she did perform its ten tracks on the road. Promoting this album and also playing most of the songs from The Kick Inside. She promoted Lionheart and talked fondly of it when it came out in 1978. As it turns forty-seven on 10th November, I wanted to spend more time with it. In the first anniversary feature recently, I dropped in some promotional interviews. Here, I will highlight some of the more under-discussed songs from Lionheart. However, this is one of Kate Bush’s albums that is very underrated. In terms of any retrospection. Whereas other albums have been written about and there is this retrospective interest, there is virtually none for Lionheart! That is a real pity. It is an album that, whilst not her very best, contains some phenomenal songs. One of the biggest factors working against Lionheart was how EMI rushed her into recording. Recorded between July and September 1978, it was recorded out of Super Bear Studios in Berre-les-Alpes, France. It was the one and only time Bush recorded an album outside of England. In terms of the impressions she had on the album through the years:

“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.
(Pulse!, April 1984)

“There were quite a few old songs that I managed to get the time to re-write. It’s a much lighter level of work when you re-write a song because the basic inspiration is there, you just perfect upon it and that’s great.”
(promo cassette, EMI Canada, 1978)

“I only wrote three new songs - ‘ Symphony in Blue’, ‘Fullhouse’’ and ‘Coffee Homeground’’ - and if you know that, then you can tell the difference in style.
Basically, this album could have been a lot better.”
(1984, Women of Rock)”.

After promoting The Kick Inside extensively, it was incredible that she put an album together at all! Back from Japan and the end of a lengthy run of interviews and performances, Bush was summoned into making a new album. She would not have had time to record all new songs and record an album by the end of the year. As she says, the three songs that she wrote new are very different in terms of style and tone. I will come to Coffee Homeground soon. Symphony in Blue is one of the best things she ever wrote, so it is curious to think what would have come out if she was given a few more months to work on tracks! In any case, Lionheart hangs together and mixes in better-known tracks like Wow (the second single from the album) and rarer songs like Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake and In the Warm Room.

It is inevitable that Bush felt it easy to write a lot of the album, as she was basically reworking and retouching songs already written. Rather than given the seven older tracks a radical reworking, they were probably not changed too much. People thinking Lionheart is a weaker version of The Kick Inside. What was Kate Bush meant to do?! I have already written about Symphony in Blue, Wow, Hammer Horror and Kashka from Baghdad quite a bit. Now, to show the strength of Lionheart, I am coming to In Search of Peter Pan, In the Warm Room and Coffee Homeground. I think that In the Warm Room is one of those songs that gets dismissed as The Kick inside-lite. It would have easily fitted on the second side of that album and might have been considered. However, I do think that it features one of Kate Bush’s most arresting vocal performances. This is a song that never had a televised appearance. It was going to be performed for Michael Aspel in 1978. However, it was felt to be too sexually explicit, so instead she was allowed to perform Kashka from Baghdad – which is about two homosexual men in a secret relationship! It is one of these songs you will never hear live, through it is a gem. This is what Kate Bush said about In the Warm Room:

“I’m always getting accused of being a feminist. Really I do write a lot of my songs for men, actually. In fact, ‘In The Warm Room’ is written for men because there are so many songs for women about wonderful men that come up and chat you up when you’re in the disco and I thought it would be nice to write a song for men about this amazing female. And I think that I am probably female-oriented with my songs because I’m a female and have very female emotions but I do try to aim a lot of the psychology, if you like, at men.

Personal Call, BBC Radio 1, 1979”.

It is interesting that Bush almost butted up against the idea of being a feminist. Maybe feeling that she had to be more male-orientated to be heard. Or that most of her favourite music was by men; that is where she wrote from. However, I do love the images that Kate Bush brings into her lyrics: “In the warm room/She prepares to go to bed/She’ll let you watch her undress/Go places where/Your fingers long to linger/In the warm room/You’ll fall into her like a pillow/Her thighs are soft as marshmallows/Say hello/To the soft musk of her hollows”. One of many terrific songs from Kate Bush’s second studio album, Lionheart.

In Search of Peter Pan is another one of those tracks you will very rarely hear played on the radio. One thing I have observed about Kate Bush’s albums is that she writes almost every single thing on them. In terms of the lyrics. In Search of Peter Pan is an example of someone else’s words being quoted. She ends the song by singing from When You Wish Upon a Star (which was written by Leigh Harline and Ned Washington for the 1940 Disney film, Pinocchio). I want to quote from a feature by Dreams of Orgonon that has some fascinating insights. First, this is what Kate Bush said about the background to the second song on Lionheart:

“There’s a song on [Lionheart] called ‘In Search Of Peter Pan’ and it’s sorta about childhood. And the book itself is an absolutely amazing observation on paternal attitudes and the relationships between the parents – how it’s reflected on the children. And I think it’s a really heavy subject, you know, how a young innocence mind can be just controlled, manipulated, and they don’t necessarily want it to happen that way. And it’s really just a song about that.

Lionheart promo cassette, EMI Canada, 1978”.

In a feature that contains more words written about In Search of Peter Pan that what everyone else combined has ever said about it I feel (except for me), there is the depth and detail that this song deserves. In 2019, Dreams of Orgonon shared their opinion about a shining example of why you cannot write off or diminish the brilliance of Lionheart. It is an album that should get love ahead of its forty-seventh anniversary:

“Of course we have to talk about the song’s titular character. Peter Pan is effectively popular culture’s favorite anthropomorphization of adolescence. As he will never grow up, he embodies childhood as an endless state which actively revolts against growing up. Given that Bush had been writing fairly adolescent songs not too far back, it’s clear to see why she’d use Pan as a touchstone. Yet her path differs from Pan’s: in the chorus, she declares her desire to grow up and “find Peter Pan” (perhaps as some kind of star sailor) and escape from the trap of adult life. The departure from Peter Pan is that Bush states that she will become an adult instead of just flying to Neverland. Part of being an adult to Bush is being able to enjoy childlike things. More pertinently, as a child you believe you will hold onto childish things forever, and as an adult she holds onto this belief. The culture of children is an important part of Bush’s ethos — it presents an alternative to the tedium of adulthood. She’s never let go of childhood as an ideal, letting it play a role in her work as late as Aerial.

Bush’s quotation of Disney in the outro is an extension of this. The quote she knabs is the most famous part of Pinocchio: “when you wish upon a star/makes no difference who you are/when you wish upon a star/your dreams come true.” This is the Disney theme song, the saccharine aphorism on which their brand is constructed. Bush is quoting the most fantastical idea of childhood possible. Yet she takes this overused quote and turns it into the song’s most interesting musical moment. She sings the quote in a minor key, slowly descending as she does it. It’s not a straight quote; Bush outright warps the song. As Bush won’t pretend childhood is without pain, depictions of it must reflect some kind of wrongness and pain.

“In Search of Peter Pan” has no shortage of adolescent agony. At the start of the song, Bush has given up and declared that she “no longer see[s]” a future. Throughout the song she sings about a child whose life has been derailed by adult interference, taking the game right out of it. Modes of escape are flights of fancy, whether it be the singer’s friend Dennis who fancies himself beautiful (a queer part of the song) or flying away to be Peter Pan. Fantasy is a refuge for Bush: when in doubt, remember your inner fantasist”.

I will wrap up after I take a look at one more of my favourites from Lionheart. Coffee Homeground, alongside Fullhouse and Symphony in Blue, is a tantalising glimpse into a direction Kate Bush could have taken. Not wanting to repeat herself, I guess you can look at this as a step between where she was and where she would head on Never for Ever, Although, there is very little on Never for Ever that sounds like Coffee Homeground! A song that mentions a controversial character, I do especially love the lyrics on Coffee Homeground. This is what Kate Bush said about writing the song:

“[‘Coffee Homeground’] was in fact inspired directly from a cab driver that I met who was in fact a bit nutty. And it’s just a song about someone who thinks they’re being poisoned by another person, they think that there’s Belladonna in their tea and that whenever they offer them something to eat, it’s got poisen in it. And it’s just a humorous aspect of paranoia really and we sort of done it in a Brechtian style, the old sort of German [vibe] to try and bring across the humour side of it.

Lionheart Promo Cassette, EMI Canada, 1978”.

This is a song that I would love to have seen a music video for. I have talked about Coffee Homeground before, but it is worth exploring as much as possible. Coming back to Dreams of Orgonon and what they say about a track, that is so compelling and odd. In the most brilliant and Kate Bush way! One I have loved for so long:

“This is a stridently different approach than the one Kate Bush has to characters, which is to empathize with them and use their plights to encapsulate fraught human experiences. Even the paranoid character presented in “Coffee Homeground” is allowed the subjectivity of their perception of events. Yet there’s still a sense that Bush is an unreliable narrator. “Homeground” is the story of their paranoia that their host is trying poison them. Bush speaks at length about all the different toxins she might be killed with, from bitter almonds to hemlock to arsenic. She’s in some sort of decrepit house with “torn wallpaper” and “pictures of Crippin/lipstick-smeared,” (likely referring to the allegedly uxoricidal Hawley Harvey Crippen). The song takes the form of a screed, with Bush declaring all the ways she won’t be caught (“in the pot of TEA!”), with verses taking an epiphoral structure in which nearly all of them end with the phrase “coffee homeground.” It’s an extravagant piece of songwriting, extremely conscious of form and rife with tension as it leaves all pretense of believability behind. Bush said the song was inspired by a paranoid cabbie she met, and that’s the sort of character she’s written here. Despite the song being entirely theirs, there’s a degree of separation from the audience, that the singer can’t be trusted. Bush is entirely operating on theatrics and leaving emotional realism at the door”.

