How to Create Downtime Menus
As a lot of my posts are, this one was inspired by a conversation with my partner. She seemed to think some of my ideas were helpful so I thought I'd write them up and share them here.
I use a combination of these ideas to do two things - redirect myself when I get stuck doomscrolling/freezing/obsessing and redirect myself when I'm stuck on the "must be good, must be productive" hamster wheel and can't seem to stop doing chores until I'm fucking exhausted or have pushed/hurt myself. Knowing you need to stop is one thing - knowing what to do instead is another.
Not all of these will work for every person at every time. Pick one or two that seem interesting and give them a whirl.
Habit of the Month
This is a small habit I can do in about 5-10 minutes a day. These are sometimes habits that I want to audition for my lineup or just want to focus on as a way of rebooting a given area of my life. Physical habits have been things like stretching, a walk, putting on moisturizer, drinking water, making tea, etc. Emotional habits have been things like stream of consciousness journaling, bullet journaling, recording myself venting, etc. Spiritual habits have been things like meditating, altar work, reading sutras, tarot readings, etc.
If I'm stuck in a loop and I haven't done that task yet, it serves as an easy win that feels moderately meaningful to accomplish. This is easier to do than longer or less interesting tasks.
Side Quests
These are little challenges I'd like to accomplish that are 100% fun and completely optional. They are specific and can me completed within a given time frame - usually a month. They usually aren't the most meaningful to keep them more fun and so I'm not letting myself down if I don't opt to complete it.
They've been things like:
The Minor Expert Challenge - read three books in one subject
The Kanopy Critic Challenge - use up all of my Kanopy credits that month
The Regal Freegal Challenge - download all the albums/songs I can on Freegal that month
The Monthly Playlist Challenge - create a playlist of the month where each song represents something about each day of that month; like a playlist diary
The Reverse Tarot Draw Challenge - pick/list a tarot card you best think represents each day of a given month or other time period; like a tarot card diary
The 100 Words Challenge - learn 100 words in a foreign language
As you can see, I prefer things that are pretty low energy friendly so I can work on them on days I'm super tired. Just little chronic illness things.
Alphabet Lists
I use these for my cleaning routines actually but I also have been trying them with my downtime. The way it works is you list out the alphabet and choose one self care or hobby task you'd like to do for each. They don't have to start with the same letter, it just serves as an easy way to limit how many you pick and keep track of what you've done. It's satisfying to cross off the whole list.
Tasks I put on these are things like
A - paint my nails
B - crochet a charity hat
C - write 5 letters for Letters Against Isolation
D - send a letter to a friend
E - play a solo rpg
F - play a solo board game
G - complete a puzzle
etc
They're fun tasks I'm not currently doing as often as I'd like but chill enough that it doesn't matter when precisely I do them more often. I try to pick tasks that are roughly 30 minutes to an hour long though some definitely take longer. I like to complete these roughly monthly but I try to complete a whole list before I start it again. Anything I just did not feel like doing and kept skipping gets scratched out and I rewrite a new list with new item to replace those. And I start again.
Whenever I'm like ugh I don't know what to do with myself, I try to pick at least one thing on the list and give it a try for 5 minutes. If I don't like it after that I can just put it away and pick something else.
10x10
10x10 lists are a different take on a similar idea. It's a list of 10 things you'd like to do at least 10 times in a given time period. Mine tend to be on the seasonal or annual timescale but maybe you're intense and prefer a monthly one. If I don't complete them in a given time period, I just continue with it until I'm done. Better to complete it on an altered timeline than not at all.
For me these tend to be slightly bigger tasks that take a little more planning or energy. I'm not totally sure why I use them this way since you could definitely use them for smaller tasks but that's just the space they occupy for me.
So examples of what would be on my list would be things like:
Grab a hot chocolate from the coffee shop (x10)
Complete a PokemonGo event (x10)
Have a spa night and watch a movie (x10)
Do something extra nice for my partner (x10)
Try a new game (x10)
Find a geocache (x10)
etc
Filing up a little 10x10 grid is pretty satisfying. Much more so than anxietying myself into my bed for the equivalent amount of time.
Seasonal Bucket Lists
I really enjoy making these though I really struggle with the current season (Spring) given my allergies. There's this idea my partner has told me about in DBT where you try to recall positive moments to help "build a life worth living". I think seasonal bucket lists are really good at helping with this for me. I look back on the seasons I made these lists way more fondly than the ones I didn't.
They generally center on seasonal activities I don't want to miss out on. So for summer that's stuff like going for a night swim/skinny dip, getting 5-10 good cloud photos, playing a yard game (like cornhole), seeing a street concert, etc. I also try to take pictures of those (if they don't already involve them) so I can reflect on them later and enjoy the residual happiness.
Conclusion
The point of these isn't to overwhelm you with options. It's just to have enough ideas prepped that you can find something no matter your energy level or time you're working with.
Remember - rest and enjoying yourself is necessary for human health. Folks how get good rest and experience flow states more regularly tend to heal better. People who spend time on what they enjoy are often more enjoyable to be around.
It's never a waste of time to make yourself happy.
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The sheer number of older and more experienced professionals involved in Måneskin introduces a tension between the rock conventions that characterize their songwriting and the fundamentally pop circumstances under which those songs are produced. They are four friends in a band, but that band is inside an enormous machine. From their perspective, though, the machine is good.
The American visitor to Rome arrives with certain preconceptions that feel like stereotypes but turn out to be basically accurate. There really are mopeds flying around everywhere, and traffic seems governed by the principle that anyone can be replaced. Breakfast is coffee and cigarettes. Despite these orthopedic and nutritional hazards, everyone is better looking — not literally everyone, of course, but statistically, as if whatever selective forces that emerge from urban density have had an extra hundred generations or so to work. And they really do talk like that, an emphatic mix of vowels, gestures and car horns known as “Italian.” To be scolded in this language by a driver who wants to park in the crosswalk is to realize that some popular ideas are actually true. Also, it is hot.
The triumphant return to Rome of Måneskin — arguably the only rock stars of their generation, and almost certainly the biggest Italian rock band of all time — coincided with a heat wave across Southern Europe. On that Tuesday in July the temperature hit 107 degrees. The Tiber looked thick, rippled in places and still in others, as if it were reducing. By Thursday morning the band’s vast management team was officially concerned that the night’s sold-out performance at the Stadio Olimpico would be delayed. When Måneskin finally took the stage around 9:30 p.m., it was still well into the 90s — which was too bad, because there would be pyro.
There was no opening act, possibly because no rock band operating at this level is within 10 years of Måneskin’s age. The guitarist Thomas Raggi played the riff to “Don’t Wanna Sleep,” the lights came up and 60,000 Italians screamed. Damiano David — the band’s singer and, at age 24, its oldest member — charged out in black flared trousers and a mesh top that bisected his torso diagonally, his heavy brow and hypersymmetrical features making him look like some futuristic nomad who hunted the fishnet mammoth. Victoria De Angelis, the bassist, wore a minidress made from strips of leather or possibly bungee cords. Raggi wore nonporous pants and a black button-down he quickly discarded, while Ethan Torchio drummed in a vest with no shirt underneath, his hair flying. For the next several minutes of alternately disciplined and frenzied noise, they sounded as if Motley Crüe had been cryogenically frozen, then revived in 2010 with Rob Thomas on vocals.
That hypothetical will appeal to some while repelling others, and which category you fall into is, with all due respect, not my business here. Rolling Stone, for its part, said that Måneskin “only manage to confirm how hard rock & roll has to work these days to be noticed,” and a viral Pitchfork review called their most recent album “absolutely terrible at every conceivable level.” But this kind of thumbs up/thumbs down criticism is pretty much vestigial now that music is free. If you want to know whether you like Måneskin — the name is Danish and pronounced MOAN-eh-skin — you can fire up the internet and add to the more than nine billion streams Sony Music claims the band has accumulated across Spotify, YouTube, et cetera. As for whether Måneskin is good, de gustibus non est disputandum, as previous Italians once said: In matters of taste, there can be no arguments.
You should know, though, that even though their music has been heard most often through phone and laptop speakers, Måneskin sounds better on a soccer field. That is what tens of thousands of fans came to the Stadio Olimpico on an eyelid-scorching Thursday to experience: the culturally-if-not-personally-familiar commodity of a stadium rock show, delivered by the unprecedented phenomenon of a stadium-level Italian rock band. The pyro — 20-foot jets of swivel-articulated flame that you could feel all the way up in the mezzanine — kicked in on “Gasoline,” a song Måneskin wrote to protest Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. From a thrust platform in the center of the field, David poured his full emotive powers into the pre-chorus: “Standing alone on that hill/using your fuel to kill/we won’t take it standing still/watch us dance.”
The effect these words will have on President Putin is unknown. They capture something, though, about rock ’n’ roll, which has established certain conventions over the last seven decades. One of those conventions is an atmosphere of rebellion. It doesn’t have to be real — you probably don’t even want it to be — but neither can it seem too contrived, because the defining constraint of rock as a genre is that you have to feel it. The successful rock song creates in listeners the sensation of defying consensus, even if they are right in step with it.
The need to feel the rock may explain the documented problem of fans’ taste becoming frozen in whatever era was happening when they were between the ages of 15 and 25. Anyone who adolesced after Spotify, however, did not grow up with rock as an organically developing form and is likely to have experienced the whole catalog simultaneously, listening to Led Zeppelin at the same time they listened to Pixies and Franz Ferdinand — i.e. as a genre rather than as particular artists, the way my generation (I’m 46) experienced jazz. The members of Måneskin belong to this post-Spotify cohort. As the youngest and most prominent custodians of the rock tradition, their job is to sell new, guitar-driven songs of 100 to 150 beats per minute to a larger and larger audience, many of whom are young people who primarily think of such music as a historical artifact. Starting this month, Måneskin will take this business on a multivenue tour of the United States — a market where they are considerably less known — whose first stop is Madison Square Garden.
“I think the genre thing is like ... ” Torchio said to me backstage in Rome, making a gesture that conveyed translingual complexity. “We can do a metaphor: If you eat fish, meat and peanuts every day, like for years, and then you discover potatoes one day, you’ll be like: ‘Wow, potatoes! I like potatoes; potatoes are great.’ But potatoes have been there the whole time.” Rock was the potato in this metaphor, and he seemed to be saying that even though many people were just now discovering that they liked it, it had actually been around for a long time. It was a revealing analogy: The implication was that rock, like the potato, is here to stay; but what if rock is, like the potato in our age of abundance, comparatively bland and no longer anyone’s favorite?
Which rock song came first is a topic of disagreement, but one strong candidate is “Rocket 88,” recorded by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythym band in 1951. It’s about a car and, in its final verse, about drinking in the car. These themes capture the context in which rock ’n’ roll emerged: a period when household incomes, availability of consumer goods and the share of Americans experiencing adolescence all increased simultaneously.
Although and possibly because rock started as Black music, it found a gigantic audience of white teenagers during the so-called British Invasion of the mid-1960s (the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who), which made it the dominant form of pop music for the next two decades. The stadium/progressive era (Journey, Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner) that now constitutes the bulk of classic-rock radio gave way, eventually, to punk (the Ramones, Patti Smith, Minor Threat) and then glam metal: Twisted Sister, Guns N’ Roses and various other hair-intensive bands that were obliterated by the success of Nirvana and Pearl Jam in 1991. This shift can be understood as the ultimate triumph of punk, both in its return to emotive content expressed through simpler arrangements and in its professed hostility toward the music industry itself. After 1991, suspicion of anything resembling pop became a mark of seriousness among both rock critics and fans.
It is probably not a coincidence that this period is also when rock’s cultural hegemony began to wane. As the ’90s progressed, larger and again whiter audiences embraced hip-hop, and the last song classified as “rock” to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 was Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” in 2001. The run of bands that became popular during the ’00s — the Strokes, the Killers, Kings of Leon — constituted rock’s last great commercial gasp, but none of their singles charted higher than No. 4. Let us say, then, that the era of rock as pop music lasted from 1951 to 2011. That’s a three-generation run, if you take seriously rock’s advice to get drunk and have sex in the car and therefore produce children at around age 20. Baby boomers were the generation that made rock a zillion-dollar industry; Gen X saved it from that industry with punk and indie, and millennials closed it all out playing Guitar Hero.
The members of Måneskin are between the ages of 22 and 24, situating them firmly within the cadre of people who understand rock in the past tense. De Angelis, the bassist, and Raggi, the guitarist, formed the band when they were both attending a music-oriented middle school; David was a friend of friends, while Torchio was the only person who responded to their Facebook ad seeking a drummer. There are few entry-level rock venues in Rome, so they started by busking on the streets. In 2017, they entered the cattle-call audition for the Italian version of “The X Factor.” They eventually finished as runners-up to the balladeer Lorenzo Licitra, and an EP of songs they performed on the show was released by Sony Music and went triple platinum.
In 2021, Måneskin won the Sanremo Music Festival, earning the right to represent Italy with their song “Zitti e Buoni” (whose title roughly translates to “shut up and behave”) in that year’s Eurovision Song Contest. This program is not widely viewed in the United States, but it is a gigantic deal in Europe, and Måneskin won. Not long after, they began to appear on international singles charts, and “I Wanna Be Your Slave” broke the British Top 10. A European tour followed, as well as U.S. appearances at festivals and historic venues.
This ascent to stardom was not unmarred by controversy. The Eurovison live broadcast caught David bending over a table offstage, and members of the media accused him of snorting cocaine. David insisted he was innocent and took a drug test, which he passed, but Måneskin and their management still seem indignant about the whole affair. It’s exactly this kind of incongruous detail — this damaging rumor that a rock star did cocaine — that highlights how the Italian music-consuming public differs from the American one. Many elements of Måneskin’s presentation, like the cross-dressing and the occasional male-on-male kiss, are genuinely upsetting to older Italians, even as they seem familiar or even hackneyed to audiences in the United States.
“They see a band of young, good-looking guys that are dressing up too much, and then it’s not pure rock ’n’ roll, because you’re not in a garage, looking ugly,” De Angelis says. “The more conservative side, they’re shocked because of how we dress or move onstage, or the boys wear makeup.”
She and her bandmates are caught between two demographics: the relatively conservative European audience that made them famous and the more tolerant if not downright desensitized American audience that they must impress to keep the ride moving. And they do have to keep it moving, because — like many rock stars before them — most of the band dropped out of high school to do this. At one point, Raggi told me that he had sat in on some classes at a university, “Just to try to understand, ‘What is that?’”
One question that emerged early in my discussions with Måneskin’s friendly and professional management team was whether I was going to say that their music was bad. This concern seemed related to the aforementioned viral Pitchfork review, in which the editor Jeremy Larson wrote that their new album, “RUSH!” sounds “like it’s made for introducing the all-new Ford F-150” and “seems to be optimized for getting busy in a Buffalo Wild Wings bathroom” en route to a score of 2.0 (out of 10). While the members of Måneskin seemed to take this review philosophically, their press liaisons were concerned that I was coming to Italy to have a similar type of fun.
