NewYearsDayProject | a song a day blog

  2019 had its share of dark moments. I struggled with the questions about what to do with my life. I wondered if I was wasting my time collecting just enough money for a job that I would one day grow out of. I was in love with someone who was struggling to achieve a very hard to reach goal. The future looked so uncertain. I really started to deconstruct my faith at this time, too, giving myself permission to think through dogmatic statements I had always held to be true, mostly because I was afraid of the consequences of if they weren’t true. Mike Mains & the Branches ' When We Were in Love   was an album I listened to on long walks when I was trying to clear my head. WITH HEAVEN’S MANSION OUT OF REACH. I saw Mike Mains and the Branches perform at the second to last Cornerstone. Around that time they played the video for “Stereo” on TVU (new RadioU TV ). The son g   had some interesting lyrics, but the message was pretty orthodox. But in 2019, the band released th...

Jonezetta 's Popularity brings back memories of being 21. Although the album had come out the year  before, I had been hesitant to buy it. But after tours with Anberlin and MuteMath I decided to buy the album and put it into the CD player of my 2001 midnight blue Toyota Corolla S, my second car, and the car I had paid for with my own money. This album is one that is forever linked to the hot black interior, the red night driving display, the drivers licenses-less friends and the friends of my little sister that I had to tote around. It was also the summer that I decided it was time to go to Cornerstone. I'VE BEEN DRIVING ALL NIGHT . My friends don't always vibe with my musical tastes and that's ok. I'm a little scared of people who like the same music as me. It makes me wonder when someone's going to hand us a big cup of Kool-Aid. However, Popularity  was quite a hit among my friends. It's dancey and just '80s retro enough to be put in your playlist s...

"I wore my Demon Hunter patch on every mission. I wore it when I blasted bin Laden. So, yes, in essence Demon Hunter did, in fact, hunt a demon" ( Fuse ).  In 2019 when Demon Hunter released their two albums War and Peace , they encapsulated the two sounds battling for this band's fandom. One one had, they are a fierce metal band and on the other hand, they love to write a dark ballad ballad for every album, which usually becomes their radio hit. The fandom around this band is intense. The opening quote from the Navy Seals on the team that killed Osama bin Laden listened to the band. Frontman Ryan Clark has stated multiple times that the logo and branding of Demon Hunter proceeded the band. And as one of the most influential graphic designers in Tooth & Nail album design (and mainstream rock for that matter), branding and style are everything.  REBORN. Music in the 2021 is great for old bands. They can capitalize on their fans and play old music online and stream i...

  Lost It All   I had a dream last night that I returned to America to visit my mom. Somehow, using dream logic, I looked in a mirror and noticed that I was bald with just a band of brown hair around the edges. Then I looked again and my face had aged and I noticed less hair on my head. I also saw liver spots on my head. I woke up to a beautiful, warm January morning, hair intact. Around noon I decided to go for a walk. On the walk I saw that the weather was predicting a winter storm. It's 50 degrees, it's not going to snow, I thought. Then as I walked farther away from my house I saw the gold had turned to grey. I turned around for my plan to walk farther had to be surrendered. STARTING OUT EVERYBODY WANTS TO SHINE. If you're of my generation or older you know what it's like to buy an album. You might hear the single on the radio or maybe the band had a good last album or you just like the cover art. You put the disk/tape/LP on and listen to it. You're either immed...

If x  then happiness. Find x. Simple algebra. What is the one thing you want for life or for the moment? How do you get it? That's the problem. I can think about some times in my life when I thought everything was coming together only for it all to fall apart. There was this awesome housing situation in college until my roommate called to say that he wasn't coming back next year. Or establishing the "dream team" at two of my schools. Spoiler alert: it never lasts, and new drama comes up to make the dream team more of a nightmare. If only I had that promotion. If only I bought X.  If only that person was available. X-Y= happiness. But what happens when it doesn't happen ? What happens when the exact opposite happens. You don't get the promotion. Maybe you get fired. They get married rather than breaking up. The relationship turns abusive or maybe hidden infidelity. What happens next? That's what this synth-pop single by Years & Years  deals with.  I DRE...