Yet there’s an element of Epic Theater which Bush neglects altogether: its strident anti-capitalism. Brecht was a Marxist who used the theater to shatter an audience’s preconceptions of how a capitalist society works. Bush has never been very interested in subverting the established social order. Even when she’s an actively subversive songwriter, she’s still essentially being one in the position of a well-to-do middle-class heterosexual white woman. This lack of political intent makes “Coffee Homeground” feel like it’s missing a key ingredient (and I’m not talking about hemlock). It’s not clear why this song has to be a Brechtian homage — it makes the song more striking, but it’s not clear what Bush is trying to say.

Resultingly, Bush’s engagement with Epic Theater is a purely audible one. “Homeground” owes more to Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya than it does to Brecht, as it’s their sound Bush pillages. Bush’s trill becomes a half-spoken warble as she strives to sound like Lenya for a track. It’s not a bad impression — sure, it sounds nothing like Lenya’s voice, but Bush doesn’t do the worst job of imitating her speech patterns. Musically, the strongest resemblance to Brecht and Weill’s work here is the morbid subject matter applied to carnivalesque scoring. The melody contains huge leaps and never sounds quite the same, as the intro and bridge repeat essentially the same phrase in a different key every time they appear. There are little discordant details such as the use of the non existent #VII chord of B flat (A), which doesn’t appear in B flat major or B flat minor. The pre-chorus will make a play at being in A before transforming into some mode of B (possibly mixolydian, or anything with a flattened seventh). Even if “Homeground” lacks conceptual clarity, it’s far from banal”.

I think the last time I featured this track on its own was last year. The Kate Bush fanzine, HomeGround, got its name from this song. Coffee Homeground’s lyrics send the imagination in all sorts of directions: “Where are the plumbers/Who went a-missing here on Monday?/There was a tall man/With his companion/And I bet you gave them coffee homeground/Maybe you’re lonely/And only want a little company/But keep your recipes/For the rats to eat/And may they rest in peace with coffee homeground/Well, you won’t get me with your Belladonna – in the coffee,/And you won’t get me with your aresenic – in the pot of tea/And you won’t put me in a six-foot plot – with your hemlock/On the rocks”.

I am not sure whether anyone will write about Lionheart on 10th November. It has so many truly great songs on it. I have expanded on a few of them. Even if I am not too hot on tracks like Don’t Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake, I recognise that it is far stronger than it is given credit for. This assumption that Lionheart is a rushed failure and poor attempt. It places low when people rank her albums, as you can see here, here, here and here. It usually placed bottom (out of ten) or second-bottom. Even if Rough Trade deemed it her worst album, insanely, ahead of 50 Words for Snow (no sane human would see that album as Kate Bush’s worst!), they did note this:

“Nevertheless, there is still beauty and bedazzlement within. Hammer Horror is camp and theatrical Kate, and is one of many examples of her strong love of all things celluloid. Don’t Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake gives a good account of how The KT Band may have sounded back when they were rocking the shit out of South London pubs before Kate launched her solo career. The emotional cry of Wow is about the cynical, finickity side of show business (is there any other side?!) This is Kate’s attempt to “write a Pink Floyd song - something spacey”, but it’s the Vaudeville meets Brecht Coffee Homeground, which is the true hidden gem here. Mad as a box of frogs”.

I am going to finish off. I hope people reinspect Lionheart and appreciate it. Despite the fact Kate Bush might not be a fan and sees it as not up to her standard, it is an album that I really love. Wonderfully rich and diverse, there is a mix of the old and the new. On 10th November, forty-seven years after it came out, go and show Lionheart…

AS much love as possible.

FEATURE: Kate Bush: Something Like a Song: Rocket Man (Two Rooms: Celebrating the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin)

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush: Something Like a Song

 

Rocket Man (Two Rooms: Celebrating the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin)

__________

I was keen to step…

away from Kate Bush’s albums for this Something Like a Song. She has done a few covers through the years. Some have appeared on compilation albums. One such example is Bush’s interpretation of Elton John’s Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time). Bush shortened it to Rocket Man for the single. That appeared on the 1991 tribute album, Two Rooms: Celebrating the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin. The original was released on Elton John’s 1972 album, Honky Château, and was the lead single. When that single came out, Bush was thirteen. Writing songs of her own at this stage, she was inspired hugely by artists like Elton John and David Bowie. In fact, these artists had a bit of a set-to or disagreement because David Bowie released Starman in April 1972 – a matter of days after Elton John’s single came out. That was the lead single from Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Elton John and David Bowie having this space race in 1972! However, David Bowie released Space Oddity in 1969. So he was sort of there first! I am not sure if Kate Bush has or would ever be tempted to cover a David Bowie song if there was another tribute album to him. It would be interesting. However, she and Elton John are friends – and Bush attended his wedding to David Furnish in 2014. Bush attended the civil partnership in 2005 too. Elton John appeared on her 2011 album, 50 Words for Snow, and the two have been close for decades. However, I want to shift to Kate Bush and her version of Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time). Simultaneously hailed as a classic cover or something that is not a patch on the original, I really love the song! It is covered with affection but done very differently.

This song was included on Kate Bush’s The Best of the Other Sides. Even though critics were a little divided, Bush holds love for this song. She directed the music video for the single and gave the track this sort of Reggae tinge. More laidback and groovy than Elton John’s original. Released as a single on 25th November, 1991, the song was recorded back in 1989. I am going to get to some of the reviews for Kate Bush’s take on Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time). It was released as a 7″ single in a poster sleeve, a 12″ single in a poster sleeve, a cassette single and a C.D.-single. All formats feature the reverse of Candle in the Wind (another Elton John song). St Etienne were especially savage towards Kate Bush’s version. Intimating it made them want to vomit. Luckily, Billboard were a little kinder. Melody Maker tore it apart! However, in years since, Bush’s version of Rocket Man (I Think It's Going to Be a Long, Long Time) has been seen in a kinder light. It was just typical of the press and artists of the time showing their sexism and misogyny. Not a lot to do with the music itself. Kate Bush always being criticised for doing something different! Reaching twelve in the U.K. and two in Australia, I think that there will be new people discovering this cover, as it appears on The Best of the Other Sides. I am going to turn to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia, and some interview archive, where Bush spoke about Elton John and a song dear to her:

“From the age of 11, Elton John was my biggest hero. I loved his music, had all his albums and I hoped one day I’d play the piano like him (I still do). When I asked to be involved in this project and was given the choice of a track it was like being asked ‘would you like to fulfill a dream? would you like to be Rocket Man?’… yes, I would.

Two Rooms liner notes, 1991

I was really knocked out to be asked to be involved with this project, because I was such a big fan of Elton’s when I was little. I really loved his stuff. It’s like he’s my biggest hero, really. And when I was just starting to write songs, he was the only songwriter I knew of that played the piano and sang and wrote songs. So he was very much my idol, and one of my favourite songs of his was ‘Rocket Man’. Now, if I had known then that I would have been asked to be involved in this project, I would have just died… They basically said, ‘Would we like to be involved?’ I could choose which track I wanted… ‘Rocket Man’ was my favourite. And I hoped it hadn’t gone, actually – I hoped no one else was going to do it… I actually haven’t heard the original for a very long time. ‘A long, long time’ (laughs). It was just that I wanted to do it differently. I do think that if you cover records, you should try and make them different. It’s like remaking movies: you’ve got to try and give it something that makes it worth re-releasing. And the reggae treatment just seemed to happen, really. I just tried to put the chords together on the piano, and it just seemed to want to take off in the choruses. So we gave it the reggae treatment. It’s even more extraordinary (that the song was a hit) because we actually recorded the track over two years ago. Probably just after my last telly appearance. We were quite astounded when they wanted to release it as a single just recently.

BBC Radio 1 interview, 14 December 1991”.

I think I might actually wrap up in a minute instead. The musicians on the song are Davy Spillane – uilleann pipes, Del Palmer – bass, Alistair Anderson – concertina, Charlie Morgan – drums and Alan Murphy – guitar. I will end with something from Gaffaweb, and observations about Rocket Man:

“Dan King is of the opinion that Kate's recording of "Rocket Man" is "danceable", "light" and "fun", and that the cover photo of Kate is therefore inappropriate because she looks "old" and "sad". This opinion is remarkable to IED because it is in complete contrast to his own.

In IED's view Kate's version of "Rocket Man", in large part because of its lilting (but sporadic) reggae-cum-Celtic folk sections and Kate's final, wordless minute of vocals, seemed (at first listen as much as at the tenth) extraordinarily poignant and sad--an extremely sophisticated and eloquent expression of the song's tragic subject.

By contrast, in IED's opinion, the photograph of Kate which Mercury Records put on the single's cover was a bit too cheerful for the tone of Kate's "Rocket Man"--let alone the even more starkly haunting "Candle in the Wind". Still, even there IED agrees with Richard Caley that the shots (there are actually two) are wonderful--they certainly don't make Kate appear "old" to this fan.

