FEATURE: Simon Le Bon at Sixty-Five: Duran Duran’s Biggest Hits and Amazing Deep Cuts

FEATURE:

 

 

Simon Le Bon at Sixty-Five

IN THIS PHOTO: Simon Le Bon in New York City in 2018/PHOTO CREDIT: Julia Johnson & Cody Cloud/The Licensing Project

Duran Duran’s Biggest Hits and Amazing Deep Cuts

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ONE of the…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Duran Duran in 1983

all-time great band leads of all time turns sixty-five on 27th October. Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon is one of the most distinct voices in music history. Le Bon has received three Ivor Novello Awards from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors, including the award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music. I am going to get to the playlist very soon. Before then, turning to Wikipedia for some background and history about Duran Duran and their history, here is some useful information:

“Duran Duran was founded by childhood friends John Taylor and Nick Rhodes along with singer-songwriter Stephen Duffy in 1978, but Duffy left a year later, convinced that the band was not going to be successful. The band went through a long succession of line-up changes after Duffy's departure, but finally settled on a guitarist and drummer.

Le Bon's ex-girlfriend, Fiona Kemp (a bartender at the Rum Runner nightclub where Duran Duran were rehearsing), introduced him to the band in May 1980, recommending him as a potential lead vocalist. As band legend has it, he turned up for the audition wearing pink leopard-print trousers, and carrying a notebook containing a large collection of poems he had written—several of which would later become tracks on the early Duran Duran studio albums.

After listening to the songs the band had already composed together, Le Bon spent some time fitting one of his poems ("Sound of Thunder") to one of the instrumentals, and found they had a good match. Le Bon agreed to "try [Duran Duran] out for the summer"; within six weeks the band was playing steadily around Birmingham, London and Nottingham, and a national tour supporting Hazel O'Connor led to a recording contract with EMI Records in December that year.

The band's debut studio album, Duran Duran, was released in 1981, and they quickly became famous as part of the New Romantic movement. Three more albums followed in quick succession: Rio (1982), Seven and the Ragged Tiger (1983) and the live album Arena (1984). Each album release was accompanied by heavy media promotion and a lengthy concert tour. By mid-1984, the band were ready for a break. Duran Duran's only other work that year was an appearance on the Band Aid charity single "Do They Know It's Christmas?" which was recorded at Sarm West Studios in Notting Hill, London on 25 November 1984. Le Bon's vocal appears fourth on the song after Paul Young, Boy George and George Michael sing their lines.

Following the departures of Roger Taylor and Andy Taylor, Le Bon, Rhodes and John Taylor continued on as Duran Duran, recording and releasing Notorious (1986) and Big Thing (1988). The group added guitarist Warren Cuccurullo and drummer Sterling Campbell and recorded the studio album Liberty (1990), but the band's success had begun to wane in the late 1980s.

Duran Duran had a resurgence in popularity in 1993 with The Wedding Album, featuring the top-10 single "Ordinary World". Several months into the extensive worldwide concert tour supporting this album, Le Bon suffered a torn vocal cord, and the tour was postponed for six weeks while he recovered.

In 1995, Duran Duran released the covers album Thank You, and Le Bon had the chance to cover some of his favourite artists, (Jim Morrison, Lou Reed and Elvis Costello), but the album was severely panned by critics from all quarters. That year Le Bon also performed Duran Duran's 1993 hit "Ordinary World" with opera tenor Luciano Pavarotti during a "Children of Bosnia" benefit concert for War Child. Le Bon described the event to Jam! Showbiz thusly: "If you're talking about name dropping, he's one of the biggest names you could drop, Pav-The-Man".

When bassist John Taylor left the band in 1997, Le Bon and Rhodes remained as the only two members who had been with Duran Duran from the beginning of their recording career. The successive two studio albums with Le Bon, Rhodes, and Cuccurullo, Medazzaland (1997) and Pop Trash (2000) were not commercial successes.

In 2001, Duran Duran's original five members reunited to record a new studio album, Astronaut, for Epic Records. Astronaut was released worldwide on 11 October 2004. The album was preceded by the single "(Reach Up for The) Sunrise", their first UK Top 10 single in a decade”.

To mark the approaching sixty-fifth birthday of Simon Le Bon, I wanted to assemble a collection of Duran Duran tracks. Even though Le Bon is more than the band, this is where people know him from. His best work is with the Birmingham-formed group. Whether you are younger and do not know much about Duran Duran, or you are someone who has followed them for decades, below is a playlist that should give you a good taste and representation of…

A music legend.

FEATURE: Inspired By... Part One Hundred and Three: Elliott Smith

FEATURE:

 

 

Inspired By...

Part One Hundred and Three: Elliott Smith

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ON 21st October…

it will be twenty years since the wonderful and hugely influential Elliott Smith (Steven Paul Smith) died. The Nebraska-born artist - raised primarily in Texas, he lived much of his life in Portland, Oregon – left the word some truly incredible music! From his beguiling and astonishing 1994 debut, Roman Candle, to 2000’s Figure 8, seemingly everything he put out into the world was impactful and astonishing! In terms of his masterpieces, maybe 1997’s Either/Or is seen as that peak. Regardless, there is no doubting the fact that Smith’s cannon of music lives on through other artists. I am going to mark twenty years of his passing with a playlist of songs from artists who have been influenced by him. First, and as I do with these features, AllMusic provide a detailed biography of the much-missed artist:

“An acclaimed singer/songwriter with a distinctively melancholic sound, Elliott Smith was a member of the thriving music scene of Portland, Oregon in the mid-'90s when he began releasing a series of highly influential solo albums. His musical palette expanded over time, from the hushed acoustic guitar demos of his 1994 solo debut, Roman Candle, to the orchestrated studio craftsmanship of his fifth album, 2000's Figure 8. Still, all were distinguished by a vulnerable demeanor conveyed by intense but wispy vocals (often double-tracked) and personal lyrics that referred candidly to subjects like addiction, depression, and alienation. His music's character was also shaped by artful chord transitions, which he called his favorite part of songs. He moved abruptly from indie cult status to mainstream success in 1997 when his contributions to the Good Will Hunting soundtrack resulted in an Academy Award nomination ("Miss Misery"). He recorded only six solo albums, releasing five before his untimely death at the age of 34 in 2003.

Born Stephen Paul Smith in Omaha, Nebraska but raised mostly in Texas, Elliott Smith's musical influences included such figures as Bob Dylan, the Kinks, Big Star, Elvis Costello, and the Beatles; he said he was inspired to become a musician after hearing The White Album. He began writing and recording his first songs around the time he moved to Portland, Oregon at the age of 14. After high school, Smith headed to Amherst, Massachusetts to study philosophy and political science at Hampshire College. It was there that he met future bandmate Neil Gust. After graduating in 1991, Smith moved back to Portland with Gust, and the co-singer/songwriter/guitarists formed the indie rock band Heatmiser with bass player Brandt Peterson and drummer Tony Lash. Mixing Smith's melancholy-pop sensibilities with Gust's more aggressive style and a notable grunge influence, they signed with Frontier Records, which released 1993's Dead Air and 1994's Cop and Speeder. Peterson then left the group and was replaced by Sam Coomes.

In the meantime, Smith's then-girlfriend convinced him to send some of his solo demos to Portland-based Cavity Search Records. The label immediately expressed interest in releasing a full album. A set of spare acoustic guitar ruminations with just a few other instruments used as accents, Roman Candle was home-recorded on a four-track tape recorder. Four of the songs didn't even have titles. It stood in sharp contrast to the scene's alternative rock that was popular upon its release in 1994. He signed with noted indie label Kill Rock Stars for the next year's Elliott Smith. It was recorded partly at his bandmate Lash's house and featured Gust on additional guitar. The attention the records received soon overshadowed Heatmiser, though they helped draw the interest of Virgin Records, which signed the band for their final LP, Mic City Sons. It arrived via subsidiary Caroline Recordings in 1996. Heatmiser officially disbanded prior to its release.

s Smith continued to develop as a songwriter, his more ambitious but entirely self-recorded third solo LP, Either/Or, arrived in early 1997. With its title taken from a Søren Kierkegaard book of the same name, the album's expanded instrumentation included several songs with full-band arrangements and even keyboards. The results were still intimate, however, marked by his whispery, often despondent delivery and lyrics, even among a few livelier, uptempo tracks. The album was mixed by Smith and Heatmiser producers Tom Rothrock and Rob Schnapf.

By then, Smith had made a fan of film director Gus Van Sant, who asked for permission to use his music in an upcoming film. Counting an orchestral version of "Between the Bars" recorded with score composer Danny Elfman, four of his existing songs could be heard in the critical and box office hit Good Will Hunting later in 1997. The soundtrack also included Smith's original song for the film, "Miss Misery." When the Academy Award nominations were announced the following February, the track was a surprise entry in the Best Original Song category. Although it didn't win, Smith performed an acoustic guitar rendition live on Late Night with Conan O'Brien a few days before the Oscars, marking his network television debut. He followed it with a live performance of "Miss Misery" on the Oscars telecast accompanied by the Broadcast Orchestra.

The newfound exposure led to a record deal with DreamWorks, resulting in Smith's first album in professional studios. Though he had relocated to Brooklyn following touring for Either/Or, he headed to Los Angeles to work with musicians including Jon Brion and Joey Waronker on the notably more elaborate XO. Released in 1998, the Beatleseque production was again mixed by Smith, Rothrock, and Schnapf. His first album to appear on the Billboard 200, it reached number 104 in the U.S., also charting among the Top 50 in Australia and Sweden. Smith performed on TV's Saturday Night Live in October 1998, backed by Schnapf, Brion, Coomes, and John Moen. In 1999, he contributed a cover of the Beatles' "Because" to the soundtrack of Best Picture winner American Beauty and moved to Los Angeles, where he began work on his DreamWorks follow-up. Recorded partly at Abbey Road Studios in London, his fifth solo album, 2000's Figure 8, was co-produced by Smith, Rothrock, and Schnapf. Its more textured, orchestral arrangements drew further comparisons to the Beatles' later recordings. Figure 8 charted in several European countries and hit number 99 in the U.S.

For the next couple of years, Smith labored over what was to be his next album. He parted ways with DreamWorks, and after a falling out with Brion, he scrapped an album they had begun together. In the meantime, "Needle in the Hay" from his eponymous LP was used by Wes Anderson to accompany a suicide-attempt scene in his film The Royal Tenenbaums. Smith eventually made a fresh start at his sixth LP, combining home recordings and material from sessions with Goldenboy's Dave McConnell. Musicians including Coomes and the Flaming Lips' Steven Drodz contributed performances to parts of a planned double album. However, Smith would not live to see its completion.

Elliott Smith died on October 21, 2003, after he was found in his home with two stab wounds in his chest. The coroner was unable to determine whether he killed himself or was murdered, and the Los Angeles Police Department's investigation remains open. Smith's estate asked Schnapf and former girlfriend Joanna Bolme to complete the album in progress. After mixing -- or in some cases remixing -- 15 tracks from over 30 he left behind, they completed From a Basement on the Hill. It was released as a single album by Anti- just two days shy of the first anniversary of Smith's death, to a warm critical reception. It became his only Billboard Top 20 album, reaching number 19.

In 2007, his former label Kill Rock Stars issued a two-disc set of Smith's earlier unreleased work, all of which had been recorded between 1994 and 1997. Entitled New Moon, the 24-track collection contained three songs that had been previously released on hard-to-find compilations or soundtracks, including an early version of "Miss Misery" and a cover of Big Star's "Thirteen." It, too, charted in several countries, peaking at number 24 in the U.S. The career compilation An Introduction to Elliott Smith appeared in 2010, and in 2015 Smith was the subject of a documentary called Heaven Adores You. The first such documentary to receive permission to use his music, its soundtrack album followed in 2016 and landed on the Billboard soundtracks chart. A 20th anniversary expanded reissue of Either/Or returned Smith to the Billboard 200 in 2017. Three years later, Kill Rock Stars reissued his self-titled second album with the addition of Live at Umbra Penumbra, a 1994 recording of Smith's first performance as a solo artist”.

It seems hard to believe that Elliott Smith is not in the world. I was into his music in the 1990s. I was instantly struck by how powerful his lyrics were, in spite of the fact his delivery is a lot softer that a lot of his peers. Somehow more affecting and potent than a more pained and angered delivery, albums like Roman Candle will inspire artists for generations. Below is a playlist of songs from artists either compared to Smith or have cited him as an inspiration. It is an impressive list of names who owe a little something to the legend. Although we mark twenty years of his passing on 21st October, we also can look back at his work and celebrate. It is an honour to pay tribute to…

A towering and peerless talent.

FEATURE: Second Spin: Billie - Honey to the B

FEATURE:

 

 

Second Spin

Billie - Honey to the B

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NOT that one needs any reason…

to write about Billie’s debut solo album, Honey to the B…though, as it is twenty-five on 19th October, I wanted to mark the important anniversary. For this Second Spin, you can grab a copy of the 1998 album and listen to one of the most infectious Pop albums of the '90s. 1998 was a year when the music landscape shifted dramatically. Now Britpop was very much gone, classic albums from Madonna (Ray of Light), Beastie Boys (Hello Nasty), Air (Moon Safari) and Ms. Lauryn Hill (The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill) were dominating. Pop music was still very much alive and well though, in a year when the music landscape was shifting, one might think that Billie’s debut would have sounded more fitting a few years earlier. At a time when the likes of Shampoo were releasing songs like Trouble (1994), Honey to the B would have slotted in perfectly. Maybe that is why some critics were not that warm towards a great album. We all know Billie Piper as a superb actress. There are some that do not know about her brief music career. Her second and final studio album, Walk of Life, arrived in 2000. I think that Honey to the B is her strongest album. You occasionally here hits like Because We Want To on stations like BBC Radio 2, Capital and more Pop-oriented options. I feel that the great and still fresh songs from the album warrant wider appreciation. With terrific deep cuts like You’ve Got It and Don't Forget to Remember, Honey to the B is well worth a listen. The then-sixteen-year-old was writing and performing music that had a lot more kick and attitude than many of her Pop peers. Songs such as Girlfriend and She Wants You were played a lot when I was at high school. I was fifteen when the album came out, so it was quite common that something like Honey to the Bee or Because We Want To would pop up on the radio. It is a shame some of the music videos from the album have not been remastered and preserved. They could do with an HD transfer.

Even so, there is a lot to recommend about Honey to the B. Billie was the first and youngest British female artist to have a debut single enter the U.K. singles chart at number one. That is not to be sniffed at! At a time when the singles charts was rammed with quality and variety, Because We Want To won out and was this massive hit. Reaching number fourteen in the U.K., Honey to the Bee is an album that I think would win and charm people now. One cannot deny the fact that its singles sound relevant now. So many current young artists have elements of Billie about them. Or at least some of the Pop that was around in 1998. Even if there are a couple of songs that can be seen as inessential or weaker – Saying I’m Sorry Now is quite difficult and a little cringey -, there are so many terrific tracks. This is what Pop Rescue wrote in their 2021 review. They awarded Honey to the B four stars:

“Today’s Pop Rescue from a fate unknown, is the 1998 debut album Honey To The B, by British pop star and actress, Billie Piper. Will this album give you a buzz, or is it simply a Honey trap? Read on…

Billie Piper – Honey To The B (1998) album

This 12 track CD opens with the debut hit single Because We Want To, which bursts open with some full-on teenage rebellion. The track is full of powerful parental defiance and this, alongside the energy the song exudes quite rightly ensured it was a hit, taking roost at #1 in the UK singles chart. The crowd shouting moments, plodding bass all help to keep this song catchy. This is a few years into Girl Power, super-charged by the Spice Girls a few years later, and you can certainly hear the musical similarities here. We’re off to a brilliant start.

That’s followed by second single Girlfriend, which takes the tempo down and temperature up. This track takes a more RnB sound to it, giving Billie a great platform to show off her richer vocals on a slower track. It’s slick, and effortlessly wanders from verse to chorus to verse. The track also hit #1 in the UK chart, a contrast to the lead single.

Officially Yours follows this, again picking up an RnB beat, with a few vinyl scratches thrown in. The synth orchestral hit works well here. I’m reminded a bit of Eternal here, but Billie’s vocals are softer. It’s quite a nice little song, with some thrown in asides from Sweet P, although it doesn’t particularly evolve much.

A gentle keyboard sequence opens next track She Wants You as a pop beat fades in and we see a return to an upbeat catchy track. Billie’s vocals sound effortlessly rich here. This track was the album’s third single, giving Billie a #3 UK hit. I seem to remember there being some excellent pumping remixes of this song, whereas this album version is a little more mellow. Still, it’s perfectly catchy and and a great pick up from the previous two slower tracks.

Next up is Love Groove, and we have a wonderfully funky introduction with bass, simple beat, more vinyl scratches and interjections from Sweet P, and even a little flurry of brass. We even get a flute in this track. Musically, it sounds like something left over from George Michael‘s Older, or a Stereo MC’s album. Vocally, it sounds odd though – with a meandering melody, and Billie takes on a slightly weird vocal style in this wafty jazz-funk track.

That’s followed by a ringing phone of Party On The Phone. You’ve got to love the 1990s, and the concept of this song reeks of 90s party lines. Whilst the song is catchy, with its ‘na na na’, chiming bell sounds from keyboards and phone ringing samples, set on top of a funky RnB track, it is now quite amusingly dated. ‘Everybody swingin’ it on the phone’ – really? ‘So get ringin’ it!‘ Billie demands. Can’t wait for the Zoom follow-up ‘everybody on mute’ ‘Tina’s left the call’.

Saying I’m Sorry Now is next, and we’re back into 90’s pop, and very much back into a kind of Eternal sound. Billie’s vocals sound a bit off at times here in this multi-layered – sometimes too low, and sometimes taking a wrong step. Breathy vocals, an RnB beat, a tinkling piano, and Billie’s vocals sound ok, but they don’t feel like they are always pushing in the same direction at the same time. This makes it a bit odd.

Then it’s time for You’ve Got It, which bursts open, feeling like a return to form. Billie is joined by the London Community Gospel Choir, who help to lift her higher in the chorus. It’s a fairly simple pop song, and it allows Billie to shine nicely. There’s a really nice bridge at roughly the 2:20 mark where Billie and the choir get to shine without the beats for a few moments. The pair also get to shine again towards the end. It’s nice enough, but lacks the same amount of oomph that the singles have.

I Dream follows that, and returns us to a heartfelt reflective Billie. Her vocals are soft and tender here, set against a shuffling beat and acoustic guitars. This is a really nice little mid-tempo song, and probably could have been a nice final single for the album. It has a really nice synth pad ending that adds to the dreaming theme of the song.

Birds sing and a bee buzzes around as titular song Honey To The Bee begins. ‘C’mon, buzz me up to heaven’ Billie whispers suggestively. Musically, the song reminds me a lot of Never Ever by All Saints, but Billie definitely makes the vocal performance her own. The track was the album’s fourth and final single, giving her a sultry #3 UK hit. The London Community Gospel Choir are back again singing about ‘heaven’, but it’s possibly a different kind of heaven to what Billie is talking about being buzzed to here. It’s a brilliant song, that grows perfectly before returning us to those birds and bees.

Penultimate track Whatcha Gonna Do follows this, and Billie is rejoined by Sweet P again, and she’s clearly taking issue with him this time. A slinky guitar riff leads us through this RnB track. Billie once again seems to be channeling All Saints a bit, as she sings about taking control and leaving her lover. It’s a nice plodder of a track, and gives Billie plenty of space to show off her vocal range.

The album closes with Don’t Forget To Remember. The song opens with what sounds like a lone pianist playing in a busy bar before a beat bursts in and we’re back in pop stomping Billie richness again. This is a really nice catchy pop song, and one of the non-single highlights of the album. The perfect ending to a debut album of a debut pop career.

Billie’s lead single ‘Because We Want To’ (1998).

VERDICT

Over all, this album is packed with an acute awareness of the late 90’s chart music of which it was part. The similarities at times to Eternal and All Saints are a reflection of the style of music that was dominating the UK at the time – bursting pop/dance songs, and slick RnB inspired tracks. That similarity clearly leant it some success but Billie’s choice of singles singled her out without relying on those.

Billie’s vocals are playful, occasionally childish, but there’s no doubting the power and control that she has over them. As a young pop star, with a debut album, she was likely at the whim of the team writing for her. What we do get here are some of the best late 90’s pop songs in the form of Because We Want To, She Wants You and Honey To The Be, but that’s joined by Girlfriend, I Dream, and Don’t Forget To Remember.

Sadly, there are some low points too, with Saying I’m Sorry Now being a difficult listen, followed by Love Groove. These are a minority though on a 12 track CD, and would have been better to have been left off of what is otherwise a great pop album, and a wonderful debut.

Why you gotta play her songs so loud? Because you ought to. Because you ought to”.

If artists of that time such as All Saints got a bit more traction and critical respect, one listens to Billie’s debut album now and realises it deserved more acclaim. Billie Piper is one of our very best actors, though she had this amazing music career. An artist that I think could release a great album now and it would do terrifically. I am going to finish off with Off the Record’s 2022 review of Honey to the B:

“Billie Piper, is an English actor and musician, she first came to the public attention when she released her debut single ‘Because We Want To’ at the age of fifteen, which made her the youngest female artist ever to enter the UK Singles Chart. She however did not truly come to be a household name until she starred as Rose Tyler, a companion to the Doctor, an alien time traveller, on the first season of the revival of the BBC show Doctor Who back in 2005. Following on from her tenure on Doctor Who she also starred as Hannah Baxter, the titular and main character, on the hit show Secret Diary of a Call Girl. She was also Brona Croft/Lily Frankenstein in the horror-drama Penny Dreadful, and she was nominated for a British Academy Television Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the Netflix Original Collateral, where she played Karen Mars. More recently she co-created and starred in the Sky Atlantic series, I Hate Suzie, a comedy/drama in which she plays the titular character, Suzie Pickles.

As I touched on above, Billie Piper, or as she was known back then, just Billie, is a former musician, having retired from the music business in 2003 to focus on acting, but prior to this point she released two albums, the first of which we are here to discuss today. Yes, we will be reviewing her debut album ‘Honey to the B’ which was released on 19th October 1998.

‘Because We Want To’ opens fast, high energy, percussive beats support Billie’s vocals, she has a nice voice, melodic but fresh, she’s obviously just starting off at this point and yet despite that she has a maturity and strength to her voice that some performers never learn. I like the energy of this track, the fun pop energy, and the back and forth, call and response nature of the chorus. Even the rap sections work well, they’ve got a nice rhythm and structure to them, that make for an overall good track.

‘Girlfriend’ opens with record scratching, and melodic vocal fills that blend into a funky, little tune, that is fun and catchy, and not just in the repetitive, cookie cutter, pop way, it’s just a nice little melody, that again shows off multiple sides to Billie’s voice. I like that even though she has a nice that’s nice to listen to, she doesn’t rely just upon that, instead throughout this song and the rest on the album she experiments with style, delivery and performance.

‘Officially Yours’ has a really nice rhythmic opening, light percussive and beats that lead into some softer vocals, you can feel the soulful delivery of the lyrics, it all comes together really well. This one is a lower tempo track than the past couple, but while it’s not as full of energy it’s still a strong performance, and you get the clearest impression of Billie’s voice throughout the track.

‘She Wants You’ has piano chords building slowly, while beneath it a more upbeat, high energy beat is playing, it then explodes and takes over, and Billie matches it, high energy vocals, but still rich and deep and passionate, you just get caught up in the vibe of this one. I’ve talked about it before but especially for a debut album by such a young artist, she’s got a remarkable range. Perhaps my only issue is that perhaps the subject material of the songs are just a touch mature, but other than that they resonate well and have a nice energy to them.

‘Love Groove’ opens with counting, before kicking into a tight bass and percussive melody, and this one just kinda flows over you, a funky tune and again we see a different side to Billie’s voice, I admire a vocalist that is confident enough to see what they can do musically, I recently reviewed Kat Graham, and I felt very much the same about them, a talented and appealing voice, but she also didn’t steer away from exploring things in her music. I really liked the pipe section towards the end, and the rap breakdown by the guest vocalist, all added to the performance.

‘Party on the Phone’ is a very busy track, it incorporates in phone trills, and a heavy bass driven beat that work to support Billie’s voice, and once again can I say that she’s genuinely a talented singer, her voice is nice to listen to, she’s got a strong range and works well within the structure of the melody. I’m curious, listening to this years after the release, how much creative control she had over this album, whether she had a hand in producing the songs. It doesn’t really impact the quality or my enjoyment of the track but it’s something to think about.

‘Saying I’m Sorry Now’ is maybe my favourite on the album, it’s a relatively simple beat and melody off the bat, especially compared to some of the other tracks, but it has some of the best vocal work on the entire album, and it just flows really well. It’s also a slower track, which is usually my preference, but honestly it’s not even just that it’s more in keeping with my personal musical tastes, it’s just a really strong, even tempo track, with a sharp percussion beat to it, and it just works.

‘You’ve Got It’ opens with a hammering beat that blends out to a sonorous sort of ambient synth melody which works really well with Billie’s voice. It’s got a really nice rhythm as well, and is surprisingly memorable as I found myself humming it a few days after I’d finished writing the review. I think it’s probably my second favourite on the album, after the song directly before it.

‘I Dream’ opens with percussive tones that build, as an electronic guitar is laid over it, it blends to create a really beautiful and filling melody, and obviously Billie’s up to the task vocally, her voice is deep and resonant and you just get caught up in it. Despite having my own favourites, I think I would recommend this song to someone if I were trying to get them to listen to the full album, there’s just something about it that’s not only good, but has mainstream appeal.

‘Honey to the Bee’ kicks off with the sound of nature, and gentle guitar notes and vocals, meshing and bouncing off one another. I really liked this track, it’s very different overall to the rest of the album, and yet it works as part of the greater help. I liked the melody a lot, and I liked the building nature of the track, you just get kinda caught up in it.

Whatcha Gonna Do’ is also different, deeper and heavier, a percussive beat is the driving force behind this track, and unlike the majority of the tracks so far, Billie has another voice to bounce off, it helps to flesh the song out, and add something to it.

‘Don’t Forget to Remember’ closes out the album for us, we are greeted by the sounds of an audience and electronic piano chords, building and creating a soft, melody before breaking, a quick percussive fill changing up the track, and then the vocals kick in. Again, I’m amazed by the range and vocal depth Billie is capable off, especially this early in her career, and I feel like this was a strong track to close things out on”.

As Honey to the B is twenty-five on 19th October, I wanted to nod to it. I am not sure whether Billie Piper will celebrate or recall memories of making the album. I’d like to think that she at least smiles remembering a wonderful time in music where this exciting and arresting Pop artist broke through. As I say, I could well see Billie Piper recording an album now and it being remarkable. Perhaps something soulful or Jazz-influenced. Her vocal range through her 1998 debut is stunning! If you have some spare pennies to get a copy of Honey to the B on cassette or C.D., it is well worth some time. It deserves a second spin. This is one of those '90s albums that sort of passed under the radar a little. It was worthy of much more than that. For anyone in need of a lift, I can thoroughly recommend you check out Billie’s…

TREMENDOUS Honey to the B.

FEATURE: Vinyl Corner: Nico - Chelsea Girl

FEATURE:

 

 

Vinyl Corner

Nico - Chelsea Girl

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THERE are a couple of places…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Nico with The Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed in 1967

where you can get this album. If you want a vinyl copy of Nico’s classic 1967 album, Chelsea Girl, then you can grab it here or here. I would recommend people think about investing in a copy, as it is one of the all-time great albums. I am featuring it now, as Nico would have turned eighty-five on 16th October. She sadly died in 1988. It was a tragic loss of a unique and unforgettable artist. She released a few iconic albums during her career. Many might know her from the timeless 1967 album, The Velvet Underground & Nico. Nico’s amazing debut solo album was produced by Tom Wilson. The title is a reference to Andy Warhol's 1966 film, Chelsea Girls, in which Nico starred. Wilson added strings and flutes to the album, even though Nico was very much against this. It is a shame that the German singer was dissatisfied with Chelsea Girl. It is considered a masterpiece by so many. When Nico was quoted in Dave Thompson's liner notes for the 2002 Deluxe re-issue of The Velvet Underground & Nico - which includes all five Velvet collaborations for Chelsea Girl -, she remarked (of Chelsea Girl):

“I still cannot listen to it, because everything I wanted for that record, they took it away. I asked for drums, they said no. I asked for more guitars, they said no. And I asked for simplicity, and they covered it in flutes!... They added strings and – I didn't like them, but I could live with them. But the flute! The first time I heard the album, I cried and it was all because of the flute”.

Perhaps, in a year where the likes of The Beatles released psychedelic albums like Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Chelsea Girl sounded twee or out of step with what was around it. It is those qualities which make it stand out. Perfectly accompanying Nico’s vocals, the flutes work really well. It is a pity a compromise could not have been worked out – so that there were flutes but more guitars and drums. I am going to get to some reviews of the mighty and mesmeric Chelsea Girl. It is a magnificent record that everyone should hear. This feature from 1st October is a brand-new view and assessment of Chelsea Girl:

“Part lost Velvet Underground album and part baroque-folk pop-art experiment, Nico’s solo debut LP, Chelsea Girl, was worlds apart from anything else she’d ever record, but it’s a classic on its own terms.

The album was made almost immediately after the March 1967 release of The Velvet Underground & Nico, and was reportedly assembled in a mad frenzy of activity over just a few days, with VU producer Tom Wilson at the helm. Its basis was the solo act Nico had recently begun developing, sometimes backed by her 18-year-old paramour Jackson Browne, who contributed three songs to Chelsea Girl. Browne would later recall that amid the hectic sessions, he was in the studio playing with Nico on his compositions the same day Lou Reed was there laying down guitar on tunes he wrote.

Chelsea Girl was not a million miles from “I’ll Be Your Mirror” and “Femme Fatale,” the ballads Nico sang with the VU. The basic template for the singer’s husky vocal approach was still Marlene Dietrich meets ‘60s mod, but instead of a full-band backing, the album places the German émigré in a baroque-folk setting.

There were precedents in Marianne Faithfull’s early recordings, which became mid-’60s U.K. hits, and Judy Collins’ In My Life, which helped break the folk singer into the mainstream. This may have informed the business-savvy Wilson’s decision to make a drumless album and engage Larry Fallon for chamber-style woodwind and string arrangements. A 1968 review in New Society would memorably dub Nico “a satanic Marianne Faithfull.”

Time has vindicated Wilson’s decision. From an objective distance, the taut but warm string and flute parts feel like the ideal foil for Nico’s deadpan delivery. But both Nico and Reed would later gripe about the arrangements. “I cried when I heard the album,” Nico would say, “I cried because of the flute.” In a 1978 Creem interview, Reed held forth on the album: “Everything on it – those strings, that flute – should have defeated it. But with the lyrics, Nico’s voice, it somehow managed to survive. We still got ‘It Was a Pleasure Then’ on, they couldn’t stop us. We’d been doing a song like that in our beloved show; it didn’t really have a title. Just all of us following the drone. And there it sits in the middle of the album.”

Half of Chelsea Girl was written by some combination of Velvet Underground members. Reed’s “Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams” and the Cale/Reed tune “Little Sister” had both been tried at the Velvet Underground & Nico sessions, ballads with calm surfaces belying the lyrics’ psychological and physical violence. Cale’s “Winter Song” and the Reed/Sterling Morrison-penned “Chelsea Girls” bear the same sort of contrast, the latter inspired by the studied decadence of the 1966 Nico-starring Andy Warhol film of the same name. The staccato string arrangements bring just the right blend of archness and accessibility to all of them.

As Reed suggested, “It Was a Pleasure Then” grew out of a wild, avant-garde improv piece from the Velvets’ live set known as “Melody Laughter.” While it moves at an unhurried pace similar to the other tracks, Fallon’s arrangements are eschewed for Reed and Cale’s ebbing and flowing currents of sonic derangement.

The Browne songs are far closer to the folk-rock singer/songwriter conventions of the day. Their tender melodies and melancholy yearning balance with Nico’s emotional distance, especially on the poignant “These Days,” the only one of his three tunes that Browne would later record himself.

Chelsea Girl is rounded out by a song each from Bob Dylan and from Nico’s labelmate and occasional accompanist Tim Hardin. Dylan’s open-hearted “I’ll Keep It With Mine” was first recorded in 1964 by Judy Collins, creating yet another parallel between her and Nico. The album closes with Hardin’s literally mournful “Eulogy to Lenny Bruce,” which would turn up as “Lenny’s Tune” on 1968’s Tim Hardin 3: Live in Concert. Hardin’s lyrics bemoan the substance abuse that led to his famous friend Bruce’s untimely death, and the song becomes all the more chilling in light of Hardin’s own early, drug-assisted exit from our realm.

After completing Chelsea Girl, Nico diverged from the album’s path as quickly and drastically as humanly possible. Her 1968 Cale-produced album The Marble Index was the start of two decades of self-penned albums embracing utterly uncharted territory. But, for a brief moment in 1967, Nico occupied the strangely compelling space between arty abandon and fragile balladry. It was – and is – a pleasure”.

Before getting to a couple of other reviews, I want to source The Vinyl District’s 2017 view on a wonderful album that you can hear in so many artists who have come along since. In one of music’s strongest-ever years (1967), Nico’s debut stood alongside the very best. The Marble Index followed in 1968. It kept the quality up – announcing Nico as a truly wonderful and compelling solo artist:

“Everybody, or so it seems, loves Teutonic chanteuse Nico’s absolutely enchanting 1967 debut solo album Chelsea Girl–except Nico. In 1981 she said, “I asked for simplicity, and they covered it in flutes! They added strings and–I didn’t like them, but I could live with them. But the flutes! The first time I heard the album, I cried and it was all because of the flute.”

“They” were Velvet Underground producer Tom Wilson and arranger Larry Fallon, and as should be obvious from the above quote they sugar-frosted Chelsea Girl without so much as asking for Nico’s by your live.

Nico may have been crestfallen about Chelsea Girl, but generations of listeners have been bewitched by her hauntingly droning approach to songs by the likes of the young Jackson Browne, Bob Dylan, Tim Hardin, and (of course) her former Velvet Underground bandmates Lou Reed, John Cale, and Sterling Morrison. These songs are as coldly tender as a Baltic Sea wind blowing through the pines of Spreewald Forest where Nico spent her childhood war years, watching the flickering lights of Allied bombers devastating Berlin on the horizon.

The veddy veddy German Nico (aka Christa Päffgen) is certainly one of the most distinctive vocalists you’ll ever run across; my East German ex-Frau lost her accent within a year or so of leaving the Deutschland, but the ex-model, Warhol actress, and member of his Exploding Plastic Inevitable’s accent remained every bit as thick as the walls of Hitler’s bunker, making her without a doubt the frostiest Ice Queen in the history of modern pop music.

But Nico’s frigid vocals are warmed up by this collection of winsome songs; with the exception of the eerily beautiful (and vaguely Middle Eastern sounding) “It Was a Pleasure Then” (on which Reed and Cale bring to bear the all of the dissonant powers they displayed on “European Son”) “Chelsea Girls,” and Hardin’s “Eulogy to Lenny Bruce” the tunes are fetching, and the Wilson-Fallon strings and flute overlay gives the LP an accessible, chamber pop sheen. Which, of course, Nico despised.

Some albums are disparate affairs; others are uniform in mood. Chelsea Girl falls into the latter category; its 10 songs, taken as a whole, evoke a bittersweet wistfulness. They bring to my mind the misty grey days I used to spend with my former significant other walking across the desolate potato fields of Mecklenburg-Vorpommen off the Baltic Coast, storks wheeling regally overhead towards their nests in the smokestacks of derelict sugar factories. The LP conjures memories and induces trances, alternately haunts and teases, leads one by the hand down a set of stone steps to the cemetery where your dreams are buried.

This is Nacht Musik to be listened to alone, preferably while strolling the backstreets of Berlin or Hamburg–some Northern German metropolis where the fog is made welcome, and the weight of history lies as heavy as the monolithic Nazi-era flak towers that still stand in the latter city. Nico is a siren calling you back to a place you never even knew was home, harkening you back to a lurking sadness you didn’t even know you felt.

Very few artists have this power to bewitch, intoxicate and mesmerize; in its power Chelsea Girl reminds me of nothing so much as Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, another masterpiece of stirring evocation and sustained mood. I have my favorites (Browne’s “These Days,” Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine,” Reed and Morrison’s “Chelsea Girls,” Reed and Cale’s “Little Sister”) and you probably have yours, but in the end they’re all enchanting, they all flicker and disappear the moment you turn your gaze upon them, they’re all as hard to catch as the fugitive feather falling from the sky in “Somewhere There’s a Feather.”

Nico would go on to make her artistic dreams come true on 1969’s The Marble Index, 1970’s Desertshore, and later albums, all of which are formidably stark and fully realized evocations of gloom, doomm and other Wagnerian fun stuff. I find ‘em a bit too Gotterdammerung bleak for my tastes, which ain’t to take away from the fact that “Janitor of Lunacy” is probably the greatest song title of all time. If you’re a depressive or just like to pretend you’re one, I suggest you check them out.

GRADED ON A CURVE:
A”.

I am going to finish with a couple of other reviews for Chelsea Girl. In fact, I will come to a review and then end with a feature that talks about the album and the legacy it holds. Pitchfork reviewed Chelsea Girl fifty years after its release in 2017. I don’t think I have ever seen a review of Chelsea Girl that is anything but effusive and hugely complimentary. Even if Nico very much went in her own direction with 1968’s The Marble Index, there is no doubting the fact Chelsea Girl holds a very special place in music history:

“Chelsea Girl presents a young woman torn between the regrets of her past and the unknown but hopeful future. Browne’s three contributions—“These Days,” “The Fairest of the Seasons” and “Somewhere There’s a Feather”—are introspective meditations on change backed up by Cale’s chirping viola and Browne’s gentle acoustic guitar. “These Days,” the ultimate loner anthem and the most famous song of Nico’s career, has been covered by artists from Drake to Elliott Smith, and is as iconic as Nico herself. It’s no wonder Wes Anderson chose to use it as a theme of sorts for The Royal Tenenbaums’ Margot, a character whose mystery and sadness is as heavy as her mink coat. But upon listening to Browne’s twangy version of “These Days,” it becomes obvious that Nico’s droning, Germanic drawl is what makes the song so affecting.

While Browne focuses on transitions, Cale pushes Nico into more a more esoteric realm. On “Little Sister” (co-written with Reed), Nico’s voice is flat and brooding in direct contrast to the whimsical organ which pipes along beside her. She sings in “perfect mellow ovals” as Goldstein wrote in 1966. “It sounds something like a cello getting up in the morning.” “Winter Song” on the other hand, basks in an almost medieval atmosphere which is heightened lyrically by talk of “tyranny,” “royal decay,” and the “worshipping wicked.” The closest thing to a Velvet Underground song on Chelsea Girl is Reed, Nico, and Cale’s hefty eight-minute “It Was a Pleasure Then.” While Cale’s viola groans with distortion and Reed’s guitar drives into darkness, Nico’s voice soars into a wordless soprano at the peak of her range. She draws out the words until they lose definition and simply become expressions.

PHOTO CREDIT: Billy Name

Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine” provides some levity at the end of Chelsea Girl. Though Judy Collins also claimed that Dylan wrote the song for her, technically he wrote it while on vacation in Greece with Nico in 1964. Whereas Collins’ version is an alarmingly cheery love song drowning in organ, Nico’s take indulges in darkness despite the poppy orchestra backing her up. “I’ll Keep It With Mine” brings Nico full-circle from “I’m Not Sayin,” and would be the last time she ever made a song so conventional.

Reactions to Chelsea Girl was at best indifferent and at worst, sexist. One Los Angeles Times writer remarked, “Nico’s a classy girl, but they’d sell more Nico if she were naked...and not hiding behind a string orchestra in a flower print dress.” For her next record, 1968’s wintry The Marble Index, Nico picked up the harmonium and wrote all of the songs after being encouraged by her “soul brother” and part-time lover Jim Morrison to document her dreams. She dyed her blonde hair with henna and trading her white clothing for an all-black ensemble. “I felt that at last I was independent, and that I knew what independence was,” she said.

But while Nico was taking some control of her music, her life was spiraling. There was the time in 1974 that she performed the German national anthem “Das Lied der Deutschen” including the verses that were banned in 1945 due to their Nazi associations. A year later, Nico was dropped from Island because she told a reporter that she “didn’t like negroes.” In an alleged instance in the early ’70s, Nico declared that she “hate[d] black people,” smashed a wine glass on a table, and stabbed the eye of a mixed-race singer who worked with Jimi Hendrix. Concert footage of a middle-age Nico in the early ’80s portray her as a skeletal figure with gaunt cheeks, rotten teeth, and sunken eyes from a disturbing heroin addiction. It’s as if Nico found power in destroying her image.

Nico once admitted that she could not relate to the songs Reed wrote for her. “I can’t identify with that,” she said of “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” “to notice only the beautiful and not the ugliness.” Despite its melancholy, Chelsea Girl is still very much caught up in this world of the Screen Test, one focused on ineffable, alluring melancholy. To today’s casual Nico fans, she still exists in this bubble, a blonde monolith in a white pantsuit, a vessel for dreams and desires. But to consider Nico as frozen in her Chelsea Girl years is a disservice to the active efforts she made later in life to move beyond her image. But consider all of Nico, the strange circumstances of the Velvet Underground, the image of Chelsea Girl, and the horrific, inexcusable actions of her later life. It’s a wholeness she craved all along”.

I will end with this feature from The Student Playlist. Another 2017 feature, they paid tribute to an album that has a really interesting background. I can imagine that there were these magical moments in the studio. Even if Nico was not fully onboard with the album, it was a breath of fresh air against what was popular and expected in 1967. Chelsea Girl is so beautiful and entrancing:

“By all accounts, Nico herself had very little creative control of the recording process for Chelsea Girl. Producer Tom Wilson was responsible for a great many of the string and flute arrangements that adorned many of the tracks, something that Nico herself had no knowledge of at the time and which were added after her vocal contributions had been finished.

Nico also had to put up with a fair amount of professional ridicule and belittlement around this time. She was deaf in one ear, which caused her to occasionally veer off-key while singing live. The more research one does into the recording process, the more it reads as a case of female creative input being casually sidelined or worse, and determined by a male-dominated process – something that seems difficult to imagine fifty years later in 2017, or at least in such a routine and egregious manner.

LEGACY

In 1967, the year of the Summer of Love and the height of flower-power, the listening public was unprepared for Nico’s music, the experimental art-rock masterpieces and autumnal, melancholic suites that Chelsea Girl offered. Commercially speaking, it barely registered. However, just like Nico’s other 1967 album with The Velvet Underground, its influence is vastly disproportionate to its raw album sales.

The desolate beauty of the album’s VU-penned numbers has enraptured artists like Patti Smith, the High Punk Priestess of American punk, and her British counterpart Siouxsie Sioux, who even offered her a support slot on some of her first tours. Portishead’s Beth Gibbons and indie icon Cat Power both owe her a great deal of gratitude in terms of their performance artistry, while in the 21st century, artists like St. Vincent, Sharon Van Etten and Angel Olsen continue to draw inspiration from Nico.

More widely, Chelsea Girls became widely rediscovered when its opening two tracks, ‘The Fairest Of The Seasons’ and ‘These Days’, were used by director Wes Anderson on his 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums. Since then, it has gone from being regarded as a strictly cult affair to an increasingly fondly regarded ‘60s classic, albeit one that was unfairly overlooked. While some have always talked it down as an interesting but superfluous counterpart to The Velvet Underground & Nico, largely because its creative genus came from Reed and Cale, that view completely unfairly disregards its unique charms.

As for Nico herself, her next album The Marble Index, released in 1968, saw her lash out at the sense of creative suffocation she experienced with Chelsea Girl, producing an alarming volte-face with some pretty frightening lyrics and avant-garde instrumentation. That album was followed by 1970’s Desertshore and 1974’s The End…, forming a loose trilogy of similar works that went on to inform the gothic and post-punk movements later in the Seventies. Only two more records followed in her lifetime, as she struggled on and off with heroin addiction for the best part of 15 years until the early 1980s, by which time she had settled in Manchester.

Nico died in July 1988 at the age of 50, following a cycling accident while holidaying in Ibiza with her son Ari, hitting her head and succumbing to a fatal cerebral haemorrhage. Her grave in Berlin has long been a tourist attraction for indie music fans around the world, and her status as an art-rock icon is secure, with many emerging artists in the last ten years recognising her influence. That status is, in large part but not exclusively, bound up with Chelsea Girl”.

As 16th October marks Nico’s eighty-fifth birthday, I wanted to focus on her best-known album. Chelsea Girl is one that some people might be unaware of. I would urge anyone who hears the album on streaming services and likes it to consider getting it on vinyl. An undoubted classic, Chelsea Girl is fifty-six this month. Nico died in 1988. Thirty-five years since her passing, it is clear that the music world has not seen anyone like her. Go spend some time listening to…

THE sublime Chelsea Girl.

