NewYearsDayProject | a song a day blog

  I was talking with my Gen X coworker last year about music, and somehow  Jonas Brothers  came up. He asked me, as a defender of pop, if the band of brothers had ever made a good album. I thought about the question. Of course, I can’t consider the teeny-bopper music from the band’s early days. But I  could say that  Nick Jonas ’ latest record  Spaceman   was a masterfully produced album by  Greg Kurstin  blending ‘80s and ‘90s R&B with contemporary electronic pop. I thought that the  DNCE  record was fun. I thought that “ Sucker ” was a great  Ryan Tedder  production and showed potential for where the Jonas Brothers could go, although  Happiness Begins   was a bit of a disappointment. But no, I couldn’t say that I liked any Jonas Brothers album. ROCK FOR ME TO STAND ON.  But that all changed when Jonas Brothers released  The Album   last May. But being able to call this album great comes with years of breaking down some of my musical biases and hang-ups. The first is a discussion

  Following up their 2020  album,  Dreamland , COIN  dropped three EPs in early 2021, leading up to their full album,  Rainbow Mixtape ,  released in April. The band wrote and recorded their follow-up album after their 2020 supporting tour  for  Dreamland  was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Singer  Chase Lawerence  sold his house at the beginning of the pandemic and moved back to his childhood home in Virginia where he began writing music for the next record. The band recorded many songs, yet the songs didn't seem to have a theme. “We broke it down to its elementary form and felt like colors represented the lyrical and sonic themes,” Lawerence told  American Songwriter.   Each song corresponded with a color and was released on three EPs.  Red-Orange, Blue-Green,  and  Indigo-Violet  make up the three sections of the band's fourth studio album. SUNRISE IN ORBIT . Rather than telling a story, like in their 2020 song " Cemetery ," "Sprite" speaks poeti

  I was wrong about twenty one pilots , and the reason I'm willing to admit that is after I spent time with their album released last year, Scaled and Icy , I realized that this duo was much more than who I thought they were.   Mostly gone--but not entirely--are the emo rapping and trap beats that turned me off of the group when they debuted. The lyrics on Scaled and Icy, though, are emotional, and singer Tyler Joseph masterfully weaves clichés, esoteric messages for fans, current lingo, and new turns of phrase all to a funky piano/guitar groove. Scaled and Icy is in the vein of Paramore 's After Laughter , on the surface it's fun and light-hearted, but when you spend a little time with the lyrics, you're bound to discover a surprising depth. THERE'S NOTHING WRONG WITH THIS. I was thinking about albums of the year and how last year I didn't seem to have one. In 2019 I was obsessed with Mike Mains & the Branches ' When We Were in Love . And although I di

Following up their 2020  album,  Dreamland ,   COIN  dropped three EPs in early 2021, leading up to their full album,  Rainbow Mixtape ,  released in April. The band wrote and recorded their follow-up album after their 2020 supporting tour  for  Dreamland  was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Singer  Chase Lawerence  sold his house at the beginning of the pandemic and moved back to his childhood home in Virginia where he began writing music for the next record. The band recorded many songs, yet the songs didn't seem to have a theme. “We broke it down to its elementary form and felt like colors represented the lyrical and sonic themes,” Lawerence told  American Songwriter.   Each song corresponded with a color and was released on three EPs, though the second and third are combined on Apple Music.  Red-Orange, Blue-Green,  and  Indigo-Violet  make up the three sections of the band's fourth studio album SUNRISE IN ORBIT . Rather than telling a story, like in their 2020 song

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. "

  Opening with a the late '90s pop-rock-sounding " Tides ," Ed Sheeran 's fourth record = seems to change genres with every track. Back in October of last year, I asked the question about whether or not Ed Sheeran could successfully integrate all the musical styles he's done in the past and make a cohesive album that would appeal both broadly to all music fans and more specifically to die-hard fans. What I found today was that most of the songs individually are good. But as an album the songs don't play together save for the common themes of falling in love with his wife Cherry, the death of family members, isolation due to the Covid-19 pandemic, recovery from addiction, and the birth of his daughter Lyra.   I WANNA DRINK THAT SMILE. The eclectic mix of singles Sheeran released before the album dropped--" Bad Habits " and " Shivers " sounding similar to  ÷ 's singles and " Visiting Hours " recalling the more sentimental moods