IED suspects that they were given to Mercury by Kate and John Carder Bush simply as portrait photographs to be used inside the liner notes of the "Two Rooms" album. (The photo session took place more than two years ago, and the shots are already very familiar to fans.) Then, when Mercury decided to release the song as a single, they opted (perhaps because Kate would or could not provide further artwork on short notice?) simply to blow up the only photos of Kate that they had been given rights to, and use them as the cover art.

Has anyone else noticed that the typographical error (of "Villean" for "Uillean" pipes) in the credits for "Rocket Man" has been corrected--without doubt at Kate's request--on the outer, poster-sleeve of the seven-inch single? The error remains on the single's normal inside sleeve, which we may assume was printed earlier. Does this correction after the fact not suggest that Mercury probably did not invite Kate to review the cover art before the design went to the presses; but that they made the correction after Kate herself saw it in the first pressings that went on sale last month? If this is true, perhaps Mercury did not invite Kate to suggest a cover design, either?

-- Andrew Marvick”.

A magnificent cover version of a song that was meaningful to Kate Bush. As such a huge fan of Elton John, her contribution to Two Rooms: Celebrating the Songs of Elton John & Bernie Taupin must have been a hard choice. I am not sure whether she considered any other Elton John songs. I do think that this song should be given more love. A beautiful vocal from Kate Bush and this video that was lost for a long time. NME reported in 2019 how this video now came to light. Bush spoke to them about it and the song:

“One of Bush’s favourite songs of all time, her rendition of Elton’s space-faring staple reached Number 12 in the charts back when it was released in December 1991. Now, she has given the high-quality, self-directed music video its first ever official release.

“I remember buying this when it came out as a single by Elton John,” Bush told NME. “I couldn’t stop playing it – I loved it so much. Most artists in the mid seventies played guitar but Elton played piano and I dreamed of being able to play like him.”

“Years later, in 1989, Elton and Bernie Taupin were putting together an album called ‘Two Rooms’, which was a collection of cover versions of their songs, each featuring a different singer. To my delight they asked me to be involved and I chose ‘Rocket Man’. They gave me complete creative control and although it was a bit daunting to be let loose on one of my favourite tracks ever, it was really exciting. I wanted to make it different from the original and thought it could be fun to turn it into a reggae version. It meant a great deal to me that they chose it to be the first single release from the album.”

She continued: “That meant I also had the chance to direct the video which I loved doing – making it a performance video, shot on black and white film, featuring all the musicians and… the Moon!”

“Alan Murphy played guitars on the track. He was a truly special musician and a very dear friend. Tragically, he died just before we made the video so he wasn’t able to be there with us but you’ll see his guitar was placed on an empty chair to show he was there in spirit”.

Go and listen to Kate Bush’s stunning and enduring Rocket Man. It is one of the best covers she ever did, and it shows her genuine and lifelong affection and respect for Elton John and Bernie Taupin. I really love what she did with it. A wonderful song that still sounds exciting and different…

ALMOST thirty-four years later.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Songs from Albums Turning Thirty-Five in 2026

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

 

Songs from Albums Turning Thirty-Five in 2026

__________

THERE are few years…

in music that are as significant as 1991. Maybe 1994, 1989 and 1967 can get some credit for various reasons. In terms of the number of all-time great albums, it is hard to beat 1991! I was a child then and was amazed at all the incredible music around. It was a real revelation. In a formative time in my life, I was exposed to so many innovative artists at their very peak. I am marking albums that turn thirty-five next year. Included are genius works from Nirvana, Pearl Jam, A Tribe Called Quest, R.E.M., and Saint Etienne. So many of these albums have endured and influenced to this day. I am someone who tries not to get as nostalgic as I used to but, whilst writing this series, it has been hard resisting! 1991 undoubtably must go down as one of the most important and finest years…

IN music history.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Songs from Albums Turning Forty in 2026

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

 

Songs from Albums Turning Forty in 2026

__________

DEEP into this run…

of features focusing on albums that have big anniversaries coming up next year, and it takes me now to 1986. The fortieth is quite a significant anniversary, so it has been interesting seeing which albums of 1986 are going to turn forty in 2026. We have classics from Janet Jackson, Peter Gabriel, Madonna, and Paul Simon among them. I was a few years old by the end of 1986, so I don’t really remember a lot of the music from then. However, I feel like it had an impact on me. The earliest memories of my life. In fact, I get hazy memories of hearing bits of albums from 1986. In any regard, it is a time to celebrate a colossal year in music. One of the very best, in fact! I am sure that you will find much to love…

FROM this mixtape.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Songs from Albums Turning Forty-Five in 2026

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

 

Songs from Albums Turning Forty-Five in 2026

__________

THE next part…

of this series sees me marking albums that turn forty-five next year. Marking that anniversary, I am including songs from the very best of 1981 in this mixtape. I was born in 1983, though I would have grown up listening to a lot of the albums these songs are from. An underrated year in music, 1981 gave us some wonderful albums from the likes of The Human League, Kraftwerk, Grace Jones, and Siouxsie and the Banshees. I am sure that most of you are familiar with a lot of the albums I am including at the end. Those that are turning forty-five in 2016. Maybe we will see reissues or new editions of some of these albums. I hope so. In the meantime, take a listen to this mixtape and take yourself back…

TO 1981.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: Songs from Albums Turning Fifty in 2026

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

 

Songs from Albums Turning Fifty in 2026

__________

THIS series…

is about me marking albums that have big anniversaries next year. I started out by looking at the best of 1966 and those albums that turn sixty. Now, I have made my way to 1976. A fabulous year for music, among those albums in the mixtape at the end are Eagles’ Hotel California, Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life, and ABBA’s Arrival. Whilst perhaps not as steeped and packed with quality as 1975 and 1977, 1976 was still a really interesting year for music. Some true classics released that year. I am bringing many of them together now. Celebrating fantastic L.P.s turning fifty next year. Even if you do not recognise some of these albums, I hope that you enjoy the songs that are included…

IN this mixtape.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Brandy & Monica - The Boy Is Mine

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

 

Brandy & Monica - The Boy Is Mine

__________

EVEN though…

IN THIS PHOTO: Brandy and Monica at the 1999 GRAMMY Awards/PHOTO CREDIT: Dan Callister/Getty Images

this is not tied to an anniversary, there is a reason why I wanted to spotlight Brandy and Monica’s The Boy Is Mine. One of the best collaborations ever, the U.S. artists are embarking on their The Boy Is Mine tour this month. The co-headline tour starts on 16th October in Cincinnati and ends on Jacksonville on 14th December. Because of that, it is worth investigating one of the biggest songs of the 1990s. One wondered why there were not more songs and gigs from the duo. It seems like they had a very brief partnership in the '90s. This article from The Los Angeles Times sources a Variety announcement/interview, where Brandy and Monica discussed coming back together after all of these years:

“This really is a full-circle moment,” Brandy said in a statement to Variety. “Monica and I coming together again isn’t just about the music — it’s about honoring where we came from and how far we’ve both come. ‘The Boy Is Mine’ was a defining chapter in R&B, and to share the stage all these years later is bigger than a reunion — it’s a celebration of growth, sisterhood, and the love our fans have given us from day one.”

She added that she recognized the love “The Boy Is Mine” still received, saying that the song “means everything to me.”

Upon its release, the song spent 13 weeks at No. 1. That was 27 years ago, and though the pair have been on “different journeys” since, they’ve come back together to give “the people what they’ve been asking for.”

“God’s timing perfectly aligned us,” Brandy said.

Presale for the tour begins June 26, with general tickets going on sale June 27. The run currently includes one Los Angeles-area show Nov. 9 at the Kia Forum.

Brandy and Monica had a widely publicized fallout in 1998. Monica is said to have punched Brandy in the face just before they took the stage at that year’s MTV Video Music Awards to perform their hit single.

The duo was seen as a monumental combination of ‘90s talent, with both Brandy and Monica being lauded for their debut records. Brandy had already achieved RIAA platinum status with her self-titled album released in 1994 when she was just 15. “The Boy Is Mine” was an instant hit when it was released four years later, but the VMAs incident seemed to spawn acrimony.

Though both would remain in the music industry, Brandy would also pursue an acting career. Her nickname “Vocal Bible” took off following her role as the first African American actor to play Cinderella in a film in 1997. More recently, she starred as a rapper in the ABC drama series “Queens” in 2021.

Monica’s 1995 debut, “Miss Thang,” went platinum when she was 14, but the singer largely remained out of the spotlight following the release of “Code Red” in 2015. She teased a pivot into the country music genre in 2022 with “Open Roads,” which she says was produced entirely by 11-time Grammy winner Brandi Carlile. Though she confirmed its completion in 2023, it has yet to be released.

After the kerfuffle in 1998, it wouldn’t be until 2012 that the two collaborated again on “It All Belongs to Me” and 11 years more before they worked on a remix of “The Boy Is Mine” for Ariana Grande. In 2021, Brandy and Monica appeared on “Verzuz,” a popular webcast series made by Swizz Beatz and Timbaland where two artists pit their best hits against each other.

The affair went down smoothly until about 30 minutes in, when Monica spoke of how she had come a long way from “kicking in doors” and “smacking chicks,” a (seemingly autobiographical) line from her hit song “So Gone.”

“You sure was,” Brandy replied. “I was one of the ones.”

But Monica refuted the quip, claiming, “People think I’m abusive. That’s not what happened.”

After a little back and forth, Brandy conceded, “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that … I didn’t mean no shade by that.”

“It was a misunderstanding,” Monica replied before moving on, as both singers seemed to have done with the announcement of the upcoming tour”.

