#it’s actually one long track with transitions to each new song

[chanzilla123]

Ahhhhh, my CDs finally came home!

[deadcactuswalking]

REVIEWING THE CHARTS: 11/05/2024 (The Drake & Kendrick Beef Analysed in Detail. And Dua Lipa, I guess)

Yeah, yeah, Taylor Swift, Dua Lipa, whatever, we have more pressing issues. Sorry to break the format again so soon, but I don’t really know in what other context I can talk about all of these outside of just dumping it all together so… consider this a prologue, perhaps. I’m cactus, and before we get to the rest of the chart, I guess it’s time to discuss the you-know-whos and whatever impact this has. If you don’t care, skip to the rundown.

Part I: Okay, but what does J. Cole think of all of this?

content warning: language, abuse

The songs did not debut in exact chronological order, so that’s why I’m separating this into a different section - it allows for a cleaner timeline of what’s actually going on and allows me to develop some more cohesive thoughts. I assume everyone reading this already knows what’s going on and has probably heard the tracks or most likely even consumed some opinion pieces on it before, and that’s why I’m not doing a stricter, review-format lyrical analysis like I would for any other lyrical rap songs that appears on the chart. There’s already so much out there, and so many double-triple-quadruple-quintuple entendres on both sides, some vile accusations plastered onto both mens’ legacies and crews, and a concerning amount of discourse surrounding all of it. Am I here to contribute to that discourse? Yes, but even this soon, it just feels a bit tired, right? Pitchfork had Alphonse Pierre writing incessantly about how much he hated it before any woman-beating or child-endangering allegations were in the fold. Rap beef existing in the 2020s, the “thinkpiece era”, I don’t know, it’s exhausting. That doesn’t change the quality of the tracks though, and even that has been discussed to death, including by me - in the past few months, I’ve already reviewed “Like That”, “Push Ups” and “euphoria”, as well as touching upon “6:16 in LA” - so I won’t be retreading my steps, I’ll be attempting to give my unique perspective outside of a timeline or rundown of events, gathering thoughts on ideas I don’t really see brought up as often.

So, where were we? When I last released an episode, it was Friday and the latest diss was Kendrick’s cryptic Instagram posts where he claims he has a mule in OVO feeding him information about Drake and his crew. He’d just dropped “euphoria”, one of the best diss tracks of all time, and whilst “Push Ups” was good, I don’t think Drake really had it in him to respond to such an evisceration. I half-expected him not to acknowledge “euphoria” at all, but sadly, he did, and famously, “meet the grahams” was released just half an hour later to squash the potential legacy of Drake’s new track, which was titled “Family Matters”. The popular consensus seems to be that if Kendrick hadn’t swooped in with something “Story of Adidon” level, Drake’s “Family Matters” would be considered an excellent diss track… and I completely disagree, that shit is trash. Here’s why.

“Family Matters” is a clear emulation of “euphoria” - if Kendrick can release his seven-minute multiple-part diss track, why can’t Drake? He spent as many days as he needed to curate a very similar song - no, I’m not saying Kendrick created the idea of beat switches or long songs, but when the two are dropped directly in relation to each other, it’s difficult to summise from that, that Drake isn’t coming to battle in a very similar way to Kendrick purposefully, using his formula and structure. The problem here is focus. Kendrick, since he’s only focusing on Drake, can outline his issues in such a streamlined and digestible way that offhand remarks are catchy and memorable but hit hard within the context of the full song. All three beats are given room to breathe and transition very smoothly into each other, and the first beat even predicts Drake’s moves over a jazz beat to make the track appear condescending, defining the song’s mood from the start. “euphoria” is a tightly-constructed evisceration of Drake, that Drake simply cannot come back from, because he isn’t fighting one side. He could shut up about everyone else and leave the bars to Kendrick, but he simply doesn’t have enough about Kendrick to do that for a substantially long amount of time, and if he comes back to “euphoria” with just a three minute diss track, he looks like a clown, not that he doesn’t already if he doesn’t acknowledge Rick Ross, Future, Metro, Rocky… or at least he thinks he would look silly not dismissing them, even though realistically, that’s what we all want him to be: focused, not spraying shots at people who no one legitimately wants to see win or fail. Like who cares if The Weeknd wins or fails a rap beef? He’s not even a rapper.

The beats don’t have any thematic purpose, the first beat is one we’ve already heard before, and whilst there are plenty of disses to chew on, a lot of it is actually just completely substanceless garbage. When he’s not repeating himself, he’s whining about how YG or whoever is ACTUALLY gang-banging as if YG wouldn’t hop on “Not Like Us” today. Sure, there’s menace in… the intro, because the only time Drake sounds energetic and venomous is when interrupting his mother - classy - but it’s weak apart from a few lines poking fun at his conscious personality which are somewhat funny if not just… strange considering Kendrick  being private leads to Drake spreading rumours regarding women and children on the idea that well, if Drake says it, everyone will believe it’s true! Also, it’s telling that Drake, after failing in “Push Ups” to prove he was a better rapper or a harder, more authentic image, all he has on Kendrick revolves around women, children and gay jokes towards The Weeknd. He spends damn near a whole beat out of the three on the side characters, which I know must have been, in Drake’s eyes, a demonstration of how he just doesn’t care about those guys… but you still rapped about them for a whole song’s length and the tightest bars come from that section, primarily because they’re easier targets. It also is pretty telling that Drake, who sounds increasingly bored over cheap beats the whole time, attempts to switch the “white boy” insult into a “white flag” wordplay but he still ends up saying “Ross callin’ me the white boy and that shit kind of got a ring to it”, without ever negating it in the punchline. He still ends up calling himself white. What is this?

Regardless, “Family Matters” debuts at #17 on the UK Singles Chart this week. It was produced by Boi-1da, Tay Keith, Fierce, Kevin Mitchell, Dramakid, Preme, Jordan Fox and… Mark Ronson of all people, who I assume had something to do with the third beat, since it’s the only one that actually sounds good. Minutes after Drake dropped, we get “meet the grahams”, produced by The Alchemist and well, it left a lot of people speechless. Once again, Kendrick goes for being condescending and systematic instead of the unfocused slop we get from Drake, directing his disses not for Drake initially, but directly addressing each member of his family. It’s not the most replayable in terms of its beat bouncing or having much in the way of a hook, of course, but it is villainous and deceptively straightforward in ways. The beat is basically one loop from Alc with basic but eerie piano and one of my favourite details in this entire beef: that yelping scream in the distance. For drumless jazz beats like this, those atmospheric intricacies are so necessary, and the instrumental break refrain that separates verses, something Kendrick would do again on the second track, is too cold. I’m not a lyrical analyst, I’m not a sociopolitical analyst, so here’s why “meet the grahams” makes J. Cole look like a fucking idiot, actually.

Cole stepped out of the beef before it got personal, probably because ScHoolboy called him up and said it wasn’t about rap, and since then, if anything, Kendrick has been slightly defending Cole in his raps whilst Drake has been dismissive and insulting. Again, telling! This should make Cole look smart, slick and the bigger man for apologising and not getting himself involved in the personal, frankly gross allegations made by both men against each other, and whilst we’d all like to hear Cole and Kendrick go back and forth on bars alone, what we got was much more impactful and cinematic, something that just wouldn’t fit Cole’s homegrown image. Whilst this is true on the surface, I beg you to go back to Might Delete Later after all of that. After all the talk about how he doesn’t take Ls, about how he’s taking everyone’s girl, about how his bars are like clips or whatever, all of his boast talk - and then he slides out of this beef before shit gets venomous. Then consider all his talk about how he can’t get cancelled like Dave Chappelle and how it’s all politically correct these days, and that trans… “fellas” are still pussies… given what’s been addressed here, with a back-and-forth by the two ACTUAL members of the big three involved essentially TRYING to cancel each other, the mixtape becomes dated and purposeless so quickly that it gives credit to its name. Cole has always seen himself as the “middle child” of rap, but really, his dichotomy isn’t between mumble rap and oldheads, it’s between being pretentious and anti-intellectual, simultaneously. At least Drake embraces that he is an asshole, which is the one reason to root for his character - I don’t like “Family Matters”, but it pretty effectively places himself as the villain of the story, at least if we’re willing to accept this as a narrative, and “meet the grahams” does an even better job at that than Drake could! Cole decided to align himself with the anti-intellectual crowd whilst being all intellectual about that approach, and let’s just say that when Kendrick is winning a beef, it looks really idiotic to be blissfully ignorant. I’m sure Cole has written a few songs about all of this, but what’s telling is that Kendrick and Drake will never delete these records, because they’re a cemented part of history in their careers and really, hip hop culture. I don’t like “Family Matters” or really, “Like That”, but there are moments in those tracks now iconic and quotable that Cole has completely lost out on. Drake got his ass handed to him, but it would be even more of a loss for him economically and in the media to delete those diss tracks. Kendrick, I would assume, somewhat regrets some of the statements made because his last album presented him as slightly above it all, and he does face an increasing number of abuse allegations now that whilst I’m sure he doesn’t sweat too hard, really aren’t great for you to have around. And sure, whilst Drake might be bringing up the size of his penis in “Family Matters” for no reason, the most homoerotic moment in this dick-swinging context might be the fact that Kendrick’s biggest song in years is focused entirely on another man’s sex crimes. Neither come out clean, but they come out with more dignity than the guy who thought he was hot shit and ended the beef with less streams, less name-drops and less tracks on his album because I bet you forgot, but he’s actually started to back track and delete the records. The only person to see this as a genuine stain on the legacy, a genuine piercing of the armour, is Cole, which is why he can’t be in that big three. Because he cares too much to prove he’s there in the first place.

On the UK charts, “meet the grahams” debuts at #28, but it doesn’t matter because the night after, he drops “Not Like Us”, a DJ Mustard banger, beats Drake at his own game and has people all across the world in clubs singing “OV-HOE”. It debuts at #10 and is co-produced with Sounwave and Sean Momberger, but the idea that Mustard is on the beat, giving Kendrick a classic West Coast banger to end out the beef whilst Drake is stuck with a myriad of identity-less tracks (ironically, one wherein he shouts out YG), is a diss in itself. Nobody cares about how much of this is true, if any of it is, because people believe that reckoning with that fact takes us out of enjoying music, which I think it’s silly but also a story for another day. I don’t idolise either of these guys - Hell, I preferred Drake’s last record to Kendrick’s - but through sheer lyrical dexterity and chess moves, Kendrick won the beef and shattered Drake’s PR statement of a comeback, “The Heart Part 6”, into pieces before it could even be rebuilt from the fragments of Drake’s pride. You can’t release a diss track that has you defending yourself against false allegations, if 1.) you yourself made false accusations and 2.) no one cares if the accusations are true, just who says them louder and harder, which is exactly why Kendrick knew “meet the grahams” wasn’t enough and that’s why he needed to drop the Mustard joint. Drake may be calculated, and a master manipulator, but he cannot out-guess the biggest hypocrite of 2015. And 2024. And maybe forever, I don’t know, he could drop something tomorrow. Now let’s shut my hoe ass up and review some charts.