FEATURE: My 21st Century Étude: The Beautiful Melding of the Contemporary and Classical – and Why We Need to See It More

FEATURE:

 

 

My 21st Century Étude

 IN THIS PHOTO: RAYE

The Beautiful Melding of the Contemporary and Classical – and Why We Need to See It More

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A couple of recent…

 PHOTO CREDIT: cottonbro studio/Pexels

albums and concerts cast my mind back to all the times that the world of the more commercial and conventional music has combined with Classical. Usually they do not overlap much. Artists might bring strings and some orchestration into their music, though most are quite sparse and liberal with the measurements. They do not want to drench a song in strings, though they understand how much beauty, atmosphere and elegance can be summoned. The sheer power and passion you can get from an orchestra. String especially are arresting and full of different emotions and contours. We can all think back to particular albums that were released as Pop/another genre. They were then backed by an orchestra when they were brought to the stage. Maybe a special concert was held where this work was now backed by an orchestra. It introduces that artist and album to a new audience. It also shows how seamlessly and wonderfully you can bring together all sorts of genres and Classical. A style of music that is centuries-old and still has this vital and clear relevance! Maybe other people have discussed this lately. We have seen quite a few gigs and performances where artists have been backed by an orchestra. It is always described as’ amazing’ and ‘stirring’. Why do we not see more of these concerts?! Why do more artists not re-record or reissue their studio albums with orchestration and this new element?!

I am not sure what provokes certain artists to work with an orchestra. Maybe it gives the music new gravitas and potential. It reaches a new audience. There is an album that came out that was an orchestral reworking of a studio album that I cannot for the life of me remember! It will come to me at some point. I am going to come to a modern-day R&B/Pop artist whose powerful and acclaimed debut studio album was recently performed with an orchestra. Such was the reception and impact; it did get me thinking about the underused and under-discussed perfection of mixing in Classical music alongside a variety of artists and genres. Sheffield legends Def Leppard released Drastic Symphonies on 19th May. They worked with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on some of their classic songs. So many contemporary and legacy artists have been looking to the world of Classical music to add something fresh and almost restorative to their music. James are a classic band whose music still sounds fresh. Even so, some may feel it belongs in the 1990s. As this article tells, they have brought new life and power to some of their work:

“Manchester favorites James are celebrating their 40th anniversary with an album of 20 re-recorded classics and deeper cuts “re-imagined” with a 22-piece orchestra and an 8-piece choir — and they’re taking the orchestral show on the road this month in the U.K.

Check out the new version of “She’s a Star,” originally off of 1997’s Whiplash, below.

The double album Be Opened By The Wonderful: 40 Years Orchestrated is due out June 9 digitally and on double CD and double vinyl in the U.K. (Pre-order: Amazon.co.uk), though it appears it may only be a digital release in the U.S. (Pre-order: Amazon.com, Apple Music).

The record finds Tim Booth and Co. performing newly arranged versions of such favorites as “Sit Down,” “Say Something” and “Laid.” There are 20 songs in total on the digital and CD releases, but one song — “Hymn from a Village” — is omitted from the 19-track double-vinyl release.

Of the project, Booth says:

“Life begins at 40. For our midlife euphoria we recorded a double orchestral album of some of our deepest cuts”.

There are other artists who are getting into the practice of reviving older hits with orchestral touches. Take Cliff Richard, for example. It is not only legacy artists who are reaping the rewards of adding strings and orchestration to their work. One of our most important modern artists is RAYE. She is someone who performed songs from her Mercury-nominated debut album, My 21st Century Blues, at the Royal Albert Hall, backed by the Heritage Orchestra. This is what The Guardian said about the extraordinary performance:

“‘No string section, no tiny violin,” goes Raye’s Oscar Winning Tears. She glances over her shoulder and behind her, in a divine sense of irony, is the entire Heritage Orchestra. For one night only at the Royal Albert Hall, the dreams of Rachel Keen are reclaimed in glorious Technicolor: a live, recorded performance of her debut album My 21st Century Blues on a scale befitting the vision she has fought for almost a decade to execute. Having been cuffed to Polydor for seven years, who allowed her (now Mercury-nominated) record to stagnate while they doled out her talents for daiquiri-syrup dance hits, tonight’s operatic reimagining is a triumphant statement of independence.

IN THIS PHOTO: RAYE at the Royal Albert Hall/PHOTO CREDIT: Luke Dyson

It makes for an incredible collision of worlds: the orchestra bleeds into Raye’s south London DNA, bringing the inherent drama of her music into sharp relief. Fortified by the thrill of strings and an entire choir, the hypnotic dance track Black Mascara reaches biblical levels of retribution. In an album laced with trauma, this musical heft matches the weight of its emotion. Mary Jane, a stripped-back confessional that grapples with addiction, is now replete with lavish saxophone solos and guitar riffs. Raye makes no attempt to hide her enchantment, waving her arms as if conducting the symphony herself, relishing every twist and turn. Punctuated with costume changes from one timeless gown to another, it feels like the realisation of a childhood fantasy.

“I promised honesty on my album,” she reminds us. As she introduces Body Dysmorphia, in an act of radical vulnerability she takes off her clothes and performs in her underwear; the slow-burning R&B track is now propelled to vertiginous heights of anxiety. She stays undressed for Ice Cream Man as she settles at her piano, a song that reckons with her experience of sexual assault. Her voice quivers as she introduces it, but she retains her incredible spirit (“I’m going to sing it for you, with my belly out and everything”) as she triumphantly underlines: “I’m a very fucking brave, strong woman”.

It makes me wonder whether RAYE will reissue the album with orchestrated songs. Reworkings. I know bygone legends like Amy Winehouse have done similar to things as RAYE when it comes to performing alongside an orchestra. RAYE has performed with an orchestra before. Whether for Radio 2’s Piano Room or with Pete Tong and The Heritage Orchestra in 2017, there is a big argument as to why more artists need to collaborate with orchestra. We do hear orchestration on albums - through most people do not isolate those parts and think about the melding of these players and that artist. Having a striking concert like RAYE’s recent turn in London must have been shivers-inducing! Who would have thought that an artist whose recent debut sounds very contemporary, soulful and personal could earn these new layers and emotions with the backing of a magnificent orchestra?! There have been occasions when artists have combined with orchestras. We do not really see it too much, mind. Many who might not be RAYE fans or know about her music are then introduced to her in a setting she would not normally perform in. There is this cross-pollination that is really interesting! There are modern artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift who I could see performing special concerts with an orchestra. Maybe a Rock band like Foo Fighters backed by beautiful strings and brass. These are tantalising prospects! I was caught my RAYE’s concert last month and how her excellent music was taken to different and new heights. Perhaps quite disparate on paper, her stunning music (and vocals) and the talents of the Heritage Orchestra were a…

TRULY heavenly match!

FEATURE: The True Definition of An L.P. Sorry I’m Late: Are Longer Albums Risking Quality Control or Offering Better Value for Fans?

FEATURE:

 

 

The True Definition of An L.P.

PHOTO CREDIT: Ruslan Sikunov/Pexels

Sorry I’m Late: Are Longer Albums Risking Quality Control or Offering Better Value for Fans?

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IT does seem like album are getting longer…

IN THIS PHOTO: Mae Muller/PHOTO CREDIT: Maximilian Hetherington

Not that there are statistics to see how that has changed during the year. It does seem like there is this thing around providing fans with value and more insight. Albums that tell more of a story of include more songs. Albums of physical formats like vinyl and even C.D. can seem expensive if there are ten or eleven tracks. If an artist can release an album with fifteen or sixteen tracks and charge roughly the same – though it might cost more on vinyl -, is that better for everyone? I have noticed it in general. Maybe it is something more common with commercial artists. Take someone like Taylor Swift and the recent 1989 (Taylor's Version). That is out on 27th October. That runs at twenty-one tracks. Speak Now (Taylor's Version) – also released this year – is twenty-two tracks! Even her original studio album, Midnights, for its 3am Edition, ran at twenty tracks. I am thinking about this because Mae Muller put out a tweet when she released her debut album, Sorry I’m Late, last month. Receiving acclaim, this is an album fans have been waiting for a while. She put out that post, as I feel a lot of people might feel it excessive that an album has seventeen songs on it. Clearly all quality enough for people to hear, Muller could easily have put out her debut and then reissued it a few weeks later with extra tracks. Instead, we get an album that is actually decent value for money – with the vinyl being £30 and the C.D. around about £14. I feel value for money is a thing. Even if you do not like a couple of tracks on Sorry I’m Late, you are still getting great value! I don’t think it detract from a complete experience or loses quality. Even at £38, for a vinyl copy of Taylor Swift’s 1989 (Taylor's Version), that is pretty good?!

I have said how vinyl is very expensive. Most albums are about ten to twelve/thirteen tracks. A vinyl copy might be, say, anywhere between £20-£25. The excellent falling or flying from Jorja Smith is sixteen songs. A vinyl copy is £25. That is not much more than you’d pay for a new studio album with three or four songs fewer – or a classic album that has been out for decades. It may be harder to market these longer albums on cassette – as it might get bulky and be spread across a doubler cassette or two cassettes -, but I like that artists are taking a risk and being more expensive…without being too expensive! With so many artists reissuing albums with extra tracks, meaning fans might sell out a lot of money to get more than one version of an album, perhaps releasing longer albums saves them that?! I will get to the subject of quality control. As many artists are embracing physical formats, like they did in the 1990s, filling every groove and spare inch of audio space with music seems like a necessary thing. It can be challenging deciding what the optimum number of songs is. The traditional ten or eleven songs is no longer the standard. More and more artists, even on a debut, are exceeding sixteen tracks. It can mean there is a bit of lag and sag here and there. You also get the option of those extra tracks you would not have otherwise had. Interesting to ask why…

Of course, in an age where more and more artists relying on streaming, getting those numbers high is more possible with a longer album. If the likes of Taylor Swift have been criticised because of their wealth, you wonder whether this will intensify the gulf (between huge artists and the majority who do not earn a living wage through music). Mae Muller’s reasoning is not related to streaming success and making money that way. She wants to give her fans as much as possible. If you have to wait a while for an album and there is the hype, maybe artists get nervous and want to include everything. Rewarding that patience – even if people never wait long and there is so much pressure to release something quickly. In the case of mainstream artists who have been around a while, I guess they do want to generate as many streams as they can. Even though they are releasing these long albums, the songs on there are available separately. It means there is greater revenue potential. That may seem cynical, though it is something all artists are considering. If a smaller band coming through generates very little with an album that has eleven or twelve tracks on, giving fans almost double that might push them in terms of how much they spend recording. It also means they have that opportunity to get more streaming figures and money from that – even if, in reality, the amount they earn is peanuts compared to huge artists regularly pulling millions of streams per song!

btw it’s not lost on me that my debut album being 17 songs long was a bit of a risk n some ppl might not get it but i just loved the songs so much and it didn’t feel right to lose any, so seeing you guys welcome it with open arms and listening to it all like i’m just so happy rn

— Mae Muller (@maemuller_) September 30, 2023

Some might say longer album is nothing new. This is true! I think it is more marked and discussion-worthy now, as one assumes people are less patient. On a twenty-track album, are people just going to skip the closer you get to the end?! In the case of artists like Jorja Smith and Mae Muller, they cannot waste songs deemed essential. You get this rounder impression of an album’s journey. One drawback is, when buying it physically, it may be a little too dear for many fans’ pockets. Streaming, therefore, is the option if they want the album but can’t afford a version that is over £30. Technology now means that artists can be recording for an album and have a few tracks that need to be polished and buffed. Technology can do that for them, so they are not spending extra studio hours and money recording. This 2019 piece noted how critically acclaimed albums were getting shorter. Was the fact they were acclaimed because there was concision in terms of the number of songs on an album and the length of each track?! Journalists for years have been asking whether albums are getting longer. Some take the positives from that – you get more music, which can be a good thing -, whereas others state that there is less quality control, and it can be a test of patience and finances investing in these albums. Rap albums were in the news a few years back, as they seemed to be getting longer. Why was this happening? Rolling Stone gave their take:

“WITH 24 TRACKS, clocking in at one hour and 46 minutes, Migos‘ Culture II lasts long enough to listen to all of Pink Floyd’s The Wall and still make it more than halfway through The Dark Side of the Moon. Its Number One debut on the Billboard album chart is the latest twist in streaming’s reshaping of music consumption: the rise of mega albums.

On Spotify, the duration of the top five streamed albums rose almost 10 minutes over the past five years, to an average of 60 minutes. It’s a trend embraced by Drake (2016’s Views was one hour and 21 minutes), Lana Del Rey (2017’s Lust for Life was one hour and 11 minutes) and Future (his two back-to-back albums in February 2017, Future and Hndrxx, totaled two hours and 10 minutes). What’s driving the trend?

“Stacking albums with extra songs is a strategic way to achieve certain goals,” says Malcolm Manswell, a marketing manager for Atlantic Records. In 2014, Billboard incorporated streaming into its chart calculations (1,500 on-demand streams equals one LP), and two years later, the Recording Industry Association of America adopted the same formula for album certifications. Longer albums that generate more streams can lead to Number One chart debuts and gold and platinum plaques. Last fall, when Chris Brown released the 45-song Heartbreak on a Full Moon, it was certified gold in less than 10 days, even though none of its singles cracked the Top 40. Album certifications remain “the indication of a great artist,” says Manswell. “On the sponsorship side, this stuff helps labels sell an artist or argue for why a brand should use an artist.”

Exploiting loopholes is nothing new in the music business. “I don’t think [releasing an extra-long album] is different than bundling tickets to your concert with your first-week sales,” says Daniel Glass, president of Glassnote Records. The bundling strategy, where fans that purchase tour tickets then get a code they can redeem for an album, is a favorite of rock and pop acts; Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem and Pink used it to ensure they debuted at Number One in 2017. (Billboard only counts a ticket sale as an album sale if a fan uses his or her code”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: cottonbro studio/Pexels

In 2016, FACT asked whether artists were getting ambitious and didn’t need to be hindered by the limitations of physical formats – they could put out a double vinyl or fit twenty tracks onto a C.D. –, or was there something more cynical at play?! Actually, a ruling from 2014 might be still a factor when we wonder why albums are getting longer today:

“At the end of 2014, Billboard changed the rules that govern the charts to reflect the way we’re now listening to music. It was the biggest upheaval in the way that information is collected since 1991, when hard sales data replaced the risible surveying of a limited number of record outlets up and down the country. “Album sales have become a smaller and smaller part of the industry,” said Nielsen senior analyst David Bakula at the time of the changes. “To just look at album sales and say this is how we measure success is really leaving out that half of the business is coming from streams and song sales.”

New rules mean that individual singles all count towards the chart progress of an album. So the question is, are artists upping production to take advantage of the fact that individual song streams now contribute to chart placement? It’s fairly simple arithmetic: the more songs to stream, the higher an album charts, hence the heft. L’Histoire de Melody Nelson by Serge Gainsbourg, Reign In Blood by Slayer, Sleater Kinney by Sleater Kinney, I Don’t Like Shit, I Don’t Go Outside by Earl Sweatshirt – all under half an hour in length – may not have been held in the same high esteem had the CEO of the label said, “Great, but could you pad it out with another half an hour of filler to get it up the charts?”

It wouldn’t be the first time record companies have taken advantage of lax regulations to push someone on their roster up the hit parade. In the 1990s the singles charts became more or less rigged by major labels offering unlimited tracks, stickers, a variety of coloured picture discs and singles in five different formats. New releases of CD singles were priced at 99p, going up to £3.99 on the second week of release, meaning songs would crash in at number one before dropping out of the top 10 the following week. Suddenly there were 50 number ones a year and the whole thing became meaningless, so by the time the chart authorities tightened up the rules, we’d all got bored and wandered off to have our frosted tips done instead.

Perhaps the strangest recent rule change by the RIAA is the one where songs released ages ago still count towards album sales if they’re included on the LP, which may go some way to explaining why Drake tacked ‘Hotline Bling’ – released last July – onto the end of Views. “1,500 on-demand song streams in the United States [hold] the same value as 10 individual track sales or one full album sale,” according to Forbes. ‘Hotline Bling’ has so far been streamed over 400 million times on Spotify and 700 million times on YouTube. In the US, those 400 million streams equate to 267,000 album sales under the RIAA’s new rules. There was never any doubt that Drake’s weakest album to date would go platinum – and that was long before the other 19 tracks had even left the studio”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Marina Photos/Pexels

Often, when we talk of long albums and this ‘what length is too long?!’ debate, it is records from Hip-Hop and Rap. I will also talk about between-album E.P.s and how they are more frequent. Actually, as Pop artists are putting out albums with sixteen tracks or more, it is not reserved to one or two genres. A complex question is this: Is less more? That is a debate that applies to all creative mediums (maybe not literature). The appropriately-named COMPLEX provided their perspective in 2021:

“According to Rolling Stone, the duration of the top five streamed albums on Spotify rose almost 10 minutes between 2013 and 2018, to an average of 60 minutes. Although, as Pitchfork points out, there were times in the late ‘‘90s and early 2000s when the average rap album was even longer than it is now. But double albums like OutKast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below or Dipset’s Diplomatic Immunity were the result of calculated decisions in an era of physical production costs, whereas long albums in today’s streaming era often lack artistic intention.

It’s worth noting that artists, especially in hip-hop, are always sitting on a lot of unreleased music. Migos collaborators have gone on record stating that they can make songs in under 20 minutes, and artists often have dozens of songs in the vault, waiting to be released. Even so, the decision to bulk up albums seems to be driven more from a commercial standpoint, rather than a desire to “feed the fans.” When Billboard and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) began incorporating streaming numbers in chart and certifications calculations, it gave artists an incentive to bulk up their albums. The longer the album, the more likely it is to generate streams, which can lead to a higher ranking on Billboard or a platinum plaque. Both Migos and Drake debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 2018, while Chris Brown’s lengthy album debuted at No. 3. This strategy is even more important right now, after the COVID-19 pandemic put a strain on yearly income and left artists looking for ways to make up for touring revenue.

Joey Badass once told Complex that a good album should have no more than 14 songs, with the duration likely varying between 30 to 45 minutes: “I don’t care if it was Michael Jackson, I am not listening to 25 songs. Less is more in my opinion.”

Financial benefits aside, though, stacking albums doesn’t take into consideration how music consumption has changed over the last few years. According to database company Statista, 54 percent of global consumers listen to fewer albums than they did five or 10 years ago. A 2019 survey conducted by Deezer in the UK, revealed that 15 percent of music fans under the age of 25 have never listened to a full album. Forty-two percent of those listeners are putting their favorite tracks on shuffle or playing them individually. Sure, adding more songs to a tracklist improves the chances that they’ll be added to playlists, but it damages the overall listening experience for a generation that’s moving away from listening to albums anyway. And in the streaming era, fans are receiving more music than ever before. Gone are the days of buying a couple albums at the record store and listening to them repeatedly for months. Today, fans have access to dozens of new albums every Friday, so it can become increasingly tiresome to shuffle through 20-song albums each music cycle.

Tracklists with 18 or more songs often cause fatigue for listeners. By the time you make it to the second half of these albums, they start sounding monotonous and stacked with filler tracks. Migos have fallen victim to this criticism. Following Culture III’s release, fans complained that the second half of the album sounded redundant and could have benefited from shortening the tracklist by three or four tracks. There were similar complaints about Culture II. These long tracklists also don’t cater to the way people actually listen to music. Very seldomly do you sit in one place while consuming an album. You’re usually on the train, in the car, or completing other day-to-day tasks, often making it difficult to listen to the same album for more than 30 minutes.

So, what is the ideal album length? Joey Badass once told Complex that a good album should have no more than 14 songs, with the duration likely varying between 30 to 45 minutes. “I don’t care if it was Michael Jackson, I am not listening to 25 songs. Less is more in my opinion,” he said.

The deluxe album trend could be a more effective way of releasing large quantities of music. Many artists, including Lil Baby, DaBaby, and the Weeknd dropped deluxe albums in 2020, which included five to 10 extra tracks each. The bonus tracks were listed under the album on streaming platforms, but were dropped weeks after the original release. The deluxe method gives listeners a break to digest music at a slower pace, which reduces the likelihood of exhaustion (although, of course, there will still be complaints from some fans about receiving too much music)”.

 PHOTO CREDIT: Martin Péchy/Pexels

Many might note how this feature is already long. Ironically, am I spending too much time writing about whether albums are too long?! Well, frankly, no. It is a tricky debate that has many different sides – especially when it comes to vinyl (sorry!). I want to bring in a couple of other takes, as this argument about album length has been discussed for years now. I will end with my opinion. This feature from 2020 discussed the importance of album running time and getting it ‘just right’:

“Earlier this year, I was listening to the new Beach Bunny record and (half) jokingly tweeted that “any LP that's less than 26 minutes is an automatic 9/10 in my mind.” That’s obviously a slight exaggeration, but I do think that shorter albums are generally better and harder to pull off than longer ones. While I realize the running time of a record may seem like an esoteric piece of trivia, I believe it’s actually a vital component of what makes an album good. Sure, I love long-winded double albums, 20-minute songs, and concept albums as much as the next guy, but by and large most of my favorite records, especially recently, are ones that tend to be leaner and more economical with their time. Hell, my favorite album of last year was a 6-track EP, so this post is a long time coming. Truthfully I think shorter records are harder to make and therefore are not the norm. I also think they can be stronger, more creative, and more impactful than a “traditional”-length album for many reasons.

In my mind, an album’s running time is as essential as it’s tracklist or sequencing. Many artists don’t take those things into consideration, but the ones that do often end up crafting a more compelling piece of art. The new Ratboys album is a perfect example of a masterfully-sequenced record; each side opens with a fast-paced single, side one closes with a banger, and the back half of the album works up to a beautifully meditative title track made all the more poignant by the flow of the songs that come before it. Part of what makes Printer’s Devil great is, yes, the songs themselves, but also how the band decided to order those songs and walk the listener through them. You could take those same 11 tracks, rearrange them, and the album would be flat-out worse.

When an artist releases an album, generally, it has a point. The musician sets out to capture a feeling, depict a time in their life, or make a statement on something in the world. If you can get your point across in less time, that only makes your message all the more compelling. One of the first times I consciously began to think about album running times was when Japanese Breakfast released Psychompmp back in 2016. Admittedly enamored with the (now) infamous long-form indieheads shitpost about the album, I went into the record with almost-non-existent expectations and came out the other side 25-minutes later blown away.

Essentially a concept album about her mother’s death, Michelle Zauner set out to capture her grief, experiences, and feelings that surrounded this major event in her life. The album opens poppy enough with the mystifying “In Heaven,” the soaring “Rugged Country,” and the immensely danceable “Everybody Wants to Love You.” Things take a turn halfway through where the titular “Psychopomp” stops the listener in their tracks with a spacy instrumental containing a voicemail of Michelle’s mom. From there, “Jane Cum” bowls the listener over with a wordless explosion of grief, pain, and sharp feelings. Not only is “Jane Cum” one of the most authentic expressions of loss ever captured in music, but it’s made stronger thanks to the songs that surround it. The record is so well-paced, and it’s conscious build-up to that pivotal moment of loss makes the feelings Michelle’s depicting all the more raw and impactful. After that heaviness “Heft,” “Moon on the Bath,” and “Triple 7” act as a sort of post-script to death that sends the listener off on a (slightly) more hopeful note, though not by much. The fact that Michelle was able to fit all of those feelings into an album that’s shorter than most episodes of TV is nothing short of spectacular.

One of the reasons I love music is because it’s the only medium with the ability to make such a compelling depiction in such a short amount of time. TV shows and movies are great, but at best they take 2 hours to create a similar effect. I suppose you could make the argument that shorter-form art house movies broach a similar level of impact, but even then the two mediums don’t exist in the same quantities. There’s a more compelling narrative in the four and a half minutes of “Born to Run” than there was in whatever new teen drama Netflix shat out this weekend. There’s no comparison”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Jorge Fakhouri Filho/Pexels

Billboard talked about the advantages of longer albums at a time when you can get any album on Spotify for a fixed monthly subscription fee. Arriving in 2023, this is a relevant modern article that framed the discussion around the release of Country star Morgan Wallen’s (very long player!) One Thing at a Time album:

“One Thing at a Time undoubtedly benefited from its stats-padding length, but it still would have dominated the Billboard 200 had Wallen and his label, Big Loud Records, opted for an average length. With the bottom 18 tracks accounting for 36% of the album’s total on-demand streams, if One Thing were a single-CD, 18-track release, Billboard estimates it would have moved about 360,000 units last week — putting it well ahead of the No. 2 album, SOS by SZA. The 10 most popular tracks amounted to 41.8% of the album’s streams, with the track “Last Night” alone accounting for nearly 9% of the 36 tracks’ aggregated streams.

In fact, an 18-track One Thing at a Time would have bested most recent No. 1 albums in their debut weeks, including Lil Baby’s It’s Only Me (216,000 units), SOS (318,000 units), Metro Boomin’s Heroes & Villains (185,000 units) and Tomorrow X Together’s The Name Chapter: TEMPTATION (161,000 units). (That’s assuming One Thing at a Time would have sold the same number of CDs and digital albums with half as many songs.) Only two recent albums, Her Loss by Drake and 21 Savage (404,000 units) and Taylor Swift’s Midnights (1.58 million units), had better debut weeks than the hypothetical, 18-track One Thing at a Time.

One Thing at a Time is part of a curious paradox in current recorded music, as the widespread adoption of streaming services has caused artists to release single tracks more often while releasing increasingly lengthier albums, too. While the album is waning in popularity, it remains a vital artistic statement and commercial event.

The trend of longer albums runs counter to the experimentations of the early days of digital music. When Napster arrived in the late ’90s, many people believed file-sharing marked the death of the album format. In the ’00s, as consumers increasingly purchased individual tracks at online stores like Apple’s iTunes, labels experimented with the new paradigm. In 2005, Warner Music Group and Elektra Records founder Jac Holzman launched a digital-only label, Cordless Music, that released music exclusively in “clusters” of three or more songs instead of albums or singles. In 2010, country star Blake Shelton released two six-song EPs — called “six paks” — rather than a single 10- or 12-track album.

Today, streaming dominates music consumption and impacts how artists and labels package music. Album sales are lower than ever, but album lengths have never been longer. Because fans can stream an unlimited amount of music for a fixed price, artists can add songs knowing that a longer album equals more streams. And because streams tend to account for far more of an album’s chart position than downloads and purchases, artists have an incentive to keep people listening.

The result has been “track creep,” a consistently rising number of songs on popular albums. In 2022, the top 10 albums on the year-end Billboard 200 chart averaged 19.1 tracks and 69.9 minutes. The top album, Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti, has 23 tracks and runs 81 minutes. Un Verano Sin Ti is a product of the streaming age: Physical album sales account for just 1.1% of its album equivalent unit sales compared to 97.5% for streaming. Track creep is made easier considering that many albums, such as SOS and Drake’s 21-track Certified Lover Boy, don’t have physical versions.

Changes in how albums are counted for the Billboard 200 can probably help explain some of the track creep: In 2014, the year Billboard began incorporating streams into the Billboard 200 chart, the top 10 albums averaged 13.2 tracks and 51.9 minutes, meaning album lengths have increased by about six tracks and 18 minutes in the last eight years. (Here, Billboard counts only studio albums and excludes soundtracks and Broadway cast recordings, which are filled with score and instrumental tracks.)

In 1992, when CD sales began to dominate recorded music revenues, the top 10 albums averaged 11.9 tracks and 51.1 minutes. Garth Brooks had two of the four 10-track albums in the top 10 — Ropin’ the Wind and No Fences — and the longest, Totally Krossed Out by hip-hop duo Kriss Kross, had just 15 tracks. Albums -- particularly in the country genre -- often topped out at ten tracks, a limit set by record labels for paying mechanical royalties to music publishers.

Today, streaming dominates music consumption and impacts how artists and labels package music. Album sales are lower than ever, but album lengths have never been longer. Because fans can stream an unlimited amount of music for a fixed price, artists can add songs knowing that a longer album equals more streams. And because streams tend to account for far more of an album’s chart position than downloads and purchases, artists have an incentive to keep people listening”.

Particular people will have their views regarding whether longer albums are good value, or if they are a test of endurance. I personally like longer albums if they are affordable. You get a more complete – warts and all – view of an album. So many artists release a normal-length studio album. They then put an E.P. out soon after or before, so you get these tracks that would have been on an album arriving in a different format. People don’t really buy physical E.P.s - they can get them through Bandcamp and Spotify -, so I guess people need to consider the fact many artists who release shorter albums still put out a lot of music over the course of a year or two; though they are in the form of an album and then E.P. When albums can be streamed cheaply, artists have to make money through providing longer albums. It does mean fans shell out more though, with many artists putting out albums every couple of few years, it is not a massive expenditure if you think about it. Mae Muller’s recent post ‘defending’ her expansive debut, Sorry I’m Late, raises an interesting point. She has started a debate that has arrived at…

JUST the right time!

FEATURE: Joni Mitchell at Eighty: Both Sides, Now: Bringing the Icon to the Screen

FEATURE:

 

 

Joni Mitchell at Eighty

IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell in 1968/PHOTO CREDIT: Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images

Both Sides, Now: Bringing the Icon to the Screen

_________

COMING up on 7th November…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell's at the Newport Folk Festival on 24th June, 2022 (you can find out more about it and buy the live album here)/PHOTO CREDIT: Nina Westervelt

we mark the eightieth birthday of one of the most influential artists ever. There is no doubting few lyrics are as evocative and poetic as Joni Mitchell. Alongside an elite few, her songs are works of art. So richly drawn and spellbinding, the songs themselves could form their own film. Maybe an album like 1971’s Blue. I think that there have been occasions where Joni Mitchell has appeared on film. Usually concert footage, she is one of those legends who has not been subjected to a biopic or T.V. drama. With series like Daisy Jones & The Six seemingly representing Fleetwood Mac in some form, you wonder when a biopic about them will come. Same too with Debbie Harry and Blondie. Madonna’s planned biopic has been shelved. That has been crying out for decades. You hope it does come to the screen very soon. One artists who might not seem as cinematic – read: dramatic and controversial – is Joni Mitchell. I have always felt a biopic or drama based on her life should happen. Luckily, as we see in this article from earlier in the year, that might come sooner than we imagined:

“Cameron Crowe, the director of Almost Famous and Jerry Maguire, is developing a new drama film with Joni Mitchell about her life.

According to a story on the entertainment site Above the Line – which was subsequently reposted on Mitchell’s own website – the project is not a documentary and Mitchell has been collaborating with Crowe on the script for the past two years.

Crowe made his name as a teenager writing for Rolling Stone and Creem magazines, experiences he went on to dramatise in Almost Famous. He is a music fanatic and has a longstanding friendship with Mitchell, who he has interviewed numerous times; in 2017 he accompanied her to her first public appearance, a Grammy awards gala, since suffering a brain aneurysm two years earlier.

IN THIS PHOTO: Cameron Crowe and Joni Mitchell pictured in November 2022/PHOTO CREDIT: Bruce Glikas/Getty Images

Crowe has not directed a feature film since the romcom Aloha in 2015, which was was a box office failure and was criticised for the casting of Emma Stone as a character with Hawaiian and Chinese heritage. In 2019, he produced the documentary David Crosby: Remember My Name, about the folk-rock singer-songwriter who died in January this year.

Mitchell, 79, has not released a studio album since 2007’s Shine and kept a low profile after her 2015 aneurysm. But she returned to live performance with a surprise set at Newport folk festival in July 2022, playing 13 songs alongside Brandi Carlile and others, and is booked to play another solo show in June at Washington state’s Gorge Amphitheatre. A live album of her Newport performance is also planned, she told Elton John in an interview in November.

Previously unreleased material has also emerged in recent years across a series of six archival releases by the label Rhino, beginning with Joni Mitchell Archives – Vol. 1: The Early Years (1963–1967) in 2020”.

There is a bit of speculation and wondering as to what could come about. Rather than a straight biopic, it seems maybe there will be a section of Mitchell’s life converted to a drama. I like that Mitchell is consulting and working on the script. It means there is truth and that personal input. It makes me wonder a couple of things. In such a wonderful and diverse life, is this going to be a career-spanning drama that uses her music as a backdrop?! Maybe set in the late-1960s or 1970s, you would have these incredible songs scoring a powerful drama. Whether set in Laurel Canyon, or if it talks place somewhere else, I cannot wait to see what might come about. One reason why it is important to have a film or T.V. series around Joni Mitchell’s work is because it introduces people to her music. A younger generation who use Spotify and cannot get her music – Mitchell removed her music from the platform in protest against controversial podcaster Joe Rogan. The biopic or music film can be quite difficult to get right. When it comes to Joni Mitchell, some might consider her a niche artist. Someone who only connects with people who experienced her music in the 1970s. Her legacy and brilliance has inspired modern artists like Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish. There are dozens of modern artists you can trace to Joni Mitchell. Alongside a drama, it would also be wonderful if there was some modern documentary. Artists and fans talking about her impact and importance. Maybe a new interview with Mitchell. Bringing those albums and songs to life in a new way. Something that covers her career and importance, you would also get to learn more about a hugely intriguing songwriter.

Whether the Cameron Crowe-helmed upcoming Joni Mitchell project is more a straight biopic or uses her music in something fictional, it is a long-overdue project that will open up her music to new generations. Show just how powerful and important her cannon of work is. I hope there is a lot of celebration in the lead-up to her eightieth birthday. Whether Mitchell herself minds or finds it a bit uncomfortable I am not sure. I’d like to think people are honouring her ahead of quite a milestone. Whilst no more original material will come, she is still performing live now and then. You cannot rule anything out. A alongside what comes to the screen, a documentary accompanying this would be magnificent. Important to hear new words from a music genius! So many people are influenced by her, thanking Mitchell and sharing their stories would be really something! I am sure we will hear something regarding Cameron Crowe and his project soon. I am excited to think about what might come about. Before 7th November, take some time to listen to Joni Mitchell’s albums and live performances. Check out video and print interviews, as they always make for engrossing and remarkable listening/reading. I am going to leave it there. I am going to put out another feature or two before Joni Mitchell turns eighty. Such a music titan, the world would not be the same without her in it! It is true that she really is…

ONE of a kind.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Lionheart at Forty-Five: Ranking the Tracks

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Lionheart at Forty-Five

Ranking the Tracks

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IN the middle of a blitz and flurry…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in an outtake from the Lionheart photo session/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz/PHOTO CONCEPT: John Carder Bush

of Kate Bush anniversary features, I am concentrating on an album that turns forty-five on 13th November. Kate Bush’s second studio album, it followed hotly on the heels of her hugely successful debut, The Kick Inside. Lionheart is a terrific album that deserves more praise. I am going to do another feature about it before its forty-fifth anniversary. Like I have done with other Kate Bush albums coming up for their anniversary, I am interested in doing a tracks ranking feature. Some might feel a top three from Lionheart would be obvious, though you can’t always predict that! I did rank the tracks a while ago. My opinion has changed since then. Below are the ten songs from Kate Bush’s second studio album…

IN order of their superiority.

___________

TEN: Don't Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake

Position on the Album: 4

Standout Lyric: “Emma's been run out on/She's breaking down/In so many places/Stuck in low gear/Because of her fears”

Background Detail:

“Song written by Kate Bush. Originally released on her second album Lionheart, the song was written a few years before. According to Kate, it was written as a 'Patti Smith song'.

Versions

There are two officially released versions of 'Don't Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake': the album version and the live version from Hammersmith Odeon, which appears on the On Stage EP. However, a demo version from 1977 has also surfaced and was released on various bootleg cd's.

Performances

Kate performed 'Don't Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake' on the Leo Sayer Show on 17 November 1978 and on the 1979 Christmas special. The song was also included in the setlist of the Tour of Life”

NINE: In Search of Peter Pan

Position on the Album: 2

Standout Lyric: “He's got a photo/Of his hero/He keeps it under his pillow/But I've got a pin-up/From/a newspaper/Of Peter Pan/I found it in a locket/I hide it in my pocket”

Background Detail:

“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)”

EIGHT: Oh England My Lionheart

Position on the Album: 5

Standout Lyric: “Oh England, my Lionheart!/Peter Pan steals the kids in Kensington Park/You read me Shakespeare on the rolling Thames/That old river poet that never, ever ends”

Background Detail:

“It's really very much a song about the Old England that we all think about whenever we're away, you know, "ah, the wonderful England'' and how beautiful it is amongst all the rubbish, you know. Like the old buildings we've got, the Old English attitudes that are always around. And this sort of very heavy emphasis on nostalgia that is very strong in England. People really do it alot, you know, like "I remember the war and...'' You know it's very much a part of our attitudes to life that we live in the past. And it's really just a sort of poetical play on the, if you like, the romantic visuals of England, and the second World War... Amazing revolution that happened when it was over and peaceful everything seemed, like the green fields. And it's really just a exploration of that. (Lionheart Promo Cassette, EMI Canada, 1978)

A lot of people could easily say that the song is sloppy. It's very classically done. It's only got acoustic instruments on it and it's done ... almost madrigally, you know. I dare say a lot of people will think that it's just a load of old slush but it's just an area that I think it's good to cover. Everything I do is very English and I think that's one reason I've broken through to a lot of countries. The English vibe is very appealing. (Harry Doherty, Enigma Variations. Melody Maker, November 1978)”

SEVEN: Full House

Position on the Album: 6

Standout Lyric: “My silly pride/Digging the knife in/She loves to come for her ride”

Background Detail:

“Song written by Kate Bush in 1978. One of three new songs - along with Coffee Homeground and Symphony In Blue - written for the album Lionheart. The lyric seems to be autobiographical, an insight into psychological struggles she was encountering, with paranoia and self-doubt. The song was also released as the B-side of the single Wow.

Performances

Kate performed 'Full House' during the Tour of Life live shows in 1979.

Kate about 'Fullhouse'

'Fullhouse' was probably quite autobiographical, you know: Talking about how hard I find it to cope with all the feelings I get, from paranoia, pressure, anger, that sort of thing. (Colin Irwin, Paranoia and Passion of the Kate Inside. Melody Maker (UK), 10 October 1980)”

SIX: Hammer Horror

Position on the Album: 10

Standout Lyric: “They've got the stars for the gallant hearts/I'm the replacement for your part/But all I want to do is forget/You, friend”

Background Detail:

“The song is not about, as many think, Hammer Horror films. It is about an actor and his friend. His friend is playing the lead in a production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a part he's been reading all his life, waiting for the chance to play it. He's finally got the big break he's always wanted, and he is the star. After many rehearsals he dies accidentally, and the friend is asked to take the role over, which, because his own career is at stake, he does. The dead man comes back to haunt him because he doesn't want him to have the part, believing he's taken away the only chance he ever wanted in life. And the actor is saying, "Leave me alone, because it wasn't my fault - I have to take this part, but I'm wondering if it's the right thing to do because the ghost is not going to leave me alone and is really freaking me out. Every time I look round a corner he's there, he never disappears."

The song was inspired by seeing James Cagney playing the part of Lon Chaney playing the hunchback - he was an actor in an actor in an actor, rather like Chinese boxes, and that's what I was trying to create. (Kate Bush Club Newsletter, November 1979)”

FIVE: Wow

Position on the Album: 3

Standout Lyric: “He'll never make the screen/He'll never make the 'Sweeney'/Be that movie queen/He's too busy hitting the Vaseline”

Background Detail:

“Wow' is a song about the music business, not just rock music but show business in general, including acting and theatre. People say that the music business is about ripoffs, the rat race, competition, strain, people trying to cut you down, and so on, and though that's all there, there's also the magic. It was sparked off when I sat down to try and write a Pink Floyd song, something spacey; Though I'm not surprised no-one has picked that up, it's not really recognisable as that, in the same way as people haven't noticed that 'Kite' is a Bob Marley song, and 'Don't Push Your Foot On The Heartbrake' is a Patti Smith song. When I wrote it I didn't envisage performing it - the performance when it happened was an interpretation of the words I'd already written. I first made up the visuals in a hotel room in New Zealand, when I had half an hour to make up a routine and prepare for a TV show. I sat down and listened to the song through once, and the whirling seemed to fit the music. Those who were at the last concert of the tour at Hammersmith must have noticed a frogman appear through the dry ice it was one of the crew's many last night 'pranks' and was really amazing. I'd have liked to have had it in every show. (Kate Bush Club newsletter, Summer 1979)”

FOUR: In the Warm Room

Position on the Album: 7

Standout Lyric: “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”

Background Detail:

“Performances

Kate was asked to perform on the children's TV programme Ask Aspel, where she wanted to present the new song 'In The Warm Room', but the BBC felt this song was too explicitly sexual, so she opted for Kashka From Baghdad instead. As a result, there are no televised performances of 'In The Warm Room'. The song, however, was performed during the Tour of Life and one of these performances ended up in the Live In Germany TV special.

Kate 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)”

THREE: Coffee Homeground

Position on the Album: 9

Standout Lyric: “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 get me in a hole to rot - with your hemlock/On the rocks”

Background Detail:

“Song written by Kate Bush while in the USA in May 1978. It was one of only three songs newly written for the album Lionheart - along with Full House and Symphony In Blue.

Cover versions

'Coffee Homeground' was covered by Kat Devlin and Mouse.

Kate about 'Coffee Homeground'

['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)“

TWO: Kashka from Baghdad

Position on the Album: 8

Standout Lyric: ”They never go for walks/Maybe it's because/The moon's not bright enough/There's light in love, you see”

Background Detail (https://www.katebushencyclopedia.com/kashka-from-baghdad):

“Performances

Kate performed 'Kashka From Baghdad' live on the piano on Ask Aspel, a TV show broadcast by the BBC in 1978. The song was also included in the setlist for the Tour of Life.

Cover versions

'Kashka From Baghdad' was covered by the Plunging Necklines.

Kate about 'Kashka From Baghdad'

That actually came from a very strange American Detective series that I caught a couple of years ago, and there was a musical theme that they kept putting in. And they had an old house, in this particular thing, and it was just a very moody, pretty awful serious thing. And it just inspired the idea of this old house somewhere in Canada or America with two people in it that no-one knew anything about. And being a sorta small town, everybody wanted to know what everybody what else was up to. And these particular people in this house had a very private thing happening. (Personal Call, BBC Radio 1, 1979)”

ONE: Symphony in Blue

Position on the Album: 1

Standout Lyric: “When that feeling of meaninglessness sets in/Go blowing my mind on God: The light in the dark, with the neon arms/The meek He seeks, the beast He calms/The head of the good soul department”.

Background Detail:

“Song written by Kate Bush in 1978, released on her second album Lionheart. It was one of three newly written songs for the album, along with Coffee Homeground and Full House. It is believed that the lyric of the song is an attempt at describing Kate's own belief system. The descriptions of God, sex and the colour blue seem to be inspired by reading about Wilhelm Reich's theory in A Book Of Dreams.

Formats

'Symphony In Blue' was released as a single in Canada and Japan. In Canada, the B-side was Hammer Horror; in Japan it was Fullhouse.

Performances

Kate performed 'Symphony In Blue' during the live shows of the Tour of Life. The song also appeared in the 1979 Christmas special”

FEATURE: Charted Territory: Brothers Inarm: Diversifying the Podcast Market and Highlighting Amazing Women

FEATURE:

 

 

Charted Territory: Brothers Inarm

IN THIS PHOTO: Professor Hannah Fry’s podcast, Uncharted, is enormously successful and must-listen, yet she is one of few women whose podcasts are charting high and among the most listened-to, leading to a question around a new rise in popularity male-focused/voiced options/PHOTO CREDIT: Charlie Clift for The Independent

Diversifying the Podcast Market and Highlighting Amazing Women

_________

AN article was published recently…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Comedians James Acaster and Ed Gamble host the hugely popular podcast, Off Menu/PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Gilbey

that raised an interesting point regarding the most popular podcasts. A market that is expanding by the day, you can pretty much find s podcast for anything! Not to say that the podcast market is dominated by men but, when it comes to the most heard and discussed, it seems that male-driven/focused ones are on top. The ‘bro’ podcast. Either podcasters who have quite a laddish or bro mentality, or two men podcasting together who are friends. There is nothing wrong with that…though there does seem to be this proliferation at the moment. I love Fearne Cottom’s Happy Place Podcast and Table Manners with Jessie and Lennie Ware. There are plenty of great podcasts made by or for women. Yet, that being said, there is a resurgence of and seeming reliance on those with a distinct energy and dynamic.  I know this is a bit music-adjacent, though it does also apply to music podcasts. I will explore that side a bit more. First, Zoe Williams wrote for The Guardian and asked what it is with all the bro podcasts we are seeing celebrated and topping listening charts:

“I went to an event last week, Is Audio the Future?, which left me full of enthusiasm for podcasts as this pure, organic, guerrilla space, which nobody had yet figured out how to gatekeep and thereby homogenise. Chris Sweeney described how his podcast, Homo Sapiens, originally co-hosted with Will Young, came about in 2018: he was an avid fan of Woman’s Hour and thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to have an LGBT Woman’s Hour?” They started with no more equipment than an iPhone. Holly Cook, head of product at the Economist, described readers having a much richer relationship with the content when they became listeners, more intimate and proprietorial. It reminded me of publishing, in the old days, when there were low barriers to entry, a thousand flowers could bloom and not everyone in the business was in an unengaging steeplechase for the next Hogwarts.