The Boy Is Mine was not this standalone single. It was the title track from Monica’s second studio album. It was released by Arista Records on 14th July, 1998. The title track with Brandy was the biggest-selling single in the U.S. in 1998. I am going to come to some other features. I am moving to a 2023 feature from Hollywood Reporter, where Monica discussed twenty-five years of her sophomore album:

“What comes to mind when you think of The Boy Is Mine turning 25?

MONICA It’s a blessing to still be acknowledged and feel appreciated and feel loved. I’ve always said that I was a bit of an underdog, but it was a place that I never said I didn’t want to be because I didn’t see it in a negative light. I was very much a product of my environment at that time. I was still working on myself. I recorded the album at the age most people are focused on learning to drive, and I graduated high school during that time, and there was a lot happening for me and I lived out loud in front of the public. So there were a lot of different things happening both personally and professionally, so when I look at all of those things collectively, I don’t just think of the music.

How did you get involved with “The Boy Is Mine”?

MONICA I was discovered by Kevin Wells and Dallas Austin, and Dallas became a father figure in my life because at the time, my relationship with my biological father was extremely strained. It’s beautiful now, but it wasn’t that at the time. And he and I would talk about what my ultimate goals were, and he always promised to love and protect me throughout the process of me learning the industry. So the way I heard any song that you would hear me on during that time frame was through Dallas, and Dallas sat me down and he played the song for me. And my initial response was, “Well, why would we make a song like this?” Because I would never fight over a boy, not like this, and we laughed. And it was very lighthearted and said in a joking manner because I was thinking to myself, “Would I actually do that?”

And in this particular form, I’m like, “I don’t think so.” And he said, “Monica, you are a force to be reckoned with; Brandy is a force to be reckoned with; you all coming together is going to be incredible.” And with the level of trust and respect that I had for him, it was definitely a no-brainer. With the level of respect that I had for Brandy and her artistry, it was a no-brainer at that point. So I actually recorded it in L.A. It was my first time meeting Rodney Jerkins and Fred Jerkins and LaShawn Daniels. They were all such a major part of it all, and she and I just started working on the vocals there.

You and Brandy won a Grammy for “The Boy Is Mine” — where did you put your Grammy?

MONICA I gifted my mother my Grammy for Mother’s Day the following Mother’s Day. Because there is no me without her — the moral compass that I have, the voice. My mother also sings, but she only sings at church sometimes after my papa preaches. She’s not the type that wants to sing in the public’s eye, she always just sings for the glory of God. But I get all of these important things from her, all of the teachings that people respect about me from her. I felt like the greatest way to honor her was to say, “Listen, I wouldn’t be here without you.” We had it encased and given to her, and she always loved it because it lights up and she could click it on when people came over. It was a focal point”.

I am going to come to a really interesting feature from Stereogum next. However, VICE examined The Boy Is Mine in 2018 on its twentieth anniversary. They stated how the song is about choosing friendship over drama. Not too many songs of the 1990s focused on that. The chemistry between Brandy and Monica on the song is clear and enduring:

“It was a pleasant surprise to learn about “The Boy Is Mine” in the first place—how could a rivalry be real if the singers chose to work together? Originally written as a solo track by Brandy and Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins in the fall of 1997, the two decided the song would work better as a duet and were inspired by Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson’s “The Girl Is Mine.” Brandy asked her label to approach Monica as a gesture of goodwill to combat rumors of a rivalry. With her label’s permission, Monica jumped on board and the single was released in the spring of 1998, quickly dominating the airwaves and climbing to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.

That success, unfortunately, didn’t translate to love for each other in real life. Although tabloids blew their rivalry out of proportion, years later, the singers admitted there was tension between them. In a 2012 radio interview, Monica said, “We were young. We could barely stay in the room with each other. By no means was it jealousy or envy. She and I are polar opposites, and instead of embracing that, we used our differences as reasons not to be amongst each other.”

Still, the way pop culture infiltrates our minds is such that we interpret things the way we want them to be, and not the way they are. And so, Brandy and Monica may have been “polar opposites,” but for me, a young Black girl subconsciously yearning for heroines to call my own, I clung to their mutual presence. It didn’t matter what was real or imagined—what mattered was that they existed on a record together, and were made stronger for it. It was a quick, satisfying hit of representation.

What I loved most was the song’s music video, directed by the talented and prolific Joseph Kahn. Dark, mysterious, and more visually sophisticated than I anticipated, “The Boy Is Mine” was a quietly radical declaration of female solidarity.

There is something beautiful, too, about the way the music video unfurls: first confusion, then confrontation, and in its final moments, solidarity. Brandy and Monica relax in their apartments, changing the channel to their favorite television programs (an episode of The Jerry Springer Show for Brandy, a black and white movie for Monica), but each girl’s remote controls the television of the other. Brandy can’t watch her show without disrupting Monica’s viewing and vice versa. As symbolism, it proves both women are in this situation (the action of the music video and the content of the song) together, whether they like it or not.

Later, they realize their beau (actor Mekhi Phifer) is two-timing them. As he visits Brandy, she partially opens the door with a smile on her face, only to open the door wider and reveal that Monica is there, too. It’s a cute and knowing moment. Why are we fighting over this man? What good has he given us?

Women are pressured to conform to contrasting ideas: We’re supposed to be the “gentler” sex, yet we’re taught to hate ourselves and each other, creating a toxic competitive atmosphere where one woman’s livelihood is a threat to another’s. In this manufactured climate of scarcity, Black women are left battling for more because we were never given our proper share in the first place. In “The Boy Is Mine,” I learned a valuable lesson about what it means to be a friend and what it means to find comfort in the friendship of other women—even women I did not know or possibly saw as my competition. Now, I know that the most significant solidarity is that between women who want each other to succeed”.

In 2022, Stereogum spent time showing some love for The Boy Is Mine. I remember when it came out in 1998. I still listen to the track today, and it fills me with nostalgia. This song that has lasted for twenty-seven years and still sounds so fresh and strong. I do wonder whether any live videos will be released from the upcoming The Boy Is Mine tour from Brandy and Monica:

“Originally, “The Boy Is Mine,” the first single from Never Say Never, was going to be a solo song for Brandy. You can hear that in the track. “The Boy Is Mine” doesn’t exactly offer two differing perspectives. It’s two different women singing the same thing, more or less, to each other. Brandy was one of five credited writers on “The Boy Is Mine.” She worked with Rodney Jerkins, his brother Fred Jerkins III, and fellow professionals LaShawn Daniels and Japhe Tejeda. But when she heard her solo version of the song, Brandy thought something was missing. She knew that “The Boy Is Mine” needed Monica.

Monica Denise Arnold grew up in the Atlanta neighborhood of College Park, and her family was not a show-business family. (When Monica was born, the #1 single in America was Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust.”) Polow Da Don, a producer whose work will eventually appear in this column, is one of her cousins, but Monica’s parents both worked at the airport — her father as a mechanic, her mother as a customer service rep. Monica grew up singing in churches with her mother, and she won talent shows around Atlanta as a kid. When she was 10, Monica became the youngest singer in a touring gospel choir. When she was 12, Dallas Austin, producer of hits like TLC’s “Creep,” heard Monica singing a Whitney Houston song a talent show and signed her to his Arista imprint Rowdy.

Monica was 14 years old when she released her 1995 debut album Miss Thang. Like Brandy, Monica was entirely comfortable singing over rap beats. Unlike Brandy, Monica had serious levels of gospel grit in her voice even at a young age. She sounded tougher than Brandy, more seasoned. She didn’t sound anything like a little kid. The sound of Miss Thang is rich and assured, and it’s wild that a 14-year-old singer was able to sound that much like what Mary J. Blige was doing at the time. Monica blew up even quicker than Brandy did. Her debut single “Don’t Take It Personal (Just One Of Dem Days)” reached #2. (It’s an 8.) Two more singles from Miss Thang went top-10, and the album went triple platinum.

Much like Brandy, Monica followed her debut album with a big soundtrack hit. For her contribution to the 1997 motion picture Space Jam, Monica went full adult-contempo, singing the Diane Warren-written ballad “For You I Will,” which reached #4. (It’s a 5.) Compared to what Monica was doing on Miss Thang, “For You I Will” was severely lacking in swagger, but it showed that Monica could do more than what she’d done on her debut. She wasn’t a TV star like Brandy, but Monica had a bright future. When Brandy put in the call for Monica to appear on “The Boy Is Mine,” the timing was great. Monica, like Brandy, was gearing up to release her second LP.

“The Boy Is Mine” wasn’t written about a real-life scenario, but it did riff on the public perception that Brandy and Monica were rivals. In the Bronson book, Monica says that this was intentional: “We took the song and brought humor to a situation that people had tried to make so serious. We thought it would be really funny to show us feuding in the video and then come together at the end because we wanted people to let go of the idea of us not liking each other — but of course, they haven’t.” We sure haven’t. Decades later, the idea of Brandy and Monica not liking each other remains a big topic of conversation in both singers’ careers.

