#adele 2017
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lumiereandcogsworth · 1 year ago
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hi can we just take a moment?
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sugdensdingle · 6 months ago
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yourdailymag · 27 days ago
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Adele Exarchopoulos for L'Officiel Spain 2017 photographed by Sonia Szostak
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caesarclowningaround · 7 months ago
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Fandoms: Aladdin (2019), Beauty and the Beast (2017) Fic Rating: E Chapter(s): 6/??? Ship(s): Jafar/Adam/Belle Fic Summary: With the curse broken and a new life ahead of them, the last thing Adam wanted was to expose Belle to the fragments of the heart he shattered years ago. But with Jafar back in his life, the three of them must learn to navigate a new way forward, if one is at all possible.
Note(s): As always, thank you @zebsfloppyears for being my lovely beta for this fic 💕
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kaipanzero · 2 years ago
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xXx: Return of Xander Cage (2017)
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justinsentertainmentcorner · 11 months ago
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Li Zhou at Vox:
There’s long been outrage over the Grammys’ Beyoncé snubs for the awards show’s highest honor — omissions that have infuriated fans and prominent celebrities alike.
At the 2024 awards on February 4, Beyonce’s husband, Jay-Z, became the latest to call them out, castigating the show for its history of overlooking Black artists, including his superstar wife. “We want y’all to get it right — at least get it close to right,” Jay-Z said. “I don’t want to embarrass this young lady, but she has more Grammys than everyone and never won Album of the Year. So even by your own metrics that doesn’t work.” He became the latest of many prominent figures who’ve raised this point in some fashion, including the likes of Adele and, famously, Kanye West in the past. Increasingly, the references to Beyoncé being overlooked by institutions like the Grammys and the MTV Video Music Awards have become more common both because of how egregious they feel on the merits and also because of what they represent. Beyond serving as an insult to her undeniable talent, Beyoncé’s treatment and the specific awards she has and hasn’t won have become emblematic of the exclusion of Black art by the music establishment. They are often cited as some of the most prominent examples that capture this problem.
Why some awards matter more than others
As Jay-Z noted, Beyoncé has the most Grammys of any musical artist — 32 — but she hasn’t ever won the coveted Album of the Year award. AOTY is widely considered the most prestigious honor of the show, much like Best Directing or Best Picture is for the Oscars, and it’s often treated like the greatest recognition that the program has on offer. Beyoncé has been nominated for AOTY four times as a solo artist but has lost out each time. In 2010, she was nominated for I Am … Sasha Fierce, which lost to Taylor Swift’s Fearless. In 2015, she was nominated for Beyoncé, which lost to Beck’s Morning Phase. In 2017, she was nominated for Lemonade, which lost to Adele’s 25. And in 2023, she was nominated for Renaissance, which lost to Harry Styles’s Harry’s House.
In 2017, the year that Lemonade lost, Adele spoke about it explicitly in her AOTY acceptance speech and emphasized the cultural impact that Beyoncé’s record had had. “I can’t possibly accept this award. And I’m very humbled and I’m very grateful and gracious. But my artist of my life is Beyoncé. And this album to me, the Lemonade album, is just so monumental,” Adele said. As the most important honor of the show, AOTY sends a powerful signal regarding the cultural impact that an artist has had, making Beyoncé’s longstanding exclusion from a win in that category especially significant. Notably, despite winning 32 Grammys, she has only won one of what are known as the “Big Four” awards of the show: Album of the Year, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best New Artist. In 2010, she won Song of the Year for her hit song “Single Ladies.”
What the Beyoncé snubs represent
This history is ultimately indicative of the Grammys’ and other organizations’ much deeper problems with race. In addition to the Grammys, both the Oscars and the Golden Globes have been scrutinized for excluding Black artists. Beyoncé’s losses (and, in some cases, lack of recognition outright) in key categories underscore how Black artists have been overlooked for the most prestigious awards at the Grammys. Per a 2021 study from the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, Black artists constituted 38 percent of all artists on Billboard’s Top 100 between 2012 to 2020 but just 26.7 percent of Grammy nominees for the Big Four awards in that timeframe. [...]