----

Part II: REVIEWING THE CHARTS

content warning: The Chainsmokers

So, Kendrick has four songs in the UK Singles Chart right now as a primary artist, which shouldn’t be allowed according to OCC rules normally, but I guess even the Official Charts Company just wants to see blood. As for the songs that actually dropped out of the UK Top 75, which is what I cover, after spending five weeks in the region or a peak in the top 40, we say farewell to “II MOST WANTED” by Beyoncé and Miley Cyrus, as well as Bey’s cover of “JOLENE”, “if u think i’m pretty” by Artemas, “Wasted Youth” by goddard. and Cat Burns (shame that one didn’t reach a higher peak, I really like it), “What Was I Made For?” by Billie Eilish and, perhaps most vindictively for this week, “H.Y.B.” by J. Cole featuring Bas and Central Cee. Ha.

We see two kind of inexplicable but also irrelevant returns with “Whatever” by Kygo and Ava Max at #74 and “As it Was” by Harold Styles at #41, but otherwise we do have a handful of notable gains, including “Mr. Brightside” by The Killers once again at #65, now the biggest song ever to never hit #1. It just never dies. Aside from that, there are boosts for Dua Lipa’s “Training Season” at #61 thanks to the album, more on that later, “Love Me JeJe” by Tems at #52 - a little detail I missed with the debut last week is that the phrase in the title was adopted from a well-revered track in Nigeria of the same name by Seyi Sodimu, which I thought was notable enough to consider sn error of research. Whoops. Put that in the corrections column. We also see “Slow it Down” by Bento Box at #23, some boosts for Kendrick as “Like That” with Future and Metro Boomin and, Ye I guess now, is at #20 whilst “euphoria” stalls at #11, and finally, Tommy Richman gets his first top 10 with the smash hit “MILLION DOLLAR BABY”. Really can’t complain.

As for our top five, it consists of “Fortnight” by Taylor Swift featuring Post Malone at #5, “Beautiful Things” by Benny the Butcher at #4, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” by Shaboozey at #3, “Too Sweet” by Hozier and #2, and finally, for a second week, Sabrina Carpenter is at #1 with “Espresso”. We still have five new songs debuting this week that aren’t disses, so let’s have some fun with songs that hopefully won’t be as heavy, and we start where every good night of fun starts. With the Chainsmokers.

New Entries

#75 - “Addicted” - Zerb, The Chainsmokers and Ink

Produced by Zerb and The Chainsmokers

Zerb is a Brazilian DJ who’s found his way into a collaboration with everyone’s favourite duo The Chainsmokers and smooth R&B singer Ink, with a Joel Corry remix probably helping this one end up at the bottom of the chart here. Now I do like The Chainsmokers, but not necessarily their work with other vocalists, as they’re not nearly as willing to experiment when it’s not just the two boys embarrassing themselves. Ink, who really just sounds like a BTEC The-Dream on here, doesn’t command much of the track due to that wispy tone, but Zerb being on board probably helps the squibbling synths spiral into more of an intense, detailed drop that traces bassy future house amidst some genuinely weird and oddly full percussive elements and sound effects, especially that incessant shaker in the pre-drop. You can tell these guys are professionals, as the sound design is very intricate and makes so much use of its available space whilst not being too fluid or syrupy, it goes decently hard, and whilst Zerb may not be The-Dream, he gets close. And I like The-Dream. I like this too. It’s a jam. Give it a chance, it kept growing on me like a brain parasite as I was listening.

#71 - “Right Here” - Becky Hill

Produced by Chase & Status

Whilst rap rivalries are brewing, EDM DJ duos seem to be having a good week by sticking together - with Chase & Status on board, this is pretty much confirmed to be at least decent before taking a listen and, well, obviously it’s good. At this point, I might just like Becky Hill’s output overall, at least from this upcoming album, and the decision from the boys to position an 80s pop rock melodrama with the soaring synths and plastic guitar below an absolute rolick of drum and bass feels very much like a throwback to the dancefloor DnB era from the early to mid 2010s, and I may like more atmospheric drum and bass tracks a lot of the time but I’m not above some unabashed pop, and this really has the momentum and kick to justify itself. Sure, the mix is a bit awkward, but the same can be said for a lot of drum and bass, and it’s not like that genre has ever suffered from being loud or overwhelming, especially not in festival mood, and the layering of Becky’s belting over those classic 90s hardcore pianos is an interesting touch compared to what I probably would have done, drowned her in reverb and echo like they sometimes did back in the day. The explosive approach taken here backs up an already infectious hook and results in yet another damn good track by Becky Hill, which would be a foreign idea to me throughout the rest of my time doing this show.

#68 - “The Door” - Teddy Swims

Produced by Julian Bunetta and Ammo

I didn’t even think we’d get a second song from Teddy Swims, but I was wrong about that when it came to David Kushner, Noah Kahan and  that Boonetown Rat over at #4 so maybe this is just the year of the edged-up white boy. I still think “Lose Control” is okay, and in terms of pure singing process, Teddy’s got a lot more soul and presence than them. That’s really carrying this one though, and whilst the groove’s a solid throwback, the reverb dampens its impact and it sounds like he’s recording the whole thing from a cave, but not a vintage chasm like Spector’s best stuff, just… a small cave near a river or some swampland. The songwriting also feels a bit basic, it isn’t all too compelling and goes for some very typical tropes, predictable rhymes, even if the “oh no!” is a bit of a fun inflection. Bunetta and Ammo also don’t let the song progress much, even just from verse to chorus, it feels stuck. I figured that when that soaring disco string section came in, we’d get a proper bridge that made it all feel satisfying, but it does tampers off into a post-chorus and we get a basic repetition of the chorus again. If you’re going to try and replicate a vintage sound, at least show respect to how they composed their tracks too, not just cosplay within their soundfont.

#67 - “Risk” - Gracie Abrams

Produced by Aaron Dessner and Gracie Abrams

Producing for Taylor Swift is the best idea the Dessners had ever. Now these indie folksters are going to have labels calling for them to prop up their attempts at making pop stars - I don’t like The National, like… at all, but get the bag, guys, I prefer them over The Monsters & Strangerz, or God forbid Julia Michaels. The largely-failed Gracie Abrams experiment has been an industry push for five years now, but the daughter of film director J. J. Abrams finally has a hit of her own and… okay, maybe calling her “own” hit was a misnomer, because this has O-Rod and T-Swift written all over it. You could genuinely run the whole thing through a Taylor Swift AI filter and I’d believe you, I imagine this is like hearing the track the “Heart on My Sleeve” guy recorded before he put the Drake effect on. It has Olivia’s wordy teenage anxiety and acoustic tones, but to be fair, Abrams is a lot more optimistic than her inspirations, with her breathy pleading that this relationship is going to work out over acoustic guitars that don’t feel relentless,  but do feel like they never end, just keep going, and the song keeps on adding elements that don’t stop them or alleviate the anxious playing at all. The same thing can be said about Gracie’s vocal take, or the wonky synth subtly placed into the chorus - classic Dessner - and the little lyrical details that make this feel as real as it does - if she’s invested, then damn, so am I, it feels like my friend is rambling or venting to me about the “tea” as the kids say and I’m on the edge of my seat. Surprisingly enough, of all things that sold me on this ballad, it’s the intensity, and the drums ramping up by the end into a rolick makes me forgive how derivative this feels… mostly because it’s doing a better job at this sound and concept than Swift is, statistically, half of the time, and emulates O-Rod’s youthful authenticity a bit less obnoxiously than she typically pulls. I know that’s a feature, not a bug, but I still prefer when it’s patched out. Excellent song.

#40 - “These Walls” - Dua Lipa

Produced by Danny L Harle and Andrew Wyatt

I wasn’t over the Moon with Radical Optimism the way I was with Future Nostalgia, mostly because outside of a nice vibe, the songs felt artifically short, awkwardly constructed and not nearly as adventurous or even cohesive as the people involved, or “Houdini” as a lead single, would have suggested. I wrote about her latest #1 album more at length on my RateYourMusic listening log - account name’s exclusivelytopostown, check it out if you care - but this was an obvious choice for the next single, because it’s one of the album’s tightest, with that psychedelic guitar lick blossoming amidst a mixture of trinkling keys before we slap right into an actually fittingly stiff pop rock groove, with a nice, subtle crunchy drum fill in the mix that I find a really interesting, distorted inclusion. It really helps the song feel claustrophobic and fed up, as the content is about the pre-empting of a breakup wherein both Dua and her partner are stuck in a frustratingly disappointing relationship where the love just… isn’t really there anymore, but they don’t want to face the reality of separation because that might be harder to grapple with than just keeping silent. For once on this album, the bridge doesn’t feel smashed in post-haste, Hell, it might not even need a bridge, and Harle’s attention to detail is on full display here, as the post-chorus keeps the dissonance going by making Dua just slightly off-key, it’s brilliant. A very tightly written and composed pop song, as well as possibly the record’s most vulnerable and honest moment, in an album that otherwise coasts off vibes. I definitely think this one could help a great deal with the record’s success later down the line.

Conclusion

Whoo, that was a lot, huh? Well, Best of the Week goes to Kendrick Lamar, obviously, for both “meet the grahams” and “Not Like Us”, but it was closer than you’d expect for Gracie Abrams who takes the Honourable Mention with “Risk”. This was actually a pretty great week overall for song quality, at least within the new tracks, so despite Teddy trying to hold his ship together, it still sinks and grants him the Dishonourable Mention for “The Door”. As for the Worst of the Week, I’d say I feel bad for Drake considering he got destroyed this week already but if what Kendrick is saying is true, I think I’d rather not say I feel bad for him at all. And if what Drake is saying is true… well, let’s just say “Family Matters”. Thank you for reading, rest in peace to rock engineering legend Steve Albini, Eurovision next week, and I’ll see you then.