IN THIS PHOTO: Joe Rogan, left, host of the U.K.’s most popular podcast/PHOTO CREDIT: SYFY/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images

But actually, that would have been publishing in the 17th century. A much better analogy for podcasts as they are now, or as I thought they were, would be the early days of the internet, without behemoths, advertisers or algorithms, before users were funnelled in one of four directions (violent misogynists, conspiracists and white-supremacists; mild lefties; consumers; people who like cats).

This week, the list dropped of the UK’s best-loved podcasts, telling a different story to the one I was telling myself. The top five are, in descending order, Joe Rogan; Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO, in which he counsels the layperson on how to become more like him; Off Menu with Ed Gamble and James Acaster; Sh**ged Married Annoyed, a kind of unfiltered(ish) account of real-life marriage, with Chris and Rosie Ramsey; and Peter Crouch’s podcast. I have a really low tolerance for bros chatting, unless they’re deliberately trying to be funny, so there is lots in the top 25 I cannot comment on, because to heap on the derision I believe them to deserve, I’d first have to listen.

Joe Rogan I have listened to, mainly to bottom out whether or not his reputation as the soothing face of conspiracy theories and other problematic views was deserved. Between the anti-vaxxing and his remark in February that “the idea that Jewish people are not into money is ridiculous”, it probably is, but I couldn’t possibly adjudicate because this is just more bros, chatting.

Across the piece, successful podcasts are funnelling into a handful of distinct streams: bros chatting, sometimes “inspirationally”; funny bros, being funny, and fair play, many of them are; facts, trivia and miscellany presented in a cute way (No Such Thing As a Fish, The Infinite Monkey Cage). Women are allowed, but only if they’re talking about their children or relationships, preferably with their husbands or children (besides Sh**ged …, there’s NewlyWeds, Parenting Hell, Saving Grace). The honourable exception is Hannah Fry, who gets to talk about maths and still be female”.

Maybe it is just a shift in tastes. Perhaps there is a particular energy and chemistry in particular podcasts that are appealing. Whilst I don’t agree that podcasts should be for one particular demographic or gender, it does seem that the most popular podcasts at the moment are more aimed at men. Of course, there are podcasts by women for women that are worth checking out. There was an issue last year where we heard of male podcast hosts and guests called out because of their sexism. It is not especially a recent problem. Whilst there are scores of women making incredible podcasts, how many are we seeing riding high in the charts?! I am going to come to music before. To defend men (sort of), there is a diverse array of podcasts that go beyond ‘bro-dom’ and celebrate blokes being friends. Whether it is a food podcast, one about sports, or even a music one, it can get a bit much!

 IN THIS PHOTO: Broadcasters, D.J.s and authors, Nick Grimshaw and Annie Macmanus, have just launched their new podcast, Sidetracked, on BBC Sounds/PHOTO CREDIT: BBC/Stephanie Sian Smith/PA

I am keen to explore this in a musical contest. Whether it is on Apple, Spotify - another well-known streaming platform - or BBC Sounds, there is this extraordinary amount of choice. BBC Sounds has a load of podcasts you can listen to. One that is mixed-gender and take that mates-chatting-formular that seems to be male-heavy and turns things around is Sidetracked with Annie and Nick. Presented by former Radio 1 stablemates Annie Macmanus and Nick Grimshaw, let’s hope their new series heralds in a lot more podcasts where it is not solely two men talking. In the same way you do not see many radio duos of all-women, the same is true of podcasts! Female friendships and relationships being explored and spotlighted through amazing series. Before going on, I found an article from last year that asked about the male-dominated market – and some advice for women getting into podcasting:

“Where Are All the Women Podcasters In theCharts?

It would be wrong to say there are no success stories for women podcasters in the charts. For example, Elizabeth Day’s ‘How to Fail’ and Vogue Williams’ ‘My Therapist Ghosted Me’ are consistently in the top 20. But the problem is, there’s just not enough.

Data on the gender split of podcast creators is pretty tough to get your hands on. But in one report from Sounds Profitable, just 29% of podcast creators in the US identified as women compared with 69% of men. 2% of those surveyed identified as non-binary.

Outside of this small study, there’s a real lack of solid data. This makes it hard to understand why women are so underrepresented in the podcast charts.

One report says the lack of data makes it “difficult to say if women’s underrepresentation on Apple’s top 100 podcasts is because women are not hosting as many podcasts or because they are not receiving recognition for their podcasts”.

The same report highlights some potential obstacles that could be preventing women from creating more podcasts. For example, there are fewer women in tech and are less likely to have experience with podcast recording and editing software because technology is a space dominated by men.

If podcasts are anything like books, there could also be fewer women in the charts simply because men don’t listen to podcasts by women as much as they listen to content by men.

It’s likely there’s a whole combination of factors keeping women out of the podcast charts. But the good news is, that there are some inspirational women who are on a mission to do something about it.

3 Women Making Waves in Podcasting

There are a lot of women podcasters and female-inspired podcast networks championing females in the field right now. After tuning into the International Women’s Podcast Festival this year, here are my top 3 to watch.

1. Imriel Morgan

Imriel Morgan is the CEO of Content is Queen and one of the founders of the International Women’s Podcast Festival.

Content is Queen is a London-based podcasting agency and community that seeks to amplify minority voices in podcasting.

The event was created to celebrate women who have been building up the industry but aren’t being recognised.

“There are still a number of hurdles for different people to jump through. But I think women can be at the forefront of the podcasting industry and should be. We are consuming, we are creating, and we are creating for audiences that are largely under-served,” said Imriel.

“So we are the ones creating at this mass rate but we aren’t necessarily benefiting financially or with the credibility, popularity or even the job prospects. I think there are a lot of things we need to address.”

IN THIS PHOTO: Imriel Morgan

2. Kim Fox

Also known as ‘The Podcast Professor’, Kim Fox is a leading academic who produces, teaches and conducts academic research in podcasting. She’s also a journalism professor with The American University in Cairo.

Fox recognises that progress in the field is almost entirely down to women championing other women podcasters:

“We are finding that more women are aligning up with other women and these opportunities […] are extremely valuable.”

“The way we share information, the way we cheer for each other, you can guarantee there aren’t going to be any ‘manels’ [all-male panels]. Sometimes, we hear when these conferences take place that they couldn’t find any women to talk about this topic. That’s not true.”

3. Bianca Foley

Bianca Foley is one half of the very successful, all-female-driven, Sustainably Influenced podcast.

Along with co-host Charlotte Williams, the duo’s show focuses on eco-fashion. The show was born out of a chat between friends about the frustration of packaging.

Despite the challenges of launching just before the pandemic hit in 2020, the show has gone from strength to strength. It’s now in its sixth season.

Content creator Bianca said: “I wanted to do a podcast for ages, but I didn’t have the confidence to just start it and that’s why I was so glad that Charlotte just said, we are going to do this, let’s just do it, let’s just try.”

IN THIS PHOTO: Bianca Foley

Best Advice From Women Podcasters? Just Do It

The advice to women podcasters from Content is Queen’s Imriel Morgan is, if you’re thinking of starting a podcast, stop thinking.

“My advice is just to start,” she said. “I’m not saying you have to press publish, I’m not saying you have to distribute it to the world, even though that’s far less scary than you think it is, but just start the process.

“We want to see those stories, and we want to hear what you’ve got to say. It does matter, and it is valid.”

If this has inspired you to start your own women-led podcast, this guide on how to start a podcast has everything you need to know.

And if all this has got you interested in checking out another great women-led podcasting conference, She Podcasts Live 2023 will take place June 19-22 in Washington DC”.

Even the music podcast market features a lot of male-helmed series. We have artists like Dua Lipa and her At Your Service podcast. In music, there is ample opportunity to platform women. So many great artists who could pair together. I would love to hear podcasts from women in production. Incredible female artists talking about their careers. Series exploring iconic women in music and modern-day queens! I think there is something incredibly captivating and fascinating hearing two women on a podcast. The dynamic is a little different. I think the conversation is usually broader and more interesting. Their personalities richer and  broader! I would love to hear music interview podcasts or thematic/topical music podcasts made by women. You can extend this to beyond the world of music. Think about film criticism. Again, there are some great film podcasts made by women. There are alluring and dynamite partnerships waiting to be cemented. Rhianna Dhillon and Anna Bogutskaya have presented Kermode and Mayo’s Take. They are brilliant together. I think they could present a weekly film podcast and it would ride high in the charts. It is all very well have these fantasy line-ups and wish-lists. There is the incredible female talent out there! That article from The Guardian makes a point. In some ways, the podcast charts are regressive. Women on podcasts with or talking about their husbands are more worthy or visible than ones where women are at the forefront and independent. Hannah Fry being an example (of the latter) with her extraordinary Uncharted. There does seem to be that preference for male voices. Men are harsher critics too. Even if there are terrific podcasts made by women, the most recognisable and memorable ones, it appears, are from men.

IN THIS PHOTO: Film critics broadcasters and writers, Rhianna Dhillon and Anna Bogutskaya/PHOTO CREDIT: Kermode and Mayo’s Take

Even five years ago, the topic of gender divides in podcast was raised by Forbes. Whilst it is a way of fighting against the patriarchy, (podcasts) also provide a space where women can be heard and talk about issues important to them! If bro-led podcasts about banter and mates shooting the breeze are popular because of their casual nature and that healthy male energy, there are plenty of toxic and problematic ones that are getting a big audience share. Things will change. The podcast market is definitely one that could be enriched if female voices are supported and amplified:

“As more women infiltrate the male-dominated world of podcasting, they’re inspiring and showing the way for other female hosts. And to those women who are thinking of starting a show of their own, don’t let the popularity contest deter you. Brushing off podcast rankings, Shannon and Thompson say, “iTunes algorithms are a mystery to everyone—that top 100 could be based on just about anything. So we try to not let it get our panties in a bunch; we just keep on going, doing our thing. But we're definitely dreaming of a more equal world where we don't even have to go there, and now is the time for women to step up, use their voices, share their stories, and support each other by subscribing and leaving ratings and reviews.”

“We live in a society that often tells women our voices and our stories don’t matter. I really internalized this and regrettably, I spent a big portion of my life thinking that I didn’t have anything valuable to add to the conversation,” says Todd. “From writers, to filmmakers, to podcasters, we need more women telling our stories. I can’t tell you how many times podcast networks or advertisers have told me they wish there were more women led shows out there. It’s dire. If you’re a woman who has something to say, don’t spend any time worrying that what you have to say isn’t valuable. We need your voice”.

IN THIS PHOTO: Daisy May Cooper hosts Educating Daisy/PHOTO CREDIT: Antonio Olmos/The Observer 

Being in the music industry, I know of great podcasts made by women here. So many more just begging to be made! Across all industries, sectors and interests,  it is vital that there is greater balance. Of course, you can’t dictate listener habits and force tastes onto people. Even so, podcast platforms in general can do more to balance things are promote worthy and interesting female voices. Mixed-gender podcasts that break away from the matey and blokey surge. Not that I have anything against men in podcasts though, with any scene, if there is too much of that it gets homogenised, boring and lacks variation! Articles like this from earlier in the year highlight some brilliant women making incredible podcast. Even Ryan Clark’s excellent Rylan: How to Be a Man is a much-needed, timely and refreshing antidote to the somewhat unfiltered and testosterone-filled podcasts that many gravitate towards. Seeing more women scaling the top podcasts charts in 2024 would be a hugely pleasant, inspiring, important and progressive…

STEP forward.

FEATURE: Even Better Than the Real Thing: Bringing the Cinematic and Immersive Into Live Music

FEATURE:

 

 

Even Better Than the Real Thing

IN THIS PHOTO: U2 performing in the Sphere, Las Vegas/PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live Nation

Bringing the Cinematic and Immersive Into Live Music

_________

IT may seem slightly tasteless…

PHOTO CREDIT: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live Nation

to some smaller artists who are relying on grassroots venues at a time when so many are threatened. It is said that costs are too high and so many are closing and unable to remain. I am about to talk about a hugely expensive live venue in Las Vegas that are currently hosting U2. It is tragic for the industry, as these are venues that artists coming through rely on. There will be a big problem in the future if there are very few grassroots venues open. It is a worrying state of affairs when we think of how essential these venues are. Ones that are not receiving adequate funding from the Government. On the other end of the spectrum – perhaps as far down the other side as you can get! – are legendary and world-famous artists who are in the position to sell out stadium and the world’s biggest venues. If course, they started in the independent venues which are now under threat. This, rather clumsily, leads me to U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere residency. Held at the Sphere at the Venetian Resort, Las Vegas, they are one of quite a few wonderful and iconic acts who are taking Vegas by storm. So far, the likes of Britney Spears and Adele have played there. Kylie Minogue is preparing for her residency there very soon. Even if Las Vegas is inaccessible to us all and mainly U.S.-based fans can go and see artists there, this rather maligned part of America is getting a bit of a makeover. More renowned for its casinos and slight tackiness, the live music side of Las Vegas is attracting a lot of people there. Whilst Las Vegas is still far from perfect, the fact it is becoming this centre for hosting residencies and performances from legendary artists means we need to cast our eyes there!

U2’s raw-yet-extravagant premiere performance at the Sphere was reviewed by The Guardian. If the Irish band were charmingly ramshackle and raw, that was blended and balanced by a stratospheric and almost cosmic visual display. You can see the photos at the top of this feature to get a sense of the wonder and cinematic that was being projected whilst the band were performing some of their classics. Maybe a million miles away from the basic and simpler venues and performances you get in this country, all of this made me think about how we need something like the Sphere venue in the U.K. Prior to getting to that, here is part of the review of U2:UV’s opening night in Las Vegas:

“U2 have never been a band noted for their love of shy understatement, but even by their standards, their arrival in Las Vegas represents a hitherto-unimagined degree of grandiosity.

They unveil not just an entire venue – the 18,000 seat Sphere, its exterior completely covered in LED screens that turn it different colours, flash up QR codes and occasionally transform it into a giant emoji face, leering over the Las Vegas strip – but also a vast overhead walkway that links it to the Venetian Resort (hotels are tireless in their efforts to stop patrons going outside, an activity that carries with it the danger you might spend your money somewhere else). The interior of the concert hall is completely covered in LED screens, too. They stretch out far above the band and over the audience’s heads, the better to provide a sequence of genuinely astonishing visual effects.

Some big, rather arty names have been involved in the visuals, among them Es Devlin and Brian Eno, and there’s a moment early on when the screens flash up a preponderance of aphorisms that recall Jenny Holzer’s text-based installations – WORK IS THE BLACKMAIL OF SURVIVAL, TASTE IS THE ENEMY OF ART, ENJOY THE SURFACE – but ultimately, it’s all about spectacle, which it provides in jaw-dropping spades. During The Fly, the visuals appear to descend from the roof of the auditorium, creating a fake ceiling made of pulsing numbers. During Even Better Than the Real Thing, they give the disorientating impression that the stage and the standing audience around it are slowly moving upwards: an amazing bit of visual sleight of hand that leaves you slightly queasy. “What a fancy pad,” offers Bono, casting his eyes around the venue. “Look at all this … stuff.”

Of course, there are dangers inherent in all this stuff. On the most prosaic level, there’s the section in the show when what appears to be a giant rope made of knotted sheets ascends to the roof and transforms itself into a swing. Bono selects a fan from the front row in an echo of U2’s fabled Live Aid performance, seats them in the swing and pushes them out over the audience: with the best will in the world, this seems less like stagecraft than an injury lawsuit waiting to happen. But there’s also the risk that U2 themselves will be not just literally be dwarfed by the visuals, which they obviously are, but overshadowed by them, the music merely an accompaniment to a vastly expensive and impressive light show”.

Although there are differences in the U.K. and U.S. regarding live music and the availability of venues, we do have some massive arenas here. There seems to be more available capital in the U.S. to support the live music scenes. We do not have anything like Las Vegas’s venues and glitz here. I hope that the U.K. government invests as much money as it can into grassroots venues. As many as possible need to be preserved and protected – ensuring that very few close in the coming years. Also, there either needs to be consideration to our larger venues. Of course they need to be supported so that they can host larger acts and, in the process, earn money for the economy. I have been to venues like London’s 02 though, to me, there are not many in this country that has that multi-dimensional and visual splendour aspect as something like Las Vegas’s Sphere. Whether it was a bespoke venues built somewhere like Birmingham, Cardiff or Newcastle, imagine bringing a cinematic and epic slice of Las Vegas to the U.K. For one, it might afford us the chance to see residencies be a regular thing. Huge artists playing in the U.K. at a converted or new venues. More importantly, it would be a rare and unique chance to witness music being backed with the most breathtaking visuals. Artists now can create terrific light shows and build wonderful sets for big gigs. Rather than have people pay a load of money to be so far away from the stage that the brilliance and spectacular nature of a set is lost, how about something that is immersive and accessible to all?! Of course, there is the ongoing and angering issue of ticket sites and artists charging exorbitant amounts for tickets.

Together with the cost of travel, many people also have to shell out hundreds to see one gig! It is eye-watering and unethical. I know it is more the venues and ticket sellers who hike the prices and set them to begin with but, as most of these huge artists earn a staggering amount on tour, they can afford to slash prices and ensure that as many people as possible are not gauged and priced-out. If this thorny problem could be resolved, then I think we could then see even more people attending live music. I guess even cinema has not mastered and experimented with viewing films much like one would view a display ta a Planetarium. Rather than people looking at the screen and it being in front of them, I wonder whether cinema will change its aspect and lens and be more immersive in that sense. Being surrounded by the picture rather than it being more centralised. Bringing some of the grandeur and wonder you get from the big screen to music would take it to a new level! I love this idea of live music being entwined with visuals. A more sensory experience where you still get to see and feel the artist playing, you would also get this extra stimulation from the screens around you. Maybe having the sound projected from different points of the venue would mean everyone was getting the same experience. From those right near the stage to those right at the very back, everyone would be witness to an unforgettable experience. Of course, it would be expensive to project and accomplish something like this. It does go back to funding and how many venues are struggling. Would it be ethical and appropriate to inject that much money into one venue that could go to hundreds?! With there being this desperate need for those in power to free up funding for grassroots venues, there is a curiosity of how U.S. venues on a different level could make their way to the U.K. – even if it is in a few years’ time. This transformation, elevation and revolution would completely transform…

HOW we experience live music.

FEATURE: Spotlight: Hannah Diamond

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Hannah Diamond

_________

ONE of the biggest and most anticipated…

albums of the year comes from the superb Hannah Diamond. On 6th October, Perfect Picture is with us. Written and composed by Hannah Amond (Hannah Diamond) & David Gamson, with production by David Gamson, singles such as Perfect Picture and Affirmations confirm that London-based Diamond has a very long future ahead! A visual artist who is in control of her image, there is this confidence and autonomy that means her music and promotion is authentic. There will be more press interviews with her ahead of the release of Perfect Picture. Following 2019’s Reflections, there will be many eyes on Diamond and Perfect Picture. She is an artist who is going to make this remarkable statement very soon! Already being discussed as modern icon, it feels almost like I am late to the party spotlighting her - although she is still rising and her best days are ahead. I am going to start with a couple of older interviews. In 2020, a matter of weeks before the pandemic started, Diamond was getting a lot of buzz and love. It was an unfortunate time perhaps to highlight this wonderful young artist! That said, Hannah Diamonds music was a source of great strength and uplift for so many people at a very challenging time. Four years later, we get to see the next phase for Diamond’s music. DIY’s 2020 interview with Diamond is one I want to highlight first. There are a few sections that caught my eye:

“Speaking over the phone from Berlin on the day after the UK general election (“If I was at home, I’d probably be sitting on the sofa, watching the politics channel and feeling pretty disheartened,”) Hannah is freshly out of doing her first ever headline shows. Although she’s done live shows previously, supporting Charli XCX and as part of the PC Music showcases, this is the first time she’s performed to a crowd who have paid specifically to see her. Oh, and all three shows sold out. Obvs. “That’s kind of blown my mind,” Hannah gushes. “I’ve been really overwhelmed by it all, to be honest.”

It’s not a surprise that she’s reached this point, even though it’s been a fairly long journey to get here. A core member of PC Music since the very start, and with her first single released in 2013, Hannah’s debut has been hotly anticipated for years. First announced in 2016 as an EP, ‘Reflections’ has since morphed into an impressive full-length debut that is a moving package of heartbreak and despair, wrapped up with a shiny pop bow. But why the wait? “Because of how the first lot of music that I dropped went down, it felt like I was always under a lot of pressure,” Hannah, *ahem*, reflects. “I didn’t feel like I had the space to make mistakes. I wanted to take my time to make [this album] something that was really good and that I was proud of, and make sure that I could really feel like I stood behind every song. I really didn’t want there to be any filler tracks on the album; I worked really hard on it to make it feel coherent. But I feel like I’ve done it and I feel really happy with it, and that’s the main thing.”

Coherency and consistency are a big theme in both Hannah’s musical and visual output, to the point where she will famously sit retouching a photo she’s taken for hours on end. Does she then see herself as more of an artist or a musician? “I definitely think the feeling of what I am flexes quite a lot,” she muses. “Right now, and especially today, I feel more like a music artist than I do a visual artist. But I know that in January when I’ve got some downtime, I’ll probably primarily be a visual artist for that month.

“I can’t drop the visual work because I enjoy it too much. I need to learn how to navigate doing both somehow, because I think I’d be really unhappy if I had to stop. But I’m excited that I’m feeling more like a music artist at the moment, because it means that if my music starts going really well, it means that a lot of the visual work that I get to do will be personal work, and that’s the stuff that I enjoy the most. The more resources I have to work on personal stuff, the better. Every artist would like that.”

It feels inevitable that Hannah’s music will start taking off in the way she hopes. The PC Music sound has permeated the mainstream through Charli XCX, who has always been a staunch supporter of the pop outliers. In fact, A. G. Cook was the primary producer on her third album 'Charli'. “She’s been repping it for us, which is really cool, because definitely at the start, a lot of people thought what we were doing was pretty weird,” Hannah gleams. “It’s exciting that people are coming round to it.”

As more people tune into Hannah Diamond, she’s got big plans for 2020. “New decade! Shit, that’s crazy isn’t it?” She’s already working on a lot more new music, wants to photograph more pop stars, and has plans to add more live dates at the start of the year. “I’m slightly scared about doing more shows because this little leg that I’ve just done has been pretty interesting and eye-opening. I’m getting an idea of how performing this album affects me emotionally. There’s quite a lot of ups and downs, and I haven’t really experienced that before because I’ve just been doing shows with other people and for other people. It’s very different doing your own, but I’m excited to do a lot more, and work out a way that I can keep myself level’”.

Also in January 2020, CLASH spoke with Diamond after a triumphant gig in London. As part of the creative nexus of PC Music label/movement, Diamond’s aesthetic, collaborators and imagery is thought out – which, as CLASH note, also applied to her live shows. This was someone who was not being directed by the industry and moulded into something commercial and fake. A pure artist who was inspiring to watch come  through:

“There’s an old saying that an artist has their entire life to work on their debut album. With that in mind, what’s the meaning of the name ‘Reflections’?

The album is named after the track 'Reflections' on my album. For me it’s the most important track as I feel it really summarises the sentiment of the whole album and for me really contextualises every other song. It’s about having this image in your head about who you are based on someone else’s opinion of your worth. And slowly starting to realise that the picture you have of yourself is wrong.

That the relationship was a mirror that magnified the ways in which you weren’t compatible with that person and that you are perfect just the way you are. It’s about getting over someone and learning to transfer the love you had for them back onto your self.

You first gained attention as part of the PC Music coterie, how do you approach that term now?

For me, things with PC music have changed quite a lot since 2013. There was a period of time where we all felt super connected and were all living in the same city. Meeting up, hanging out going to parties together. Everything was less official and we were all in the same place. These days, things are transitioning to becoming more official in label terms and everyone has grown up and become more independent. Most of us live in different cities, I’m still super good friends with everyone there’s just more distance between us now.

PHOTO CREDIT: Rachel Lipsitz

At times, the press suggested you were merely an avatar, or a front for male producers. That kind of attitude is appalling – how did it feel to be on the receiving end?

It was really frustrating for me, and I think had more of an impact on my self-esteem than I realised at the time. On the one hand its like great that you must think this is so good that it couldn’t have possibly come from me. But also what is it about me or my appearance, or what I’m doing (because at the time no one really knew much about me at all) that makes me seem like I’m incapable?

It really sucked cos a lot of the think pieces were written from a feminist perspective, but no one reached out to me to ask about my process and some that did have their own agenda and bypassed/twisted what I said to fit that. And that really took away my agency. I still sometimes feel like I have to prove myself.

It’s been over five years since ‘Pink And Blue’ went viral. Why does an album feel right for you at this time, and what makes 2019 the best opportunity to release it?

Sometimes I’m sad that it took so long for me to release my album because it did take a long time. But when I listen to it and I take a step back and look at what I made, including all the artworks, images, graphics, videos. I think no one will ever fully understand how much work and time I put into it other than me. And I’m so happy I took my time because it’s the best body of work I’ve ever made and the closest I’ve ever been to fully realising something I wanted to communicate. And somehow I made all of this when I was having a really tough time in my personal life.

I went through so much between 2016-2018, and 2019 I was coming out the other side and feeling so creative and powerful enough to finish everything off but also enough to feel able to get out on stage and start performing the album as well.

You work with different producers and collaborators on the record, how do you pick this cast? Do you have any tips on who you let into your life and art?

I’m still definitely learning about this, especially since now like I was saying earlier my main collaborators are all over the world. But I think at the start you should try things out, work with lots of friends, people you know who’s stuff you like and see what works and what fits. Then when you’ve worked that part out, if you’ve found someone or people that you really connect with on a creative level and personal level sometimes too is super important. Stick with them, look out for them support each other. For me it’s really important for me to have personal connections with the people I work with, it means I can be my self unashamedly and make my best work without feeling judged or inadequate”.

Before getting to a new interview, I want to come to a brief feature from FADER. It was in promotion of Diamond’s Affirmations. It arrived earlier in the year, at a moment  that the PC Music label is starting to wind up. Perhaps one of her best cuts yet, Affirmations is one of the best songs of the year. It all bodes well for an album that is already being tipped to be among the finest of 2023:

“With the news that PC Music is winding down after 10 years of changing the pop landscape, each new release from the label is bound to come with a new poignancy. That’s certainly the case with “Affirmations,” the new song from Hannah Diamond. Extraterrestrial mall-pop built for blasting away melancholy, “Affirmations” makes the struggle for positivity sound like a battle worth fighting.”

Diamond said of the new song in a press statement: “This one particular day we were on Zoom and my carefully placed camera angle in my bedroom had accidentally shifted to reveal my ‘wall of self-esteem.’ It’s a wall of affirmations I put together when I was at a really low point and had a really negative view of myself. I decided that I would every day when I was struggling write five good things about myself and add them to my wall.

“Through the window of the Zoom, I became aware that my wall might look like a wall of madness,” she continued, “so I explained to Dave what it was. He was super supportive and after a long chat he said, ‘hey, “Affirmations” – great song title’”.

I am going to finish with a new interview from The Guardian. There will be more press with Diamond closer to October and Perfect Picture. Declaring her upcoming album as the pinnacle of Pop in 2023, there is a lot of faith and support around what Diamond is doing. She has caught the heart and mind of the nation. An artist who will be a worldwide sensation soon enough:

“Diamond debuted a decade ago with Pink and Blue, a dewy-eyed but slightly unnerving bubblegum single with a photoshoot to match. Back then, her music was deemed so uncanny – so pink and so feminine, especially in the experimental circles she was associated with – that many onlookers speculated whether Diamond was a model hired as the face of a project by one of her (male) friends in the then-nascent PC Music avant-pop collective. “A lot of my agency was taken away,” she says. “There were a lot of think-pieces about whether I was a real person.”

While writing Perfect Picture, Diamond started thinking about her early career in the context of “what it means to be a girl or woman in the music industry, who’s having to deal with these two sides of herself – a very pure me that my family and closest friends know, and this outward version of myself that’s almost a magnification of all those things, a very pristine pop version.”

She came to the realisation that these are twinned experiences: “To be a pop star is to always be performing and to be a girl is to always be performing,” especially in a world dominated by the internet, where “everyone thinks about how they are branding themselves; you’re never really off duty.” This is amplified under the gaze young women are subject to. “As a woman and a girl, I’ve always felt a lot of pressure to be perfect in some way – when I was young, I was scared to not be good,” she says. “And then you become an adult, and you become aware your body has sexual currency and start learning that there are all these contradictions that are impossible to live up to.”

So Diamond leaned into the girlishness that is both scorned and fetishised across culture. For Perfect Picture, she says, “I wanted to shed the ick that had developed in me for all this stuff” – pink, exaggerated femininity – “that I was really attracted to”. But Diamond remains “always aware of how much I’m contributing to …” – she air quotes – “‘the spectacle of girlhood.’ Femininity, the way it’s been commodified, marketed and corporatised, you could argue it has been pretty oppressive towards women. How much, by creating the images I make, feeds into that [even with] the intention of challenging something?”

PHOTO CREDIT: Hannah Diamond/Carina Kehlet Schou

As a child in her home town of Norwich, Diamond was “very much a tracksuit kind of girl”; her “crazy creative” grandma’s house was an “explosion of pink,” which she found “all too much”. But by the time she moved to London for university, she was dressing “quite outrageously and really having fun with it,” then she found that in the capital, “the way I dressed affected the experience I had in the outside world.” She started dressing more plainly, to avoid being catcalled or kerb-crawled.

Things changed when she found a bright pink North Face puffer jacket for £10 in a Covent Garden secondhand store. The coat “almost felt like a safe way” to be typically feminine. Since then, she has been “learning to be myself in a confident way, and that it doesn’t have to feel limiting to express yourself in girlish ways.” Diamond wore the jacket on the cover of Pink and Blue; it’s since become one of her most iconic outfits. “Little did I know the impact that jacket would have,” she says. “A pink item had the ability to transform me into a musician, and make that a viable career, and transform my relationship with myself.”

Her single Poster Girl rejects the tyranny of perfection she had struggled under: “It’s the imperfections in moments / That make life so worth it.” It’s a surprising admission for an artist whose visual identity has always been defined by photos so airbrushed as to look surreal. Diamond’s early visuals – as well as the ones she made for other PC-affiliated artists, including QT, GFOTY, Sophie and Charli XCX – became hugely influential; their pristine, hyper-feminine aesthetic, once deemed outre, is now so commonplace in mainstream pop that, when Diamond released Poster Girl earlier this month, Swedish pop star Zara Larsson accused Diamond of copying her aesthetic before backtracking: “I didn’t know about her work … now I do, and she’s an icon”.

A truly wonderful artist who everyone should know about, I am so excited to see where Hannah Diamond heads next. Perfect Picture is certainly going to be one of the best albums of this year – no pressure on her! -, which will lead to new opportunities. Maybe some big exposure at huge festivals next year. With this loyal and very passionate fanbase behind her, there is no stopping this jewel in Pop’s modern crown. When it comes to Hannah Diamond, there is no doubt that she is set…

FOR superstardom.

__________

Follow Hannah Diamond

 Official:

https://shop.hannahdiamond.com/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/hannahdiamond_/

TikTok:

https://www.tiktok.com/discover/Hannah-Diamond

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/Hannahdiamond_

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/3sXErEOw7EmO6Sj7EgjHdU

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDX7cO28VXOvEdrwpWFQu0g

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/hannahdiamondofficial/

FEATURE: One For the Record Collection! Essential November Releases

FEATURE:

 

 

One For the Record Collection!

IN THIS PHOTO: Dolly Parton/PHOTO CREDIT: Vijat Mohindra 

Essential November Releases

_________

SOME great November-due albums…

IN THIS PHOTO: Cat Power

have been announced. Looking into next month and what is worth saving your money for, I will recommend those albums you should add to your collection. I am going to start off with four that are due on 3rd November. It is quite a busy week for new albums. bar italia’s The Twits is an album people should pre-order. A wonderful group everyone needs to know, here are some details:

“bar italia are the London based three-piece of Nina Cristante, Jezmi Tarik Fehmi and Sam Fenton.

They release their second full length of 2023, The Twits, less than six months after their acclaimed Matador debut, Tracey Denim.

The Twits was recorded by the trio over eight weeks from February 2023 in a makeshift home studio in Mallorca, and was mixed by Marta Salogni. It finds bar italia’s economical yet evocative songcraft taking raucous, mystic, unkempt, occasionally sinister, and wholly committed turns. Songs like “my little tony”, with its in-the-red riff and excitable hooks, the cathartic four-on-the-floor of ‘world’s greatest emoter’ and the festival tent psychedelia of “Hi-fiver” need little in the way of exposition – these are exhilarating rock songs, if wayward and strange.

Other moments see the band’s increasingly signature, three-act mini-dramas moving into previously uncharted territory. Cristante, Fehmi and Fenton can each manifest a different melody, mood, and cadence – at times overlapping and linear, at others unexpectedly divergent – often within the space of thirty seconds, a tag team rooted in shared language and kinship. “Jelsy”, for instance, plays out like a conversation between friends over wistful, buzzing country blues, the alternating voices at points comforting, wry and hopelessly yearning. The sinuous, slow-burning waltz of “twist” stands out in its bare lyricism and seems to invite each band member’s individual take on a confessional.

While Tracey Denim was notable for its compact 2-3 minute compositions, horizontal and open-ended tracks like “Shoo” ebb and flow, moving from reptilian dive-bar soloing to a palpitating two-note piano coda. ‘glory-hunter’ takes playful twists and turns before ending up somewhere entirely different from where it started. “Real house wibes (desperate house vibes)” and “que surprise” imply sleepless, noirish misadventure, while at the other end of the light spectrum, “sounds like you had to be there” features some of the band’s most sweetly optimistic musical gestures yet. Closer “bibs” is a rare instance where all three can be heard in unison, as a procession of ghostly chords and lacerating feedback bookends the group’s most adventurous and rich set to date.

Released in May, bar italia’s Matador debut Tracey Denim followed a string of word-of-mouth releases on Dean Blunt’s World Music label and received widespread attention from publications including The Guardian (“one of the albums of 2023 so far”), The Times (“excellent debut album”), The Observer (‘Artist To Watch’), NME ("a lasting impression that’s all of their own making"), The Quietus (“endlessly evocative”) and Pigeons And Planes (“quickly establishing themselves as one of the most enticing upcoming bands”). Single “Nurse!” was playlisted on BBC 6 Music and received spins from BBC Radio 1, Absolute Radio and NTS. The release was accompanied by a UK tour, culminating in a sold-out headline show at the ICA in London, which The Spectator described as “transfixing… They just make their beautiful, off-kilter music, and let you unfold your own stories on top”.

There are a few buying options when it comes to Black Grape’s Orange Head. Go and pre-order and see what I mean! Following 2017’s Pop Voodoo, Rough Trade give us some more details (the album isn’t available to own on their site until 15th November). I am really looking forward to one of the most characterful forces in music. Orange Head will definitely not disappoint:

“The return of Black Grape with an essential new platter. Black Grape could only have been made in Manchester. The swagger, fun and cryptic humour seem hewn from a city historian AJP Taylor once described as offering an archetypally different way of English urban life to London. Both Shaun Ryder and Paul Leveridge, known as Kermit, came from edgy-but-cool parts of the city. In Shaun’s case Salford, with Kermit originating from Moss Side. For those unfamiliar, ‘the Moss’ lay in the shadow of Manchester City’s old stadium at Maine Road, and was one of the first multi-ethnic areas in Manchester.

Black Grape are widely regarded as one of the most innovative and iconic bands of the last twenty five years. Black Grape have had 4 Top 10 singles and their debut album It’s Great When You’re Straight… Yeah shot straight to No.1 in the UK charts upon its release in 1995 and went Platinum. Follow up album Stupid Stupid Stupid went Gold in 1997. 

Ryder has grown from a wild young tearaway into a British National Treasure. Black Grape always were a grimily cosmic musical jigsaw, melding rock, hip-hop, acid house, psychedelic pop and reggae with Ryder’s gutter poetry, delivered in his inimitable shyster’s bark”.

Also out on 3rd November, the wonderfully-named new album from the legendary Laura Veirs, Phone Orphans, is released. The title is appropriate, given the fact that these incredible songs were from her phone. Almost lost to the world, this album follows the acclaimed Found Light of 2022. I would urge anyone new to her work or familiar to investigate this wonderful work. Phone Orphans sounds like it is an intriguing new chapter for one of the greatest songwriters alive. I would recommend people pre-order this essential album:

“It feels good, on my 50th birthday and after 30 years of writing songs, to bring these "Phone Orphans" into the light - These songs have been been hiding out on my phone, some of them for over eight years. They are about my family, my lovers and me. I recorded them alone in my living room into my voice memo app. I like their relaxed feel. These songs were mastered but we made no edits to the recordings. I hope you enjoy this intimate glimpse into my artistic process. All songs by me except "Up is a Nice Place to Be" by Rosalie Sorrels and "The Archers" with lyrics adapted from a poem by Federico Garcia Lorca”.

One other great must-order due on 3rd November is Cold War Kids. The eponymous album from the California band, go and get yourself a copy if you can. A hugely prolific band, their new album follows on from 2021’s New Age Norms 3. I am interested to see what Cold War Kids offers up:

“The band’s singer and songwriter Nathan Willett describes: "This is our self titled record. Everybody gets one. This felt like the right time because the sound of this record is the sound that makes Cold War Kids unlike any other. I’m so proud of these songs. They took a long time to come together. The longing and struggle and joy I wanted to express are personal to me and I am so excited to share it with our fans who have come with us on the journey”.

There are some other pretty great albums due on 3rd November. I wanted to finish this week’s round-up with Marnie Stern’s The Comeback Kid. Go and pre-order the fifth studio album from the New York City-born songwriter. The Comeback Kid comes ten years after the acclaimed and wonderful The Chronicles of Marnia. I am looking forward to seeing what Stern offers with her new album. It is going to be a wonderful release and an aural delight. An artist that takes you somewhere with her music:

“It’s been a decade since we last heard from Marnie Stern, but when her guitar bursts in like a shower of stardust on The Comeback Kid, the follow-up to 2013’s The Chronicles of Marnia, it’s like no time has passed.

But this is no nostalgia trip. The Comeback Kid is a statement of intent. “I can’t keep on moving backwards,” Stern repeats on anthemic opening track “Plain Speak,” her fingers furiously tapping the fretboard as the song joyfully zips forward like a rocket hitting warp speed. Stern continually pushes herself outside of her comfort zone throughout The Comeback Kid, including not leaning on the tapping technique that launched a thousand Eddie Van Halen comparisons. “Til It’s Over” is as straight-ahead an “alternative rock” song as Stern has ever made and there’s a cover of Ennio Morricone’s “Il Girotondo Della Note.”

“It was so great to be able to start being myself again and when I would think, ‘Oh, is that too, too weird?’ I'd remember I'm allowed to do whatever I want! This is mine. It's me,” says Stern of writing songs for The Comeback Kid. “I'm trying to go against the grain of this bullshit that when you get older, you lose your sense of taste. I want to empower people to not be so homogenous and go against the grain a little bit.”

Taking joy in your individuality is the message of The Comeback Kid, as is the realization that making music which truly reflects who you are in all your brightness and your weirdness is quite possibly the key to happiness. “This record is about reassuring yourself that happiness is not about what kind of things you have or how many things you have or what you don’t have—it’s about all the good things you do,” says Stern”.

There are a couple of must-own albums due on 10th November from two established and loved acts. Beirut’s Hadsel is going to be a real treat. Pre-order this magnificent album from the U.S. band. Four years after the positively-received Gallipoli, it seems Hadsel is going to be another fantastic addition to their catalogue. You may be new to the band and unsure of where to start. I would say stream their albums and, if you can, set some money aside for their upcoming release:

“Hadsel is the first new full - length record since Beirut’s 2019 release, Gallipoli, and the first on Zach Condon’s own label , Pompeii Records. Recorded in the Norwegian island of Hadsel shortly after a physical and mental break forced Condon to cancel his 2019 tour, Condon was looking for a place to recover after being left in a state of shock and self-doubt. Working in isolation, Condon explains, “I was lost in a trance, stumbling blindly through my own mental collapse that I had been pushing aside since I was a teenager. It came and rang me like a bell. I was left agonising many things past and present while the beauty of the nature, the northern lights and fearsome storms played an awesome show around me. The few hours of light would expose the unfathomable be auty of the mountains and the fjords, and the hours - long twilights would fill me with subdued excitement. I’d like to believe that scenery is somehow present in the music.

The resulting is a collection of songs beautifully reflecting that vulnerability, sense of self-determination and belief that after collapse, one can learn to manage on their own again”.

Maybe an unexpected recommendation, Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert is out on 10th November. This beautiful album is one everyone will want to pre-order. It is going to be such a rich and emotional listen from one of the most powerful and stirring voices in music. I do love a live album. Cat Power’s tribute to Bob Dylan is going to be a very special one indeed:

“In November 2022, Cat Power took the stage at London’s Royal Albert Hall and delivered a song-for-song recreation of one of the most fabled and transformative live sets of all time. Held at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in May 1966—but long known as the “Royal Albert Hall Concert” due to a mislabeled bootleg—the original performance saw Bob Dylan switching from acoustic to electric midway through the show, drawing ire from an audience of folk purists and forever altering the course of rock-and-roll. In her own rendition of that historic night, the artist otherwise known as Chan Marshall inhabited each song with equal parts conviction and grace and a palpable sense of protectiveness, ultimately transposing the anarchic tension of Dylan’s set with a warm and luminous joy. Now captured on the live album Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert, Marshall’s spellbinding performance both lovingly honors her hero’s imprint on history and brings a stunning new vitality to many of his most revered songs”.

I will finish off with albums due on 17th November. There are four very different ones that I want to recommend. The first is Dolly Parton’s Rockstar. The iconic artist and philanthropist covers a range of legendary songs and joins forces with some musical greats, you will definitely want to pre-order this magnificent album. Aside from the questionable inclusion of Steven Tyler and Kid Rock – two quite controversial figures for different reasons -, the guestlist looks pretty impressive:

“Global icon and recent Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductee, Dolly Parton, has joined forces with some of Rock music’s most legendary artists along with today’s biggest stars for her first-ever Rock album, Rockstar. The ever-evolving Parton teamed up with an all-star roster of musicians for the 30-song collection which includes 9 original tracks and 21 covers of iconic rock anthems”.

1. Rockstar (special guest Richie Sambora)

2. World on Fire

3. Every Breath You Take (feat. Sting)

4. Open Arms (feat. Steve Perry)

5. Magic Man (feat. Ann Wilson with special guest Howard Leese)

6. Long As I Can See The Light (feat. John Fogerty)

7. Either Or (feat. Kid Rock)

8. I Want You Back (feat. Steven Tyler with special guest Warren Haynes)

9. What Has Rock And Roll Ever Done For You (feat. Stevie Nicks with special guest Waddy Wachtel)

10. Purple Rain

11. Baby, I Love Your Way (feat. Peter Frampton)

12. I Hate Myself For Loving You (feat. Joan Jett & The Blackhearts

13. Night Moves (feat. Chris Stapleton)

14. Wrecking Ball (feat. Miley Cyrus)

15. (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (feat. P!nk & Brandi Carlile)

16. Keep On Loving You (feat. Kevin Cronin)

17. Heart Of Glass (feat. Debbie Harry)

18. Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me (feat. Elton John)

19. Tried To Rock And Roll Me (feat. Melissa Etheridge)

20. Stairway To Heaven (feat. Lizzo & Sasha Flute)

21. We Are The Champions

22. Bygones (feat. Rob Halford with special guests Nikki Sixx & John 5)

23. My Blue Tears (feat. Simon Le Bon)

24. What’s Up? (feat. Linda Perry)

25. You’re No Good (feat. Emmylou Harris & Sheryl Crow)

26. Heartbreaker (feat. Pat Benatar & Neil Giraldo)

27. Bittersweet (feat. Michael McDonald)

28. I Dreamed About Elvis (feat. Ronnie McDowell with special guest The Jordanaires)

29. Let It Be (feat. Paul McCartney & Ringo Starr with special guests Peter Frampton & Mick Fleetwood)

30. Free Bird (feat. Ronnie Van Zant with special guests Gary Rossington, Artimus Pyle and The Artimus Pyle Band)”.

Another essential 17th November album is Emeli Sandé’s How Were We to Know. A decade after she came onto the scene, this hugely respected artist is back with a new album. If you are not overly-familiar with Sandé’s music, I would still advise you pre-order this album, as it is shaping up to be very interesting and fantastic. Her fifth studio album comes a year after Let's Say for Instance:

“Introduced to the world ten years ago, Emeli Sandé MBE has become an icon of British singer-songwriting; emotional, honest, and prolific in the kind of manner that cements you as a go-to artist for heartfelt pop sensibility. This latest pop record is reminiscent of 2012, when Emeli had her first breakout hit.

How Were We To Know is Emeli's second independent album release through Chrysalis Records. “There was a lot I wanted to say about myself, and I hope that through the lyrics people will get to understand me on a deeper level.”

