#Prolific songwriter

[dewitty1]

Burt Bacharach, the songwriter and performer who turned easy listening into high art, has died aged 94. A representative for Bacharach confirmed to the Washington Post that the singer died at home in Los Angeles of natural causes.

In all, he scored 73 Top 40 hits in the US and 52 in the UK.

[become-a-robot]

I hate there maybe ants.

[acelessthan3]

Just read that as of May 2024 CRJ has said she's written 26 songs for her next album already.

[kindahoping4forever]

Ash IG Story

[numbknee]

South park fan

[thefloatingstone]

I learned about Doji Morita today

[studebakerhearse]

Dyke

[aiiaiiiyo]

[fran-kubelik]

As someone who’s a much more casual fan than most of her diehards, I’m not immune to getting a bit tired of TSwift on occasion. But nobody who dislikes her can be even marginally fucking normal about it, so I am simply obligated to keep liking her because her haters are the most insufferable freaks on this planet.

[wizzard890]

okay so picture this.

You're a man named Jim Steinman. You are one of the most prolific songwriters of the 80s. In your spirit, output and essence, you are eternally popping a wheelie on a motorcycle while a hot half-naked woman clings to you and bats wheel in the sky above.

You wrote a song in which Meatloaf plays a hideously disfigured hunk who steals a nubile lady back to his crumbling manor and introduces her to the pleasures of magic lesbian group sex.

You wrote a song in which Celine Dion sings as Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, dancing with Cathy's corpse on a beach in the moonlight; a scene which you, Jim Steinman, believe should have been in the book. (The moors of Wuthering Heights are landlocked, but you, Jim Steinman, are too fucking real to care about that.)

You wrote the song for the opening scene of the movie Streets of Fire, in which evil leatherdaddy Willem Dafoe leads his malefic motorcycle crew into a concert to abduct Diane Lane while she's wearing a skintight satin jumpsuit.

You wrote a song in which Bonnie Tyler wanders a haunted boarding school as literal demon twinks gyrate at her out of the fog.

There is no peak of goth camp that you, Jim Steinman, have not summited, no horny energy you have not tapped. They say that Alexander the Great wept when he saw there were no more worlds to conquer. But you, Jim Steinman, are not Alexander the Great. You, Jim Steinman, are better. You, Jim Steinman, have vision.

You take your most successful song, the song everyone knows, the most big-haired, white dress, gothic arches, doves flying, possessed choir boys chanting, bombastic song you have, and think: what if this, but with vampires.

And so you change the lyrics to be about death and infinity and a powerful bloodsucking lord seducing a girl who is ALL ABOUT IT, and then toss off a whole musical for this song to be the centerpiece to, and the musical is bad but it's also a weird hit that's been staged in fourteen countries and revived seven times, because nothing has ever whipped as campily, as ridiculously, as perfectly as this:

It never takes off in America. A prophet is without honor in his own land. But that doesn't matter. How could it matter? You are perhaps the most creatively self-actualized man who has ever lived. Look at that vampire. He's coming in hot and a hundred Venetian nuns gave their lives to make his ludicrously capacious lace sleeves. Look at that girl. She was born in a fog machine. She wore her best red velvet cape. She's down bad. She's singing Total Eclipse of the Heart the whole time.

You are Jim Steinman, and you have reached apotheosis.

[ohnoitstbskyen]

100 songs to get to know me

I posted this image over on the bluesky, and it got like 100 likes, so now here we are. I was going to write them all up here, but Tumblr imposes a 10 video limit on embeds per post which I find infuriating.

So! You can read the first ten entries here, but you can read the entire list here: https://tbskyen.bearblog.dev/100-songs-to-get-to-know-me/

1. ABBA - Lay All Your Love On Me

I genuinely don't quite know if my enjoyment of ABBA is something I came by honestly, or something which is simply genetically engineered into my Scandinavian soul. I remember hearing my mom blasting their songs on the home stereo in my childhood, and the association has put permanent nostalgia blinders on me for all of ABBA's greatest hits. Still, I think the beat is undeniable and the mournful tone of the chorus adds some real melancholy to the dramatic plea at the core of the song.