[arkhamknightz]

DELICATE

summary: after an ongoing online scandal, you come out with a new album. during an interview, you talk about your inspo :)

warnings: this fic is an excuse to write this fic again that i made for joe since i wrote it months ago and for evan instead with reputation since i think its one of the best albums ever made! link to actual genius article for everyone :)

GENUIS!

“Three years after the release of their 2014 album, and following several public spats with celebrities, Y/N Y/L/N aims to clear their name and inaccurate public image on Reputation. At a fan event that took place in June 2018, Y/L/N described the record as a story of “finding love throughout all the noise,” referring to how the album transitions from discussing her persona to falling in love with American actor Evan Peters.”

*VIDEO STARTS*

“Is this thing on?” you looked at the camera crew and laughed as they held up a thumbs up. “Hi! Im Y/N Y/L/N, I’m here with Genius and I’m here to talk about my new album, reputation.” you smiled at the camera. Evan, sitting alongside the crew, read out the cards they had handed him. “So, how many tracks are on the album?” he asked. “Well, theres fifteen tracks” “Can you list them out for us?” he smiled warmly.

“The album starts off with Ready For It, End Game featuring Ed Sheeran and Future, I Did Something Bad, Don’t Blame Me, Delicate, Look What You Made Me Do, So It Goes, Gorgeous, King Of My Heart, Dancing With Our Hands Tied, Dress, This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things, Call It What You Want, and the album ends with New Years Day.” Evan softly smiled, reading off the next card. “Is there anything you can tell us about each track?”

You laughed softly, “So, Ready for it is pretty much just diving into what the rest of the albums gonna be like, referencing past songs, kinda lightly digging into the whole situations thats been happening for a while.” you quickly moved onto the next track.

“End Game is just about my reputation and how this effected my outside relationships. I did something bad is pretty much about the same thing, but its a more direct approach.” You took a glance over at Evan, a small smile painted across his face as you carefully explained each track.

"Delicate is about my current relationship, as is Don't Blame Me, I'd definitely say it's one of my more vulnerable tracks." You smiled at Evan, who was already smiling as you started explaining. "My reputation wasn't the best when we first met, which obviously lead to me questioning a lot of it at the start. I didn't think someone could love me in the way he does after everything was going down, it felt like the whole internet was against me but he loved me for who I am and not who I was painted out to be."

As you finished going through each track Evan's smile only grew wider. "What's your favourite track off the album?" You clapped excitedly before speaking. "That's a really hard one but right now I'd have to say either New Year's Day or Dress, both songs are special in terms of relationships." "Do you have a favorite lyric from them?"

You nodded, "For Dress I'd have to say the bridge-" You watched as Evan looked down and smiled before looking back up at you. "Because it really touches on another vulnerable thought I had for a long time. He saw the best in me in my worst time. And for New Years Day probably the bridge as-well for the same reason.

Evan carried on the interview, you wandered questions about the album before closing off. "Well, I'm Y/N Y/L/N and this was my genius interview! Make sure to listen to Reputation on all platforms." You waved at the camera with a small smile on your face before they cut.

You stood up from your chair as the crew around you started speaking. You walked over to Evan who had put the cards down and opened his arms for you to walk into. You wrapped your arms around him as he gently kissed your forehead. "So I'm your muse hmm?" You let out a laugh and nodded before gently kissing him letting out a soft 'mmhm' You looked at him before slightly tearing up. "Thank you for loving me" He smiled softly before tightening his grip on your waist, "I'll love you for the rest of my life."

A/N: hi friends! I decided to finish this because after hearing delicate live and seeing this in my drafts I needed to finish this so badly.. live laugh love taylor swift!

[londonspirit]

Our Flag Means Death is special. From creating a surrealist version of the Golden Age of Piracy, to centering a later-in-life coming-out story, to including people or many races, gender identities, abilities, and cool freaking hairstyles, to moving production for season two from LA to New Zealand in order to highlight the beauty of the land, Lord of the Rings-Style, and build a majority Kiwi crew. It’s makes our pop cultural heart swell to see a production being so intentional with its decisions.

But nowhere is that intentionality more apparent than in OFMD’s music. More than just fun, jokey needledrops, each song in Season One acts as a counterpoint to the action, adding emotion and depth to what becomes a surprising queer love story. A lot of the credit for the show’s unique tone can go to Music Supervisor Maggie Phillips and her team. Leah Schnelbach recently got to speak with Maggie about baroque pop, “The Beautiful Ones”, making “the non-obvious choice”, and—the long-awaited SEASON TWO.

Season two debuts on Max in the U.S. on October 5, and Neon on October 6 and is coming soon to Sky Open in New Zealand.

(This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.)

How do you start? Do you get the script and let you mind wander, or do you pick a period and do a deep dive on songs from a period?

Maggie Phillips: It depends on the project. For [OFMD] I got the scripts—at least the first four or five—so I had enough to have a sense of the love story, and the themes. I made thematic playlists. Sometimes I do character driven playlists. But across the board it starts with scripts and playlists. Then I send the playlist to the director or showrunner and we start a back and forth. And this one, same, except that I’d worked with David Jenkins before on People of Earth, so I knew his taste already, and it’s very similar to mine, which is very melodic, we both like baroque pop, we both like a lot of classical elements in our music and in our pop.

And he’s very encouraging of me to—I realized when we worked on People of Earth—he pushed me to go weird. Some people have me rein it back, but he pushed me to go even further. So, I just start a general playlist, thematically driven, mostly romantic. We wanted to play up the romance in the first season, so a lot of romantic music and songs, pop songs about unrequited love, pining, heartbreak, heart-loss, it’s been a long time since I started these – longing, leaving behind a part of your life and moving on to another part, transition…and then another part was just like, ocean life! And the sea! I made a lot of playlists and sent them over to David, and what actually happens—sometimes we’ll pull from the general playlist. I work closely with the editors on specific scenes and send over specific playlists for each scene that we were listening for. I’d make playlists of 500 songs, and then listen to that for each moment—mostly end credits in Season One—and then send playlists over for spots. But that’s how it starts, and that’s the fun part.

That’s about twenty-five percent of my job. The rest is clearing songs and tracking rights and dealing with budgets, and blah blah blah. (laughs)

One of my favorites is Moondog. How did Moondog… happen?

MP: That’s a song that I’ve had, I love that song. His music is very avant garde, there’s only a handful of his songs that I thought could be synch-able. Even that one, I had saved on a playlist years ago, and hadn’t pitched it to anyone. It hadn’t worked in any moment, this I did not put on the general playlist, i tried specifically for the end of the pilot, and I almost didn’t send it because I thought, there’s no way they’ll go for this. And luckily the editor, the editor is sometimes the middleman, they’ll try out the stuff and show it to David. They’re in the rooms with David more than I am. So like sometimes I’ll send my stuff out to editors and not know which one they’re going to show. I’ll send them 15-20 songs, and they’ll show the director or showrunner three to five choices. But Hilda [Rasula], the editor of the pilot was very collaborative and communicative, and she responded and said which ones she liked and would try, and I knew this was one of them, so I was excited. There was a handful of songs that I loved for that pilot, but this one was one of my top favorites, and she said she was going to show it, but I still didn’t think this was going to be the one they’d pick.

Sometimes I’ll get an email saying we’re putting on [one of the choices], but I didn’t get it for this one, so I got to watch the pilot like an audience member not knowing which song they selected—I immediately knew it from the first note, and was like, “Oh they went with Moondog!” And then I got to watch and see how it works.

It worked beautifully.

MP: That was a really hard spot to nail, and that song is perfect because it’s melancholy and wistful, but there’s also hope. It hits both notes, and he just left his—you have to gloss over that so you can still love Stede, but he left his fuckin’ family. He’s having this intense mid-life crisis and he does what some people dream of, which is starting over, but most people don’t do, you know? I think we hit both notes with that song. And we wanted to hit the humanity on all those characters, we see Jim, we see a few characters in that montage. And the humanity of all of them being in the boat at sea all alone…

Heading out!

MP: Yeah! For the adventure of their lifetimes! (laughs)

It was perfect, I thought. I know from other interviews with you that you had a 300-song playlist for season one, were you able to use any for this season?

MP: For season two? Yes. I definitely we still… we still haven’t scratched the tip of the iceberg like there’s so many songs I have for this show… and there’s only so many songs in the show. There are fifteen in season one and even fewer in season two, and we only have eight episodes to work with. We use one in Episode 1: “Strawberry Letter 23”, the Shuggie Otis. We used one in the trailer, “The Beautiful Ones” by Prince…

That was uhhh pretty great!

MP: That was one of the first songs—I think the first song that David and I spoke about for the show?

Oh! Like, before season one started?

MP: Yeah, even before we spoke about “The Chain”—I can’t remember if “Beautiful Ones” came from David or me? But we talked about Prince and we both bonded on the fact that we loved that song specifically. That literally was the first song I had in my head for the whole show. I think in season one the estate was off-limits because it was soon after his passing, but then by season two his music was licensable again. I’ve been doing this for almost 18 years, and it’s the first time [I’ve licensed his music]. And he’s one of my top ten artists of all time.

When we posted the trailer, I’m pretty sure the tweet I wrote was just screaming about “Beautiful Ones”, I was so excited.

MP: My Instagram post I did like a purple heart, I made my own Prince purple heart background, and put the trailer on top of a ton of purple hearts, and I put a crown on top of one of them. Just the teenage glee of ohmygod, we got a Prince song!

Were there any songs that were absolute no, whether because they were overused, or they just didn’t fit?

MP: There’s one from season one and one from season two, and the one from season one is “Perfect Day”, for the reason you just said. I think it’s been overused, that was one I didn’t pitch, but I kept trying to beat it—it’s an amazing song. There’s a reason it’s been used a bazillion times, cause it’s a perfect song, right? I tried so hard to beat it, and I think I did, to be honest, but there’s an inherent familiarity and comfort when you hear a song you know, and I think that helps that scene. And David was just in love with it, and I understand why, and I’m sure it was very satisfying for the audience.