There are other reasons the Grammys have long had a credibility issue with the hip-hop community, as A.D. Carson, a professor of hip-hop at the University of Virginia, wrote for the Washington Post in 2022. Jay-Z alluded to some examples of this exclusion in his Sunday remarks, describing how DJ Jazzy Jeff and Will Smith boycotted the Grammy Awards in 1989 when they won the first Grammy for best rap performance because the show wouldn’t televise the presentation of the new award. The Grammys’ history of confining Black artist nominations to certain categories, such as rap and hip-hop, has also drawn scrutiny, Carson writes. And there have been concerns that the list of Black artists the show has chosen to elevate underscores, in his words, a “trend of respected rap artists being overlooked in favor of those who crossed over into pop music and gained the most White fans.”
Jay-Z is right: Beyoncé has been unfairly snubbed at the Grammys for the highest honor awards like Album Of The Year.
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figureskatingcostumes · 2 years ago
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Villö Marton and Danyil Semko skating their Cha Cha Congelado short dance at the 2018 World Junior Championships. They skated to Set Fire to the Rain by Adele and Kiss performed by Tom Jones.
(Photos by David W. Carmichael)
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adeledaily · 2 years ago
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59th Annual GRAMMY Awards at Staples Center in Los Angeles - February 12, 2017
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louisupdates · 18 days ago
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By Ed Power | Sat Nov 30 2024 - 05:15
During the pandemic the songwriter and producer James Vincent McMorrow would rise early, go for a run and write songs for Louis Tomlinson, of One Direction.
“I actually made half of a record for him,” he says. Tomlinson’s team “had a lot of songs but maybe not a lot that he was as into as he wanted to be. I think they were maybe looking for a weirdo. So they reached out to me. I love him. He’s a fascinating human being. I absolutely loved making that album,” adds McMorrow, who is about to start a tour of Ireland.
When it comes to potential collaborators with a boy band megastar, McMorrow’s name is not the first that springs to mind. He’s an indie songwriter whose open-veined, falsetto-driven pop has been compared to that of folkies such as Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens. But Tomlinson was a fan of the Dubliner’s beautifully wrought music. He wasn’t alone: Drake famously sampled McMorrow on his 2016 track Hype.
One of the tracks they wrote together, The Greatest, would serve as the opener to Tomlinson’s second LP, Faith in the Future. As is often the way with the music industry, the rest are in a vault somewhere. Still, for McMorrow the opportunity to work with a pop star was about more than simply putting his craft in front of a wider audience. The call from Tomlinson’s team had come at a low point for the Irishman, who had become mired in confusion and doubt after signing to a major label for the first time in his career.
Executives at Columbia Records had recognised potential in McMorrow as an artist who bridged the divide between folk and pop. The fruits of that get-together would see daylight in September 2021 as the excellent Grapefruit Season LP, on which McMorrow teamed up with Paul Epworth, who has also produced Adele and Florence Welch.
The album was a beautifully gauzy rumination on the birth of his daughter and the muggy roller coaster of first-time parenthood. It went top 10 in Ireland and breached the top 100 in the UK. Yet the experience of working within the major-label system was strange for McMorrow, who at that point had been performing and recording for more than a decade. He didn’t hate it. But he knew he didn’t ever want to do it again.
“It was a weird time. I stopped touring in 2017. My daughter was born in 2018. I signed with Columbia Records at the same time and made a record that ... There were moments within it I was proud of. But fundamentally, I think if I was being very honest, I would say that I definitely got lost in the weeds of what the music industry wanted for me rather than what I wanted for myself.”
[…]
McMorrow grew up in Malahide, the well-to-do town in north Co Dublin; as a secondary-school student he suffered debilitating shyness. In 2021 he revealed that he had struggled with an eating disorder at school, ending up in hospital (“Anorexia that progressed into bulimia”). He was naturally retiring, not the sort to crave the spotlight. But he was drawn to music. “It was definitely a difficult journey,” he says. He wasn’t alone in that. “The musicians that tend to cut through and make it ... A lot of my friends, musicians that are successful, they’re not desperate for the stage.”
The Tomlinson collaboration was part of his strange relationship with the mainstream music industry. It went back to McMorrow’s third LP, Rising Water, from 2016. A move away from his earlier folk-pop, the project had featured engineering from Ben Ash, aka Two Inch Punch, a producer who had worked with chart artists such as Jessie Ware, Sia and Wiz Khalifa.