Brandy and Monica tried recording “The Boy Is Mine” together, in the same room, but it didn’t work. Their voices clashed, and some of the people who worked on the song have said that they didn’t like being in the same room together. So they tried something else. Brandy recorded her part in California with Rodney Jerkins, and Dallas Austin recorded Monica’s parts in Atlanta, tweaking the arrangement in the process and earning himself a co-producer credit. (The other two credited producers are Rodney Jerkins and Brandy.) The song went through multiple mixes until everyone was satisfied that nobody upstaged anyone else. In the Bronson book, Austin says, “I had to make Monica Monica on it. I didn’t want it to turn into something where Monica’s full character wasn’t on it. It had to have their attitudes on it and not just be them singing a song.” It took multiple mixes before they came up with a version of “The Boy Is Mine” before all parties agreed that neither singer upstaged the other.

To its great credit, “The Boy Is Mine” does showcase the attitudes of both singers. The producers might’ve had to put the song together piecemeal, but there’s a real chemistry at work on it. The contrast between the two voices is subtle, but it’s there. Brandy is softer, and Monica is harder. The argument on the track is pretty much an “is not”/”is too” thing, and it never reaches a resolution, but that probably makes it more fun. It’s structured almost like a rap battle, with both Brandy and Monica getting chances to flex on each other. Brandy: “There’s no way that you could mistake him for your man, are you insane?” Monica: “You see, I know that you may be just a little bit jealous of me.” On the chorus, the two of them sing the same thing at each other. The line “I’m sorry that you seem to be confused” is a truly great piece of faux-nice shit-talk”.

I am ending with this article from Billboard. Brandy and Monica appeared on the cover of Essence to discuss the tour. I think there has been a lot of misconception about the lyrical content of The Boy Is Mine. I hope that the new tour dates from Brandy and Monica not only ignite interest in the 1998 single. We also need to discuss the album it came from. A wonderful work from Monica. I do also hope that she and Brandy record together again. It would be nice to hear a new chapter from them:

“I think that even though the lyrical content and some of what started to play out created more division than it did togetherness, we’ve taken control of that, and we’re making what the legacy of this song would be totally different for the next generation. And that’s what I’m most proud of, when I look at what is happening now with ‘The Boy Is Mine,'” Monica tells the publication.

While their timeless duet about fighting over a boy spent 13 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and earned both women a Grammy for best R&B performance by a duo or group with vocal, the success of the record couldn’t always sweeten the unsavory parts of Brandy and Monica’s relationship. The two allegedly got into an altercation during rehearsal for their performance at the 1998 MTV Video Music Awards, which caused a years-long rift. When they went head-to-head for a Verzuz battle in 2020, they openly discussed their feud, and Brandy revealed in a later interview on Ebro In The Morning that she had apologized to Monica behind the scenes.

IN THIS PHOTO: Brandy and Monica during an interview on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday, 25th June, 2025/PHOTO CREDIT: Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Images

When Ariana Grande reimagined “The Boy Is Mine” on her 2024 album Eternal Sunshine — and tapped Brandy and Monica for the official remix that scored a Grammy nod for best pop duo/group performance — Monica adds, “it was that subtle reminder for us of how special that moment was,” adds Monica. “And what I love so much about it was that we were young, living in the moment and creating. We were creating without critics. We were creating without anything outside of ourselves. And that was the part that I think made it so great and made it so timeless.”

“I see it as so much bigger than just a hit record. At the time, it was two young women coming together, bringing our voices and our stories into one moment — and the world connected with it in a way we couldn’t have imagined. To see how that song connected with people all over the world — and still does — is such a blessing,” says Brandy. “For me, it represented sisterhood and the power of collaboration. Now, all these years later, it feels like a landmark in R&B history, but also a reminder of how far we’ve come as women and as artists. It’s humbling to know that a song can stand the test of time like that, and it inspires me to keep creating music that resonates across generations.”

In a couple of weeks, Brandy and Monica will bring “The Boy Is Mine” to U.S. arenas for The Boy Is Mine Tour, which kicks off on Oct. 16 at Cincinnati’s Heritage Bank Center in Cincinnati and goes through major cities including Las Vegas, Los Angeles and New York before wrapping up on Dec. 7 at Houston’s Toyota Center.

Brandy also tells Essence that making the setlist was “definitely one of the hardest parts, because so many songs hold a special place in our hearts and in the fans’ hearts. We thought about what records shaped the culture, what moments people connect with most, and how to create a flow that takes the audience on a journey. Of course, the classics are there, but we also wanted surprises — songs people might not expect to hear live, and even some new touches, to make the music feel fresh again. I might even throw in some unreleased music!”.

I will wrap up now. It has been great revisiting one of my favourite songs of the 1990s. Brandy and Monica are about to head on tour. Fans who experienced their The Boy Is Mine duet in 1998 will be there. New fans too. It is a co-headline tour, so both artists get a chance to showcase their material, though that demand to hear Brandy and Monica sing is going to be very strong. No wonder. A massive single in 1998, twenty-seven years later, The Boy Is Mine has lost…

NONE of its power.

FEATURE: Groovelines: Paul Simon - 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover

FEATURE:

 

 

Groovelines

 

 Paul Simon - 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover

__________

BECAUSE one…

of Paul Simon’s best albums turns fifty very soon, for this Groovelines, I am including one of its standout cuts. Still Crazy After All These Years is the fourth solo album from Simon. It was released on 17th October, 1975. Its title track is phenomenal and one of Paul Simon’s best songs. However, I am going to focus on 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. I first heard it when I was a child and the criticism around it was that, in the song, Simon does not list fifty ways to leave your lover! The song or Simon never purports to stick rigidly to the title and name fifty different ways someone can leave their lover. What is more important is Simon’s lyrics and the inventiveness of the song. The third single from Still Crazy After All These Years, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover was the third single released from the album. It was a chart success and critically acclaimed. I am going to go a little deeper with this song. There are quite a few excellent features about 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. I am going to start with a bit of a jokey feature. One that points out how there are, indeed, not fifty ways to leave your lover listed in the song:

“My issue is that the song promises fifty ways to leave your lover, and by my count there are only five. That’s no small discrepancy! It’s a great pet peeve of mine to be promised something (whether it’s in a song, a movie trailer, a commercial, or otherwise) and be given something totally different or insufficient. For instance, the movie Trainspotting; they’re not looking for trains, they’re trying to get drugs! Or when I got that Ginsu knife because I saw it could cut through shoes, and then it didn’t make it halfway through mine.

I may not be as celebrated a songwriter as you, but I can tell you this: My songs make good on their titles. “Rufus the Dog” is not some misleading title to get you to listen to a song about a cat or a llama or something ridiculous like that. It’s about a dog. What he eats, where he sleeps, all kinds of things. Or my song “Three Little Words.” Guess what; those words are “I” and “Love” and “You.” I don’t stop with just two of them and I don’t barrel on to four or five. It’s just those three, exactly what I promised.

But you say fifty right in the title—not to mention in the song itself (six times by my count)—and then proceed to only give us five. Now just to be fair, because maybe I miscounted or something, let’s go through the five I see.

1. Slip out the back, Jack
2. Make a new plan, Stan
3. Don’t need to be coy, Roy

And then there’s the “listen to me” part, which isn’t a way to leave your lover. (Honestly, “Don’t need to be coy, Roy” isn’t really a way to leave your lover, but I’ll accept it. Poetic license and all that.) Then there’s:

4. Hop on the bus, Gus (“don’t need to discuss much” is, I assume, still directed at Gus)
5. Drop off the key, Lee

And “get yourself free” is for Lee, I’m assuming”.

I am going to move to a couple of features that look at the story behind the song. On the face of it, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover might seem like fantasy and Paul Simon coming up with the seeds of an idea and building on it. However, there might be more of the personal in it. Rather than cast himself as the protagonist and coming from a first-person perspective, instead, Simon might be embodying himself in the characters. This is the first feature I want to drop in:

“On the face of it, this song would imply that the protagonist is getting advice from a new lover about how to get rid of the old one. Maybe he’s been deceiving her, but the only thing that stands out as being deceiving is the title. You read the title and think that’s a lot of ways but in reality, only list’s five. So, what happened to the other 45? Maybe he didn’t need them!

Simon and his vocal partner, Art Garfunkel, who began their career under the name Tom and Jerry, had major success between 1966 and 1970 and really hit the big time right at the end when Bridge Over Troubled Water – the album and single – topped all charts and sold by the bucket load, but it caused tensions and by 1973 the pair had gone their own ways and launched successful solo careers. Who was the most successful? It’s hard to say because although Paul Simon had more hits he never reached number one in the UK, but he did write all his own songs whereas Art didn’t write any of his hits, but did have two ‘eyes’ chart toppers in the shape of I Only Have Eyes for You in 1975 and Bright Eyes in 1979, the latter becoming the best-selling single of that year.

Paul’s solo career began in 1972 with Mother and Child Reunion which reached number five. He followed it with Me and Julio Down by The Schoolyard, Take Me to The Mardi Gras, Love Me Like A Rock and then after a two-and-a-half-year gap he returned in 1976 with 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover. In essence Paul really did write this after leaving his lover. He had been married to Peggy Harper since 1969 and divorced in 1975. On his 1983 album Hearts and Bones Paul reflected on his married life in the song Train in the Distance. He then began a relationship with the actress Carrie Fisher.

So how did that song come about? Well Simon, in an interview with Rock Lives: Profiles and Interviews, explained how it started, “I woke up one morning in my apartment on Central Park and the opening words just popped into my mind: ‘The problem is all inside your head, she said to me…’ That was the first thing I thought of. So, I just started building on that line. It was the last song I wrote for the album, and I wrote it with a Rhythm Ace, one of those electronic drum machines so maybe that’s how it got that sing-song ‘make a new plan Stan, don’t need to be coy Roy’ quality. It’s basically a nonsense song.” He’s been quite reserved regarding the song’s subject, except to say that it wasn’t about his wife”.