The one from season two—it’s a Kate Bush. I had advised against it, but, this one I don’t think we could beat it. I had used it myself, “This Woman’s Work”, in Handmaid’s Tale. It wasn’t a song I pitched. I pitched “Running Up that Hill”—which then was in Stranger Things—I pitched that for an end of an episode in Handmaid’s Tale, and the showrunner didn’t want to use that one, but it made him remember “This Woman’s Work”, and he put it into a very controversial scene, for fans of The Handmaid’s Tale—some people hate it, and some people loved it. So, I of course read all the backlash online about using song, and people have strong opinions about it. [OFMD] was right after the Stranger Things TikTok phenomenon, and I thought “We’re gonna look like we’re copycats”, but David was like… “I don’t care.” (laughs) he said, “People have a short attention span when it comes to music and TV”, and he’s right. And it was a Taika [Waititi, OFMD’s Blackbeard/executive producer/sometimes director) song, Taika really wanted that song, he’d wanted to use that song for many years. Then I saw it cut into the episode, and I think they transformed the song. They re-contextualized it and made it their own, even so the lyrics have different meaning than I’ve ever heard listening to it previously. They clearly had a vision, and it gave me chills to watch it.

I’m excited to see how it’s used in this context.

MP: And that’s what I love about my job, you put song and image together and they both change, and in this instance it was really powerful. But I mean, I always, unless it’s a show that doesn’t care about overusing, I always tell David if I have a reaction or an opinion, and one of the things I’ll react to is if a song’s been overused, or feels uninspired—but this one felt inspired once it was cut in.

I feel like this show is so off-kilter, and it’s always surprising. So the other one that I absolutely love was the use of the Beach Boys for the Blackbeard reveal. How did you jump to that? To me that’s their meet-cute, but it’s not actually cute.

MP: No, it’s demonic/angelic, weird vocals…I had tried to use that song in a different tv show, and we got denied actually, because it was a violent scene, so I had that song on a bunch of playlists. I love that song. I think that was one that was on my general playlist. And when I’m trying out music what I do for these scenes is I’ll do a brainstorm playlist where I’ll throw on a whole bunch of songs without knowing what’s going to work and without thinking about it, just like “That’s worth trying, that’s worth trying”—I call it my kitchen sink approach—I try not to overthink what I throw onto that playlist and then I just play those songs against picture, because you never know what’s gonna click, and that’s where you get the non-obvious choices, or like, the counterpoint choices, because you don’t know until you put them together how they’re going to play off each other. And so that was one that when I tested I was like, “Oh fuck, this is beautiful.” Then I sent it to the editor, and fingers crossed that they’ll have the same reaction. I try not to color…like I don’t say in my emails which ones are my favorite, because I want them to have an unbiased reaction. But that one worked, and everyone fell in love with it.

That one, well, they’re all my favorite, but that one might be my favorite favorite. It’s such a good contrast! Stede’s almost dead, Blackbeard’s covered in gore, and then there’s these angelic voices.

MP: Right? They’re saving each other. The relationship is that they’re each others’ saviors, right? I feel like that moment, that song sort of captures that.

But without being too sappy, it’s not a song I ever hear anywhere, so it’s startling. Bigger question: I know for The Dropout you did mid-‘00s indie, because it’s a period piece, horrifyingly, that’s becoming a period piece.

MP: I know right? That made me feel old, those were songs that felt like just the other day?

Yeah (laughter) but for this, obviously it’s the Golden Age of Piracy, but it’s also kind of a surrealist fantasy did you have in mind an era, like “Oh I’m going to use a lot of ‘60s pop to create a thematic contrast”? Or more hodge-podge?

MP: It was more hodgepodge-y, and then David and I both like baroque pop, we both love a harpsichord, and that style’s heyday was ‘60s and ‘70s, and that’s where my sensibility—I love music from that time period. There’s psychedelic rock, and there’s just so much cool stuff that happened back then. It has a timeless classic feel, and then there’s yacht rock happening.

I’m a sucker for yacht rock.

MP: I am too! And it fits the whole fantastical/dude/extreme-mid-life crisis. I hate to call it Dad Music, but there’s an element of that. And not that I think this is a male-driven show, but there is a lot of male energy, and it’s these two dudes’ love story, mostly. But the whole fantasy of escaping your normal existence and going off to live as a pirate has that whole dude-dad-driven energy. So that music works. But I think it if I look at my playlist, it was maybe half ‘60s-‘70s, and half more modern stuff, and that’s just the stuff that was working. For me, the way I listen for music is very emotional and gutteral it’s not as much thinking and making it logical and setting rules, it’s more just what feels right, and the we just kind of ran with it. With The Dropout we wanted a hard timestamp. I was given rules from the outset, and with Dropout, I loved working on it, but it was one of the easier shows I’ve worked on because we had those clear delineations. This song needs to be from these couple years, and it needs to have been a radio hit, there’s only so many songs you can choose from, but when you’re doing a show like Our Flag and there’s no rules at all…

Did you set any boundaries for yourself?

MP: The only boundaries I set was… stuff I hadn’t heard before. I wanted to honor the off-beat weird tone. This is something I’ve never seen before. There’s almost no comparable show. I wanted to honor that with music that was new and different.

The only show that feels similar to me is People of Earth.

MP: I loved that show so much. Not enough people watched that show.

It was so clearly ahead of its time.

MP: There’s been enough TV shows that are weird, people have… it lives in some sort of niche. But when People of Earth came out there hadn’t been enough of those kinds of shows.

Did you come into season two with a different approach at all, or was it more of a flow from Season One?

MP: The only thing that was different is that we get to dive into more of the characters, and we wanted to flesh them out a little bit. We picked a lane that was successful, and we want to stay in it. There’s so much I haven’t done yet [from the first playlist] I hope we get a third season.

Do you have a moment from a movie or TV show that is the perfect music cue for you?

MP: I like really understated music supervisions, like Succession or Roma—it’s such a beautiful movie, very understated, and there’s no score actually. The sound design is so beautiful. You don’t need music, they played up all the soundscape to score it. And there are songs, but they’re very diegetic, just like, on the radio, very elegant and quiet. I like a reserved, economical hand. Or if they make me laugh with their musical choices, like a bold unexpected choice that makes me giggle.

[thisworldisablackhole]

Listening Log, May 2024

May has been a good month so far. Some highlights that I've already discussed have been One Step Closer, Like Moths To Flames, and Knocked Loose. I've been getting out of my comfort zone and listening to some different kinds of metal lately, so this roundup is gonna be a bit more varied than normal. Yay.

FFO: SOULFUL INDIE, FOLK ROCK

This has been one of the biggest announcements of the year for me personally. Clairo dropped a new song on thursday accompanying the announcement of her new album, which comes out in less than two months! It's refreshing to see an artist not drag out an album release for half a year. "Sexy to Someone" is such a promising first single. We still get the same lush arrangements of instruments that were utilized on Sling, just with a little more snap from the rhythm section which keeps the song grooving at all times. I was a little surprised to see her move away from working with producer Jack Antonoff, because I think what they accomplished together on Sling was a home run, but Leon Michels seems like a fitting choice to push Clairo's sound in a more soulful direction. I am just so excited for this one, I pre ordered the album as soon as I saw the announcement.

FFO: WIERD DISSONANT POST PUNK AND BLACK METAL

Time for a jarring u-turn. First off, this might be my favourite album cover of the year. The sci fi dork in me make me think it looks like someone standing on the moon and gazing through some kind of portal, which is dope (even though that's probably not what it is). This was my first exposure to Inter Arma, and the turn this album took was so unexpected and fascinating to me. New Heaven starts off with some insanely dissonant guitars before turning into a full on blackened death pummel fest that lasts for the first three songs. Guitars are sharp like razor wire, vocals are low and evil, and thanks to the killer production job, the whole thing just thunders with an atmospheric, dark energy. Fourth track "Endless Grey" begins to slowly transition us to the dark side of the moon with an epic instrumental passage of soulfully dueling guitar leads and plodding, funeral-esque drums. Then the second half begins to get really experimental with it's blend of gothic post punk, post metal and neo-folk. It's truly a journey of an album and one that's most likely gonna make it onto my year end list.

FFO: BLACK METAL, ATMOSPHERIC SLUDGE

Glassing were introduced to me as "similar to Hopesfall and Portrayal of Guilt", which was a description that immediately sold me. Two of my favourite bands which both occupy pretty different ranges of the energy spectrum, with Hopesfall being brighter and more atmospheric, and Portrayal of Guilt being downright dystopian and crushing. The crazy thing is, Glassing actually delivers on both of these promises. A sludgy, blackened low end with dismal, sometimes spooky clean/sometimes shrieking vocals topped by atmospheric, "glassy" yet crunchy lead guitars. Unfortunately, I didn't love the album as much as I love those two bands separately. Some of the songs are a bit too plodding and focus intensive for me, and I was a little disappointed by it's lack of flow in the track list. Some of the songs shift seamlessly into each other, while many others have like 5-6 seconds of silence in between them, which doesn't sound like a big deal, but it throws some speed bumps into the listening experience which remind you that you're about to go through another long tunnel of misery.

FFO: DEATH METAL, HARDCORE, MELODEATH

Gatecreeper, Gatecreeper, Gatecreeper. The black sheep of the modern death metal scene. This band has been criticized for their formulaic take on hardcore infused death metal, but Dark Superstition is a welcome surprise which shakes up the band's meta in the best way possible. This album not only features their absolute crunchiest, chunkiest production to date, but it's also their most melodic. Dark Superstition still packs some blistering heaters, but it also quite often veers into pure melodeath territory with harmonized guitar leads and tonally conscious grooves. I wish they went even further with this sound though, because as much as 50% of this album rules, the other 50% just makes me want to listen the The Black Dahlia Murder to get an even more concentrated dose of melodic guitar work.

FFO: PROGRESSIVE METAL WITH ADVENTUROUS MELODIC PARTS

Hijacking The Zeitgeist is another album that I mostly checked due to the album art, but Exist quickly caught me off guard and captured my heart with this one. Metal which is progressive and whimsical while still firmly rooted in traditions of rock n' roll is always a winning recipe for me. This album is just very focused on sick grooves and even sicker riffs. The songs are memorable and structurally familiar with just enough melodic curveballs thrown in to evoke an emotional connection that will keep you coming back.

FFO: POST HARDCORE, EMOTIVE DISSONANCE

Oberst are a band from Norway who make some very tasteful post hardcore that balances melody and dissonance with a masters hand. Toil is a brilliant array of angular, emotive hardcore riffs, and moody rhythms that will leave you gripping your chest. I haven't spent enough time with this album yet, but I think fans of bands like Birds In Row and Loma Prieta should absolutely adore this. Seems like an album with enough depth and subtle ear worms to really reward repeated listens.

