NewYearsDayProject | a song a day blog

Venezuelan-born, Mexico-City based artist Andrés Vicente de Jesús Lazo Uslar goes by the name Lasso . He’s been recording since 2009, releasing four studio albums. His latest, Eva , was released last year. Teaming up with Colombian singer Sebastián Yatra on a re-recorded version of his hit “ Ojos Marrones ” as a bonus track on Eva . I instantly connected with the song’s forlorn guitar which plays throughout the song. The atmosphere of the song reminded me of both Deas Vail ’s “ Wake Up and Sleep ” and Taylor Swift ’s Speak Now Vault version “ I Can See You ,” on which Jack Antonoff plays a guitar in a similar, mysterious way. The slight rasp of Lasso’s voice brings the melancholy romantic lyrics to life. This is the first Spanish language song I’ve blogged about. I’ve been getting into some Spanish songs lately, so today I’m going to make a playlist of some of my recent finds. I hope you enjoy them too.  Check out the playlist on Spotify.  

Last year Taylor Swift was in the middle of a whirlwind romance with the frontman The 1975 , Matty Healy , allegedly. This romance came after Swift broke up with actor Joe Alwyn after a six-year relationship. Swift and Healy’s relationship has never been confirmed by Swift or Healy, but the press surrounding the two and neither’s denial of the affair has cemented the relationship in pop culture canon. The spring fling was said to have lasted for a month, possibly a fortnight . All of this was happening in the middle of Swift’s Midnights Era—songs about life experiences that supposedly happened in the past. Some listeners have interpreted Midnights as a breakup album. LIKE A TATTOOED GOLDEN RETRIEVER.  Fans were eagerly awaiting for Taylor Swift to reward their Easter Egg hunt with the release of The Tortured Poets Department , the album that she announced when she won Album of the Year at the 2024 Grammy Awards. The Easter Eggs Swift gave fans and the press led listeners to believe

Both Taylor Swift and Adele love the album format. This love for the format made both artists resistant to streaming platforms in the mid-’10s. In 2014, Swift removed her music from Spotify to protest the platform’s payment of artists. She didn’t add her music to Apple Music until 2015 and resubmitted her music to Spotify in 2017. Adele fought Spotify to turn off the default setting of albums to be on “shuffle.” She wrote on Twitter (now X) “This was the only request I had in our ever[-]changing industry! We don’t create albums with so much care and thought into our track listing for no reason. Our art tells a story and our stories should be listened to as we intended.” IT'S NO SECRET THAT THE BOTH OF US ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME.  In 2015, Adele was arguably one of the biggest artists. After struggling with writers’ block to follow up her 2011 breakthrough sophomore album 21 , the singer released 25 . The album was only released in stores and only the album’s singles were availab

It starts with a single and maybe a B-side, then an EP of 4-6 songs. This is often followed by more singles and more EPs. Finally, we get the full-length studio record which may be reworked versions of the early singles and songs from the EP. These artists often struggle to fill a full concert set because they don’t have enough material. They often resort to playing covers of songs that influenced their early career. However, somewhere along the way, an artist, should they last, becomes prolific. The frequency of singles, EPs, and full albums increases. In the past when this happened, the artist had passed their radio prime. But today, we have artists like Drake and Taylor Swift in their prolific period and in their commercial prime. Sometimes artists get big enough to release whatever they want, and that's what has seemed to happen with the latest from Taylor Swift, The Tortured Poets Department , released last month to record-breaking streaming numbers.   FUCK IT IF I CAN’T HAV

  Today, we’re going to explore 21st-century singer-songwriters. Beyond the Taylor Swift s, Ed Sheeran s, and Phoebe Bridgers and my favorites like Tyson Motsenbocker and Sasha Alex Sloan , I also include some up-incomers I’ve found more recently but haven’t delved into their music as much. For example, LA-based artist Rosie Darling released her debut full-length album, Lanterns , last year. Her debut EP, 2021’s Coping , and its follow-up 2022’s Golden Age were more indie pop than Lanterns uses more acoustic guitars. I’m not considering either style for my playlist as more worthy of the title of singer-songwriter , though the acoustic guitar does seem to satisfy the stereotype better. I hope you enjoy the playlist and discover some new music.

One of the biggest challenges of writing about music that I often run into is there isn't always a lot to talk about. Just because it's a good song, doesn't mean that it is a conversation piece. New music is particularly hard to write about. It takes a lot of research, and it takes quite a few listens over some time to pick up the nuance. Furthermore, I mostly write about old music because I have memories associated with it. These memories are acquired over time, and can't be forced onto a song every Friday with the new release cycle. But when a song has layers of meaning, or in this case, layers of history, not only is it easier to write about, but also I can connect with the song on a deeper level. I won't be able to get into all of the layers that I want to in this short post, but I'll see what I can accomplish.  I'M CAUGHT UP IN YOU. First appearing on Sparrow Records , Luna Halo debuted as a Christian Rock band. The band was formed in 1999 by brothers

Back in 2010, we learned that yes, a pickle can get more likes than  Nickelback , a band that had become the most hated  "butt rock"  band in the mid-'00s. In fact, the conclusions of the social media study found that a pickle had more likes than Oprah Winfrey or other beloved figures. It turns out that internet users' hate outweighs Internet love, or the terrible outweighs the good. In 2014, the most hated rock band would become  U2  after their release of  Songs of Innocence   was forced into every  iTunes user's library. People tried everything to scrub the songs from their shuffle. Today, people have mostly forgotten about Nickelback, and Apple Music no longer comes standard with that U2 album, so people have other musical axes to grind. Justin Bieber has grown up and is no longer blaring in our cultural continuousness. So who is the most hated band these days? After the 2019 Super Bowl,   Maroon 5 , for taking to the stage when the NFL was in the middle of ra