NewYearsDayProject | a song a day blog

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

Codes and Keys was a very different Death Cab for Cutie album. The records prior to the band's 2011 album were guitar-based, but the band's producer and guitarist Chris Walla and lead singer Ben Gibbard decided to make guitar a secondary feature of the band's seventh album. Furthermore, the band broke with the melancholy, producing what listeners found to be a decidedly more upbeat, positive Death Cab record. Codes and Keys was written and released in a time when Ben Gibbard was married to actress Zooey Deschanel. But just as everything seemed to be going well--a number 1 Alternative hit and a number 1-selling rock album--the success wouldn't last. PLATES, THEY WILL SHIFT. I’ve talked about how Death Cab for Cutie was so influential on my college experience . I don't think I'm in a unique position, though, because Death Cab was the cool band for twenty-somethings for half a decade before Plans. The spiritually ambiguity of the record seemed to speak to millennia

Tears for Fear's debut, The Hurting , caused the pop-rock duo composed of Roland Orzabel and Curt Smith to look to their darker emotions to produce honest lines that were rare in popular music at that time. By their sophomore album, Song from the Big Chair, Orzabel and Smith expanded their sights on bigger issues, but the lyrics still come off as personal.  The band's most recognizable song "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" looks at greed on a personal level, which ultimately expands to an intricate, Cold War era of problems contemporary to the band's hit.  The layered sounds of the Big Chair  are quintessentially '80s, and if it weren't for the '80s renaissance that started in pop music c. 2004 which hasn't ended yet, Tears for Fears might have sounded dated. Today's song "Shout" doesn't sound old, though. It sounds retro.  I'M TALKIN' TO YOU. I didn't realize "Shout" is six and a half minutes long when I

In 2008, Tooth & Nail Records was looking for their next big band after their mid-'00 lineup had signed to major labels. In several episodes of Labeled, Brandon Ebel talks about this time, without specifically naming a band, as a time when the label signed acts that no one on staff particularly liked, but in hopes that there would be a band that could generate the income of the label's heyday. Capital Lights was one of the bands to release their debut during an eclectic year for the label. Formed in 2002 under the name afterEight, the Tulsa, Oklahoma natives who would become Capital Lights started out as a screamo band with lead singer Jacob Dement. But when Dement left the band, bassist Bryce Phillips took over vocal duties, and the band's sound changed into a power pop-punk sound. With big dreams to follow in the footsteps the Golden Age of Tooth & Nail bands from just three years prior to them, they hoped to build a Warped-Tour career, but that never happened. RO

There's an urgency in  Eat, Sleep, Repeat unlike Copeland's first two records. The small-town feel of Beneath Medicine Tree, though the record deals with death and sickness, feels warmer than Copeland's third record. The band's follow up In Motion was a '90s rock album six years too late. As for packaging, the first two Copeland albums, and the fourth one, used earth tones to convey a slightly melancholy, but somewhat hopeful message. Eat, Sleep, Repeat 's artwork looks like it was partially inspired by Gustav Dore and garden gnomes. The grey pencil drawings match with the minimalist sound of grey, electronic melodies interwoven with guitar-tracks hinting at some continuity in the band's work. Fans of Copeland expressed their dislike for the album, but it was a signal toward the musical experimentation that the band would travel toward. MAYBE YOU SHOULD WRITE A LIST FOR ME. Opening with an acoustic guitar, "Careful Now" sets itself up to be one of

Red 's debut album, End of Silence , comes in the middle of a maximalist orchestral rock era on the alternative/active rock stations. The lead single, " Breathe Into Me " is a heavily produced single that involves screaming, a Middle-eastern sounding guitar solo, and a string section that sounds like it's being tuned in on an FM radio. As novel as that sounds, a DJ today might be able to recreate that sound if he picked up a hundred other active rock records from 2003-2009. The sound effects and heavy guitars could be found on any Linkin Park record, the strings on an Evanescence record, the screaming on almost any other record. But in 2006, Red's End of Silence was a fun, aggressive radio-rock record, and I had every hope that they would go on to have a career of unique heavy music. FALLING FASTER . Released the summer after I graduated from high school, I didn't really start listening to Red's debut record until the Fall, when I was driving to morning