NewYearsDayProject | a song a day blog

  Muna 's 2017 record  About U  takes listeners on a rollercoaster of emotion. Unlike their 2019  Saves the World   record,  About U  focuses on the positive and negative of being in love and breaking up.  About U  doesn't enjoy the near-universal acclaim that their follow-up has, but the album helped to establish the three-piece band of queer musicians on the scene of Alternative dark synth-pop. Today the sadness, desperation, and loneliness of " If U Love Me Now " resonated with the sadness felt by the nation of South Korea after the tragic events of Saturday night  in which at least 153 people lost their lives, crushed in a stampede during Halloween festivities. While today's song doesn't deal with the topic of tragedy, it is a very sad song, so I think it reflects my feelings about an otherwise beautiful Halloween day. IT'S JUST A HYPOTHESIS I TEST. “If U Love Me Now”  explores the theme of mental illness and suicide. The singer...

Big TV is White Lie's first concept record. Every song on the record is part of a story in which a woman in the U.K. decides that her current relationship is not fulfilling, so she decides to wander around Europe in order to find herself. The fourth track, after the instrumental " Space i ,” helps to begin this journey. Whereas " Big TV " was the story's status quo, " There Goes Our Love Again " was the rising action in which the female protagonist wanders away from stability into something more adventurous, leaving her stable partner, and finding a life of her own. WE GO LIVE IN A HEARTBEAT. I remember radio call in shows. If you were the 20th caller or something like that, if you could answer the trivia question, you could win tickets to a concert, go on an all-expense-paid trip to Disney world, or $1000. The pop radio station out of Charlotte was giving away money as they always did, but suddenly my mom tuned in and started trying to call. It was li...

  Ashley Nicolette Frangipane, or Halsey , released If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power  in 2021, recording with Nine Inch Nails members Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross . The production leans into Nine Inch Nails’ industrial sound, making Halsey both a rocker and a dark pop artist on her latest album. The emotions are high in the singer's latest record; Halsey called the album “a concept record about the horrors of pregnancy and childbirth.”  EVERY MORNING GOT A HOLLOW WHERE MY HEART GOES.  The album’s cover features Halsey sitting on a throne with a bare breast exposed and holding a baby, inspired by various artistic depictions of the Madonna and Child, Mary and the Christ child, a kind of crèche scene, though the focus seems completely on the “god” herself, not the child. Some of the themes on the record deal with the singer’s bisexuality and non-binary gender identity. As of last March, Halsey claims both “she/her” and “they/them” pronouns. Wrapped into the fabric ...

In  Season One of  The Big Bang Theory ,  Leonard is moping after his love interest, Penny, starts seeing another man. He comes into the apartment singing Augustana 's  " Boston ,"  quite horribly. "Boston" is Augustana's biggest hit. It placed on the Billboard Hot 100 , it was a Top 40 hit, and a top 10 Adult (light rock) hit. The band formed at Greenville University , a conservative Christian college where Jars of Clay formed before them and Paper Route after them. While  the two other bands were comfortable with the Christian circuit, Augustana's lead singer, Dan Layus , talks about breaking free from the strict rules of Christian college and choosing not to be a Christian band.  BOSTON, WHERE NO ONE KNOWS MY NAME . "Boston" is not only a breakup  with a lover, but a place too. If you've never moved to a city where no one knows you, it's freeing. You possess the ability to rebuild your reputation and become whomever you want to be...

Heavy metal music is quite scary to many people even without the visuals. But add the visuals and the backstory along with titles like " Raining Blood ," you've got a genre of music that's pretty great for Halloween. But then you add the macabre images of  classic acts like Alice Cooper and Ozzy Osbourne or Nu Metal giants like Rammstein or Rob Zombie , metal is horrifying. Stone Sour isn't a shock metal group, but cofounder and lead singer Corey Taylor left the band in 1997 to replace Slipknot 's original frontman, and became known for an outrageous, downright brutal stage image.  DON'T KNOW HOW MUCH TIME HAS PAST. In 2000, Stone Sour reunited, and Corey Taylor fronted both Stone Sour and Slipknot concurrently. While Slipknot released some of their heaviest music, Stone Sour had radio rock singles. The band released their debut self-titled album in 2002 with the single " Bother ," which was on the Spider-Man soundtrack , though Corey Tayl...

Stephen Kellogg   parted with his band,   The Sixers , in 2012. Though the band doesn't consider themselves right-wing, they were named the “Armed Forces Entertainer of the Year” in 2010. Kellogg continues to play for the troops and raises money for St. Jude's every holiday season. His last album with the Sixers,   Gift Horse  is a treasure of Northeastern folk rock tunes, delving into topics of family, love, religion, and existential dread.  HIS RANTS COULD BE CONTAGIOUS.   In a concert clip, Stephen Kellogg describes " Charlie and Annie " as his memories from middle school during a time he didn't feel very safe. The song talks about an ill-fated romance between alcoholic Charlie, who shows his kindness just enough to partially redeem himself through the singer. He's a victim of his addictions, though the singer doesn't let him off the hook. Annie is a beautiful woman who had quite the past before she got tied down by "Charlie and motherhood." C...

