NewYearsDayProject | a song a day blog

Yesterday, we took a deep dive into where Kesha is as a musical artist by looking at a mature work in her discography. When Wikipedia introduces Kesha Rose Serbert, she is said to be an American Singer-Songwriter, a term that signals to significant factors: 1) the singer writes songs and thus has a greater opportunity to monetize the song and 2) the singer is actually an artist, which is more important for music snob conversations. It grafts the wheat from the tares, the Lady Gaga s from the Britney Spears . But recently, I’ve been rethinking this argument, mainly because it doesn’t account for the sexism in the industry. Moreover, I’ve really started to think about how unfair my opinion has been formed about Britney Spears, particularly after watching the documentary Britney vs. Spears .  A TASTE OF YOUR POISON PARADISE. I happened to go through puberty around the time of Max Martin ’s first era of teen pop. MTV was filled with the late ‘90s sounds of boy bands, pop rock, a few Spani

Ten years ago, Lady Gaga released her most avant-garde record, Artpop , an album that polarized both fans and critics alike. To be fair, the album was a statement of a pop star’s artistic vision. To illustrate that vision, Lady Gaga channels ‘60s pastiche in the way that Andy Warhol blended the popular and the artistic. But with the critical pushback of Artpop, Lady Gaga took note and didn’t make another dance-pop record until Chromatica in 2020, instead venturing into acting, singing standards with Tony Bennett , a folk-rock album Joanne , and the Oscar-winning soundtrack to the film she starred in A Star Is Born . In 2020, the Lady Gaga persona could have done anything, and yet she graced fans with a return trip to the dance floor.  LIFT ME UP, GIVE ME A START. I’ve been thinking a lot about pop music lately. When I was a  hipster high school and college student, I thought of pop music as a kind of opioid. It puts you into a trance, makes you dance, and makes you not think about t

Last month, The Japanese House released their long-anticipated follow-up album to 2019's Good at Falling . The solo project of Amber Mary Bain , The Japanese House collaborated with a number of musicians from Bon Iver 's Justin Vernon and The 1975 's Maty Healy and George Daniel to MUNA and Charli XCX on their latest project, In the End, It Always Does . The English singer-songwriter Amber Bain offers a hybrid between the acoustic and highly processed, like if Bon Iver recorded and produced Joni Mitchell. It's simple. It's zen. It's nice music for a rainy or slow humid summer day. I'M STILL LOOKING OUT FOR ME. Before releasing In the End, It Always Does, The Japanese House released the lead single, " Boyhood ." The instrumental direction of In the End, It Always Does feels less processed than The Japanese House's earlier work. Singer Amber Bain had talked about using The Japanese House to mask the person behind the music. I've written

  Maybe you started bobbing your head thirty years ago when Trinidadian-German singer Haddaway released " What Is Love ." The 1993 infectious hit escaped the discotheque and reached number 1 in 13 countries-- though peaking at number 11 in America--and spawned cultural memes before there were memes were on dial-up Internet, most notably appearing in a recurring Saturday Night Live sketch-turned feature film as Will Ferrell , Chris Kattan , and the guest of the week danced at The Roxbury.  WHAT WE DO BEHIND DOORS IS OUR BUSINESS. Fast forward to 2023 and we're in the middle of a '90s revival. Maybe Lady Gaga started the early '90s revival in 2020 with tracks like " Babylon " on Chromatica , but we could hear it also on Tove Lo 's " Grapefruit " last year. Last August  French DJ   David Guetta   released the on-the-nose club hit " I'm Good " (Blue) featuring vocals by Bebe Rexha . The song interpolated what I thought was an

  Two years ago, I wrote about  Key 's mini album  Bad Love .  I decided to reformat my original post as track-by-track, a kind of home for the songs on this record, should I write about the record at a later date. While SHINee has been the singer's main gig, Key has managed to release music every year as a solo artist. Bad Love is my favorite of his efforts. So today, let's look at this retro-electro-pop EP by the fashionista from Daegu. 1.  " Bad Love ."  The title track reminds listeners of  Lady Gaga 's 2009 hit " Bad Romance ," speaking about the toxicity of a relationship that may have started under good intentions, but devolved into something toxic. The music video feels like a futuristic vision from the '80s, in other words, looking futuristic but dated with '80s technology.  2. "Yellow Tape"  builds on the theme of entering relationships cautiously. 3. "Hate that..."    a duet with Taeyeon,  was also released as

  It's officially spooky season, so I decided to make a playlist celebrating the spookier songs I've blogged about or artists that had a spooky song. The 31 tracks that I included perhaps won't make you writhe in horror, but they have a loose connection to Halloween. Maybe there's a lyrics or a creepy video, or maybe it was just a song that I listened to a lot in October. I will post the Spotify playlist below and links to the posts and the tracks so that you can read the spooky stories behind the tracks.  1.       " Ghost " by Yellow Ostrich 2. " Closer " by Kings of Leon 3. " Unholy " by Sam Smith ft. Kim Petras 4. " I'm Pretty Sure I'm Out of Luck and Have No Friends " by Underoath 5. " Two Graves " by Anberlin 6. " Moonlit " by Falling Up 7. " Panic Switch " by Silversun Pickups 8. " Killer " by Chvrches   9. " Midnight City " by M83 10 " Edge of Seventeen "

Folklore   is an album without a radio single, according to Taylor Swift . However, the music industry, even with its changes in practices over the last decade and over the course of the pandemic, is still the music industry. And when one of the biggest pop stars releases an album, there better be a single to release. But what song? There was a lot of great music released and produced during lockdown. Charlie XCX , Lady Gaga , and The Weeknd had us dancing in our underwear in the living room with our old cereal bowls stacked up on the arm table (did I just confess something?). Travis Barker produced a shit-ton of music, changing rap into rock. There were a ton of lockdown concerts. For Taylor Swift, lockdown was all about reinventing herself by going back to the basics.  CHASE TWO GIRLS, LOSE THE ONE. Like when Stephen Christian  at a Cornerstone set jokingly called " Like Steps in a Dance " was the "radio hit" from Anchor & Braille 's Felt , an album that

You shouldn't expect too much from a group whose first single is a monologue about a young woman who is addicted to her phone as she goes out for the evening who vaguely sounds like she could be the daughter of the girl from the opening of " Baby Got Back ." But we don't get Sir Mix-A-Lot to break up the monotony of The Chainsmokers ' " Selfie ." But in a way, it's great that the band started their career with their most picayune song. GETTING DRUNK ON THE PAST. It's been rather silent at the frat house since the pandemic has put a damper on the party. Sure there have been some party tracks from Gaga and Charlie XCX , but it's been a minute since The Chainsmokers seemed relevant. At one point, though, the handsome duo were the most highly paid DJs in the world. After topping the Billboard Hot 100 with their duet with Halsey , it seemed that " Closer " and the band's string of hits was the musical tide of the late '10s, muc

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. "