NewYearsDayProject | a song a day blog

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 ...

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 envelope 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 t...

  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...

There are not many songs that get the promotional treatment that Harry Styles ' " Adore You " received when Columbia Records released the second single from Fine Line   in 2019. Before the single was released, a Twitter page title "@visitedora" appeared.  Then a website for the fictional tourist island appeared, though it wasn't advertised as a fictional location. There was no place to book a ticket and Google Maps wasn't able to find the location.  WOULD YOU BELIEVE IT? Harry Styles released a trailer for "Adore You" on December 2, 2019 and then dropped the single and music video on December 6. In the music video, Styles treats viewers to a storytelling video about a boy (played by Styles) who is rejected by the residents of the small island, Edora. The boy befriends a magical fish, saving the fish from a fish market. Along the way, the "Adore You" music video introduces viewers to a number of colorful characters who live on the g...

Last month, The Japanese House released their long-anticipated follow-up album to 2019's Good at Falling . The solo project of Amber Mary Bain , The Japanese House collaborated with a number of musicians from Bon Iver 's Justin Vernon and The 1975 's Maty Healy and George Daniel to MUNA and Charli XCX on their latest project, In the End, It Always Does . The English singer-songwriter Amber Bain offers a hybrid between the acoustic and highly processed, like if Bon Iver recorded and produced Joni Mitchell . It's simple. It's zen. It's nice music for a rainy or slow humid summer day. I'M STILL LOOKING OUT FOR ME. Before releasing In the End, It Always Does, The Japanese House released the lead single, " Boyhood ." The instrumental direction of In the End, It Always Does feels less processed than The Japanese House's earlier work. Singer Amber Bain had talked about using The Japanese House to mask the person behind the music. I've writte...

In 1996, Welsh singer-songwriter  Donna Lewis  released her debut single " I Love You Always Forever ." The understated, delicate pop song became an international hit. In the United States, it hit number 2 on the  Billboard Hot 100 , unable to take the top spot because of multiple versions that counted as Los Del Rio 's version of  " Macarena ," the dance track that plagued '96. Lewis never matched the success of her debut single. SECRET MOMENTS SHUT IN THE HEAT OF THE AFTERNOON. Donna Lewis wrote the song "I Love You Always Forever" basing it on a 1953 novel, Love for Lydia by Herbert Ernest Bates. The lines from the chorus "I love you always forever, near and far closer together" appear in the novel, and Lewis' original title for the song was "Lydia." While Lewis had a few other minor hits, such as "At the Beginning," a duet with Richard Marx on the 1997 song for the Anastasia original soundtrack, "I Love...