That was followed by the Drake sample in 2016 and by McMorrow writing the song Gone, which was at one point set to be recorded by a huge pop star whom he’d rather not identify.
“Gone is the red herring of red herrings in my entire career. I wrote that song for other people. I didn’t write it for myself. The whole reason I signed to Columbia Records and I had all these deals was because of Gone. I was very happy tipping away in my weird little world. And then I wrote that song, and a lot of bigger artists came in to try to take it,” he says.
“I won’t name names. There were recordings of it done. It got very close to being a single for someone else. I would go in these meetings with all these labels, and I would play it for them – just to play. Not with any sense of ‘This is my song.’ And they were, like, ‘You’re out of your mind if you don’t take this song. This is the song that will make you the thing that is the thing.’ And I was, like, ‘You’re wrong.’ For a year I basically was, like, ‘I disagree.’ And if you go in a room with enough people enough times and they tell you that you’re crazy ... I loved the song, but I did not love it for me. I never felt I fit. There was a little part of me that wanted to believe.”
As he had predicted, Gone wasn’t a hit. He received a lot of other strange advice, including that he cash in on the mercifully short-lived craze for NFTs by putting out an LP as a watermarked internet file. All of that was swirling in his brain when Tomlinson got in touch. To be able to step outside his own career was exactly what McMorrow needed.
“With Louis it was like boot camp. I had a very limited time with him. I had to wake up every morning, go for a run, write a song in my head, go to the studio. We made songs all day long. It lit a fire in my head again. I loved the process. I like sitting and talking to someone like Louis, who’s had this unbelievably fascinating lifestyle – so much tragedy in his life,” he says. Tomlinson’s mother and sister died within three years of each other, and his 1D bandmate Liam Payne died in October. “So many things have happened to him. I chatted to him and then write constantly. That was a lovely process.”
Because life is strange and full of contrasts McMorrow ended up working with Tomlinson around the same time that he was producing the Dublin postpunk “folk-metal” band The Scratch, on their LP Mind Yourself. “Totally different animals,” he says. “The Scratch album was an intense period in the studio of that real old-school nature of making music. A lot of fights. A lot of pushing back against ideas. A lot of different opinions. And you have to respect everybody’s opinions and find the route through.”
During his brief time on a major label, McMorrow was reminded of the music industry’s weakness for short-term thinking. In 2019, the business was obsessed with streaming numbers and hot-wiring the Spotify algorithm so that your music posted the highest possible number of plays.
“Everyone was driven by stats. ‘This song has 200 million streams.’ ‘That song has 400 million streams.’ I went into my meetings with Columbia Records ... the day I had my first big marketing meeting was the day my catalogue passed a billion streams, which, for someone like me, who started where I started, was a day where I should be popping champagne corks. Instead they immediately started talking about how they have artists that have one song that has two billion streams. So by their rule of thumb I was half as successful as one song by one artist on their label.”
Five years later he believes things have changed. He points to Lankum, a group who will never set Spotify alight yet who have carved a career by doing their own thing and not chasing the short-term goal of a place on the playlist. They are an example to other musicians, McMorrow says.
“I was in Brooklyn, doing two nights, a week and a half ago. In the venue across the road from where we were, pretty much, Lankum were doing two nights and had [the Dublin folk artist] John Francis Flynn opening for them. Those are two artists that, if you were to look at their stats, you wouldn’t be, like, ‘These are world-beating musicians.’ You start aggregating to this stat-based norm and you miss bands like Lankum, bands like The Mary Wallopers, people like John Francis Flynn.”
McMorrow is looking forward to his forthcoming Irish tour, which he sees as another leg of his journey to be his best possible self.
“The last two, three years have been a process of building it back to a version of me that actually made me happy rather than making me cry at night-time – a version that was making music because I liked it. Within this industry there’s so much outside noise. It’s quite overwhelming. I was overwhelmed. It’s been nice to reset the clock.”