FFO: SLUDGE METAL, ROCK N' ROLL I've known that this band is extremely prolific and successful for years, but I've just never been into sludgy stoner metal enough to check them out. Bands like Electric Wizard and Sleep have always bored the shit out of me, call the cops. Fortunately for High on Fire, they fucking rock. Slowed down Motörhead riffs, killer solos and a gruff yet melodically sensible vocalist who commands absolute control over the mid tempo serpent of the metal world.

FFO: METALCORE, HYPER POP, DEFTONES, ZOOMER BRAINROT-CORE

Last but not least, this new BMTH album was just sprung on us with less than a day's notice. It's no secret that this album has been in the works for a really long time, with some of these singles dating back to 2021, but I don't think anyone was expecting for it to drop like that without warning. It's very on brand though, because this album defies a lot of odds. I'll be honest, I haven't cared about this band since 2010, and I thought amo and That's The Spirit were incredibly boring, so I was not expecting this album to be so much damn fun. The mish mash of genres here just works so well for me, combining hyper pop with metalcore and grungy alt metal. It's like BMTH had a baby with underscores and Deftones. This album is 55 minutes long, but the variety keeps it so engaging. It almost feels more like listening to a playlist as opposed to a cohesive album, which I think was an intentional move to capture the attention of todays society of instant gratification induced brain death. I admit, there's some stinkers on this album. In particular I don't looove the way this band does it's Deftones rip off as it feels more like an unoriginal imitation than a fresh spin. Loathe does that type of stuff so much better. Some of the straight up pop songs were a bit lackluster as well, but when the band hits that sweet spot mixing chaotic blasts of electronic pop with metalcore, it just lights up all the right neurons in my brain. I can see why so many people despise this shit, but I think not being a BMTH fan prior, and thus having zero expectations of what they should or should not sound like really made it easy for me to get into this. Going to be spinning this one for a while.

[rilshock]

Milestones - Miles Davis (1958 Review)

One of the three Miles Davis albums I have heard, we'll get to another one of those albums much later, Milestones was a transitional album for Davis in 1958. It was still showing him in his Bebop and Hard Bop phase, but he was also showing hints of his newfound knowledge of "modal jazz", where you Improvise not over chord changes, but modes. Davis would perfect this album on his seminal album Kind of Blue a year later, but since that's not part of the "10s" Revisited series it's gonna be a while before I review that album. Though the one time I did hear the album back in 2021, it has a really good stereo mix for 1959. Anyways, the album case in point. We start off with the opening track. Dr. Jackle, which I thought was just fairly average fast bebop. A rare moment other than the 1984 New Edition self-titled where I though that the opening track was the weakest on the whole album. But back to the song, all I can say about this song is that the double bass, played by Paul Chambers, sounds like the strings are being bowed rather than fingerpicked when played really fast. Much like on Sonny Rollins' Saxophone Colossus, the second track is a complete contrast from the previous in terms of speed, this case being the song Sid's Ahead. This is the longest song on the album at 13 minutes. Because it's at a slower speed, the improvisation is much more noticeably melodic, and I like how much minimalism the backbeat of the bass and drums are backing the horn solos before the piano, played by Red Garland, joins in during the second half of the song. The speed picks back up with track 3, Two Bass Hits, for some reason I can see the melodic intro and outro of this song somewhat fitting as background music in the scene of an 90s or very early 2000s anime. Unlike Dr. Jackle I actually enjoyed the Improvisation here a lot more, It's not as in your face and all over the place, but there are some melodic elements still there. Not a bad song for the side one closer. Side 2 is the golden run of this album, back to back home runs. It starts off with the albums title track, Milestones(originally called Miles). What I said about the background music in an anime applies here a lot more. This song is also one of the earliest noticeable hints showing Davis's experimentation with Model Jazz that he would later perfect on albums like Kind of Blue a year later. Moving from between G Dorian or A Aoliean. The next song, Billy Boy, is a beautiful sounding song with Red Gardland fronting in the song. Just a piano, bass and drums, no horns. The album closes with Straight No Chaser, another long song at almost 11 minutes long, which is also my favorite "long song" on this album. With each member giving time to improvise in their solos, everyone sounds remarkable. The only other similarity this album has to Saxophone Colossus, is that both albums are exactly 9 out of 10s

Listen to the album here

[dollarbin]

Dollar Bin #26:

Bob Dylan's Bringing it All Back Home

Ah, the initially alarming, deeply flawed, but ultimately classic, transition album:

Neil Young started his deep dive into the ditch with Time Fades Away's bungling fever; Tom Petty crept off the plantation in search of SoCal zombies and skateboards with the hodgepodge airplane crash of Let Me Up; Joni Mitchell jumped off her increasingly precious clouds and instead fed us mysterious brownies, terrifying electric piano trance music and street corner clarinet; Paul Simon abandoned Artie on their graceful bridge and dove straight into the troubled water he'd formerly avoided at all costs, determined to reunite Mother and Child; Ringo and his clever lads joyfully totaled their quaint and geriatric tour bus so as to embrace rampaging chaos.

Each of these artists would have made their fans happy by staying the course. The public wanted endless choruses of All Together Now from each of them. After all, no one ever wants to see their hero just do it in the road.

But thank god they all swerved into the ditch, transitioning through straight up weird songs like L.A., Duncan, Woodstock and All Mixed Up to new, previously undreamt heights with Tired Eyes, American Tune, Blue and Free Fallin'. Thank God Paul McCartney shrieked about monkey sex long enough to give us Hey Jude.

Like most concepts in the Dollar Bin, Bob Dylan charted the seemingly reckless course for each of these vital transitions. And so let's talk about Bob's own transitional mess/masterpiece of a fifth record, Bringing it All Back Home.

It's of course tempting to think of the record in terms of Sides A and B: Like the 66 tour that followed, Bob makes an electric declaration alongside a conciliatory acoustic compromise.

But I think that assessment is all wrong, or at least too elementary (for the tour and the album). Rather, I think Bringing it All Back Home has four different, mingled song sets to consider: there are a) two tossed off novelty songs, b) three hastily recorded future masterpieces, c) three sprawling problems, and d) two songs that are total filler.

Add a fifth category: there's also one - and only one - full success on Bringing It All Back Home. That's right, it's one of my favorite albums of all time and yet I think there is only one song on the record that Bob did right the first time:

Despite the popular imagination there are plenty of Dylan tracks which feature great singing. At least once a decade Dylan reminds us that he's capable of nailing a melody alongside surprising and perfect phrasing.

Want a handy, 70 year long, left field list from off the top of my head? I'm happy to provide!

60's Moonshiner

70's Knocking on Heaven's Door

80's Blind Willie McTell

90's Lone Pilgrim

00's Nettie Moore

10's Long and Wasted Years

20's Key West

Dylan sings She Belongs to Me with similar elegance and personality, yes? The song is built on repetition and yet nothing seems to occur more than once. He tells us twice that his lady friend is an artist, he bows down to her twice and describes her firm footwork, you got it, twice, but he does so in such different fashions, stretching the second phrase in the second line of each verse just so, like a tableau vivant that has obviously changed - but how? - while you were blinking.

Indeed I've always thought of She Belongs To Me as the musical version of the album's cover, the most staged and ambitious of Dylan's career. Albert Grossman's impossibly elegant wife, the piles of rick rack and the precious kitty cat in Dylan's lap: like the song's title itself, none of these things actually appear in Dylan's perfectly paced, intimate and stately song. But every detail seems borrowed from the song's missing verses.

(It's too bad a literalist approach was taken for the Basement Tapes cover. I'd prefer images from the absent songs rather than the drunken tea party dress up vibe that was chosen. Dylan, at least, seems to understand this: while everyone else mugs for the camera he flips his stringed object 90 degrees and dreams about the door...)

Dylan of course opened his 66 tour each night with She Belongs to Me, and all the versions are successful. But none of them touch the arrangement from the album track: Bruce Langhorne's swaying, gurgling lead guitar, the unobtrusive but burgeoning drums: everything waltzes along perfectly together and insists that Bob keep up. And keep up he does, still finding chances to linger without ever getting sleepy. It makes for lovely, lovely music: perfect from the beginning.

But most of all we think of Bringing It All Back Home as an introduction to masterpieces that Bob, and everyone else, has been wrestling with ever since. Dylan recorded the whole album in 3 days so it's no wonder that songs like It's All Over Now Baby Blue, Love Minus Zero/No Limit, and Mr Tambourine Man are so complex that we're still getting to the bottom of them.

I'm not going to spend much time on Mr Tambourine Man here; check out the Dollar Bin (#6?) on Judy Collins' Fifth Record. Suffice it to say that Dylan's first version is great, but is obviously not the master take in that there were at least two competing versions that same year that were just as good.

But let's linger over Love Minus Zero/No Limit. It's one of my all time favorites, period. I have no real idea what Dylan is trying to tell us but the poetry never fails to knock me out. Consider the third verse, which echoes Proofrock's yearning, anticipates Get Smart and makes touchstones out of everything from chess to Daniel's prophesies about Nebuchadnezzar's faulty artistic future. This is Dylan and his most obtusely wonderful:

The cloak and dagger dangles, Madams light the candles. In ceremonies of the horsemen, Even the pawn must hold a grudge. Statues made of match sticks, Crumble into one another, My love winks, she does not bother, She knows too much to argue or to judge.

And yet the album's dense arrangement simply does not understand the song's greatness. The same backing players who both corralled and gave Bob space on She Belongs To Me here force Dylan to rush through his thoughts and linger over nothing; we don't need complexity behind such lyrics and the melody: works of art always look better without gilded frames.

Dylan knew as much; he knew he couldn't hope to contain the song's multitudes on first attempt so he gave up after two series of rushed attempts over two days. But on The Other Side of the Mirror, recorded the following summer at the Newport Folk Festival, we see him come much, much closer, as the wind howls like a hammer no less, to unveiling the song's full greatness.

I'll make a nerd club comment quickly, however, about Bringing It All Back Home's mono mix. I grew up listening to this record on an 80's era CD that made everything sound like it had been recorded in Dylan's private vomitorium. Listening this morning to my more recently purchased, but almost 60 year old, mono record, I wondered if the album track is way better than I claim here.

When it comes to others trying to touch Dylan's own interpretration of the masterpiece I usually groan (when Eric Clapton tried to play it at Bob Fest, I, listening live on some barely-there FM station, almost shouted my famous farmer buddy Ned, who was driving his dad's ancient suburban, off a very windy mountain road. Thanks for not letting us die Ned!).

