NewYearsDayProject | a song a day blog

The Juliana Theory started as a pop-rock side project for Brett Detar , guitarist of the Christian metalcore band Zao . The band's first record, Understand This Is a Dream , underperformed when it released in 1999 and throughout their career, The Juliana Theory suffered from marketing purgatory due to not wanting to be marketed to the Christian market but being on a predominately Christian label. On the band's second record, Tooth & Nail 's founder and CEO Brandon Ebel thought The Juliana Theory had a hit with " We're at the Top the World ," a short, lyrically dearth song that was pure emotion on the ironically titled album Emotion Is Dead .  WE'VE GOT A LOT OF TIME.   Twenty - two years have solidified Emotion Is Dead as a cult classic in the Tooth & Nail cannon. Like Understand This Is a Dream, Emotion Is Dead was r ecorded and co-produced with friend and Zao producer Barry Poynter . While Poynter was most known for heavy records, lead singer B

In 2019, Carly Rae Jepsen released her fourth studio record, Dedicated . But the fifteen songs that made it onto the standard edition of the album were nowhere near the amount of songs the surprisingly prolific songwriter wrote for the album. Jepsen revealed that she wrote over 200 songs during the two album cycles of E-M0-TION   and Dedicated. In an interview with Vox , Jepsen said that she turns to her friends and family with whom she has listening parties where she "feeds them and gives them copious amounts of wine so that they have opinions about the music." While many of these songs will never be released, in the tradition Jepsen set with E-MO-TION, she released a B-sides record for Dedicated, titled Dedicated Side B.   HE WAS BORN IN VEGAS. Years ago, I was impressed when I heard that a band wrote 70, 100, 200, etc. songs for a record. Years later, through listening to more and more interviews, I found out that the myth was debunked. Several bands have said that they h

You might know  Filous  if you get the bonus tracks of pop singers. He's an Austrian producer, musician, and remixer, and he's remixed  Selena Gomez ,  Troye Sivan ,  Kodaline , and others. For " Feel Good Inc ." Filous teams up with electro-pop singer-songwriter  LissA  to bring a new interpretation to Gorillaz's 2005 hit, " Feel Good Inc. " The song has been covered by multiple artists, and while the original is the best, Filous's cover highlights the melancholy of the song by stripping the song of its bass line and leaning into its minor chord melody. Filous's "FGI" is laidback. It's a perfect coffee shop cover of the track because coffee shop tracks often don't have rapping or words like "ass crack." While today's song of the day is by Filous, it's the artistry of the musicians behind Gorrilaz that makes this song interesting. DON'T STOP. GET IT, GET IT!  In 2001  Blur  frontman  Damon Albarn  and anima

Winner is a South Korean boy band signed to YG Entertainment . Debuting in 2014 as a five-piece group, they had several successful singles before group member Taehyun left the group in 2016, citing mental health and personal issues. The next year, in 2017, Winner released two single-records Fate Number For  and Our Twenty For , with two new songs on each single record. Besides emphasizing that the band was now only four members, the records played with a spring/summer Tropical Dance vibe. Unlike many K-pop artists, Winner is largely self-produced, with the band members taking active roles in producing their songs, choreographing their dances, and marketing their music.  TRUST MY HEART. A lengthy K-pop hiatus over a year between the EP Exit: E and Fate Number For, the band emerged with singer Nam Taehyun. The year 2019 was a bad year for K-Pop. Former f(x) member Sulli committed suicide following only bullying. A few weeks later singer Goo Hara took her life as did former Surprise

" Escalates " is the second single  from Falling Up 's debut record, Crashings . All three of the band's singles from Crashings, " Broken Heart ," "Escalates," " Bittersweet "   topped Christian Rock Radio charts. Falling Up signed to BEC Recordings because of industry hype from the band Kutless , who came from the same suburb of Portland, Oregon as Falling Up. Working with the same producer, Aaron Sprinkle , Falling Up was set to be the next big Christian Rock band. I CAN'T FIND IT, BUT MAYBE I'LL COPE.    I've talked about the sonic production on Crashings and how I think that it is perhaps on of Aaron Sprinkle's best feats of production despite the record never coming up in the podcast conversations I've heard with Sprinkle. I've speculated that there's an interesting, perhaps an uncomfortable, story about Falling Up's tenure in the Tooth & Nail universe. Sprinkle and the band maintain high-tempo s

In 2017, it had been five years since The Killers released new music, and even longer since they were a “household name.” Lead singer Brandon Flowers talks about starting with the song “ Rut ,” Wonderful, Wonderful ’s third track, which defined the band’s new direction. While The Killers had been on hiatus had released his second solo record, The Desired Effect . Also before recording The Killers’ fifth record, Flowers moved out of his beloved hometown of “ The Fabulous Las Vegas ” which turned out to be a bad place to raise a family in the ‘10s. Still, digging out of the musical rut wasn’t easy. Flowers found on Wonderful, Wonderful it was ok to write about his family. DON’T NEED NO ADVICE, I GOT A PLAN. The first single from Wonderful, Wonderful, though, " The Man ," doesn't fall into the typical storytelling songs we come to expect from The Killers, rather "The Man" is a bragging song. The song was featured in the Netflix original film The Perfect Date

Technically speaking, The Great Gatsby is a satire of a wealthy society. But F. Scott Fitzgerald's third novel is often enjoyed as a time capsule to the Jazz Age, and the parts that Fitzgerald criticizes are what the reads indulge in. But Fitzgerald certainly isn't the only artist to have toed the line between criticism and indulgence. In 2002, two freshmen music majors, Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser , formed a band at Wesleyan University, this band would eventually be called The Management, and the band wrote several songs which they never took too seriously because they felt that their pop sound was secondary for their love of old psychedelic electronic music. THIS IS WHAT THE WORLD IS FOR. The Management’s hipster approach to pop made the group famous on campus, and despite never caring for pop music, the group’s most catchy songs eventually caught the ear of Columbia Records . The band prepared their debut record  Oracular Spectacular   and shortened their name t