In November 2022, McMorrow posted this now deleted Instagram post:
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Text: late 2021 I got a phone call asking me if I wanted to come to London to meet @louist91 and possibly write some songs. A few years ago he released a statement talking about changing his path musically, instead of the immediate search for hits, he’d start with music he genuinely loved and see where it got him. Seems like a simple and obvious thing to say, but considering the amount of people just chasing hits with little regard for vision or artistry, a statement like that struck me when I read it. So I was excited to meet him and see what he was about. First day we met we all wrote Common People, second day we wrote Lucky Again. In December of last year we went back in again, finished those ones, wrote and produced 3 others that are also on this album. It was the studio line-up of dreams, @mrfredball @jmoon1066, @riley_mac. Shouts to Louis for letting us do our thing, letting a dork like me come write some weird lyrics and weird melodies, trust us to shape the vision that he had. These last few years were dark at times, but it was moments like that where I remembered why I’m obsessed w music and why it’s all I’ve ever understood. incredibly proud of the work, Holding on to Heartache is genuinely one of my most favourite songs I’ve ever been a part of.
Also I was reading something about the album and it mentioned something about the gospel choir on the bridge of that song… nah man thats’s just 200 stacked of me singing super super high in the studio out back of Fred’s house😂]
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matan4il · 8 months ago
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On this Yom Ha'Zikaron Le'Chalalei Ma'rachot Yisrael (Memorial Day for Israel's Fallen Soldiers and Terror Victims), I figured it's important to remember that Israeli victims did not exist solely on Oct 7. We have lost loved ones before and since. Here's a list with just one random victim to represent each year. Please scroll down the list to see how far back it goes.
(part 1/5, all parts in the reblogs)
2024: On Jan 7, we lost 19 years old Shai Garmai
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2023: On Oct 7, we lost 28 years old Osama abu Madiam
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2022: On Nov 23, we lost 18 years old Tiran Faro
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2021: On May 12, we lost 5 years old Ido Avigal
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2020: On Aug 26, we lost 39 years old Shai Ochayon
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2019: On May 5, we lost 49 years old Zaid al-Chamamda
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2018: On Dec 12, we lost Amiad Israel Yish Ran, who was murdered in his mother's womb
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2017: On Nov 22, we lost 21 years old Hodaya Nechama Assoulin
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2016: On Oct 25, we lost 14 years old Rami Namer abu Amar
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2015: On Feb 17, we lost 4 years old Adelle Biton
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2014: On Oct 22, we lost 2.5 months old Chaya Zissel Brown
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2013: On Dec 24, we lost 22 years old Salech al-Din abu al-Atayef
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2012: On Jul 18, we lost 28 years old Yitzchak Idan Kolangi
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2011: On Apr 17, we lost 16 years old Daniel Aryeh Viplich
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2010: On Feb 26, we lost 52 years old Netta Blatt Sorek
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2009: On Apr 2, we lost 13 years old Shlomo Nativ
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2008: On Mar 6, we lost 26 years old Doron Trunach Mahareta
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2007: On Jun 17, we lost 85 years old Meir Cohen
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2006: On Aug 10, we lost 4 years old Fatchi Assdi
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2005: On Jul 12, we lost 16 years old Nofar Horvitz
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2004: On Sep 29, we lost 2 years old Dorit Massarat Binsan
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2003: On Sep 9, we lost 20 years old Naava Appelbom
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2002: On Nov 10, we lost 4 years old Noam Levi Ochayon
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2001: On Dec 12, we lost 42 years old Ester Avraham
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2000: On Nov 21, we lost 19 years old Itamar Yefet
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1999: On Jun 24, we lost 34 years old Tony Eliyahu Zanna
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1998: On Dec 2, we lost 41 years old Osama Moussa abu Aisha
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1997: On Mar 13, we lost 13 years old Natali Alkalai
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1996: On Feb 25, we lost 57 years old Yitzchak Elbaz
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1995: On Jul 24, we lost 60 years old Zehava Oren
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As Tumblr limits a post to 30 images... part 1/5 - the next parts will be posted in the reblogs momentarily. Please check out the full list.
(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)
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wingzie · 21 days ago
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BTS in the UK Part One: 2017- 2018
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On 25th September 2017, BTS had its first play on UK Radio with DNA. The song was played by Olivia Jones on TheHitsRadio. This was followed on 2nd October, with the first play of DNA on BBC1 Radio with Adele Roberts, who would interview BTS later on.
