NewYearsDayProject | a song a day blog

I have many fond memories of my first Cornerstone in 2007, seeing a lot of the bands that I loved for the first and only time. There was a lot of effort to see as much as possible--looking at the pamphlets mailed when you purchased your tickets, trying to synchronize them with friends, and inevitably being unable to see everyone you wanted to see because of scheduling conflicts. But there was one stage that took the least effort--The Gallery.  SCATTERED IN AMERICAN CROWDS.  In the back of The Gallery stage was the coffee shop, or I should say the coffee canteen. Depending on the year, it was hot and dusty or wet and buggy, but cheap refills if you bought that year's mug early in the festival before it sold out and the music in the mornings just quiet enough to have a conversation made the stage my favorite. The evenings got a little crowded with some of the mellower hippy crowd or sometimes a CCM band that wasn't quite big enough for the main stage. But in the morning, crowds w

Around 2007 Internet bloggers started sharing a song by an edgy new pop star called " Ur So Gay ," a song in which  Katy Perry  complains about her metrosexual, emo boyfriend who is more feminine than she wants in a man. The song was one of many cringe-worthy homophobic, sexist, or otherwise problematic songs that could exist only in the noughties, the UK pronunciation for the time period of 2000-2009. I think that it's apropos when talking about this era of music. While "Ur So Gay" never impacted radio, other head-scratching lines littered Perry's major label debut  One of the Boys .    YOU CHANGE YOUR MIND LIKE A GIRL CHANGES CLOTHES.  Katy Perry broke through with the single " I Kissed a Girl ." After the 2004 Super Bowl incident involving  Janet Jackson 's wardrobe malfunction, the Bush-era FCC heavily censored the television and radio waves. While there were edgy hits from that time, "shock pop" seemed to abound at the end of Geo

  After a successful career with the '90s boyband B2K , Omari Ishmael Grandberry , known by his stage name Omarion , began a solo career. Omarion's career was at the center of when R&B and Hip-Hop started to dominate Billboard's Hot 100. The podcast Hit Parade discusses this phenomenon when looking how three artists helped to create the hip hop sound from 2000 to even today in the episode " Flip It and Reverse It ." I GOT MEMORIES. THIS IS CRAZY. Chris Molanphy described Virginia-bast artists Pharrell, Timbaland, and Missy Elliot as three nerds who "added quirk" to the modern hip-hop sound. These talented musicians didn't just work in hip-hop, but also helped to craft pop and R&B. Take for example Timbaland 's contribution to pop music. From creating a mature sound for former *NSYNC leader Justin Timberlake to reinventing Nelly Furtado, to introducing the world to OneRepublic, Timbaland's production skills in the '00s were like

There are numerous examples of Indie bands getting big and the fan crisis of how to label the formerly “indie” band. R.E.M. , Modest Mouse , Mumford & Sons and today’s band, Glass Animals , have had major hits that propelled a niche sound intended for smaller audiences to festivals, arenas, and pop radio. While the English band Glass Animals had enjoyed some success from even their first record Zaba , it wasn’t until their 2020 sleeper hit “ Heat Waves ” became a TikTok hit that took the band to the top of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart for five weeks two years later in 2022.  SOMETIMES ALL I THINK ABOUT IS YOU.   Dave Bayley , lead singer of Glass Animals, both wrote and produced "Heat Waves." The melancholy tune has been interpreted in a number of ways in its path to reigning as the number 1 song of the year in 2022, according to Billboard. Was it a break up song or a song about a death? Was it a song about missing the old days? Was it a song about missing a pre-Covid worl

There are some general rules about music that gets consumed by Evangelical audiences in the United States. Except for the very conservative fundamentalist Christians, Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) can take any genre from Doo Wop to Hip Hop, from Folk to Death Metal. As for the content, though, Christian music usually refrains from using profanity and tends to shy away from anything that is grotesque, though metal albums certainly pushed the envelop in the ‘90s and ‘00s. While releases from progressive bands on Tooth & Nail and competing record labels started including less theology in lyrics, for the most part, the theology on a CCM record was in line with the dreaded televangelist on every cable channel on Sunday mornings.  I’M STILL FUCKING CHRISTIAN. Every blanket statement I wrote in the introductory paragraph has been challenged by one band or another in the ‘90s or ‘00s Christian bookstore, and when the evangelical gatekeepers of the Christian bookstore closed in the ‘1

  ROSIE is a singer-songwriter whose song “ Never the 1 ” became a TikTok hit in 2020. The singer began posting music on Spotify in 2018, and this year she released EP 5 Songs for Healing , which includes today’s song “ I Should Just Go to Bed .” It’s a song about the intrusive thoughts that come when fixating on a relationship late at night. The song has ROSIE featured on Spotify’s Next Generation Singer-Songwriters , Chill Pop , and others. Today, I decided to make a playlist related to insomnia. These are songs about not sleeping for both positive and negative reasons. This playlist is certainly different from my Sleep playlist from last year. In summer, I often have a hard time sleeping because it’s too hot or I’m too wrapped up in something that I can’t wind down. So that’s today’s soundtrack. You should go to bed, but if you’re up, enjoy! Check out the playlist on Spotify!

  We’re firmly in the territory of “butt rock” today. According to Houston Press , the origin of the phrase comes from a radio station in the ‘90s that had a programming slogan, “Nothing but Rock,” and listeners dropped “nothing” from the tagline. Loudwire points out that there are two distinct eras of butt rock: the ‘80s hair bands and the post grunge and nu metal of the late ‘90s and ‘00s.  HOPPIN’ ON A TRAIN, WE’LL BURN UP THE TRACKS. What, then, is the characteristics of “butt rock”? Like any musical sub-genre, especially if it is named more as a slur for the sub-genre not even used by the bands classified by the sub-genre, associations in the label are loose. Just as The Doobie Brothers  &  Daryl Hall and John Oats may be classified or contested alongside Christopher Cross and Kenny Loggins in the now so-called sub-genre of Yacht Rock, association with “butt-rock” seems to be more about music listeners disdain for certain characteristics. For the sake of today’s song, I’m