Here I should disclose that Larson edited an essay I wrote for Pitchfork about the Talking Heads album “Remain in Light” (score: 10.0) and that I think of myself as his friend. Possibly because of these biases, I read his review as reflecting his deeply held and, among rock fans, widely shared need to feel the music, something that the many pop/commercial elements of “RUSH!” (e.g. familiar song structures, lyrics that seem to have emerged from a collaboration between Google Translate and Nikki Sixx, compulsive use of multiband compression) left him unable to do.
This perspective reflects the post-’90s rock consensus (PNRC) that anything that sounds too much like a mass-market product is no good. The PNRC is premised on the idea that rock is not just a structure of song but also a structure of relationship between the band and society. From rock’s earliest days as Black music, the real or perceived opposition between rocker and society has been central to its appeal; this adversarial relationship animated the youth and counterculture eras of the ’60s and then, when the economic dominance of mass-market rock made it impossible to believe in, provoked the revitalizing backlash of punk. Even major labels felt obliged to play into this paradoxical worldview, e.g. that period after Nirvana when the most popular genre of music was called “alternative.” Måneskin, however, are defined by their isolation from the PNRC. They play rock music, but operate according to the logic of pop.
In Milan, where Måneskin would finish their Italian minitour, I had lunch with the band, as well as two of their managers, Marica Casalinuovo and Fabrizio Ferraguzzo. Casalinuovo had been an executive producer working on “The X Factor,” and Ferraguzzo was its musical director; around the time that Måneskin broke through, Casalinuovo and Ferraguzzo left the show and began working with the stars it had made. We were at the in-house restaurant of Moysa, the combination recording studio, soundstage, rehearsal space, offices, party venue and “creative playground” that Ferraguzzo opened two months earlier. After clarifying that he was in no way criticizing major record labels and the many vendors they engaged to record, promote and distribute albums, he laid out his vision for Moysa, a place where all those functions were performed by a single corporate entity — basically describing the concept of vertical integration.
Ferraguzzo oversaw the recording of “RUSH!” along with a group of producers that included Max Martin, the Swedish hitmaker best known for his work with Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. At Moysa, Ferraguzzo played for me Måneskin’s then-unreleased new single, “Honey (Are U Coming?)” which features many of the band’s signature moves — guitar and bass playing the same melodic phrases at the same time, unswung boogie-type rhythm of the post-Strokes style — but also has David singing in a higher register than usual. I listened to it first on studio monitors and then through the speaker of Ferraguzzo’s phone, and it sounded clean and well produced both times, as if a team of industry veterans with unlimited access to espresso had come together to perfect it.
The sheer number of older and more experienced professionals involved in Måneskin introduces a tension between the rock conventions that characterize their songwriting and the fundamentally pop circumstances under which those songs are produced. They are four friends in a band, but that band is inside an enormous machine. From their perspective, though, the machine is good.
“There’s hundreds of people working and talking about you and giving opinions,” De Angelis said at lunch. “So if you start to get in this loop of wanting to know and control and being anxious about it, it really ruins everything.” Here lies the conflict between what the PNRC wants from a band — resistance to outside influences, contempt for commerce, authenticity as measured in doing everything themselves — and what any sane 23-year-old would want, which is to have someone with an M.B.A. make all the decisions so she can concentrate on playing bass.
The other way Måneskin is isolated from the PNRC is geographic. Over the course of lunch, it became clear that they had encyclopedic knowledge of certain eras in American rock history but were only dimly aware of others. Raggi, for instance, loves Motley Crüe and has an album-by-album command of the Los Angeles hair-metal band Skid Row, which he and his bandmates seemed to understand were supposed to be guilty pleasures. But none of them had ever heard of Fugazi, the post-hardcore band whose hatred of major labels, refusal to sell merchandise and commitment to keeping ticket prices as low as possible set the standard for a generation of American rock snobs. In general, Måneskin’s timeline of influences seems to break off around 1990, when the rock most respected by Anglophone critics was produced by independent labels that did not have strong overseas distribution. It picks up again with Franz Ferdinand and the “emo” era of mainstream pop rock. This retrospect leaves them unaware of the indie/punk/D.I.Y. period that was probably most important in forming the PNRC.
The question is whether that consensus still matters. While snobs like Larson and me are overrepresented in journalism, we never constituted a majority of rock fans. That’s the whole point of being a snob. And snobbery is obsolete anyway; digital distribution ended the correlation between how obscure your favorite band was and how much effort you put into listening to them. The longevity of rock ’n’ roll as a genre, meanwhile, has solidified a core audience that is now between the ages of 40 and 80, rendering the fan-versus-society dimension of the PNRC impossible to believe. And the economics of the industry — in which streaming has reduced the profit margin on recorded music, and the closure of small venues has made stadiums and big auditoriums the only reliable way to make money on tour — have decimated the indie model. All these forces have converged to make rock, for the first time in its history, merely a way of writing songs instead of a way of life.
Yet rock as a cluster of signifiers retains its power around the world. In the same way everyone knows what a castle is and what it signifies, even though actual castles are no longer a meaningful force in our lives, rock remains a shared language of cultural expression even though it is no longer determining our friendships, turning children against their parents, yelling truth at power, et cetera. Also like a castle, a lot of people will pay good money to see a preserved historical example of rock or even a convincing replica of it, especially in Europe.
In Milan, the temperature had dropped 20 degrees, and Måneskin’s show at Stadio Giuseppe Meazza — commonly known as San Siro, the largest stadium in Italy, sold out that night at 60,000 — was threatened by thunderstorms instead of record-breaking heat. Fans remained undaunted: Many camped in the parking lot the night before in order to be among the first to enter the stadium. One of them was Tamara, an American who reported her age as 60½ and said she had skipped a reservation to see da Vinci’s “Last Supper” in order to stay in line. “When you get to knocking on the door, you kind of want to do what you want,” she said.
The threat of rain was made good at pretty much the exact moment the show began. The sea of black T-shirts on the pitch became a field of multicolored ponchos, and raindrops were bouncing visibly off the surface of the stage. David lost his footing near the end of “I Wanna Be Your Slave,” briefly rolling to his back, while De Angelis — who is very good at making lips-parted-in-ecstasy-type rock faces — played with her eyes turned upward to the flashing sky, like a martyr.
The rain stopped in time for “Kool Kids,” a punk-inspired song in which David affects a Cockney accent to sing about the vexed cultural position of rock ’n’ roll: “Cool kids, they do not like rock/they only listen to trap and pop.” These are probably the Måneskin lyrics most quoted by music journalists, although they should probably be taken with a grain of salt, considering that the song also contains lyrics like “I like doin’ things I love, yeah” and “Cool kids, they do not vomit.”
“Kool Kids” was the last song before the encore, and each night a few dozen good-looking 20-somethings were released onto the stage to dance and then, as the band walked off, to make we’re-not-worthy bows around Raggi’s abandoned guitar. The whole thing looked at least semichoreographed, but management assured me that the Kool Kids were not professional dancers — just enthusiastic fans who had been asked if they wanted to be part of the show. I kept trying to meet the person in charge of wrangling these Kool Kids, and there kept being new reasons that was not possible.
The regular kids, on the other hand, were available and friendly throughout. In Rome, Dorca and Sara, two young members of a Måneskin fan club, saw my notebook and shot right over to tell me they loved the band because, as Sara put it, “they allow you to be yourself.” When asked whether they felt their culture was conservative in ways that prevented them from being themselves, Dorca — who was 21 and wearing eyeglasses that looked like part of her daily wardrobe and a mesh top that didn’t — said: “Maybe it turns out that you can be yourself. But you don’t know that at first. You feel like you can’t.”
Here lies the element of rock that functions independently from the economics of the industry or the shifting preferences of critics, the part that is maybe independent from time itself: the continually renewed experience of adolescence, of hearing and therefore feeling it all for the first time. But how disorienting must those feelings be when they have been fully monetized, fully sanctioned — when the response to your demand to rock ’n’ roll all night and party every day is, “Great, exactly, thank you.” In a culture where defying consensus is the dominant value, anything is possible except rebellion. It must be strange, in this post-everything century, to finally become yourself and discover that no one has any problem with that.
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Perfect
Zayn said he wouldn’t buy the record when he heard Perfect (so salty!). Harry's emotions varied performing it in its short 27 performance run from Oct-Dec when 1D ended. These 2 stand out:
November 20 2015, rather than sing the Bridge Harry said to the crowd "if you think it's so funny you can sing it".
3 days later at the AMAs he rolls his eyes and looks ready to walk out, the camera cuts to a kid who seems to agree. (Bridge is 2:40).
It was only performed 6 more times, in Carpool Karaoke (10:30) Harry stops singing for parts and the song cuts before the bridge, at the Jingle ball he looks away and the last time was new years.
Or this concert he put the mike into the crowd, someone stole the microphone and licked it.
Safe to say he regretted that bridge, it's savage to them both.
Writers
Perfect ties with Fools Gold for the title of the Haylor song with the most writers, at 7. While Fools Gold has all 5 of the band, Bunetta and Ryan. Harry and Louis are the only band members who worked on Perfect with Bunetta, Ryan and 3 others:
Jesse Shatkin, (cowrote Sia's Chandelier)
Jacob Kasher (Maroon 5 collaborator), and
Mozella (cowrote Miley Cyrus Wrecking Ball and Fools Gold.)
To me, Perfect has more media grabbing pop-song than Harry Styles. HS’s best 1D work was with teams of 3 or 4 writers. In fact, Bunetta said Olivia came out in 45 minutes while overworking another "less good" MITAM song.
Timeline
Bunetta also told Rolling Stone about Perfect:
"That one took a long time, just because it was written over a couple different continents. It started as one thing and ended up where it is."
MITAM was made in the summer of 2015. To have been written in a couple of continents and with USA based writers it was probably either side of the BBMAs. It could have been started 'as one thing' in April in South Africa before the BBMAs other songs that reference Style including Two Ghosts started early in the year. The "ended up where it is" with those writers would be after the BBMAs, when they got back to the USA from July. This would be at the end of the album and he was singing it daily within 3 months.
Similarity to Taylors songs
It has the same chord progressions as Style and is also very similar to out of the woods as this video on Twitter shows. He called it a love song in the made in the AM interview (6 mins) and that it wasn’t literal in another. I do love this James Cordon bit and I love his Taylor smile so much.
Lyrics
[Verse 1: Louis]
I might never be your knight in shinin' armour
I might never be the one you take home to mother
And I might never be the one who brings you flowers
But I can be the one, be the one tonight
Grapejuice, has the perfect (get it) call back to this verse, along with 'Red' and 'Pay for it' and I love him for it:
"I was on my way to buy some flowers for you (ooh) / Thought that we could hide away in a corner of the heath / There's never been someone who's so perfect for me / But I got over it and I said / "Give me somethin' old and red" / I pay for it more than I did back then"
[Pre-Chorus: Liam]
When I first saw you from across the room
I could tell that you were curious, oh, yeah
Girl, I hope you're sure what you're looking for
'Cause I'm not good at making promises
Promises come up again in Woman "Promises are broken like a stitches is", which is interesting if both Woman and part of Perfect are written after the 2015 BBMAs.
‘Know what you are looking for’ is interesting. In "Say don't go" and the 1989 TV Vaults in general Taylor did not get what she was looking for. At 23, dating a 19 year old Taylor told us she didn’t get wavy she needed. Her most recent ex, JG was 29. (yes - JG was the age Harry is now! Imagine if he did that) So I kind of stand by this line.
The start refers to the night they met. Which neither has ever confirmed, I think it was in 2011 (see timeline) Many look at the coat he tries on in the music video, which matches both his Up All Night Tour outfit (from December 2011) and the 2012 Kids Choice Awards. The awards are fun though. The Up All Night DVD also has it.
[Verse 2: Niall]
I might never be the hands you put your heart in
Or the arms that hold you any time you want them
But that don't mean that we can't live here in the moment
'Cause I can be the one you love from time to time
Urgh I choose to attribute 'love from time to time' to one of the 6 other people writing this. To me this line always sounds like a boy-band heartthrob priority playing out in the writers room. No wonder it took time and HS1 to overcome this.
However, this does speak to a theme of them not being available to each other because of their careers and 1D punishing schedule. If I could fly's "I'm missing half of me when we're apart" and Half the World Aways " So you're not my girlfriend / Don't pretend that makes us nothing / Tell me you don't miss this feeling" speaks more honestly to the interplay of his band image, schedules and priorities which Taylor referred to Suburban Legends.
[Chorus: Harry, All]
But if you like causing trouble up in hotel rooms
And if you like having secret little rendezvous
If you like to do the things you know that we shouldn't do
Then, baby, I'm perfect
Baby, I'm perfect for you
And if you like midnight driving with the windows down
And if you like goin' places we can't even pronounce
If you like to do whatever you've been dreamin' about
Then, baby, you're perfect
Baby, you're perfect
So let's start right now
Here are Haylor themes we know and love, Driving at midnight (Style, HYGTG, Wish You Would) generally going from a high schooler to superstar overnight (placed they can’t pronounce like Cannes), and hidden love/hiding (I Know Places, Slut!)
[Bridge: Harry]
And if you like cameras flashin' every time we go out
Oh, yeah
And if you're looking for someone to write your breakup songs about
Then baby, I'm perfect
And baby, we're perfect
The camera’s flashing is good imagery and his voice brings to life how personally challenging it was for them both in a way I Know Places didn't with very few words. Taylor also refers to this imagery in Is it over now?
But the break up songs is a low blow and I assume the part he regretted to the point of not wanting to sing it. In a later interview Harry said:
“The only time you really think, ’is this song too personal?’ is if you think about, ‘is this going to be really annoying for the other person?’ Because I do [care],” he finished.
Which I think the break up song line would have been very annoying.
If you made it through that reward yourself with Grapejuice at Wembley 🍇
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4 or 7 please
A little switch-a-roo! Harry is Y/N's bands' producer and they don't always see eye-to-eye.
Y/N was pissed and it was definitely coming through in the recording session. When their band's manager, Richard, initially told them that they were trying to get Harry Styles to produce their album she was excited. Y/N's initial excitement stemmed from the fact that even though he was only 34 he was incredibly successful and had an incredible reputation. He was an icon! She wanted to learn from him what making a good album meant, because she was interested in doing a good job every single time she put out music. At first she was really excited to have him on board and was soaking it all in, but the closer they get to the album finish the more she has started to dislike him. He constantly tore down her ideas or made her seem like she didn't know what she was talking about, he critiqued her choices and her style, and it just put her in a bad mood. And now, he was working their drummer, Kassie to the bone and Y/N was tired of it.
"Can we take a 10? I have t'pee." Kassie said when they finished a recording bit. She was shaking out her hands as she waited for a confirmation.