How Were We To Know’s 11 tracks explore intimate encounters with love in all its forms, along with the risk required to pursue it. “Once you’ve been hurt, it’s very hard to pick up the pieces again and allow yourself to be vulnerable,” Sandé says. “So I think these songs explore the bravery of love, and loving others but also yourself. These songs were pieces of a puzzle I had to put together, and now feels like the right time to share them.”

The album features production from Jonny Coffer (Beyoncé, Miley Cyrus), Jim Jonsin (ASAP Rocky, Usher, Eminem), DI Genius (Drake, Raye, Sean Paul), Rxwntree, Chris Loco and Mac and Phil”.

The penultimate album I am going to recommend is Nicki Minaj’s Pink Friday 2. We do not have a pre-order link at the moment. Suffice to say, keep your eyes peeled and add it to your calendar to order this album when it arrives. Capital FM give us some details about the upcoming album from a legendary rapper and global superstar. Someone who recently featured on the soundtrack for Barbie:

“’Pink Friday 2's release date is 17th November, so Barbz have a matter of weeks to wait.

Nicki has promised fans 'will love this album', which is a follow-up to her iconic record which dropped in 2010. If the bombshell release news wasn't enough to get fans hyped, Nicki also announced she's heading on tour(!), news of which will come later this year.

Here's what we know so far about Nicki's 2023 album...

When is Nicki Minaj's 'Pink Friday 2' album coming out?

Nicki Minaj's fifth album 'Pink Friday 2' will be released on 17th November 2023 after she had to push back the release date for reasons unknown. The album was originally meant to be released in October.

In her announcement post about the album's updated release date, the rap queen told her followers: "I love you guys so much. I am so grateful for the years of support and love you guys have given me. At times maybe I didn’t even deserve all that you have poured into me.

"Nonetheless, you. will. love. this. album. I will give tour deets closer to that time, but obviously the tour will start around the first quarter of 2024. I’ll also share the REAL album cover at a later date."

Nicki has released her first single from the album 'The Last Time I Saw You', which sounds incredible, exclusively on TikTok and it's available on streaming platforms on 1st September.

What is Nicki Minaj's 2023 album called?

Nicki's upcoming album is called 'Pink Friday 2', a sequel to 'Pink Friday' which will be released within the same month her iconic EP was released in a whole 13 years ago.

'Pink Friday' was a generation-defining album when Nicki released the record on 22 November 2010 and included bangers like 'Super Bass', 'Blazin' and 'Here I Am'.

What's the album cover for 'Pink Friday 2'?

Nicki has finally unveiled the album artwork for 'Pink Friday 2', revealing a pink-themed photo of herself on half of a train carriage floating above a glistening city. Always one to treat her fans, Nicki confirmed there's another album cover on the way and that the first is just one of two.

Dressed an an all-white outfit and with an intricate head piece placed in her long ombre pink hair, Nicki looks like an actual goddess in the shoot.

What's on the track list for 'Pink Friday 2'?

There's not yet a track list for 'Pink Friday 2' but Nicki's promised it's going to be a banger and as it's a follow-up to her 2010 record of the same name, fans naturally have high hopes.

She also excitingly confirmed that Rihanna will feature on her new album - much like she did on the first 'Pink Friday'!

Responding to a fan who asked her if Rih is featured on 'Pink Friday 2', she said: "Is pigs motherf**king flying? Hold on I think I just gave a trick answer.”

That's all the confirmation we need!

As a reminder in the meantime, here's what was on the 'Pink Friday' track list all those years ago:

I'm The Best

Roman's Revenge (Ft. Eminem)

Did It On'em

Right Thru Me

Fly (Ft. Rihanna)

Save Me

Moment 4 Life (Ft. Drake)

Check It Out by Nicki Minaj & will.i.am

Blazin' (Ft. Kanye West)

Here I Am

Dear Old Nicki

Your Love

Last Chance (Ft. Natasha Bedingfield)

Super Bass

Blow Ya Mind

Muny

Girls Fall Like Dominoes

Catch Me

Wave Ya Hand

Roman’s Revenge”.

I am going to end with the new album from The Polyphonic Spree. Salvage Enterprise is out on 17th November. Go and pre-order what is going to be an enriching album. It comes two years after the collection of covers, Afflatus. It sounds like this is going to be another evocative and spiritual record from the huge choral group. Through the years, the Dallas group have had so many people pass through their ranks:

“The phoenix symbolizes a new beginning. The fire burns off the last vestiges of the past as the bird spreads its wings and takes flight into the future. The Polyphonic Spree harness the flames of rebirth on their 2023 full-length offering, Salvage Enterprise. Led by frontman, founder, producer, multi-instrumentalist, and visionary Tim DeLaughter, the group embark on their next season. They’re reverent of their history, yet they’re also ready for an even brighter tomorrow.

“Across all of the music I’ve done, lyrically there’s a sense of desperation and a moment of convincing myself I’m going to make it through regardless of how the music dresses up,” notes Tim. “On this one, I struggled with the amount of vulnerability I was experiencing and was willing to share both musically and lyrically, but ultimately decided to let it play out. Now that it's done, I'm happy with the dance between the two. It’s a ‘rising-from-theashes’ record.”

Salvage Enterprise beckons complete immersion. Opener “Galloping Seas (Section 44)” affixes softly strummed acoustic guitar to an orchestral hum as Tim urges, “Hold on through the galloping seas.” “We’re all galloping through rough waters,” he says. “I tried to describe the process as well as I could and encourage people to keep their heads above the storm and the waves. Ride it out. It’s going to be okay. It starts off very calm and introspective, and you can envision where it’s going.”

Flute echoes over nimbly plucked guitar during “Shadows On The Hillside (Section 48)” as keys twinkle. A glorious harmony amplifies the nostalgia of “Hop Off The Fence (Section 49).” It concludes with “Morning Sun, I Built The Stairs (Section 52).” Optimism strains through his hopeful intonation, “I learned to fly, the more that I become a new reason, I want to try,” uplifted by boisterous horns and cinematic strings. It crashes into an Ennio Morricone-style crescendo bolstered even higher by operatic vocals. “There is an arc of leaving the world behind, stripping your old self away, and becoming new again,” he offers. “You’re shedding off this old world, and you’re heading into the future. It’s an epic ending. You’ve made it. You’re going to be alright.” In the end, The Polyphonic Spree are the soundtrack to that light at the end of the tunnel”.

These are the November-due albums you should check out. You can see what else has been announced and the speculated and rumoured albums – some of which might be announced for November. Things can change and update very quickly indeed. The ones above give you a good starting point. I am sure there are a few that you will definitely want to…

ADD to your collection.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s Lionheart at Forty-Five: The Interviews

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s Lionheart at Forty-Five

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during the photoshoot for Lionheart, 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz

The Interviews

_________

AS I do with anniversary features…

relating to Kate Bush I am going to bring in some press interviews. It is good to start off getting an idea of how the album was being perceived and what Bush was saying. Two of her albums have big anniversaries coming up. Her seventh, The Red Shoes, is thirty on 2nd November. On 13th  November, Lionheart turns forty-five. Released in the same year as her debut, The Kick Inside, Lionheart was a chart success. It reached six in the U.K. I am going to pull in a few press interviews that were published around the time of its release. One of Bush’s albums that is under-appreciated but is actually incredible strong and fascinating, below are some insights into how Kate Bush was feeling about a rushed second studio album. With gems like Wow and Kashka from Baghdad among its ranks, the ten-track beauty still sounds fantastic and offers up new treats! There are not a tonne of interviews about Lionheart from 1978. Some that go into 1979. I am going to end with one that is focused on the album. First, published on 7th October, 1978, Record Mirror’s Tim Lott interviewed Bush about a hectic and successful year. Just over a month until she released an unexpected second album, there was this sense of a unique artist finding popularity and a worldwide audience:

“Her abnormality has never been more apparent than in this setting: a L100 at night, two floor leather-and-flowers suite at the Montcalm Hotel, Marble Arch.

She has just been interviewed by "Ritz" and "Vogue". Attended by two press officers, she is, despite her protestations, a star, a true star, by virtue of her immense success, her pink skin and her Page 3 curves.

A number one single (an international hit) a number one album and immense publicity: Kate Bush is a phenomenon. The fate that befalls such animals - arrogance, self-indulgence, mania - has yet to manifest its symptoms, partially because this particular phenomenon is dedicated to the preservation of her personal reality.

Nervous

"I'm not really aware of being subjected to any starmaking machine."

She tap her fingers on the chrome and glass table in the only nervous gesture she possesses.

"I know that might sound odd, but I've really no idea about it. The record company thought this hotel would be practical. I thought it would be nice. It's quite a trip for me to be here.

"I didn't walk in here and say 'where are the flowers? Where is my champagne?'

"I hope I haven't become a prima donna yet. I really mean that. I really, really resent that a lot.

"It's nice if you're on the road that you should have somewhere nice to sleep. But I'm not into the 'Oh, Dahling!' bit, and everybody having a Rolls Royce."

It sounds almost defensive, but one subject that Bush is totally convincing about is how critical she considers her grasp on her own situation.

She has reached a point already of being such a valuable property to EMI Records that she is at the point of being able to control her immediate destiny.

The interviews she does are her own choice - "I want to get into as many areas as I can. So I did the fashion magazines and "Vegetarian" and "The Sun". I'm testing the water.

She says that she is, quote, into people. People, of course, reciprocate, and therein lies the danger. A surfeit of attention killed Janis Joplin and, more lately, put Ply Styrene into a mental home.

"I have some person principles I stick by, though they are pretty free. They don't just apply to the press. They are my way of living.

"I have tried to avoid an 'image'. If you have an image you intend to maintain, it's going to be very difficult, because you're going to get holes in your image. I may be that animal 'Kate Bush' a bit when I'm offstage, but mostly, I'm me."

Kate spends most of her time with a smile on her face that look straight at you, but she looks away and almost shutters for a moment.

"The things I don't like doing is... is... going to these sort of parties that you hear about. I don't go to parties. I find that sort of thing very unhealthy. In fact I find them disgusting."

She pronounces the word 'parties' like you or I might pronounce some vile disease or weird sin.

"It's not me. I'm basically a quiet person. When I get the time, I like to go home. I clean up the flat - which is a mess, because I'm never there. And I get some friends around that maybe I haven't seen for a long time.

"It's not a question of insulating myself. This is something that is extremely important to me - I'm very much a human being, and I don't want to lose that.

"You don't have to believe all the sycophants. I am aware that in my position I am both vulnerable and very powerful. People are always trying to grab a piece of your pie. But it can only be down to you to get yourself out of... er... a vulnerability situation."

This tiny vision is both unusual and predictable; the first because she is so damn scientific, the second because she is so blatantly optimistic.

She takes a relentlessly practical approach to her career - "I have to look at it in a realistic way" - and admits that she trusts no-one at all. On the other hand she believes like many before her, that she can have her cake and eat it, that she can be a star and not a star, that she can somehow escape the pre-requisite of her job - to give, and give, and still give, at the expense of, at the very least, a part of her personality.

"People might call me it, but I'm not a star," she says, and I think she almost believes it. "I'm just a person who writes songs that, at the moment, people happen to like.

"They might not like anything on the next album: in which case I'll still be the same."

Except that she'll be a failed star. Kate has yet to reach the point of acceptance that things will never be the same. Her family, her friends will inevitably take second place and some will disappear. The blue-print is there, and inescapable.

Or maybe I'm wrong, and Kate has more strength of mind than I dare hope. Maybe. She is certainly convinced, and that's half the battle.

"You don't have to make yourself an island. In your head, you know what you are."

Illusions

"The only person with you all your life is you. Your parents die. Things inside you die - illusions, gushes of personality. Only you can sort yourself out. Yourself may not be all you need, but it's all you got."

Whatever problems have still to hit Kate, she is as mentally well prepared as anyone could be. A precious - in the real sense of the word - teenager, her defenses are rooted in her very successful self-adjustment.

After reading the teaching of the philosopher Gurdjieff, which made an enormous impression on her, she came to the conclusion that human beings were all a load of shit anyway, which is an enormous help with any ego problems that might present themselves.

"Look around you just a little bit and you realise that you're nothing. Look at the world, the universe - this is getting very hippyish, right? - but we are very small.

"And yet everybody goes around thinking how incredible they are - you know, I am it, I am everything.

"People are obsessed by themselves. I am even. I find myself thinking about myself a lot. "

Kate sees this, to a certain extent, as an evil suffered through lack of mental discipline, of which she wishes she possessed more. She wants, she says, to be a "better human being."

"Because I'm in the position I am I have an incredible chance of being able to do that. I'm in a position where I have power to help people - by doing charity shows, spreading the word about whales... I don't know."

With her peace and love philosophies, her conservation ideals, her Gurdjieff satin 'n' tat post sixties glamour, and her vegetarian obsession, it's not surprising that she has been mistaken several times for that anachronistic chestnut, the "hippy".

"I'm not a hippy, though I thought the potential of the movement was enormous. I was too young, really.

"I was never particularly into drugs. I don't even get into alcohol very much. Just nicotine really. I smoked my first cigarette at the age of 9."

She experimented with drugs, though - marijuana and something she never managed to identify.

"I've never taken acid. I don't think I'm into things like that. I've seen a lot of people screwed up through it. The idea of it is really fascinating, though - to be able to see the room breathe, and stuff like that.

"There must be a way for you to do it without drugs."

Kate, nevertheless, has her trite addictions, innocent though they are. She is, for instance, hooked on chocolate, which she says she has a physical craving for. Food is drug enough.

How long that situation holds remains to be seen. Kate is about to experience pressures she can only guess at, by embarking on a major tour, reaching Britain in February.

This, she is told, is not a necessity, the album would still sell without it.

"But I feel it's a really important thing for an artist to do. It's the only chance people who really like you get to see you without media obstruction."

Kate is in the very unusual position of being a young, inexperienced artist who isn't being forced into any compromises. EMI has exerted pressures for her to hurry her new album, something she refuses point blank to do.

"I have to. If you're not ready, then you can't give it to them. There is no way you can rush an artistic thing to meet a business deadline.

"If you blow that artistic," she laughs at her own grammatical gaff, "you're going to lose so much for nothing.

"I've been really lucky, I have. I [It???] often terrifies me, and I wonder, why? I think it's a very karmic thing - what you give you, you get back."

Kate has Good Karma. She does nothing to bely her apparently angelic nature. It gets difficult to stomach that anyone can be so thumper.

"Actually," she jibes, "I mug old ladies. Would you like me to smash a window or something?

"Seriously, I recognise flaws in myself, and try to keep them quiet.

"It's a drag to throw your faults around for other people to see. But I do recognise flaws in myself, of course.

"I don't, for instance, like hearing very truthful thing about myself. It's hard to give examples without giving away very personal things, like within the family, but I get really indignant. I put a lot of defenses up.

"And I can be stubborn. I might have a strong idea in my brain and it's hard to thrash it out with anyone else, though the idea could be wrong."

Emotion

"Also, I'm very soft. My emotion just gets in the way, sometimes at business meetings - my intellect does not have control over my passions.

"Still I don't know anyone who hates me. Why should anyone? I don't do anything to make them. There are, after all, very few people I dislike."

Tread carefully here Lott.

The assumption is very easy after quotes of such a... gentle nature, that Kate Bush is a sort of talented blancmange, determined to be like, a rock 'n' roll goody twoshoes.

I don't think that's true. Though people complimenting people was never one of my hobbies, I went to meet this cherub with some determination to find the brat inside, or at least expose the milky veneer as a good PR. I got a glimpse of neither.

This lead me to suspect that Kate Bush is actually for real. She is not a hippy-dippy altruist or a walking media exercise. She is what she seems: a teenager with a clear head, and obvious talent.

The vision will probably crack as the Biz tightens its grip on her swan-like neck, but at the moment Kate Bush is a creature I thought extinct: a phenomenon with ideals.

This thing of beauty may not be a joy forever, but least acknowledge it while it lasts”.

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz

The second interview moves us into November 1978. One I have highlighted before, Harry Doherty spoke with Kate Bush on behalf of Melody Maker. Clearly fascinated by this true original and wonderful voice, there was this sense of Kate Bush being enigmatic. Not as transparent and predictable as most of her Pop peers:

“The enigma that is Kate Bush--it confuses us all. I've just read a bitter character assassination of Kate Bush (in another paper) and the central area of complaint around which this assault revolves is that Ms. Bush is "nice"

"An hour or so in the company of Kate Bush," this enlightened scribe considered, "is like being trapped for the duration in a very wholesome TV show with definite but unwarranted intellectual aspirations."

I can understand that as a reaction to a well-mannered chance meeting, but really, had the writer listened attentively to her first album (regardless of liking or disliking it), I don't think he would have come to the same rash and puerile conclusion.

Actually, Kate Bush scares me, for a combination of reasons. The first is the diplomatic pleasantness and awesome logic she displays in interviews, but that is only one dimension--she is, in fact, a "nice" person. It is when that initial impact is paired with the multifarious intensity of her music that I start to quiver.

The contrast is eerie, and frightening. In the studio, living out her imaginative fantasies, kate Bush is strickien by a rush of surrealism, and suddenly a range of weird personalities are displayed. It is a subconsciousness that was evident on her first album, The Kick Inside, and it is captured to an even greater extent on Lionheart, the sequel now released.

"Nice" is not a word I'd turn to to describe the consequences. The songwriting, the singing, the arrangements, the production have the mark of a singular personality. Kate Bush's music is more like a confrontation. At times, it makes the listener feel uneasy and insecure. Kate's approach to her work is marked by an obstinate refusal to compromise in any way, so she does not make it easy for the listener to get into the music. To begin with, it's a challenge.

Because, then, it's difficult to appreciate full Kate Bush's music (and who, after all, is she to make such demands?)--compounded with the fact that she seems to have the Midas touch--she is set up for criticism, which must make it all the more fulfilling to carry off two awards in the MM Poll. Even when told of her performance in the Poll, Kate girlishly enthuses: "That's wonderful! Fantastic! Incredible!"

Nice.

The success of The Kick Inside and its hit singles ( Wuthering Heights and The Man With the Child in His Eyes) was as much a hindrance as a help when the time came for Kate Bush to record a second album. As she has said before, the terms of reference were suddenly overturned. Instead of a rising talent, she is now a risen talent--and anything less than an emulation of the initial success will be interpreted as a failure. It's a pressure, though, that she can live with.

There are similarities to the debut album. Lionheart is produced once more by Andrew Powell and, generally, the musicians who did the honours on The Kick Inside are recalled. Kate wants the connections between her first and second album to stop there.

For instance, her own band makes a slight contribution to the new album, being featured on two of the tracks, Wow and Kashka From Baghdad, and had it not been for a mix-up in the organisation, might have made a heavier contribution. It is, it appears, a sensitive situation, and one that Kate doesn't care to dwell upon, but she's still determined that, eventually, her own band--Charlie Morgan (drums), Brian Bath (guitars), Del Palmer (bass), Paddy Bush (mandolin)--will play a more prominent part in the recording proceedings.

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush during the photoshoot for Lionheart, 1978/PHOTO CREDIT: Gered Mankowitz

On the subject of producing, it's significant that Kate is accredited as assistant producer and so is acknowledged as playing an active role in mixing the sound as well as performing. She takes an immense interest in recording techniques and states intentions to pursue ambitions in that area. There was, however, a problem in communication when she was involved in the production and her lack of professional lingo for various methods of recording often led to confusion and amusement in the studio.

"I feel I know what I'm talking about in the studio now. I know what I should hear. The reaction to me explaining what I want in the studio was amusement, to a certain extent. The were all taking the piss out of me a bit."

Overall, Bush was concerned that the new album should differ quite radically from her first. Maybe I'm a bit too close to it at the moment, but I find it much more adventurous than the last one. I'm much happier with the songs and the arrangements and the backing tracks.

"I was getting a bit worried about labels from that last album: everything being soft, airy-fairy. That was great for the time, but it's not really what I want to do now, or what I want to do, say, in the next year. I guess I want to get basically heavier in the sound sense...and I think that's on the way, which makes me really happy.

"I don't really think that there are any songs on the album that are as close to .bf ital Wuthering Heights .pf as there were on the last one. I mean, there's lots of songs people could draw comparison with. I want the first single that comes out from this album to be reasonably up-tempo. <The first single was Hammer Horror .> That's the first thing I'm concerned with, because I want to break away from what has previously gone. I'm not pleased with being associated with such soft, romantic vibes, not for the first single anyway. If that happens again, that's what I will be to everyone."

She is acutely aware of the danger of being pigeon-holed, and is actively engaged in discouraging that.

 "If you can get away with it and keep changing, great. I think it should be done because in that way you'll always have people chasing after you trying to find out what you're doing. And, anyway, if you know what's coming next, what's the point? If I really wanted to, I guess I could write a song that would be so similar to Wuthering Heights . But I don't. What's the point? I'd rather write a song that was really different, that I liked, although it might not get anywhere."

Have you heard her new single, Hammer Horror ? Now that's really different.

The major changes in the preparation for Lionheart was undoubtedly that Kate, over-burdened with promotional schemes for the first album, was for the first time left with the unsavoury prospect of meeting deadlines and (perhaps) having to rush her writing to do that. It was a problem she was having trouble coming to terms with at our last meeting, when she spoke in obvious admiration of bands like Queen--who came up with the goods on time every year, and still found time to conduct world tours.

But Kate insisted that she wasn't going to be rushed, and eventually the songs came along. In all, it took ten weeks to record the twelve tracks (ten are on the album), an indication of the meticulousness shown by Bush herself in exercising as much control as possible over every facet of the work. "I'm not always right, and I know I'm not," she says, "but it's important to know what's going on, even if I'm not controlling it."

I'll be interested to read the reviews of Lionheart . It'll be sad, I think, if the album is greeted with the same sort of insulting indifference that The Kick Inside met, when Kate Bush was pathetically underrated.

Lionheart is, as the artist desired, a heavier album than its predecessor, with Bush setting some pretty exacting tests for the listener. Kate's songwriting is that much more mature, and her vocal performance has an even more vigorous sense of drama.

Musically, the tracks on Lionheart are more carefully structured than before. There is, for instance, a distinct absence of straight songs, like the first album's Moving, Saxophone Song, The Man With the Child in His Eyes and The Kick Inside . Here, only Oh England, My Lionheart makes an immediate impression and I'm not sure that the move away from soft ballads (be it to secure a separate image) is such a wise one. As Bush proved on those songs on The Kick Inside, simplicity can also have its own sources of complication.

There is much about this album that is therapeutic, and often Kate Bush is the subject of her own course. Fullhouse is the most blatant example of that. <There is no evidence that this song is autobiographical.> On of the album's three unspectacular tracks musically (along with, in my opinion, In the Warm Room and Kashka From Baghdad ), it is still lyrically a fine example of ridding the brain of dangerous paranoias. The stabbing verse of "Imagination sets in,/Then all the voices begin,/Telling you things that aren't happening/(But the nig and they nag, 'til they're under your skin)" is set against the soothing chorus: "You've really got to/Remember yourself,/You've got a fullhouse in your head tonight,/Remember yourself,/Stand back and see emotion getting you uptight."

Even Fullhouse is mild, though, when compared to tracks like Symphony in Blue, In the Warm Room and Kashka From Baghdad, which exude an unashamed sensuality. Symphony in Blue, the opening track, is a hypnotic ballad with the same sort of explicit sexual uninhibitiveness as Feel It from the first album. "The more I think about sex,/The better it gets,/Here we have a purpose in life,/Good for the blood circulation,/Good for releasing the tension./The root of our reincarnation," sings Kate happily.

In Search of Peter Pan, Wow (running together on the first side) and Hammer Horror are are examples of Kate's strange ability to let the subconscious mind run amok in the studio. Wow is tantalisingly powerful and Hammer Horror (the single) is most impressive for the way it seems to tie in so many of the finer points of the first album and project them through one epic song.

That leaves three tracks, Don't Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake, Oh England, My Lionheart, and Coffee Homeground . All of them with totally contrasting identieds but all succeeding in areas that many might have considered outside the scope of Kate Bush.

A few months ago, in the paper, Kate said how one of her musical ambitions was to write a real rousing rock'n'roll song and how difficult she found that task. James and the Cold Gun was her effort on The Kick Inside, and with Don't Push Your Foot on the Heartbrake she has tackled the art of writing a roasting rocker on her own terms. Heartbrake (another piece of emotional therapy) might not be considered a rocker in the traditional sense of racing from start to finish but it's still one of the most vicious pieces of rock I've stumbled across in some time. The chorus is slow, pedestrianly slow. The pace is deceiving. It slides into the chorus. Bush moves into a jog. Then the second part of the chorus. It's complete havoc, and when it comes to repeating that second part in the run-up to the end, Kate wrenches from her slight frame a screaming line of unbelievably consummate rock'n'roll power that astounded me. A rather unnerving turn to Kate's music, I think.

Then there's Coffee Homeground, influenced by Bertold Brecht and inspired by a journey with a taxi driver who was convinced that somebody was out to poison him.

For Oh England, My Lionheart, from which the album title is derived, Kate is expecting a barrage of criticism because of the blatant soppiness of the lyric.

Kate's reasons for writing the song are simple enough. She had always liked Jerusalem, and thought that a contemporary song proclaiming the romantic beauty of England should be written.

"A lot of people could easily say that the song is sloppy. It's very classically done. It's only got acoustic instruments on it and it's done...almost madrigally, you know. I daresay a lot of people will think that it's just a load of old slush, but it's just an area that I think it's good to cover. Everything I do is very English, and I think that's one reason I've broken through to a lot of countries. The English vibe is very appealing”.

A brilliant second album that arrived on 13th November, 1978 – though some sites claim it was 10th November -, I am going to explore Lionheart more before the anniversary. It is interesting revisiting interviews Bush gave around the time Lionheart came out. Someone who is always intoxicating and fascinating, her second studio album spawned a hit single in Wow. An album that was a commercial success but less appreciated by critics, it warrants more love and respect as this album heads to…

ITS forty-fifth anniversary.

FEATURE: Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes at Thirty: Ranking Its Five Exceptional Singles

FEATURE:

 

 

Kate Bush’s The Red Shoes at Thirty

IN THIS PHOTO: Kate Bush in 1993/PHOTO CREDIT: John Stoddart 

Ranking Its Five Exceptional Singles

_________

THIS 2nd November…

marks thirty years since Kate Bush released The Red Shoes. Her seventh studio album, it was her last before a twelve-year hiatus. I think it remains one of her most underrated. Few people place it high in their list of favourite Kate Bush albums. I think that there is a lot to recommend when it comes to this album. I will do one or two other features ahead of the thirtieth anniversary – maybe looking at 1993 and the events around The Red Shoes’ release – but, today, I am going to feature the single released from the album. Including international-only releases, five were released in total. They are all very different songs. I will rank each of the songs, drop a bit of information in about the singles, in addition to where they charted and any new reviews/articles about them. I have changed my mind recently regarding the top-two singles, so that will be a surprise to some! I think that there are other tracks on The Red Shoes that could have been singles. Lily is one of those great ‘what ifs’. That seems a natural single! I also feel like The Song of Solomon could have been an interesting single internationally. Before getting to the singles – and I will turn to the Kate Bush Encyclopedia for information regarding all of them -, here is a bit about Bush’s under-appreciated album:

“Seventh album by Kate Bush, released by EMI Records on 2 November 1993. The album was written, composed and produced by Kate.

The album was inspired by the 1948 film of the same name by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The film in turn was inspired by the fairy tale of the same name by Hans Christian Andersen. It concerns a dancer, possessed by her art, who cannot take off the eponymous shoes and find peace. Bush had suggested she would tour for the album and deliberately aimed for a "live band" feel, with less of the studio trickery that had typified her last three albums (which would be difficult to recreate on stage). However, the tour never happened in the end. A few months after the release of the album, Bush did release The Line, The Cross and the Curve, a movie incorporating six tracks from the album.

Most notably, The Red Shoes featured many more high-profile cameo appearances than her previous efforts. Comedian Lenny Henry provided guest vocals on Why Should I Love You, a track that also featured significant contributions from Prince. And So Is Love features guitar work by Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck. Gary Brooker (from the band Procol Harum) appears on two tracks as well.

The album was recorded digitally, and Bush has since expressed regrets about the results of this, which is why she revisited seven of the songs using analogue tape for her 2011 album Director's Cut”.

Below are the five great singles released from The Red Shoes. I really like them all, though there are some that stand out as being especially great – and didn’t get the chart love that they deserved! It will be interesting to see how many people react to the thirtieth anniversary of The Red Shoes. A remarkable album with only a couple of weak spots, here are the five singles that I think still…

STAND the test of time.

______________

FIVE: And So Is Love

Release Date: 7th November, 1994

B-Sides: Rubberband Girl (U.S. Mix)/Eat the Music (U.S. Mix)

Label: EMI

Release Territory: International

Chart Position: 26 (U.K.)

Background:

“Song written by Kate Bush. Originally released on her seventh album The Red Shoes. Also released as a single by EMI Records in the UK on 7 November 1994.

Formats

'And So Is Love' was released in the UK as a picture disc 7" single with a large poster and as two CD-singles: one in a regular small case and one in a big case with three 5" x 5" card prints.
All formats feature the lead track and the U.S. mix of Rubberband Girl. The two CD-singles also featured the U.S. mix of Eat The Music.

Versions

There are two versions of 'And So Is Love': the album version from 1993, and the version from Bush's album Director's Cut in 2011, on which the key lyric 'But now we see that life is sad' is changed to 'But now we see that life is sweet'” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

Players:

Stuart Elliott - drums

John Giblin - bass

Eric Clapton - guitar

Gary Brooker – Hammond organ

FOUR: Moments of Pleasure

Release Date: 15th November, 1993

B-Sides: Moments of Pleasure (instrumental)/Home for Christmas/Show a Little Devotion/December Will Be Magic Again/Experiment IV

Label: EMI

Release Territory: International

Chart Position: 26 (U.K.)

Background:

“I think the problem is that during [the recording of] that album there were a lot of unhappy things going on in my life, but when the songs were written none of that had really happened yet. I think a lot of people presume that particularly that song was written after my mother had died for instance, which wasn't so at all. There's a line in there that mentions a phrase that she used to say, 'every old sock meets an old shoe', and when I recorded it and played it to her she just thought it was hilarious! She couldn't stop laughing, she just thought it was so funny that I'd put it into this song. So I don't see it as a sad song. I think there's a sort of reflective quality, but I guess I think of it more as a celebration of life. (Interview with Ken Bruce, BBC Radio 2, 9 May 2011)

I wasn't really quite sure how "Moments of Pleasure" was going to come together, so I just sat down and tried to play it again-- I hadn't played it for about 20 years. I immediately wanted to get a sense of the fact that it was more of a narrative now than the original version; getting rid of the chorus sections somehow made it more of a narrative than a straightforward song. (Ryan Dombai, 'Kate Bush: The elusive art-rock originator on her time-travelling new LP, Director's Cut'. Pitchfork, May 16, 2011)” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

Reaction:

“In his review of the song, Ben Thompson from The Independent remarked, "A smile and a tear from the Welling siren." Chris Roberts from Melody Maker said, "'Moments of Pleasure' is The Big Literary Effort, Kate at her very tremble-inducing, vocal-range-like-the-Pyrenees best." Alan Jones from Music Week gave the song four out of five and named it Pick of the Week, writing, "Beautiful and traditional Bush fare with expansive orchestrations, poignant vocals and off-her-trolley lyrics. As subtle as "Rubberband Girl" was direct, and probably as big a hit." Terry Staunton from NME commented, "Her personal exorcisms reach new heights on "Moments of Pleasure", a deceptively simple ballad with a swooping chorus and a coda where she namechecks the people who've been important to her over years. It's a song that may baffle the world at large, but it wasn't written for us; Kate's just decided to share it” – Wikipedia

Players:

Kate Bush – Piano

THREE: The Red Shoes

Release Date: 5th April, 1994

B-Sides:You Want Alchemy/Shoedance (The Red Shoes dance mix)/Running Up That Hill" (12-inch mix)/The Big Sky (special single mix)/This Woman's Work/Cloudbusting (video mix)

Label: EMI

Release Territory: International

Chart Position: 21 (U.K.)

Background:

“Song written by Kate Bush. Originally released on her seventh album The Red Shoes. Also released as a single by EMI Records in the UK on 4 April 1994. Lead track of the movie The Line, The Cross and the Curve, which was presented on film festival at the time of the single's release” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

Reaction:

“Chris Roberts from Melody Maker said, "'The Red Shoes' meets its jigging ambition and sticks a flag on top, making her dance till her legs fall off." Another editor, Peter Paphides, commented, "Only as a grown-up will I be able to fully apprehend the texture and allegorical resonance of the themes dealt with in "The Red Shoes". Until then, I'll content myself with Tori Amos and Edie Brickell." Parry Gettelman from Orlando Sentinel wrote, "The mandola, the whistles and various curious instruments on the driving title track really recall the fever-dream quality of the 1948 ballet film The Red Shoes, the album's namesake” – Wikipedia

Players:

Kate Bush – lead and backing vocals, keyboards

Paddy Bush – mandola, tin whistle, musical bow, backing vocals

Del Palmer – Fairlight CMI programming

Danny McIntosh – guitar

Gaumont d'Olivera – bass guitar

Stuart Elliott – drums, percussion

Colin Lloyd Tucker – backing vocals

TWO: Rubberband Girl

Release Date: 6th September, 1993 (7th December, 1993 in the U.S.)

B-Side: Big Stripey Lie

Labels: EMI/Columbia (U.S.)

Release Territory: International

Chart Position: 12 (U.K.)

Background:

“I thought the original 'Rubberband' was... Well, it's a fun track. I was quite happy with the original, but I just wanted to do something really different. It is my least favourite track. I had considered taking it off to be honest. Because it didn't feel quite as interesting as the other tracks. But I thought, at the same time, it was just a bit of fun and it felt like a good thing to go out with. It's just a silly pop song really, I loved Danny Thompson's bass on that, and of course Danny (McIntosh)'s guitar.  (Mojo (UK), 2011)” – Kate Bush Encyclopedia

Reaction:

“Alan Jones from Music Week gave the song four out of five and named it Pick of the Week, writing, "With Kate at the helm any single would be quirky but by her own otherwordly standards this is Ms. Bush at her most direct." He added, "It's a rhythmic, almost raunchy, workout with the occasional outburst of rock guitar, strange lyrics — "if I could twang like a rubberband, l'd be a rubberband girl" is as ordinary as it gets — and a weird vocal impression of said office accessory being stretched. It is also a very commercial rejoinder and will probably be Kate's first Top 10 solo hit since "Running Up That Hill" hit the spot eight years ago." Everett True of Melody Maker felt that the song is "a little too uptempo for my tastes" and noted that he prefers Bush when she is "all dreamy and mysterious". Despite this, he added, "It still has enough kookiness to draw me under, and she's still the only artist for whom the word 'kooky' isn't an insult."

Another editor, Chris Roberts, praised it as "a gorgeous, daft, groovy single with a bassline to shame Bootsy Collins". Terry Staunton from NME wrote, "Kate's self-doubt emerges right from the beginning on "Rubberband Girl", the relentless one-chord single where she wishes she could learn to give, learn to bounce back on her feet.” Parry Gettelman from Orlando Sentinel said that "Bush waxes positively perky as she struggles to forge a "Sledgehammer" out of a flimsy tune, dopey lyrics and bouncy dance-floor beat." Richard C. Walls from Rolling Stone noted the "pure pop" of "Rubberband Girl". Tom Doyle from Smash Hits also gave the song four out of five, saying that it's "a bit of a shock because she's gone all funky with Prince-ish drums all over the shop" – Wikipedia

Players:

Kate Bush – vocals, keyboards

Danny McIntosh – guitar

John Giblin – bass guitar

Stuart Elliott – drums, percussion

Nigel Hitchcock – tenor and baritone saxophones

Steve Sidwell – trumpet

Paul Spong – trumpet

Neil Sidwell – trombone

ONE: Eat the Music

Release Date: 7th September, 1993 (30th May, 1994 in Australia)

B-Sides: Eat the Music (12" Mix)/Big Stripey Lie/Candle in the Wind/You Want Alchemy/The Red Shoes Dance Mix

Label: Columbia (U.S.)

Release Territory: U.S.

Chart Position: 10 (US Alternative Airplay (Billboard)

Background:

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

Reaction:

“Chris Roberts from Melody Maker felt that the song was "misguided", "all ghastly, Lilt-supping, Notting Hill Carnival calypso". Terry Staunton from NME declared it as "a shopping list of exotic fruit, as if Kate is pulling Carmen Miranda's hat apart looking for metaphors for love.” Parry Gettelman from Orlando Sentinel wrote, "The bizarre fruit metaphors on "Eat the Music" are exceedingly pretentious, but the song has a lilting, African high-life feel” – Wikipedia

Players:

Kate Bush – vocals, keyboards

Paddy Bush – vocals

Stuart Elliott – drums, percussion

John Giblin – bass guitar

Justin Vali – valiha, kabosy, vocals

Nigel Hitchcock – tenor saxophone

Neil Sidwell – trombone

Steve Sidwell – trumpet

Paul Spong – trumpet

FEATURE: Revisiting… James Blake - Friends That Break Your Heart

FEATURE:

 

 

Revisiting…

James Blake - Friends That Break Your Heart

_________

HAVING recently…

 PHOTO CREDIT: Josh Stadlen

turned thirty-five, I have been thinking about James Blake’s music. The U.K.-born, U.S.-based producer and artist released his Mercury Prize-winning second studio album, Overgrown, in 2013. That celebrated its tenth anniversary earlier this year. His most recent album, Playing Robots into Heaven, came out last month to widespread acclaim. I wanted to use this feature to spotlight his previous studio album, Friends That Break Your Heart. Released on 8th October, 2021, I was keen to look back a couple of years. At a time when we were still in the pandemic but there was a shaft of light ahead, it must have been a strange time to release an album. I think we get a different perception and flavour of them listening now compared to when they came out. Even so, Friends That Break Your Heart was met with applause and kudos. I will come to a couple of those reviews. Reaching number four in the U.K., and with his partner Jameela Jamil as one of the producers, Friends That Break Your Heart is a brilliant album from one of our finest and most consistent artists. In August 2021, CLASH interviewed James Blake from Los Angeles. At a time of lockdown, confusion and a strange new time, it was interesting getting this insight into the life and music of an artist who had relocated and was in a public and high-profile relationship with a huge name in broadcasting and acting:

“When Clash is patched through to James Blake there’s an immediate burst of energy in the songwriter’s voice. An Englishman abroad, he’s talking to us on the morning after England’s defiant defeat to Italy in the final of the European Championships. Having relocated to Los Angeles some five years before, he’s itching to discuss the game, and his enduring pride in Gareth Southgate’s young squad. “I think that they’re heroes,” he gushes. “They represent a huge step forward, culturally speaking.”

Living in America full-time has triggered a shift in the way James Blake interprets his own Englishness. “It’s definitely highlighted more. I am very English in contrast with what’s around me,” he says. “But you know, Englishness is a complex thing. It’s a multitude of different cultural reference points and identifications.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Tyrone Delaney

There’s a subtle confidence to James Blake’s voice as he chats to Clash. He appears comfortable in his own skin – slim, tanned, and wearing one of the many colourful shirts that have bedecked his IG Live sessions, our conversation moves from UK rap to classic British comedy such as Monty Python in the blink of an eye. He’s eager to talk – whether that’s Marcus Rashford (“just an exemplary person”) or his now-compete new album, the pace rarely lets up.

In a way, it’s the energies of lockdown propelling him forwards. While he’s the first to discuss the traumas of the past 12 months, James Blake is also keen to assert the deep sense of emotional evolution that has come over him, something that permeates our conversation and ultimately defines his new album ‘Friends That Break Your Heart’. “The lockdown triggered a seismic shift in my personality,” he says. “I dropped a lot of things that were holding me back, in terms of insecurities and worries. I think it allowed me to be more creative. It’s a myth that when you get more mentally ill, your music gets more creative – that is never how it’s been with me. It’s always been… if I’ve had a breakthrough, mentally, then I had a breakthrough musically. I guess that kind of happened last year, and into this year.”

2019’s astonishing ‘Assume Form’ garnered incredible reviews, with James Blake’s intense artistry augmented by some stunning collaborations. Touring across the world in support, the songwriter’s itinerary was wiped clean by COVID. “My social skills really took a dive!” he laughs. “It definitely took a huge toll on my mental health, not being able to play shows and having a huge part of my identity put on hold. But I had to work it out and come to some other understanding of myself that wasn’t predicated on only this thing, that I do.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Tyrone Delaney

Being forced to look inwards, he argues, opened him up to re-focusing on aspects of his life that he had neglected. “It’s forced us to prioritize our own mental health,” he says. “I think it’s something that a lot of musicians are prone to. A lot of us come from unpredictable home lives or situations where we’re placating others, and we ultimately become used to prioritizing others over ourselves. A lot of us are very vulnerable to industry power, because of that.”

The path to this kind of self-awareness hasn’t been easy. We chat a little about the previous Clash cover story James Blake took part in, a conversation around his debut album, and the EPs which preceded it. He’s used this passing decade to build a singular catalogue, one that recontextualized club tropes within a shocking personal musical landscape, resonating between poles as disparate as the nebulous post-dubstep nexus of his debut LP and the glorious Catalonian pop of Rosalia that erupts from ‘Assume Form’ highlight ‘Barefoot In The Park’. “I’d like to think that I’m always looking forward,” he insists, “but I think that it’s important – just like history in general – to look back and say: what did I get right and what did I get wrong?”

“It’s building on top,” he insists. “We naturally evolve as people, and our scenarios – and hopefully the context of our lives – change as we’re evolving.”

‘Friends That Break Your Heart’ is the latest junction on this ongoing journey. Soulful, lucid, and profoundly honest, it finds James Blake re-adjusting his connections with the world around him. “The album is not love song heavy,” he is at pains to point out. “It’s coming to terms with lots of different types of relationships – whether that’s friendships or professional types of relationships, or whatever – and reflecting on them, and reflecting on myself and my position, I guess, in the world. How I felt about myself, during lockdown. The dangers of comparing yourself to other people, worrying about, ‘have I done enough?’ Have I achieved my potential?”

PHOTO CREDIT: Michael Tyrone Delaney

“I live in Los Angeles, so there are plenty of people to compare yourself to!” he laughs. “It’s about coming to peace with the way you are, even if that’s not exactly where you plan to be. That’s a realisation that many people have to come to, regardless of situation. I’d say it’s a heavy record that sounds lighter. It’s a paradox. When you hear it, you’ll know what I mean.”

He’s conscious of people reading the album through a lens of his most prominent, most public relationship. “Jameela actually asked me to write an album that had nothing to do with her,” he says with a chuckle; “so, here it is! It’s called ‘Friends That Will Break Your Heart’ and it really is about that.”

If lockdown prompted a turn towards introspection, it also released James Blake from outside commitments. “I stopped thinking about other people, to be honest. I stopped thinking about the world, in terms of a musical perspective. I started thinking about the world in other ways. I was making music purely for my own catharsis, really, and that’s a very pure way of writing.”

James Blake shared an At Home playlist for Apple Music last year, one that seemed to parallel his creative thinking; fantastically chilled, it covered the folk-soul of Terry Callier and the abstract electronics of Floating Points. The emphasis, it seemed, was on sound in its purest form – sonics as a means of emotional communication, as well as aural delight”.

The reviews were hugely positive for Friends That Break Your Heart. You can get this phenomenal album on silver vinyl if you are a fan of James Blake and have not heard the album in a while – or you have but want it on a physical format. In their review, this is what CLASH had to say about an album they had heard about recently via their interview with Blake:

“In a recent interview with Clash, James Blake explained how lockdown saw him recenter and reset all his insecurities in light of a larger crisis. It marked another improvement in his career-spanning journey towards finding equanimity, most recently with 2019’s 'Assume Form' and its journey breaking free of the mental turmoil he once swam in. Now romantically self-assured, 'Friends That Break Your Heart' navigates the throes of the affecting friendships in his life. From that design brief, he has created an ethereal alternative to the cavernous Assume Form.

The stillness of ‘Famous Last Words’ puts full focus on Blake’s lyrics, aptly ushering in his most songwriting-focused project yet. Moreover, it’s his least jagged project, with a pastel atmosphere gently shading around songs. For the James Blake fan who prefers his more abstract electronic tracks, this one may, in fact, break your heart – though those ideas aren’t completely scrubbed off.

Ever the mad conductor, he still manages to sweep electronics through even the most cloudy of instrumentals. It pops up in the gulps of acid bass on ‘Coming Back’ and especially ‘I’m So Blessed You’re Mine’ – a James Blake cocktail of technicolour arpeggios, glassy chords and wordless harmonies to sonically illustrate joy in the presence of an amazing person.

Lyrically, James is reacting to seeing friendships fray, either with heartbreak, fatigue, pleading or acceptance. Explaining these situations is less descriptive than simply showing Blake’s singular lines that sharply sums them up. “It was built in a day, so it fell in a day / What do you expect?” on Foot Forward. “We both swam out to sea / you lost me willingly” on ‘Life Is Not the Same’, which is a highlight despite Take A Daytrip’s production tag being crassly shoved in just before verse #1.