Let's take a look at one of my favorite fall albums, Copeland 's 2005 sophomore record In Motion . I consumed the first three Copeland albums around the spring and summer between senior year and college.  I think that Beneath Medicine Tree was on sale at Best Buy  so I picked it up maybe around April. Then I picked up In Motion in the summer and Eat, Sleep, Repeat in the late autumn. I always associate Copeland albums with the seasons in which I listened to them. And like the brown leaves on the album cover of In Motion, I'd like to talk about a short memory with each song.   1. " No One Really Wins ." The album opens with grungy guitars, a sound that Copeland would soon abandon in later albums. The song also sets the album up with a spiritual theme--the fight between "heart and mind" and "grace and pride." The message of the song is to "change if you want, but don't . . . change for me" which was something very different fro...

Listening to Michael Stripe and Peter Buck talk, I couldn't place R.E.M.  as southerners from Georgia. The Netflix   Song Exploder 's episode on " Losing My Religion " wasn't the first time I had heard R.E.M. talk about their music; however, I was both intrigued and put off by Michael Stripe in the extended interview. He is perhaps one of the most articulate rock stars I've ever heard speak; however, I picked up on an underlying arrogance when he talked about this song. According to most accounts, the band recorded  Out of Time  using the mandolin as kind of a throw-away record before they returned to more conventional writing approaches. The band chose "Losing My Religion" as the lead single, thinking that it wouldn't chart or that it would just be a minor hit. The band would quickly record more material and go on charting in the lower regions of the Rock Charts. However, "Losing My Religion," despite its unconventionality became a n...

A short lived indie-rock band from Dallas, Texas,  The New Frontiers  released one full-length album on  The Militia Group  in 2008 before calling it quits the following year. Their album  Mending   was produced by  Matt Goldman , the Atlanta-based producer known for heavy-hitting bands, like Underoath , The Chariot ,  As Cities Burn . Goldman, however, isn't exclusively a hard rocker. Working as the drummer of the Christian Rock band Smalltown Poets , Goldman's early production credits include Luxury , Copeland , and Casting Crowns . The New Frontiers' mellow folk-rock album,     Mending  drew critical acclaim from Paste and Daytrotter. The band contributed the track "Mirrors" to the the 2008 Cornerstone Festival digital mixtape along with many other indie rock acts who performed at the festival. "Mirrors" deals with coming to terms with an inescapable realization of who one is by "mak[ing] peace with the world." TURNED 22 WHEN YOU...

In 2015,  Sufjan Stevens released his saddest album. The songs on  Carrie & Lowell   give listeners insight into the folk singer's upbringing and his process of dealing with the grief of losing an abusive parent. Stevens' mother Carrie had passed away in 2012 from cancer, and " Death with Dignity ," the album opener, finds the lyricist struggling for the words to tell the story. He says "I don't know where begin," showing how something deeply personal is hardest to talk about. The song structure is unique in that there is no chorus, but rather five verses--this is a fact I never noticed in all the times I listened to the song before I wrote about it last year. "Death with Dignity" is best in the context of the entire album, but if you don't have the time to dive into the depths of sorrow like a mourner's kaddish, the song is a sweet twinge of sadness to throw into an otherwise happy playlist.  AMETHYST AND FLOWERS ON THE TABLE. I w...

Anchor & Braille has been Anberlin 's lead singer Stephen Christian 's side project for a while. Some of Anberlin's songs started out as Anchor & Braille songs. In 2009, Christian collaborated with Aaron Marsh and a few other hometown musicians including Louis DeFabrizio of Gasoline Heart , and released A&B's debut record Felt , an album that feels as if Christian were the lead singer of Copeland somewhere between their In Motion and Eat, Sleep, Repeat releases. Anchor and Braille's sound would vary greatly over their occasional four albums as well and the makeup of the 'band' would just become Stephen Christian collaborating in the studio with other musicians. You can tell that it's the same singer of Cities and Never Take Friendship Personal struggling relationships. SHE MAKES THREATS I HOPE THAT SHE SEES THROUGH .  Felt  was an album that appeared in my Junior year of college (one of them :) around a month or so before  New Surre...

In 2011, Rolling Stone named Eric Clapton as the second greatest guitarist of all time--Jimi Hendrix was the first. Coming to prominence in 1963 as the replacement guitarist for The Yardbirds, forming the group Cream, Blind Faith, and Derek and the Dominos , Clapton has started and played with and started a number of bands and took songs from each of his musical eras into his solo career in '80s and '90s. In 1970, Clapton joined with three other musicians he worked with in another band, Delaney & Bonnie to form a "make-believe band" called Derek and the Dominos. The band only released one record, Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs , but the title track became one of Clapton's signature tunes particularly for its guitar riff.  YOU GOT ME ON MY KNEES. Derek and the Dominos formed during recording sessions of former Beatle George Harrison ’s third solo record, All Things Must Pass . And that connection between Clapton and Harrison wasn’t the only one. Clapt...

" My my, hey hey / Rock 'n' Roll is here to stay" declares  Neil Young  in his 1978 song.  Rock music has had lasting presence in pop culture since the age of  Chuck Berry  and   Little Richard . Some points in the '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s, and '00s the genre took the primary spots on radio charts outside of the genre. However, around the end of the '00s, Hip Hop decimated the genre. The rock bands left standing, mostly traded their axes for acoustic guitar, keyboards, EDM beats, or Trap rhythms. Much of the rock music was indistinguishable from other genres, and that trend continues into the 2020s. However, just as rock bands cross over to the pop charts, the late 2010s to 2021 is seeing pop singers experiment with rock music. From Miley Cyrus performing with Metallica to rappers like  Post Malone  and  Machine Gun Kelly  flirting with emo, some may argue that Rock is seeing a mainstream resurgence. Enter  Olivia Rodrigo 's " good...