The best cover of Love Minus Zero that I know of is hardly a cover at all. Witness the Go-Betweens sneaking it in to their song Clouds (no, not that song Clouds; this is one of their own with that title):

But even so, I'm sticking to my guns: Love Minus Zero is best unadorned and sung by Bob.

The album's other lyrical masterpiece, It's All Over Now, Baby Blue, has an even richer history and an even more questionable start. I can understand, wholeheartedly, while Dylan felt done after the album's eventual take was in the can. The swirling, melodic bass alone makes the track worthy of inclusion on this, or any other, record. Dylan adds impassioned vocals and sensitive harmonica; it all comes together into a marvelous flotilla of music.

But the song still includes a straight-up, gasp-worthy, mistake. Check out the third verse, second line. According to Bob himself, the lyric is, and always has been, "all your reindeer armies, they're all going home". Following up on Bob's seasick sailors rowing home, this is a bizarre and perfect lyric for a bizarre and perfect song.

But Dylan sings nothing of the sort. Instead we get something that sounds like "your empty handed army-ers are going home." That's not the same thing Bob! Indeed it sounds like you were so into this take 1/2 way in that you blew it, then shrugged and went out to kick it with Nico or something. Dude, Bob, give us another take!

He did of course. Like She Belongs to Me, he made the song a centerpiece of his 66 tour, usually nailing it. And many others have given us earnest versions of their own, from Them's Beck-worthy cover to the obligatory Byrd's version, and so on.

But this entire post was inspired by Chan Marshall's just released take of Baby Blue. If you haven't heard all of the Cat Power re-creation of Dylan's Judas concert, get your act together, stop reading this and do so right now.

Why, oh why, doesn't Dylan tour and record his next album right now with Chan and Fionna Apple sharing the vocals with him? You know both women are game, and I guarantee you both of them would remember it's reindeer we're talking about here, not armyers.

Okay, that covers the initially tossed off classics-to-be. Let's talk about the problem songs: It's Alright Ma and Gates of Eden. There's a lot to be said in favor of these songs. They both feature dense writing with bumper-sticker-ready tag lines. "Even the President of the United Sates Sometime Has to Stand Naked" and "The Savage Soldier Just Sticks His Head In Sand and Then Complains" are a bit wordy but there's plenty of room on the back of my 08 Honda Civic Hybrid. I'm ready to make people tailgate me and squint.

But Dylan delivers both numbers as dirges. Frankly I have to take a deep breath to get through them back to back. Listening is like doing your homework, and, while I'm a pretty good teacher, I'm a lousy student. Thus, they are problem songs.

But Dylan figured out one of them, It's Alright Ma, in a big way in 74 while on tour with The Band. He belts it out in frantic double time, creating the perfect Watergate Era protest song. Obtuse and direct, vague and fierce:

I was negative 2 years old at that point but I swear I heard Dylan's holler in utero, beckoning me to join the argument here on Earth. I'm happy to have answered the call, and I hope I never see Trump naked. But jail would be sweet...

As far as I know, Gates of Eden has never been similarly salvaged but I'd argue it's ready for resuscitation. Bob's dense Adam and Eve tale is just sitting around 60 years later, waiting for someone other than Bob to finally give it some life. Check out the lyrics to the second verse; there's plenty worth wrestling with here:

The lamppost stands with folded arms, its iron claws attached To curbs 'neath holes where babies wail, though it shadows metal badge All and all can only fall with a crashing but meaningless blow No sound ever comes from the Gates of Eden

I don't know how a lamppost can shadow a metal badge under wailing toddlers, but the whole thing freaks me out in good ways. I wish Leonard Cohen had given Phil Specter the boot and sung this with Bob instead of Don't Go Home With Your Hard-On.

The third of the problem songs is problematic in an entirely different sense. Yes, I know that Maggie's Farm is historically important because Bob used it to help create punk rock in 65 by lighting up Newport's speakers and driving Pete Seeger into an axe-wielding rage, but the song has basically no melody and is, to my ears, pretty dull. Name me a good version. Dare you! Meanwhile, I ain't gonna talk about this song no more.

I'm afraid to say that the remaining two categories, Bringing It All Back Home's novelty songs and its filler, are less rich pastures for us to dwell in, but let's visit anyway, shall we?

First of all, I'm here to tell you that one of Bob Dylan's masterpieces, Subterranean Homesick Blues, is nothing more than a novelty song. By that I mean it's a gimmick: awesome once and then never worth redoing by anyone, ever again. I've never heard a Dylan live version of any kind - he knows better - and I dare even my famous brother to produce a quality cover. (And if he plays me the Red Hot Chili Peppers' take I will declare him no longer famous.)

Simply put, I think the song is a fantastic and spontaneous piece of wit that would go stale the moment it is ever retold. Do I like the song and its sweet one liners? Sure! I dare say I have even taken a fair bit of Bob's advice to heart over the years. No one's ever caught me hanging around an inkwell, that's for damn sure. But I never want to hear the song in any other context beyond the opening two minutes of this record or in the poster flinging alleyway bit.

Thankfully Bob feels the same way. Can you imagine a Budokan version, slowed down to a reggae beat and chanted with the ladies while Dickicus Maximus on the sax shows off his swaggering mass? Or imagine a Jesus phase rewrite accompanied by auto-harps entitled Jesus is the Answer Blues (Christ's in his Heaven's, mixing up the punishments; I'm on the pavement thinking about the rapture..), or a Neverending Tour take wherein no one other than Bob, including the band, even knows the song is happening (must be Cat's in the Well?) until Bob suddenly tells everyone to light themselves a candle, at which point everyone goes from stupefied to frantic because they failed to hit record on their smuggled-in iPhones.

Instead of covers or remakes we're left with a long line of other novelty songs in the same vein. We're talking End of the World As We Know It, about 1/4 of every great song in Elvis Costello's catalog from Pump it Up to Beyond Belief and, I'm so sorry because now it's stuck in your head, We Didn't Start the Fire.

Dylan knew his 115th Dream was a one-off joke from the get go, and so he added the hilarity from the first of its only two attempts onto the intro for the record. I never miss a chance to grin at the nonsense Bob and Captain A-Rab get into, but this song is not on any best of lists and, like Subterranean Homesick Blues, has thankfully never been attempted by anyone since.

Curiously, it's also the last "Bob Dylan's Dream" song we ever got from Dylan. I guess there are really only two of them, but I think of the two I Shall Be Frees and Talking World War Three Blues as additional members of the genre. Now don't get me wrong, I love Series of Dreams as much as any other Bobhead, but images of running and climbing are no substitute for another song from Dylan's ridiculous dream journal about harpoons and Bob being reminded that he is not Christ.

That leaves us with the filler: On the Road Again and Outlaw Blues are exactly that. Had he written them, Stephen Stills would proudly place these songs on his Greatest Hits package; they are that bad.

Dylan's made more than just this one transition record, of course. John Wesley Harding... Street Legal... World Gone Wrong... Maybe all his records are transitions!

Just imagine us ten years and three new Dylan albums from now. Bob is a spry 92 and has just added a cheap-enough-for-me lager to his whiskey line. And, at long last, he has invited me over to the bobpad as my famous brother's plus one; that's right: after years of rejecting interview appeals from even the AARP, the Bobster finally wants to talk, and my bro's more than earned the gig. Our plan for the evening is to quiz Bob about how he transitioned into yet another masterful phase way back during Rough and Rowdy Ways.

Now that's a dream I'd like to hear him sing about.

[toomuchopulence]

IF LOOKS COULD KILL - DESTROY LONELY

DISK ONE SIDE ONE

1. HOW U FEEL 10/10

2. RAVER 9/10

3. IFLCK 8/10

4. FLY SHIT 7.5/10

5. WHICH ONE 6.8/10

NOTES: THIS PORTION OF THE ALBUM IS ALL GUITARS AND DEEP BUT IT DOES GET REPETITIVE ESPECIALLY SINCE THE INTROS FOR FLY SHIT AND WHICH ONE SOUND ALIKE AND ARE ALSO VERY LONG EVEN THOUGH THEY’RE 2 DIFFERENT SONGS SOUND WISE BUT THIS DISK HAS A HANDFUL OF MEANINGFUL LYRICS THAT TOUCH THE SOULD AND THE HIGHLIGHTS BALANCE OUT THE NEGATIVES AND ALSO THROUGHOUT THE DAY FLY SHIT REALLY GREE ON ME A-LOT

REPLAY VALUE: 8

LYRICS/MEANINGFULNESS: 8

VIBES: CALM 7.5

INSTRUMENTAL: 9

FLOWING: 7 (flows so well that it became repetitive especially since the first few seconds of each song sound the same)

DISK: 8.0

DISK ONE SIDE B

1. CAME IN WIT 9/10

2. BIGGEST PROBLEM 9/10

3. ALL THE TIME 8.5/10

4. BY THE POUND 8/10

5. CHRIS PAUL 8/10

NOTES: THIS PART OF THE ALBUM IS PROBABLY THE MOST ENERGETIC, LONE REALLY DID WELL ON THIS PART ONE OF MY FAV LINES WERE “NIGGAS KEEP TALKIN SHI I KNOW THEY TEETH DIRTY” ON CHRIS PAUL THE ENERGY ADDS DIRECTORY AND DIVERSITY TO THE PROJECT

REPLAY VALUE: 10/10

LYRICS/MEANING: 6/10

VIBES: TURNT 8/10

INSTRUMENTALS: 7/10 easy cook ups but high In dopamine so I love it

FLOWING: 9/10 all of the songs fit each other

DISK: 8.0

DISK OVERALL 8.5/10

DISK TWO SIDE A

1. SUPERSTAR 10/10

2. NEW NEW 9/10

3. RIGHT NOW 8.5/10

4. WHICH WAY 8.3/10

5. WAGWAN 7.5/10

NOTES: THIS PORTION IS LIKE BOTH SIDE A AND B OF DISK ONE IN ONE SIDE. THIS WHOLE PORTION IS LIKE A MOVIE SOUNDTRACK THIS WHOLE SECTION TALKS ABOUT HIM EVOLVING FROM HIS PAST AND HE MAKES IT CLEAR WITH THIS NEW SOUND. I CANT WAIT FOR HIM TO PERFORM THIS. HE REALLY BROUGHT OUT HIS UNIQUENESS ANS NEW SOUND TO FULL DISPLAY IN THIS SECTION THIS PART MIGHT ACTUALLY REAL DEAL BE MY FAVORITE.

