NewYearsDayProject | a song a day blog

Aaron Sprinkle is a musician's musician. And I've talked about him so much that any readers I have would be sick of reading about him. I talked about his solo career when I talked about Fair . Throughout this year, I've talked about how prolific Sprinkle has been as a producer, but I've rarely talked about his personal music. In his various podcast appearances, Sprinkle talks about how he came to realize that his musical career was about making other musicians sound incredible, as his bands and solo projects under performed in comparison to the records he produced. But when Sprinkle releases his own music, listeners get a look into the genius behind the hit records. Sprinkle's 2017 record  Real Life   is perhaps his most accessible work and has received the most critical love due to its keen sense of the contemporary music scene and its ability to link the new to the past. WITHOUT A LIGHT TO SHINE OR A ROOM TO GRACE. Ugh. It's photo day at school. I'm crin

English rock band Muse has been making dystopian concept albums since 2009's The Resistance . Their third concept album, Drones , has a more fleshed out story than the previous records. Reacting to world governments' increased usage of drones to carry out covert military operations, the album imagines a scenario in which soldiers are conditioned to "kill with no remorse," ultimately becoming a human  drone, furthering only the government's cause. By the end of the album, the protagonist wakes up to the manipulation and defects. The album topped Billboard's Hot 200 album charts and the world tour was filmed and shown in theaters around the globe.  YOUR LIPS FEEL WARM TO TOUCH . As a three-person band, Muse has packed a lot into their sound. The band wanted Drones to be a departure from their symphonic sound they created on The Resistance and The 2nd Law , working with producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange to return to a hard rock sound. Lange came to f

In 2012, Tyler Ward released Hello. Love. Heartbreak, an EP that would shift his music back to originals rather than covers. Before YouTube, the singer-songwriter struggled to find a following, playing local gigs and recording his music at home, practicing his production on himself. He had uploaded covers of popular songs, but didn't get a following until he had heard that famous singers were going to record a new version of "We Are the World." So before the new version of 'We Are the World" was uploaded to YouTube, Ward covered the song, and for a short time, his version was the first video that appeared when viewers searched for the song! Viewers then started subscribing to Tyler's YouTube channel, discovering his cover songs, and today the singer has 2 million subscribers. I COULD HEAR MY SONG PLAYING ON THE RADIO. Thanks to YouTube and Patreon, Tyler Ward has built a successful YouTube music model. Like fellow YouTubers Kurt Hugo Schneider, Sam Tsui, and

In 2007 Paste Magazine named Paper Route "One to Watch." And while they never lived up to their potential, the Nashville band recorded music that they believed in. The band released several independent EPs before signing to Universal Records. Their debut LP Absence  and remix EP Additions were released on Universal Motown. But before their major-label debut, the band released a 5-song EP titled Are We All Forgotten, a named for a song which would also appear on their debut LP. After sharing several songs on the band's MySpace page,  Are We All Forgotten was released on July 8, 2008. Absence was released on April 28 the next year. THIS IS THE FIRST YEAR. Are We All Forgotten featured big studio production the band hadn't used on their earlier EPs, Paper Route and  A Thrill of Hope. The band's previous work had been more in the vein of Americana. But the complex beats and noisy synths on AWAF  showed where the band was heading. Yet, the band's ear for Americana

After a hiatus which allowed each member of the group to complete their conscription for the Korean military, Nell reappeared in 2012 with their fifth album Slip Away  in April. By the end of the year, the band started their 3-EP Gravity series. Their second EP in the series,  Escaping Gravity , was released on June 10, 2013. Escaping Gravity  gave the band a different tone. The lead single, " Ocean of Light " was the most optimistic Nell track they had released up until that point. On August 7th, the band released a single that they recorded for the MBC drama Two Weeks. The upbeat song sounded like it could have been recorded during the same sessions for Escaping Gravity with its guitar and keyboard production and fast tempo. "Run" sets up the show as the song appears in the action sequence before the story begins and also is played at the end of the episode as we see the protagonist framed for murder. I FALL AND BREAK EVERY DAY. Airing on MBC between August 7- S

Last year we got two new Taylor Swift records. This year, we get two re-recorded records. In April, we got Taylor's Version of Fearless . Yesterday, Swift dropped a new version of Red, expanding the 65 minute original album to 130 minutes of the original plus tons of new songs. When Taylor announced that one of her songs was "like 10 minutes long" fans began to speculate that they would finally get to hear the album's gem "All Too Well" in its original form.  The 5:29 track was already one of Swift's longest songs, but she revealed to Rolling Stone in 2020 that the original song was whittled down from a 10-minute song that contained explicit lyrics--off brand for Taylor at the time. Along with the release of Taylor's version of Red , the singer released a 15-minute short film to accompany the new version of "All Too Well" and there was too much to talk about for this not to be the song of the day. I LEFT MY SCARF THERE AT YOUR SISTER'S

Sufjan Stevens Presents: Come On Feel the ILLINOISE was the breakthrough album from the singer-songwriter. The second in an ambitious series to create an album about each of the 50 states, though later retracted as a joke, Illinois topped Billboard 's Heat Seekers charts and introduced countless new fans to Stevens' musical storytelling. Musically, Illinois is dense. Layer upon layer of sound is added to a composition that sounds sometimes like a marching band, sometimes like a jazz band, sometimes like a folk song, and sometimes like a symphony. Stevens prepared the lyrics by obsessively immersing himself in writers, poets, and historians who wrote about the state in order to reference some of the most Illinois things that locals of the small towns and large cities could pick up on the record. The album is rich in geography, historical figures, and mythology of the midwestern state. I FELL IN LOVE AGAIN. Illinois has a score of 90% on Metacritic, ranking at number #54, at th