‘Lost Angel Nights’ wrestles with feelings of envy and fears of being replaced, while a couple of duets offer two perspectives: ‘Coming Back’ with SZA and the touchingly despondent ‘Show Me’ with Monica Martin. In each, Blake is caught in a tangled web of thoughts and feelings, dealing with a fallout with lines that violently switch between ego-driven impulses and a longing to reconcile.

Note that most songs here can be applied to a romantic partnership, the same emotional push-and-pull still exists. Though the narrative is not as clear-cut as Assume Form, Friends That Break Your Heart expounds on the similarities between romantic and platonic relationships. And, by extension, their equal worth.

The LP’s home stretch is up there with Blake’s best, not just in the tense penultimate title track and wet-cheeked closer ‘If I’m Insecure’, but on the lead single. ‘Say What You Will’ shows off the magic trick Blake’s perfected by now. Vocally, he’s unsettlingly beautiful.

8/10”.

I will end up with a review from DIY. They had some interesting observations and takeaways from one of the strongest albums from 2021. It is one that I would urge people to seek out and listen if they have not heard it recently. Friends That Break Your Heart is one of Blake’s best albums. One that rewards repeated listens – and yet I do not heard many songs from it played on the radio:

“Laid over his trademark minimalist production, James Blake battles with his insecurities on the tentatively optimistic ‘Funeral’. “I feel invisible in every city,” he remarks on this familiar feeling. “Don’t give up on me,” he pleads, before promising that “I’ll be the best I can be”. It’s this journey through self-doubt that underpins his fifth studio album, one that ultimately looks to celebrate the self regardless of wider influence. It’s a mantra that reaches its fittingly melancholic climax on the painfully retrospective title track. “In the end it was friends who broke my heart,” he offers in his distinct tone.

Yet there’s freedom in James’s realisations, unfolding on a record that simultaneously expands on his delicate production and sees him fully embrace his singer-songwriter alter ego. The SZA-featuring ‘Coming Back’ sits alongside ‘Frozen’ as his most assured foray into new genres. The latter part of the record elevates his vocal delivery, as ever paired with considered electronic flourishes. ‘Show Me’, featuring Monica Martin, is among his most beautiful work to date. His shifts in sound are as delicate as his music, continuing to showcase his ability to blur styles with unparalleled precision.

It provides the space for him to take on these insecurities head on. The tellingly-titled ‘If I’m Insecure’ finds salvation in love. It lands on both resignation and acceptance, that it’s OK to be lost and found at the same time. This blissful resignation runs throughout ‘Friends That Break your Heart’. “I know I’ll be replaced,” he laments at the album’s midpoint before cementing the record’s driving force. “I put my best foot forward,” he affirms, “what else can I do?”.

The remarkable and always-brilliant James Blake crafted something rich and nuanced with Friends That Break Your Heart. Richly making the top forty albums of 2021 in many critical lists, and recorded between The Green Building (Los Angeles, California) and No Idle Campus (Los Angeles, California), everyone should clear some time to enjoy and dive into James Blake’s fifth studio album. It was another exceptional release from…

ONE of our very best.

FEATURE: The Digital Mixtape: The Northern Ireland Music Prize 2023: The Shortlist

FEATURE:

 

 

The Digital Mixtape

The Northern Ireland Music Prize 2023: The Shortlist

_________

IN recent weeks…

 IN THIS PHOTO: ROE’s (Roisin Donald) album, That's When The Panic Sets In, is among the shortlisted albums for this year’s Northern Ireland Music Prize

I have done a playlist around and covered national music prizes for Wales and Scotland. I don’t think we spend enough time investigating the strong and diverse music that comes out of Northern Ireland. As the shortlisted albums for the Northern Ireland Music Prize 2023 have been announced, I wanted to finish with a playlist of each. You can follow them on Twitter and Facebook. I am going to list the albums in a minute. First, here is some details about what the prestigious Northern Ireland Music Prize is and when it is happening:

“WHAT IS THE NI MUSIC PRIZE?

The NI Music Prize is an annual award aimed at recognising the great wealth of music from Northern Ireland. The prize includes a trophy and a monetary prize of £3000 for Album of The Year.

WHO ORGANISES THE NI MUSIC PRIZE?

It is organised by the Oh Yeah Music Centre in Belfast.

WHEN WILL IT TAKE PLACE?

The NI Music Prize 2023 will take place on Wednesday 15th November at the Ulster Hall in Belfast”

Given the richness of music coming from Northern Ireland, this year’s tantalising shortlist is hard to predict. Similar to Scotland and Wales, it is such a tough field. I guess that The Choice Music Prize - known for sponsorship reasons as the RTÉ Choice Music Prize – will announce their runners and rider soon enough. As the Northern Ireland Music Prize say, it has been a tough time narrowing the field down! Also, if you are local to Ulster Hall, you can book a ticket to go to the event:

“Wow! What a great year, that was possibly the toughest year to date, so much great music. So now that the counting and scoring has been completed we can reveal the shortlists for 2023. Thank you to our nominators for their time throughout the process and to the public and fans for your input so far.

Congratulations to all the acts that have made it through to this years shortlists and to all involved in the process regardless of lists, the level of music is something to be proud of. We look forward to celebrating the year of music with you on 15th November.

Voting opens Monday 9th Oct at 10am and closes on 4th November.

News on ATL Artist of The Year in association with BBC Introducing coming soon.

All winners will be announced at the awards on Wednesday 15th November”.

The twelve shortlisted albums are all remarkable and worthy. We will see who walks away with the prize in November. I have discovered some new gems via the shortlist. A few artists worth spotlighting. There are some new and rising artists sitting alongside the odd established and legendary group:

Arborist - An Endless Sequence of Dead Zeros

Clara Tracey – Black Forest (Public Vote Winner)

Conor Mallon – UNEARTHED

ferna – understudy

Jealous of The Birds – Hinterland

King Cedar - Everything More, & Other Stories

New Pagans - Making Circles of Our Own

No Oil Paintings - Rain Season

Phil Kieran - The Strand Cinema

ROE - That's When the Panic Sets In

Therapy? - Hard Cold Fire

Two Door Cinema Club - Keep on Smiling

To celebrate and spotlight a dozen diverse and interesting Northern Irish albums, below is a playlist of a song from each of them. Even though ceremonies like the BRITs and Mercury Prize are inclusive – the latter covers the U.K. and EIRE -, I think we sometimes focus too much on English artists and do not give as much exposure to artists from nations like Northern Ireland. With ceremonies like the Northern Ireland Music Prize, it is helping to put the country’s grand artists…

FIRMLY on the music map.

FEATURE: Joni Mitchell at Eighty: Eight Essential and Interesting Albums to Add to Your Collection

FEATURE:

 

 

Joni Mitchell at Eighty

IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell wearing a black short-sleeved dress with several necklaces, November 1968. This image was from a photo shoot for the fashion magazine, Vogue/PHOTO CREDIT: Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Eight Essential and Interesting Albums to Add to Your Collection

_________

ON 7th November…

IN THIS PHOTO: Joni Mitchell in Amsterdam in 1972/PHOTO CREDIT: Gijsbert Hanekroot/Redferns

the genius Joni Mitchell turns eighty. It is very satisfying that we get to celebrate an eightieth birthday of an artist. Maybe it is because of the longevity of their career and the fact they are still with us but, in the case of the likes of Joni Mitchell and Paul McCartney, they are still making music and are quite active. I am going to put out a couple of other Mitchell features before the big day. Her albums sound perfect on vinyl and physical formats. As we know, her albums were taken off of Spotify – though you can still access them from Apple. More than most albums, her music has this richness and depth that demands vinyl. I am going to select eight of her nineteen studio albums (I don’t think we will ever see a twentieth, although Mitchell has performed live recently) that everyone needs to investigate. I am going to mark them in terms of their essentialness. Selecting four that are classics that one needs to hear on vinyl, two that are great that have that classic potential (and grabbing a C.D. copy is crucial) – and are maybe still underrated –, and a couple of rarer/less-loved/discussed albums that are definitely worth exploring digitally – and, if you like them, maybe investing in the physical equivalent. Special thanks to Joni Mitchell’s official website for all the album information and details (including who played on various tracks). All of Joni Mitchell’s albums are remarkable, although I feel that there are a select few that demonstrate why she is so influential and loved. In the run-up to her eightieth birthday on 7th November, I wanted to celebrate this iconic songwriter. One of the most important artists who has ever lived, below are her golden (silver and bronze) records that you…

NEED in your collection.

______________

VINYL: “WE ARE GOLDEN…”

Ladies of the Canyon

Release Date: April 1970

Label: Reprise/Warner Bros.

Producer: Joni Mitchell

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/joni-mitchell/ladies-of-the-canyon

Standout Tracks: For Free/The Arrangement/Big Yellow Taxi

Players, Dates and Details:

“Ladies Of The Canyon is, mostly, the record on which Mitchell delivers on all of those ambitions, although in some ways it remains a transitional album. While more decorated than Clouds, it is still relatively sparse- half the tracks feature just Mitchell's voice with her own solo instrumental accompaniment. Strings, additional vocals and horns are subtly deployed, but as a rough rule of thumb, it's whenever she chooses the piano as her primary conduit of expression that things start to get really interesting. The way her voice colludes with the instrument brings out astonishing new tonal shades, while her increased proficiency offers not just an increased range of textures, but a new way into her music. On songs such as "Willy", her love-struck hymn to Graham Nash, the music follows the whims of the heart. It ebbs and flows, with its own internal logic, unbound by any formal structure, her accompaniment subtly changing with each new line.

Album Notes

Composed and arranged by Joni Mitchell
Engineered and advised by Henry Lewy
Recorded at A&M Studios, Hollywood, California
Assisted on arrangements for Cello by Don Bagley
Cello played by Teressa Adams
Percussion by Milt Holland
Paul Horn on clarinet and flute
Jim Horn on Baritone Sax
Bop vocal by "The Saskatunes"
Circle Game Chorous by "The Lookout Mountain United Downstairs Choir"
Other vocals, guitar and piano by Joni Mitchell
All music published by Siquomb Pub. Co., 55 Liberty Street, New York, N.Y., 10005
Lyrics copyright by and reprinted with Siquomb's permission
Cover by Joni

Reviews of the album from the Library:

• Frick: East Village Other, April 1, 1970

• Joni Mitchell stays serene: Morning News (Wilmington DE), April 4, 1970

• Feminine Statements by Joni Mitchell: Philadelphia Inquirer, April 5, 1970

• Ladies of the Canyon: New York Times, April 5, 1970

• Some Good Vibes: Cincinnati Enquirer, April 5, 1970

• Beauty Revealed: 'Ladies Of The Canyon' Shows Joni At Her Best: Indianapolis News, April 8, 1970

• The Record Rack: Meriden Morning Record, April 9, 1970

• Discography: Statesman (Univ Minnesota- Duluth), April 16, 1970

• Joni: A moment of reflection: Michigan Daily, April 17, 1970

• Soft into the garden: Los Angeles Free Press, April 17, 1970

• joni mitchell (enough said): Record World, April 25, 1970

• Joni and Graham: ThisRecording.com, April 2, 2010

• Joni Mitchell’s Laurel Canyon Rediscovered: Analog Planet, June 28, 2012

• listening to joni: #3: ladies of the canyon: We Move To Canada, December 17, 2017

• Joni Mitchell’s 'Ladies of the Canyon' stark and beautiful on vinyl: LemonWire, June 13, 2018

• Joni Mitchell's fearless Jazz Debut, Ladies of the Canyon: PopMatters, January 9, 2020

• How Joni Mitchell made Ladies Of The Canyon and galvanised the singer-songwriter movement: Classic Rock, May 1, 2020

• Joni Mitchell’s ‘Ladies of the Canyon’: Painting the Canvas: Best Classic Bands, June 15, 2020

• Joni Mitchell’s Ladies of the Canyon At 50: A Different Voice: Culture Sonar, July 15, 2020

• Ladies of the Canyon: UNCUT, December 2020”

Review:

“Named after hippie music mecca Laurel Canyon, Ladies of the Canyon appears, at first, to emulate the sun-dappled, “free love” milieu of which Mitchell herself became reluctantly emblematic. But contrary to that mecca’s sound and iconography, and to the myriad streaming services and music archives that label Ladies of the Canyon as such (see its entries in AllMusic and Wikipedia, among others), it is not a folk-pop album. Perhaps more daring: it is Mitchell’s earliest expression of the jazz sound she would employ holistically in later LPs, notably The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Hejira, and Mingus.

How is this possible? Boasting environmentalist anthems like “Big Yellow Taxi” and zeitgeist requiems like “Woodstock“, all leading up to her rawest expression of the acoustic sound on Blue the following year, labeling Ladies of the Canyon a jazz album feels extreme, even contrarian.

Then again, what is jazz, at its essence?

Merriam-Webster defines the genre as being characterized by “a loud rhythmic manner…propulsive syncopated rhythms, polyphonic ensemble playing, varying degrees of improvisation, and often deliberate distortions of pitch and timbre”. On overtly jazz and experimental albums like The Hissing of Summer Lawns and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, such attributes are immediately noticeable. Loud rhythms, syncopation, improvisation, and so on, do not manifest baldly on Ladies of the Canyon, which opens with “Morning Morgantown”, performed on a rustic guitar with a bright, open piano supporting its strums. Jazz? Not quite.

Track two presents an alternative narrative. ”

For Free” begins with a similar simplicity, before unspooling into a stunning jazz expression. This example denotes what I like to call “tangible employment”, the first of two tactics Mitchell utilizes to infuse the genre. As her contemplative piano bleeds into silence, a striking clarinet solo by Paul Horn takes over, pulling the song into a cerebral U-turn during its final moments. The jazz is direct, tactile, redoubtable, so much that it feels like a mistake. Surely Mitchell did not mean to include such a diversion.

Upon shamelessly revisiting a jazz denouement (this time louder and more elaborate) at the end of “Conversation”, the idea that Mitchell “mistakenly” allowed clarinets, saxophones, and even percussion to slip into her otherwise piano-packed and guitar-laden album proves an underestimation, not only of her diverse artistry, but her self-awareness. She understood her handlers’ attempts at essentializing her sound, and image, into that of the folky, Laurel Canyon poster child. Perhaps

Ladies of the Canyon is Mitchell’s proud, unapologetic wink at her listeners: a calculated middle finger to the industry — a hidden jazz statement wrapped up in flower-power accoutrements.

Of course, that image was not a complete misrepresentation of Mitchell’s creative sensibilities. “Big Yellow Taxi” remains not only a masterpiece of the folk genre, but perhaps the most recognizable song about ecological concerns to emerge from the 20th century. As noted by biographer David Yaffe, “When

Ladies of the Canyon was released, “Big Yellow Taxi” became instantly popular — because its protest message was timely and right, and the song was completely infectious.” Other songs, like “The Priest“, “The Circle Game“, and even the title track, emerge as sophisticated exercises in acoustic music-making that have stood the test of time. Thus, to ultimately call Ladies of the Canyon a jazz album in no way eliminates its undeniable folk qualities. But even in its folkiest excursions, a jazz sensibility remains. This second tactic of genre infusion is what I like to call “spiritual emulation” – PopMatters

Key Cut: Woodstock

Blue

Release Date: 22nd June, 1971

Label: Reprise

Producer: Joni Mitchell

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/joni-mitchell/blue-7

Standout Tracks: Blue/River/A Case of You

Players, Dates and Details:

“Commercial success didn’t sit easy with Joni Mitchell. Clouds had gone gold and brought with it a level of popular appeal that took away some of her everyday liberties. Having finished Ladies Of The Canyon in 1970, she vowed to take a year off, ostensibly to recharge her jaded batteries, but also to escape what she felt was an increasing sense of claustrophobia. “I was being isolated, starting to feel like a bird in a gilded cage,” she explained to Rolling Stone’s Larry LeBlanc. “A certain amount of success cuts you off in a lot of ways. You can’t move freely. I like to live, be on the streets, to be in a crowd…”

In many ways, it signalled the start of Mitchell’s conflicted relationship between art and celebrity. Now that the “black limousine” and “velvet curtain calls” of “For Free” had narrowed into the reality of her own life, she needed to regain her peripheral vision, restore a degree of clarity. Mitchell came to despise show business, declaring fame “a series of misunderstandings surrounding a name”. Not for nothing did David Geffen once tell her: “You’re the only star I ever met that wanted to be ordinary.”

There were major upheavals in Mitchell’s private life, too. Her intense love affair with Graham Nash, which had coincided with an accelerated spurt of productivity from both parties, was nearing its end, resulting in a series of petty squabbles. Against this backdrop, Mitchell decided to head for Europe, where she travelled around Greece, Spain and France. Her main seat of exile was the island of Crete, where she took up residence in a cave amid a hippy community in the fishing village of Matala. It was from here that she sent Nash a telegraph home. He was busy laying a new floor in Mitchell’s kitchen when it landed, it read: “If you hold sand too tightly in your hand, it will run through your fingers. Love, Joan.” “I knew at that point it was truly over between us,” Nash recalled, disconsolately, in his memoir, Wild Tales.

Album Notes

CREDITS
Stephen Stills: Bass & Guitar on "Carey."
James Taylor: Guitar on "California," "All I Want," "A Case of You."
Sneeky Pete: Pedal Steel on "California," "This Flight Tonight."
Russ Kunkel: Drums on "California," "Carey," "A Case of You."
Engineer: Henry Lewy
Art Direction: Gary Burden
Cover Photography: Tim Considine
Recorded at A&M Studios, Los Angeles, California
All Selections copyright 1971, Joni Mitchell Music, Inc. (BMI)
Except "Little Green," copyright 1967 Siquomb Music (BMI)

Reviews of the album from the Library:

• Front Cover: Cash Box, January 1971

• Blue is Best: Reprise , April 1971

• New LP thought Joni's best: Saskatoon StarPhoenix, June 26, 1971

• JONI MITCHELL'S 'BLUE' on record: Guardian, June 29, 1971

• Joni Mitchell's Bid for Top Album: Los Angeles Times, June 29, 1971

• Joni’s ‘Blue’ album shows less artistic skill: Summer Illini, June 29, 1971

• Joni's Blues: Summer Bruin (UCLA), July 2, 1971

• Beautifully Blue Joni Mitchell: Sounds Magazine, July 3, 1971

• Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ Rates as Her Finest LP: Philadelphia Inquirer, July 4, 1971

• Singing-Songwriters: 1971 is Woman's World: Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1971

• How True Is Blue?: Melody Maker, July 10, 1971

• Nobody Like Joni Mitchell: Birmingham Post, July 10, 1971

• Joni Mitchell’s Newest Album Is ‘Blue’: Greenville News, July 12, 1971

• Joni’s ‘Blue’ and Rundgren’s ‘Ballad’: Summer Campus (SMU), July 15, 1971

• Blue: NOLA Express (Michigan State Univ), July 30, 1971

• Records: Spectrum (Buffalo University), July 30, 1971

• Blue: Joni Mitchell: Carlisle Sentinel, July 31, 1971

• Blue: Rolling Stone, August 5, 1971

• Joni Mitchell at a Crossroads: New York Times, August 8, 1971

• Joni’s New Album A Personal Statement: Cincinnati Enquirer, August 15, 1971

• Sorry I wavered Joni, I love you after all: Maclean's, September 1971

• Joni Mitchell Sings Her Blues: Stereo Review, October 1971

• Joni Mitchell - Blue: MusicMusingsAndSuch.com, August 27, 2017

• David Mitchell on Blue by Joni Mitchell: 'It’s art, so it’s ageless': Newstatesman (London), December 17, 2017

• listening to joni: #4: blue: We Move To Canada, January 24, 2018

• Stuck in a Beach Town, Rosanne Cash Turned to Joni Mitchell’s Music: Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2018

• Amarillo: BlogSpot.com, March 31, 2018

• Blue: Sound Opinions, June 8, 2018

• 47-Year Anniversary for Joni Mitchell's Album Blue: Audioboom, June 22, 2018

• The Only Thing That’s Never Going Away: Bloomsbury Academic, January 24, 2019

• This Album Changed My Life: Joni Mitchell – Blue (1971): Irish Times, February 23, 2019

• Anatomy of a Perfect Album: Literary Hub, March 19, 2019

• 'We Live In The Time Of Joni Mitchell': NPR.org, October 25, 2019

• Blue: Sound Opinions, March 20, 2020

• Joni Mitchell reflected on the defining sounds of her seminal album ‘Blue’: Far Out Magazine, June 22, 2020

• Reflections on Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’: Varsity (Cambridge), October 1, 2021

• From Mother to Daughter, The Gift of Joni Mitchell: Maine Seniors, November 2021

• Experiencing Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’ in the age of streaming: Observer (Notre Dame), February 9, 2022

• Fighting the Spotify Algorithm With Joni Mitchell’s ‘Blue’: OB Rag, May 10, 2023

• All Romantics Meet the Same Fate Someday: Routledge, June 2023”

Review:

“The last time I saw Joni Mitchell perform was a year and a half ago at Boston's Symphony Hall, in one of her final appearances before she forswore the concert circuit for good. Fragile, giggly and shy, she had the most obvious case of nerves I have ever seen in a professional singer. Her ringing soprano cracked with stage fright and her frightened eyes refused to make contact with the audience. It wasn't until well into the second half of the concert that she settled down and began to enjoy herself; even then it seemed clear that she would have preferred a much smaller audience perhaps a cat by a fireside.

Joni Mitchell's singing, her songwriting, her whole presence give off a feeling of vulnerability that one seldom encounters even in the most arty reaches of the music business. In "For Free," her one song about songwriting, she declared that she sang "for fortune and those velvet curtain calls." But she long ago renounced the curtain calls; and her songs, like James Taylor's, are only incidentally commercial: Her primary purpose is to create something meaningful out of the random moments of pain and pleasure in her life.

In the course of Joni's career, her singing style has remained the same but her basically autobiographical approach to lyrics has grown increasingly explicit. The curious mixture of realism and romance that characterized Joni Mitchell and Clouds (with their sort of "instant traditional" style, so reminiscent of Childe ballads) gradually gave way to the more contemporary pop music modern language of Ladies of the Canyon. Gone now was the occasionally excessive feyness of "Rows and rows of angel hair/And ice cream castles in the air"; in their place was an album that contained six very unromanticized accounts of troubled encounters with men.

Like Ladies, Blue is loaded with specific references to the recent past; it is less picturesque and old-fashioned sounding than Joni's first two albums. It is also the most focused album: Blue is not only a mood and a kind of music, it is also Joni's name for her paramour. The fact that half the songs on the album are about him give it a unity which Ladies lacked. In fact, they are the chief source of strength of this very powerful album.

Several of the lesser cuts on Blue give every indication of having sat in Joni's trunk for some time. The folkie melody of "Little Green" recalls "I Don't Know Where I Stand" from her second album. The pretty, "poetic" lyric is dressed up in such cryptic references that it passeth all understanding. "The Last Time I Saw Richard" is a memoir of Joni's "dark cafe days," cluttered with insignificant detail and reminiscent of the least memorable autobiographical songs on Ladies. "River" is an extended mea culpa that reeks of self-pity ("I'm so hard to handle/I'm so selfish and so sad/Now I've lost the best baby/That I ever had"). Joni's ponderous piano accompaniment verges on a parody of Laura Nyro, especially the melodramatic intro, which is "Jingle Bells" in a minor key. The best of this lot is "My Old Man," a lovely, conventional ballad.

These songs have little or nothing to do with the main theme of the album; developed in the remaining songs, which is the chronicle of Joni, a free lance romantic, searching for a permanent love. She announces this theme in the first line of the first cut, "All I Want": "I am on a lonely road and I am traveling/Looking for something to set me free."

In "This Flight Tonight," "A Case of You," and "Blue," Joni comes to terms with the reality that loneliness is not simply the result of prolonged traveling; the basic problem is that her lover will not give her all she wants. In "This Flight Tonight," Joni has walked out on her man, is flying West on a jet, and now regrets the decision. The lyrics, a clumsy attempt at stream of consciousness, are virtually unsingable and Joni's lyric soprano is hopelessly at odds with the rock and roll tune. But the chorus has just the wispiest trace of Bo Diddley and it sticks with you:

Oh Starbright, starbright

You've got the lovin' that I like, all right

Turn this crazy bird around

I shouldn't have got on this flight tonight.

The beauty of the mysterious and unresolved melody and the expressiveness of the vocal make this song accessible to a general audience. But "Blue," more than any of the other songs, shows Joni to be twice vulnerable: not only is she in pain as a private person, but her calling as an artist commands her to express her despair musically and reveal to an audience of record-buyers:

And yet, despite the title song. Blue is overall the freest, brightest, most cheerfully rhythmic album Joni has yet released. But the change in mood does not mean that Joni's commitment to her own very personal naturalistic style has diminished. More than ever, Joni risks using details that might be construed as trivial in order to paint a vivid self portrait. She refuses to mask her real face behind imagery, as her fellow autobiographers James Taylor and Cat Stevens sometimes do.

In portraying herself so starkly, she has risked the ridiculous to achieve the sublime. The results though are seldom ridiculous; on Blue she has matched her popular music skills with the purity and honesty of what was once called folk music and through the blend she has given us some of the most beautiful moments in recent popular music” – Rolling Stone

Key Cut: Carey

Court and Spark

Release Date: 17th January, 1974

Label: Asylum

Producer: Joni Mitchell

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/joni-mitchell/court-and-spark

Standout Tracks: Court and Spark/Help Me/People's Parties

Players, Dates and Details:

“The year 1973 was relatively quiet for Joni Mitchell, at least as far as the public eye was concerned. She only performed a few times, once at a benefit concert, then a few shows with Neil Young; indeed, much of 1973 would be spent in the studio, finding the right musicians and the right metier for the songs that would make up her next album, 1974's Court And Spark. For anyone who has listened through Joni's first wave of albums in their entirety, the leap from the folk stylings of 1972's For The Roses, with its tentative nods to the pop charts, to the panoramic Court And Spark, is nothing short of startling: it's the career equivalent of a deep, long exhale, as though Mitchell has finally, after five albums, found musicians who fully grasp what she is capable of doing. She still kept contact with her old crew - David Crosby and Graham Nash both tum up on backing vocals - and as with For The Roses, she brings in outliers for exotic touches, such as Jose Feliciano's guitar on "Free Man In Paris", and The Band's Robbie Robertson on "Raised On Robbery". What you take away most from listening to Court And Spark, though, is a massive jolt of confidence to Mitchell's writing- she was doing things, now, that simply no-one else was doing.

Album Notes

Drums and percussion - John Guerin
Bass - Max Bennett (on Trouble Child), Jim Hughart (on People's Parties and Free Man In Paris), Wilton Felder
Chimes (on Court and Spark) - Milt Holland
Woodwinds & reeds - Tom Scott
Trumpet (on Twisted and Trouble Child) - Chuck Findley
Piano - Joni Mitchell
Electric Piano - Joe Sample
Clavinet (on Down To You) - Joni Mitchell
Background voices - Joni Mitchell, David Crosby and Graham Nash (on Free Man In Paris), Susan Webb and David Crosby (on Down To You), Cheech and Chong (on Twisted)
Electric Guitar - Wayne Perkins (on Car On A Hill), Dennis Budimir (on Trouble Child); Robbie Robertson (on Raised on Robbery), Jose Feliciano and Larry Carlton (on Free Man in Paris), Larry Carlton on all others
Joe Sample appears courtesy of The Crusaders and Chisa/Blue Thumb Records Inc.
Larry Carlton appears courtesy of Chisa/Blue Thumb Records Inc.
Jose Feliciano appears courtesy of RCA Records
Cheech & Chong appear courtesy of Ode Records
Robbie Robertson appears courtesy of Capitol Records.
The strings on the 'Same Situation' were arranged by Tom Scott; 'Down To You" arranged by Joni Mitchell and Tom Scott; 'Car On A Hill' arranged by Joni Mitchell
Sound Engineer - Henry Lewy
Mastering Engineer - Bernie Grundman
All songs composed by Joni Mitchell, © 1973 Crazy Crow Music/BMI. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Except 'Twisted,' written by Ross and Grey, © 1965 Prestige Music/BMI. All rights reserved. Used by permission
Art Direction / Design - Anthony Hudson
Photography - Norman Seeff
Cover Painting - Joni Mitchell
© 1974 Asylum Records. Mfg. by Elektra / Asylum / Nonesuch Records, a division of Warner Communications Inc., 15 Columbus Circle, New York, N.Y. 10023. Printed USA

Reviews of the album from the Library:

• Joni - A Leader Once Again: Sounds Magazine, December 22, 1973

• Joni's Songs Are For Everyone: New York Times, January 6, 1974

• Joni Mitchell Album, Tour: Record World, January 19, 1974

• Court and Spark: Melody Maker, January 20, 1974

• Joni for the charts: Record & Radio Mirror, January 26, 1974

• Pop Picks: Cash Box, January 26, 1974

• Joni’s quest grows intense: Michigan Daily, January 30, 1974

• Dylan, Mitchell create new moods: Vidette (Illinois State University), January 31, 1974

• Joni Mitchell: beautiful as singer and songwriter: Chicago Daily Herald, February 1, 1974

• Court and Spark: Sounds Magazine, February 2, 1974

• Insights from Inside Joni Mitchell: Los Angeles Times, February 3, 1974

• Joni Mitchell - is sweet white wine: Journal News (Hamilton, OH), February 3, 1974

• Album Review: Joni Mitchell: ‘Court and Spark’: Marin Women’s News Journal, March 1, 1974

• Court and Spark: Spectrum (Buffalo University), March 1, 1974

• Joni Mitchell courts and sparks: Griffin (Buffalo NY), March 1, 1974

• Joni Sells Out, But Still Sounds Blue: Oakland Tribune, March 1, 1974

• Joni Mitchell Hits You Mid-Hangup: Chicago Sun Times, March 2, 1974

• Songs to Think About: Winston-Salem Journal, March 3, 1974

• love’s continuing saga: Great Speckled Bird, March 4, 1974

• Story Behind The Image: Getty Images, February 2, 2015

• Free, Open Spaces: Brian Eno's Favourite Records: Quietus, April 13, 2016

• How 'Girls' Helped Me Rediscover Joni Mitchell: Culture Sonar, March 7, 2017

• Joni Mitchell’s ‘Court and Spark’: A Significant Pivot: BestClassicBands.com, November 16, 2017

• Maria Doyle Kennedy: Joni Mitchell taught me not to feel sorry for myself: Irish Times, December 1, 2017

• Belted out by my mom in a VW Beetle: a young boy’s perfect Joni Mitchell moment: Salon.com, March 24, 2018

• listening to joni: #6: court and spark: We Move To Canada, August 1, 2018

• Court and Spark: UNCUT, December 2020

• Revisiting ‘Court and Spark’, Joni Mitchell’s alternative take on love and freedom: Far Out Magazine, January 17, 2021

• Court and Spark: Resistor Magazine, July 15, 2021

• The Joni Mitchell album that changed my life: Washington Post, December 3, 2021

• ‘Court and Spark’: Joni Mitchell’s Commercial and Creative Breakthrough: Dig!, January 17, 2022

• The Jazz Singer: MOJO, July 2023”

Review:

“Her 1974 commercial break-out, Court and Spark, found her backed by first-call jazz session cats L.A. Express. It was her official severance from folk music. Court is her most pop album and gave her three chart hits, going gold five weeks after its release. Mitchell's production features heavy and sudden multi-tracked swells of her voice that spike melodies like a choir of accusing angels and mimic strings and horns. Her arrangement on "Down to You" (aided by Express bandleader Tom Scott) is stunning in its complexity, yet it never shakes you; it is still utterly a pop song.

Now six albums deep on the topic of love and loss, Court has a marked cynicism. It's a grown up album about arriving at the intractable issues of adult love. "Help Me", which was Mitchell's only top 10 hit, is reluctant about romance; she's "hoping for the future/ And worrying about the past." The refrain is pocked by the dawnlight realizations of that post-free love era: "We love our lovin'/ But not like we love our freedom." For the largeness of her band (which included Joe Sample of the Crusaders, and Larry Carlton, soon to be of every memorable Steely Dan guitar solo) they are nimble throughout; their finesse suited her own” – Pitchfork

Key Cut: Free Man in Paris

The Hissing of Summer Lawns

Release Date: November 1975

Label: Asylum

Producer: Joni Mitchell

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/joni-mitchell/the-hissing-of-summer-lawns

Standout Tracks: Edith and the Kingpin/The Hissing of Summer Lawns/The Boho Dance

Players, Dates and Details:

“The Hissing Of Summer Lawns is many things. It's an exclusive peek behind the curtain of palm trees that protects the super-wealthy and the super-bored. It's a set of 10 musical pieces that are at times melancholy, graceful, fine-woven and inscrutable. It's a dossier of sophisticated observations on women's material victories and defeats as they rely on, resent or revolve around their men. Above all, it's an LP that documents the lives of an endangered species that knows little of worlds beyond its own: the indigenous tribespeople of American suburbia. On the embossed sleeve, Mitchell transposed the giant snake to a fettucine-green landscape that might have been a modern-day urban park. The skyscrapers of a metropolis towered in the distance. Lined up in front of them, occupying the space between the businessmen and the bushmen, a row of bungalows stood like tanks before an army, guarding the city's perimeter. Mitchell's motif of the summer lawn was both impressionistic and sociocultural.

Album Notes

In France They Kiss On Main Street
Background voices - G. Nash, D. Crosby, J. Taylor, and Joni Mitchell
Electric guitar - Robben Ford and Jeff Baxter
Acoustic guitar - Joni Mitchell
Electric piano - Victor Feldman
Drums - John Guerin
Bass - Max Bennett
The Jungle Line
Moog and acoustic guitar - Joni Mitchell
and the warrior drums of Burundi
Edith And The Kingpin
Electric piano - Joe Sample
Electric guitar - Larry Carlton
Acoustic guitar - Joni Mitchell
Bass - Wilton Felder
Drums - John Guerin
Horn - Chuck Findley
Sax and flute - Bud Shank
Don't Interrupt The Sorrow
Acoustic guitars - Joni Mitchell
Electric guitars - Larry Carlton
Dobro - Robben Ford
Bass - Wilton Felder
Drums - John Guerin
Congas - Victor Feldman
Shades Of Scarlet Conquering
Piano - Joni Mitchell
Electric piano and vibes - Victor Feldman
Electric guitar - Larry Carlton
Bass - Max Bennett
Drums - John Guerin
String arrangement - Dale Oehler
The Hissing Of Summer Lawns
Keyboard and percussion - Victor Feldman
Trumpet - Chuck Findley
Sax and Flute - Bud Shank
Guitar - James Taylor
Bass - Max Benett
Arrangement - drums - Moog - John Guerin
The Boho Dance
Keyboards - Joni Mitchell
Bass - Max Bennett
Drums - John Guerin
Flugle horn - Chuck Findley
Bass flute - Bud Shank
Harry's House - Centerpiece
Keyboards - Joe Sample
Guitar - Robben Ford
Trumpets - Chuck Findley
Drums - John Guerin
Bass - Max Bennett
Sweet Bird
Piano and acoustic guitars - Joni Mitchell
Electric guitars - Larry Carlton
Shadows And Light
Arp-Farfisa and voices - Joni Mitchell
This record is a total work conceived graphically, musically, lyrically and accidentally - as a whole. The performances were guided by the given compositional structures and the audibly inspired beauty of every player. The whole unfolded like a mystery. It is not my intention to unravel that mystery for anyone, but rather to offer some additional clues:
"Centerpiece" is a Johnny Mandel-Jon Hendricks tune. John Guerin and I collaborated on "The Hissing Of Summer Lawns." "The Boho Dance" is a Tom Wolfe-ism from the book, "The Painted Word." The poem, "Don't Interrupt The Sorrow" was born around 4 a.m. in a New York loft. Larry Poons seeded it and Bobby Neuwirth was midwife here, but the child filtered thru Genesis at Jackson Lake, Saskatchewan, is rebellious and mystical and insists that its conception was immaculate.
Henry - more than an engineer - Lewy and his assistant Ellis Sorkin, piloted these tapes to their destination; Henry and I mixed them; and Bernie Grundman mastered them at A&M studios in Hollywood.
I drew the cover and designed the package with research help and guidance from Glen Christensen, Electra/Asylum Art Director. The photo is Norman Seeff's.
I would especially like to thank Myrt and Bill Anderson, North Battleford, New York, Saskatoon, Bel-Air, Burbank, Burundi, Orange County, the deep, deep heart of Dixie, Blue, National Geographic Magazine, Helpful Henry The Housewife's Delight - and John Guerin for showing me the root of the chordand where 1 was.
She could see the blue pools in the squinting sun and hear the hissing of summer lawns...
All songs written and composed by Joni Mitchell copyright 1975 by Crazy Crow Music BMI, except "Centerpiece," written and composed by Johnny Mandel and Jon Hendricks and published by Caphryl Music ASCAP copyright 1958 and "The Hissing Of Summer Lawns," written and composed by John Guerin and Joni Mitchell and published by Crazy Crow Music BMI and Man Man's Drum Music ASCAP. All Lyrics reprinted with permission of the publishers. All Rights reserved.
Max Bennett, Robben Ford, Victor Feldman and John Guerin - Courtesy of The L.A. Express - Caribou Records. Larry Carlton, Wilton Felder and Joe Sample - Courtesy of the Jazz Crusaders-ABC-Blue Thumb Records. Graham Nash, Dave Crosby - Courtesy of ABC Records. James Taylor - Courtesy of Waner Bros. Records.

Reviews of the album from the Library:

• Fighting Winning Loving Losing: Sounds Magazine, December 16, 1972

• Joni Mitchell: Asylum Releases Her First Album Since Re-Signing: Cash Box, November 22, 1975

• New Joni Mitchell LP: Record World, November 22, 1975

• The Pop Life: New York Times, November 28, 1975

• Album Reviews: The Yell (UNLV), December 3, 1975

• Capturing California's Essence: Washington Post, December 3, 1975

• The Hissing Of Summer Lawns: Salient (Victoria University), March 29, 1976

• Getting the Message: Branching Out (Edmonton), April 1976

• In the Groove: Allentown Messenger-Press, April 29, 1976

• Joni: It's a labyrinthine affair: Street Life, December 27, 1976

• Old music: Joni Mitchell – Edith and the Kingpin: Guardian, February 7, 2012

• The Hissing Of Summer Lawns – Asylum Records/Speakers Corner Records – vinyl: Audiophile Audition, April 17, 2013

• 40 Years On: Joni Mitchell's The Hissing Of Summer Lawns Revisited : Quietus, November 23, 2015

• On Joni Mitchell’s Enduring Hissing of Summer Lawns, 40 Years Later: Pitchfork Media, November 30, 2015

• It's the lady's choice: Joni Mitchell and Hissing of Summer Lawns: HamptonRoads.com, December 1, 2015

• listening to joni: #7: the hissing of summer lawns: We Move To Canada, December 25, 2018

• The Hissing of Summer Lawns: UNCUT, December 2020

• The Hissing Of Summer Lawns: Joni Mitchel’s Savage Takedown Of Middle-class Life: Dig!, November 5, 2022”

Review:

“With 1975’s The Hissing of Summer Lawns, the singer’s seventh album, Mitchell leaned into her experimental musical influences with synths and jazz painting the soundscapes. Compared to albums like Ladies of the Canyon, The Hissing of Summer Lawns is much more ambitious in its sonic palette, although this has proved divisive. Yet, the unconventional instrumentation works terrifically alongside Mitchell’s voice, providing greater intrigue and weight to her lyrical explorations. With frenetic jazz bursts and drums played by the African percussion group Drummers of Burundi, the record feels expansive and eclectic, highlighting Mitchell’s ease outside the realms of piano and acoustic guitar.

Lyrically, Mitchell is on top form, often focusing her musings on feminine identity, city life and artistry. With every song, Mitchell uses her words to craft lucid stories which immerse the listener in a specific moment in time. The accompanying instrumentals help to bring these small snapshots to life, resulting in a beautiful and thought-provoking collection of songs.

Opening with ‘In France They Kiss on Main Street’, Mitchell depicts a young girl growing up under the influence of rock and roll’s emergence in the 1950s. With lines like “Feel so wild you could break somebody’s heart/ Just doing the latest dance craze,” the singer encapsulates the intensity of growing up, with simple actions amplified tenfold under the haze of new experiences. “Gail and Louise in those push-up brassieres/ Tight dresses and rhinestone rings, drinking up the band’s beers,” Mitchell sings, crafting a vivid portrait of youth through her observations. The song is accompanied by the occasional electric guitar riff, cleverly uniting form and content.

The following track, ‘The Jungle Line’, takes a slight sonic shift to welcome a sample of the Drummers of Burundi’s percussion, which creates a slightly ominous tone as Mitchell plays a Moog synthesiser alongside. The song stomps forward with a musical intensity like nothing Mitchell had released until this point. Yet, the charging potency of the track works well; it’s one of the record’s most memorable tracks, the demands of its drums forcing us to listen.

Female agency is a central theme of the album, which was released during the midst of second-wave feminism. On ‘Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow’, Mitchell’s pleasant acoustic guitar floats along with steady percussion, allowing her voice to take prominence. She argues for the independence of women, using traditional religious imagery to illuminate the historical subordination of women by men.

Elsewhere, Mitchell explores the relationship between a husband who essentially locks his wife away in a fancy house, keeping her as a decorative object rather than an autonomous being. An underlying terror lies at the heart of the song, with the motif of “the hissing of summer lawns” suggesting an unknown threat – potentially a snake – which evokes further religious imagery. The husband puts up a “barbed wire fence,” retaining his ownership over his wife through “just a little blood of his own” on “every metal thorn.” The symbolism commands the song’s message with power, which culminates in the wife choosing to stay trapped in the relationship, possessing a twisted sense of love for him regardless. Mitchell’s vocals sweep through the background in harmony with gentle saxophones and trumpets, which stand in contrast with the brutal sadness of the narrative.

An album highlight comes in the form of ‘Harry’s House/Centerpiece’, which emphasises the isolation of modern life, commenting on the effects of industrialism and capitalism on people, especially women. While the husband thinks of his wife’s body only in retrospect, preferring her youthful “body oiled and shining,” he soon recognises that he cannot live without her, clinging onto the remnants of their relationship with the realisation “’Cause nothing’s any good without you/ Baby you’re my centrepiece.” Musically, the song has an otherworldly quality, aided by mesmerising trumpets, keys and guitars, which begin to break down with the relationship described by Mitchell, resulting in a stunning, unstable jazz display.

The Hissing of Summer Lawns is a terrific album that sees Mitchell expand her repertoire, unafraid to experiment with bolder sounds. Her lyricism remains tight and contemplative, telling stories with strong social commentary weaved throughout. From the Gone With the Wind-inspired ‘Shades of Scarlett Conquering’ to the gentle acoustic number on the slippage of youth, ‘Sweet Bird’, Mitchell’s seventh album proves her prowess as one of music’s most impressive writers” – Far Out Magazine

Key Cut: In France They Kiss on Main Street

C.D.: “AND I’LL PUT ON SOME SILVER…”

Clouds

Release Date: 1st May, 1969

Label: Reprise

Producers: Joni Mitchell/Paul A. Rothchild

Buy: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Clouds-Joni-Mitchell/dp/B000002KOJ/ref=sr_1_1?crid=20KRQ4TWBL35B&keywords=joni+mitchell+clouds&qid=1695885303&s=music&sprefix=CLOUDS+%2Cpopular%2C52&sr=1-1

Standout Tracks: Tin Angel/The Gallery/Both Sides, Now

Players, Dates and Details:

“By the time Joni Mitchell released Clouds, in May 1969, the track whose chorus gave the album its name - "Both Sides, Now" - had already been recorded by more than a dozen other artists, with further renditions on the horizon. Its ubiquity was understandable: not only is it a remarkable song but, as Mitchell revealed on March 12, 1967, in an interview for Gene Shay's Folklore Program, "I've been driving everybody crazy by playing it twice and three times a night." She'd only written it "a few days earlier", she added, but within months Judy Collins had cut a version for her Wildflowers album, which, released as a single a year later, took the song into the American Top 10. Frank Sinatra adopted it too, and Camelot star Robert Goulet, while Claudine Longet and Marie Laforet delivered French interpretations. Even Leonard Nimoy took an affectionate, if faltering, crack at it for 1968's The Way I Feel, and its allure has apparently never waned. Including Dexys' cover last year, Mitchell's website currently states that it's been recorded an astonishing 1,480+ times. A standard before Mitchell even put it to tape herself, "Both Sides, Now" is, one might argue, indestructible.

