NewYearsDayProject | a song a day blog

Fleurie is just shy of 3 million monthly listeners on Spotify. The Nashville-based singer-songwriter's majority of listeners, though, come from outside the United States from India, Turkey, Brazil, and Germany to be precise. Last year I talked about about her cover of Sufjan Steven 's   " To Be Alone with You ," which appears in the Looking for Alaska mini-series. While Fleurie has released many covers including a haunting version Linkin Park 's " In the End " and Gary Jules ' arrangement of Tears for Fears ' " Mad World ," the singer also writes original songs and released her fourth LP earlier this year titled Supertropicali .  CALIFORNIA GIRLS DON'T LOOK LIKE ME. How to describe Fleurie's latest album, Supertropicali? Fleurie describes it on her Spotify page as "a world, an era, a story unfolding, all stitched together in '90s nostalgia, romance, youthful hope, and belonging." Taking inspiration from Mary Popp

Last Friday, Lauren Daigle returned with her first record since 2018’s blockbuster sophomore record, Look Up Child .  Daigle’s music has been featured in movies and television shows from Blade Runner 2049 to Grey’s Anatomy ,  which makes the singer stand out from other artists in her genre, Contemporary Christian Music, a genre she dominated with the number-one Christian song for sixty weeks for the crossover hit, “ You Say .” WE KNOW THE FUTURE’S BURNIN’ BRIGHT. Maybe like me, you spent a part of the ‘10s backsliding from your evangelical upbringing. Don’t worry, I’m not here to tell on you. You probably stopped listening to DC Talk and Michael W. Smith , and maybe became a “ Bad Christian ” with Emery , followed Michael Gungor ’s journey, or went full-out atheist like Underoath . Somewhere along the way, what was playing on Christian Radio sounded like a bad version of what was popular two years ago on the pop station, only mellower. Somewhere along the way, Hillsong and Bethel M

In 2005, Denison Witmer released Are You a Dreamer ?  The album was released on the now defunct Chad Pearson -owned record label The Militia Group , home to a plethora of Christian and secular acts in the late '90s and early '00s. The former A&R guy at Tooth & Nail Records founded The Militia Group on similar values as the legendary label: musical variety. From underground punk rock bands like Brandston and The Beautiful Mistake to indie rock gems like Copeland and Lovedrug to mainstream successes like The Summer Set and Cartel  and to indie folk acts like The New Frontiers and Denison Witmer, the label fostered talent for nearly 10 years before the label folded.   HOW YOU FOUND ME, I STILL NEVER UNDERSTAND.  " Little Flowers " opens  Are You a Dreamer?   with  simple acoustic guitar plucking. But in addition to guitar, Denison Witmer's dear friend and occasional housemate Sufjan Stevens appears playing banjo on the track. Stevens' 2005 releas

March 15th was the Ides of March, the day when Julius Cesar was stabbed. I realized that I didn't celebrate   Casimir Pulaski Day   (March 1st, also a   Sufjan Stevens   song), nor did I celebrate Pi Day with a song about circles on Tuesday, nor am I posting a St. Patrick's Day song today, but I thought that it would be fun to analyze Stevens's most ironic song of all, in which he states to his fans that he doesn't want to be their "Julius Caesar... [nor their] personal Jesus." The pairing of the two figures I found fascinating because in Dante's   Inferno  we meet Judas (betrayer of Christ), and Brutus and Cassius (betrayers of Caesar) in the deepest layer of hell, tortured by Satan himself. Beware indeed the Ides of March. I DON'T WANT TO BE THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE.  Just when we thought we firmly established Sufjan Stevens as a folk singer, perhaps an heir to Woody Guthrie or Gordon Lightfoot , he goes and makes an electronic album. While the

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

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. "