If you have been in a cave for a few years, you may not know about this South Korean boyband. There's usually a glass ceiling for how popular K-pop can get in America. But this group constantly shatters that ceiling. Number 1 on Billboard's Hot 100? Today, I recommend the song "Fake Love," by BTS, particularly the "Rocking Vibe Mix" which replaces some of the keyboards and electronic music with guitars. They did a similar remix with their hit "DNA," but we can save that song for another day. Because this is the first of what I assume will be several K-pop recommendations, I figured I'd start with my history of how I became K-pop listener, a genre I barely knew existed before landing in South Korea in late August, 2012, which you may recall was the time when a certain 40 year old rapper blew up the internet talking about his hometown in the wealthy neighborhood of Gangnam. A FAKE FAN. Please Internet and K-pop fans be kind. Please rock people he...

  Lovedrug's fourth album released in 2012 transitioned the band from a heavier Keene-sounding piano rock band to a full-fledged guitar driven rock band. This album came out in my last few months in America and proved to be an album that helped me transition to one of the biggest changes in my life, living abroad. The title Wild Blood, while I don't think intentionally done by the band, drew a connection to Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood , which is a crazy story about a backwoods preacher who starts his own stranger religious organization. Whether or not the connection is intentional, the music of Wild Blood makes me think about the novel and vice versa. There certainly are some great tracks on this album, but it's not one that I come back to too often. Today on my walk, however, I took a close listen to this song and remembered the sticky summer of 2012 and the great divide that's come up ever since. YOUR SILHOUETTE STANDING THERE IN THE DISTANCE. So let...

I'm 33 years old as of January 2021, and I'm listening to a song called " Letter to Myself " from the year 2002. Now I'm imagining that I'm back in my dusty room in a house my parents moved away from in 2006. Of course we packed, but let's imagine that we didn't. I see the loft that my dad built, some plastic shelves, my now rusting dumbbells. I see the two dressers. I open up the drawers and see the old t-shirts, my socks, boxer shorts--and I notice some papers written. Old songs? Poems? I cringe. Imagine that when listening to this old song. Where were you back in 2002--if in fact you were alive? What would your 14 or 15 year old self tell the 33 year old? What were the hopes and fears of year? How have they changed? What's still the same? DEAR ME. Pop singer Anne-Marie released a song called " 2002 " a few years back in which she uses a bunch of familiar choruses from Britney Spears , *NSYNC , Nelly, and others. At that time, I had a...

WAKE UP YOUR EYES. It's difficult to pick a track from this record. Although it was released in the fall of 2008, my first year off at college, it was really the dead of winter of 2009 that has burned this record into my memory. The winter of 2009 was particularly cold, even for East Tennessee. There were lots of grey days which had nothing particularly special but Easy Mac and fresh laundry. Saturday nights or Sundays some friends would drive into Chattanooga for dinner and then we’d just go back to the dorm to do our homework. Rather mundane stuff. This album was a soundtrack to those grey days. Songs like "Should You Return" was a song of hope that the spring would finally come. "The Grey Man" was a song about wallowing in the the uncertainty of things ever looking up. "Chin Up" was a melancholic song about the futility of trying too hard--though the song never actually makes you want to give up.  I'M AFRAID YOU STOPPED TO LICK YOUR WOUNDS. Then...