I am going to finish up with a feature from Stereogum. As part of their The Number Ones series, they spent some time with a Paul Simon masterpiece. One of my favourite songs of his, because the album it is from, Still Crazy After All These Years, turns fifty on 17th October, it was important to dive inside this song. 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover is a track that has been with me for decades and still provokes emotion. The memories I have tied to it. More than that, the sheer quality of the songwriting and everyone on the record:

“Simon started to write “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” as a sort of kids’ game. Earlier in 1975, the 33-year-old Simon and his first wife Peggy Harper had split up after six years of marriage. One day, Simon had their three-year-old son Harper at his apartment, and he was trying to teach Harper how to rhyme. That’s how he came up with the chorus, with all its rattled-off names: “You just slip out the back, Jack / Make a new plan, Stan.” (Harper is now doing just fine for himself as a singer-songwriter, so the lesson must’ve worked.) In a 1975 interview, Simon admitted that “50 Ways” is “basically a nonsense song.”

He’s wrong, of course. “50 Ways” is actually a dazzling little piece of storytelling. A man is having an affair, but he’s dithering about ending his main relationship. He wants out, but he doesn’t know how to go through with it. The other woman wants him to hurry up and get the fuck out, and she tells him that he needs to do it. But she never comes out and says that. Instead, she frames it as helpful advice: “She said, ‘It grieves me so, to see you in such pain / I wish there was something I could do to make you smile again.'” And then she tells him to just do it — to act, to be decisive, to do any of the 50 things you can do to become single again.

Simon presents the whole thing as a dialog, almost a scene from a movie. He never offers any details on his own narrator or on the woman who’s helping him in his struggle to be free. Simon doesn’t even say if he’s cheating with this other woman; it’s just heavily implied. In that simple stretch of dialogue, we can infer the entire situation that this man has made for himself. And we can see the light slowly dawning on him. He can do it. He can leave. It’ll be fine. Simon said that he didn’t write “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” about his ex-wife. But when you come out with a song like that a few months after your first divorce, you’re telling us something.

In any case, “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” remains one of the few divorce songs that isn’t mired in reflection or self-pity. Instead, it’s a sly exultation, a wink at the whole idea that there can be freedom after marriage. The divorce rate was skyrocketing by the mid-’70s, so maybe that had something to do with the song’s popularity. A whole lot of the baby boomers who’d gotten married straight out of college — as well as those who, like Simon, were slightly older than the boomers — were starting to figure out that they didn’t have to stay with the same person for their entire lives. Heard from a certain perspective, “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” works as a celebration of that ability to get yourself free, and of the loss of stigma around it. (All those boomer divorces, it’s probably worth noting, did a real number on my generation of kids. But my parents are still together, and it’s not like I’m any less fucked up than my peers, so maybe all that freedom was ultimately a good thing.)

Simon wrote “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” to the beat of a drum machine. (I’ve now learned that a lot of ’70s songwriters did this, and I find that delightful.) When Simon recorded the song, the great studio drummer Steve Gadd came up with an intricate marching patter-riff. Simon, wanting to keep the song simple, arranged the entire track around those drums, which was a smart thing to do. “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” is a casually funky track, one that keeps bubbling throughout. The chorus doesn’t explode; it effortlessly slides right in. And when the chorus subsides, everything comes back to that drum riff again. That beat is the reason that “50 Ways” has been sampled dozens of times. (See below.) It’s also probably what keeps “50 Ways” from ever sounding vicious or callous, even though it’s really both.

Incidentally, all three of the backup singers on “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover” — Valerie Simpson, Patti Austin, and Phoebe Snow — were prominent musicians in their own right. Valerie Simpson was the Simpson of Ashford & Simpson, who had already written “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and produced the 1970 Diana Ross version, which had been Ross’ first solo #1 hit. Simpson had also released a couple of solo albums on Motown; later on, Ashford & Simpson, as artists, would peak at #12 with 1984’s “Solid.” The singer-songwriter Phoebe Snow, who’d been touring with Simon all year, had already peaked at #5 with 1975’s “Poetry Man.” (It’s a 6.) And Patti Austin will eventually show up in this column, Simpson, Snow, and Austin don’t really get a whole lot of opportunity to show off on “50 Ways,” but that’s still a whole lot of talent in one room”.

There is a lot more to say about this classic. However, on 17th October, people will talk about Still Crazy After All These Years will get some new attention. I hope people talk about the songs. 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover is one of Paul Simon’s finest achievements. In terms of the lyrics and the chorus. The composition. Everything beautifully sits together. A song that is still startling brilliant…

AFTER all these years.

FEATURE: Elegie: Patti Smith’s Horses at Fifty

FEATURE:

 

 

Elegie

 

Patti Smith’s Horses at Fifty

__________

TURNING fifty…

IN THIS PHOTO: Patti Smith in 1975/PHOTO CREDIT: Lynn Goldsmith

on 10th November, Patti Smith’s Horses is one of the defining albums of the 1970s. I want to spend some time with it ahead of its fiftieth anniversary. I am writing this feature nine days before the release of an anniversary edition. Not only for Patti Smith fans and those who love the 1975 album, this is a release I think everyone should get. One of the greatest albums of all time. Horses is a singular and spectacular vision from one of music’s greats. An undeniable masterpiece that is influencing artists today:

“New York, NY – August 22, 2025 – Legacy Recordings, the catalog division of Sony Music Entertainment, announced today a vinyl and CD release in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Patti Smith’s Horses. The album, originally released in 1975, will be released as a 2-LP and 2-CD on October 10. Pre-order is available now here.

This release will feature the iconic original album remastered direct from the original 1/4” master tapes, as well as previously unreleased outtakes and rarities, including Patti Smith’s 1975 RCA audition tape.

The release of Horses (50th Anniversary) will feature eight never-before-released songs, such as “Snowball” and “Birdland (Alternate Take)”, along with RCA demos. “Snowball” (here) will be the first single available on all streaming platforms today.

“The poet may stand alone, but in merging with a band, surrenders to the wonder of teamwork. Thus joined, we birthed Horses together.” – Patti Smith, Bread of Angels

On November 4, Patti Smith will publish her long-awaited memoir, Bread of Angels, via Random House Publishing. In Smith’s most intimate and visionary work, she describes her post-World War II childhood in working class Philadelphia and South Jersey, her teenage years when the first glimmers of art and romance take hold, her rise as punk rock icon to her retreat from public life when she meets her one true love and starts a family on the shores of Lake Saint Clair, Michigan. As Smith suffers profound losses, she also returns to writing, the one constant on a lifelong path driven by artistic freedom and the power of the imagination.

Bread of Angels Pre-Order: LINK
Order and Listen Link: https://PattiSmith.lnk.to/Horses50

Even though it was not a huge commercial success, Patti Smith’s Horses has this enormous and vital legacy. It is one of the most spectacular debut albums ever. Not only igniting Rock music but also fuelling and igniting Punk and New Wave. This is what critics have observed retrospectively. You can hear bands of today like The Last Dinner Party that nod to Patti Smith. Her music definitely has this impact and resonance. Horses is widely considered to be her best album. I am starting out with a 2015 article from Chris Charlesworth, and his recollections of his 1975 interview with Patti Smith for Melody Maker:

“Her band has been increasing in size over the years. Four years back it was just Patti and her guitarist Lenny Kaye, an occasional rock journalist and walking encyclopaedia on the last two decades of pop in America. Kaye, who three years ago, incidentally, compiled the Nuggets album of relatively obscure US singles for the Elektra label, might be described as a free-form guitarist, as he plays random notes at will according to the prompting of Patti’s dialogue. They understand one another and, as such, it’s doubtful whether any orthodox guitar player would fit.

Pianist Richard Sohl is a similar performer. Like Kaye, nothing he plays can be predicted beforehand. Recently two other musicians have been added: a second guitarist, Ivan Kral, who, like Patti, bears a striking resemblance to Keith Richards, and drummer Jay Dougherty. There is no bass player — Patti feels a drummer is ample rhythm.

John Cale was brought in to produce her first Arista album, Horses, which is released this month. It was on this topic that we began what turned out to be a very lengthy conversation last week. “It’s a live album,” she informs me, squatting on the floor. “There’s hardly any overdubbing at all. We just went in and did the songs straight away.

“In the studio we went through hell. I asked John to do it for me, I begged him to, and we had nothing but friction, but it was a love-hate relationship and it worked. At first I wanted an engineer producer, somebody like Tom Dowd, but Atlantic wouldn’t let him go, so I figured I’d get a top artist producer who would act as a mirror.

“The whole thing in the studio was us proving to John that we could do it the way we wanted, so we fought a lot but it was fighting on a very intimate level.”

The result is an album that’s actually far more melodic than the half dozen or so occasions I’ve watched Patti perform in various places in New York. The inclusion of a drummer – Dougherty was brought in immediately before the sessions began – tightens up Patti’s style no end. Before, it was often shapeless and lacked discipline of any kind. Now you can even dance to Patti Smith, or at least some of the tracks.