2. Afenginn - Oestrogenmanipuleret Basilisk

Afenginn describe themselves as "bastard etno-punk" which is probably as good a description as you're going to get. There's a lot of klezmer and eastern European folk influences here, but what is more important about Afenginn's best songs is that they go hard as f*ck and it's an absolute blast to dance to them at a show. They played this the first time I saw them live, and the rhythm comes back every time I hear it again. Good times!

3. Afenginn - Ralli in D Minor

With 100 slots to fill, I am giving myself permission to allocate two slots to Afenginn, and for the same reason. Ralli in D Minor is less of a dance tune to me, and more of a headbanger, but with a sufficiently loud subwoofer and a game crowd, you could f*ing mosh to this.

4. Anamanaguchi - Prom Night

I discovered Anamanaguchi as the composers of the title track to the Nerdist podcast back in the day, and being unfamiliar with the concept of chiptunes, I was drawn in initially by the sheer novelty of hearing the squeaks and bloops of my gaming childhood employed towards rock tunes and combined with "real" instruments.

Beyond the gimmick, though, Anamanaguchi won me over fully with the Scott Pilgrim game soundtrack, and then 2013's Endless Fantasy, where the gimmick of chiptune nostalgia noise (at least for me) finally coalesced into something that felt entirely like its own thing. Plus I'm a sucker for exactly this kind of bright dance pop, and Bianca Raquel's vocals here are a perfect match for the tone of the music.

5. Jennifer Hudson - Memory

2019s Cats is a fascinating fucking disaster. Tom Hooper is the worst director of musicals in my living memory, the abuse of the VFX staff extended beyond brutal crunch and absurd challenge imposed by a director who had no idea what the hell he was asking them to do all the way into an astonishingly arrogant and condescending joke from Rebel Wilson and James Corden at the expense of workers who were the last people at fault for the disaster that the movie became (look in the fucking mirror, Wilson and Corden, your performances were rancid).

Still, the silver lining of Cats is we got to hear Jennifer Hudson shake the world on its foundations with her rendition of Memory. I don't give a shit what anyone says, this performance is transcendent and no amount of institutional failure can dim its quality.

6. Annette Bjergfeldt - Min Bærende Bjælke

Annette is one of my mother's oldest friends, and a prolific singer-songwriter now turned author. I've been going to her concerts since I was a little child, and while I am absolutely not the target audience for any of it, it has stuck with me as part of my musical vocabulary deep into adulthood.

She has experimented with brass band accompaniment a few times, but for my money, nothing quite comes close to the floating, optimistic vibe of Min Bærende Bjælke. It sounds like a very particular kind of lasting romance, which of course is also what the lyrics are about.

7. Hozier - Blood Upon the Snow

We'll get more than one Hozier song on this list, but Blood Upon the Snow stands out to me as a song which easily transcends the videogame soundtrack promotional tie-in nature of its conception. Bear McCreary's hurdy gurdy and lyrics about surviving through adversity by holding on to existence with your teeth and nails... yeah, it hits with me. There's something real in that.

"The trees deny themselves nothing that makes them grow, no rainfall, no sunshine, no blood upon the snow." Something about that feels real.

8. The Beatles - Something

idk if I really need to write anything about George Harrison's most famous love song that hasn't been written more extensively by a million dad-rock enthusiasts before me.

I will say, this is one of the few songs I listen to regularly that justify the expensive audiophile headphones I invest in. There's a LOT to hear on a good, lossless, original mix of this song, if you're the kind of pervert who gets off to listening to a song a hundred times to focus on different parts of the soundscape. (it's me, I am the pervert)

9. Blink-182 - Adam's Song

I discovered a lot of my music taste as a young man from extremely low-resolution AMVs that my friend used to download off sketchy file-sharing sites. Blink-182 entered my musical lexicon through the one above, specifically, piggybacking off of my teenage love of Dragon Ball.

I never really grokked what the lyrics were actually about, until relistening to the song years later, but something about the minor-key wail of the thing really sat with my angsty teenage soul and has stuck with me ever since. I cannot listen to this song without that music video playing in my head, the song will forever belong to Vegeta.