" Lyrics " Tooth & Nail Records is been know throughout the years for its eclectic catalogue of mostly Christian artists. This came to ahead in 2008 when they signed Country artist Corey Crowder. This one-off album the Tooth & Nail cannon could be easily lost. I first heard this song on a compilation along with pop-punk and hardcore bands and was struck by how different it sounded--in a good way. But more on that later. For context, this was an era of music that Brandon Ebel, CEO of Tooth & Nail, was desperately trying to find the next hit to save the company in the downward spiral of the music industry. Ultimately, the record label survived a divorce with its major label backer, EMI, but a lot of artists were sacrificed in the the restructuring. So, this hiccup--Tooth & Nail's strange venture into Country music--is all but forgotten. IT'S KIND OF A FUNNY STORY. I listened to an excellent episode of Labeled  with Randy Torres today. Torres might be bes...

In 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional, Chief Justice Earl Warren declared that American schools be integrated "with all deliberate speed." What does that mean? I think that if you are trying to speed something up, being deliberate about it, you press your foot on the execrator and the car gains speed. You go as fast as you can go, looking out for cops and and pedestrians, but your intention is to go quickly to your destination. Apparently, I'm wrong. Chief Justice Warren's meaning was that the change be gradual as not to stir the anger of the states. Don't let change happen too quickly. WHAT BROUGHT YOU HERE IN THE FIRST PLACE?   Now is this even related to  Mae 's song? The lyrics without considering the quote by Chief Justice Warren, made me think about the band's dreams. Perhaps internal band strife with management, particularly as they are almost making it. In fact, in an earlier season of  Labele...

In 2019, I rediscovered Wolves At the Gate band from the Labeled podcast. Labeled is a podcast about the history of Tooth & Nail and Solid State Records. As I get older, my tolerance for hard music is decreasing. Of course, when I was a teenager Post-Hardcore was king. Everyone used screaming in their music, but musical genres started to become more defined c. 2006 and there was hardcore and rock. And a lot of rock went more electronic and pop.  Still, even after the murky time, hardcore bands still liked to take a break from screaming and sing a ballad. When I picked up this record, though, I found less screaming and more of the type of music I liked before the rock/hardcore split. This group sounds more like New Medicines era Dead Poetic than Define the Great Line era Underoath. This album made me miss intense rock. Guitars and bass and drums and passionate singing spiced with some well-intentioned screaming.  YOU WON'T MAKE ME INTO YOUR PAWN. "Counterfeit" was th...

I caught Paper Route playing one afternoon at the Gallery stage at Cornerstone. Many bands from Cornerstone don't stick around for long, but I could tell that this band had something very special. They played multiple instruments, but yet, their music didn't sound like it was trying too hard to be creative. It sounded like pop music. I bought their first EP which came in a paper bag. The songs were all about Christmas, but none of the songs were familiar Christmas songs. I began following the band's career. All of their releases were delayed. First the Are We All Forgotten EP, followed by their first major label debut LP   Absence , the departure of vocalist/guitarist Andy Smith, tours with Paramore and Anberlin, the delay of their second, poppier The Peace of Wild Things , an EP called Thank God the Year Is Finally Over , some random covers of Lorde and Destiny's Child , and then their final work, Real Emotion , released on September 23, 2016. BORROW HOPE TO UNDERSTAN...

  I'd recommend first reading the lyrics  and reading the notes. And of course, listening to the song . Today in America is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. I chose this song from 2017 as a warning that although things are picking up a little, it's now time to work harder than ever for social justice.  I first heard of Propaganda on the BadChristian Podcast . He talked about his song " Precious Puritans ," which deserves a blog post of its own. However, when he came out with the Crooked album in 2017 and had this track with Copeland 's Aaron Marsh calling out Christians for their support of politics that forsakes the African American and non-white community, it put into words I could have never formed to tell how angry I had become.  PRAY TO MY SAVIOR, AND MIDDLE FINGER TO MY NEIGHBOR . In an episode of Straight White American Jesus , historian Randall Balmer points out that religious leaders such as Jerry Falwell tried to raise doubt in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr...