REPLAY VALUE: 9.5/10 (10/10 if wagwan wasn’t on it)

LYRICS/MEANING: 10/10

VIBES: MIXED 10/10

INSTRUMENTALS: 10/10 easy cook ups but high In dopamine so I love it

FLOWING: 10/10 all of the songs fit each other yet so diverse

DISK: 9.3/10

DISK TWO SIDE B

1. MOMENT OF SILENCE 9.5/10

2. PASSENGER 8.5/10

3. BRAZY GIRL 8.3/10

4. GOIN UP 8.2/10

NOTES: THIS PART OF THE ALBUM IS THE CLOSEST THING WE’RE GOING TO EVER GET THAT SOUNDS LIKE OLD LONE. I LOVE THIS SECTION AS WELL AND THE TRANSITION BETWEEN PASSENGER AND GOIN UP WAS SO SEEM-LESS YOU WOULD THINK THEY’RE THE SAME SONG AND THATS NOT A BAD THING AS WELL

REPLAY VALUE: 9

LYRICS/MEANINGFULNESS: 7.5 (MOMENT OF SILENCE DEF IS 10/10 Though)

VIBES: MIXED BETWEEN CALM AND TURNT 7.5

INSTRUMENTAL: 10

FLOWING: 9.5

DISK: 8.8

DISK OVER ALL 9/10

DISK THREE SIDE A

1. MAKE SOME WORK 10/10

2. REDLIGHT 8.8/10

3. PROMO 6.8/10

4. WORTH IT 5/10

NOTES: PROBABLY THE MOST RANDOM PART OF THE ALBUM BECAUSE YOU HAVE 2 SONGS THAT ARE STUNNING AND THEN YOU HAVE 2 FILLERS BUT IT IS NEARING THE END OF THE TAPE AND MOST OF THE TIME FILLER HELPS BUILD AN ALBUM STORY. THIS ALBUM IS STILL AMAZING WHEN IT COMES TO THE CLOSING ITS JUST THE 2 TRACKS

REPLAY VALUE: 5.5

LYRICS/MEANINGFULNESS: 7

VIBES: MAINLY CALM BUT TURNT 7.5

INSTRUMENTAL: 8

FLOWING: 5

DISK: 6.5

DISK THREE SIDE B

1. SAFETY 10/10

2. MONEY & SEX 10/10

3. YOUR EYES 10/10

NOTES: ONE OF THE BEST CLOSINGS OF AN ALBUM EVER THAT SHORT FILM COULD’VE BEEN WAY LONGER WITH THIS ALBUMS TRACK LIST. THIS ALBUM IS A PERFECT SOUND TRACK FOR A MOVIE THIS IS AN AMAZING PROJECT

REPLAY VALUE: 8.5 (SAFETY IS A STORY AND LONG)

LYRICS/MEANINGFULNESS: 8.5 ($X is more of a fun track and not a meaningful song)

VIBES: CLOSING/ END OF A MOVIE 10/10

INSTRUMENTAL: 10/10

FLOWING: 9/10 (Since $X is a Bonus track)

DISK: 10

DISK OVERALL: 8.3

ALBUM OVERALL: 9/10

After listening to this album nine times today, I decided to review it and dissect the contents. Initially, my experience with the album was not ideal because I listened to it out of order. I started with "Snitch," then moved to "How You Feel," skipped "IFLCK," and listened to "Fye Shi." The movie associated with the album was released at 11 PM, and I watched it immediately. Although I enjoyed the movie, I didn't have a fresh mindset for the album.

I began with track four and, influenced by my friends' mixed reactions, I initially thought the entire album sounded the same due to Lone's voice. As I continued to listen throughout the day, I realized I had approached the album incorrectly. I listened to it during a test at school, during a school event (although I could barely hear it), and even dissected the album into multiple playlists based on sound.

I made another attempt to create a playlist of only good songs and which songs had different vibes , but that didn't work either. Finally, I listened to the album while riding my electric scooter and found myself vibing to nearly every song. However, I couldn't remember the song names once my ride was over. I decided to listen to the album again at night, as if it had just been released, and took notes to help me identify each song And listened to it like 6 EPS with the help of the discs track-list . That's when it clicked - this album is perfect. I should have approached it this way from the start. If an album doesn't sound good to you, it's probably not the album itself, but the way you listen to it. The album in question is "If Looks Could Kill" by Destroy Lonely.

In summary, my various listening experiences shaped my understanding and appreciation of the album. My initial impression, based on starting with track four, was part of my first listening experience. The key takeaway is to approach an album with a fresh and open mind, and to give it a proper listen before forming an opinion.

[chorusfm]

Bert McCracken Announces Solo Project

Bert McCracken of The Used has announced a new solo project robbietheused. Today he’s shared the new single “Just A Little Bit.”  Best known for his two decades of fronting scene icons The Used, Bert McCracken has officially announced his brand-new solo project robbietheused. When people reach a milestone birthday, they tend to celebrate the occasion with an appropriately big gesture — a special vacation, maybe, or an extravagant gift. When robbietheused turned 40, that meant adopting a brand new moniker and making a leap to a brand new genre.    “I wanted a nice 40th birthday present for myself,” he says. “So I decided to make a pop record.”   robbietheused found the transition from aggressive rock music to keyboard-driven pop music rather easy to navigate. “I've always tried to push for the poppy stuff for The Used records,” he says. “And the band really likes to keep it heavy. So this is my way of getting all those pop songs that maybe wouldn't make a Used record out into the world.”   To kick off the new chapter, robbietheused has released his debut single “Just A Little Bit” via Big Noise. Produced by John Feldmann, the track showcases the familiar angst of robbietheused’s lyrics overlaid with a hesitant hope for brighter days, wrapped up in a synth-tinged pop groove that makes it impossible to stand still while listening.   “Just A Little Bit” is available to stream now at https://bignoise.ffm.to/jalb   “It's a song about living through turmoil of the world and seeing a bit of a bright future ahead, seeing the sun peek out of the clouds, seeing a mistake being fixed,” says robbietheused on the new single. “It’s about having a little bit of hope."   In general, robbietheused always finds solace in writing and recording new music because this creativity has a positive impact on his mental health. Having these songs were particularly vital, as he started writing during the COVID-19 pandemic when he was unable to travel from his home in Australia.    “The whole vibe was really, really dark—and I was in a really, really dark place,” he says. “But recording pop music helped. Having a bunch of pop songs lifted my spirits quite a bit. And ‘Just A Little Bit’ was a bright moment in the record—seeing positive things for the future and hoping for the best.”   Producer John Feldmann came onboard to work on robbietheused material. (Fittingly, “Just A Little Bit” was one of the first songs they recorded.) Given that the two men have known (and collaborated with) each other for decades, it wasn’t a stretch for them to focus on pop-oriented songs. In fact, this camaraderie led to adventurous sound explorations, such as incorporating heavy bass undertones and effects and vocoders.    The pair holed up in the studio for intense, week-long studio sessions; among other things, they recorded one song every day, without fail. This approach to the recording process was quite meaningful, in no small part because it doubled as a daily mental health tune-up.   “In the morning, we’d talk about how we're feeling and what's on our minds on that day,” he explains. “And ask, ‘How's the mental health? How's the vibes?’ And then we’d formulate a song around that. It was almost like a therapy session, where I’d really get to talk about anything that's on my mind, and then make a song about it.”   Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the robbietheused songs ended up being heavier than others and resembling The Used music; in fact, one tune actually ended up on 2023’s Toxic Positivity. Fans don’t need to worry, however: robbietheused is a distinct project—and The Used isn’t going anywhere.    “The Used is my number one priority and my favorite band in the world with my favorite singer of all time,” he says lightly. “My band members have all been really supportive, and they know how much I love pop music.”   With a full album and even potentially live dates coming in the future, robbietheused has proven to be an invaluable gift — in more ways than one.   “Any feeling is valid—and to be… https://chorus.fm/news/bert-mccracken-announces-solo-project/

[my-chemical-wheaties]

Albums That I Listened to in February 2024

I noticed that in the past few months that I've done this challenge, that certain albums have been overrepresented in my listening habits. For one, an overwhelming majority of the albums that I listened to in December and January combined were rock albums, and the majority of them were also albums released in the 2010s. Since part of my reasoning for undertaking this is to diversify the music that I listen to, I decided to challenge myself this month to not listen to any rock albums this month and to limit the number of 2010s albums that I checked out.

These were the albums that I listened to:

Norman Fucking Rockwell! - Lana Del Rey (2019)

Modern Times - IU (2013)

Holy Diver - Dio (1983)

Since I Left You - The Avalanches (2000)

Dummy - Portishead (1994)

Joy'All - Jenny Lewis (2023)

Samara Joy - Samara Joy (2021)

Just Another Diamond Day - Vashti Bunyan (1970)

Windswept Adan - Ichiko Aoba (2020)

That! Feels Good! - Jessie Ware (2023)

Dusty in Memphis - Dusty Springfield (1969)

At Last! - Etta James (1960)

Here's how I would rank these albums:

Norman Fucking Rockwell!: This album clicked with me way faster than Lana's most recent album Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Boulevard? did (Although I'm still salty about Taylor winning AOTY at the Grammys instead. Talk about being snubbed). The compositions on this album feel older, like they were written in the 1960s or 1970s, but the production is clearly modern and it creates this peculiar sound that Lana had been crafting for pretty much her entire career up to that point. In fact, I think this album is where she has mastered said sound and sort of perfected it. I once heard music YouTuber Mic the Snare describe this album as (Paraphrasing) constantly expanding into this larger, grander atmosphere and to me, that it is perfect description of what this album sounds like. On top of that, the lyrics delving into these vignettes of Lana's relationships with different people read like short stories, and I love when lyricists do that. I could go on about this album, but I will just end this by saying that all of the praise that this album has received is deserved and I truly believe this is among her best work. 9/10

2. That! Feels Good!: Ugh, this album is just immaculate. Jessie Ware is the queen of contemporary house and disco music and you cannot tell me otherwise. Every single track goes extremely hard and is something that I would 100% put on at a party. If you decide to check out any one track from this album though, it has to be "Pearls." That song is perfect and I have been obsessed with it ever since I first heard it. I strongly recommend checking this one out. 9/10