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Olivia interviewed Namjoon a month later, for their first UK interview. Namjoon was aware that UKArmy had sent her purple flowers as a “thank you” for playing DNA. He also mentioned chartings and wanting to go to the UK, which they were meant to do in 2017.
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Adele Roberts interviewed BTS in South Korea and filmed some dance practice behinds.
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The LG x BTS Advert was played at Piccadilly Circus during the summer of 2018.
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The O2 Tube posted a photo of the board with BTS track names and lyrics. 
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BTS performed at a sold out O2 Arena in October 2018. UKArmy were hyped up before the concert even began, by singing the songs playing out around the arena. 
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Big Hit announced online that Jungkook had injured his heel and was advised to not dance on stage. At the venue, their interpreter relayed the same information. UKArmy responded by chanting Jungkook's name in support.
Backstage, Jungkook had indeed injured himself whilst warming up. The members and staff comforted him as they weighed up their options.
Jungkook went to get his stitches and the rest of the group discussed the adaptations that would need to be made. The members spoke to each other over the mics and then got into position as the concert began.
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The concert continued with high energy and all the members did their best, whilst including Jungkook in the songs.
Full Link 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9igTbMrr8w
Full Link 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4f-hSy_njlI
Full Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CVTW_YZ90I&list=PLYEZN69Ouffxi1ZkbHRNxBJnJMXVqRTiq
Jin tweeted after the concert
The next day, Jungkook tried to convince the members to let him walk around during the medley. Jin then wheeled him and the concert began. Showing their great teamwork as they continued to work hard on stage.
Full Concert Link
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Hobi Tweeted “I enjoyed London.”
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On 11th October, BTS were featured on the BBC News. In the background, we can see them talking amongst themselves 
In the interview, Jungkook talked about the concert and that they would come back to England. Clips of UKArmy were also used, with Namjoon talking about the importance of mental health/healing with music and Hobi talking about their dances as a team.
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Another interview from the UK was Noisey’s Questionnaire of Life and Lorraine BTS Take on a British Quiz
Link 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpxmQMDahiU&t=144s
Link 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECqqi0C0w6w&t=258s
They also did two NME interviews Link 1:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L993jVyE1I4&t=1s Link 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2tUY95IzLc&t=4s
BTS was on the Graham Norton show whilst in the UK. Unfortunately, JImin was unable to join them due to muscle strain. In the behinds, the members talk about how to do the Idol performance. Later on, the members say how much the performance was a struggle.
Full Episode Link with interview:
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The members posted some tweets as they were leaving London. Namjoon accidentally overlapped Tae’s and then apologised. 
On 21st October, BTS played the Award Box Challenge to collect their awards for Best International Group and Best Social Media Star.
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On 15th November 2018, Burn the Stage was released in the UK. With BTS Love Yourself in Seoul being aired a few months later.
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lumiereandcogsworth · 1 year ago
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oh my gosh i found another (!!!)
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unfinishedrambles · 2 years ago
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on devotion
two, sleeping at last / everything everywhere all at once (2022), dir. dan kwan & daniel scheinert / kill your darlings (2013), dir. john krokidas / the chapter closes, critical role / twitter: jenny slate / episode 4, fleabag (2019) / euripides, anne carson / make you feel my love, adele / h of h, anne carson / the judge, bojack horseman (2017) / coffee and cigarettes, sade andria zabala / the chaos of stars, kiersten white / wild geese, mary oliver / mary on a cross, ghost / the art of fuckery, our flag means death (2022) / @/gayassnatural / the seven husbands of evelyn hugo, taylor jenkins reid / i will, mitski
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yourdailymag · 3 months ago
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Adele Exarchopoulos for L'Officiel Spain 2017 photographed by Sonia Szostak
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caesarclowningaround · 1 year ago
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Fandoms: Aladdin (2019), Beauty and the Beast (2017) Fic Rating: E Chapter(s): 5/??? Ship(s): Jafar/Adam/Belle Fic Summary: With the curse broken and a new life ahead of them, the last thing Adam wanted was to expose Belle to the fragments of the heart he shattered years ago. But with Jafar back in his life, the three of them must learn to navigate a new way forward, if one is at all possible.