  There are a few truths about Simon and Garfunkel we hold to be self-evident. First, Simon and Garfunkel is a duo from the 1960s that remains relevant to any playlist today. Their music holds up on any rock playlist (heavy metal, excluded of course). Second, very few covers of Simon and Garfunkel actually hold up. Last winter around this time I was in a brewery with my sister and this awful country rendition of "The Boxer." Just like Adele covers, you don't cover a song unless you're going to add something to it. This reminds me of two Memphis Mayfire covers I heard yesterday. They covered Stone Temple Pilots' "Interstate Love Song" using double bass drums. *Skip* Then they did Linkin Park's "Faint." It sounded good but didn't add anything that Chester and Mike did. Nope. I'll post a worthy cover of this song. My Chemical Romance's Gerard Way recorded this song for Umbrella Academy's first season.  The third truth, Paul Sim...

  Thomas Wolfe is most famous for his novel You Can't Go Home Again   which is a tome that I haven't read. However, I did read his first novel,  Look Homeward, Angel ,  which deals with similar themes. I picked up the book in the middle of a semester from hell and an existential crisis. I found Wolfe's descriptions of Southern life--the people in town and family members, the scenery, and the food--so comforting. The mostly autobiographical novel is nostalgic, but the protagonist, Eugene's academic pursuits push him to see the world outside of the isolated mountain town of Altamont (Asheville). DEFER TOMORROW. These days lots of bands are getting back together. Some are doing 10, 15, 20 year anniversary tours (or live streams). The age of COVID has been pretty kind to old music, but not so much to new music. The music of my teenage life is now the music of today, but I'm not sure if they can get the kids on board. After finishing Look Homeward Angel, the semester en...

This is one of the most cringe-worthy stories from my teaching experience. And of course all names have been changed. Five years ago the first grade middle school students put on a program. In Korea, first grade middle school equates to seventh grade. The show consisted of presentations for special English classes the student did that semester. Then the English singing class came to stage. A student started playing some stiff piano music and five students started singing in unison. The song was "Love Me Like You Do." Two girls took turns singing the verses and three boys awkwardly joined in the chorus. When they all sang, it reminded me of when the Peanuts kids sang "Hark the Herald Angels Sing!" at the end of Charlie Brown Christmas  and of Cartman, Kyle, and Kenny putting on a highly inappropriate South Park style musical. As Tina* (not real English name or Korean name) sang "I'll let you set the pace, 'cause I'm not thinking straight" my for...

Republic was the end of an era for New Order . The band’s popularity was at its peak after scoring hits in America even outside of the dance hall. But it was an album that the band didn’t want to make. According to then-bassist Peter Hook, the band’s music club in Manchester, The Haçienda, was in dire financial straits, and the band’s record label Factory Records threatened to go bankrupt. The band members’ funds were tied up in Factory Record and the finances of the club were also entwined. However, bassist Hook and lead singer Bernard Sumner were “at the point in the relationship where you hate each other’s stinking guts.”   BREAKING IS A CRIME. Republic was released in 1993 and charted the best of all New Order’s albums on the Billboard album charts . The band went on a five-year hiatus after playing the Reading Festival in August, and New Order’s millennial records were nothing like the height of their popularity in the late ‘80s to early ‘90s.  The album artwork for Repu...

  Let's return to Death of a Salesman  from yesterday's post . In 1948 Arthur Miller encapsulated the problems with the American dream long before Leave it To Beaver was even on television. This was supposed to be the time that America was great. War War II had ended and men and women were back to work. Life in America was truly modern. The urban move led Americans to suburbia where they could fill their homes with radios, the latest home appliances, and televisions. Life looked more like today than Little House on the Prairie. Yet, Arthur Miller's work stands in the center of the good ol' days begging the questions: "Does my work make me who I am?"; "How many toys must I have until I've arrived?"; "Should I have to work myself into an early grave in order to finance my family's happiness?" "How can I take care of myself to keep the money making machine going?"; "Does this cultivated, domesticate human existence fulfi...