NewYearsDayProject | a song a day blog

Fantasize  is Kye Kye's second album, and it deals with love in both a tangible and abstract way. Lead singer  Olga      Yagolnikov Phelan  was married to drummer Timothy Phelan during the band's first two records.  Kye Kye 's debut record,  Young Love  deals more with spirituality and  Fantasize  deals more with human relationships. Songs like the record's epic opener, " I Already See It ," the contemplative " Seasons ," " Glass " or today's song, the second track on  Fantasize , show the band at their best: electronic pop with vague but relatable lyrics.  A PART OF ME JUST ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW.   The music video  for Kye Kye's "Honest Affection" was directed by  Salomon Ligthelm , who has directed several music videos including a  Justin Bieber  video and a  Little Simz  video last year. Kye Kye's video starts off with an exploding plane over the Pacific Ocean in technicolored World War II  footage. Next the message

Kye Kye  released two albums in the early 2010s. My earliest memory with this indie-electronic band was their single "Broke" on  RadioU , which took a while to grow on their listenership, failing to beat the other singles of the week on their " Battle of the Buzz " program. However, when the single was finally released to regular rotation, it quickly topped their " TMW " (Ten Most Wanted) program. That summer, I saw the band perform at Cornerstone in the Come & Live tent before or after Showbread. Lead singer, Olga Yagolnikov Phelan , seemed a little shy when talking to the audience, but the band sounded great when performing. The band's strength lies in their atmospheric sound rather than their spiritually cryptic lyrics.  TAKE YOUR TIME; I ALREADY SEE IT.  One Saturday night in college some of my friends and I were invited to one of our professor’s homes. That night the professor taught us a game involving classic issues of National Geographic an

I haven't been keeping up with updating my playlists these days. So today, I wanted to take the opportunity to create a 2023+ playlist for Apple Music. Recall that my + playlists mean that I include songs from the previous two years, and Kye Kye's "Animal" fits that description because it was released in 2021. In the past I've only included tracks that I blogged about on these lists, but this time I will try to opt for the newer tracks. Furthermore, I'll continue to update this playlist, swapping songs. 

  I got into Kye Kye in 2013 when I was also staring to listen to K-pop. The Christian electronic band made up of Estonian-born, Portland, Oregon-based siblings with their vaguely spiritual, etherial pop music never quite caught on with any part of the Christian music scene. Maybe they were too artistic for the Christian pop world and not heavy enough for the Christian rock world. The band is still around today, though not releasing Christian music. Today I wanted to delve into their remix EP, Young Love .  1. " Broke ." This is a remix of the band's single from the record. I remember it kept losing on RadioU 's Battle of the Buzz   but when it was released in regular rotation, it caught on and even topped their countdown show, TMW . 2. " Introduce Myself ." On the album Young Love , "Introduce Myself" is kind of a mundane track; a kind of meandering intro to public speaking class that breaks the rules of good speech writing. As a dubstep track,

This is certainly a gimmick to publish more content, but I was listening to 2022+ on Spotify on Friday and on a lark, I thought that I really wanted the AppleMusic version. Also, it's been half a year since I talked about the playlist directly, and it's undergone quite a bit of alteration since then. I tried to arrange the songs into a cohesive playlist, but when I'm working with different genres, it's a little hard. Also, I made a few deliberate choices to change the songs to offer more variety to the playlist. So instead of " Sine from Above ," I included " Babylon " by Lady Gaga. I hope AppleMusic listeners enjoy this list. Maybe a YouTube list is next instead of a repost from last year. 1. " Bad Love " by Key is today's song. It's an infectious dance song that I wrote about last year. It's worth a repeat.  2. " Shivers " by Ed Sheeran  3. "Babylon" by Lady Gaga 4. "Sometimes" by MUNA 5. "