There's remastered versions of this AMV out there, apparently, but if it's not 144p with tinny audio, it's just not right. That's not what the song is supposed to sound like, not to me.

10. Blink-182 - Miss You

Blink-182 is one of those bands I discovered via anime AMVs and listened to obsessively for a period as a teenager (The Offspring will show up later on this list), and then fell entirely out of touch with for years until discovering much later in life that they did, in fact, keep releasing music. I Miss You from their self-titled 2003 album felt, when I discovered it sometime in the early 2010s, like a much more mature and interesting sound from a band which had gotten stuck associated with my adolescent superpower kung-fu fantasies which I was, at the time, feeling a bit embarrassed about.

The song had a resurgence on TikTok a little while ago as a meme template, which made me listen to the albums again, and rediscover yet again that Blink-182 is, in fact, still putting out albums.

---

The rest of the list is here: https://tbskyen.bearblog.dev/100-songs-to-get-to-know-me/

[dlstmxkakwldrlarchive]

Partly for the prolific volume of projects artists release each year and partly for the fluid definition of an album (running anywhere from three to 13 tracks), an annual ranking of K-pop albums is never easy. As South Korea continues to extend its global musical influence, certain projects transcend hit-song compilations, presenting larger visions and conceptual narratives.

In 2023, stars like V, WOODZ and ONEW used their latest solo projects to share the music that inspires them at their core as artists and let listeners settle into sonic worlds they’ve developed.

[...]

First Place: Onew, Circle The First Album

While it’s somewhat criminal to think that 15 years after ONEW’s debut with SHINee in 2008 we only just received his first full Korean album, the singer-songwriter himself would say that now was the perfect time for Circle. A musical journey unlike anything released this year, ONEW shared that he had attempted to record the album’s title track before dropping his Dice EP in early 2022, but felt it wasn’t at the level of perfection it deserved and held onto the song. ONEW then involved himself in every aspect of Circle‘s production process, from meticulous mixing and mastering to tuning, beats, recording and mastering, attesting to the singer-songwriter’s dedication to artistic expression.

The single “O (Circle)” opens the album with an intriguing blend of electronica and strings, while its gospel-tinged chorus emphasizes lyrics about the circular nature of life and how memories, feelings and dreams are all fleeting. The 10 tracks on Circle develop unique transformations from start to finish: the breezy melodies in “Cough” are paired with loneliness-themed lyrics and a melancholy instrumental breakdown, while “Rain on Me” starts with aggressive acoustic guitar strumming before transitioning into an atmospheric, percussive ballad. Sweet surprises abound, too: ONEW scats on the jazz-rap hybrid “Caramel” and gives a glimpse into his indie-rock side on “Parachute.”

The album’s effortless flow is anchored by ONEW’s famously solid yet understated vocals. As Circle concludes with the tender piano ballad “Always” which addresses themes of loyalty and resilience, the listener wonders if it’s an allegory for ONEW’s public journey through health challenges, including vocal cord surgery. Even without any writing credits on Circle, ONEW’s presence is undeniably felt in this seamless collection that boasts an emotional depth brought on by 15 years in the game. That’s the kind of introspection you can’t rush or doctor through A&R but need to cycle through and arrive at when the moment is right. From scheduling this album’s release to the messages on the final track, time is definitely on ONEW’s side to deliver such a project. — J.B.

source

[deconstructthesoup]

What's been in my head lately is a Fantasy High pirate AU. Not a Leviathan AU, an actual pirate AU.

Bear with me---

Adaine is a bookish princess of a kingdom by the sea, and while she has everything from an outsider's perspective, she's neglected by her parents as the second child and is incredibly lonely. Her only real friend is Kristen, who's a representative of the church of Helio and is kind of Adaine's unofficial lady-in-waiting, and both of them are fairly sheltered... until one fateful day, while the two are enjoying a small day of freedom, they get captured by a motley crew of pirates.

Fabian is the captain and the son of the fabled Old Bill, and he's been making his own mark on the seven seas via sheer charisma and chaos. He's trying to build up a reputation of being a ruthless thief and murderer like his father was, but it's pretty plain to see that he cares a lot more than he lets on... like, for instance, upon realizing that Adaine's parents don't care enough about her to pay for ransom, he immediately offers her a spot on his crew. And once Kristen has a very public crisis of faith, she's granted a spot, too.