The only reason they were in this mess was because Harry said that when he went in to start editing that song the drums were sloppy. In Kassie's defense, that particular song was really hard and tiring, which Y/N explained to Harry. She also reminded him that they had a full day of recording their last song of the album and didn't have time to keep going over old stuff. He then told her that he was aware of what the session today was supposed to be and that in terms of Kassie, the song being hard wasn't an excuse and that she could do a much better job if she tried harder. Y/N just rolled her eyes at him and here they were, 30 minutes later after re-recording the same last 2 minutes of that blasted song about 15 times. What Y/N was more annoyed at is that at some point in between takes Harry had gone in and shown Kassie perfectly what needed to be done and instead of recording that he just gave her what she believes was the worst pep talk in history. The mics were off so no one could hear what he was saying but she was tearing up and he handed her a box of tissues, so it couldn't have been good.
"Yeah, let's take a ten." one of the techs announced once Harry gave him the OK and Y/N immediately made her way into the live room.
"Hey Kass, how're the hands?"
"Sore." she said smiling up at Y/N.
"Sorry, I tried to tell Harry that it was fine how it was but-"
"No, it's not. He's right, I can do better." she said with determination.
"Kass, it's OK if you can't." Y/N assured. Kassie was going through a bit of a rough time personally and she was sure that this was making her feel worse. She didn't want to tell Harry that, because that's none of his business, but he needed to listen to Y/N and get off of Kassie's case.
"Really Y/N, I can do it. I'm just really in my head, OK? I'm gonna go pee, take a little breather and come back."
"OK." She sighed and Kassie just offered her a smile before heading out of the studio. She wasn't all that shocked to see Harry following after her, but she would have a word with him later. He needed to stop being a dick.
To say the least, Kassie had successfully executed the part Harry had called sloppy after her little bathroom break and they were able to jump into the last song. Harry had tons to say about her vocals and about some of the lyrics- how they didn't work with the rhythm well and they ended up changing some things around. Y/N had been singing the song in her practices the old way and kept forgetting the blasted changes he made. She groaned as Harry yelled another cut. She was prepared to have him ream her again and already glanced down at her feet so that he couldn't see her eyes roll in irritation.
"Obviously we're not getting what we need today-" she shot her head up and glared at him through the glass, "So let's just call it a day. Great work, everyone." he said and just like that everyone started packing up. She hung the headphones up on the stand and burst into the control room where Harry was chatting with the studio crew.
"Ummm, we need to keep going. Today's our last studio session. that's all we paid for." she reminded him.
"We'll figure something out." he said to her and she scowled at him.
"We don't have money for another full day or however many days you plan on hijacking this process! If we hadn't been wasting our time re-recording kass' perfectly fine drumming we would have 45 more minutes to get this right-"
"Y/N, can you please just...be quiet?" he asked with a frown and she grimaced.
"Excuse me?"
"Just shut up, OK? Your voice is shot for today and if we keep going at it you're gonna cause some real damage to your vocal cords. You're really reaching in there, OK?" She scoffed, "Did you call that vocal coach like I told you to two months ago?" he asked and she rolled her eyes, "I'll take that as a no and that's why you can't sing the song today." he said to her. She felt her eyes welling up as he scolded her and insulted her talent. She scoffed and stormed out and to the bathroom. Harry sighed as he watched her rush out. He believed that Y/N didn't really understand what he was getting at and if she would just stop being so stubborn and listen to him...
Y/N didn't let herself actually cry at his words, but she was fuming mad to the point that her eyes grew teary. She tended to cry when she got angry. But he was an ass and he was cocky and smug and so fucking dumb with his porn-stache and fucking pink beanie. She headed angrily to her car after heading out of the studio, realizing that hers was one of only three cars left in the lot. She had been cooling off in the bathroom for quite a while. As she reached for her keys in her pocket she groaned, realizing that she never grabbed her things from the studio.
"Fuck me..." she grumbled and headed back inside. As she headed over to the control room they had been in, much to her dismay Harry was sat at the sound board with his laptop hooked up to it and he glanced up to the door when he saw someone come in. She looked over to the couch and saw that her bag was sitting there next to his.
"Forgot my stuff." she said.
"I know. I also grabbed your notebook from the piano bench, dropped it in your bag for you." he informed before turning back to the screen.
"Thanks." she hummed and headed to the couch to grab her bag.
"Figured you had left." he hummed.
"Was just cooling off." she responded lowly and then he spun around on the stool he was on to look at her.
"Why are you so fucking stubborn?" he asked her with a half-smile, "I'm just trying to do the job you and your team hired me to do."
"Why are you such an ass?" she responded and he frowned.
"I'm not an ass." he defended himself and she scoffed.
"You so are! That shit you pulled with Kassie today, you made her cry! We all saw it and-"
"You know she's dealing with a breakup right?" he asked Y/N and her eyebrows furrowed, of course she did, but how did he know that?
"Yeah."
"She got cheated on, she was telling me. I don't know if that's ever happened to you, but I can tell you from experience it is completely demoralizing. It makes you doubt every single part of yourself, especially the parts of you that you love the most, because we tend to associate the things we love together." he said and she frowned, "For Kassie that's her music. This chick was a part of her life for a really long time, as you probably know. She pushed her to do good and to excel in her music. Realistically, Kassie knows that her talent is her own and that she has all of you, and her family, and her friends, but that chick, whatever her name was-"
"Alisha."
"Whatever." he hummed, "Her opinion, her belief, her support bore a lot of weight to Kassie. She wasn't crying because I was an ass to her. She was crying because I told her that she's one of the best drummers I've ever worked with. She doesn't believe it right now, but it's the truth. She had only ever heard that from one person and having someone else validate that was a lot for her." he said and Y/N's eyes softened.
"Oh."
"Yeah." He said and Y/N sighed, "You should've heard the previous recording we had. I deleted it the moment I heard it, it was absolute shit. You're not trained to hear what I hear. It's my job to help you guys make this the best album possible and sometimes that means pushing you guys, like I pushed Kassie today. She doesn't need to sit back and relax with her thoughts. She needed to hit something, hard! And she needed to see that there was more to her than that relationship. She was able to see that in herself again today. She needs you and the rest of the band to believe that she can do it."
"I do believe she can do it!"
"That's not what it sounds like when you come griping to me about how the piece is too hard. That you're OK with a mediocre recording instead of telling her that she can do better-"
"She's just going through it. I just wanted to cut her some slack, OK? And this is not just about Kassie. This is about the way that you treat me all the time! You're always undermining me! My ideas, my writing, my singing, my playing! And don't give me that shit you just spewed about pushing me too because I don't buy that for a moment. On top of that you're so arrogant and condescending! You think you know everything, but you don't! Maybe no one can see it because they kiss your ass, but I see it clear as day." she said and he shook his head, fighting a smile. Smug piece of shit.
"OK. You're clearly not ready to have a conversation with me." he said cooly and she wanted to scream, he was treating her like a kid.
"Why do you do that? Treat me like a child?!" she shouted in aggravation and he scoffed.
"Look at you and the way you're behaving and tell me you're not acting like a child." he challenged and her eyes narrowed into angry slits, "You shout and shout and shout and you're not saying anything of substance. You're acting like an entitled brat who's upset because she's not getting her way and believe me when I tell you that everyone sees that." he finished and she was speechless. Her eyes started welling up once again and she scoffed before grabbing her bag and rushing to the door. "Don't forget to call the vocal coach!" he called to her.
"Fuck you!" she shouted back and he sighed. She was so fucking difficult and petulant. She made him want to tear his hair out sometimes. Harry was so frustrated because at first he really enjoyed working with Y/N. He always thought she was beautiful, smart, promising and he felt that he could contribute to the music her and her band made. Somewhere down the line she started losing sight and started playing it so safe. The music was suffering and it was so boring and mediocre. Something he knew wasn't her or her band at all; he was trying to guide her back to her original and risk-taking nature. To claim back the sound that had enticed him to produce for them. But boy, was she putting up a fight.
A few days later Harry contacted her to see if she was able to come to his house and finish recording the last song vocals at his home studio. She waited nearly the full day to reply, but at least she didn't leave him hanging.
*******
It was 9am when Y/N was ringing Harry's doorbell as promised. His housekeeper had come to the door and guided her out back. His backyard was beautiful. There was a pool and a hot tub and even a few fruit trees further back on the property then the pool house, which the woman told her was where the studio was located. She thanked her before sauntering back there and opening up the door and peeking in.
"Hey, good morning!" Harry greeted her cheerfully as she stepped inside. It was like a little lounge area where he was. There was a big comfy couch, TV, and a bar and fridge at one end of the room.
"Hi." she said and upon fully entering she saw another person there, "Hello." she then greeted the woman sitting on the couch.
"Good morning." the woman said.
"Y/N, this is Dr. Dauphine Auclair - the vocal coach I kept referring you to?" he said and if Y/N could punch him she so would. She felt her blood boiling and despite that she turned back to the woman and smiled politely.
"Pleasure, Dr. Auclair." she extended her hand and the woman took it.
"I was just making her some tea. Would you like a cup? I've got licorice root or ginger. These are the only throat safe options." he said and she shrugged.
"Ummm, surprise me." she said and he smiled.
"Cool. So Dr. Auclair is here to do a little warming up with you. I know you mentioned that you only took a few lessons in the past, can you elaborate a bit more with Dr. Auclair while I get this going?" he asked her and she swallowed down her rage and nodded before turning to the woman.
Y/N had started to sing in high school and the only "lessons" she had ever taken were when her choir teacher taught them some warm ups. That's what she had been working off of for performances and such for the last 6 or seven years. After a couple of minutes Harry was joining them on the couch and she glared at him in the brief moment that Dr. Auclair took a sip of her tea.
Dr. Auclair went on to explain that she should prioritize this as the vocal cords were sensitive and affected by many things. They were easy to damage and ensuring that her vocal warmups and maintenance evolved along with her was of absolute importance. She just nodded along and Harry watched on silently as she listened along, seemingly captivated by what Dr. Auclair shared with her. He sat in for a bit of her warm up before slipping out to give them a bit of time. After about a half hour he was returning to say his goodbyes and he happened to overhear her confirming another appointment with Dr. Auclair. He gave them a moment before knocking on the studio door and announcing himself, he said his goodbyes and walked Dr. Auclair out to her car.
Y/N was glad that Harry didn't have to hear her confirming voice coaching appointments. He actually liked Dr. Auclair and she did feel more relaxed in the throat for the recording session and was looking forward to learning more from her. She had some water and waited in the control room for Harry to return.
"Ready to go?" he asked as he came back in, tone cheerful.
"Yeah, good to go." she said and he had been right, she was recording the vocals with ease, even the higher harmonies and ad-libs he was suggesting. And after about an hour and a half they had finished up and Harry was giving her a thumbs up through the glass and she smiled as she hung up the headphones and headed into the control room.
"That was really good." he smiled and she sighed.
"Yeah, it felt good too. I'm not as tired as before."
"That's good. Dr. Auclair was helpful then?" he asked and she nodded.
"Yeah." she smiled.
"I'm sorry if the way I suggested coaching to you before made you feel like I thought you were bad or unskilled, that's not at all why." he said, "I think you're extremely gifted and I just want you to take great care of your instrument. Just looking out for you, s'all." he said to her and she sighed.
"I can see that now." she admitted, "I'm sorry too for... acting like a brat as you so eloquently put it." she said to him and he chuckled and glanced down as his fingers combed through his hair.
"Entitled brat s'what I said I think." he hummed and she rolled her eyes, "There you go again." he hummed and she scoffed.
"Rolling my eyes is not bratty."
"S'petulent though. Childish."
"I know what petulant means you smug prick." she said and he smirked.
"S'that mouth of yours that gets you into trouble." he chuckled and she shrugged.
"I have a lot to say."
"Not everything needs to be said. Specially when you have a face as expressive as yours." he pointed out and she giggled before biting her lip.
"I know...I need to be more mindful of that." she huffed.
"Can I be honest with you?" he asked and she nodded, "Won't get all salty with me?" he asked as he took a seat beside her and she chuckled.
"I'll try not to." she smiled and he chuckled.
"I'm hard on you because you're better than whatever the fuck has been going on with you the last few months. You guys sounded different, had something so special and unique about you. Lately it just seems that you're trying to fit in with the fads. Almost like you're scared to just be yourselves. And the rest of the band, they really look to you for guidance and Y/N, you've been playing it safe. It's not at all like you." He said and she sighed, "Don't know why you take your anger out on me when I know for a fact all of my suggestions are living up to the vision in your head." he said and she looked into his eyes.
"I get angry at you because you have the guts to be yourself and execute your vision so unapologetically. I feel like... I may seem like it, but I'm not brave enough." she confessed and Harry tutted.
"But you're brave enough to come gripe at me and speak your mind without a question?" he asked with a chuckle, "You're definitely brave enough to unapologetically be yourself." He assured her and she smiled timidly. "I see it every single day. Don't keep that part of you out of the music. It's what makes you special." he said and she sighed.
"I guess I'll be honest with you and tell you that I was really excited when I heard that you agreed to produce the album. I really admire your work too, I'm a big fan of yours." she confessed.
"Oh really?" he asked and she chuckled and nodded, "Never would've guessed." he teased and she rolled her eyes again. "Should start charging you every time you roll your eyes at me." he said and she giggled.
"Yeah, maybe. You're kinda of a pain in the ass." she scrunched her nose up and he mimicked her expression mockingly which made her laugh.
"There she is!" he announced happily, "That's the girl I first met." he hummed and she felt her face heating up, "Don't want to fight with you anymore. I want us to work well together, communicate better, so that we can make the best album possible. Want you to be involved in every bit of it." he said, "Can we agree on that?" He asked her and she bit her lip and nodded, her eyes meeting his. She was fucking pretty and undoubtedly a handful, but he didn't care. His eyes flickered down to her lips and then her eyes again, "Good." he hummed. Y/N was positive she hadn't imagined him look at her lips and she felt her heart pounding but pushed it aside. After a few more minutes he was standing outside of her car with her as they said their goodbyes.
"Thanks for today, Harry." she said and he smiled.
"Yeah of course. Anything you need, you let me know." he assured and she smiled, "So long as that bratty attitude is stowed away." he warned.
"Mmmm, no. Think it's good to keep you on your toes." she said, "Besides, I think you like it a little more than you let you on." she smirked and now he was blushing.
"Whatever helps you sleep at night, love." he chuckled a bit nervously and she bit her lip as her eyes trailed down to his soft ones. So pretty and pink, he definitely noticed.
"OK, we'll talk soon."
"Definitely." he assured and he watched her pull out of his driveway with a half hard cock and a muttered curse. He didn't know how yet, but he was gonna make her his.
