NewYearsDayProject | a song a day blog

Musically, Underoath ’s most recent record Voyeurist pays homage to different points in their 25-year career. On the band’s breakthrough album, They’re Only Chasing Safety , Underoath experimented with elements not always heard in Metal. One example was including a church choir on the song “ It’s Dangerous Business Walking out Your Front Door .” According to Tim McTague on the episode of Labeled Deep Dives about today’s song “ Hallelujah ,” the Underoath guitarist said he made up a story about how the 2004 single had religious significance in order to record a youth choir in a church basement. Eighteen years later, the second song on Voyeurist prominently features a choir, this time in the chorus. But unlike “Dangerous,” Underoath had distanced themselves from the Christian music scene.  In an interview with Loudwire , Tim says that “Hallelujah” is about “struggles with everything – faith, life and so on.”  The presence of a choir on “Hallelujah” and the track’s title serve as a kin

Closing 2019's heart-wrenching  When We Were in Love , " Swamp " perhaps sums up Mike Mains & the Branches ' third album in a single song: love, depression, and religion. Like the songs " Breathing Underwater " and " Around the Corner ," Mike Mains gave an intimate insight into his writing process on Labeled . Mains talked about earlier Tooth & Nail releases from mewithoutYou and As Cities Burn which helped to inspirer him to write darker Christian songs and push the genre of Christian Rock lyrically in order to open an honest conversation about mental health, depression, and questioning one's faith. YOU HAD ME AT MERLOT. "Swamp" is the conclusion and the title-bearer of the album. Mike asks his wife, bandmate Shannon Briggs Bolanowski-Mains, "Do you remember when we were in love?" On the Labeled podcast interview, Mains talks about "Swamp" being about a fear that his wife were to leave him. Mains wrote

It's time for our mandatory dose of Anberlin . I decided on the song late last night, and I think " Type Three " fits in nicely after Shura. Anberlin experimented a lot on their latter albums, and 2012's Vital is probably their most experimental album, and "Type Three," is one of the vibiest songs on the record. In a Spotify audio commentary about the album , guitarist Joesph Milligan talked about listening to a lot of The National when recording the album, and vocalist Stephen Christian said that lyrically the song was born out of "listing a bunch of one-liners" on which he based the song. DANCING THROUGH THE FIBERS OF TIME. Last year, when the band performed Vital in their Heavy Lies the Crown lockdown livestream, Stephen Christian talked about the song's title as a reference to his Enneagram Type .   The Enneagram of Personality is an increasingly popular, but yet-to-be-proven, lens for understanding personality types. The history of t

Today is the third entry from Shura 's Nothing's Real album. In an interview at Austin City Limits in 2019 , Shura said that her mother said that her mother said of her first album "It gets better the more you listen to it," which Shura and the interviewer lightheartedly took as a  criticism of the singer-songwriter's 2016 album. I agree with Shura's mother, but not as a criticism of the album. It was great the summers of 2016 and 2017 when I first enjoyed Nothing's Real . But the album was more than just a song fleeting song of the summer. To me, it gets better every time I listen to it.  IF YOU LET ME DOWN, LET ME DOWN SLOW. Today, I'll provide a track-by-track reaction to each song on Shura's Nothing's Real much like what I've done with Acceptance 's Phantoms and Turn Off the Stars .    My reaction isn't meant to be extensive, and I will add to it as I choose more songs to be the song of the day. I'll provide the Spotify ver

Much of my blog is about nostalgia for different times in my life. Unless you are a futurist, most art is about the past. The ‘80s movies that I grew up watching were about events that happened in the ‘60s and the movies from the ‘90s were about the ‘70s. But suddenly I wake up one day and ‘00s nostalgia is a thing, in music or in the television. So when Hulu adapted John Green ’s 2005 debut novel  Looking for Alaska into an eight-part mini series , the writers and producers decided to keep the series set in the time of its publication, the early ‘00s. To build a believable setting to the young adult series, the producers created a soundtrack full of songs and covers of songs from the era. The soundtrack as released on streaming services was only a fraction of the music features in the series. Tracks by The Strokes , Phantom Planet , Modest Mouse, and Coldplay could be heard in the show, while covers of well-known hits of that time also appeared on the soundtrack. The original songs

From the Airport was a duo that formed in 2012 when guitarist Zee met DJ/Keyboardist Milo and the two started jamming together. Prior to the inception of From the Airport, Zee worked playing music for film scores and played guitar in progressive rock bands,  and Milo worked in the studio with K-pop acts such as MC Sniper . Milo and Zee together create a dreamy sort of pop-rock that isn't particularly cool, but full of wonder and excitement. It's almost as if the band's concept is waiting for the adventure that comes when traveling to the airport to fly away to an interesting place. DREAMING STILL NEXT TO ME.  Before r eleasing their debut album in 2015,  You Could Imagine , they released singles and two EPs. The South Korean electronic indie pop group's first single " Colors " gained some notice by foreign publications, including The Guardian   in the UK. Today's song is the band's third single. Their second single " Everyone's All Right &quo