The other members of Fabian's crew are as follows:

Riz, his first mate and best friend. He's a son of two prolific spies from the goblin kingdom, and he initially wanted to take down the vast network of pirates across the world, but quickly changed gears once he realized that working for the monarchy was a lot more morally corrupt. He kind of acts as the voice of reason, while simultaneously being one of the most feral members of the crew.

Ragh, the ship's chef and the other first mate---Fabian couldn't decide between him and Riz. His mom used to be a pretty prolific pirate herself, and he and Fabian have known each other since they were kids... and, yeah, their relationship has changed from "best friends forever" to "work husbands" over the years. They have some good times.

Gorgug, the ship's resident gunner. He grew up in a family of blacksmiths, couldn't find a lot of honest work, and eventually got a steady position on Fabian's ship. He's happy to be here, he's happy to show off the fact that he's a beast in combat situations, and he's one of the most technically savvy members of the crew. Also, he's a surprisingly good listener.

Fig, the musician and "dark sorceress" of the ship. She used to be a traveling singer-slash-songwriter and used an elven disguise to blend in, but eventually decided "fuck it" and took on her true form as a free-spirited tiefling pirate who kicks ass, takes names, and curses anybody who badmouths her. She's great.

Tracker, the ship's surgeon. She was raised in the church of Helio before being bitten by a werewolf, after which she promptly left to learn under her uncle, who was a prolific pirate himself before he retired. Nowadays, she's learned the secrets of both witchcraft and medicine and made a name for herself as a skilled healer and fighter, and is pretty happy where she is.

Gertie, the ship's other chef and resident wildlife expert. She's definitely one of the most friendly members of the crew, and even though she butts heads with Fabian a lot, she's a pretty core part of the crew. And yeah, between her and Tracker, Kristen is definitely getting a big lesbian awakening.

There is, of course, still a version of Leviathan out there, and Ayda still lives there as a librarian... which is the reason why the crew regularly makes stops there, though getting more supplies is also a plus. Garthy is also there, along with Sandralynn and Jawbone (and Hallariel and Gilear, much to Fabian's displeasure). The Seven are also around---they're a fierce crew of pirates who have a bit of a friendly rivalry with Fabian's crew, though it's never escalated into outright battle.

[cardsharksplayingames]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again but it’s absolutely bonkers that the best and most prolific songwriter of this generation has NEVER won a SOTY Grammy

[wrightmourmarriage]

everything they say on tumblr about roger waters is true. he's 5-times divorced (including the band), his most well known vocal roles include him screaming in the most fucked up ways possible, his most prolific songwriting is about his doomed situationship with his childhood friend guitarist, he's been named the "gloomiest man in rock 'n' roll" and he delivers on that title as best as he can, he has daddy issues and about 5 different complexes and every few years he starts drama with his arch nemesis of 4 decades over shit like an album remix. and he looks like this the whole time

[muzaktomyears]

John did not let Yoko’s foot-dragging [in coming up with songs for Double Fantasy] slow him down. He kept working on the album, refining songs and coming up with new ones. He joked that he was becoming more and more like Paul McCartney, whose prodigious musical output had sometimes been a source of friction in their relationship. John wondered if Yoko might be feeling intimidated by his current period of fertility, just as he had once been intimidated by Paul’s greater musical productivity. (...) He again likened their situation to his old songwriting partnership with Paul McCartney, who had always been the more prolific writer and had frequently prodded John to come up with new material. “Paul never stopped working,” John said with grudging admiration. “We’d finish one album and I’d go off and get stoned and forget about writing new stuff, but he’d start working on new material right away, and as soon as he had enough songs he’d want to begin recording again. I would have to scramble to come up with songs of my own. I wrote some of my best songs under that kind of pressure.” Although it remained unsaid, I got the distinct impression that John believed his spontaneous emissions were better than Paul’s meticulously crafted material.

John Lennon: Living on Borrowed Time, Frederic Seaman (1991)