Album Notes

FOR SADIE J. MCKEE
Composed and arranged by Joni Mitchell
Recorded at A&M Studios, Hollywood, California (thank you)
Engineered by Henry Lewy
"Tin Angel" produced by Paul Rothchild
Special thanks to Michael Vossi and Elliott Roberts
All music published by Siquomb Publishing Corp., 55 Liberty Street, New York, N.Y. 10005
Cover art by Joni Mitchell
Art direction: Ed Thrasher

Reviews of the album from the Library:

• Joni Mitchell: If You Want Album, You’ll Want Words: California Tech, May 22, 1969

• Three New Albums Reviewed - Dunbar, Joni Mitchell, The Who: News Record, University of Cincinnati, May 28, 1969

• Album Reviews: Cash Box, May 31, 1969

• The Best on Record: Patent Trader (Mount Kisco NY), June 7, 1969

• Joni Mitchell: The Message is Love: Washington Post, June 22, 1969

• Robb Reviews Newest Albums by Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell: Chicago Tribune, June 22, 1969

• the lighter side: High Fidelity, August 1969

• The lighter side: High Fidelity, August 1969

• Recordings of Special Merit: Stereo Review, September 1969

• Footlights Fonographs Footnotes: Duquesne Duke, September 15, 1969

• Review of Clouds: Melody Maker, September 27, 1969

• Joni Mitchell is a folksinger: Rock Island Argus, October 4, 1969

• listening to joni: #2: clouds: We Move To Canada, November 28, 2017

• 50 Years in the Clouds: No Depression, June 2019

• Clouds: UNCUT, December 2020”

Review:

“Clouds (1969) is the introduction to Mitchell's real deal, shaking folk tradition and giving off a little humor and spirit. The album sounds casual. Lyrically, she was transitioning from the era's de facto hippie sensualism (colors! the weather! vibes!) to the classically prosodic style (Keats! Cohen!) she'd become known for. The album's biggest signs of life are two of her most famous songs-- the kicky "Chelsea Morning", which is about as straightforward as Mitchell ever got, and "Both Sides Now". Though she'd known burden and heartache plenty by her still-tender age (she'd borne a child alone and in secret after dropping out of art school and married singer Chuck Mitchell in order to make a family; he changed his mind a month later and she put the baby up for adoption) she sounds a bit too young and chipper to be singing about disillusionment. Still, Clouds was a landmark, and she landed a Grammy for Best Folk Performance” – Pitchfork

Key Cut: Chelsea Morning

For the Roses

Release Date: November 1972

Label: Asylum

Producer: Joni Mitchell

Buy: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Roses-Joni-Mitchell/dp/B000002GYQ

Standout Tracks: Banquet/For the Roses/Electricity

Players, Dates and Details:

“By Joni's own admission, the brutal self-exposure of Blue took its toll. In 1985, she declared it to be "probably the purest emotional record that I will ever make in my life". That superlative holds still, but what sounds like a simple artistic judgment bears the faint suggestion of a shudder, with a note-to-self attached-never again.

In the latter half of 1971, Mitchell realised that her mental health was being compromised by a combination of factors: her deep, autobiographical questing, the fallout from her breakups with James Taylor and Jackson Browne, the voracious demands of what she felt was an exploitative industry and the public adulation that Blue delivered -to the point where she was cancelling as many shows as she was playing. Even applause she found difficult. As she told Timothy White in Rock Lives: "My animal sense was to run offstage. Many a night I would be out on stage, and the intimacy of the songs against the raucousness of this huge beast that is an audience felt very weird. I was not David to that Goliath." So, at the age of 28, she sold her Laurel Canyon home and retreated to a small stone house - just one room with a loft, "like a monastery" - that she was building on a 40-acre property on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast. It was there, in a period of unsettlement, that she wrote most of her fifth album, and her first for Asylum, For The Roses.

Album Notes

This album was added to Library of Congress' National Recording Registry in 2007.

Woodwinds and Reeds: Tommy Scott
Bass: Wilton Felder
Drums: Russ Kunkel
Percussion: Bobbye Hall
Strings: Bobby Notkoff
Harmonica: Graham Nash
Electric Guitar (Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire): James Burton
Rock 'n' Roll Band (Blonde in the Bleachers): Stephen Stills
Sound and Guidance: Henry Lewy
Recorded at A&M Studios- Hollywood, California
Art Direction/Design: Anthony Hudson
Photography: Joel Bernstein
Direction: The Geffen Roberts Co.
All songs composed by Joni Mitchell
All songs published by Joni Mitchell / BMI
Copyright 1972
Asylum Records, Manufactured by
Atlantic Recording Corporation
1841 Broadway, New York, New York 10023

Reviews of the album from the Library:

• Joni Mitchell's New For The Roses: Los Angeles Times, November 21, 1972

• Joni Sounds Fine Where Others Would Falter: Philadelphia Daily News, November 25, 1972

• Joni Mitchell, Carole King - Both Good and Different: Hartford Courant, December 2, 1972

• Minding Joni’s Roses: Brown Daily Herald, December 2, 1972

• Joni Changes Song Style: Tallahassee Democrat, December 3, 1972

• Joni Mitchell: Back to the Rose Garden: Observation Post (CCNY), December 4, 1972

• Joni, James offer strange albums: Rice Thresher (Houston), December 7, 1972

• Fifth Joni Mitchell Album Is Headed 'For the Roses': Van Nuys Valley News And Green Sheet, December 8, 1972

• One Step into the Future: Georgetown Hoya, December 8, 1972

• Roses, Raspberries, And Faces: Gettysburgian, December 8, 1972

• Joni Mitchell Sings Her Sad Songs on New Album: Philadelphia Inquirer, December 10, 1972

• Joni Mitchell- Latest offering is a pleasant whole: San Pedro News Pilot, December 10, 1972

• Musical Notes: Arcadia Tribune, December 14, 1972

• Review: For The Roses: Choragos (Mount Holyoke College), December 14, 1972

• For the Roses: San Mateo Times, December 23, 1972

• Joni Mitchell — For the Roses: San Mateo Times, December 23, 1972

• Her new album reveals a different Joni Mitchell: Toronto Star, December 30, 1972

• Joni Mitchell Tells it with Folk Lyrics: Pittsburgh Press, December 31, 1972

• For the Roses: Newsday, January 1973

• Joni Mitchell's For the Roses: It's Good For A Hole In The Heart: Rolling Stone, January 4, 1973

• Mitchell style: Disc shows emotion: Daily Utah Chronicle, January 4, 1973

• Looking back at ’72…records to remember: Michigan Daily, January 9, 1973

• Bare-bottomed Joni and mournful Melanie: Newcastle-upon-Tyne Journal, January 11, 1973

• listening to joni: #5: for the roses: We Move To Canada, February 19, 2018

• Off the Beaten Tracks: After Blue – what Joni Mitchell did next: Conservative Woman, September 30, 2019

• For The Roses: UNCUT, December 2020

• My Favorite Album: LA Weekly, March 8, 2021

• Sounded Like Applause: Substack.com, May 19, 2022

• Joni Mitchell's 'For the Roses' is the perfect balance of love and breaking up: National Catholic Reporter, September 3, 2022

• When Shawn Found Joni: Library of Congress, September 28, 2022

• On ‘For The Roses’ 50 years ago: PopMatters, November 14, 2022

• 50 Years Ago: Joni Mitchell Finds Personal Freedom on ‘For the Roses’: Ultimate Classic Rock (Website), November 21, 2022”

Review:

“On For the Roses, Joni Mitchell began to explore jazz and other influences in earnest. As one might expect from a transitional album, there is a lot of stylistic ground explored, including straight folk selections using guitar ("For the Roses") and piano ("Banquet," "See You Sometime," "Lesson in Survival") overtly jazzy numbers ("Barangrill," "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire," and hybrids that cross the two "Let the Wind Carry Me," "Electricity," "Woman of Heart and Mind," "Judgment of the Moon and Stars"). "Blonde in the Bleachers" grafts a rock & roll band coda onto a piano-based singer/songwriter main body. The hit single "You Turn Me on I'm a Radio" is an unusual essay into country-tinged pop, sporting a Dylanesque harmonica solo played by Graham Nash and lush backing vocals. Arrangements here build solidly upon the tentative expansion of scoring first seen in Ladies of the Canyon. "Judgment of the Moon and Stars" and "Let the Wind Carry Me" present lengthy instrumental interludes. The lyrics here are among Mitchell's best, continuing in the vein of gripping honesty and heartfelt depth exhibited on Blue. As always, there are selections about relationship problems, such as "Lesson in Survival," "See You Sometime," and perhaps the best of all her songs in this genre, "Woman of Heart and Mind." "Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire" presents a gritty inner-city survival scene, while "Barangrill" winsomely extols the uncomplicated virtues of a roadside truck stop. More than a bridge between great albums, this excellent disc is a top-notch listen in its own right” – AllMusic

Key Cut: You Turn Me On I’m a Radio

DIGITIAL: “HANDY’S CAST IN BRONZE…”

Hejira

Release Date: November 1976

Label: Asylum

Producers: Joni Mitchell/Henry Lewy

Standout Tracks: Furry Sings the Blues/Hejira/Blue Motel Room

Players, Dates and Details:

“The women of The Hissing Of Summer Lawns were always trapped in somebody else's frame. Joni Mitchell only used the first person once on her seventh album; instead, she sang of women as seen through men's eyes, assessed according to their suitability for motherhood, sex and deference. Similarly, Mitchell found herself made into an adjunct when she briefly joined the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975, opening for male artists who were her equal. She approached the tour as a research trip, "an amazing experience, studying mysticism and ego malformation like you wouldn't believe", as she told journalist Timothy White. "Everybody took all of their vices to the Nth degree and came out of it born again, or into AA."

Where these acts were tilting towards the mainstream, by the mid-‘70s, Mitchell was keenly following Marvin Gaye in "moving away from the hit department, to the art department", keen to forge her own rhythms away from rock. In the wake of her split from drummer John Guerin, she was ready to give life the slip for a while.

After the end of the Hissing tour, Mitchell was sojourning at Neil Young's beach house.

Album Notes

COYOTE
Bass Jaco Pastorius
Rhythm guitar Mitchell
Lead guitar Larry Carlton
Percussion Bobbye Hall
AMELIA
Rhythm guitar Mitchell
Lead guitar Larry Carlton
Vibes Victor Feldman
FURRY SINGS THE BLUES
Drums John Guerin
Bass Max Bennett
Harmonica Neil Young
Guitar Mitchell
A STRANGE BOY
Rhythm guitar Mitchell
Lead guitar Larry Carlton
Percussion Bobbye Hall
HEJIRA
Bass Jaco Pastorius
Guitar Mitchell
Percussion Bobbye Hall
Clarinet Abe Most
SONG FOR SHARON
Drums John Guerin
Bass Max Bennett
Vocals & Guitar Mitchell
BLACK CROW
Bass Jaco Pastorius
Rhythm guitar Mitchell
Lead guitar Larry Carlton
BLUE MOTEL ROOM
Bass Chuck Domanico
Drums John Guerin
Acoustic guitar Larry Carlton
Electric guitar Mitchell
REFUGE OF THE ROADS
Bass Jaco Pastorius
Drums John Guerin
Guitar Mitchell
Horns Chuck Findley & Tom Scott
Recorded at A&M Studios in Hollywood by Henry (Inspirational) Lewy
assisted by Steve Katz
Musical Director Mitchell Mixed by Lewy & Mitchell
Mastered by Bernie Grundman
John Guerin, Max Bennett & Victor Feldman appear courtesy of Caribou Records – The L.A. Express
Larry Carlton appears courtesy of ABC/Blue Thumb Records
Jaco Pastorius appears courtesy of Epic Records
Neil Young appears courtesy of Warner Bros. Records, Inc.
Bobbye Hall appears courtesy of 20th Century Records
Tom Scott appears courtesy of Ode Records
Henry Lewy appears courtesy of Nado Lewy
All songs by Mitchell ©1976 Crazy Crow Music (BMI)
All songs used with permission
All rights reserved
Cover design Mitchell
Art Direction Glen Christensen
Photos by Norman Seeff & Joel Bernstein
Photo prints Keith Williamson
Special thanks Toller Cranston
Personal management Elliot Roberts

Reviews of the album from the Library:

• Red Roses for a Blue Canyon Lady: Crawdaddy, April 1974

• Asylum Sets Joni LP: Record World, November 27, 1976

• Joni: Summer Lawns, Grey Gardens: Melody Maker, November 27, 1976

• The tip of the iceberg: Sounds Magazine, November 27, 1976

• Joni’s Self-Pity Is Lovely: Charlotte Observer, December 3, 1976

• Mitchell, Baez albums get mixed reviews: Trintonian (Trinity University), December 3, 1976

• Album Reviews: Cash Box, December 4, 1976

• Hejira Review: Toronto Star, December 4, 1976

• Rock superstars are recording more big albums: Toronto Star, December 4, 1976

• Review of Hejira: Minneapolis Star, December 15, 1976

• Joni and Browne Discs 'Superb': Miami Herald, December 16, 1976

• Joni Mitchell attends to particulars in album: Pasadena Star-News, December 17, 1976

• Now Joni is Down to Earth: Birmingham Evening Mail, December 18, 1976

• Pops: Bristol Evening Post, December 18, 1976

• Record Review: Joni Mitchell Travels Winning Path: Daily Record (Morristown NJ), December 19, 1976

• Sounds '76: Rapid City Journal, December 19, 1976

• Joni Mitchell - Truly Distinctive: Green Bay Press-Gazette, December 26, 1976

• Music notes - Hejira: Wichita Beacon, December 29, 1976

• Joni Mitchell puffs elegant smoke-rings: Windsor Star, December 31, 1976

• An end to innocence: how Joni Mitchell fails: Village Voice, January 1977

• Hejira a bit too cerebral for its own good: Rolling Stone, January 5, 1977

• Joni Mitchell: Hejira – Asylum: Het Parool, January 5, 1977

• Joni Mitchell Reveals Herself: Kingsport Times-News (Tennessee), January 9, 1977

• Joni Mitchell: Too Cerebral: Asbury Park Press, January 9, 1977

• Album Review: Saint George Dixie Sun, January 13, 1977

• She Finds Womanhood on New Album: Palm Beach Post-Times, January 16, 1977

• Joni: Love and Life: New Mexico Daily Lobo, January 17, 1977

• Kaos Critics Pick the Hits: Cooper Point Journal (Evergreen State), January 20, 1977

• Pop Records: Edmonton Journal, January 22, 1977

• Joni’s again fleeing down that lonely highway: Age (Australia), January 27, 1977

• Hejira: Statesville Record and Landmark, January 29, 1977

• Joni's Work Marked by Simplicity: Munster Times, January 30, 1977

• Revelations from Joni Mitchell: Student Life (Logan, Utah), February 2, 1977

• Hejira: de Volkskrant (Amsterdam), February 4, 1977

• Joni Mitchell sets standard for excellence: Brandon Sun, February 5, 1977

• listening to joni: #8: hejira: We Move To Canada, May 17, 2019

• The Making of Hejira, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, and Mingus: JoniMitchell.com, May 4, 2020

• Hejira: UNCUT, December 2020

• Joni Mitchell’s jazzy ‘Hejira’ captured the pitfalls of life untethered 45 years ago: PopMatters, November 22, 2021

• Running Away With Honor: Dallas Observer, December 8, 2021

• ‘Hejira’: How Joni Mitchell Journeyed Into Her Greatest Musical Experiment: Dig!, November 17, 2022

• Hejira: Pitchfork, December 4, 2022”

Review:

“Blue is probably the most accessible of Mitchell’s records. Each self-contained song tells a story that is matched by an emotion that is equally well pitched. It is about the angst of young love, for the most part. Yet it is with Hejira, her ninth album, that Mitchell had reached a maturity in which her imagination and talent burst the banks of traditional song-writing. She had shaken off the acoustic sound with the 1974 album Court and Spark, and this had increased her popularity. She started to experiment with jazz, a sound that can be heard on her 1975 album The Hissing of Summer Lawns. That experimentation led to the stripped-bare record Hejira, which, unlike its predecessors, was markedly not commercial.

Hejira is 52 minutes long, and yet contains 9 tracks. The title track is almost 7 minutes long and is followed by the epic ‘Song for Sharon’, which is closer to 9 minutes. The majority of the tracks comprise the sound of Mitchell’s guitar (electric and rhythm), and the fretless bass played by jazz musician Jaco Pastorius. Neil Young plays harmonica on ‘Furry Songs the Blues’. The acoustic guitar appears only on one track, ‘Blue Hotel Room’ and the percussion throughout is, for the most part, understated.

Hejira is a contemplative work about travel, as well as the alienation & observation that accompanies the traveller. Mitchell matches the sense of her lyrics perfectly with songs that work at their own pace and are not shaped by the tradition of verse and chorus, and the limitations that lead to radio-play. They do not follow predictable patterns, and because it is not about what appears on the surface, it becomes necessary for the listener to adapt, to really listen. It challenges the sense of what popular music is and can be.

If you think of the music of the mid to late ‘70s, of the pre-punk era, the dominant sound is that of disco. Hejira is not tied to time and trends anything other than the time and trends in Mitchell’s development. It is the most out-of-time of all her records.

Take the track ‘A Strange Boy’, which recalls the singer’s attraction to, and conflict with, a young man she does not feel has reached maturity. There is all the excitement of what playing the rebel with this boy can be. Then there is the tension that results from demanding that he also behave as she thinks he sometimes should, as a grown-up. That tension is mirrored in the percussion, which weaves in and out of a track ruled by electric and rhythm guitar, and in a melody that undulates with the mood of the singer.

What a strange strange boy

He sees the cars as sets of waves

Sequences of mass and space

He sees the damage in my face

The shape of the song, the direction of the song, is determined by the story told by the lyrics. The lead characters are played by the rhythm electric guitars respectively, and the percussion reflects the tension between them. There is a real audacity in writing a song in this manner, which is stripped to its basic components and as a result resonates with feeling.

There is a maturity and idiosyncrasy to Hejira that is not often witnessed in popular music. It is the product of an artist at the peak of her creativity who also knows that after this act of observation she must return to everyday life. This is a statement that not only describes her subject matter but the creative process she has undertaken in bringing the songs to life. As she writes at the end of the title track,

I’m travelling in some vehicle

I’m sitting in some café

A defector from the petty wars

Until love sucks me back that way” – Polari Magazine

Key Cut: Coyote

Taming the Tiger

Release Date: 29th September, 1998

Label: Reprise

Producer: Joni Mitchell

Standout Tracks: Man from Mars/Taming the Tiger/Stay in Touch

Players, Dates and Details:

“For better and worse, nearly every track on Taming The Tiger seems to have been inspired by the possibilities offered by this "virtual guitar". And it's not just in tunings -the same technology can be used to trigger sounds that you'd usually associate with other instruments. For instance, the opening track, "Harlem In Havana" starts with the digital burblings of what sounds like a heavily mutated steel drum, or a marimba. All of these voicings, however, are actually synth sounds being triggered by Mitchell's new digital toy, the VG8. "It's like a marimba," says Mitchell, "but it's not like any marimba part you've ever heard because it's fingerpicked. Meanwhile, the bass string is almost atonal and sounds like a didgeridoo ... " She describes the Roland guitar on the sleeve credits as her "guitar orchestra".

"Harlem In Havana" was apparently inspired by a very young Joni witnessing Leon Claxton's Afro-Cuban circus when it visited her home town of Saskatoon in the '50s. Her parents had forbidden her from visiting, and the lyrics relish the circus's forbidden status ("Hootchie-cootchie! Auntie Ruthie would've cried if she knew we were on the inside!"). Despite recalling an event that happened in the 1950s, the sonic language being used couldn't be more forward looking. "Step right in! Silver spangles, see 'em dangle in the farm boy's eyes", she hollers, the "silver spangles" mirrored by the futuristic metallic sounds made by the synth guitar. It's a curious collision of styles - Brian Blade eases through a swinging shuffle rhythm, Wayne Shorter sprays his soprano sax in the gaps, while Mitchell lays punky thrash guitars over her digital chimes. Absolutely nothing released in 1998 sounded anything like this.

Album Notes

Harlem In Havana
Larry Klein – Bass
Brian Blade – Drums
Wayne Shorter – Sax
Femi Jiya – Barker
Joni Mitchell – Guitar Orchestra, Vocals and Background Vocals
Engineered by Femi Jiya, Dan Marnien and Tony Phillips
Man From Mars
Brian Blade – Drums
Joni Mitchell – Bass, Guitar and Keyboards
Engineered by Femi Jiya, Dan Marnien and Tony Phillips
Love Puts On A New Face
Wayne Shorter – Sax
Greg Leisz – Peddle Steel
Joni Mitchell – Guitar and Keyboards
Engineered by Femi Jiya, Dan Marnien and Tony Phillips
Lead Balloon
Larry Klein – Bass
Brian Blade – Drums
Wayne Shorter – Sax
Michael Landau – Low Lead Guitar
Joni Mitchell – Guitar Orchestra, Vocals and Background Vocals
Engineered by Femi Jiya, Dan Marnien and Tony Phillips
No Apologies
Brian Blade – Drums
Greg Leisz – Peddle Steel
Joni Mitchell - Bass, Guitar and Keyboards
Engineered by Dan Marnien and Tony Phillipsv
Taming The Tiger
Joni Mitchell – Guitar, Keyboards, Vocals
Engineered by Dan Marnien
The Crazy Cries Of Love
Larry Klein – Bass
Brian Blade – Drums
Wayne Shorter – Sax
Greg Leisz – Peddle Steel
Joni Mitchell – Guitar, Keyboards, Vocals and Background Vocals
Engineered by Dan Marnien and Tony Phillips
Stay In Touch
Wayne Shorter – Sax
Joni Mitchell – Guitar and Keyboards
Engineered by Dan Marnien
Face Lift
Wayne Shorter – Sax
Joni Mitchell – Guitar and Keyboards
Engineered by Dan Marnien
My Best To You
Greg Leisz – Peddle Steel
Joni Mitchell – Bass, Percussion and Keyboards
Engineered by Dan Marnien
Tiger Bones
Joni Mitchell – Guitar, Keyboards and Vocals
Engineered by Dan Marnien
All Songs Written, Arranged, and Produced by Joni Mitchell
©1998 Crazy Crow Music ASCAP
All rights administered by
Sony/ATV Music Publishing
8 Music Square West
Nashville, TN 37203
Except "The Crazy Cries Of Love" (Words by Don Freed)
©1994, 1998 Crazy Crow Music ASCAP/Scratchatune Publishing SOCAN
And "My Best To You" Written by Gene Willadsen and Isham Jones
©1942 Forster Music Publishers Inc. ASCAP
Lyrics Reprinted by Permission. All Rights Reserved.
Mixed by Joni Mitchell and Dan Marnien
Art Direction by Joni Mitchell and Robbie Cavolina
Album Photography by Theo Fridlizius
Management by Steve Macklam and Sam Feldman for S.L. Feldman and Associates
Special Thanks to Fred Wallecki and Brian Blade for rekindling my desire to make music.
Thanks to everyone at The Daily Grill for the good food and the good cheer.
Thanks to Edwin and the parking gang for their friendliness and courtesy.
Thanks to Julie Larson for fighting for me and with me.
And special thanks to Kilauren and Marlin just for being in this world.
©1998 Joni Mitchell. Made in U.S.A.

Reviews of the album from the Library:

• Singer Joni Mitchell cultivates artistic groove after seclusion: Chicago Tribune, September 20, 1998

• New Stripes: San Diego Union Tribune, September 24, 1998

• Taming the Tiger: London Times, September 25, 1998

• Mitchell Brings Perspective and Wit to 'Taming the Tiger': Los Angeles Times, September 26, 1998

• Joni Roars: New York Daily News, September 27, 1998

• Riled Woman: Washington Post, September 30, 1998

• Sharps and Flats: Salon.com, September 30, 1998

• Taming the Tiger: George Graham Website, September 30, 1998

• Still Hard: Q Magazine, October 1998

• Taming the Tiger: Patriot Ledger, October 16, 1998

• Taming the Tiger: Seattle Times, October 22, 1998

• Joni still to be found at the very top: Daily Post (Merseyside), October 23, 1998

• Taming the Tiger: Newark Star-Ledger, October 25, 1998

• Mitchell true to her muse on Taming the Tiger: Saskatoon StarPhoenix, October 29, 1998

• Taming the Tiger: Feminist Bookstore News, November 1998

• Mellow Minstrels - Joni and others sing of joy and reconciliation : Maclean's, November 2, 1998

• 2 Joni Mitchells - on TV and album - are both worthwhile: St Louis Post-Dispatch, November 6, 1998

• 2 Joni Mitchells — on TV and album — are both worthwhile: St Louis Post-Dispatch, November 6, 1998

• The Divine Ms. M’s: Bay Area Reporter, December 31, 1998

• Joni Mitchell's 'Taming the Tiger' Turns 20: Why the Spaced-Out Album Deserves More Applause: Billboard, September 29, 2018

• listening to joni: #16: taming the tiger: We Move To Canada, November 25, 2020

• Taming The Tiger: UNCUT, December 2020”

Review:

“The story of Taming the Tiger begins with a health necessity: Mitchell was a polio survivor at age nine, and has struggled with related back problems ever since — as such, she needed a sound and approach that worked for her physical limitations. As Mitchell recalled in a 1998 conversation with musicologist and her site creator, Wally Breese, “There was a merchant in Los Angeles who knew of my difficulties and knew that this machine was coming along that would solve my tuning problems.”

That machine was the Roland VG-8, a digital guitar processor that allowed her to program her increasingly labyrinthine guitar tunings on the fly. A luthier then made a “wafer-thin,” “two-and-a-half-pound” Stratocaster to go along with the processor, “which not only kind of contours to my body, but also kind of cups up like a bra!” But as Joni Mitchell’s biographer, David Yaffe, put it in Reckless Daughter: A Portrait of Joni Mitchell, the processor sounded “like a computerized approximation of a guitar with a head cold.” No matter, Mitchell had landed on a dreamy new sound, one that updated her textural work on albums like 1976’s Hejira for a digital age.

Mitchell wrote a set of songs that fit her ambient, drifting new sound. While Turbulent Indigo had a glaring edge to it, from its darkly Van Gogh-referencing cover to its socially critical lyrics, Tiger is down-to-earth and movingly personal. She was no longer lashing out; she was observing her own heartbreak and daily minutiae with candidness and heart.

Take “Man from Mars,” the second track on Tiger, which was originally commissioned as a lost-lover song for the mostly forgotten 1996 music flick Grace of My Heart. It ended up being about Mitchell’s cat, who the song was named after — that’s him on the cover. According to Mitchell’s site, she threw the kitty out for having one too many accidents on the rug — and Man from Mars did not return for some time. “The grief that I felt in his absence coincided with the grief of the character in the movie,” she remembered.

Mitchell also gets lost in the past. “Harlem in Havana” is a dreamy remembrance of a circus that would come through her tiny Canadian hometown of Saskatoon. As Joni explains it, “The thickness of the arrangement, the density of it is an attempt to, in an orderly fashion, create the cacophony and the compressed density of the sound … through the screams of people on the double Ferris wheel.” “Face Lift” explores Mitchell’s relationship with her mother in a series of small moments: pushing a bed up to a candlelit window, seeing the Christmas lights.

But the twin triumphs on Tiger are the quietest. “No Apologies” continues the heavier themes of Indigo: it’s a ripped-from-the-headlines indictment of a rape incident involving servicemen in Okinawa, Japan. But the music isn’t aggressive or didactic; it’s pure melancholy, riding on long, gorgeous trails of lap steel. And the most glacial song of the whole set, “Stay in Touch,” peels apart the meaning of its commonplace title until it’s about any two souls meeting and parting: “In the middle of our time on Earth / We perceive each other.”

The album’s unique atmosphere is just as indebted to its backing ensemble, made up of saxophonist Wayne Shorter, bassist and ex-husband Larry Klein, and legendary session drummer Brian Blade, who’s just as powerful for not appearing on most tracks, letting the glacial, synthesizing sonics envelop” – Billboard

Key Cut: Harlem in Havana

FEATURE: Spotlight: Dark Tropics

FEATURE:

 

 

Spotlight

Dark Tropics

_________

A terrific Belfast duo…

who I think should get attention far and wide, I wanted to spotlight the magnificent Dark Tropics. I have been a fan of theirs a while now. I think I first heard them when their 2021 debut album, Ink, was released. Out at the height and toughest time of the pandemic, it was a challenge promoting the album and establishing a foothold. it is a superb album. Since then, they have grown even more assured and confident. The latest single, Carnival, is one of their very best! I do wonder whether there will be a second studio album next year. Growing in popularity and acclaim, everyone should have Dark Tropics on their radar. Comprised of Gerard Sands and Rio McGuinness, there is a close interaction and real chemistry between the friends. In my view, McGuiness has one of the most expressive, soulful and beautiful voices in modern music. Paired to the talent that Sands has dripping from every pore and Dark Tropics are a tantalising and unstoppable force! I was wondering how often we look at music coming from Belfast and Northern Ireland. In fact, I feel the media has an issue still with looking outside of England and the U.S. Hopefully that will change! I am going to come to a recent interview with Dark Tropics. First, I wanted to head back. In April 2020 – when the pandemic was new and there was uncertainty in the air -, The Music Files spend some time with the fabulous duo:

“1.    How did you guys form?

Gerard: I’d been on the look out for a singer for a while. Just over a year ago I saw an ad online from a singer based in Belfast looking to perform live in a jazz band. Although I didn’t want to start a jazz band or play jazz I thought it was intriguing so I messaged Rio and she emailed me back from Morocco where she was volunteering, seeming interested. She sent me this really jazzy voice note of her singing ‘crazy’ by Gnarls Barkley acapella. It sounded beautifully strange so we organised to meet on her return. At our first meeting we discovered a mutual appreciation of Radiohead and The Rolling Stones song ‘Sympathy for the devil’ and decided to try recording something.

Rio: The first time we actually met I was just out of work, my manager had made me re-set half the restaurant because the salt and pepper were on the wrong sides so I was not only horrendously nervous but also late (very typical of me). I was surprised at how well we got on and how much we had to talk about! As soon as we met I abandoned the jazz band I was planning on busking with.

2.    How would you describe your music to first time listeners?

Pop-Noir.

3.    You were recently played on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic in California – what an achievement! How does it feel knowing your music has been played worldwide?

Gerard: Getting played on that show was an especially big deal for me because I’ve listened to it for a long time. I’ve discovered lots of new music there so I was absolutely delighted. ‘Badlands’ isn’t the chirpiest song in the world so the response from radio generally has been fantastic. It’s incredibly hard to get to radio and we’re so grateful for the support.

5.    You are based in Belfast, how would you describe it’s music scene?

Gerard: It’s an incredibly exciting time for Belfast Music. It’s buzzing. There’s genuine camaraderie among musicians and with the ‘Oh Yeah’ Music Centre there’s an important avenue for musicians who want to gig, record and release but need help getting started. The music is so diverse and it feels like there are great songs being released all the time. You can go to a show with a pop act following a heavy rock band and it somehow works cause the crowds are so open”.

I am going to move things along. In February last year, Dark Tropics discussed how they put something of themselves into the music. Explaining to Hot Press how things are polished to perfection, we learn more about a wonderful duo who were gaining a lot of traction and new adoration. It seems like, over a year later, they are in the position of playing some huge festivals. I think next year will be a breakout year where they will tour internationally and get some huge bookings:

“The first time Gerard Sands heard Rio McGuinness sing, she was humming Gnarls Barkley’s ‘Crazy’ into a handset.
“I was at a bus stop, walking to work, singing into my phone,” recalls McGuinness.

“It was this jazzy version. The melody was different,” continues Sands. “Everything about it was weird. I half hated it, half loved it. I was like, ‘We need to meet.’”

So went the origin story of Dark Tropics, the Belfast duo whose Lana Del Rey-esque cinematic pop has seen them anointed one of Ireland’s most acclaimed new outfits. Sands had discovered McGuinness on an app called “Join My Band”, which in Belfast largely consists of heavy metal bass players looking for drummers.

After inhaling her breathless take on Gnarls Barkley they met, mucked around in the studio – and a beautiful partnership was born. Since then, and even with the pandemic doing its best to derail the collaboration, they’ve barely stopped.

“Rio’s voice dictated what type of songs we wrote,” says Sands. “I knew very quickly it wasn’t going to be EDM music, with the way she sang. Slower songs, more thoughtful songs, suited her voice. Her voice dictated where all the production went.”

They’ve had a rapid rise, with swooning reviews for last October’s debut album, Ink, which they have dedicated to their late manager, Lyndon Stephens. Hailed by Hot Press’s Lee Campbell as “atmospheric, moody and complex”, the project has also received sustained airplay both sides of the border.

Given that Dark Tropics’ introverted sound demands the listener lean in and pay attention, this success is not to be sniffed at. Quiet and thoughtful music doesn’t always get a fair hearing, particular in our present era of shrinking attention spans. And yet somehow Dark Tropics have touched a chord.

Their calling card is ‘Badlands’, a vertiginous ballad that combines Philip Glass piano minimalism, pre-stardom Billie Eilish vocals, and an Americana sensibility so rich you can almost feel the desert dust whipping your face. It all comes together as McGuinness arrives at the enigmatic chorus: “Strayed from the heart / Strayed from home / Dead from the start / I let you in.”

“This is the best case scenario in terms of radio play and how lovely people have been,” says McGuinness. “It’s all extremely positive. When people hear us on the radio and find us online and leave a lovely comment  – I guess I hope it’s people seeing something in our music that we see. We put a little bit of ourselves in all of our music. Everything is polished to perfection. Those songs do not go out if they’re not perfect.”

“Rio” is short for Rionnach: the singer, who has just graduated from Queens, grew up in a family steeped in traditional music. And if that background hasn’t percolated into Dark Tropics, there is nonetheless something very ancient and hauntingly Irish in the way in which McGuinness can convey a lifetime of heartache in a single, sustained note.

“The man my mam used to work with used to make bodhráns. To the point of choosing the goat [the skin of which was used to make the instrument]. I grew up around trad musicians. Unfortunately I never did it. It’s an entirely different set of skills, especially the singing – it’s insane and it’s so beautiful.”

McGuinness is speaking from Brighton where she is on a post-Christmas break. Her bandmate, meanwhile, is in his family home just outside Newry. It’s a few days since minimum alcohol pricing was introduced south of the Border, and he confirms the roads to Newry have been doing well out of parched citizens from the Republic.

“The road’s chockablock,” he says. “It’s weird. Coming in from the Dublin Road, there is a Sainsbury’s and that carpark is completely packed.”

He’s lived most of the past several years in Belfast, where he received a history degree from Queens. Sands also spent his time at college immersed in the city’s music scene. He came to Dark Tropics having previously fronted the dance project Kid Trench.

“It’s not that big,” he says of Belfast’s indie circuit. “It’s about 20 people all together, not including the artists. You meet bands. It’s a wee bit ridiculous how supportive everyone is of everyone. A lot of the same musicians play in each other’s bands. You kind of know everyone. Even if you don’t know them, you know them.”

Dark Tropics’ music is often described as “cinematic” – and it is frequently suggested that they would be the perfect artists to soundtrack a future season of True Detective. Sands takes that as a compliment – up to a point.

“It’s very easy to get into, ‘it’s a bit earnest and cringe’,” he says. “You have to stay on the right side of that, which is surprisingly tricky. All of the songs are so melancholic, it’s hard to avoid the filmic thing. It’s honestly not that intentional. Rio’s voice dictates it, really”.

There are a couple of things left. I will get to a new interview from the Irish Post. I want to start with their review of Dark Tropics’ Ink. It is one of the best albums of 2021 in my opinion. A real treat that gained great reviews - yet you do not hear it played on radio as much as it truly deserves. I know things are changing now and the duo are getting more love. This is what the Irish Times wrote when they sat down to review the amazing Ink:

“Belfast duo Dark Tropics (Rio McGuinness and Gerard Sands) have all the right inspirations, musical (from Radiohead and The Velvet Underground to Aretha Franklin and latter-day Leonard Cohen) and literary (from Paul Auster to William Somerset Maugham). But what is most impressive on their debut album is how effortlessly these influences, and more, fuse into something you don't hear much of these days: genuine individuality.

While their separate backgrounds wouldn’t give many clues as to what their combined work is like (they met via an online ad from Rio looking to sing in a jazz band), the result of about two years of collaborating presents not just an intriguing slant on pop music but also an insightful one.

Despite the somewhat classic influences, there is a distinct contemporary thread running through most of the songs – a little bit of London Grammar here (I Remember), Lana Del Rey there (The Drug) and Lorde over there (Escape).

The dynamic between the pair of musicians is such that you’d wonder who calls the shots, but between the jigs and the reels (not literally, in this instance) we reckon there is an equal give and take here”.

Let’s finish off with a great recent interview from the Irish Post. In a busy year for Dark Tropics, we get to learn more about where they are. Rio McGuinness was fielding the questions. It sounds things are all go in their camp! I am fascinated to see where the duo go from here:

“What are you up to?

As of the time of writing this I am currently multitasking, finishing up my masters dissertation, working on lyrics to a new song and drinking a cup of tea. I find I’m more productive if I have multiple things to work on at once, when my brain goes to mush while working on one, I can use a different part of my brain to work on another! It’s an essential skill to have, and of course, one which requires copious amounts of tea!

Which piece of music always sends a shiver down your spine?

“Un bel di vedremo” from Madama Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini. I

.Who would be in your ideal band?

Joan Jett.

How did you get started in music?

Choirs, so many choirs. Everyone in my family has an intense love for music, my grandfather played piano and conducted, my grandmother sang, my dad headbanged, my mum danced around the kitchen and sang to me, and my uncles played blues.

Where are you from in Ireland, and what are your roots?

I’m from Antrim, with some roots in Scotland and around Ulster. I’ve tried to map it, but not with the success I’d like. My heart and soul belongs to this isle.

What’s on your smartphone playlist at the minute?

I have a playlist full of Japanese noise music, mostly female vocalists, Midori, Otoboke Beaver and the likes. Then I have The Scratch, Gurriers, Enola Gay and more local bands on that playlist.

What is your favourite place in Ireland?

I would have always said Dingle, but Glenveagh National Park is coming in close second.

Which song being played a party would make you get up and leave?

Wonderwall.

If you were told musicians are no longer welcome in Ireland, where would you go? - Scotland, probably Edinburgh.

Mozart or Martin Hayes?

Martin Hayes.

Who will you thank in your Grammy award acceptance speech?

My family and partner, for pushing me to do what I need to do, Gerard for having really good ducking reflexes after a long studio day, and my cat, for putting in tireless hours as a non-licensed therapist.

If you weren’t a musician what other job would you be really good at?

Animal rehabilitation worker and conservation officer, if I wasn’t doing music, I would be working in reptile care and conservation.

What's the worst piece of advice you've been given this year?

Bathing a cat is better than using no-rinse shampoo. I still have the scar on my face.

Have you a favourite line from a song?

“Slow down, you’re doing fine. You can’t be everything you want to be before your time”

In terms of inanimate objects, what is your most precious possession?

A white music box with painted pink and lilac flowers.

What’s the best thing about where you live?

The traditions

PHOTO CREDIT: Will Walden

....and the worst?

The price of Guinness

What’s the greatest lesson life has taught you?

Nothing is more important than your physical and mental health. And therapy is not just a solution, but a preventative measure.

What do you believe in?

Kindness

What do you consider the greatest work of art?

Watching someone laugh until they snort, its pure joy.

Who/what is the greatest love of your life?

My cat Roxas”.

Actually, I will end with a recent post from She Makes Music. They reacted to the news of Dark Tropics bringing us Carnival. It is a magnificent track that shows that they definitely deserve huge respect and opportunities:

“Irish duo Dark Tropics today release their new single and music video for ‘Carnival’. Channelling their signature pop-noir sound, the songwriting duo invite you down a twisted path of love and lust, demanding you fall prey to the allure of their summer street party.

Following the critical acclaim of their debut album INK and 2023 singles ‘Midnight 10th Of December’ and ‘I Bet You Can’, Dark Tropics announce their brand new era.

Discussing the making of the single, Dark Tropics say “‘Carnival was written and demoed really quickly and felt completely effortless. The groove seemed to have an immediate swagger and the lyrics danced onto the page. It’s about an intense but fleeting holiday romance; one that stays ingrained in your mind forever.”

The stylised single is a sweeping cinematic slideshow of energising percussion and upbeat bass hooks in the classic pop tradition. Reminiscent of the sound and scope of Florence and The Machine and Haim, Dark Tropics’ newest release is their most ambitious yet. Lyrics dripping with seduction powered by towering vocals and arrangements propel the act into a new era of stadium sized songs”.

The mighty and wonderous Dark Tropics are no doubt looking ahead regarding their next step. On an upward trajectory, this close-knit and wonderfully talented duo of Gerard Sands and Rio McGuinness have a bright and long future ahead. Carnival shows that they are very much here for the long-run! Fans around the world will wait eagerly to see…

WHAT comes next.

_________________

Follow Dark Tropics

 Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/darktropicsmusic

Twitter:

https://twitter.com/DarkTropics

Bandcamp:

https://darktropics.bandcamp.com/

TikTok:

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

Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/artist/5Q6MmuHDeKmELYF8HV7VzI

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCK9k60zRaNjl40wTt-eQBtw

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/DarkTropicsMusic/

FEATURE: Record Highs: Year-Defining Albums from Female Artists

FEATURE:

 

 

Record Highs

IN THIS PHOTO: Cleo Sol

Year-Defining Albums from Female Artists

_________

THIS year is not through yet…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Kylie Minogue/PHOTO CREDIT: Ed Cooke via Rolling Stone UK

though I think most of the best albums we will get have already been released. Towards the start of next year, I am going to do a general feature about the best albums of the year. In 2023, just like the past, I don’t know, six or seven years, there has been a clear dominance by women! Not to ever exclude male artists but, at a time when equality reigns and there is still not parity on stages on playlists, it is important to highlight the extraordinary music released by women this year. I have selected a portion of (if not all) of the albums that are among the best of this year – in fact, I think these could all be in the top forty of anyone’s year-best (so far) without people arguing too much. From recent chart-topping work by an Australian icon, through to amazing debuts from terrific artists who are only going to grow stronger, below are the 2023 gold albums from music queens that everyone should have firmly in their collection. I have assembled a playlist below with a song from each. This year has been amazing one for music! The best and most memorable albums, by and large, have been made by women. I know that this is going to continue into…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Mitski/PHOTO CREDIT: Ebru Yildiz

NEXT year.

_________________

Iraina Mancini – Undo the Blue

Release Date: 18th August

Label: Needle Mythology

Producers: Simon Dine/Jagz Kooner/Sunglasses for Jaws/Erol Alkan

Buy: https://needlemythology.tmstor.es/?ffm=FFM_223547f986c515dad3b8ba21bf8b1dcd

Key Cuts: Cannonball/Sugar High/What You Doin’

Review:

“Iraina’s love affair with music stretches back to her childhood when she spent her time immersed in her dad’s Northern Soul records. By her early 20s, she was a familiar presence in the DJ booth at many discerning London club nights. Her love of French ye-ye, British freakbeat, Brazilian bossa nova, soul, and Turkish psych was established and is now shared with the listeners of her Soho Radio show.

Seemingly always a singer, Iraina has built her sound and her songs via a growing collection of collaborators including Jagz Kooner (Sabres Of Paradise), Sunglasses For Jaws (Miles Kane) Simon Dine (Paul Weller, Noonday Underground) Kitty Liv (Kitty Daisy & Lewis). Now with the arrival of her debut album, we’re seeing a joyous collision between her historic influences and her own evolving sonic palette.

Regular readers and visitors to Right Chord Music will be familiar with a string of her singles from Iraina Mancini including Undo The Blue, Deep End, Shotgun and What You Doin’ each has been met with gushing enthusiasm and excitement.

Now these familiar faces are packaged up alongside some new treats which also contain a reassuringly familiar retro sound. In some ways it’s like being reacquainted with a lost friend, you know the one that you can instantly just fall back into easy conversation with.

Listening to Undo The Blue is a wonderful aural experience. The overwhelming feeling is positivity and sunshine. While writing this review, words like joyous and glorious rolled off the tongue. I’m sure if I wanted to dive deeper into the lyrics I could find themes of lost love and uncertainty, but for today I’m quite content with the glow of happiness that radiates from this record. On that note, check out track 6 My Umbrella, and the title track Undo The Blue, amazing.

Ultimately this album is a lot of fun, and hell we could all do with some of that in our lives at the moment. To add to the fun Iraina is selling a beautiful vinyl of this album, via Needle Mythology. If you are new to vinyl, this would be a great way to start your collection!” – Right Chord Music

Standout Track: Undo the Blue

Kylie Minogue – Tension

Release Date: 22nd September

Labels: Darenote/BMG

Producers: Duck Blackwell/Cutfather/Jackson Foote/Jon Green/Oliver Heldens/KayAndMusic/Lostboy/PhD/Biff Stannard

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/kylie-minogue/tension-5

Key Cuts: Padam Padam/Tension/You Still Get Me High

Review:

“Few artists straddle both commercial success and cult fandom like Kylie Minogue. She’s not only her adopted nation’s sweetheart (and every dad’s biggest crush) but her devoted queer fanbase reveres her legacy career as highly as Madonna’s. Previous albums ‘Golden’ and ‘Disco’ - country and disco records respectively - scored high on both the mainstream and hardcore scales, sustaining solid positions on traditional charts before only really living on in memory through dedicated stans. Perhaps the issue was a younger generation of streamers unfamiliar with her cultural peaks, an assumption that her work solely belongs to mums and aged gays. But this time around on sixteenth studio record ‘Tension’ she’s here for her flowers, and has global listeners - old and new - gripped.

