NewYearsDayProject | a song a day blog

Taylor pulled a Beyoncé  in late July of last year. Pulling a Beyoncé is a record industry term for releasing a studio record without any promotion or explicit social media hints. The term comes from in December of 2013 when Beyoncé released her self-titled album on iTunes without warning. The album quickly shot to number one, and so did Swift's folklore , an album written and recorded at home during quarantine. Swift worked on the project with producers Jack Antonoff and The National 's Aaron Dessner . For me on the first few listens, the album was underwhelming. I knew that there was something there, and I was pretty sure that this album would be a defining record of the new decade, but it was hard to get into the right mood for this album, much like other Jack Antonoff's masterpiece, Lana Del Rey's Norman Fucking Rockwell. However, the catchy ballad "exile" featuring Bon Iver was a good excuse to dive into the record today.   YOU NEVER GAVE A WARNING SI

Following the traumatic experience of surviving cancer between Jack's Mannequin 's first album ( Everything in Transit ) and second album ( The Glass Passenger ) , lead singer Andrew McMahon  decided to write about the people and things that he appreciated the most. The singer talks about deciding on the name for the project quite early in the album's production process in the podcast Meet the Musician . People and Things  topped  the Alternative albums chart, but the lead single, " My Thoughts Racing ," only peaked at #43 on the Rock Digital Sales chart . The album was released in October of 2011, but by February of 2012, McMahon started publicly discussing dropping the band's name. "I foresee an end to the usage of that name. I don’t know that it’s doing for me what it used to," he told Lehigh Valley Music . To McMahon, he wanted to start fresh. Healthy, married, and becoming a father, the concept of Jack that McMahon had created in his early 20s w

This is our third entry from Credential Recording's short-lived band, Turn Off the Stars. I don't know much about what the band members did after breaking up. Guitarist and backup vocalist Andrew Walker now leads worship at a church, but the other members don't have much of an Internet presence. Signed to Credential Records, a home to acts like Edison Glass, Seabird, Future of Forestry , Sixpence None the Richer at one time, and Swichfoot's Jon Foreman and his side project with Nickel Creek's Sean Watkins, Family Fiction, the label seemed to drop most of its supported bands in the late '00s. Some of the bands transitioned, but others, like Turn Off the Stars, folded. Now the label partnered with Jon Foreman's label Lowercase People and only market's Foreman's projects other than Switchfoot.  BUT YOU DO IT TO YOURSELF . The fourth track on the moody album, "Hours and Days" is a brooding song about tediously waiting for someone to change. The

" Even Rats " comes from Boston's rock band The Slip and was a featured playable track on Playstation's Guitar Hero. Formed in 1989 and releasing their first album in 1997, the band was known for an "avant-rock" sound, often creating a jazz fusion sound. The band's 2006 album, Eisenhower , produced by Matthew Ellard, shifted the band's direction to indie rock. The band never got very popular. They performed on Late Night with Conan O'Brien and opened for indie rock band My Morning Jacket. Just as their indie rock career was taking off, the band went on hiatus until 2015. They released a new record earlier this year. I HEAR SPRING'S NICE IN CANADA. "Even Rats" is a fun grungy, guitar jamming song. After being mesmerized by the ending guitar solo when I first heard the song in college when my roommate put it on his driving mix and we listened to it every time our friends would go downtown, I started to pay attention to the lyrics. It

In 2002, when Blindside released their major-label debut, Silence,  there was a lot of hype around this group. Formed in Sweden as Underfree in 1994, the band released two records in the United States through Solid State Records, Tooth & Nail's hard music sister-label. The band was heavily promoted by fellow rock bands, especially P.O.D., whose multi-platinum 2001 record Satellite solidified the hard rockers in pop culture. As P.O.D. had been helped by other bands in the scene, the group paid it forward with other bands, particularly Blindside. Blindside toured with P.O.D.; their lead singer, Christian Lindskog, appeared on the track "Anything Right" on Satellite;  and the band even appeared in P.O.D.'s music video for " Boom ." In the video, Blindside appears as "Sweden" in the outrageous pingpong tournament.  WHAT IF I COULD REACH INSIDE?  Silence was a rebirth in Blindside's sound. Elements of the hardcore sound on the band's first t

Listening to the songs on Acceptance's 2020 album, Wild, Free, I really like them in playlists. Of course, " Cold Air " is the best track on the record. However, this album now ties with Acceptance's Phantoms for the most songs chosen for my blog, and Acceptance follows Anberlin (11 entries) and Copeland (7 entries) with six entries for "Song of the Day," tying with Sufjan Stevens. Getting to the end of the year, there are so many songs I still want to write about, but there are only thirty-four days left in the year. I haven't even had a chance to talk about Acceptance's 2017 Colliding by Design , which is a far superior album to Wild, Free. YOU'RE MY ONLY FAILURE. "Dark Age" encapsulates the mood that Wild, Free  gives. The album's cover art and darker-toned songs offer a much less hopeful tone than the band's previous effort,  Colliding by Design,  an upbeat, colorful album. Some fans rejected Colliding by Design  for its lat

The third Thursday of every November, barring no situations like a pandemic delaying the start of the school year or an earthquake in a major city the day before the exam, South Korea holds its once-a-year College Scholastic Ability Test (CSAT) or 수능. Much of a Korean student's academic future rests on the score he or she receives on the test. Unlike American SATs or ACTs, failure to get a good score means either waiting another year to take the exam or settling with a lower-tier college. The subjects covered on the CSAT are Korean language, Mathematics, English, and Korean History. There are YouTube videos in which graduates from top universities around the world ( in this video US college graduates ) attempt to solve the questions on the CSAT. Korea is a country that places so much importance on students' scholastic abilities, but it comes at a cost--both financial and emotional.  IS THIS REALLY TRUE? Several dramas and films have looked at the economic inequality in the wor