Even words were improvised in the studio, she says. “I’m not into writing songs. I find that real boring. All our things started out initially as improvisation, but doing them over and over again got them into a formula. I can’t play anything at all, so Lenny and I work out tunes as they go along. I have words and know how I think they should go, so we just pull it out and pull it out further until we get somewhere.”

She and Kaye first got together in 1971. This followed a period of Patti’s life when she lived at the Chelsea Hotel, writing poetry and spending time with rock musicians in what she describes as a “tequila split life”. Before that she was at art school, which followed work in a factory in New Jersey, where she was brought up. It was Dylan cohort Bobby Neuwirth who introduced her to the changing musical inhabitants of the Chelsea Hotel. (Neuwirth is currently playing on Dylan’s tour of New England with Joan Baez.)

“Neuwirth recognised my poetry and immediately introduced me to everybody he knew in rock and roll and kept pumping me to work at it. I studied Rimbaud, too, but being surrounded by these rock and roll rhythms the two moved simultaneously.”

It wasn’t until 1972 that Patti started making regular appearances in New York.

In 1973 Lenny Kaye appeared following a reading Patti gave on the anniversary of Jim Morrison’s death, and from then on things accelerated. Pianist Richard Sohl joined the ranks and gigs followed at anywhere manager Jane Friedman could book them.

Which just about brings us up to where we began: the ‘Hey Joe’ single recorded at Electric Ladyland. It was a deliberate choice of studio, for Patti strongly allies herself with Hendrix, another artist who took his art beyond contemporary strictures.

“We had three hours of studio time, but I just did it like we were on stage. Eventually we had ten minutes left and no ‘B’ side, so I recited this poem and the musicians just joined in and we had it done”.

Patti Smith is currently performing some Horses anniversary dates across Europe and the U.S. I am going to finish up on a couple of other reviews. I want to start out with The Observer and their 2015 celebration of Horses. Forty years after its release, they heralded its staggering genius:

“The word “punk” would later be attached to everything CBGB-related, but Horses is more punk in its attitude than in its sound. It takes a cabaret approach to rock, and by cabaret I mean Brecht/Weill, not the Sweeney Sisters. Richard Sohl’s graceful keyboard work drives the arrangements more than Lenny Kaye’s scratchy guitar, and although the band can work up a good head of steam, it tends to do so in a knowingly theatrical way. This music has a deeper affinity to Van Morrison lapsing into animal noises on “Listen to the Lion” than to the primal power of the Ramones.

While we’re on the subject of animal noises, it must be acknowledged that Horses is not always a pleasant listening experience. Smith didn’t intend it to be. Over the course of its 44 minutes, she bleats like a goat, yelps like a cat whose tail has been stepped on, howls like an abandoned toddler and pounds her chest while she sings to give her voice a guttural gulp. All for what? Like a shaman (a word and a concept she loves), she’s always reaching for the transcendent, trying to slip past the borders of her own self, enter the spirits of others, and meld with the mysterious force that binds us all together. She doesn’t always attain this transcendence, but she knows where she can find it: in rock and roll.

That is the abiding message of “Gloria” and “Land,” the garage-recitative suites that are Horses’ two centerpieces. The message is conveyed more through the music’s overall mood, the swells and surges of the band, and the sound of Smith’s voice—harsh edge, yearning center—than it is through her words (which, truth be told, verge on gibberish at times, especially during “Land”). And that message further confirms that this album could only have been made by people who were young and starstruck in the ’60s.

It’s true, you don’t have to be familiar with “Gloria” as rendered by Them (or any number of others) or “Land of 1,000 Dances” as rendered by Wilson Pickett (ditto) to appreciate what’s going on here. But it sure helps a lot if you are, and if you subscribe to the notion that three chords and the truth are really all that matters. To quote David Bowie, “Till there was rock, you only had God.”

These holy orgiastic moments are necessary to counterbalance the rest of the disc, much of which—“Redondo Beach,” “Birdland,” “Break It Up,” “Elegie”—is fixated on death. One curious irony about Horses is that an album so closely associated with the beginning of something (punk) is itself so concerned with endings. Its celebrated opening line, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine,” now seems far less significant than its closing ones: “I think it’s sad, it’s much too bad, that our friends can’t be with us today.”

All of which is a long way of saying that the kind of pretentiousness and self-indulgence on display in Horses is the kind everyone needs from time to time. It’s a positive thing to be reminded of Smith’s wild-eyed belief in the power of rock to provide catharsis, to soothe, to heal, to transform. Unlike many of her generation, she’s never given up that belief. She was still proclaiming it loud last Sunday through her very presence on stage with U2 in Paris. Would the world be a healthier place if more of us shared her faith? It could be worth a try”.

I am heading to 2011, and this NPR article from Charlie Kaplan. Highlighting how Horses is this towering achievement, though it is an album with some difficult and some sometimes dark subject matter. I think I first heard Horses a decade or so ago. Quite late in life, it will be interesting seeing how journalists mark its fiftieth anniversary on 10th November:

“The album's opening intonation, "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine" would feel like a stale trope or pose coming from someone else, but feels radical and terrifying when Smith says it. Part of what's so gripping about Horses' first track, "Gloria — In Exelcis Deo — Gloria" (an interpolation of Them's "Gloria") is how changeable and unpredictable Smith makes every element in the song. Nothing takes a single shape for long: not the tempo, the instrumentation, her accent, or the song's idea of gender. Smith sings from the perspective of a male narrator, all lupine lip-licking, but even his personality is in chaotic flux, distorting grotesquely as his libidinal advances intensify. Smith's narrator isn't rejecting atonement in his opening statement — he is relishing the depravity of what he can't wait to do, acts Jesus probably wouldn't have bit the big one to atone for, if he could take it back. And all this is coming from a woman, narrating as a man, preying on a woman. It really makes you rethink Van Morrison's early material.

The album then gets increasingly demanding and confrontational, and focuses on themes untouched in rock music preceding it. Disfigurement and escapism — surrealistic and almost one and the same here — emerge as prevalent themes. On "Break It Up," both the narrator and the boy she fixates on tear their skin off, turn into angels, and fly away from their hellish, earthly existence. On "Birdland," Smith's voice vacillates between beat poetry, Sprechstimme, and rock vocals as a boy realizes that his late father is, in fact, not dead but an alien, right before he is mutilated by a flock of birds, abducted by said aliens, and transported to another dimension. "We love birdland," she concludes.

Suicide also recurs as a theme. On "Redondo Beach," Smith settles into a stylistic form — peppy, jerky reggae — to sing about her narrator's girlfriend committing suicide. Suffice it to say, this juxtaposition is dissonant, dark, and left me feeling a little sick; in other words, it was effective. In the album's incredibly powerful and upsetting centerpiece "Land/Horses," — which reminded me of the band Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop," which would come out two years later — a boy named Johnny is raped, gets addicted to cocaine, and commits suicide. Smith's poetry is affecting here; Johnny's emotional collapse is a herd of horses, "white shining silver studs with their nose in flames," his ultimate act "a butterfly flapping in his throat."

"Land/Horses" also reprises lyrical themes from "Gloria — In Excelsis Deo — Gloria," again conflating rock references — particularly to dance — with sexual predators and assault. Close to the end of the song, Smith repeats a line from "Gloria," "humping on the parking meter, leaning on the parking meter," now transformed from an image of sexual appetite into a motif of victimization. This perspective and reinterpretation of the optimism and sexual liberation of the '60s is, to me, the central idea behind Horses. An outsider to that moment in time, Smith sees the injustice obscured by the pop patrimony.

Horses was hard to enjoy, but I think that was the point. Having been squired by Rolling Stone, whose '60s-centric sensibility was much of what Smith took aim at, I probably had a similar initial reaction to this album that critics swaddled in the Beatles and Stones did. Going back to the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time," for the first time I picked up on the obvious bias of the list; it was compiled, the issue's introduction proudly proclaims, by "An eclectic and stellar panel of experts — including the Rolling Stone editors, Fats Domino, Flea and Britney Spears," who "voted on the following albums, by everyone from Abba to ZZ Top, from Robert Johnson to the White Stripes." After listening to Horses, the Hands-Across-America diversity represented by "Flea and Britney Spears" and the faith-restoring ecumenism that somehow managed to place Robert Johnson and the White Stripes on the same list doesn't sound quite as impressive to me as maybe it did to Rolling Stone when they wrote it”.

I am ending with a review from Punk News. There are so many positive reviews for Horses. This is an album that received nothing less than effusive and ecstatic love and reaction. An album too potent and important to be half-hearted about! Fifty years later and its creator is touring songs from it. It is wonderful to see:

“Patti Smith had an equal love for poetry and 60's garage rock. She drew from both, showcased in her amazing lyrics (the best of any artist from the early punk days; compared to Bob Dylan's) and teamed them up with a three-chord rock and roll backing. The music shows the most dynamic range of the newborn genre, from songs with lengthy quiet sections with expressive spoken word vocals, to pounding rock and roll with Smith snarling, jabbering and yelping overtop. Smith shows intelligence and raw energy throughout, a deserving inspiration to generations of female rockers through her songwriting, performance, and by remaining androgynous, never relying on her gender to gain appeal (shown by the cover photo, taken by Robert Mapplethorpe). She was the first person to write a punk song with movements (no it wasn't Green Day) and the first female rocker- I believe- to fall off a stage while rocking out (no it wasn't Karen O).