READ ONE SHOT FOR PART 2
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2023/11/10 Blog post by Wakana おしゃべりガーデン第3回目‼︎〜記憶喪失者続出の七五三〜
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Talk Garden #3!! ~Lost Memories of Shichi-Go-Sen~
The November podcast has been uploaded 😃♡ This time's talk topic is "Anecdotes of Shichi-Go-San"!! ️ Funnily enough, almost all the messages I received from everyone were full of "I don't remember". That made laugh🤣🤣I'm sorry, who am I to judge? I honestly don't remember a lot either, I guess we were all too young when we celebrated Shichi-Go-San 😂 I wonder if we should increase the age of celebration from 7(Shichi), 5(Go) and 3(San) to 12 and 15. *laughs* This way, it would be much more memorable 😂 Of course there were also some people who said that they remembered everything perfectly. Some of you mentioned that you remember crying a lot. Very relatable to be honest~ *laughs*
As a small gift to everyone whose message I read in the podcast, I made a handmade glass deco sticker of Shark-chan!\\٩( 'ω' )و // I had a vague idea that a sticker would be a good gift to give as a thank you, so after doing some research, I finally decided on these glass deco stickers! This is the completed set of my Shark-chan glass deco sticker🦈🦈🦈🦈💕A small gift! You can draw whatever picture you like on the film sheet by using the paint, then let it dry and it's done. It takes about 8 hours to dry the whole thing, but I let it dry for about two days just to be sure. Shark-chan is being mass-produced... (I also made one with some odd colouring.) When I tried sticking it on my Mac, the shark looked a bit wrinkled. But these are so much fun to make! 😳✨The glass deco paint is released by the same company that makes the popular Arabic Yamato glue. According to the official description, magical paint is a mixture of paint and glue that turns into colourful and shining stickers and looks like stained glass after drying😊 I didn't know about the existence of these stickers at all until I researched it but they seem to be quite popular😳When I went to Daiso, they also sold paint for this 😳From now on, I want to try more different kinds of drawings! ! \\٩( 'ω' )و // So, everyone whose message I read, please wait patiently for your Shark-chan sticker to arrive!
And I have some news! For the fan club event that will be held after the "Wakana Classics 2023 ~Winter Party~" on December 15th, we have decided to do a poll for the song that I will be singing during that particular section! I started my classical concerts back in 2020 with the "Wakana Covers ~Anime Classics~" album. I thought I would let everyone choose from a selection of songs from this album😉Click here for the poll!
・Yasashisa ni tsutsumareta nara
・Inochi no Namae
・Kimi no Todoke
・Get Wild
・Yume no Yukue
Please let me know which song you would like to hear! ! ! ♪♪♪\(^o^)/♪♪♪ Lastly, here's a picture of my Gazania which bloomed again due to the abnormally warm temperatures(?)🌼It's blooming so beautifully 😳💕I'm so happy ♡
Well, I hope you enjoy the new episode! This time it's about 40 minutes long *laughs*Please relax and listen 😊
***Wakana***
Wakana’s Talk Garden#3 「Anecdotes of Shichi-Go-San」
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For this month, the topic is as follows =>
“Anecdotes of Shichi-Go-San”
For next month’s episode which is scheduled to air in December, the topic is "Things I should do before the end of they year but somehow, I turn a blind eye to it." The submission deadline is 11/30.
Wakana Winter Shark Festival Vol.#3 ~ Birthday Cross Talk Event ~
This year, there will once again be a fan club exclusive online streaming event to celebrate Wakana's birthday. This year, “Wakana Winter Shark Festival Vol.3 ~Birthday Crosstalk Event~” will be held on December 10th, the day of Wakana's birthday! Wakana will be joined by Yuuka Nanri, they will get together for the first time since spring. Everyone, let's celebrate Wakana's birthday together!!
‖Event details
Wakana Winter Shark Festival Vol.3 ~Birthday Crosstalk Event~
Date: December 10, 2023
Time: 14:00~
Starring: Wakana& Yuuka Nanri(Guest)
‖Ticket details
Ticket sales: Bitfan tickets
Live streaming: Bitfan Live
[Order period] November 11th 18:00 to December 16th 23:59
Event viewing ticket: ¥2,000 (tax included)
*Ticket are limited to FC members
*The archived video will be available for viewing December 18th.
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Toronto or London
Hello Everyone, Am I back? I am not sure, but I just really got stuck in my head these past few days, and well, I figured writing would help me. I didn't really proofread this, so I apologize in advance. I also don't necessarily love this that much, but at least it got me out of my limbo phase.
Warnings: None really
Word Count: 2,510
Summary: She has always been in love with Toronto; she just didn't know why yet.
Enjoy!!
- - - - - - - - -
20/05/2018
“Toronto or London?” — Jimmy asked as the last question of the fast questions round.
“Toronto” — Emily replied, without a second thought to the question. Which got the audience and all her fellow colleagues to look at her by surprise.
“Wait a minute, weren’t you born in London? What makes you choose Toronto?”
“Honestly? I just have always had a good feeling about Toronto, even though I never really got spend that much time there, I hope that at some point once I have a break I manage to go touring on that city.” — She replied, with an honest response. The truth is that she always had a good feeling when she was around Toronto, she just didn’t know why.
- - -
12/06/2018
“Shawn, someone told me you wanted to tryout for a few acting gigs, and that Harry has been pushing you to do it?” — Shawn laughed at the question while nodding his head confirming the information. — “So my question to you is, if you had to work with any actor/actress who would it be?”
“Oh wow, that’s a difficult one Jimmy, but I think I would have to say Emily Wilson, I just really love everything she does, like it would be such an honour. I am a huge fan! Honestly even meeting her would be a huge honour”
“Well I was told she loves Toronto! So maybe it won’t be that hard to find her roaming around the city, you could just ask her on a date you know?” — Jimmy joked.
“I don’t think I would ever even dare to do that!” — Shawn answered, his face definitely a bit flustered.
“Well, but moving on to business Shawn, talk to us about your new album!”
30/09/2019
“So, Emily lets talk about your new film, you are now shooting in Toronto, right?”
“Yes, and it has been an amazing experience to be able to be in Toronto for 3 months now, I really love this city so much!” — She replied with a smile on her face.
“That’s so great! I hope you managed to finally go to all the places you wanted to visit around the city, did you manage to have the time to do that?”
“Oh, I really wish! We barely stopped during the filming process because I need to run to London right after this, we are starting to shoot The Selection series with Netflix, as you all know, so I manage to visit a few places but definitely have to come back.”
“So, if you had to choose between life in Toronto or London, which one would you choose?”
“Toronto!” — She answer without second thoughts. — “Don’t get me wrong I love London, but there is just something about here that I can’t take my head off it.”
- - -
10/01/2020
“Girl I just loved your work so much! I mean you know I love your acting gigs but your song, I just don’t know how you didn’t win song of the year! It was my song of the year for sure!” — Billie said as soon as she spotted Emily at the Grammy’s after party.
“Come on! You are queen here today, don’t even start! You killed it!”
“Thank you! It means a lot coming from you! I heard you are back to filming in New York this month? Maybe we can meet up for a coffee when you are around?”
“Actually, I just finished filming yesterday, I am heading to Toronto tomorrow, and then back to London for more filming.” — Emily said a bit sad she would miss the coffee with Billie.
“No wayyyy! Wait up, I will probably head to Canada for a few days too, Justin recommend me a very nice retreat in which paps won’t find me, and I am in need of some offline days, especially after this crazy night, I feel like I can definitely go for that!”
“That’s amazing, if you want you can come with me in the plane and we have that coffee and you can tell me more about how was this masterpiece production”
“I am in girl! Let’s go!” — Billie answered before being dragged by her brother to answer to a phone call they had just got.
- - -
11/01/2020
“Wait up! You have never talked with Shawn or Justin before? Even though you have been obsessed with Canada your entire life? How is that even possible?
“You know I was nominated for a song for the movie I did right? I don’t actually sing B.” — Emily said laughing at her friend.
“Oh shush girl, you just won a grammy yesterday for best song for visual media, maybe you don’t want to admit but you are good in what you are doing”
“Billie, I literally have one song out!”
“True! But still…”
“Enough on me and my obsession with Canada, tell me more about what you have been up to! It has been so long since we had time to actually talk!” — Emily answered, eager to know more about her friend.
- - -
12/01/2020
“Shawn there is an invitation for you to go to this interview tomorrow with Emily Wilson, I know it is last minute but if you want to do it, we can do it.” — Andrew said over the phone.
“Wait, what? Really? Of course I want to do it, should probably talk to Camilla first about it, but yes.” — He said, immediately texting his girlfriend about the interview as he knew she could become a bit insecure with Shawn going to an interview with his celebrity crush. But her response came out being super supportive which made Shawn at ease about going.
- - -
13/01/2020
“Hello you guys, I was told you had never met! And honestly I didn’t believe it!” — The interviewer at the radio said making Shawn and Emily smile at each other before answering.
“I honestly just never spent enough time here to get to meet new people, I am always hanging out with the crew and it just never happened, but it is an honour to finally meet you Shawn!” — Emily said with a smile.
“No, please the honour is all mine! I just really cannot believe this is happening right now and I am not sure I know exactly how to properly behave, I am like your number 1 fan!” — He said, totally fingerling over her and making her giggle.
“Normally Emily comes over to talk about acting, but today we will talk about song writing, and her process on writing and recording her song for a Disney movie! How did that happen?”
“Well Kate, I don’t even know myself if I am being honest, I knew I would have to sing, but when Julia contacted me asking if I wanted to help with writing it took me a lot by surprise, it was the first time I ever wrote a song in my life, so I definitely was not expecting the response we got, honestly I really believe it was all Julia’s magic and I ended up being there with her by a struck of luck or something” — She answered.
“What do you think of the song Shawn? And how it is writing for you?”
“What do I think of her song? I wrote with Julia a few weeks after they finished recording and Julia couldn’t shut up about you and how you brought all the sparkles into the song, and I really think it is an amazing vulnerable song and that you really should give yourself some more credit, I really love it. And about writing, for me this song is an example of what I am trying to do every day, really just pouring my soul into it and making feelings into words.” — He answered making her blush a little.
“Thank you Shawn, we don’t have a lot of time today unfortunately, so we chose one question from fans for you to answer: If you had to choose between writing in London or anywhere else in the world where would you choose to go?”
“I really like recoding in LA, but London is on my top 5 places too.” — Shawn answered and waited for Emily.
“Toronto, 100%! If there is one place I feel the most comfortable being in such a vulnerable state is Toronto for sure.”
“Time is up, guys thank you so much! I hope I get to see more of you around Toronto Emily, and Shawn let’s please meet up soon! I will see you again tomorrow to talk about the process of filming Game of Thrones with Emilia Clarke!”
As they left the recording room, Shawn finally had the chance to compliment Emily properly.
“I really really love your work so much, you have no idea! — He said in an exited way which made her smile. — Can I hug you? — He asked and she immediately nodded and was engulfed in his hug. She really had a strange sensation when they were hugging, it was the same sensation she felt whenever she would arrive in Toronto, it felt like home. “Is it too much if I ask for an autograph too?” — He asked, making her laugh.
“Of course, here you go.” She signed on his notebook.
They talked for over an hour after the interview, and he also left her his number for whenever she was around if she needed company to tour on his city. She knew he had a girlfriend but at the same time she couldn’t help but to wonder which is also why she promised herself to never text him.
- - -
15/08/2021
“Our final question of the night” — Elen said with a pout and the audience also made a sound of protest. “I know, I know you love her, I love her too!” — She said taking Emily laugh
“And I love you all of course” — She said seeing a kiss to the audience.
“If you had to make a song duet, and I mean a real one, not one with me for this show. Who would you like to sing with?”
“Shawn Mendes” — She said, very fast and without thinking too much.
“Oh wow, that was fast, is there something going on that we don’t know about? You definitely do make a lot of visits to Toronto.” — Elen said, leaving it open to her to interpret it.
“I just really like the way his voice sounds” — She said, bluish a little when she noticed how her response sounded. — “ And of course if we record in Toronto even better”
“Smooth Emily, I guess we all will have to let that slide since our time is up for today”.
- - -
19/10/2021
“So Shawn” — Elen Paused —“Do you watch my show?”
“Whenever I can, I do.”
“A few months ago we had an interview with Emily Wilson, and apparently she really likes your voice” — She said making him blush because he had no idea what she was talking about.
“I am not exactly sure what you are talking about Elen” — He answered, not wanting to mess things up with his favourite star.
“Here is Emily on this show, and what she said” — Elen replayed the clip, and Shawn immediately felt his blushing. “Adorable right?” — She said making him close his eyes for a second and smile timidly.
“I really like the way her voice sounds too, not only in music but also everything she has even acted on, she is perfect in everything she does” — He answered and bit his lip softly at the end, still embarrassed by the situation.
Later that night he was surprised when his phone received a text from Emily, as he hadn’t really talked to her in over a year.
Emily: I will be in Toronto next week, if you are around and want to meet for a coffee maybe?
Shawn: Text me your hotel once you have it and I will pick you up and show you around the city if you want a proper tour.
- - -
25/10/2021
“Connor I am sincerely nervous for this. — Shawn said for the 100th time that day.
“It will be fine, honestly I can’t believe it took you guys so long to actually go on a date!”
“What do you mean, Man I did have a girlfriend before remember?”
“Shawn, we both know your relationship with Mila started for the wrong reasons, and honestly the possibility of it evolving was very slim.” — He said referring to the publicity stunt they had agreed and that later evolved into a relationship. — “You love her, but only as a friend, whereas you have been fungirling over Emi for years, even before Camila.”
“I am not sure if you saying that helps a lot to soothe my nerves at all” — He said adjusting the collar of his shirt and deciding it was time to leave.
- - -
05/04/2022
“Okay, so since you are here, and we are being honest with each other, I though we might as well go for Spill your Guts or Fill your Guts!” — James said being filled by a round of a applauses. — “Everything in here is vegetarian, so you can eat everything, or nothing if you decide to answer the questions.”.
“Oh God, this does not look good at all, but yeah, I am ready, ask me”.
“We are nearing the finale of your series with Netflix, are there any spin-offs of the series being prepared for later? Or is that the last of The Selection we will see? — He asked making her close her eyes.
“Come on James, that is really not fair, I can’t answer this.” — She said trying to sound a bit mad, but laughing at the end.
“That’s all right, you can always go for the onion and garlic tea.” — He said, and she took a sip making a lot of effort to not throw up in the process.
“My turn, James, is there any celebrity who you refused to invite to your show before?” — She read her question and smiled at him.
“She really knows what she is doing you guys, nop I guess olive pudding for me it is” — He said looking a bite of the disgusting looking olive pudding.
“Emily, some photos have been circling around the internet, and I we are all wondering if they are real, so I would like to read Shawn’s last 3 messages to you” — He said making her blush, they still hadn’t officially confirmed nor denied anything, but their photos of the grammy’s were all over the internet already so there was really no hiding to do anymore.
“Okay, I guess you can do that” — She said after verifying the messages quickly.
“Oh wow! I was not expecting that you guys! I really wasn’t, okay so let’s do this:
Hi Emi, I really really miss you.
I hope James is not too mean to you, Love.
Good luck, I love you, and see you later.
“Awww… you guys are melting our hearts right now.” — He said taking her phone close to his heart. — “IT’S REAL EVERYONE!”