Yes, trending tracks can be fleeting, but ‘Padam Padam’ continues to be a gargantuan moment still, four months following its release - marbleised in memes, parodied by drag queens and danced along to by Hobbycraft staff on TikTok. It charted globally, too, and cemented the fifth consecutive decade that Kylie has achieved a Top Ten single in the UK. Perhaps its success is owed to its reference to a time of pop music immemorial when Top Tens were blissfully free from the shackles of seriousness.

‘Tension’ pushes the carefree energy of ‘Padam Padam’ to a thousand. Using 2003 hit ‘Slow’ as a reference point, Kylie’s intention was to stray from genre-locked records towards a collection that “celebrate[s] each song’s individuality”. That it does - there’s a commitment to make each the best on the album. Ironically, there’s an ease in ‘Tension’ then, a welcome flourish of authority over pop that’s pulsating and vibrant, a gift for a preoccupied culture. It’s got the sort of effortlessly glamorous swish that will have gays screaming “mother!”, while noughties Scandipop, synthpop and Eurodance infuse the album with sweaty dancefloor catharsis. It’s quintessential Kylie - throughout she touches on classic monolithic Kylie sounds - while imagining what a future Minogue Club Utopia might look like, where perpetual dance and ecstasy push an agenda of, well, just having a load of fucking fun and not thinking about too much else.

Its highlights include the title track, the dancefloor euphoric ‘Tension’, featuring experimental robotic vocals; the preppy Scandipop and whispering sax of ‘You Still Get Me High’, and ‘Vegas High’. Then there’s ‘Hands’, a cut that throws back to the ’90s with ‘Vogue’-ish vocals that will surely have her fanbase grinning with glee: “Big trap on the baseline / Tick tock on the waistline / Don’t rush, baby, take time,” she instructs rhythmically.

It’s been suggested ‘Tension’ is more a promo album for More Than Just a Residency - Kylie’s Las Vegas run later this year - than a fully fledged creative project, but that’s not the case. There’s no sign of cash-grab radio pop; it has more perspective than that. But even if so, there’s enough originality pumped throughout each track that ‘Tension’ will undoubtedly stand as one of the most favoured contemporary Kylie eras. There’s no pretension to its greatness, just our Kylie, once again, humbly proving how easily she can forge gold and transform into pop culture phenomenon. Padam? Padam” – DIY

Standout Track: Hands

boygenius – the record

Release Date: 31st March

Label: Interscope

Producers: Catherine Marks/boygenius

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/boygenius-2/the-record-5

Key Cuts: $20/Cool About It/Anti-Curse

Review:

“From their Nirvana-inspired Rolling Stones cover shoot, up to the recent announcement of their UK shows, the supergroup have been dominating the social media feeds of excited fans for months. Now, their debut album – aptly titled the record – is here in all its poetic, cutting glory; and it’s been entirely worth the wait.

The product of three bright musical minds with an enviably close connection, Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus continue to bloom under their wry moniker. Following on from their debut self-titled EP released in 2018, the record is an unfiltered love letter to true friendship and intimacy in its many guises. Across twelve tracks, the trio extrapolate on everything from nearly drowning in the sea (“Anti-Curse”), gushing over genuine infatuation (“We’re In Love”), to unexpectedly long and meaningful road trips (“Leonard Cohen”). It’s the latter that arguably started it all.

“If you love me / you will listen to this song,” muses Dacus in the opening line of “Leonard Cohen,” recalling the real life moment that Bridgers asked her bandmates to listen to “The Trapeze Swinger” by Iron & Wine in their car. Clocking in at nine and a half minutes, the epic duration meant that Bridgers missed their turn off, but Baker and Dacus didn’t mention it until it was too late, because she was so engrossed in the music. This motion-picturesque, yet ridiculous moment is the lifeblood of the record, deftly summed up by Dacus’ line: “It gave us more time to embarrass ourselves / telling stories we wouldn’t tell anyone else / you said ‘I might like you less / now that you know me so well’”.

Shame is a potent emotion that can skew perspective and shrink a narrative, but boygenius’ direct-yet-tactful dynamic and genuine off-stage friendship means they transgress this. “I want to hear your story / and be a part of it” the trio of harmonious voices sing on demo-like opener “Without You Without Them,” and what follows is a collection of life-affirming, sometimes joyful, occasionally crushing poetry about that.

Their narratives are often eccentric, ambiguous and deeply personal, but their universal veins of frustration, revelation, growth and unfiltered feelings – both platonic and romantic – permeate the record. Whether Dacus is delivering poetic ruminations on “True Blue” (“When you don’t know who you are / you fuck around and find out”), or all three songwriters are “feeling like an absolute fool about it” on “Cool About It”, they’re underscored by the band’s trademark patience, grace, and deadpan humour. Only someone like Baker could get away with writing a bop about a near death experience in the sea on “Anti-Curse,” only someone as dry as Dacus could sing the lyric “and I am not an old man having an existential crisis / in a Buddhist monastery / writing horny poetry” on “Leonard Cohen,” and only someone like Bridgers could deliver the line “you called me a fucking liar” with such tenderness on “Emily I’m Sorry.”

What truly sets the record apart from its predecessor is Baker’s input of genuinely 'sick riffs'. Whilst they were present on the EP (“Stay Down,” “Salt In The Wound”) on the album they really propel things forward and kick in at all the right moments, fully fleshing out boygenius’ sound. Indie anthems like “$20,” “Not Strong Enough” and the superb “Satanist” contrast well amidst the softer moments on “Revolution O” and closing track “Letter To An Old Poet.” This considered instrumentation allows the vocals of each songwriter to shine through consistently.

It goes without saying that there are songs that listeners will instantly take to on the record, and others that will require more patience, but “Satanist” is one of the former. “Will you be a satanist with me?” asks Baker, “Will you be an anarchist with me?” Bridgers propositions, “Will you be a nihilist with me?” questions Dacus – all irresistible invitations that can’t be refused even after repeated listens. This rebellious spirit, one that encourages listeners to mess around, make mistakes and quite literally take the wrong route, is what makes the record such a bright and brilliant listen” – The Line of Best Fit

Standout Track: Without You Without Them

Cleo Sol - Heaven

Release Date: 15th September

Label: Forever Living Originals

Pre-order: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/cleo-sol/heaven-3

Key Cuts: Self/Miss Romantic/Love Will Lead You Here

Review:

“Not much is known about Sault, even though the mysterious London collective have released 11 startling albums over the past few years. Their output exists without exegesis: no interviews or photos. They have yet to play live.

The soul singer Cleo Sol is a big part of Sault. But compared with them, the enigmatic vocalist is – almost – an open book. We know what she looks like. We know she was born in London as Cleopatra Zvezdana Nikolic; her parents (Jamaican and Serbian-Spanish) are thought to have met in a jazz band. She has a social media presence; she plays live. Earlier this year, Sol sold out two nights at London’s Royal Albert Hall. (It was easier, complained some on Twitter, to get tickets to Beyoncé.)

We know that Sol and Sault also share a label, Forever Living Originals (FLO), run independently by producer Inflo (Flo for short), the alias of Dean Josiah Cover, whose productions have racked up Mercurys, Mobos, Ivor Novellos and Brits either for Inflo specifically or for his clients. Michael Kiwanuka and Little Simz have both made award-winning records with the producer and have guested on Sault outings; Sol has appeared on Little Simz tracks such as Woman. Inflo and Sol are an item, and it’s assumed that it’s their sleeping child on the cover of Sol’s very personal 2021 album, Mother – watched over by a photo on the wall, thought to be of Sol’s own mother.

Other than her social media posts, some since deleted, Sol hasn’t explained her art in detail in quite some time. Sol/Sault records drop most often with no warning, as Heaven, her third overall, did just over a week ago. Context and motivations can only be guessed. (This is where FLO’s independence is key: letting the art speak for itself is easier when there aren’t multiple stakeholders to please.)

But while Sault’s more rhythm-forward music comes with a distinct political edge, the music of Sol can be heard as the yin aspect to Sault’s more outgoing yang. Her work is cool, dreamy, downtempo; inward-facing and often consolatory.

Like those before it, her latest record feels like a balm; succour offered in the context of the continuing challenges of living. Sol often sings simply of faith, love and courage – all at play on Heaven. It’s unclear who the title track is addressed to, but it seems to pick up where Mother left off, thanking the almighty for a child.

If Heaven feels a little less cohesive when compared with the unifying themes of Mother, where Sol sang about new parenthood in the context of her experience as a daughter, it’s a short and delicate offering that crystallises her distinct appeal. Here, her butterfly vocals, gossamer instrumentation and stylistic breadth are all allied to a quiet righteousness.

Hard lessons, personal growth and ways to cope all receive an airing in these delicate, matter-of-fact songs that often wrestle with everyday situations. Miss Romantic, by far the poppiest tune here, recalls the 1990s tendency for dishing out advice in R&B form: TLC’s No Scrubs, say, or the work of Lauryn Hill. In response to a love triangle, Sol deploys an iron fist in a velvet glove, redirecting a friend towards self-respect. Her voice climbs to peaks of clarity without resorting to showy melismas.

These retro musical touches – 90s neo-soul, 70s soul fusion, jazz inflections – continue across nine brief songs that seem to hover outside time. Most startling here, stylistically, is the guitar-led Airplane. It borders on 60s folk music. “You will find your power/ Little bird, wait,” Sol counsels.

The road to Heaven has been winding. Sol started off more than a decade ago as a featured vocalist on pop-grime era tracks, via producer DaVinChe. After a hiatus, the singer came back more soulfully in 2018 with an EP called Winter Songs – and a more personal set of themes and motivations. Her first album proper, Rose in the Dark (2020), appeared at times to be addressed to her younger self.

Sol doesn’t just dish out advice to others; a great many of her songs are addressed to the mirror. Self is a jazz-inflected plea for self-development, for doing the internal work before trying to “change the world”. (“Ooh, save me, save me from myself,” she sings, featherlight, at the start of the record.)

The core diffidence that pervades the Sault family does crop up in the music too. Old Friends, one of the more direct tracks on Heaven, regretfully calls time on a friendship. “You had my trust and we had choices,” croons Sol delicately, to a simple backing of keys: “But you told my secrets to strangers.”

PR-wise, then, Sol keeps things on the down-low. But she does share with strangers – in the controlled space of her own music, where confessionals about her life, and the lives of those around her, open up generously, full of love and conscious thought. And if these songs occasionally feel underwritten – many are brief, jazzy sketches that seem to wander in and meander back out again – they contrast pointedly with the overwritten, attention-deficit music crafted to punch out on today’s Spotify playlists. Sometimes all you need is a little tenderness” – The Guardian

Standout Track: Heaven

Caroline Polachek – Desire, I Want to Turn Into You

Release Date: 14th February

Labels: Sony Music/The Orchard/Perpetual Novice

Producers: Caroline Polachek/Danny L Harle/Dan Nigro/Jim-E /Stack/Sega Bodega/Ariel Rechtshaid

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/caroline-polachek/desire-i-want-to-turn-into-you-2

Key Cuts: Bunny Is a Rider/Blood and Butter/Sunset

Review:

“Few artists have seen a meteoric rise in recent years quite like Caroline Polachek; sidestepping away from band-work to solo, then stepping out from the umbrella of pseudonyms and monikers to truly unleash her solo star power upon the world. Her debut record, ‘Pang’, shattered expectations with its quirky angle on pop, an avant-pop sound bathed in razor sharp production and slick songwriting. Since, Polachek has refused to slow down, most notably collaborating with UK avant-pop counterpart Charli XCX, among a myriad of other contemporary talents. Several years on from the debut, Polachek delivers her hotly anticipated sophomore record – ‘Desire, I Want To Turn Into You’.

Like she did on her debut, Polachek sprints with her distinctive experimental slant that sets her apart from so many. Whether it be bagpipes, breakbeats or angelic vocal performances, Polachek covers a serious number of bases – and it never once feels tacky or forced. Her songwriting is natural, the production choices organic. Opener ‘Welcome To My Island’ bursts with classic pop sensibilities, but radiates a leftfield energy, helped in part to that bridge performance, as well as some fierce production from hyperpop trailblazer Danny L Harle, who also assisted on the creation of ‘Pang’.

The production and writing have some immaculate moments across the record, most notably on ‘Pretty In Possible’; a free-flowing cut bursting with Bjork, Aphex Twin and SOPHIE flavours, the glitchy percussion cementing an almost industrial edge to the track. Though some influences are easy to pick out, it still remains quintessentially Caroline: her vocal work, whether it be smooth onomatopoeic passages, charismatic spoken moments or pure ethereality, is her trademark. Though amidst the heavenly timbres of much of the record, halfway through the tracklist Polachek takes a detour, inviting you into her own nightclub, the clientele high calibre and brilliant. ‘Fly To You’, boasting stunning features from Grimes and Dido, lays a drum ‘n’ bass foundation, ambient-soaked breakbeats, and ‘I Believe’ delivers noughties pop paired with UK garage, Polachek two stepping her way across the track. But then closer ‘Billions’ feels like a heavenly fever dream, with its trip-hop percussive textures and choral passages. ‘Desire’ boldly tackles a plethora of styles, sounds and genres, moulding them in her hands to create something truly astonishing.

‘Desire’ is an extension of pop music, redefining the concept of pop songwriting and production while never once losing the essence and polish that the genre, or even ethos, requires. Polachek raises her own bar for vocal performance, delivering some of the most ethereal vocal work heard in pop for quite some time. Her free-flowing approach to writing, matched with some of the most unique and interesting collaborators in the scene right now, creates the innovative, beautiful and sub-shaking ‘Desire, I Want To Turn Into You’.

Despite only being February, Caroline Polachek has set a serious precedent for any pop releases that follow it this year. She is an artist completely in her own lane, refusing to conform, every moment on this record a vicissitude. Her commitment to her craft is undeniable, her talent indisputable - 9/10” – CLASH

Standout Track: Fly to You

Jessie Ware – That! Feels Good!

Release Date: 28th April

Label: EMI

Producers: James Ford/Stuart Price

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/jessie-ware/that-feels-good

Key Cut: Free Yourself/Pearls/Lightning

Review:

“That! Feels Good! is an emphatic answer to 2020's What's Your Pleasure? in more than one way. The dialogue evoked by the titles translates to how Jessie Ware's fifth album relates to her fourth, as this moves the party into a bigger and more opulent disco with a laser focus on fevered physical gratification. Continuing to work with primary What's Your Pleasure? collaborator James Ford, Ware also pairs here with Stuart Price -- who reached out after helping Pet Shop Boys and Dua Lipa make other dancefloor bombs dropped in 2020 -- to assist in turning up the heat. Somewhat surprisingly, this set is considerably less electronic, more "Relight My Fire" than "I Feel Love." The dashing '70s flashback on the previous LP's "Step into My Life" was a kind of precursor to the wider use of robust brass and strings, and pianos skip and rollick through a few especially potent songs such as "Free Yourself" and "Begin Again." Ware and company cleverly twist tried-and-true lyrical themes present throughout the history of dance music -- rebirth, independence, communal celebration, the quest for release after being overworked and, of course, the desire for passionate intimate connection. Vocally, Ware has somehow found another gear, turning in her most commanding performances while having what sounds like a ball with her background singers. She isn't above supplementing her unmistakable smoldering and blazing leads with clear references to inspirations, recalling effervescent Teena Marie (again) and authoritative Grace Jones at points in the title song, and striking a pose like Madonna in "Shake the Bottle." The Ford and Price collaborations are almost evenly split and easily commingle, so it's only right that the producers each assist with a slower number. "Hello Love," modeled on lavish late-'70s soul with a warm zephyr from Chelsea Carmichael's saxophone, delights in an unexpected rekindling, while "Lightning," a spacious and pulsing slow jam, basks in a blooming romance. These two ballads don't have the feel of afterthoughts on an album fizzing with wholly liberated and exhilarating grooves” – AllMusic

Standout Track: Hello Love

Blondshell – Blondshell

Release Date: 7th April

Label: Partisan

Producer: Yves Rothman

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/blondshell/blondshell

Key Cuts: Vernoica Mars/Kiss City/Joiner

Review:

“Some albums devastate you with subtlety, and others bust your lip – Blondshell’s superb debut album is certainly the latter. There’s no lack of the lighter stuff currently – just look at Boygenius and Gracie Abrams’ seriously impressive releases – but seldom do they use rage and despair, pointed inwards or outwards, to make the point. It’s what makes this LA rocker’s debut so memorable, potent and enjoyable.

Sabrina Teitelbaum, currently based in LA, began her recording career writing and releasing on-trend pop, a world away from her childhood loves of The Rolling Stones and The National. That period would spawn a mildly successful single in 2020’s ‘Fuckboy’, a dramatic, if anonymous, track that would eventually get lost in the scrap for attention on streaming services. Change would come when Teitelbaum began writing songs just for herself and not with the expectation to release them, alongside a decision to go sober in early 2020. Radical honesty – and wit – would now prevail and shine in every song, alongside a rawer, more familiar sonic palette for Teitelbaum to pull from.

‘Veronica Mars’, which sports a chugging guitar riff alongside sly reflections on the Kristen Bell-starring 2004 TV drama and teenage media consumption, tells us that “Logan’s a dick, I’m learning that’s hot”. On ‘Joiner’, amidst substance misuse and self-harm, humour finds a place next to the sincerity: “I think you watched way too much HBO growing up”, she says with a wry grin. Even on ‘Sepsis’, Teitelbaum willingly puts herself at the butt of the joke: “I’m going back to him, I know my therapist’s pissed / We both know he’s a dick, at least it’s the obvious kind”. This is a record stuffed with barbed and memorable one-liners.

In accompanying liner notes, Teitelbaum likens the big riffs on ‘Blondshell’ as a “protective shell” for the fragile vulnerability in her writing. It does the textures something of a disservice – the production is perfectly attuned to what the song needs, not there to shield it from scrutiny. Indeed, ‘Olympus’ could have been a minimalist ballad, but the measured production encourages the song forward, its subtle solo leaving a lasting imprint. ‘Joiner’ has a radio-friendly pace that feeds the chaos within, while the ferocity of  ‘Sepsis’s chorus is as frustrated and angst-ridden as the truths she spills about a doomed relationship: “It should take a whole lot less to turn me off”, she roars.

‘Blondshell’, then, is a complete triumph in several ways. Rarely do emerging artists receive the benefit of the doubt to change tack, recalibrate their sound and allow their lived experiences to develop and find their way into the music. Too often is that creator pigeonholed or, worse, written off – and such could have been the case for Teitelbaum. Instead, we have one of the alternative rock albums of the year, and one to treasure tightly for quite some time” – NME

Standout Track: Sepsis

Mitski – The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We

Release Date: 15th September

Label: Dead Oceans

Producer: Patrick Hyland

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/mitski/the-land-is-inhospitable-and-so-are-we-2

Key Cuts: Bug Like An Angel/I Don’t Like My Mind/I’m Your Man

Review:

“Noticed, collected, and created over the course of several years, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We is a sweeping musical epic spanning essential facets of human experience; a meditation on self-witnessing, of owning one's estrangement.

The album alienates and reincorporates the self. In a somewhat less literal mode, Mitski focuses on herself through varied fictional voices. Each track is a chapter of an unfinished story. In the album's first act, Mitski offers up the devastatingly relatable experience of feeling to blame for our own loneliness. In I Don't Like My Mind, Mitski's literary voice and musical acumen combine into pure feeling. Vomiting up unwelcome memories, the track's narrator touches a nerve that only Mitski can: 'A whole cake, so please don't take / Take this job from me', is a knife to the heart; it's a staggeringly concrete plea from someone at rock-bottom, someone who would rather work than recover. Sometimes it feels like our only choice.

The album is far-reaching but never vague – true to form, Mitski's writing remains supremely evocative, mesmerising. Mitski writes and performs with singular conviction, reflecting the bargains we make with ourselves as we march determinedly towards self-destruction. The album is built by community – bolstered by a choir, Mitski's uninhibited voice envelops the listener. My Love Mine All Mine wraps itself around the self-effacing core of the album; it's a gentle anthem, a reminder of what we own and what we can let go. Here, Mitski offers up a balm for our open wounds in a gentle, honest cadence. Her commentary is always genuine, never cloying – it feels like talking to an old friend after a long separation. My Love Mine All Mine acts as a fulcrum for the album, teetering towards a more hopeful, reflective narrative voice.

While the album expresses plenty of Mitski's signature melancholia, it is undergirded not by regret, but by memory. The album is a personification of hope and self-love, told through the deep roots of compassion. In a media landscape saturated by sanitised, cloying depictions of self-love, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We is a brutally honest chronicle of the eternal challenge of simply liking oneself. The album is truly extraordinary – it is a once-in-a-career masterpiece that synthesises difference through abstracted self-observation. It is a vehicle for making meaning, an invitation to try again” – The Skinny

Standout Track: My Love Mine all Mine

Margaret Glaspy - Echo the Diamond

Release Date: 18th August

Label: ATO

Producers: Margaret Glaspy/Julian Lage

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/margaret-glaspy/echo-the-diamond

Key Cuts: Act Natural/I Don’t Think So/My Eyes

Review:

“It won’t take long to hear New York City’s influence on Margaret Glaspy. The one-time Californian’s third album opens with “Act Natural”’s twisty, edgy guitar lick, somewhere between Lou Reed and Television, as the singer extolls the excitement of new love and a partner (in co-producer/guitarist Julian Lage) about whom she gushes You even sparkle in the dark/oh I can’t unsee it / Is this some kind of butterfly rebirth? / Are you from this earth? The crunching sound returns to the darker-hued, stripped-down guitar/bass/drums approach of her first album.

Although she’s in love, Glaspy’s far from timid about her thoughts, especially in the gripping “Female Brain” with the opening words of Don’t be a dick / I’m out here dodging stones and sticks as drums thump and her guitar chops and churns out shards of chords with a short, taut distorted solo. It reverberates with the tough, unapologetic, gritty urban groove New York infuses in many of its inhabitants. The music dials down a few notches for “Irish Goodbye.” The song is about a woman who sneaks out of a party after making an initial connection with a guy who thinks he might have a future with her. It causes him to question his intuitions with the beat slowly and methodically pumping as Glaspy sings, Was it something I said?/He wondered inside/All that I get are Irish goodbyes.

That sense of uncertainty in relationships imbues other tracks where the singer/songwriter keeps the music teetering on the precipice of rock and gloom, without tipping into either. Glaspy’s voice shifts from vulnerable to assertive, pushing the backing musicians to follow her instead of vice versa. Sometimes she radiates both as on the tense “Memories,” singing I’m alright of that I’m sure/Until I’m crying on the kitchen floor over a simmering, softly strummed melody that’s uneasy and a little menacing.

Lage’s jazzier impacts are felt in the intense “The Hammer and the Nail.” Here Glaspy sees herself jeopardizing her best interests for another person with It’s my wedding but you want the veil / Here I am the hammer and the nail to a powerful melody that feels just as ambiguous and lacerating as the words.

This moodier, more prickly attack suits Glaspy’s voice, concepts, and vision. She aligns with other New York City performers who push into shadier, more extreme territory with a similar snarl, mirroring the insecurity, brashness, and honesty the area seems to instill in its finest artists” – American Songwriter

Standout Track: Female Brain

Lana Del Rey - Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd

Release Date: 24th March

Labels: Interscope/Polydor

Producers: Jack Antonoff/Benj/iZach Dawes/Lana Del Rey/Drew Erickson/Mike Hermosa

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/lana-del-rey/did-you-know-that-theres-a-tunnel-under-ocean-blvd

Key Cuts: The Grants/A&W/Paris, Texas

Review:

“Blue Banisters, Lana’s album from 2021, introduced many of the ideas that stand out here: revisiting old material with new relish, releasing pop’s conventional structures and polish, writing about loved ones with tender specificity. Lana, née Elizabeth Grant, opens Ocean Blvd with a track that bears her family name, and she holds her father, brother, and sister close throughout, as if bracing for loss. On one song, she exhales a prayer amid jazzy squiggles, calling on her grandfather’s spirit to protect her father, a maritime enthusiast, while he’s deep-sea fishing. She entreats her brother Charlie to quit smoking. The matter of bearing children—her sister’s daughter and Lana’s own hypothetical offspring—comes up repeatedly, on “The Grants” and “Sweet,” a tradwife fantasy tucked in a mid-century movie-musical score. “Fingertips” broaches the topic of motherhood with a devastating admission of self-doubt: “Will the baby be all right/Will I have one of mine?/Can I handle it even if I do?”

Such a sentiment could easily be extrapolated into a comment on millennial unease, but this feels more personal. It’s Lana, a self-made emblem of vulnerable womanhood—in her own words, “a modern-day woman with a weak constitution”—at her most genuinely unguarded. She was nervous to send early sketches to producer Drew Erickson, she said, and even in finished form, the material sounds like it’s for her ears only. With its solemn hush, meticulously rendered but opaque details, and lack of organizing logic, “Fingertips” seems disinterested in holding our attention. There’s no rhythm, no structure, only the strings and the Wurlitzer picking up Lana’s breadcrumbs as she wanders the misty forest of her own memory.

Elsewhere, Lana throws stones into these still waters, most memorably on “A&W.” She writes from the perspective of the other woman, a familiar figure in her discography—sometimes, a sympathetic lonely heart; here, a symbol of the ire that unorthodox women unleash. “Did you know that a singer can still be looking like a side piece at 33?” asks Lana—unmarried and child-free at 37, a subject of constant physical scrutiny. The title is a fit-to-print stand-in for “American Whore,” and Lana cycles through her many avatars: an embattled attention-seeker, an illicit lover, an imperfect victim (“Do you really think that anybody would think I didn’t ask for it?”). Then, after a radical about-face that steers the song from voice-memo balladry into boom-bap playground rap, she is someone else entirely: a girlish brat tattling to someone’s mom. A critic, albeit a clumsy one, of empowerment feminism, Lana here embodies characters that point to just how little girlbossing has done to remedy societal malice toward women. They reflect an enduring taxonomy, reified in a post-Roe landscape: We are whores who deserve what we get, or else children to be saved from our own decisions.

Where do we go from here? To church, apparently. Lana follows “A&W” with a sermon on lust from Judah Smith, the Beverly Hills pastor and influencer who counts the Biebers (and Lana too) among his congregants. The four-and-a-half-minute homily, accompanied by melancholy piano, is presented with little comment beyond an occasional laugh or affirmation, possibly from Lana herself; given its placement, the track seems designed more to inflame than to enlighten. At the end, though, comes an interesting kernel: “I used to think my preaching was mostly about you,” Smith concedes, “...I’ve discovered that my preaching is mostly about me.”

Now more than ever, Lana’s preaching is mostly about her, reflecting a growing instinct to self-mythologize. On Ocean Blvd, she sings explicitly about being Lana Del Rey, with lyrics like “Some big man behind the scenes/Sewing Frankenstein black dreams into my song” pointing all the way back to the industry-plant allegations that surfaced around the time of her debut. That backward-looking gaze also settles on hip-hop, a longstanding presence in her work that was substantially dialed down after 2017’s Lust for Life. The trap beats are back, at least in the record’s final stretch, where they accompany some of Lana’s most willful provocations. Her lyrics flirt with transgressions that have previously landed her in hot water, within and beyond her music: casual Covid noncompliance, brownface. There’s a sense of doubling down, of insistence that her path is hers alone to forge. On “Taco Truck x VB,” the chimeric closer that is partially a trap remix of Norman Fucking Rockwell!’s “Venice Bitch,” Lana elbows her way in front of the criticism: “Before you talk let me stop what you say/I know, I know, I know that you hate me.” She is fresher yet out of fucks.

Lana is a postmodern collagist and a chronic cataloguer of her references: Take “Peppers,” which samples Tommy Genesis’ ribald 2015 track “Angelina,” name-checks the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and interpolates a surf-rock classic, all in the span of four minutes. At her best, Lana reinterprets others’ work with intention, percolating their meaning through a personal filter. The way that she now applies this same approach to her own past material—beyond the “Venice Bitch” remake, there’s a sliver of “Cinnamon Girl” in the Jon Batiste feature “Candy Necklace,” and chopped-up strings from “Norman Fucking Rockwell” on “A&W”—suggests an artist who is tracing her own evolution and also submitting her work, ripe for reimagining, for entry in the greater American songbook from which she so readily draws.

One of Ocean Blvd’s key takeaways is that perfection is not a requirement for inclusion in this canon. Part of the title track is spent extolling a sublime flaw—a specific beat in the 1974 Harry Nilsson song “Don’t Forget Me.” Lana cites, by timestamp (2:05), the moment when the singer-songwriter’s voice breaks, cracking open the track with raw emotion. As an indicator of Lana’s mindset, this embrace of imperfection may help explain some of Ocean Blvd’s excesses and experiments, which nobly pursue profundity and succeed only sometimes. Still, there are 2:05s to be found within the sprawl” – Pitchfork

Standout Track: Kintsugi

Rhiannon Giddens - You’re the One

Release Date: 19th August

Label: Nonesuch

Producer: Jack Splash

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/rhiannon-giddens/youre-the-one-2

Key Cuts: Wrong Kind of Right/You Louisiana Man/You Put the Sugar in My Bowl

Review:

“Rhiannon Giddens has a voracious musical appetite and a big talent that uses everything to fuel her many creative activities. With a MacArthur, a Pulitzer, and multiple Grammys on her shelf, this has not gone unnoticed. In a body of work that includes musicological projects along with different types of art, You're The One focuses on Giddens as a songwriter, in a variety of idioms. "I hope that people just hear American music," she says. "Blues, jazz, Cajun, country, gospel, and rock—it's all there. I like to be where it meets organically."

For her, where it all meets has a bullseye on the banjo. She often plays a beautiful mellow-toned replica of a mid-19th century fretless model, the kind used in blackface minstrelsy. In writing songs on this troubled vessel, her stated intent has been to create new music that reminds listeners of its original purpose, one that is "rooted in spiritual connection." She looks to "recast it in a modern light" without totally decontextualizing it, so that the music is not completely divorced from its history. This makes for a powerful aesthetic, which is at the core of the soulful title track, "You're The One," a ballad written for her newborn son. The sounds arranged around her banjo and voice appear as present day reverberations of an old bell, still ringing. One hears that resonance again in the zydeco-inflected "You Louisiana Man," which she seems to have sung live in the studio, banjo in hand. (See the YouTube at the bottom of the page.)

Giddens was looking to branch out with this project, which meant collaborating with new artists and dipping into other genres in order to reach "people who might dig [it] but don't know anything about, you know, what I do," she says. Her work fills in a history of American music that has omitted contributions of African Americans, particularly regarding country string bands and the banjo. She came to the job with solid tools and training. An Oberlin Conservatory graduate, she can sing in many timbres and tongues, research like an ethnomusicologist, and play fiddle and banjo like the old-time players she learned from in North Carolina; a well-rounded combination.

In creating You're The One, "I just wanted to expand my sound palette," Giddens explains. "Another Wasted Life" is a stunning example of this expansion. Inspired by the singular voice of the great Nina Simone, especially Simone's protest songs, Giddens' lyric responds to the horrific story of Kalief Browder, a young man incarcerated on Rikers Island for three years without trial ("given solitary time at institutional caprice"), who committed suicide after his release. The groove has a relentless chromatic ostinato at its center, and the performance culminates in a howling wordless improvisation, a unique jazz-blues moan that sends chills down the spine.

You're The One is yet another extraordinary offering from a great American musician whose work is consistently and superbly "beyond category," to quote Duke Ellington. One looks forward to the next” – All About Jazz

Standout Track: Another Wasted Life

RAYE - My 21st Century Blues

Release Date: 3rd February

Label: Human Re Sources

Producers: Rachel Keen (RAYE)/Mike Sabath/Punctual/BloodPop/Di Genius

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/raye/my-21st-century-blues

Key Cuts: Black Mascara./The Thrill Is Gone./Ice Cream Man.

Review:

“It’s taken the best part of a decade for RAYE to reach this point. Signing to Polydor in 2014 aged just 17, the relationship ended in 2021 in a thunderous mix of contradictory statements. RAYE, frustrated at making repeated attempts to get the label to allow her to record an album in vain, called them out with a poignant attack on industry misogyny. High-profile collaborations and songwriting credits for some of the world’s biggest artists were set aside; “ALL I CARE ABOUT is the music,” the London born singer tweeted. “I’m sick of being slept on and I’m sick of being in pain about it.”

Stepping out on her own has undoubtedly worked: starting 2023 with her affirmative 070 Shake-featuring trip hop-infused ‘Escapism.’ sitting at the top of the UK singles chart, the sweet irony of the track’s fan-led viral success isn’t lost. For RAYE at least, major label prioritising can’t compete with the power of a truly great song and a dedicated audience.

With confidence, ‘My 21st Century Blues’ pushes against the boundaries previously placed on her music. There’s an empowered defiance on display, the record’s opening tracks cementing this moment as all her own. “I’m a very fucking brave strong woman,” she demands on powerful midpoint ‘Ice Cream Man’, a fact that underpins the record’s blend of soul, hip hop, blues and a multitude of other styles. Even its occasional musical inconsistency makes complete sense, mirroring RAYE’s desire to explore all facets of herself, and it is autobiographical to its core, whether touching on heartbreak, discrimination, or distorted self-image. Fundamentally, this is her through and through.

“I’ve waited seven years for this moment,” she exhales on outro ‘Fin.’. The pain and frustration of that time bleeds throughout the record, ultimately underpinned by her eventual cathartic freedom. With the emotionally charged beats of ‘Black Mascara’, the candour of ‘Body Dysmorphia’ and the unfiltered soul of ‘Buss It Down’, it would be impossible for anyone to sleep on RAYE anymore” – DIY

Standout Track: Escapism.

Corinne Bailey Rae - Black Rainbows

Release Date: 15th September

Label: Black Rainbows/Thirty Tigers

Producers: S. J. Brown/Corinne Bailey Rae/Paris Strother

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/corinne-bailey-rae/black-rainbows-2

Key Cuts: Black Rainbows/New York Transit Queen/Put It Down

Review:

“Corinne Bailey Rae dynamites her own musical past and embraces a larger historical one on her new album, “Black Rainbows.”

With her self-titled 2006 debut, Bailey Rae established herself as an agile, airy-voiced pop songwriter; it reached No. 1 in her home country, Britain. Her big hit single, “Put Your Records On,” cheerfully but unmistakably called for celebrating a Black heritage.

Bailey Rae hasn’t rushed her albums. Her second one, “The Sea” in 2010, dealt with her grief — at 29 — at the sudden death of her first husband, the saxophonist Jason Rae; the songs reflected on time, love and sorrow. For her 2016 album, “The Heart Speaks in Whispers,” she followed record-company advice to return to polished pop-soul love songs. By then she had married S.J. Brown, who has co-produced “Black Rainbows” with her.

On “Black Rainbows,” Bailey Rae boldly jettisons both pop structures and R&B smoothness to consider the scars and triumphs of Black culture. “We long to arc our arm through history,” she sings in “A Spell, a Prayer,” the album’s opening song. “To unpick every thread of pain.”

The songs on “Black Rainbows” flaunt extremes: noise and delicacy, longing and rage. In some, Bailey Rae reclaims her distant punk-rock past, when she was in a band called Helen. Others summon retro elegance, toy with electronics and move through multiple transformations. In the album’s genre-bending title song, Bailey Rae repeats the words “black rainbows” over a mechanical beat; her voice gets multiplied into a choir as a labyrinthine, jazz-fusion chord progression gradually unfurls, brimming with saxophone squeals.

The album has a conceptual framework. Most of its songs are inspired by artifacts Bailey Rae saw at the Stony Island Arts Bank in Chicago, a former bank building that now holds a huge repository of African and African-diaspora materials gathered by the artist Theaster Gates: art, books, magazines, music and what the arts bank calls “negrobilia,” everyday objects that perpetuated Black stereotypes. For Bailey Rae, the collection summoned thoughts about slavery, spirituality, beauty, survival, hope and freedom.

An ashtray in the shape of a Black child with an open mouth was a touchstone for “Erasure,” a pounding, screeching, distorted rocker about the exploitation of enslaved children; Bailey Rae blurts, “They took credit for your labor!” and “They put out lit cigarettes down your sweet throat!” Another, more ebullient rock stomp, “New York City Transit Queen” — with Bailey Rae overdubbed into a hand-clapping cheerleading squad — commemorates a cheesecake photograph of Audrey Smaltz, the Black teenager who was named Miss New York Transit in 1954.

That song is followed by a different take on Black beauty: “He Will Follow You With His Eyes.” Bailey recites what sounds like old advertising copy — “Soft hair that invites his caress/Attract! Arouse! Tantalize!” — over a nostalgic bolero. But partway through the track, she casts off the cosmetics, with an electronic warp to the production and a scornful bite in her voice, as she sings about flaunting, “My black hair kinking/My black skin gleaming.”

While Bailey Rae allows herself to shout on “Black Rainbows,” she doesn’t abandon the graceful nuance of her pop past. In the shimmering, billowing “Red Horse,” she envisions romance, marriage and family with a man who “came riding in/in the thunderstorm,” cooing, “You’re the one that I, I’ve been waiting for.”

Bailey Rae shared a Grammy Award — album of the year — as a vocalist on Herbie Hancock’s 2007 Joni Mitchell tribute, “River: The Joni Letters,” and she welcomes Mitchell’s influence with the leaping, asymmetrical melody lines and enigmatic imagery of “Peach Velvet Sky,” which has Brown on piano accompanying Bailey Rae in an unadorned duet.

“Black Rainbows” is one songwriter’s leap into artistic freedom, unconcerned with genre expectations or radio formats. It’s also one more sign that songwriters are strongest when they heed instincts rather than expectations” – The New York Times

Standout Track: Peach Velvet Sky

Billie Marten – Drop Cherries

Release Date: 7th April

Label: Fiction Records

Producers: Dom Monks/Billie Marten

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/billie-marten/drop-cherries

Key Cuts: God Above/Devil Swim/Drop Cherries

Review:

“Yorkshire-born Billie Marten is no stranger to our ears, having released three studio albums already at the tender age of 23. Her latest record, ‘Drop Cherries’, rings true to the Billie Marten we all know and love while introducing a more mature musical style as she takes her fans on a sonic journey. On this record, Marten has truly gathered some of her best work to date.

If this record had to be summed up briefly, it would be as an ode to relationships, from the good to the bad and everything in between. ‘Drop Cherries’ is a reference to the album’s titular closing track, which is simple in its structure and lyricism to end the record on a note of how the mundane things may be what truly makes love.

Elsewhere in the record, Marten uses music to explore the complexities of love and companionship, resulting in some beautiful tracks, namely ‘Willow’ which is beautiful in its imagery-led structure, with lyrics depicting “two weeping willows throwing an arm to one another.” ‘Arrows’ is another moment which is stunning in its lyricism, this time letting the listener into the tougher side of relationships, where Marten sings ‘’I am at war with my shadow, roads dark and narrow.’’

The lyric-lacking album opener ‘New Idea’ set a tone for Marten’s new instrumental approach on her fourth record as it let the music do the talking, introducing her controlled and soothing harmonies along with strings – something I did not expect on a Billie Marten album.

The increased instrumentation on this record is a welcome addition, as the orchestral-type strings in ‘Devil Swim’, woodwind solo in ‘Willow’, and plucked strings with cymbals in ‘God Above’ make Billie Marten stand out in a crowded singer-songwriter market. Though there are moments – for example, on ‘Just Us’ – where the vocals seem drowned out by the instrumentation, the record as a whole benefits from these sonic layers, with band-led track ‘I Can’t Get My Head Around You’ being one of my favourites for its cohesive sound. After taking a more electronic synth route on previous record ‘Flora Fauna’, this is just another indicator of Marten’s growth.

A conceptual album which feels honest and authentic, ‘Drop Cherries’ showcases the best of her musical ability while being lyrically complex – it’s another strong record for Billie Marten to add to her repertoire - 8/10” - CLASH

Standout Track: Willow

Olivia Rodrigo – GUTS

Release Date: 8th September

Label: Geffen

Producer: Dan Nigro

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/olivia-rodrigo/guts-3

Key Cuts: ballad of a homeschooled girl/get him back!/teenage dream

Review:

“On ‘Guts’, Olivia Rodrigo goes to war for every young woman who has been unable to articulate why it is so belittling not to be taken seriously. In the orbit of her urgent and riotous second album, the 20-year-old turns her own vulnerabilities into a rallying cry: here, she’s a songwriter of control, diving headfirst into the collective female experience while also pursuing adventure, desire and relief. “I’m grateful all the time,” Rodrigo repeats on opener ‘All-American Bitch”, “I’m pretty when I cry.” She adopts a coo-like vocal as she continues to sing of how, in general, women are expected to moderate their emotions in the public eye. This record throws a sparkling firebomb at that grim, shared reality.

These 12 songs dissect embattled loves and revenge fantasies and highlight the near-impossibility of maintaining relationships when you’re at battle with the watchful eye of social media. There’s a feeling of being overburdened, too. Rodrigo shot to fame in 2021 with her record-breaking debut ‘Sour’, an album that spawned stratospheric hits (‘Drivers License’, ‘Good 4 U’) and put the former Disney star on a life-altering ascent, closing the year as the best-selling singles artist worldwide. This dominance not only coincided with the intensity of lockdown but gave her the reach to become one of the most influential pop writers of her generation; her sound – a mix of bratty, Avril-indebted pop and swooping balladry – can already be heard in a number of newer artists, including Lauren Spencer-Smith and Dylan.

This new chapter feels like an opportunity for Rodrigo to shake off that level of pressure or at least reshape it on her own terms. Lead single ‘Vampire’ bristles with fury towards a leeching older figure that took advantage of Rodrigo and her influence, exuding the same raw emotion that fuels Billie Eilish’s ‘Your Power’. “Six months of torture you sold as some forbidden paradise,” she sings, her voice building with urgency before letting rip into a red-hot screech. ‘The Grudge’ and ‘Making The Bed’ are more subdued, wistful songs of regret and burn-out.

Moments of elegant production are balanced with some compellingly unflattering lyrics about failed romantic pursuits – Rodrigo is equally capable of asserting her agency with humour. Backed by a cheerleader chant, she is needy, sly and covetous on the frenzied ‘Bad Idea Right’, while ‘Get Him Back!’ is uninhibited in the way it takes down an ex over a choppy melody. The barbs grow sharper and funnier – he lied about being 6ft tall! – before Rodrigo, the child of a family therapist, breaks into a knowing admission: “But I am my father’s daughter / So maybe I could fix him!”

‘Guts’ doesn’t just feel transitional in a musical sense. It marks the end of Rodrigo’s teenage years, a moment that has gravity given that she recently said in a statement that she felt like she grew “10 years” between the ages of 18 and 20. Here, she offers blunt self-analysis while reflecting on wider cultural ideas of performance and swallowing anger in order to comply with the wants and needs of others. It works as a display of real power, range and versatility – all of which Rodrigo possesses in abundance” – NME

Standout Track: bad idea right?

Yazmin Lacey - Voice Notes

Release Date: 3rd March

Label: Own Your Own Records

Executive Producer: Dave Okumu

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/yazmin-lacey/voice-notes

Key Cuts: Flylo Tweet/From a Lover/Tomorrow’s Child

Review:

“Yazmin Lacey is a truly special vocalist, someone we’ve long held close to our hearts. Yet in her slim but endlessly fascinating catalogue, there’s been a gap – namely, a full length album. ‘Voice Notes’ closes that hole, a work of remarkable unity that hinges on her emphatic creativity. Soulful in a pan-genre fashion, she’s able to craft an aesthetic memoir that crosses jazz, system culture, and more, all while finessed to remarkable degree.

A self-declared “sound collage”, this mosaic approach is set out from the off. Opener ‘Flylo Tweet’ was born from an improvisatory spoken word piece, edited down into something more succinct. It’s emblematic of her magpie-like approach, and epitomises the sense of editing as an instrument in itself on this project.

Boasting a full hour of music, ‘Voice Notes’ is packed with inspiration. ‘Bad Company’ and ‘Late Night People’ are impeccable neo-soul bumpers, dipping into those twilight hours in the process. ‘From A Lover’ takes on a more vintage feel, it’s soulful vision rooted more in Aretha, say, than Erykah. It’s far from an R&B record, though – Yazmin touches on jazz, while ‘Tomorrow’s Child’ feels like a love letter to system culture.

‘Pass It Back’ hinges on a low slung beat and a stellar bassline, but even at her most direct ‘Voice Notes’ utilises a sense of the transcendent. Closer ‘Sea Glass’ ripples with spiritual jazz harp, a song that finds Yasmin Lacey making incredible use of space. Casting an ethereal glaze, it’s the perfect summation of an often-personal project.