In the early '10s, electronic music inspired by the '80s was making a comeback. While Rock music was still king in the Christian circles, the bands that had brought Christian Rock to the mainstream stopped selling records, and record labels started phasing out Rock bands. But somewhere between the hard rockers and the teeny boppers, Alternative was shifting to incorporate everything else. And with that shift, many female Alternative musicians emerged. In this new shift, Christian music had the opportunity to develop and promote a band based on programming, organic, and synthetic sounds: Kye Kye . I'M A FIRE THAT LIGHTS WHATEVER'S IN SIGHT. The   Estonian-born Yagolnikov siblings talk about their musical influences in a 2014 interview at New Zealand's most famous Christian Rock festival, Parachute Music Festival. Growing up listening to European synth-pop their parents listened to in Estonia shaped the musical direction the band would write. The sounds they captured

The changing of seasons will fascinate me until climate change renders the seasons one blur of erratic weather. I always long for the year that I sit in nature drinking in the subtle changes of each day. I've never been one for grandiose ambitions, and there is some spark that ignites in my heart whenever I read nature. The semester that I took British Lit. II in community college, I felt so taken by the Romantics and their descriptions of the Lake District. When I listened to the speech with Wendell Berry in preparation for my Paper Route post , I felt that spark as well. WEARY EYES. Listening to Wendell Berry's speech reminded me of a dream I have had that I've never actually committed to writing. I had a fantasy about taking a full year off from modern life with all of its stresses and working on a farm--maybe my grandparents' farm--and then writing a book about what I learned over the course of one year. In this fantasy, I'd do all of the chores to keep the far

Paramore 's 2017 album After Laughter not only took the band in a new direction musically, the lyrics of the band's latest album started a conversation about mental health.  Lead singer Haley Williams transcends the emo genre in this mature discussion about the depression that followed her divorce, band mate controversies, and media scrutiny.  The album's opening track and first single, " Hard Times ," sets the tone for the album along with calling on the motif of weather, all the while disguising itself as an upbeat, positive track musically. It's not, though.  YOU HIT ME WITH LIGHTNING. I just realized the other day that March is Women's History month, so today, I decided to make a playlist titled  Women Rock: A Playlist Celebrating Women in Music Pt. I. This is a compilation of songs from my blog featuring female artists who have made a difference in the genre that they play. Enjoy! Tracklist: 1. "Hard Times" by Paramore. The

The second single from the 2006 album Eyes Open  after the album opener and rocker, " You're All I Have ," "Chasing Cars" is the most recognized song by  Snow Patrol . The band's frontman and songwriter Gary Lightbody said that he wrote the song after sobering up after a white wine binge in the garden of producer Jacknife Lee 's cottage. Lightbody told Rolling Stone  that "Chasing Cars" is "the purest love song I've ever written. There's no knife-in-the-back twist." He stated that "all the other songs I've written have a dark edge." While the song and video for "Chasing Cars" don't have a dark side, the connotation the song has with dramas like Grey's Anatomy and One Tree Hill  certainly wields the knife so carefully left out by the songwriter.  LET'S WASTE TIME CHASING CARS. As tempting as it is to make a Bad Romance playlist or Sad Romance playlist, I've decided to make my Spotify al

On a cold winter's day, in the middle of the stress of house-hunting, I thought I'd make a playlist for those bad days that aren't quite depressing and not quite angry. Today's featured song is " Beth/Rest " by Bon Iver. I resisted putting this song on my Pseudo '80s Playlist  because, despite the soft-rock keys and saxophone, the vocal distortion sounds more of a product of its time than a retro track. Some of the songs on today's list will be a little sad, but something about them gives me strength rather than pushes me further into a despair. As always, I'll put the links for each song. I'm going to stick to tracks I've written about and add to this list as I feel the song is appropriate. First, I'll share my Spotify playlist: 1. "Beth/Rest" by Bon Iver is the representative song of the day.  2. "Tell Me How" by Paramore is a sad song, but the resolve at the end leaves the power in Haley Williams' hands. 3.