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⠀♪ . ⠀ JJ’s FAVE KPOP RELEASES OF 2023 !!! ★
ᶻ (ゝ。∂) ☆ ⠀ im unemployed on a sunday at 4pm quite literally what did you expect. anw everyone’s doing it on twt but my list is 30 songs long & i’m not fucking around embedding 30 videos on my iphone 8 bc that would probably make it explode. Thanks x. this is in no particular order, boygroup-heavy (getting into more ggs is on my new years resolution list trust!!!) and all my opinion. im just here to give my faves their 10s ♡
› ⠀ GO ⠀ ☆ ⠀ !
OO1 ASAP, NEWJEANS ⠀ saw this on a couple people’s worst releases lists ouhhh.. anyway i love this!!! me when it’s just for a minute.. Yeah. AND THE TICK-TOCKS don’t even they’re so fun.
OO2 ETA, NEWJEANS ⠀ yes them again. THE TRUMPETS GOT MEE like they Did that actually!!! boys be always lyinnnn 😒😒 and ofc the iconic back n forth verses w that video.. u know the one don’t lie.
OO3 SOS, NCT DREAM ⠀ stop giving them siren-like noises they’ll make something RIDICULOUSLY cunty out of them (see 119 and fire alarm like what..). when jeno said “Drippin’ too much, I’ma make it rain” i felt the earth shake Not joking.
OO4 POISON, NCT DREAM ⠀ FUCK OFFF they’re whores. whores that make Real Music. me and lee donghyuck **** to this song i am NOT JOKING!!!! this ate down im in tears. and don’t get me started on renjun’s vocals i might actually throw a glass..
OO5 AY-YO, NCT 127 ⠀ textbook 127 excellence it’s true. they all looked so good in the mv (YUTA LEVITATING LMFAOO.. and ty w that spiky hair he DID that), markil ATE, and this j makes me want to like beat someone up idek.
OO6 SKYSCRAPER, NCT 127 ⠀ they sat hyuck in the studio, held a gun to his head, and told him to deliver one of the cuntiest verses like Ever at exactly 1:51. AND THANK FUCK HE DID!!! it makes me want to rob a bank and i start fizzing up like a coke w a mento dropped into it. johnil ate too like let’s be fr.
OO7 CREAM SODA, EXO ⠀ WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT 주체 못 할 APPETITE 내 모든 걸 뒤흔든 그 맛. old men of the year i need to absorb them into my bloodstream. and d.o. in the open shirt.. kyungsoo the glorious man that you are.
OO8 PRIVATE PARTY, EXO ⠀ and again. this album is UP there w my top cbs hello.. why are they allergic to making bad music im sick. sh + cy went hard and the “우리만의 private pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-party” was CRAZYYY i moved so bad.
OO9 PARADE, NCT 127 ⠀ HOLY FUCK????? i actually have no words. when i get my hands on mark lee.. ohh you don’t even want to know. WHY IS HE LIKE THISSSS he is genuinely incapable of not laying down the hardest verses in the history of the world. and i thank him for it. JOHNNY AND JAEHYUN TOO MY GODDD i was going insane. 10 OUT OF 10!!! if i had to rank this list this would be near the top no questions asked.
O1O LOVE IS A BEAUTY, NCT 127 ⠀ me when i hold moon taeil in my arms and slow-dance with him and then put him to bed wrapped in a soft blanket tucked up to his chin.. (he is 29). notoriously a slower/softer song disliker but THIS.. Yeah. if anyone speaks on it i fear i’ll have to shoot them.
O11 PADO, NCT U ⠀ HELP i swear the nct stops after this. but how can you hear this and not want to fuck sth up like it goes so crazy.. and do NOT mention the words “haechan pado 230826” to me otherwise i might have to jump off of a cliff. I HATEW IHM SO BAGFDD FUCK
O12 JUMP, P1HARMONY ⠀ MY BOYS WERE GETTING 0 NOISE ON TWT IT WAS SICKKK. they ate!!! the mv ate!!! this is so fun and silly and p1h excellence and fun!!! everyone get up and JUMP. NOW.
O13 MORE THAN WORDS, P1HARMONY ⠀ VOCAL KINGS I FEEL ILL. you ask the people who in 4th gen was doing it like keeho theo and jiung and i fear the people will be silent. and seobtak.. let’s not. they’re just Like That. and it’s the best we cheered!!!
O14 IN BLOOM, ZEROBASEONE ⠀ won the best 5th gen debut competition EASILY. clean sweep. it’s fresh and fun and funky what more could you literally ask for. AND THE PRE-CHORUSSS it makes me want to melt into the floor. no other 5th gen groups can compare imo. riize might b in competition when they ACTUALLY DROP SIREN ?
O15 NEW KIDZ ON THE BLOCK, ZEROBASEONE ⠀ SINGING TA-DA-RA-RA-RA FEELS LIKE NEW KIDZ ON THE BLOCK!!! just club beat fun like if you put me in the dj booth im bumping this. and matthew ATE his “That’s my role 뻔한 hero보다는 antihero” line let’s not lie.
O16 TAKE MY HAND, ZEROBASEONE ⠀ dethroned crush Ridiculously easily like what.. I WAS FEELING TS ITS CRAZYYYY how can you listen to this and NOT move are you insane. the way they kinda make their vocals go up and down (does that make sense) i Love it.
O17 HAPPILY EVER AFTER, TXT ⠀ gyu getting no lines is INSANE. but this does hit im dancing (just not the choreo.. i think i would break a limb i can’t do ts). taehyun ate and the pre-chorus goes crazy. we all cheered!!!!
O18 TINNITUS (WANNA BE A ROCK), TXT ⠀ was debating between this or srr but this is sm more fun so here it is. one thing taebin did here, you ask? ATE DOWN would be the answer. me when i cook them for dinner and serve them up on a platter. this is on the me and sb *** playlist it’s true..
O19 3D, JUNGKOOK ⠀ jk has phone sex CONFIRMED? also im sorry but jack’s verse lowk goes hard too like.. BUT THIS OUTSOLDD LIKE IM BEING SO SRS. saw someone say jk’s solo releases outdid bts’ whole discog and like.. Yeah. YOU KNOW HOW I LIKE IT GIRLLL... 3D!!!
O2O SPICY, AESPA ⠀ DON’T HURT ‘EM KARINA.. oh my gdo she did it anyway. and giselle ate too let’s not forget that!!! the mv is giving little mix but in a good way and also if little mix was x10 more cunt. LOVE THEM!!!
O21 HARD, SHINEE ⠀ THE MV HIT SO GOOD WHY’D THEY GO CRAZY LIKE THAT. and key looked so good i passed out actually.. this being on some people’s worst releases list was CRIMINAL ik everyone’s entitled to their own opinions but that’s just Wrong. if you don’t go hard like a criminal hard like the beat then idk what to tell you..
O22 SEOUL DRIFT, ONLYONEOF ⠀ rumoured to have broken the scale on the cuntmeter.. they should put this on the GTA6 soundtrack omg?! one thing these boys are gonna do is eat down in neon lights and hard fits. it’s true i checked!!
O23 SHOOTING STAR, XG ⠀ excellence i fear.. i need to kiss whoever made this beat on the lips like actually IT’S TOO GOODDD. and the matching blue hair in the mv omg they’re so cunty. IT’S SO FUNN AND EVERYTHING IN THE MV LOOKS AMAZING TOO?!? im ill.
O24 GOLDEN HOUR, MARK ⠀ not me lying.. oh well. it’s MARK LEE did u rly think he wasn’t gonna be on here. one word away from telling the whole world he’s packing oh i love this man so much. GORDON RAMSEY FOUND DEAD IN A DITCH AFTER RELEASE OF MARK’S GOLDEN HOUR!!! he’s topping my fave and fuck knows he can top me too. i dont know how to make eggs😭😭😭😭
O25 SHALALA, TAEYONG ⠀ cunt himself! the whole crowd collapsed, buildings exploded, sirens were blaring, fires broke out.. it was a whole situation. THE MV IS ACTUALLY ONE OF MY FAVOURITES EVERR he really Did That like im in shock. if you don’t got the bounce Wow, wow, wow, wow then that is ENITRELY your problem. because i do :P
O26 DO NOT TOUCH, MISAMO ⠀ it’s classy it’s mother it’s wonderful their outfits are giving their hair is giving the music is giving it just doesn’t get much better than this. everyone in the room cheered and danced and if you didn’t then there must be something a little wrong with you. BANGER!!
O27 ROVER, KAI ⠀ oh you know i had to include father himself.. had the whole industry dancing and RIGHTFULLY SO!!! GOOD FOR HIM!!! pre-chorus makes me want to die in the best way.. like oh im Moving!!!! just again not to the choreo. mayb i’ll learn it next year. OH and the mv is amazing too!!!
O28 CHACONNE, ENHYPEN ⠀ oh this is seriously cunty evil like i love it. HEESEUNG AND JUNGWON LIKE LET’S NOT??? they’re so good when they’re evil vampires or whatever they are idk i don’t keep up w the lore.
O29 SACRIFICE (EAT ME UP), ENHYPEN ⠀ ANOTHER DARK BLOOD HIT IKTR.. kind of went crazy w this one like let me sway and move Okayyy! olivia wilde nodding rn it’s so good. Wht do u even know ab But here you are 빛으로 가득한 너..
O3O POPPY, STAYC ⠀ last but not least!! NODDING AND CHEERING AND JUMPING UP AND DOWN!!! do NOT ask how many times i’ve watched jeno dance to this the answer is something horrific and may scare some people. a Hit actually i love the stayc girlies. asap is one of my fave kpop songs EVER no arguments.
ahh ok and thats my list complete!!! i do hv some honourable mentions.. god of music svt, misty nct 127, bouncy atz, break the brake xdh, and eve psyche & bluebeard's wife by le sserafim!!! this is so long bye 1thing ab me i am allergic to never shutting the fuck up. like who cares 😭 anw baii i love moon taeil
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Early Sunsets over Monroeville - MCR Interviews
89.5 WSOU FM Interview - 7/11/02
14:12-15:33, 20:21-20:32, 21:20-21:28, 21:47-21:51
Interviewer: Do you think that added to the performance, that you had to actually get through the pain?
Gerard: For Early Sunsets Over Monroeville, definitely. I was in-- It was like, I don’t know like 10-- 9:30 at night. We were just getting ready-- It was the last song we did for the day, and I was in so much pain. And I just-- you know Geoffy [Geoff Rickly] was like, “Alright, let her rip.”
Interviewer: That’s the mellow song, right?
Ray: Right, that’s the-- what’s awesome about that too is the last, I think it’s like the last 3 minutes of that song is just one take, no edits, no stops, no cuts. It’s just...It’s an amazing performance by-- by him and just by all of us, I think because we-- we wrote that song like a few days before we went into the studio. It wasn’t finished when we recorded it, so it was just us, you know, kinda letting all of us [unintelligible], you know?
Interviewer: (Overlapping) It was your studio song.
Ray: Right, we wrote it in the studio.
Interviewer: Well since we’re hyping this up so much... (Ray laughs) We might as well play it ‘cause everyone out there’s going “Wow, sounds like a great song.”
Ray: Hopefully
Interviewer: “I wanna hear him crying.” (Ray and Gerard laugh) “I wanna hear that tooth.” (Continued laughter) So, I guess let’s go into a little bit background of the song, and then we’ll play the song for everybody, and everyone can hear.
Gerard: Okay, Mikey does not want me to reveal--
Interviewer: He’s going “No! You’re out!”
Gerard: (Overlapping) what the song is about, but if you-- there’s plenty of clues in it, so if you figure out, it’s-- I’ll say it’s about a film. Is that enough?
Ray: Yeah, that’s good.
Gerard: Okay, you can figure out--
Ray: (Interrupting) Horror film
Gerard: Alright. (Pauses then laughs) You messed it up! (Arguing in background)
Interviewer: What are some of your favorite songs off this record to play live and actually-- or during the recording process?
Ray: Um, I think recording process-wise, definitely “Monroeville.”
Frank: (Talking about his favorite songs) And “Monroeville” because I had no clue what I was gonna do. (Interviewer laughs) I wrote it in the van before we recorded, and I had like frostbite on my fingers so it kinda sucked.
Mikey: I like the “Monroeville” song. (To Gerard) It was fun watching you tweak out at the end. (Gerard laughs)
/
Noise Theory Interview - 11/13/02
Page 1, paragraph 5
Interviewer: Even though ‘My Chemical Romance’ as a band have been together only a short time, the album displays some excellent and mature song writing skills. Were the album songs written after the band became complete?
Ray: We started in October 2001, and had written 5 songs by January 2002. This was when the band was still a four piece. The rest of the songs came together a few weeks before we went to record. Honey This Mirror and Early Sunsets were written about a week before we left for the studio. We asked Frank to be in the band around the same time, so to get his input on those songs really helped them become what they are.
/
HardcoreNJ Interview - March/April 2003
Paragraph 3
Interviewer: What was the inspiration behind "Early Sunsets Over Monroeville"?
Matt: Musically there wasn't any inspiration, 2 days before the recording I happened to be strumming an acoustic guitar in our practice space, and the guys all seemed to like what I was playing (which is a rarity). Anyways, we knew we wanted something different on the record to reflect our softer side. I think it was the most magical part of recording process, seeing a 2 day old song kinda just work, we didn't even have an ending for it. We all just jammed it out improvising. Oh, and the vocals were inspired by a certain movie...
/
89.5 WSOU FM Interview - 7/3/03
8:25-8:31, 8:59-10:27
Interviewer: Alright, so, we’re gonna hear “Monroeville.”
Ray: It’s a slow one. Grab your girl...and then shoot her in the head. (Laughter)
Interviewer: I remember a long time ago when you were recording this record that you had a problem while you were singing this song.
Gerard: Yeah, I had a hole in my tooth and an abscess in the hole, and it was pushing against all the nerves in my face, and it looked like I had Parkinson’s, and it was (a?) drag, and it--
Interviewer: And your face was droopy, and--
Gerard: It was drooping, and I looked like a-- I went to hospitals the whole time we were recording, and they thought I had facial nerve paralysis, nerve damage, so I had to do that song, like basically with, yeah like the most intense pain and half a face. (Dramatically) Half a face!
Interviewer: So, alright, everyone listening out there, now you know he did this song with half a face.
Gerard: (After a pause) Half a face. (Laughter)
Interviewer: How did you feel about the song after you played it? I know you must have been like, you know, “This can’t be the best I can do” because you’re all messed up and stuff. (Ray protesting in background)
Gerard: It felt like that, but (Unintelligible as Gerard and interviewer talk at the same time) when I was doing it, but everybody was so psyched on it when I did it--
Ray: Psyched! People were crying--
Gerard: They were crying man (Laughter)
Ray: It was amazing. It was the most amazing, definitely the most amazing--
Matt: (Overlapping) Yeah, we were definitely a bunch of wusses.
Frank: Alright, correction, not a bunch of wusses. Ray and Otter (Matt) cried. (Laughter) That’s what happened.
Ray: No no no, I will definitely say I--
Mikey: The red sea might have been parted when my brother did that part.
Ray: I cried. I think Alex [Saavedra] might have shed a singular tear.
Interviewer: A singular tear?