Note(s): BIG THANK YOU to my lovely beta @zebsfloppyears​!!! <3
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dailytomlinson · 18 days ago
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During the pandemic the songwriter and producer James Vincent McMorrow would rise early, go for a run and write songs for Louis Tomlinson, of One Direction.
“I actually made half of a record for him,” he says. Tomlinson’s team “had a lot of songs but maybe not a lot that he was as into as he wanted to be. I think they were maybe looking for a weirdo. So they reached out to me. I love him. He’s a fascinating human being. I absolutely loved making that album,” adds McMorrow, who is about to start a tour of Ireland.
When it comes to potential collaborators with a boy band megastar, McMorrow’s name is not the first that springs to mind. He’s an indie songwriter whose open-veined, falsetto-driven pop has been compared to that of folkies such as Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens. But Tomlinson was a fan of the Dubliner’s beautifully wrought music. He wasn’t alone: Drake famously sampled McMorrow on his 2016 track Hype.
One of the tracks they wrote together, The Greatest, would serve as the opener to Tomlinson’s second LP, Faith in the Future. As is often the way with the music industry, the rest are in a vault somewhere. Still, for McMorrow the opportunity to work with a pop star was about more than simply putting his craft in front of a wider audience. The call from Tomlinson’s team had come at a low point for the Irishman, who had become mired in confusion and doubt after signing to a major label for the first time in his career.
Executives at Columbia Records had recognised potential in McMorrow as an artist who bridged the divide between folk and pop. The fruits of that get-together would see daylight in September 2021 as the excellent Grapefruit Season LP, on which McMorrow teamed up with Paul Epworth, who has also produced Adele and Florence Welch.
The album was a beautifully gauzy rumination on the birth of his daughter and the muggy roller coaster of first-time parenthood. It went top 10 in Ireland and breached the top 100 in the UK. Yet the experience of working within the major-label system was strange for McMorrow, who at that point had been performing and recording for more than a decade. He didn’t hate it. But he knew he didn’t ever want to do it again.
“It was a weird time. I stopped touring in 2017. My daughter was born in 2018. I signed with Columbia Records at the same time and made a record that ... There were moments within it I was proud of. But fundamentally, I think if I was being very honest, I would say that I definitely got lost in the weeds of what the music industry wanted for me rather than what I wanted for myself.”
Finding his way out of the weeds involved putting out The Less I Knew, a mixtape of tracks, in 2022, and, in June 2024, Wide Open, Horses, the official follow-up to Grapefruit Season. It’s a fantastic reboot from an artist who has found his way into the light once again. The album showcases McMorrow’s propulsive voice – imagine a goth Bee Gees – and his ability to turn a diaristic observation about a tough day into musical quicksilver, as he does on White Out, a blistering ballad that draws on his experience of suffering a panic attack while out at the shops (“white out on the city street ... pain comes from strangest places”).
He workshopped the project with two concerts at the National Concert Hall in Dublin in March 2023, performing the as-yet-unfinished record all the way through. The risk of something going amiss was significant – which was why he did it in the first place.
“Those shows, that process was me very much back on my bullshit,” he says, meaning that, having tried to fit into a corporate structure, he was embracing his old idiosyncratic methods once again.
“I’m the worst sort of career musician in a lot of ways. I do the weird thing. I like doing things that make me interested selfishly. ‘I’m engaged with this process.’ ‘The stress of this is making me feel the way that I want to feel.’ And I’d lost that. Doing those two shows was me doing something where I was, like, ‘There’s stakes to this’ ... ‘If I f**k this up, people are going to see it.’ That brings out the best in me.”
McMorrow grew up in Malahide, the well-to-do town in north Co Dublin; as a secondary-school student he suffered debilitating shyness. In 2021 he revealed that he had struggled with an eating disorder at school, ending up in hospital (“Anorexia that progressed into bulimia”). He was naturally retiring, not the sort to crave the spotlight. But he was drawn to music. “It was definitely a difficult journey,” he says. He wasn’t alone in that. “The musicians that tend to cut through and make it ... A lot of my friends, musicians that are successful, they’re not desperate for the stage.”