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

  In 2016, Tyson Motsenbocker signed to Tooth & Nail Records and released his debut LP, Letters to Lost Loves . Motsenbocker had been deeply affected by the loss of his mother and decided to go on a walk between San Diego and San Francisco to process his grief. Some of those reflections could be heard on Letters. Although Motsenbocker didn't follow up Letters with a full length until 2020, Someday I'll Make It All Up to You , he released two EPs in 2017, Almira and A Kind Invitation .  I KISSED YOU AFTER MIDNIGHT. Almira is a beautiful EP with 5 songs, including " Rust " (see post) and " Coeur d'Alene ," and A Kind Invitation includes " Talk All Night for Nothing ," (see post) which Motsenbocker would go on to perform with Switchfoot 's Jon Foreman and release as a single, the eponymous storytelling, spoken word track; and today's song " Something in the Way ," which deals revisits relationship material as "Talk A

In March of 2015,  Sufjan Stevens   released  Carrie & Lowell ,  and the album was  praised   by indie music journals and NPR. In May of that year,  a study concluded that most of the number one hits from 2005-2014 were written on the reading level of a fifth grader.   Maybe that's the reason I don't spend too much time wrestling with finding the meaning of the text in most song lyrics. However, whenever I choose a Sufjan Stevens song, I spend quite a bit of time reading the Genius annotations, discovering hidden metaphors and symbolism that don't appear until quite a few listens. " Should Have Known Better " is the second track on the album, following his invocation of the muse in " Death with Dignity. " Stevens recalls more specific, particularly the jarring details about whe n   his mother "left [him and his brother] at that video store" when he was three or four.  WHEN I WAS THREE, THREE, MAYBE FOUR.   As Stevens gets more specific on 

We've talked about the demise of the band Yellowcard three days ago , but today we're going to delve into Yellowcard's lead singer William Ryan Key 's solo career. Although during his tenure in Yellowcard, Key was known on stage by his middle name, Ryan, the singer wanted to craft a solo career in his own right without relying on Yellowcard's popularity. With two EPs released in 2018, first Thirteen and then Virtue , Key's solo music career went on pause until his EP earlier this year, Everything Except Desire . During the the gap between these projects, Key worked on reimagined Yellowcard songs and wrote and recorded with an ambient electronic side project called JEDAH along with fellow Yellowcard guitarist Ryan Mendez. Bowery Street (in pink) in  Manhattan, photo Wikipedia WHO DO I THINK I AM? Listening to Yellowcard and William Ryan Key's writing, we get a nostalgia for home. But where is home for Key? Yellowcard is famously from Jacksonville, Florida,

  I listened to an episode of The New York Times' Popcast reviewing the critics' top singles of the year 2015 when looking for new perspectives on Carly Rae Jepsen 's masterclass in pop music E-MO-TION this evening. For that particular episode, the critics tried to pick singles that either were released without an album or the song far outshined the album. However, they came up with the "Carly conundrum." The critics felt that Carly Rae Jepsen's 2015 album contained many good songs, but it wasn't a great album. They compared it to a box of candy, and they said you wouldn't want to eat the whole box in one sitting. 'CAUSE I WANT WHAT I WANT. DO YOU THINK I WANT TOO MUCH?  I think that there's certainly more substance to this album than a pixie stick. I've talked about this album being a calculated, smart indie pop record. Jepsen moves to more mature themes, assuming adult relationships. She's not going to win the Rebecca St. James award

Director Luca Guadagnino approached Sufjan Stevens to provide narration to Guadagnino's 2018 film Call Me By Your Name and Stevens refused. Guadagnino reached out to Stevens again, but this time asking him only to provide music for the movie. Stevens accepted and provided three songs to the critically acclaimed film. He reworked a track from his 2010 album Age of Adz , " Futile Desires ," and wrote two new tracks, " Mystery of Love " and " Visions of Gideon ." The songs were used throughout the film along with classical, jazz, and early '80s music as a backdrop to the setting of Northern Italy in the early '80s.  Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus I FLEW UP TO YOUR ARMS. I often think of Elaine Benes stuck in the theater with her boss J. Peterman, forced to watch The English Patient , a movie that received so much praise in the '90s. Seinfeld ' s Elaine can't stand the long, pretentious movie, despite everyone in her cir