Ray: It was definitely some crying going on. (Matt talking in background)
Gerard: (Overlapping) I got a hug after that one
Ray: (Overlapping) It was bad.
Gerard: (Overlapping) I got a hug. I got lots of hugs after that.
Interviewer: (After a pause and laughter) Alright, so how’d you feel about the hugs afterwards?
Gerard: The hugs were sweet. (Laughter in background) The record was sweeter.
/
Punk It Interview - 10/29/03
Paragraph 28
Sev (Interviewer): What are some of the biggest disagreements amongst yourselves?
Gerard: We mesh really well musically and personally. We all have a good time, so there's probably not that many disagreements. The only thing I think we ever disagree upon is if we're going to play "Early Sunsets Over Monroeville" or not. We had a little thing tonight. Some guys wanted to play it tonight, but I'm not sure. It's an ad lib song - the first verse was written, but the last part of the song was freestyle. And I'm not fucking Eminem, so unless the vibe is right, I don't like to do it. I did it in Chicago because the vibe was perfect. It basically happens in the middle of the set. We feel the energy, and if they can deal with it, we can deal with it.
/
Life On the Murder Scene - 2005
31:24-32:01
Ray: And Frank played on 2 of the tracks off the first record, and one of them was “Early Sunsets Over Monroeville.”
(“Early Sunsets” begins to play)
Ray: He just plays some great, great parts.
Frank: (Cuts to different interview) When we were doing “Monroeville”, Ray was laying down his parts, and as soon as he was done, I took the parts that they had recorded into a van, that had like no heat, outside the studio and wrote what I was gonna play.
Ray: (Back to first interview) A lot of the melody that he plays during the verses and the choruses is just, you know, absolutely beautiful, and I think really makes those songs work.
/
Barcelona Live Stream - 3/5/11
6:10-6:34
Ray: (Reading a live chat feed) Ooh, would you ever play “Early Sunsets”?
Frank: Oh, we have (turns to Ray while Mikey speaks in the background) this tour? I don’t know.
Ray: I can’t even remember the last we played that.
Frank: I think it was in Chicago.
Ray: Yeah?
Mikey: (After a pause) Oh yeah, we played it in the Metro.
Gerard: (Unintelligible as multiple people speak) like “The End”?
Frank: Yeah
Ray: That would be a cool one to revisit.
Gerard: It was a cool-- I think especially if we give it some structure at the end like, ‘cause that was the problem with playing that song. It has no definitive ending, like it kinda just keeps going and going.
/
Kerrang #1376 (alt) - 8/10/11
Page 3, paragraph 11
Interviewer: I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love” was released in July 2002. What do you think of it now?
Ray: You can hear the nervousness and excitement. Every song speeds up which gives them a lot of character. I like the rawness, especially in the vocals. It sounds very true. I get emotional, too. Early Sunsets Over Monroeville is unlike anything we’ve ever done since -- it’s amazing.
/
Where Are Your Boys Tonight? (Chris Payne) - 2020-2022
Chapter 9, page 113
Geoff Rickly: When we were in the studio, Gerard’s wisdom teeth were really hurting him, and he wasn’t able to sing, so he went to the dentist to have them out and afterwards they gave him a bunch of painkillers. He didn’t sing with the fire or the venom, so Alex took the painkillers away from him. Like, “You gotta sing in pain, fuck you! You gotta feel it!” I was taking the painkillers, watching him sing the record. I remember lying on the floor and coaching him through how to sing “Early Sunsets Over Monroeville,” the ballad on the record. I was saying, “You’re following the music, make the music follow you. More intense! The music will catch up to you.”
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(Photo of me and my husband by @mettieostrowski on insta)
Caroline Polachek as a Sociological Phenomena and why it’s Important to Gatekeep Twinks.
So there I was (picture unrelated) waiting for the train at 10:30 PM on a Sunday so I can go take some extra estradiol from a generous friend at a gay bar, full incognito, wearing a fucking hoodie, I’m so tired I spent all day working on the flier for my new absurdist drag bingo because I and everyone I know are walking parodies of bushwick transexuals.
Train is taking forever so I have some time to kill, and I decide (d? Should I care about continuity? I am not a writer, I’m an author.)
Anyway I decided to put the recent Caroline Polachek album on, which is big for me because I have been a bit of a Caroline Polachek denier. I listened to Chairlift very casually when I was a teenager but I was far from die hard and since then I’ve kind of just thought of her as an unfortunate but all too common case of a talented musician being so aggressively HAIM-Pilled that it’s practically deafening. I say this as a dyke with love for all dykes❤️
Also the “new queen of artpop” claims coming from the exact type of 5’8 naturally dirty blonde he/they’s I’ve made it my life goal to disagree with at all times are really not helping her case for me.
Because here’s my thing. I’m a Kate Bush ride or die, surprising I know. I have I’ve always been a coward tattooed below my collarbones like the only 1% I’ll ever be a part of is her Spotify listeners.
But here’s the tea, if you’re not ready and willing to hee haw like a fucking donkey on a song that’s probably about some form of domestic abuse you just aren’t the new queen of artpop. I do make the rules and to be honest the only people in pop music right now not named lady fucking gaga who has the panache, the gaul, the unwavering commitment to pull stunts and shenanigans on that level are Ethel Cain and Lingua Ignota, especially since FKA Twigs decided she wanted to live a happy and fulfilling life (and good for her, thank you for all the good times queen)
And Caroline is simply not there, she’s too squeaky clean and widely appealing to go to those absurd and ugly places that make a Bjork.
Now my personal cocomelon/surrogate father figure Anthony Fantano the Internet’s Busiest Music Nerd did love her album, and I usually agree with his takes (mbdtf is mid you just love it because it was baby’s first concept album and you have a deep yearning to return to a time in your life where you first realized music could be art) BUT WHILE I AGREE WITH MANY OF HIS TAKES (sorry) my one glaring exception is that he never takes how cunt something is into consideration while evaluating a piece of music, and by that I do mean that he said gaga peaked at fame monster and 212 is the only good azealia banks song. He doesn’t have the tools to engage with music in a fag like manor, so when we’re dealing with music for gays, I don’t trust him.
And then last night I saw a Drag Queen named The Illustrious Pearl perform welcome to my island as a showgirl vampire wearing rhinestoned knee pads and frankly if Caroline is good enough for her she’s certainly good enough for me.
And I’m gonna be really vulnerable here, I really enjoyed the album. Like, there’s about as much art in it’s pop as cranberry in a gay bar vodka cran but it’s damn good pop and the art adds a nice little aftertaste.
I believe is definetely my favorite, those Rhythm Nation/Mortal Kombat ass synth hits always make me convulse (America Has A Problem is my favorite track off Renaissance) (it took me a whole 2 minutes to spell renaissance right) but I also like welcome to my island a lot and I at least liked everything else except for Billions which sounds like a song that was rejected from The Sensual World because Kate would never release a song that non-violent.
But it was cute. I have a meeting with a literal church upstate that is trying to book me for their pride drag show tomorrow and one of them just texted me “Brainstorming with the Holy Spirit is so exciting and so fruitful ✝️💜✝️) and I believe those synth hits on I Believe will carry me through my challenges tomorrow. Love Down.
Xoxo
-Evangeline
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so many great singles dropped this month!! 2024 is shaping up to be a rlly exciting year for music. plenty of interesting projects are coming within the next few months and the singles accompanying them have me setting my hopes super high. here are my thoughts on some of the most notable singles & songs from the month!!!
to check out my thoughts on some of the albums, EPs, and mixtapes that came out this month click here!!!
since three noteworthy artists dropped singles like right after i posted this i made an add-on post here!!
also feel free to follow me on rate your music and twitter <3
"Turn the Lights Back On" - Billy Joel
◇ genres: piano rock, singer-songwriter
The way they hyped up Billy Joel's performance of his first single in over 30 years at the Grammy awards earlier this month ironically described why I'm not crazy about the track. The way it was framed in the video, and how I perceive the situation given the song itself, was that Freddy Wexler consistently pushed Joel to get back into the studio until finally Joel conceded. It was played up for laughs, but this song really does sound like a "please, will you get off my back" kind of thing. I don't know, it's fine. I feel like an asshole pooh poohing on a new single from Billy Joel, but it just feels so unnecessary. I doubt this will lead into a full album. Likely, the Piano Man will continue to sell out Madison Square Garden multiple times a year and play the songs everyone actually wants to hear.
listen here:
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"Burning Down the House" - Paramore
◇ featured on Everyone’s Getting Involved: A Tribute to Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense (not yet released)
◇ genres: new wave, pop rock
Paramore have provided the lead single for the new Stop Making Sense tribute album being headed up by A24 Music. It's a decent cover. The band can't really capture the frenetic, weird energy of the original, but that is an impossibly high task. Judging by some of the other artists involved in this project, this might be the best we get. I don't wanna be a hater because I'm hopeful this project might introduce more people to one of the greatest live albums, concert films, and bands of all time, but we shall see!
listen here:
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"Floating on a Moment" - Beth Gibbons
🥇 SONG OF THE MONTH
◇ featured on Lives Outgrown - Beth Gibbons (not yet released)
◇ genres: chamber folk, psychedelic folk, singer-songwriter
Beth Gibbons releasing a new solo album wasn't on my 2024 bingo card, but holy shit I'm so excited. Her feature on Kendrick Lamar's Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers nearly 2 years ago really got me excited to hear more new stuff from her and "Floating on a Moment" was exactly what I needed. This song is so good. Gibbons' voice is obviously fucking incredible, that goes without saying, but this sound suits her so well. That chorus is one of the best things I've heard this year so far. The twinkling guitars paired up with her vocals feels like you're ascending to a higher plane of existence. Not to mention that refrain at the start of the outro!!! What a lead single and what a comeback for one of the most distinct vocalists of all time. Can't wait for the full album. Ranks highly among my most anticipated albums of the year so far.
listen here:
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"Dreamfear" | "Boy Sent From Above" - Burial
◇ genres: breakbeat hardcore, electro
Not entirely sure if this is an EP or a single, but I'm gonna throw it on here anyway. London electronic artist Burial is back with his first release for the XL label. 2 over 10 minute tracks that are pretty cool! My knowledge about Burial's sound isn't super expansive, I've only heard Untrue, but there's some really cool sounds here. Of the two tracks, "Boy Sent From Above" is probably my favorite. I love the more atmospheric vibe to it. The drops are really satisfying too. I'll try to revisit this again once I'm more familiar with Burial's work, but I still enjoyed these songs a good bit.
listen here:
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"RiTchie Valens" | "Dizzy" - RiTchie
◇ featured on Triple Digits [112] - RiTchie (not yet released)
◇ genre: experimental hip hop
RiTchie, formerly of Injury Reserve and currently half of By Storm, has released his first two solo singles and is teasing a new upcoming project. I was a bit surprised by this because I assumed we would be getting some kind of By Storm project first after they released "Double Trio" late last year. This single is also a big change of pace compared to the tone of what they've been doing. Here, RiTchie is playful throwing out confident bars over a shimmering beat. The little "RiTchieeee, RiTchieee's" throughout the song are so silly too. The second single "Dizzy" is even better. It only dropped a couple days ago, but I can't stop listening to it. Alongside its release, RiTchie officially announced his first solo project coming in April. We're in for a real treat.
listen here:
"RiTchie Valens"
Apple Music
Spotify
Bandcamp (not available)
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YouTube
"Dizzy"
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"Butterfly Net" - Caroline Polachek & Weyes Blood
◇ featured on Desire, I Want to Turn Into You Everasking Edition - Caroline Polachek
◇ genres: art pop, new age
Caroline Polachek has released a deluxe edition of Desire, I Want to Turn Into You this month and it features a host of new tracks. One of them being this reworking of "Butterfly Net" featuring Weyes Blood. The original wasn't my favorite on the album, but this reworking has made me appreciate it a bit more. These two have really powerful vocals and they play off of each other very well. I haven't gotten the chance to listen to all of the new tracks from the deluxe version, but if they're as good as this then I'm excited. I also should probably revisit the whole album itself sometime soon.
listen here:
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"16 Carriages" | "Texas Hold 'Em" - Beyoncé
◇ featured on Act II - Beyoncé (not yet released)
◇ genre: country pop, country soul, contemporary country
Beyoncé surprise dropped two singles during the Super Bowl and announced the follow-up to her amazing 2022 album RENAISSANCE. While that album was focused on celebrating dance and house music as well as the black and queer pioneers of those genres, Act II seems to be trying to do the same for country. "16 Carriages" is the clear highlight here and Beyoncé feels right at home with this sound. Love the way she leans into the country soul side of things and I hope we get more of that on the album. "Texas Hold 'Em" is a bit rowdier, but it's the weaker of the two. I love the instrumentation though, for both tracks actually. Perhaps the best thing about "Texas Hold 'Em" is that it finally knocked Jack Harlow's boring, uninspired "Lovin On Me" off the number 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100. I'm hoping it'll grow on me when it's in the context of the full album. I'm super excited to see where she can take this sound.
listen here:
"16 Carriages"
Apple Music
Spotify
Bandcamp (not available)
SoundCloud
YouTube
"Texas Hold 'Em"
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"Capricorn" | "Gen-X Cops" - Vampire Weekend
◇ featured on Only God Was Above Us - Vampire Weekend (not yet released)
◇ genres: indie pop, chamber pop
I was a massive Vampire Weekend fan when I was in high school. I was listening to Modern Vampires of the City almost every day, I was obsessed. I would be lying if I said they were something I "grew out of" because these new singles really hit the spot for me. "Capricorn" sounds like a darker take on what the band was doing on a lot of Father of the Bride, leaning into some of the more psychedelic and folkier sounds. "Gen-X Cops" is more reminiscent of their earlier work, but still has a more mellow and introspective slant to it. Love the almost surf-rock sound at the start of it. Both tracks dive into themes of aging and Koenig makes some pretty poignant observations. Really excited for the new album!
listen here:
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"Training Season" - Dua Lipa
◇ genres: dance-pop, disco
I loved Dua Lipa's Future Nostalgia and it even made it into my top 5 albums of 2020 (don't go back on my rym and look at the list, i'm embarrassed at my writing from that time). I was super excited about whatever Lipa would drop next and it looks as if she's building up to a new project probably sometime this year. "Training Season" follows "Houdini" and I feel the same sense of apathy for the latter that I do the former. Neither are bad by any means and the production work by Kevin Parker on these singles is stellar, but it just feels like something is missing. Lipa still sounds like a star, but these hooks just don't grab me like some of her singles from a few years ago. Again, neither "Training Season" or "Houdini" are bad songs, but I'm just having a hard time getting into them. Hopefully they grow on me in the context of a full project.
listen here:
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"Saturn" - SZA
◇ featured on LANA - SZA (not yet released)
◇ genres: neo-soul, alternative r&b
I'm not up to date on the SZA lore, but when this dropped I saw people saying that it was "finally on streaming" so I guess this song has been around for a bit. I think it's the lead single for SZA's LANA album, which is a reissue of SOS ... uhhhh I don't know this is very confusing to me. What I am sure of, is that SZA can make a damn good song. "Saturn" is further proof of that. This feels like a cut from CTRL and I love it. It has this hazy, dream-like production with SZA's distinct vocal style that sounds like she's bouncing along the beat. Really great stuff. I'm still not sure what LANA is, but as long as we get some more great songs I'm not gonna complain!
