I wish I understood how Spotify works with WordPress. Some weeks, after I put these posts up, I’ll check them and get an error on in my browser window that Spotify can’t load. I’ll check it in a different browser and it works fine. So I don’t know if you all are running into the same issues, or if it is something on my end (I’ve checked to make sure it’s not my ad-blocker). Anyway, I hope these posts are working for you.
This week a celebration of some of the brightest, new artists I’ve enjoyed recently. They all just happen to be women.
“Cost Your Love” – Miya Folick. Folick’s debut album, Premonitions, arrived with on a wave of critical praise a couple weeks back. I’m having a hard time describing her music, because it doesn’t fit into any of the categories that I am used to slotting music into. All I know for sure is that I really like this song.
“Light On” – Maggie Rogers. Speaking of hyped artists, Rogers was all the buzz not too long ago as she came out of seeming nowhere – well, Alaska is pretty off the grid, pop culture-wise – a little over a year ago. She’s produced a series of outstanding singles that blend pop, indie, R&B, and occasionally folk. I highly recommend checking out her performance of “Fallingwater” on SNL last week. It was breath-taking.
“Just Goes to Show” – Eliza Shaddad. My biggest, and perhaps only, complaint about Spotify is its presentation of new music. Each Friday it throws all the new music out onto a single page. Rather than assessing my listening history and likes and pushing artists I like to the top of the page, the most popular artists are always at the top. So I have to wade through a ton of singles by artists 16-year-olds are listening to to find my middle-aged, suburban dad indie rock waaaaaaaay down the page. So, often, I miss out on new albums by artists I like if they are slightly out of the critical spotlight. Honestly Apple Music gets this wrong too, and no one has really nailed it like the defunct Rdio service did. Anyway, this week I accidentally discovered that Shaddad, one of my favorite discoveries of 2017, had released a new disk last month. It’s quite good, with this track standing out just a little more than the other excellent tracks.
“Salt In The Wound” – boygenius. Man, as supergroups go, boygenius has knocked it utterly out of the park. Their EP, recorded over just four days, came out a couple weeks back and has floored pretty much everyone that has listened to it. They are slaying people with their live shows. There are at least two songs on it that are in the running for my rapidly approaching Favorites of 2018 list. This is one of those two, a scorching stunner.
“thank u, next” – Ariana Grande. When Grande first hit the scene, I hated her. It was mostly because of that terrible Cat Valentine character she played on various Nickelodeon shows. Well, the shows were horrible too. So horrible that we banned our girls from watching them. Eventually I was worn down by the irresistibleness of her voice, as well as her sense of humor and global outlook. Plenty has been written about this song since it dropped at 11:00 last Saturday. All I can add is that it is a brilliant piece of work when you understand the context behind it.