The way classic rock radio plays the same ten songs over and over again may lead you to believe that you know all the songs and bands from the ‘70s, ‘80s, or whatever era that station plays. And of course, the 10 bands have full albums and lesser-known hits, but you think you’ve come across every professionally recorded band at least. That’s a really dumb assumption I had having listened to enough music both hit and non-hit because of my parents and just l oving music. But then earlier this year I was introduced to the pop/rock duo Sparks when the group broke down their 1974 minor hit “ This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us " on the podcast Song Exploder (see below). In the introduction, Hrishikesh Hirway talked about the band’s accolades and their status as a “band’s band.” ZOO TIME, SHE AND YOU TIME. There have been several incarnations of the band Sparks, but at its core, the band is two brothers: Ron and Russell Mael . The brothers grew up in Southern California. R

Today we have another piano-based slow opening track. However, unlike Acceptance ’s Phantoms , promotion for Paper Route ’s debut record Absence was mostly word of mouth from the band’s existing fan base and getting on major tours with Paramore , Mutemath , and others, despite the band being on a division of a major label. The band’s established fan base, curated through touring and social media, had already been introduced to the band’s evolving sound on the Are We All Forgotten EP released on 2008 from the folk-electronic sound of their early efforts. Absence though was full electronic progressive pop. HE STOLE AS BEST HE COULD. The disorienting intro to the song " Enemy Among Us " is a reverberated piano. In the living-room-filmed album promotional performance video (see below) shows a drum set a top the electric piano as Chad Howat plays the song. I have no idea how the band recorded the song, but Absence is an album that I would like to know more technical specifics

" Take Cover " is the opening track to Acceptance 's debut and almost final album, Phantoms . It starts with a piano loop and adds momentum with the drums. Jason Vena 's smooth vocals hit a high register which puts the band on good emo footing for the time, as a singer who could whine a few lines was essential for a band that makes it. Listening to Phantoms again today--as I've talked about this album at least three times before--I thought about one of the fatal flaws of the record: the track order. Even though, I think that this album is a perfect artifact of my last two years in high school, I can kind of see why this band wasn't huge, and it has to do with the track listing of this album. SHE MAKES THE CITY SEEM LIKE HOME. Today, I'm going to do a track-by-track analysis of this album, and I'll probably add to this analysis as I choose more songs to be song of the day. I may not have a lot to say about the tracks individually as I've already tal

At first it may seem like an odd choice to release a summer album in December, but if the artist in question releases a big enough record, that artist can ride the success into the following summer, sweetening the spring along the way. However, if that album happened to be released in December of 2019 like Harry Styles ' Fine Line , that following summer is going to look different. Fortunately for Styles, his album was a welcome reprieve for the hell that we were going through back then. And by the time the single " Watermelon Sugar " was released in May of 202o, the was longing for normal sweet, sticky fun. I'M OUT OF MY HEAD, AND YOU'RE STILL SCARED.  But when a friend said, "You should check out that new Harry Styles record. It's surprisingly good," all I heard was static. My brain was trying to dump the useless information that I knew that there were five boys in One Direction , and that at one point Harry Styles allegedly dated Taylor Swift , gi

Shoegaze  is a sub-genre of rock music that employs heavy distorted guitars to create what is called a "wall of sound." Shoegaze came out of psychedelic rock and often creates a hypnotic effect. Not every group that uses "the wall of sound" is necessarily a shoegazer act, but some bands that have famously used this effect are Oasis ,  The Verve , and the  Smashing Pumpkins . The etymology of  "shoegazing" is said to be a description of the guitarists of these bands because they mostly stared at their shoes. While music critics don't often place  Silversun Pickups  in the subgenre of Shoegaze, what else would  you classify their 2009 hypnotic hit " Panic Switch "? IT'S NEVER WORTH MY TIME . Silversun Pickups topped the Alternative Rock chart with this song. Released in 2009, in a time when I was devouring different kinds of music, Silversun Pickups' sophomore album  Swoon   challenged my 2001 Corolla's stereo in all the right ways

Damn you Covid-19! Sir Elton John simply wanted to tour the world and retire. The 75-year-old legend has been making music and touring since 1962. After saying goodbye to touring, he planned to settle down with his husband David Furnish and their two children and lead a quiet, un- Elton John life—out of the spotlight. But instead of stadiums full of fans across generations singing along to John's most famous hits from the '70s to '90s, we got an album of collaborations called The Lockdown Sessions , seventeen tracks featuring a few fellow legacy acts like Stevie Wonder , Stevie Nicks, and Eddie Vader . But mostly the album contained tracks with newer artists--pop, rock, hip-hop, and country acts. IT'S A HUMAN SIGN. In some ways, I feel that this month's playlist is an April Fool's joke on my younger self. I've included mostly catchy pop songs, and my younger self would have refused to see the talent of the pop artists like Joe Jonas , Olivia Rodrigo , or E