listen here:
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"Fool" - Adrianne Lenker
◇ featured on Bright Future - Adrianne Lenker (not yet released)
◇ genres: indie folk, singer-songwriter
Another excellent single from Adrianne Lenker ahead of her new album coming next month. "Fool" is a lot shorter and sounds a lot more upbeat than "Sadness As a Gift" from last month, but it still has Lenker's signature writing style. It feels like ever since Songs she's just on an unstoppable role. I thought the well might've run at least a little dry following Big Thief's incredible double album from two years ago, but that's quickly been proven not to be the case. I'm not sure if this new album will be better than Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You, but it certainly has the potential to be Lenker's best solo project. Definitely one of my most anticipated albums of the year, can't wait to listen.
listen here:
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"Hand On Me" - Nourished by Time
◇ featured on Catching Chickens - Nourished by Time (not yet released)
◇ genres: chillwave, synthpop
I listened to Nourished by Time's last album Erotic Probiotic 2 in like December of last year and I was so blown away by it that it ended up almost cracking my top 10 favorite albums of the year. It seems like he's not slowing down either, announcing that he has signed to XL and dropping this new single alongside a new EP coming next month. "Hand On Me" is brilliant. Taking his unique vocal style and throwing it alongside some dreamier production is a match made in heaven. Coming off his last album, I said that Nourished by Time is an artist that you NEED to keep your eyes on and this new single proves me right! Can't wait for the new EP.
listen here:
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"Life Is" - Jessica Pratt
◇ featured on Here in the Pitch - Jessica Pratt (not yet released)
◇ genres: brill building, singer-songwriter
The first time I listened to Jessica Pratt was around the time her last album Quiet Signs dropped. I ... wasn't crazy about it. Pratt's unique vocal delivery just didn't resonate with me and I just never revisited it. That was until earlier this month when I, at the behest of my partner, revisited both that album and the two that came before it. I get it now! I was wrong, she's really good! Then like a week later she teases this new single ... perfect timing. This is an interesting new direction for Pratt, sort of ditching the folk of her previous work and instead turning to brill building. The pairing of Pratt's voice and this sound are so satisfying. It's like hearing a forgotten hit from like 1965 only with a bit bit of a more modern, dreamier sound.
listen here:
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"I'm a Man" - Kim Gordon
◇ featured on The Collective - Kim Gordon (not yet released)
◇ genres: industrial hip hop, trap, noise rock, witch house
Kim Gordon's new album is coming out in a few weeks and this month she released another insane sounding single leading up to it. "I'm a Man," like the previous single, has Gordon experimenting with hip hop and trap in a surprisingly ... great way! She mixes those sounds with some noise rock which we all know Gordon fits in like a hand in a glove. The lyrics here are a bit more substantial than the other single as well. The way she sings "come on, Zeus, take my hand" is just so fucking cool. I'm so hyped for The Collective and it's so cool that an Kim Gordon is still experimenting this deep into her legendary career.
listen here:
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"The Invisible Man" - Maruja
◇ genres: post-rock, post-punk, art rock
Following an amazing EP and a string of great singles in 2023, Manchester post-rock band Maruja have returned with their first release of 2024. They're in a really interesting spot right now because they've been dropping some really great stuff without having a debut album to their name. All eyes, at least in pretentious music spheres, are on them. This new single, "The Invisible Man," is certainly no different and its one of their best tracks to date. The instrumentation here is unreal, especially the saxophone parts. I'm a sucker for a post-punk band with a saxophone. Maruja are great at building tension in their songs and that's no different here. Everything just feels very anxious and when the climax finally comes it feels so earned. Their lyricism has also continued to impress me. I'm not sure if this new single means a debut album is on the way sometime this year, but I sure hope it does.
listen here:
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"Doves" - Armand Hammer
◇ featured on We Buy Diabetic Test Strips - Armand Hammer
◇ genres: experimental hip hop, abstract hip hop
billy woods and Elucid have seemingly reissued their amazing album from last year with this incredible new bonus track "Doves." A slow-burning near 9-minute track featuring vocals and guitar from Benjamin Booker. The track begins with some soft guitar over this ambient noise with twinkling pianos interspersed within it. Booker's hushed vocals almost force you to pay attention to them. There isn't as much rapping on this song as you would expect, but when the verses do come in they lack the fire we've come to expect. In a good way, I might add. The noisy ambience gets harsher and harsher as we reach the end of the song. It's almost unnerving. They manage to make you feel so many emotions in just this one track. I've only had a couple days to sit with it, but "Doves" is really great. One of the most experimental tracks these guys have ever put out and it pays off.
listen here:
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thanks for reading <3
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SATIVA ROOT Muster Thunderous Groove For ‘Kings of the Weed Age’
~Review by Billy Goate~
Artwork by Armin Schweiger
Many of us have seen at least one silent movie in our time, probably Nosferatu or maybe even the prophetic Metropolis. On a whim, I decided to take a chance on another silent film one night, and settled randomly on a one-reeler called An Unseen Enemy from 1912. The plot concerned a home assailed by a veiled gunman, and what made it special was long sequences without any title cards. Actors would be talking to each other and I'd be perplexed wondering, "What are they saying now?" Then the most remarkable thing happened: my imagination started to kick in. It was as if I were viewing something happening in a neighbor's house across the street and my mind was scraping to fill in the salient little details.
A similar thing happens when I listen to instrumental metal, whether shorter tracks (The Death Wheelers) or long form compositions (Clouds Taste Satanic): my imagination becomes invigorated in the absence of words. Music, after all, is a storytelling medium. With the right solo, a skillful musician can have their listeners spellbound. Now that's a little harder to do with slower modes like doom, but as many of us have learned from experience there are revelations to be had from investing eartime in the slow 'n' low (think Dopesmoker).
Before us stands 'Kings of the Weed Age' (2023) by SATIVA ROOT from Salzburg, and knowing their point of origin I have to conjecture that there's something special in those Austrian waters, as I've encountered more than a fair share of stellar bands there (Savanah, TarLung, and most recently psychedelic garage rockers High Brian and The Heavy Minds)...not to mention that Salzburg is Mozart's birthplace.
While Sativa Root is a far cry from Wolfgang Amadeus, they are similarly masters of their medium. The record begins with bells ringing ominously through the city square, and one imagines this all happening under an eerie sky lit only by the moon glowing through pregnant clouds. Attention is fixed upon the apocalyptic sounds of The Riffer reverberating across cobbled streets.
Sliding strings grimace and groan, accenting the soft strumming of "Weedotaur." A pensive melody is heard and then two-minutes in crunchy, downtuned machinations are turned loose. Riff and rhythm converge for a theme that's vaguely familiar to the genre, though bands always do it a bit differently. Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard's "Les Paradis Artificiels" comes to mind, and Sativa Root likewise has a flair for dramatic, even worshipful, moments.
"Megalobong" is dark and towering, with low-end notes hammering out a brooding melody. At 3:15, the mood shifts. The band sputters and fumes, then gets all frustrated and grindy, like an animal scratching off pesky little fleas. By 4:30, smoke is released to emphatic notes of ultimate doom. Out of this the guitar speaks, turning into a furious, glistening monologue backed by some excellent drumming.
Stoner humor is evident in many of the song titles, including "Assassins Weed," where the bells return accompanied by windy streets and the gentle desert plucking. By the end of the two-minute mark, the bass swells with girth, drums burst with sulfur and fire, and twin guitars weave and dodge like rivers of lava. The longest of the six tracks, this near 13-minute behemoth had me gazing back at the album cover art -- both are quite ominous.
Sativa Root and Doomed & Stoned have a history spanning 10 years, when we reviewed their first EP. Then in 2018, I did a big piece on their debut full-length Oneiroid. It's good to have them back (now a four-piece) for a second full-length, which boasts six tracks for about 55 minutes of runtime. Their music is more than just heavy, it's consequential. And, yes, it would make a damned fine soundtrack for many a silent film.
Give ear...
Kings of the Weed Age by Sativa Root
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Album Review: GUT - Odour of Torture (1995)
this ones gonna be long bc theres a lot to say abt it. do read it tho
Gut is a goated band in... a certain grindcore subgenre which i do not feel like naming but im sure one could guess after looking at their lyrical content... this is their first full length album and best work in my opinion, but how good is their best?
The first thing that grabs attention on this album is the use of samples. After 2 back to back p*rn samples on the first and second tracks on the album (Woundfuck and Perpetual Sp*rm Ej*culation), one realizes that this is going to be a theme for the project. and indeed it is. I haven't been counting but over the course of my most recent listenthrough of this album (I'm about 42 minutes in as of writing this part of the review) most of, if not all of the tracks have some kind of sample. these range from horror movie clips, to p*rn clips, to just random noises, and also helped establish a norm for this subgenre of grind. I think they add to the atmosphere, ik a lot of ppl hate them, but either way, at least theyre short.
The next thing that tends to come up when I discuss this project with my weirdo friends is the vocals. a lot of ppl HATE the vocals on this album, which i completely understand as I did too upon first hearing this. I got into the second track and heard what sounded like a hobbit being waterboarded and immediately turned it off, as most reasonable people would. But overtime, theyve grown on me. in fact, i think the unique vocals r one of Gut's strong points. Unlike most grind bands, which tend to focus on one or 2 main vocal techniques, Gut's vocalist does a LOT. from deep pitch shifted gurgles to death growls, to the aforementioned hobbit waterboarding noises, this album is a multi-tooled vocal ASSAULT and i think it works rly well in the bands favor, especially when it sounds like hes shredding his throat with his shitty technique /gen.
The songwriting is after. This album doesn't get stale, and it isnt too samey, but it still feels consistent and has a solid atmosphere through out the entire thing. This album is like the musical equivalent of being trapped in a sex dungeon, but in a good way and not in the horrible trauma way of the real thing. Every song is distinct from the other, except for maybe the several filler tracks which are usually only 10-30 seconds long and usually only have a sample, a simple drum beat, and a single riff which repeats the entire time. The full-length tracks on this album are all sick and great in their own ways.
A quick nod to the production, the guitars sound GREAT, very muddy and washed out, and the drums compliment them perfectly, crisp and snappy without sounding too processes. Really just a great production job overall. This album feels dirty and claustrophobic, and while most of that is due to the songwriting, the production compliments it perfectly to create an album that i feel like i need to shower after listening to.
95/100
Standout tracks: Woundfuck, Vomitorium of Maggot Infested... , Consequence, The Taboo Room (really all of them r standout, but these came to mind first. please listen to this album)
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psychonaut 4 - dipsomania album review/feedback.
i've heard of psychonaut 4 during my early days of getting into dsbm. i never really paid attention to them til later. "dispomania" is the first psychonaut 4 album that i've listened to and at first it didn't really catch my attention but it definitely grew on me the more i listened. psychonaut 4 is not among my favorite bands, primarily because their style or approach in dsbm does not align with my usual preferences. however, i still acknowledge and value their released music.
this album gives off a strong post-black metal vibe, which I'm not necessarily against. while i've heard a few post-black metal songs before, i can't say it's my favorite genre. nevertheless, psychonaut 4 has released some noteworthy records that i genuinely enjoy. a lot of people compare this band to another dsbm band "lifelover" which i can see. anyways i'm going to head on with reviewing the tracks of the album..once again, i'll rank them from my least favorite to most favorite. (i won't count the intro btw)
10: 'eyes of a homeless dog'. meh. there's not much going on in this song other than the crying and sad piano music. i can't take it too seriously in my opinion but the piano medley is lovely.
9: 'moldy'. now, this is a much better song than the last one. i really like how this one sounds but it's not something i would go out of my way to look up. however, the riffs and vocals are pretty neat in this.
8: 'don't leave the room.' im not going to lie, the first half felt a little boring to me but towards the middle of the song, it got kinda better(?). there's not much for me to word all i can say is that i definitely prefer this one over the last two.
7: 'we will never find the cure.' alright, the instrumentals in this song are actually quite fantastic. i could definitely feel the "post-black metal" in this song but i'm not complaining. it's good.
6: 'pain dealer'. i believe that this particular song is what makes the album progress in a way. it improves the listening experience for me and i find myself enjoying the album more as a result. specifically, around the 5:30 mark, the slow riff sounds incredibly pleasing to my ears.
5: 'suicide is legal'. i find the guitar riffs in this song to be excellent. i pay a good amount of attention to instrumentals since i feel like they can carry a song. i genuinely enjoy this track.
4: 'beware the silence'. this was a pretty darn good way to start the album. usually for the most part when i discover new albums to listen to, they often have a really boring song that doesn't capture my attention enough to continue listening to the rest of the album. but i digress, this was such a good way to start off the album.
3: 'how much for the hope?'. oh my god. this song is absolutely gorgeous. i can feel the "post- black metal" in this song and im not complaining. the background vocals around the 5 minute mark of the song are a really nice touch to this song.
2: 'personal forest.' some of you may think i added this for a second spot of the list due to its popularity but i shit you not this track is actually just really amazing in my opinion. as a beginner vocalist, i hope that in the future when i improve my vocals i can one day cover this song. that's how much i like it. it took a while for this song to grow on me but i really enjoyed it so much the more i listened that i felt inspired to one day, maybe, do a cover in the future.
1: 'alcoholism'. i feel like this song subtly elevates me to the heavens(or drags me down to hell). graf's vocals enhances my enjoyment of this song and i appreciate the sense of melancholy it carries. towards the middle of the song, i really dig the change of rhythm as it begins to become more rapid which i really liked. the reason why i chose this song as my top favorite of the album is mostly due to the fact that i really loved the change in rhythm and how much i liked both of those changes.
this was requested by @black-metal-booty . thank you so much for the request!