Every track is great and it's inevitable that this review will be long, but I'll try my best. "Gloria" the opener pulls the chorus from the song of the same name made popular by Them, an early band of Van Morrison, and the rest is by Smith. It starts with the incredible opening line, "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine". "Redondo Beach" is a song mourning a girl who committed suicide, masked by the happy reggae tune supporting it. "Free Money" would be one of my favorites for being one of the most catchy and straight-forward rockers on the album. It starts with a quiet intro of twinkling piano with gentle bass and vocals, which soon takes off into a toe-tapper with a great ending full of back-up vocals and the title repeated rapid-fire.

"Land" is the focus of the album for sure, a 9 1/2 minute song with three connected movements. It starts with a powerful beat poetry section about a boy being attacked who, in terror, imagines as if he's surrounded by horses, and "Horses" also being the name of this first movement. The tempo builds up steam and then bursts into the second movement, another nod to Smith's love for old rock and roll with her take on "Land of a Thousand Dances." It seems like an odd transition, but it just seems to make sense here moving from chants of "Horses! Horses! Horses! Horses!" to "Do ya know how to pony like Bony Maroni? Do you know how to twist? Well it goes like this, it goes like this." By this mood change the song is in full swing and you will stomp your foot and sing along every time. The song winds down and returns to a possibly violated Johnny ("his sperm coffin") in the final movement "La Mer (De)" with dances reappearing occasionally ("Do the Watusi!").

The original album ends with the subdued piano-based "Elegie", but this release adds one more track. No it's not a waste-of-space demo version of a song on the album like on so many re-released classics, it's a worthy track. The Patti Smith group live in Cleveland in 1976. They perform a punk-as-hell version of The Who's "My Generation" complete with added profanity by Smith (rather than "Things they do look awful cold, Hope I die before I get old", she screams "I don't need that fuckin' shit, Hope I die because of it!" It ends with Smith chanting over top of the feedback, "I'm so young, I'm so goddamn young!" which later reappears as a lyric from "Privilege" on 1978's Easter. Also, it seems that John Cale from VU (also the producer of this album) is playing with them, because she yells "John Cale!" right before the bass solo. The song is a worthy addition and also works well to end the disc. As far as the album as a whole in reissued form, it looks great and sounds great so I have no complaints other than I wish the lyrics were included since they're so fantastic. Lyrics can be found easily online however”.

On 10th November, Patti Smith’s groundbreaking debut turns fifty. The word ‘masterpiece’ is perhaps the most commonly-used when it comes to Horses. Artists such as Viv Albertine of The Slits, Michael Stipe, PJ Harvey, Courtney Love and Johnny Marr have shared their appreciation for the album. How it has impacted them. Fifty years on, and Horses is touching a new generation. Musicians who will incorporate the sound of this 1975 album and influence those coming through. If you have not heard Horses in a while then spend some time with it now. Horses is one of the most important albums…

IN music history.

FEATURE: The Reasons Why This Album Is a Masterpiece: Kate Bush’s Aerial at Twenty

FEATURE:

 

 

The Reasons Why This Album Is a Masterpiece

 

Kate Bush’s Aerial at Twenty

__________

I will write one or two…

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 2005/PHOTO CREDIT: Trevor Leighton

more anniversary features for Kate Bush’s Aerial. As it turns twenty on 7th November, it is important to discuss one of her best works. Arguably her greatest album. In the first feature, I sourced some interviews and reviews. What Kate Bush was saying in 2005 and what critics were too. The second feature was about A Sky of Honey, Aerial’s second disc, and its visual possibilities. 1993 was when she released The Red Shoes. Most did not know whether Bush would released an eighth studio album. It seemed like she might retire. However, there were signs and encouraging words. When she attended the Q Awards in 2001, where she collected the Classic Songwriter award. She mentioned how she was working on a new album. That it was taking a bit of time. Eight years after The Red Shoes came out, glimmers of hope for Kate Bush fans! Despite the fact it would be another four years until an album materialised, what we actually got was a double album. So, to be fair, she only left six-and-a-half years between albums! Now, we have waited almost fourteen years for an eleventh studio album. I don’t think Bush will grace us with another double album – though you never know! For this features, I am going to write why Aerial is so affecting. Why it means so much to me. For a start, it has similarities with 1985’s Hounds of Love. They are different in many ways, though both have conceptual second sides/albums. The ambition for Bush to go back to the idea of a conceptual suite. A Sky of Honey arguably surpasses The Ninth Wave. In terms of its scope and sonic blends, it is this dizzying and beguiling forty-two minutes of genius. If The Ninth Wave seems like a concept with short stories woven together, A Sky of Honey very much is this continuous suite. That is how Kate Bush wanted people to experience it. I have written how we need to see something visual. A new film or immersive experience that brings A Sky of Honey to life.

I might go into more detail regarding A Sky of Honey. An Endless Sky of Honey. As you can see from her website, Aerial is an album “full of birdsong - from wood pigeons on a lovely afternoon to the human turned-blackbird at the break of dawn”. As Kate Bush said: “I wanted to explore the idea of birdsong as a language and the idea that light is a trigger for their extraordinary song. Why do they all start to sing at dawn? Why do they sing so strongly as the sun starts to set?”. Aerial has been reissued a few times. In 2010, when Aerial was released to iTunes for the first time, its A Sky of Honey title was changed to An Endless Sky of Honey. How Bush wanted it all along. And it is this magnificent and accomplished work. An album in itself, very few artists ever have released an album consisting of a continuous suite. Kate Bush breaking ground decades after she recoded her first song! You could have A Sky of Honey on its own as an album, and it would be a masterpiece loved by critics. However, A Sea of Honey is the first disc. It contains many of Bush’s greatest songs. If she was worn out and dealing with a lot when The Red Shoes was released in 1993, time away to focus on herself and family not only rejuvenated her. It was a lifeline and new lease of life. She gave birth to her son, Albert, in 1998. There is a blend of family new and old on that first disc. A Sky of Honey I feel mixes fantasy with Bush embracing the joys of an English garden through a summer’s day. There is also her taking the listener to a foreign beach and shifting the scenery. From wood pigeons and blackbirds, through to a painter musing, to the sands of an exotic beach as it goes dark, it is this incredible and sumptuous cocktail consisting of so many different colours, tones, flavours and scents. An extraordinary musical bouquet.

A Sea of Honey is more conventional. However, one can also make connections between Hounds of Love’s focus on family and their importance and Aerial. That will be the last comparison to her 1985 album. However, as that is regarded as her masterpiece and one of the best albums ever, Aerial does not fall that far short of its impeccable standards. Bertie is this joyous ode to her new son. A mother’s pure joy. A Coral Room mentions Bush’s late mother. Mrs. Bartolozzi, I think, is also partly about her mother. Or Bush as a new mother. The imagery and magic through these songs is staggering! Bush’s voice has picked up new layers, age and depth. In her forties, this slightly older artist conveys and projects new wisdom and weight. I think Aerial is her most impactful album. In terms of the emotions she conveys, there is so much openness and love. However, Bush also takes us back and reminds us of some of her most eccentric and delightfully odd moments. Pi is her reciting a series of numbers. King of the Mountain, though autobiographical in the sense of Bush casting herself as this mysterious and reclusive figure in the wild, is about Elvis Presley. A jewel of a song “about the extreme pressures of fame, specifically using Elvis Presley as a focal point to explore the idea of his possible continued existence and the unbearable nature of his celebrity. The song draws parallels between Presley's isolated life and the themes of Orson Welles' film Citizen Kane, particularly the search for lost happiness or innocence, symbolized by Kane's sled "Rosebud". Bush questions if such intense public adoration can truly sustain a human being, suggesting that the weight of constant fame is ultimately too much for anyone to bear”. King of the Mountain is the opening track on Aerial and its only official single. I think Aerial contains one of the best run of four songs on any Kate Bush album. We have Mrs. Bartolozzi, How to Be Invisible, Joanni and A Coral Room ending the first disc. Joanni is one of the few songs that does not reference Kate Bush’s family. Instead, it is a song about Joan or Arc. How to Be Invisible contains some of Kate Bush’s most powerful and indelible images: “You stand in front of a million doors/And each one holds a million more/Corridors that lead to the world/Of the invisible/Corridors that twist and turn/Corridors that blister and burn”.

A gorgeous, wide-reaching and endlessly listenable double album. After twelve years, it could have been underwhelming. Self-indulgent or misdirected. Instead, not only did Kate Bush release something new and vastly different to 1993’s The Red Shoes. Her production was at its very peak. Aerial is an album that constantly reveals new things. Put it on today and listen the whole way through. A Sea of Honey will take you in different directions and evoke different reactions. I think it contains all of Kate Bush’s best assets and facets. Her voice is so rich and stunning. A Sky of Honey, or An Endless Sky of Honey as it should be, is this almost cinematic experience. You close your eyes and are immersed in this cycle of a summer’s day. The details Bush puts into the songs. How she can summon the intimacy and beauty of an English garden one moment, and then take us into the sky and to the sea. Something Balearic and euphoric towards the closing moments. All of the songs perfectly unite to tell this larger story. Understandably, critics raved about Aerial! It was this artistic work of genius that confirmed Kate Bush is one of the greatest artists and producers ever. I remember when it came out in 2005. I will explore various other sides of Aerial for the remaining one or two anniversary features. I do hope others celebrate the album near to 7th November. Aerial sounds as sense-altering and emotion-provoking now as it did…

TWENTY years ago.