Dubbed “a collection of my life” at times ‘Voice Notes’ takes on the feeling of visiting an art gallery – you pause for a moment at one work, absorbing it fully, before moving to the next. Yazmin Lacey’s curatorial skill sits alongside her painterly-like vocals, resulting in a bold, and emphatic album project - 8/10” – CLASH

Standout Track: Pass It Back

Chappell Roan - The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess

Release Date: 22nd September

Label: Island

Producer: Dan Nigro

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/chappell-roan/the-rise-and-fall-of-a-midwest-princess-2

Key Cuts: Femininomenon/Naked in Manhattan/Guilty Pleasure

Review:

“It’s a little cliché at this point: listening to a musician who seemingly ‘knows exactly how you feel,’ whose lyrics seem ‘ripped out of your diary.’ Usually, these are reserved for more depressing artists, whose admissions of personal shortcomings we can see in ourselves as well (Mitski, Self Esteem, Taylor Swift to some extent). But with Chappell Roan, the feeling is different. It’s usually one of joy, silliness, exhilarating nature and the bursting energy that music can bring out.

Likely due to her age (25), the glittery pop newcomer writes in a way so in sync with the minds of young people, memes and inside jokes included. This could veer on the side of trite, heard-before or cringy, like a tweet that relies on humour from years ago, but Roan is always in control of the narrative. She writes about sex and relationships earnestly with humour, whether on a ballad like “Casual” (“Knee deep in the passenger seat and you’re eating me out, is it casual now?”, a horny hook-up anthem such as “Red Wine Supernova” (“Back in my house, I got a California King / Okay, maybe it’s a twin bed, and some roommates”) or even on “My Kink Is Karma,” a revenge-tinged breakup track. “It’s hot when you have a meltdown in the front of your house and you’re getting kicked out,” she admits of a former partner: “People say I’m jealous but my kink is karma.” A predecessor of Taylor Swift, if only she were this transgressive.

The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is distinctly queer in two ways – the first being an honest admission of her own journey as a woman in the LGBTQ+ community, performing to fans in the same boat. Exuberant debut single “Pink Pony Club” takes place in a gay bar in West Hollywood, lamenting her Tennessee mother’s disapproval of where her life has taken. “Oh mama, I’m just having fun / On the stage in my heels,” she says, and elsewhere, has noted that the stage essence of Chappell Roan is basically just a drag persona. On “After Midnight”, too, she says, “I kinda wanna kiss your girlfriend if you don’t mind,” but there’s no straight girl acting it up here – like with MUNA, there’s no faking it with Roan.

The second queer influence is the notion of complete self-autonomy and reliance that comes with shrugging off men, demonstrated on the opener, “Femininomenon”. She complains that men aren’t able to give her the satisfaction she requires, whether it be through a good beat or good sex. “Ladies, you know what I mean, and you know what you need!” goes the call to action on the spoken-word bridge. On what has to be one of the top three best pop songs of the year, “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl” compares a boyfriend’s averageness to his girl’s star quality, much like the marketing for the recent Barbie movie: “She’s everything, he’s just Ken”: “I’m through with all these hyper mega bummer boys like you,” she decides, and in a lyric that’s simple but which perfectly encapsulates how we’re punished for our desire and standards, she sings, “Not over dramatic / I know what I want.” Over a stomping beat that will have people looking up Roan’s tour dates to hear this song live, she sings, “I need a super graphic ultra modern girl like me.” Doesn’t everyone?

Mirroring the experience of one’s twenties, this album is also very horny. If the lyrics cited above aren’t enough to convince you, look no further than “HOTTOGO!” where Roan serves herself up on a platter, happy to be feasted upon and even relishing the opportunity to be lusted after. “What’s it gonna take to get your number!?” she asks in a crazed voice on the chorus, perfectly simulating the mind-bending obsession one can submit to in the presence of a hot person. “Naked In Manhattan” presents a situation that can be gleaned from the title, “After Midnight” is a sensual disco track about being a “freak in the club,” and “Guilty Pleasure” basks in the satisfaction about finding someone just as sexually oriented as Roan. “Oh my God, you are heaven sent,” she admits, “With your dirty mind, you’re perverted.”

Roan is a blazing tour-de-force on her debut album. She tackles every corner of human sexuality, psychology, desire, and lust, all on some of the hookiest choruses of this year. During some tracks she takes the time to slow it down, which sometimes hinders the album’s flow – as in the case with “Coffee” and another song whose odd analogy comparing love to a kaleidoscope seems offhand – but it shows she has the range. With some of its songs released as late as three years ago, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is a little lacking in vision and coherence, but this first glittery collection of pop songs from Chappell Roan drips in charisma and hedonistic pleasure. Let’s drop the ‘star in the making’ label – she’s already here” – The Line of Best Fit

Standout Track: Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl

Julie Byrne - The Greater Wings

Release Date: 7th July

Label: Ghostly International

Producers: Jake Falby/Eric Littmann/Alex Somers

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/julie-byrne/the-greater-wings

Key Cuts: Portrait of a Clear Day/Flare/Death Is the Diamond

Review:

“A while back, I was fortunate enough to finally get a chance to see Grouper live. It was during her tour for her last LP, Shade, and although it featured very few recognizable Grouper songs, it was beautiful and transportive all the same. Opening for her, though, was ambient composer Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. While he played one continuous, enveloping drone piece, a female singer sang — mostly wordlessly, I think — at his side. It was the perfect accompaniment to his eerie but placid piece, her voice weaving in and out and around it like water.

I didn’t know until after the show that it was Julie Byrne sitting on that stool, half-shrouded in moonlight-like stage lights and shadows. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t pinned her voice: a signature smoky smooth instrument, unfurling like a silken quilt. It made such perfect sense with Cantu-Ledesma’s work that I must have not been able to transpose the voice I had listened to so many times singing over the delicate acoustic watercolors of her sophomore LP, Not Even Happiness, into this synthetic and droning atmosphere. But it was a harmonious marriage, and, in retrospect, reified everything I already believed and loved about Byrne and her ability to relocate you elsewhere when she sings, whether that’s a glade beneath a cerulean blue sky, or a dark and humid wetland.

On her third record, The Greater Wings, she mostly returns to her own personal milieu — that of the ground and sky, of guitars and harp and strings. Coming after a long six year gap that saw Byrne engage with rigorous touring, collaborations with other artists, and the tragic loss of close collaborator Eric Littman in 2021 — who produced part of this record before his death with Byrne, who then enlisted Alex Somers to finish the project with her — The Greater Wings is a document of love, loss, connection, and the natural world. Although elements of grief and sadness are stitched into these songs, much of it was written before Littman’s passing, lending the album an eternal, cyclical feeling. As she said in a recent Guardian interview, there is so much longing and yearning in grief, in addition to the sadness. That longing is rife on The Greater Wings — a longing for learning, for renewal, for people, for life itself.

If you were a fan of Not Even Happiness, the odds are high you’ll find much to enjoy here. It might not be a huge reinvention, but it does cement Byrne’s status as a forerunner in her field. The opening title track is classic Byrne: thick guitar fingerpicking, pleasant strings, a healthy dose of reverb, and a gently ascending melody sung in her velveteen voice. It feels a little clearer and sharper than her past work, with finer and more robust production giving her songs more breathing room. The song finds Byrne in a moment of reflection, taking in everything around her and looking outward for more and for welcome, but there’s also an undeniable linkage to her sense of loss, as when she sings the lovely and heartbreaking “You’re always in the band / Forever underground / Name my grief to let it sing”. In creating music out of this emotional excavation and unnaturally hard times, Byrne has found a pinhole up to the sun.

Nature has been a massive inspiration to Byrne’s past work, and that’s unchanged here. Natural imagery is conjured again and again throughout these songs — in the lyrics and even in many of the song titles — imbuing the world around us with a sensitive, divine weight. “Moonless” gives us a sky with no moon above a dark ocean. “Summer Glass” shows us our singer at the water’s edge, contemplating the nature of desire, as the sun comes up on her own piece of the shoreline. The sun rises on her again on “Flare”, further deepening her solar and lunar symbolism. But in between all this imagery, which might feel slightly familiar to longtime fans, are enough variations on her usual mode to keep it feeling fresh.

After the first two rather expected cuts, “Moonless” gives us a slowly crawling piano ballad, a deeply moving ode to discovering love (“I found it there in the room with you / Whatever eternity is”) that feels as timeless as an old painting. Harp trickles in, covering her voice in dewy crystal drops. Closer “Death is the Diamond” is another piano ballad, and while it may not have quite the magnetic pull of “Moonless”, it does have one of the album’s most emotive, plaintive melodies, as she sings lines like “You make me feel like the prom queen I never was.” “Hope’s Return” (a rework of a collaborative piece she did with Cantu-Ledesma a couple years back) finds Byrne strumming with a slightly unusual vigor, almost like a The Man Who Died In His Boat-era Grouper song, and then the strings and percussion joins in, alongside ghostly backing vocals, and the song is ushered into a higher stratosphere than a Byrne song usually shoots for.

Perhaps most unexpected is early single “Summer Glass”, which rests almost entirely upon Littman’s fluttering, arpeggiated synth. It’s not the first time Byrne has sung over electronic flourishes — for one, her last album ended with “I Live Now As a Singer”, which also hinged on a Littman-produced bed of synths — but it feels nearly out of character for her to be singing over such a flashy, nimble instrumental. And yet, it’s perfect: a memory piece about human connection and a moment of intimacy, supported with a blooming synth texture, harp, and heavenly strings and bass. It’s a short story unto itself, sung by an artist with a very firm grasp on her strengths.

Releasing a record after such an extended wait, and having that wait be suffused with grief and loss, is a tough gig. Many will rush to find hints of Byrne’s grieving process within the lyrics, even though it was largely written prior to it, and yet you can’t really outrun it either. Even songs that are so much about joy and love and excitement and vitality become engraved with melancholy when released in the wake of something like that. But The Greater Wings, for all its inevitable connotations, is not a downer. It’s a beautiful testament to life and to the people we love and that keep us going, physically and spiritually. It’s also a testament to moving forward with grace and strength, and rediscovering that longing to live. As Byrne sings at the end of “Summer Glass”: “I want to be whole enough to risk again.” It sounds like she’s made it there, or like she’s at least firmly toeing the warm waters of that renewal. Like she’s ready” – Beats Per Minute

Standout Track: Summer Glass

Noname – Sundial

Release Date: 11th August

Label: Noname, Inc

Producers: Saba/Yussef Dayes/Wesley Singerman/Berg/BMC/Daoudemil/Gaetan Judd/Kevin Efofo/Ben Nartey/Nascent/R-Kay/Slimwav

Key Cuts: black mirror/toxic/gospel?

Review:

“As Sundial progresses, there seems to be no limit to what knowledge Noname possesses, and this isn’t due to the Chicago rapper being the little girl with her hand always raised in class poised to answer the next question like her detractors characterize her as; there is such a gift as intuition. Live with empathy and intuition for any amount of time in the last five years and it may all run together as part of some great injustice or call to worship. Each individual point between 2018's Room 25 and Sundial was both a watershed moment in American political history and also now pristinely in the rearview. Within an excruciating blink, we’re back again.

And Sundial feels like not a moment was lost in the gap with her already polished stream of consciousness sumptuously evolving into free word association, moving speedily from one vignette to another philosophically intriguing vignette. The album pacing reflects this shift; instead of ample room for rumination, world peace and self-worth are achieved in spare moments on the fly. This does not gut them for their power, it simply maximizes the time and breadth of her subject matter. The tempo increases in time with the stakes.

Noname’s discography has become an ever-evolving list of ways to reach auditory bliss, and Sundial is a big band ensemble speeding past on a highway like the forum for social issues is Mad Max Fury Road. Part of this band is an impressive list of collaborators including the equally as relentless Billy Woods, capturing a striking moment of clarity near the end of the record; Ayoni’s sung hooks on “boomboom” and “oblivion” are indulgently gorgeous and make for some of the catchiest refrains of 2023. However, the controversial inclusion of Jay Electronica induces a frightened stare when he begins rapping about numerous conspiracy theories ranging from the Rothschilds to the war in Ukraine being a Jewish hoax. Needless to say, the soapbox provided for this on such a project can sour the message for many in a time of increasing antisemitic violence.

Her striking lyrical flow has become more relentless but comes off more like a constant drip of honey than an imposing assault, at least sonically. On the other hand, the subject matter of the lyrics is rife with Socratic lines of moral questioning and political comedy. Every track excels in a topical focus that will not be spoiled or summarized by the deadline-watching eyes of a critic. They are to be found and grappled with individually, or communally, if that’s your thing.

The gift of intuition lays the whole world bare, all can be felt and observed in the most personalized ways. After “oblivion” and its message of “When the world blow up that’s it/motherfucker I don’t care, I’m gonna talk my shit” resonates into the dark, a clear picture of an artist is left, if ever there was one: we are five years closer to doomsday than we were, and there is dignity in the descent” – The Line of Best Fit

Standout Track: Namesake

Say She She – Silver

Release Date: 29th September

Labels: Karma Chief Records/Colemine Records

Producer: Sergio Rios

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/say-she-she/silver-4

Key Cuts: C’est Si Bon/Forget Me Not/Bleeding Heart

Review:

“The female-led discodelic soul band Say She She, named as a silent nod to Nile Rodgers (C’est chi-chi!: It's Chic!”), release their sophomore album Silver on the heels of an epic break-out year that grows brighter by the day.

The three strong voices of Piya Malik (El Michels Affair staple feature, and former backing singer for Chicano Batman), Sabrina Mileo Cunningham and Nya Gazelle Brown front the band. This harmonizing trio was formed in a classic New York tale of friends that met by following the music: the downtown dancefloors, through the Lower East Side floorboards and up to the rooftops of Harlem.

Silver was entirely written and recorded live to tape at Killion Sound studio in North Hollywood earlier this year and produced by Sergio Rios (of Orgone). While these analog recording techniques help root Say She She’s sound in a bedrock of tonal warmth that only tape can achieve, it is also their process of cutting the track in the moment and capturing the magic of communal creativity that has seen their sound described as “a glorious overload of joyful elation and spiritual elevation” (MOJO) and “infused with the wonky post-disco spirit of early '80s NYC” (The Guardian).

Silver, the element, is known as the metal of self-confidence and the mirror of the soul. With that, the 16-song double-LP projects not only their growth in writing with confidence, but also reflects a deeper exploration into their punk-chic, femmeforward sensibility.

Ultimately, Silver oozes with quirk and adventure and embraces the multifaceted nature of what it means to be a modern femme. The She She's fully embrace their role as beauticians, actively reminding people of the inherent beauty in the world. They skillfully employ double entendres and humor to encourage open dialogue and fearlessly address important matters that demand attention” – Rough Trade

Standout Track: Astral Plane

Róisín Murphy – Hit Parade

Release Date: 8th September

Label: Ninja Tune

Producer: DJ Koze

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/roisin-murphy/hit-parade-2

Key Cuts: CooCool/The Universe/Crazy Ants Reprise

Review:

“Róisín Murphy has been a pioneer when it comes to electronic music and with ‘Hit Parade’, she has solidified her icon status. Pairing up with DJ Koze, the two have created a record which does exactly what it says on the tin; delivering hit after hit that sail by you in a haze of awe. Predecessor ‘Roisin Machine’ brought the Moloko artist back to the forefront of critic’s and music lovers’ minds alike. Combining aspects of house, pop and modern electronic was a winning mix. ‘Hit Parade’ continues this but injects another type of energy into every track. Whether it’s humour, a dance sensibility or graceful gentleness, Murphy has captured the essence of the ups and downs of life.

The record has crests and waves, not a trough to be found. The seamless transitions from light to dark are expertly done.‘CooCool’ is so groovy, so danceable with sumptuous bass and crazy mini guitar riffs. ‘Hurtz so Bad’ has a darker tone to it. “Did I get it wrong?/ All along” leaves behind the upbeat atmosphere but replaces it with an emotional purging. These charged tracks make ‘Hit Parade’ more than a record stacked with bangers, ready for the dancefloor. The likes of ‘You Knew’ with its deep house melody and melancholic tender vocals add a complexity to the album.

The soundbytes which are scattered throughout the record are downright hilarious particularly on sunny ‘The Universe’ and ‘Crazy Ants Reprise’. Murphy puts on a Californian accent, highlighting the many times that things have been blown out of proportion because of a certain American outlook. “This guy, this captain was right out in the ocean, rowing away, rowing away from the boat,” interrupts the American voice and Murphy responds right back singing “Row, row, row and row” (potentially being a dig at those who chat during performances). Even Irish comedian Tommy Tiernan gets a small feature on ‘The House’.

Passionate ‘Fader’ is accompanied with a music video filmed in Róisín Murphy’s childhood home Arklow in Ireland. Irish dancers and girls in communion dresses, boy scouts and baton twirlers capture the true parade that Murphy is a part of and is a beautiful gesture to her Irish roots. Experimental ‘Two Ways’ is a trap inspired track that is the definition of a musical slam dunk. Melding Murphy’s sensuous vocals, a vocoder and pounding 808, she pushes the genre boundaries and delivers a contemporary track that blows the current names in music out of the water.

‘Hit Parade’ is as colourful and playful as Róisín Murphy herself. Truly a contender for album of the year,  Murphy has created an album of true musical depth that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Mashing genres, both new and well-loved together means that Murphy is doing what any artist should be doing which is responding to what is happening around them. Marching to the beat of her own drum, Róisín is setting a precedent to be followed for decades to come - 9/10” – CLASH

Standout Track: Fader

Jorja Smith - falling or flying

Release Date: 29th September

Label: FAMM

Producer: DameDame

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/jorja-smith/falling-or-flying-2

Key Cuts: Little Things/Falling or flying/Crazy Make sense

Review:
”There’s always been something special about Jorja Smith. Since the Walsall-raised artist’s arrival in 2016 with her breakout hit ‘Blue Lights’, there’s been a certain magnetism about her: the voice is technically sensational, and there’s truth to every word sung. Early comparisons to Amy Winehouse, her idol, were not unwarranted, and her ability to resonate with listeners across the spectrum only blossomed.

Her 2018 debut ‘Lost & Found’ showcased that personality, if only in subtle ways: with the tasteful R&B and pop stylings, it felt like a safe first step to satiate the hype rather than a defining musical portrait. Musical collaborations with Drake, Burna Boy, and rising star Enny continued to build the star and myth around her.

It was 2021’s ‘Be Right Back’, a mid-pandemic mixtape, that simmered with Smith’s most intriguing material yet, like someone realising where their path was headed and how to harness it. She hasn’t looked back: ‘Falling or Flying’, her second studio album, is a triumph because of that conviction. Having decided that London was not conducive to her life and music-making, she moved back home to the Midlands, keen to rekindle the pre-fame Jorja that the industry didn’t want you to see but that existed every time the mic was off. In an accompanying statement, she says that formative years growing up in the industry had made her a “people pleaser” and that moving home helped her be “better at trusting myself, not doubting myself as much, and not being so affected and worried by other peoples’ opinions.”

On ‘Falling or Flying’, she teams up with DAMEDAME*, an emerging production duo who also happen to be Smith’s pals from back home; their presence is keenly felt, the trio coursing with ideas and freedom. From the mesmerising opener ‘Try Me’ to ‘Little Things’, a nod to UK funky that has potential to rival ‘On My Mind’ for her biggest dancefloor heater, ‘Falling or Flying’ reveals itself much like Solange’s 2019 album ‘When I Get Home’: an uncompromising and arresting treasure of a record. Even ‘Go Go Go’, a fairly formulaic, indie-indebted number, is the type of song that could only spring from febrile recording sessions with close confidantes: it’s not hard to picture the three thrashing along hard and laughing at each other above the din.

Scarcely any songs on ‘Falling or Flying’ sound the same, but the throughline of Smith trusting her gut remains and reconnecting with herself remains a guiding constant. ‘Greatest Gift’, a song about Smith reconnecting with her younger self, is as touching as she’s ever sounded as a pertinent message rings true: I promise to make sure you’ll never fall far from your grace / I hope that you know you are never too far from your purpose” she reminds herself. ‘Falling or Flying’ was the record she was destined to make, she just had to allow herself to get there” - NME

Standout Track: Try Me

CHAI - CHAI

Release Date: 22nd September

Labels: Sub Pop/Otemayon

Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/product/chai/chai

Key Cuts: MATCHA/We the Female!/KARAOKE

Review:

“GO!
MATCHA CHA
MATCHA CHA, MECHA
CHO MATCHA!

So begins CHAI’s fourth album in a chant of technicolor enthusiasm. For the initiated, it’s a familiarly infectious vibe that’s led to the quartet securing Sub Pop record deals and collaborating with the likes of Gorillaz. For the newbie, it’s as good a place as any to enter the world of CHAI. 

Formed in 2012 by twin sisters Mana and Kana alongside high school/college buds Yuuki and Yana, the band has spent the past decade marrying homegrown influences with experimental pop, punk, and hip-hop rhythms. It’s proved a winning formula, the group reclaiming Japan’s ‘Kawaii’ (cute) aesthetics to create ‘Neo-kawaii,’ a more inclusive and feminist slant that embraces imperfections. Imagine candy-colored riot girl over some seriously groovy synths, and you’re halfway there.

The band’s latest self-titled offering follows 2021’s fabulous ‘WINK,’ an album that rightfully ended on a few ‘best of’ lists. While this last full-length leaned more into foreright dance territory and contemporary collabs, this latest ten-track sees the outfit embrace and update 80s city pop. While this Japanized version of lounge music is truly of their parents’ era, the once-maligned genre has had an unexpected revival thanks to boutique labels, Youtube, and TikTok. The soundtrack of Japan’s tech boom, this once-disposable genre always had a knack for creating the kind of bass lines Daft Punk would happily build worlds from. By merging this effortlessly smooth blueprint with their own punk lyrics and ethos, CHAI has created an album that’s warmly inviting yet still exciting. 

An excellent example of this blend is ‘GAME,’ which marries Prince’s ‘Controversy’ with the vibe of a Yuzo Koshiro Mega Drive soundtrack to great effect. It’s part pop jam, part house number, and 100% addictive. Elsewhere, ‘1992’ has the band breezily embrace aging over chaotic drum loops and vintage synth sounds. It proves a highlight and captures the spirit of 90s console culture for anyone lucky enough to have lived it. Still, this being a CHAI record, there are more immediate moments, namely the rallying ‘We The Female!,’ a nu-rave sounding track led by Yuna’s tight machine gun drumming. 
Another highlight is ‘LIKE, I NEED,’ a sultry pop-banger that discusses the dangers of social media reliance despite the track’s catchiness. The chorus’ punchy multitracked vocals over Yuuki’s dreamy basslines are glorious and showcase the great synergy between the band and producer Ryu Takahashi. Teaming up with Takahashi once more was a wise choice, the whole album sounding perfectly balanced while including more subtleties than seen in their previous work on ‘WINK.’ 

This sense of contained chaos is far from the straight indie dance production featured on their first two albums. These two opposing forces are perfectly captured on the album’s brilliant artwork – the girls are captured in black and white, grimacing with backcombed hair and smeared lipstick as a blast of pink rays and stars is doing its best to blow them away. It’s both subdued and retro while ready to explode at any moment – just like the record. If you’re looking for an album to brighten your day, come enter the world of CHAI - 8/10” - CLASH

Standout Track: GAME

FEATURE: Shade of Red, White and Blue: This Country of Ours: Fighting Against the Genre’s Culture Wars

FEATURE:

 

 

Shade of Red, White and Blue

IN THIS PHOTO: Country artist Morgan Wade 

This Country of Ours: Fighting Against the Genre’s Culture Wars

_________

I want to quote quite liberally…

 IN THIS PHOTO: Broadway, formerly a rough neighborhood with a handful of honky-tonks, has become NashVegas, a strip lined with nightclubs named for Country stars/PHOTO CREDIT: Ashley Gilbertson/VII for The New Yorker

from an article in The New Yorker from July. It talks of the culture wars happening in the genre. How Nashville is transforming. The article look at how Tennessee’s government has turned hard red (Republican). It is a shame but, with a new set of outlaw songwriters challenging Music City’s conservative ways and a scene proliferated by dudes, bros, and white men, things look positive for the future. I will get onto the fact Country has been in the spotlight recently due to protest songs and how some male artists have been making headlines due to seemingly far-right and small-town mentality ideas expressed in songs. If there is a new wave of artists challenging the anti-progressionist ways and male-heavy scene, figures from earlier in this year show how stations playing country still seem to be against female artists:

“A new study solidifies the belief that country radio has long been reluctant to play songs from women in general — and almost never plays two women artists back-to-back.

The study, by Jan Diehm of The Pudding and Dr. Jada Watson, is titled They Won’t Play a Lady-O on Country Radio: Examining Back-to-Back Plays by Gender, Race and Sexual Orientation. It pulls from the daily logs of 29 country radio stations in large market areas, analyzing 24-hour programming in each month of 2022 to see how often listeners of those stations could expect to hear back-to-back songs by women, artists of color and LGBTQ+ artists. Among the country radio stations included in the study were KKGO (Los Angeles), WUSN (Chicago), KKBQ and KILT (Houston), WKDF (Nashville) and WMZQ (Washington, DC).

The study found that at these stations, songs from women country artists were played back-to-back an average of 0.5% of the time. In data that is consistent with SongData’s findings regarding daypart programming, the majority of these back-to-back plays (46.1%) occurred in overnights (between midnight and 6 a.m.), while 19% were played during evening hours (between 7 p.m. and midnight) — time periods with lower listenership. In the intro to the study, an anecdotal sample is given, noting that if one had tuned into a particular (unnamed) station at 8:35 a.m. on Jan. 7, 2022, it would have taken over nine hours before hearing two consecutive songs from female artists.

“If you listen to this station non-stop from midnight to 11:59 p.m. today, you’d likely only hear three back-to-back songs by women, compared to 245 from men,” the report states.

“We’ve heard for many years that songs by women should not be programmed back-to-back — as we say in the study, it’s been part of industry rhetoric since at least the 1960s and was even written into programming manuals,” Watson tells Billboard via email. “But it’s one of those issues that is spoken about anecdotally and now we have this study to show not just that it’s true, but just how bleak it is for women, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists at radio.”

The new report builds upon Watson’s earlier work, including her March 2021 study, Redlining in Country Music: Representation in the Country Music Industry (2000-2020), and an updated version released earlier this year.

“As a listener, it’s pretty easy to pick up on the bias in country radio when you can spend 20 minutes in your car and go without hearing a single song by a woman, let alone back-to-back songs by women,” Diehm tells Billboard via email. “So, I was expecting the worst, but it was so much worse than that. My hometown station is San Antonio (KCYY-FM), the station we used in the intro of the piece — [and] you know it’s bad when you start to think of a station that plays women back-to-back at 0.99% as one of the ‘better’ stations”.

It is no secret that Country music is one of the slowest to diversify and embrace the modern world. In terms of its racial breakdown and attitudes towards Black artists, Country has had a big problem with race and moving forward. In a lot of ways, it is still white and male-dominated. With big artists in its midst popular in spite of allegations of racism against them, things are slowly starting to clean up. Books like Marissa R Moss’s Her Country: How the Women of Country Music Became the Success They Were Never Supposed to Be illuminates the journeys of numerous female artists trying to make a break in a genre set up for and focused on men. In spite of small movements forward in recent years, there is still a huge issue with sexism and misogyny. A genre that has had to battle those accusations in years past, that bro mentality was called out back in 2014 here. Have things moved on?! A lot of women in Country have transformed and stepped more into Pop. The likes of Kacey Musgraves and Taylor Swift began in Country and have since become more commercial and mainstream. If there are more Black artists in Country music than there has been, and there is a tiny shift in terms of the sexist and white men-only stricture, there has been a recent uncomfortable look at politicians and right-wing attitudes in Country.

North Carolina artist Oliver Anthony’s Rich Men North of Richmond caused some controversy and storm. Even if there is some empathy to his lyrics and agenda, the song has been mobilised and supported by those on the right. Problematic lyrics about welfare and taxation means that what could have been an inspiring and uplifting song is seen as one with a political agenda. One that has quite an ugly surface. Populist outrage is returning to and dominating the charts. The protest song is very much back. At a time when there is so much gun violence and senseless murder in the U.S., coupled with climate change and people struggling to make ends meet, right-wing music is dominating. A genre that should be tackling vital and important themes instead. If an attack against perceived dangerous wokeism or a reaction to growing dissatisfaction and anger among the working-classes, there is an ugliness coming from white men in Country. Jason Aldean’s Try That in a Small Town, as you might expect from the title, is very smalltown and anti-urban. As Arwa Mahdawi wrote for The Guardian in July, there is this delusional attitude and toxic narrative coming from conservatives and the far-right:

“Try That in a Small Town was released in May but when the music video came out last Friday it generated immediate controversy. The video leaves little doubt as to what Aldean is trying to communicate: it intersperses footage of him singing in front of Maury county courthouse in Tennessee – the site of the lynching of a Black man, Henry Choate, in 1927 – with footage from protests, looting and civil unrest. Small towns are wholesome, the message is. Full of “good ol’ boys” who were “raised up right”. Cities, meanwhile, are hotbeds of violence … and diversity.

That last bit isn’t spelled out – it’s not like Aldean yells “I’m a massive racist!” in the middle of the track – but the dog whistles are difficult to ignore. The song has been called “a modern lynching song” by detractors and the video was pulled from Country Music Television (CMT) on Monday. (While CMT has confirmed the video was taken off rotation, it hasn’t put out a statement as to why.) Fellow country star Sheryl Crow has also voiced her disapproval. “There’s nothing small-town or American about promoting violence,” Crow tweeted on Tuesday. She further noted that Aldean should know better, “having survived a mass shooting”. Crow was referencing the shooting at Las Vegas’s Route 91 Harvest festival in 2017: the deadliest mass shooting by a lone shooter in modern US history. Aldean was performing and got out unscathed. He was lucky. Sixty people were killed and 867 injured. Those people weren’t killed and injured by a Black Lives Matter protester. They were killed by Stephen Paddock, an angry white man from Iowa.

Try That in a Small Town has generated a lot of criticism, but it also has fervent supporters. Including, of course, GOP lawmakers. “I am shocked by what I’m seeing in this country with people attempting to cancel this song and cancel Jason and his beliefs,” the South Dakota Republican governor, Kristi Noem, posted in a video on Twitter on Wednesday. The Tennessee house GOP leader, William Lamberth, similarly tweeted: “Loved this song since it was released and will continue to fight every day to spread small town values … Give it a listen. The woke mob will hate you for liking this song.” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the governor of Arkansas, also didn’t miss the chance to stoke a little culture war. “The Left is now more concerned about Jason Aldean’s song calling out looters and criminals than they are about stopping looters and criminals,” she tweeted.

.@Jason_Aldean I’m from a small town. Even people in small towns are sick of violence.There’s nothing small-town or American about promoting violence. You should know that better than anyone having survived a mass shooting.

This is not American or small town-like. It’s just lame https://t.co/cuOtUO9xjr

— Sheryl Crow (@SherylCrow) July 19, 2023

Aldean, for his part, is furious at insinuations there is anything racist in his song about shooting outsiders who come to his little country town

“In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song,” Aldean tweeted on Wednesday, “and was subject to the comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests. These references are not only meritless, but dangerous. There is not a single lyric in the song that references race or points to it – and there isn’t a single video clip that isn’t real news footage.”

If Aldean isn’t trying to make a point about the Black Lives Matter protests, what is Try That in a Small Town about then? Community, apparently. “When u grow up in a small town, it’s that unspoken rule of ‘we all have each other’s backs and we look out for each other,’” Aldean wrote on Instagram when he launched the video. “It feels like somewhere along the way, that sense of community and respect has gotten lost”.

There is a progressiveness. Red blood, a red heart. Blues and blue politics. A white heat against the white dominance and ideologies. The American flag of Country music being repainted and defined. Singer-songwriter Allison Russell organised the Love Rising benefit concert. It was established to show resistance to Tennessee’s legislation targeting L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ residents. their Republican government banned drag acts anywhere near children could see them. The supergroup boygenius protested against this at one of their concerts. The benefit gig pulled together legends of Country/Blues music new and older like Sheryl Crow, Brittany Howard (Alabama Shakes), Julien Baker (boygenius), Jason Isebell and Amanda Shires.

IMAGE CREDIT: Love Rising

Maybe many of these performers can be seen as Americana. That is a wider term given to any artist outside of Country music - whose lyrics and sound could be seen as Country. To show that sexism is still alive in Country, Amanda Shires’ hit, Cover Me Up, was covered by Morgan Walley. Many of Wallen’s fans assumed that he had written it. This corporate machine that is running Country radio is still very much in favour of white men. Even so, there are shades and flickers of light and colour emerging – against the beer-stained, gun-owning and male-dominated scene that has been dogging Country for decades. I want to get to that piece from The New Yorker. I will not bring it all in. Suffice it to say, there are some passages that make for particularly important reading. It starts with details about that incredible recent benefit concert:

“On March 20th, at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena, a block from the honky-tonks of Lower Broadway, Hayley Williams, the lead singer of the pop-punk band Paramore, strummed a country-music rhythm on her guitar. A drag queen in a ketchup-red wig and gold lamé boots bounded onstage. The two began singing in harmony, rehearsing a twangy, raucous cover of Deana Carter’s playful 1995 feminist anthem “Did I Shave My Legs for This?”—a twist on a Nashville classic, remade for the moment.

The singer-songwriter Allison Russell watched them, smiling. In just three weeks, she and a group of like-minded country progressives had pulled together “Love Rising,” a benefit concert meant to show resistance to Tennessee’s legislation targeting L.G.B.T.Q. residents—including a law, recently signed by the state’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, barring drag acts anywhere that kids could see them. Stars had texted famous friends; producers had worked for free. The organizers had even booked Nashville’s largest venue, the Bridgestone—only to have its board, spooked by the risk of breaking the law, nearly cancel the agreement. In the end, they had softened their promotional language, releasing a poster that said simply, in lavender letters, “a celebration of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”—no “drag,” no “trans,” no mention of policy. It was a small compromise, Russell told me, since their goal was broader and deeper than party politics: they needed their listeners to know that they weren’t alone in dangerous times. There was a Nashville that many people didn’t realize existed, and it could fill the biggest venue in town.

IN THIS PHOTO: Brittany Howard/PHOTO CREDIT: Alysse Gafkjen for She Shreds

The doors were about to open. Backstage, global stars like Sheryl Crow, Alabama Shakes’ Brittany Howard, and Julien Baker, the Tennessee-born member of the indie supergroup boygenius, milled around alongside the nonbinary country singer Adeem the Artist, who wore a slash of plum-colored lipstick and a beat-up denim jacket. The singer-songwriters Jason Isbell and Amanda Shires walked by, swinging their seven-year-old daughter, Mercy, between them. There were more than thirty performers, many of whom, like Russell, qualified as Americana, an umbrella term for country music outside the mainstream. In the Americana universe, Isbell and Shires were big stars—but not on Nashville’s Music Row, the corporate engine behind the music on country radio. It was a divide wide enough that, when Isbell’s biggest solo hit, the intimate post-sobriety love song “Cover Me Up,” was covered by the country star Morgan Wallen, many of Wallen’s fans assumed that he’d written it.

Shires, overwhelmed by the crush backstage, invited me to sit with her in her dressing room, where she poured each of us a goblet of red wine. A Texas-born fiddle player who is a member of the feminist supergroup the Highwomen, she had forest-green feathers clumped around her eyelids, as if she were a bird—her own form of drag, Shires joked. Surrounded by palettes of makeup, she talked about her ties to the cause: her aunt is trans, something that her grandmother had refused to acknowledge, even on her deathbed. Shires’s adopted city was in peril, she told me, and she’d started to think that more defiant methods might be required in the wake of the Tennessee legislature’s recent redistricting, which amounted to voter suppression. “Jason, can I borrow you for a minute?” she called into the anteroom, where Isbell was hanging out with Mercy. “The gerrymandering—how do we get past that?”

“Local elections,” Isbell said.

“You really don’t think the answer is anarchy?” Shires remarked, bobbing one of her strappy heels like a lure.

“Well, you know, if you’re the dirtiest fighter in a fight, you’re gonna win,” Isbell said, mildly, slouching against the doorframe. “You bite somebody’s ear off, you’re probably gonna beat ’em. And if there are no rules—or if the rules keep changing according to whoever won the last fight—you’re fucked. Because all of a sudden they’re, like, ‘Hey, this guy’s a really good ear biter. Let’s make it where you can bite ears! ’ ”

That night, the dominant emotion at “Love Rising” wasn’t anarchy but reassurance—a therapeutic vibe, broken up by pleas to register to vote. Nashville’s mayor, John Cooper, a Democrat, spoke; stars from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” showed up via Zoom. The folky Americana singer Joy Oladokun, who had a “keep hope alive” sticker on their guitar, spoke gently about growing up in a small town while being Black and “queer, sort of femme, but not totally in the binary.” Jake Wesley Rogers, whose sequinned suit and big yellow glasses channelled Elton John, sang a spine-tingling version of his queer-positive pop anthem “Pluto”: “Hate on me, hate on me, hate on me! / You might as well hate the sun / for shining just a little too much”.

One of the worst shifts had followed the 2003 Dixie Chicks scandal. At the time, the group was a top act, a beloved trio from Texas who merged fiddle-heavy bluegrass verve with modern storytelling. Then, at a concert in London, just as the Iraq War was gearing up, the lead singer, Natalie Maines, told the crowd that she was ashamed to come from the same state as President George W. Bush. The backlash was instant: radio dropped the band, fans burned their albums, Toby Keith performed in front of a doctored image showing Maines alongside Saddam Hussein, and death threats poured in. Unnerved by the McCarthyist atmosphere, Knowles and other industry professionals gathered at an indie movie house for a sub-rosa meeting of a group called the Music Row Democrats. Knowles told me, “It was kind of like an A.A. meeting—‘Oh, y’all are drunks, too? ’ ”

But a meeting wasn’t a movement. For the next two decades, the entire notion of a female country star faded away. There would always be an exception or two—a Carrie Underwood or a Miranda Lambert, or, lately, the spitfire Lainey Wilson, whose recent album “Bell Bottom Country” became a hit—just as there would always be one or two Black stars, usually male. But Knowles, now fifty-three, knew lots of talented women his age who had found the gates of Nashville locked. “Some of them sell real estate, some of them write songs,” he said. “Some sing backup. None became stars.”

Knowles felt encouraged by Nashville’s new wave, which had adopted a different strategy. Instead of competing, these artists collaborated. They pushed one another up the ladder rather than sparring to be “the one.” “This younger generation, they all help each other out,” he said. “It feels unfamiliar to me.”

Whenever I talked to people in Nashville, I kept getting hung up on the same questions. How could female singers be “noncommercial” when Musgraves packed stadiums? Was it easier to be openly gay now that big names like Brandi Carlile were out? What made a song with fiddles “Americana,” not “country”? And why did so many of the best tracks—lively character portraits like Josh Ritter’s “Getting Ready to Get Down,” trippy experiments like Margo Price’s “Been to the Mountain,” razor-sharp commentaries like Brandy Clark’s “Pray to Jesus”—rarely make it onto country radio? I’d first fallen for the genre in the nineties, in Atlanta, where I drove all the time, singing along to radio hits by Garth Brooks and Reba McEntire, Randy Travis and Trisha Yearwood—the music that my Gen X Southern friends found corny, associating it with the worst people at their high schools. Decades later, quality and popularity seemed out of synch; Music Row and Americana felt somehow indistinguishable, cozily adjacent, and also at war.

People I spoke to in Nashville tended to define Americana as “roots” country, as “progressive-liberal” country, or, more recently, as “diverse” country. For some observers, the distinction was about fashion: vintage suits versus plaid shirts. For others, it was about celebrating the singular singer-songwriter. The label had always been a grab bag, incorporating everything from honky-tonk to bluegrass, gospel to blues, Southern rock, Western swing, and folk. But the name itself hinted at a provocative notion: that this was the real American music, three chords and the historical truth.

Since 2000, the proportion of women on country radio has sunk from thirty-three to eleven per cent. Black women currently represent just 0.03 per cent. (Ironically, Tracy Chapman recently became the first Black female songwriter to have a No. 1 country hit, when Luke Combs released a cover of her classic “Fast Car.”) Country is popular worldwide, performed by musicians from Africa to Australia, Watson told me. It’s the voice of rural people everywhere—but you’d never know it from the radio.

All parties agreed on only one point: you couldn’t ignore country radio even if you wanted to—it drove every decision on Music Row. As Gary Overton, a former C.E.O. of Sony Nashville, had put it in 2015, “If you’re not on country radio, you don’t exist.” Not enough had changed since then, even with the rise of online platforms, like TikTok, that helped indie artists go viral. Streaming wasn’t the solution: like terrestrial radio, it could be gamed. When I made a Spotify playlist called “Country Music,” the service suggested mostly tracks by white male stars.

Another song performed that night had a different feel: “Bonfire at Tina’s,” an ensemble number from Ashley McBryde’s pandemic project, a bold concept album called “Lindeville,” which featured numerous guest artists. The record had received critical praise but little radio play. During “Bonfire at Tina’s,” a chorus of women sang, “Small town women ain’t built to get along / But you burn one, boy, you burn us all.” In its salty solidarity, the song conjured the collectives emerging across Nashville, from “Love Rising” to Black Opry, groups that embodied the Highwomen’s notion of the “crowded table.” You could also see this ideal reflected in “My Kind of Country,” a reality competition show on Apple TV+, produced by Musgraves and Reese Witherspoon, that focussed on global country acts and included the gay South African musician Orville Peck as a judge, and in “Shucked,” a new Broadway show with music by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, which offered up a sweet vision of a multiracial small town learning to open its doors. Mainstream country radio hadn’t changed, but all around it people were busily imagining what would happen if it did.

McBryde, who grew up in a small town in Arkansas, had spent years working honky-tonks and country fairs, a journey she sang about in the anthemic number “Girl Goin’ Nowhere.” She was a distinctive figure in mainstream country, a brunette in a sea of blondes, with arms covered in tattoos. When we met backstage one night at the Grand Ole Opry, she was playing in a memorial concert for the character actor and pint-size Southern sissy Leslie Jordan, who had created a virtual crowded table during the pandemic, through ebullient Instagram videos, then recorded a gospel album with country stars such as Parton”.

If Country music is diversifying – more artists of colour played on radio; fewer traditional blonde women joined by other types of artists, many with tattoos; a slight move towards gender parity, different backgrounds and politics mixing alongside one another -, recent news and songs still show that there is this ugly streak running through. Fortunately, like heroes riding through on horseback, Music City’s hard red and sexist, bro-rules-all sounds are being challenged and combated. Slowly but surely Nashville is changing. If many of Country’s women have moved to other genres, there is still a bright and hugely talented new wave and existing legends – Megan Moroney and Jessie James Decker among them – who are adding diversity and different voices, even recent playlists of new Country songs is largely white men. There are inspiring artists like Maren Morris who, rather than quitting the scene, are calling for change and necessary, overdue progression. MSNBC explained more in a feature from earlier this month:

“What does it mean to quit a music genre? That’s what many of Maren Morris’ fans are asking themselves in the wake of the singer’s announcement in a recent Los Angeles Times interview that she is “getting the hell out” and “leaving” country music. Her explanation, essentially, is that she is fed up with the country industry’s institutional racism, gender discrimination and tolerance for anti-LGBTQ+ voices, along with the blowback she has received for speaking out against these problems. It’s an eye-catching renouncement given Morris’ status, but there’s also a subtlety that may be getting lost. At the heart of this news lay much thornier questions about what country music as a genre even represents in the modern era. Can you quit it like a bad habit or, as Morris sings, more like a bad relationship?

Genres are created by the ever-evolving, nuanced interplay of how fans think about their music and themselves.

In the practical world, a music genre is a complex category defined not by any one set of gatekeepers in the music industry nor by any particular list of awards shows and marketing venues. Rather, genres are created by the ever-evolving, nuanced interplay of how fans think about their music and themselves, how musicians enmesh particular sounds and styles into their sound, and how the industry attempts to differentiate what is, in reality, a messy, interconnected sonic world.

In other words, if fans hear the songwriting roots echoing decades of country artists in Morris’ new EP, along with the poignant twang in her vocals, they are going to hear a country song — regardless of whether Morris shows up at the Country Music Awards or whether any particular DJs pitch the song on country radio. And that’s a good thing, both for Morris and for the whole genre of country music: Headlines blare that she is quitting, but she is also simultaneously doing the vital work of expanding country merely by making the music she makes and calling out the decades-long exclusionary practices of an industry she no longer wants to buy into. After all, her name is in the headlines and her music and message in water-cooler conversations, while Billboard’s “Hot Country Songs” chart this week has only one track by a solo female artist in the top 20, and a mere three that include a female vocalist as “featured”.

Even if, on the surface, it seems like Country music is white, Christian and radically conservative, there are complexities. What does one define as ‘Country music’?! Is a traditional sound of the South? It is a wide-ranging genre that has at least diversified its sound through the years. Whether you think that the far-right are co-opting controversial Country songs for their own agenda, it is clear a lot of artists from smaller towns and southern states are seen as less progressive as many from larger cities. Those who are changing the face of Nashville. There are geographical divides and blurriness around that is seen as Country and how one defines the genre. What is clear from statistics, testimony and time is that there is still gender disparity. Fewer artists of colour being played on Country radio than there should be - even if the needle has slightly moved. Artists leaving Country because it is not progressive. The anti-L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ legislation and hard-red politics that are coming in. It is clear that, the more right the genre becomes, the more that it is heading…

IN the wrong direction.