NewYearsDayProject | a song a day blog

A few Saturday afternoons circa 2015-17, I went  down a rabbit-hole, looking for the best   Paper Route ,   Anberlin , and   Copeland   covers on YouTube. This was long after finding artists like   Tyler Ward   who covered pop music. I wondered if anyone had recorded high quality covers of my favorite bands. It turns out that there were   a few . These artists weren't on the level of popularity of   Kurt Hugo Schneider   or   Boyce Avenue . I had hoped to created a cover playlist of a Copeland album, but there weren't enough high-quality covers on YouTube at the time. Charles Angell's   YouTube account   has 7 videos, 77 subscribers, and the singer hasn't posted anything in 3 years. From a quick Facebook search, it turns out that Angell is still active as a musician, with a new haircut and some designer rims, now under the moniker of   Snarly  (link to his social media presence).  YOU'RE STILL A BREEZE UPON ...

Signed to Columbia/CBS Records   in 1984 under the "tacky" and "tongue-in-cheek" moniker The Baseball Boys, the London-based band quickly changed their name to The Outfield . The band's chief lyricist and guitarist John Spinks got the idea for a baseball-themed band when watched the movie The Warriors . The band's American manager convinced the band to change their name. Spinks was a fan of both American sports, particularly baseball and football because those sports were "far more business, far more spectacle, than British sports." The "American-sounding band" found their earliest success in America, not the U.K., starting with 1985's hit " Your Love ." NO SECOND CHANCE, NO GIVING UP. The Outfield has a string of hits after "Your Love" between 1985 and 1990, but their popularity faded with the rest of the New Wavers. Most of their album titles are named after baseball references, starting with their debut Play De...

Fuel 's 1998 hit " Shimmer " propelled the band onto the rock charts. This was the post-grunge, Modern Rock era when rock's sound was cleaner, less gravelly, but still hard. At this time, rock still had crossover pop-chart/ Hot 100 hit-making skills. While Fuel's follow-up record, Something Like Human  would sport two hits that charted higher than "Shimmer," the band's first song is still one of their best-known songs.  ALL THAT SHIMMERS IN THIS WORLD IS SURE TO FADE. I've included a video below about the career of Fuel. When I think of late '90s/early '00s Modern Rock, Fuel is certainly on my shortlist, but I'm not sure that they would make everyone's. I'd list Third Eye Blind , Semisonic , Tonic , Vertical Horizon , and The Goo Goo Dolls along with Fuel, though Fuel aimed to be a harder rock act than these groups. That may be one reason Fuel may be forgotten. Another reason may be that after Something Like Human,  they were...

Artists often show off their influences when they play a cover. In 2004, Copeland released an EP of covers of songs by singer-songwriters from the '70s and '80s. While the band has moved into more experimental territory in recent years, know nothing stays the same shows the musical education, the melodies, the song structure from which Copeland came. Today's song was written by Billy Joel and released in 1977, and Billy Joel's version appears on the Spotify and AppleMusic version of the April 2022 Mixtape  because know nothing stays the same is a rare Copeland release. Copeland's covers EP is worth checking out, though. Hearing the band's unique take on the soft rock classics gave me a new appreciation for the band when I heard this EP, and I only wish it was more widely available. THE WORST SHE CAN DO IS THROW SHADOWS AT YOU. Now we come to Under the Covers,   Volume 3 (see below), naturally another YouTube Edition to the playlist because the main song on wh...

Hearing IU always reminds me that spring is on the way. Commonly called South "Korea's Sweetheart," the 30-year-old singer-songwriter and former teen singer, born Lee Ji-eun (이지은), explains the meaning of her stage name as "You and I become one through music." Today's song comes from her 2014 EP of covers of folk/rock ballads made popular in the '80s and '90s, A Flower Bookmark . The song was written by Kim Chang Wan and originally recorded with his punk-rock band Sanulrim (산울림, meaning Mountain Echo ), which was a hit in 1984. Kim also is featured on the IU cover version. Although the IU version was not released as a single, it was featured in an SK Telecom commercial and was often played in cafes, grocery stores, and everywhere in Korea in 2014 and still today. The original version was used in the zeitgeist drama Reply 1988 (음담하러 1988)   SADNESS BLOOMS AS COSMO FLOWERS AT THE TRAIN STATION. Today I'll present my final Romantic Mix  version...

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...

In 2020, Stephen Christian released his fourth Anchor & Braille album, Tension .  When he released his third A&B project, Songs for the Late Night Drive Home in 2016, many of his fans were still mourning the disbandment of Anberlin . But starting in 2018, Anberlin had started to play one-off shows and even started touring the next year. In 2020, the band was supposed to announce a tour with Memphis May Fire and perform at several festivals. But in lieu of the pandemic, the band started a livestream concert series. While Anberlin was active, Christian released Tension, an album of the most straight-forward pop songs Christian has released to date.  TRY TO EXPLAIN YOURSELF TO A STONE WALL. Last year, I wrote about 13 love songs leading up to Valentine's Day. This year, I'm not sticking to that format, but as Valentine's Day approaches, I thought I'd make a few playlists compiling the love songs I've written about.  1. " Madness " by Anchor ...