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dairy26
9/30/2023 - 10/01/2023
went to a drag show tonight and worked on music a little.
the music stuff is pretty light, i started a new song and wrote some lyrics, there's still a riff i need to put into midi and that might be a whole other song, and there's another song / riff i need to fill out. but i think working these 3 new things out, there might be one more short song left to do for the project, and then i think that'd be it for songwriting, or who knows, i should just keep making short songs if/when i feel like it, and finding new ways to do it.
maybe if i write any new long songs, long meaning over 1 minute, i'll just have some stuff for a new ep, or something. i shouldn't get too hasty, album art isn't done even, and all the lyrics aren't fully written either. i should just focus on the songs i have hear and start editing through them, i guess, if i feel like the thing is too long, to get to a better length.
i think i like all the songs though, so i could, at worst, split it into 2 albums or something, if that has to be done. but i've conceived of this as one thing so far.
anyways, the drag show was fine. i saw manila luzon, i'm not super into drag race or anything really, but my gf is so she was really excited/ happy about this. on the way to the bar, there were all these weird business people out wandering around, basically, like bugs, it was really funny, i kept saying loudly how they look like they're ready to make a deal "like that tv show". they seem annoying so annoying them is justified, to me.
i think maybe this monday i will really resume doing vocals again, super excited for that actually, if i can get a couple short songs done then i can work on them through the week alongside some of the older stuff that's pretty written out. there's one song that does need a lot of work still, so that should be done, i guess.
but now i'm so sleepy and spent still from yesterday, i was falling asleep in the middle of the day today.
right now i'm listening to the cobra kai discography comp, really good hardcore / pv / emoviolence stuff, a good break from the way disso stuff usurp synapse do but not really less crazy, it's got a lot of really imaginative bits. i guess it skews a little more emo sometimes in the writing but it's got synths and stuff, i should really pull out a cheap synth for one of these new songs i'm working on, it'd be pretty easy i think cuz basically the one i've got lyrics down for only has 2 guitars, and drums so far, it's also not fully written but now that i have lyrics down i can figure out what will go where and how well that could go. i should also do something where i'm more comfortable with guitar just handling fucked up chord stuff and not really trying to write a riff really, just finding interesting movements and charting them, letting a cheap sounding squarewave synth handle other stuff, and maybe another guitar for squeal sounds. but i can just make the regular one do that.
also today i found out the tuning one of the guitarists in arab on radar used, which was aaddaa, and the high e string used a 13 gauge string and had it pretty low, so it was loose and rumbly. really crazy tuning, i'm interested in trying it (as best i can at least) and seeing what comes out of that. it's hard to do droney stuff w/ midi though. or the guitars i've made at least don't deal with it well.
anyways i really am fucking sleepy, so this entry will be short i guess.
one last funny thing i guess, my gf woke up and told me she had a nightmare where i got ffs (i don't think i'd ever do this) and said i looked like a literally different person and she didn't like me anymore.
byebye!!
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Dollar Bin #4:
Emmylou Harris's Angel Band
I visited four different Iowa record stores while dropping my second born off at college last week and I have much to report.
Yes, there are at least four record stores in the state. The mystery is how they stay open.
Emerson, Lake and Palmer records are deemed worthy of plastic protection in Iowa, and $25 Yes records come with handwritten stickers that say things like "Side 1 Skips!" followed by a frownie face. These stores are convinced - convinced! - that newly printed Guns and Roses records deserve places of high honor up on the wall and that Jerry Jeff Walker belongs in folk rock. After all, the Country section is behind a wall of dangling beads and George Jones fills an entire crate.
A rotund, nose-ringed salesdude nods when you enter, drops the store's diamond needle on Bad to the Bone, then ambles over to offer you a tour "of their whole set up" while bragging about the minty, clear vinyl, limited edition Blink 52 record they just scored for $75 even though it's worth $300, easy.
I was happy for the dude, I really was, but I shook them off, strode past a pickle barrel of still cellophaned tapes (4 for $5!) and found that their Neil Young section was - I swear to god - entirely empty.
Is that even legal? I mean can you really own a record store and not have a single Neil Young record? And how, you ask, are such stores even in business?
I'll tell you how: at one of them I found, after 30 years of earnest hunting, my first ever copy of Henry the Human Fly (it was an original Reprise print no less, and even though I could really give a flying turd about such things - this is the Dollar Bin after all, not Nathan's VGG++ Nerd World - I was still pretty damn fired up and almost hugged the salesdude). Anyway, I snapped up that little blue number for the very non-Dollar Bin price of 37 bucks, thereby keeping that store in business long enough for them to blast George Thorogood for another glorious day. B-B-B-B-Bad!
All kidding aside, the people of Iowa are amazing. At stop signs drivers wave to one another! Please pack up all spare copies of your favorite records, drive to Iowa, and donate them to those lovely people.
I don't know about you, but every time I enter a new record store for the first time I head straight to Young, Neil and start judging the place. I don't really expect to find anything by Neil that I don't already have - but please, God, please help me find a copy of Ragged Glory someday, and please make it cost less than $50; I don't ask for too much God but this one favor I do of you most humbly implore - but Neil's section is an easy and effective way to find out if the store is worth my time. Or yours.
If there's nothing to be found other than a $22 copy of Comes a Time, or even worse, nothing but an already dusty, year-old copy of Noise and Flowers for $65, I know I'm better off at Chili's eating a bloomin onion alone; if they have nothing but copy after copy of Re-ac-tor, Time Fades Away and Journey Through the Past, I stay open minded - maybe ten minutes earlier they sold a crunchy old copy of On The Beach; and if they have Old Ways or Trans for $8-10 it's time to get excited and explore the store.
Stop #2 for me in any new record store is always Emmylou Harris. I submit for your consideration the following thesis: a good record store should have on stock most, if not all, of her records between Gliding Bird (1970) and Bluebird (89). We're talking about something like 15 titles between those bookends, and all of them should be in any good record store for under 8 bucks a piece.
Don't get me wrong: these records should not be cheap given their quality. I am hear to tell you that Emmylou Harris does not make bad, or even mediocre records. Like Paul Simon (well, there is Songs from The Capeman...), she only releases good albums. The same cannot be said for Neil or Bob, though I love them dearly. I defy even my famous brother to find an argument for Down in the Groove or The Monsanto Years.
(For those at home taking notes: I did indeed make the statement in an earlier post that Neil can do no wrong. I stand by that statement! Dylan and Young alike put out crap intentionally. It's what genius's do, people! Come to think of it, that's why some (maybe all!) of my posts are gonna suck. Neil, Bob and I are simply shaking off any fair weather fans.)
But back to Emmylou: why, you ask, should every record store worth its salt have all her records cheaply in stock?
Consider:
A) between 75 and 89 she put out a record a year, all of them good, and sold them consistently to my mother and all my mother's friends and all my mother's friends' friends and... you get the idea: that's a lot of records;
B) all those women have, since they made those purchases, got a life. Unlike me. They don't need their records anymore and they've told their loser sons to put down their bongs and go out and do something with all their old vinyl in the hopes that the sons will learn entrepreneurship and decency in the process. Those loser sons have, in turn, not ignored their mother and listened to the Emmylou Harris records (like they should have!) but instead taken them to their local Treasured Vinyl and exchanged them for autographed copies of Roll the Bones, or some other comparable crap;
C) unlike her friend Dolly Parton, Emmylou has no amusement park to call home, nor any lifetime movies made in her honor; and, finally,
D) unlike Fleetwood Mac, no boyband applicant on a skateboard drinking juice has destroyed the internet with one of her songs as a soundtrack, thereby unleashing hoards of hipster kids to demand of all the local rotund record store dudes copies of Rumors.
Put all that together friends, apply a little supply and demand, and what do you get? Record stores should be full of cheap and outstanding Emmylou Harris records.
So let's focus in on one of my favorites and one that I bet none of you have ever listen to, Angel Band.
There's no getting around it, I have to tell you: Angel Band is a Jesus record.
Don't panic! You haven't been lured in here to be told that He Gets You. Instead, it's time for this entry's second thesis: Angel Band is The Best Jesus Record (by a white person, anyway).
That's right, it's better than Saved, Jesus Was a Capricorn, My Mother's Hymn Book and everything Van the 80's Jesus man ever put out. By far! Indeed, I'd even go so far as to argue that while listening to Angel Band you will forget altogether that the man from Galalee is even involved.
Before I preach the word of Emmylou, let's listen to the opening track.
I kinda feel like I could just end this entry right here. What can anyone possibly say other than Jesus Christ! The barely there but perfect band creates simple and delicious space around Harris' aching goddess of a voice. If some jerk doctor ever tells me I need to stop drinking beer (dear God, I'm back! Never mind my earnest appeal for Ragged Glory. Rather, God, please avert that hateful beerless future!), then I'm gonna have to listen to this album every day just to calm the hell down.
My prime hobby in life (good news everyone: as of this morning this blog is my day job because, thanks to my famous brother, I now have like 16 followers and surely that means cash money is coming my way, yes? Isn't that how the world wide web works? Siri, where's my paycheck?!) is teaching High School English and History; in that role I teach a four week block each year on The Holy Books.
The class is easy to teach even though I'm not a regular church goer; tell cool teens about Muhammad getting seized by the Angel Gabriel, back that up by showing them that Abraham is everyone's mythical great-grandad and they are all in. But, given the fact that Donald Trump and Samuel Alito continue to exist and threaten all our lives, Jesus is a tough sell to teens. (See that? Right there I'm not shaking off any new fair weather fans; I'm telling any Trump people reading this to go away and stop acting like shitheads.)
I do what I can in my Holy Books course to salvage Christianity: we get to the good stuff within the Sermon on Mount and St. John's Prelude and we separate St. Augustine's hateful nonsense from the essence of Christ. But the turning point, the moment when smart, open-minded kids realize that Jesus is about love without exception, not hate, often comes not through the texts or through my earnest lectures, but instead when I play them them The Stanley Brothers Angel Band or The Louvin Brothers I See A Bridge. No spiritual teaching that leads to such beauty could be altogether with merit, and kids get that.
Just about any song on Angel Band could win that same argument, including Harris' version of the title track. Covering a song that is perfect to begin with is either a brilliant move (see Dark End of the Street, originally by James Carr, and the versions by Linda Ronstadt and Richard and Linda Thompson), shrugable (Neil Young singing If You Could Read My Mind) or intolerable and gross (Stephen Stills' version of The Loner - I curse thee Stephen Stills!). But as far as I'm concerned Emmylou Harris could cover anything, from Will to Love to Love Shack, and make it great.
So get over your fear of Jesus, dive into your local dollar bin and relax while listening to Angel Band. God, if we are lucky, exists. And she sings just like Emmylou Harris.
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Well, it happened, I saw AB again June the third in Tilburg and what can I say? It was awesome. Yes, my little recap is a little late but I also had Gojira on the agenda the next Tuesday, wild week. So yeah as I'm currently suffering in front of a ventilator to bat off the heat, if you do want to hear my thoughts feel free to read further!
I arrived a little bit later at the venue than I originally planned - lets say a good 30 minutes - due to construction and Google maps not knowing what to make of that BUT at last I arrived, about three and a half hours before the doors opened, and there where only about 10 other people in line so lucky me!
I'll fast forward through the boring sitting in line in the sun on the curb turning my ass into mush, though I did get to chat with some amazing people. AB fans are the best. There were about 20 people with VIP tickets, so a spot at the rail was out of the question - also I wanted to get a shirt before the gig started because I would miss my train home if I hung around too long afterwards - but once the doors opened and I secured a tour tee, I managed to land in-between 3/4 row at the front. Sweet! (Thanks great grandfathers who gave me long legs so I could powerwalk as fast as possible. Security didn't want us to run you see.)
Mammoth WVH opened once again and they kicked ass! There were some sound issues during the first few songs, so Wolfie's voice and the guitars were kinda muddled, but that got fixed real quick and it was a great set. The crowd got pretty into it.
Mammoth's setlist;
Mammoth
Mr. Ed
Epiphany
Like a Pastime
Stone
Distance
You're to Blame
Another Celebration at the End of the World
Don't Back Down
You're to Blame was my personal favorite, a real stomper live! And be sure to check out their latest singles if you haven't already.
And then it was happening. The lights dimmed for a second time after waiting around for few and though the majority of the people around me were already in great mood, you could really feel the crowd come to life. Are there going to be more puns in here? Probably because I can't help myself ha.
I stood smack-dab in the middle, with no tall concert goers in front of me, so I had a perfect view when AB took the stage. This would have been the perfect opportunity to take some pictures but me being me, well, I'm always way too swept up in the moment and the music to even think about taking out my phone haha.
Anyhow, here's AB's set list and I'll just go through the moments that stood out to me or I will be rambling for the upcoming hours;
Silver Tongue
Addicted to Pain
Ghost of Days Gone By
Broken Wings
Sin After Sin
Coeur D'Alene
Burn it Down
Cry of Achilles
Watch Over You
In Loving Memory
Blackbird
Come to Life
Stay
Isolation
Metalingus
Encore: Rise Today
Slip to the Void will likely be my most favorite opening song ever, but Silver Tongue is a close second. Just hearing that intro riff alone already hypes me up, followed by Addicted to Pain, if anyone in the venue wasn't paying attention already they sure do then!
(Warning for some flashing) Video by Dany In Flight [x] If I'm correct in my assumption this was the same lady I spoke briefly to while waiting in line, she came all the way from Italy!
Broken Wings was beautiful and hearing Sin After Sin again was a treat. The biggest surprise for me however was hearing Coeur D'Alene. COEUR D'ALENE. Yes, I was aware AB pulled this one out of the box during their US tour, but man I'm so happy they played it in Tilburg as well. ABIII is my favorite AB album so this was very special to me.
Myles took a little break and Mark took over the vocal duties for Burn it Down and he absolutely crushed it. You go Mark 💜
Video by _josdecross [x]
After the amazing Cry of Achilles, it was time to get emotional with a triple kick to the face. I'm not ashamed to say my waters were rising a little when Myles serenaded the crowd with Watch Over You, followed by In Loving Memory and then, of course, Blackbird. Boi, if I ever have kids or grandkids, I will make sure that song gets passed on down because it will never get old. What a masterpiece.
The emotional portion of the concert quickly got pushed aside by the energetic Come to Life, another all time favorite of mine (and the crowd, from what I could hear haha). A fan had requested earlier if AB could play Stay that night, and they did! Which was very sweet.
What followed were the bangers Isolation and of course Metalingus - were we all obediently went down on our knees (I fell over a few times because my legs were pretty fried at that point lol) for the classic "jump up and down like a kangaroo during the breakdown".
We got treated with Rise Today as the encore - chanting "we want more" with the crowd likely doesn't have any effect whatsoever but I like to think that it does haha.
And then it was over. Is there a thing such as post-concert depression? Man those hours went by quick. Picks were thrown out, setlists in the form of paper-planes; the usual mayhem. I'm terrible at catching anything because I'm always afraid I'll get accidentally socked in the face. There did however bounce something off my shoulder, which I assumed was a pick from Brian because a millisecond later the guy standing next to me snatched it from the ground. Better luck next time, but thanks Brian lol. And then the drumsticks were flying and I took cover once more.
Going to concerts is still new territory for me and even though it was only the second time I saw AB live, being a big fan aside, they killed it. What a band. What an amazing, talented bunch of musicians. The crowd was having a blast and AB too seemed to really enjoy and revel in the energy. Even Myles commented at one point "There's always a great vibe when we play here." My voice was gone from loudly singing along to all the songs and I probably slept for about 12 hours the next day.
Compared to the first time I saw them in Amsterdam last year December at the Ziggo Dome, I prefer this gig with the smaller venue. As much as I love that AB gets to play bigger venues in Europe, selfish me wish they could stick to smaller ones like the 013 in Tilburg.
Here's a pic of the fabulous tour tee that I scored;
I've been a fan for over 14 years now and to be able to see my favorite band live two times in the span of only 7 months is crazy lucky to me. If you have the opportunity to see them, do it! You won't regret it.
Thanks AB for the beautiful music and I hope to catch them again on their next album cycle!
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