The Tomlinson collaboration was part of his strange relationship with the mainstream music industry. It went back to McMorrow’s third LP, Rising Water, from 2016. A move away from his earlier folk-pop, the project had featured engineering from Ben Ash, aka Two Inch Punch, a producer who had worked with chart artists such as Jessie Ware, Sia and Wiz Khalifa.
That was followed by the Drake sample in 2016 and by McMorrow writing the song Gone, which was at one point set to be recorded by a huge pop star whom he’d rather not identify.
“Gone is the red herring of red herrings in my entire career. I wrote that song for other people. I didn’t write it for myself. The whole reason I signed to Columbia Records and I had all these deals was because of Gone. I was very happy tipping away in my weird little world. And then I wrote that song, and a lot of bigger artists came in to try to take it,” he says.
“I won’t name names. There were recordings of it done. It got very close to being a single for someone else. I would go in these meetings with all these labels, and I would play it for them – just to play. Not with any sense of ‘This is my song.’ And they were, like, ‘You’re out of your mind if you don’t take this song. This is the song that will make you the thing that is the thing.’ And I was, like, ‘You’re wrong.’ For a year I basically was, like, ‘I disagree.’ And if you go in a room with enough people enough times and they tell you that you’re crazy ... I loved the song, but I did not love it for me. I never felt I fit. There was a little part of me that wanted to believe.”
As he had predicted, Gone wasn’t a hit. He received a lot of other strange advice, including that he cash in on the mercifully short-lived craze for NFTs by putting out an LP as a watermarked internet file. All of that was swirling in his brain when Tomlinson got in touch. To be able to step outside his own career was exactly what McMorrow needed.
“With Louis it was like boot camp. I had a very limited time with him. I had to wake up every morning, go for a run, write a song in my head, go to the studio. We made songs all day long. It lit a fire in my head again. I loved the process. I like sitting and talking to someone like Louis, who’s had this unbelievably fascinating lifestyle – so much tragedy in his life,” he says. Tomlinson’s mother and sister died within three years of each other, and his 1D bandmate Liam Payne died in October. “So many things have happened to him. I chatted to him and then write constantly. That was a lovely process.”
Because life is strange and full of contrasts McMorrow ended up working with Tomlinson around the same time that he was producing the Dublin postpunk “folk-metal” band The Scratch, on their LP Mind Yourself. “Totally different animals,” he says. “The Scratch album was an intense period in the studio of that real old-school nature of making music. A lot of fights. A lot of pushing back against ideas. A lot of different opinions. And you have to respect everybody’s opinions and find the route through.”
During his brief time on a major label, McMorrow was reminded of the music industry’s weakness for short-term thinking. In 2019, the business was obsessed with streaming numbers and hot-wiring the Spotify algorithm so that your music posted the highest possible number of plays.
“Everyone was driven by stats. ‘This song has 200 million streams.’ ‘That song has 400 million streams.’ I went into my meetings with Columbia Records ... the day I had my first big marketing meeting was the day my catalogue passed a billion streams, which, for someone like me, who started where I started, was a day where I should be popping champagne corks. Instead they immediately started talking about how they have artists that have one song that has two billion streams. So by their rule of thumb I was half as successful as one song by one artist on their label.”
Five years later he believes things have changed. He points to Lankum, a group who will never set Spotify alight yet who have carved a career by doing their own thing and not chasing the short-term goal of a place on the playlist. They are an example to other musicians, McMorrow says.
“I was in Brooklyn, doing two nights, a week and a half ago. In the venue across the road from where we were, pretty much, Lankum were doing two nights and had [the Dublin folk artist] John Francis Flynn opening for them. Those are two artists that, if you were to look at their stats, you wouldn’t be, like, ‘These are world-beating musicians.’ You start aggregating to this stat-based norm and you miss bands like Lankum, bands like The Mary Wallopers, people like John Francis Flynn.”
McMorrow is looking forward to his forthcoming Irish tour, which he sees as another leg of his journey to be his best possible self.
“The last two, three years have been a process of building it back to a version of me that actually made me happy rather than making me cry at night-time – a version that was making music because I liked it. Within this industry there’s so much outside noise. It’s quite overwhelming. I was overwhelmed. It’s been nice to reset the clock.”
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