3. Since I Left You: This is definitely one of the most unique albums I've listened to so far, alongside Modern Times. I thought that the usage of samples of dialogue from movies and TV shows combined with samples from older music was creative, especially on tracks like Frontier Psychiatrist where The Avalanches almost use these clips to create these new, elaborate stories. Additionally, I loved how smoothly all of the tracks transition into each other, too, almost as if the album was just one long mashup. This album is definitely an experience to listen to, and if anyone wants to check it out, I recommend listening to it in its entirety from start to finish, because I've found that that's how it sounds best due to the aforementioned transitions. I will definitely be coming back to this one. 8/10

4. Dusty in Memphis: This was the first sixties album that I listened to for this challenge and I actually really liked it. The production is great for an album made during this time and Dusty has a lovely singing voice. The lyrical subject matter is a little simplistic, but not everything has to be deep and profound. Simple can be good, too. I will probably revisit this album at some point. 8/10

5. Windswept Adan: This is such a gorgeous folk album. The instrumentation is light, yet lush, and Ichiko Aoba's vocals are beautiful, and complement said instrumentation well. Listening to this album feels like traveling through the countryside or the mountains, looking out at what feels like miles of greenery and nature as you inhale the fresh air. If any of you enjoy artists like Joanna Newsom or Vashti Bunyan, I highly recommend checking this album out. If you like the Minecraft soundtrack, I also recommend checking this out, too, because some points do remind me a little of that aforementioned soundtrack as well. 9/10

6. Modern Times: This is by far one of the most unique albums I've listened to so far. It's technically a K-pop album, but it mainly blends together jazz, bossa nova, and swing music with modern pop songwriting to create this distinctive blend that's hard to categorize into just one genre. I also think that it's cool that IU writes her own songs and has songwriting credits on this album, given how restrictive and controlling a lot of K-pop labels can be, especially towards their female artists. I'm not much of a K-pop fan, but this album was a pleasant surprise and I'm curious to hear more of IU's discography. 8/10

7. Samara Joy: I don't listen to a whole lot of jazz, so I figured that my mini challenge within a challenge was a good opportunity for me to explore the genre more. I heard a lot of good things about Samara Joy, so I decided to give her self-titled debut album a listen. The tracks all sound good - the instrumentation is rich and Samara has a beautiful alto voice. However, I feel like this is going to be one of those albums that only really clicks for me if I'm in the mood for it. There were some points where it was difficult for me to get through a song as I listened to it because the album generally has some pretty slow pacing. This might work better for me as an album to put on when I'm studying or making dinner. 7/10

8. Just Another Diamond Day: This is a perfectly pleasant seventies folk album. I was curious to listen to it after hearing the story behind Vashti Bunyan's career as a whole and how this album exploded in popularity all of a sudden in the early 2000s after decades of going largely unnoticed. As mentioned earlier, it's a pleasant album to listen to and definitely gives strong cottagecore vibes. I will be putting this on next time I go fishing at a rainbow river or something. 8/10

9. At Last!: This is only the second sixties album that I listened to, both this month and within the challenge as a whole. The brass section and occasional strings on this album are both good, and Etta is a sublime singer, although her vocals can get a little too shouty at points. The lyrics are a bit hit or miss (I am begging, no - pleading with her to stop calling her partner "daddy" on a couple of these tracks), and while I think her voice works well with Harvey Fuqua's, I find it odd that all of their duets are shoved to the end of the album. Although in fairness, that's probably just a time period thing. 6/10

10. Holy Diver: This is the first eighties album I've listened to for this challenge and only the second metal album after King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard's Infest the Rat's Nest and it was pretty solid. The guitar melodies are catchy and really well-written, and Ronnie James Dio is a great singer. The lyrics leave a lot to be desired, though, and definitely need some work. Hopefully if I listen to anything else in Dio's discography, there will be some improvement in that department. 7/10

11. Joy'All: For whatever reason, I have a really hard time getting into Jenny Lewis, both through her solo work and through her band, Rilo Kiley. I feel like I should like most of her work because of how much I like indie music and a little bit of ✨country flare✨, but for some reason, a lot of it isn't clicking for me. Psychos and Puppy and a Truck were good, and while the title track was hard for me to get into instrumentally, I did like the overall message. The rest of it, however, kind of fell off for me. I might go back to this album and give it a second chance, but for now I'm going to say that it was pretty meh. 5/10

12. Dummy: This is another situation akin to when I listened to Heaven or Las Vegas last month where I really don't get why this album is considered a classic and gets so much praise. It's not a bad album per se, but it all of the tracks sound kind of same-y over time and I got bored with it at certain points. I feel like I'd probably have to be in a certain mental state in order to enjoy this and as someone who has dealt with mental health issues in the past and is working to overcome them and be happier in life... yeah, no thanks. 6/10

I'm going to go back to listening to some rock albums next month, so I'm not cutting out the genre entirely. And as always, if any of you have any suggestions for me, feel free to comment them below. 🙂

[djmossback]

Spacebar 12/16/23

Third Space Saturday

Tasting Notes

So many semi-grandiose plans for the night: Christmas music. Refreshed crates. New records for the mix. You know what they say about best-laid plans. Not only did I leave my wallet at home, I also left my auxiliary record bag on the floor of the staging room. I need a tour manager. The one time I actually prepare for a gig, and get there early, I do something to make it more difficult for myself. The bag I forgot contained the Christmas records. All seven of them. IGA and I were texting each other about the December show, and how much he always looked forward to it, and it is fun to switch it up a bit and try to integrate something so specific into a regular set. Well, no choice in the matter now, just have to roll with what I have. Mr. Grant Olsen thinks I bring too many records anyway.

I roll up on the elevator – it works – and I’m at the booth in no time. Brando has the night off, so Trystan is on door duties. I know him from the outside world, so it’s cool to see him there. Brando shows up later anyway, as a patron.

I unpack my records, get set up, check out the turntables, and turntable left is completely unplugged. I’m there in plenty of time to do cord management and still be ready to start at 9.

When I inform Cyberjewel that there will be no holiday music in the set, she looked at me a long time and said, ”That is SO ok. Do your thing.” She had the sound set up and kicking, and a glass of Athletic with a bottle of water chaser waiting for me. Gracias.

I start right at 9, with the venerable George Clinton jam “Do Fries Go With That Shake?” – an incredible banger, one of my favorite of his, long but not too long, lots of detail and sound flourishes on this track.

Van McCoy is a surprise. Tavis starts doing disco moves behind the bar, and I loosen up a bit. This single I have is a reissue, from a Record Store Day not too long ago. It really works. Crowd digs it, too.

After that I go on a 7” single jag, including a Jackson Browne to Eddie Rabbitt transition that was rocking.

I mentioned the semi-grandiose plans earlier. This included some Sixties music. I wanted to see how the early ’60s monophonic records would work in this setting, but I forgot I brought them in until later, when Nicky Mustard had already gone home. I think he would have loved to hear “All Day and All of the Night” while he and his bandmate/friend Alex played Centipede. Next time.

I left my Ray Price record at home. I was thinking of playing some crying uptempo honky tonk to see what would happen, but decided against it before I even left the lab. That stuff, like Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, was built to cut across the din of the barroom and stand out. But I have been sparing in my use of that genre. I’m so happy to not be limited to one style or sound.

I did play some stuff that didn’t work. The B.I.G. track I played is a favorite of mine, but too wordy for this setting, and I left it before the gunfire coda. Perhaps it didn’t fit with the vibe of the Pet Shop Boys song that preceded it, or going into the Vibrators track, which didn’t fit either.

I got back on track with the Bush Tetras. The Cramps track was misplaced, too, so I cleared the slate with some New Jack Swing.

During the Amii Stewart track, a girl came up and asked if I took requests. I told her I was not set up for it, but asked her what it was she wanted. Remarkably, it was a track I was thinking about putting on anyway: “Tainted Love/Where Did Our Love Go?” by Soft Cell, the 12” extended mix. I told her I could never play that track. She said she was asking for a friend. She leaves. I see them in the back putting on their coats, so I fade “Knock On Wood” early to keep them in house.

The “friend” came up later and asked for “Car Wash” – you know 🎶“workin’ at the CAR WASH݉🎶 – darn it! I would have totally played that. Need to get that and “Love Rollercoaster,” too.

I was finishing up close to 1 and had plans to end on the Khruangbin track, when a lady my age came up and asked for New Order, and I hurried to look for the “Temptation” 7” I had just noticed earlier, and I had to throw ESG in to buy time. I found it with about 30 seconds to go in the track, and hurriedly cued it up and let it rip. I had forgotten how great that track is.

I didn’t want to end on it; I like to have slower, downtempo or other different styles of music to transition to the regularly scheduled program. So I got the wonderful Junior Murvin to finish up.

I really love doing this gig. I really take it seriously, and want to do things in a different way, but still help the Spacebar provide a good vibe. It’s important to me that people enjoy themselves, and are surprised by things. One thing I’ve noticed from the younger people is that they know a lot of the older music as well as the new, probably because it’s been in so many movies and video games, and Tik-Toks and the like. I approve of the fact that there is no mass audience any more. It always bugged me anyway. Not the music necessarily, just the sameness. I liked some of the songs, and I am not immune to nostalgia for time and place. I just accept it. That’s who I am. That’s who I’ve always been. Thanks for reading. -Mossback

Next Third Space Saturday is January 20th,2024!

Track List

George Clinton, Do Fries Go With That Shake 12” single

M|A|R|R|S, Pump Up The Volume 12” single 45 RPM

Van McCoy & The Soul City Symphony, The Hustle (Disco Mix) 12” single 33 RPM

Pointer Sisters, He’s So Shy 7” single 45 RPM

Police, Message In A Bottle 7” single 45 RPM

Jackson Browne, The Boulevard 7” single 45 RPM

Eddie Rabbitt, Drivin’ My Life Away 7” single 45 RPM

The S.O.S. Band, Take Your Time ((Do It Right) 7” single 45 RPM

Tears For Fears, Change 7” single 45 RPM

Fun Boy Three, Our Lips Are Sealed 7” single 45 RPM

GO-GO’s, We Got The Beat 7” single 45 RPM

Tom Robinson Band, 2-4-6-8 Motorway 7” single 45 RPM

The System, You Are In My System LP cut

Level 42, Something About You Extended play promo thing, Shep Pettibone mix 33 RPM

Climax Blues Band, Couldn’t Get It Right 7” single 45 RPM

Chic, Dance,Dance,Dance (yowsah, yowsah, yowsah) 12” single see below 33 RPM

Fatback Band, Take It Any Way You Want It LP cut

Althea and Donna, Uptown Top Ranking LP cut

Heatwave, The Groove Line 7” single 45 RPM

Beastie Boys, Brass Monkey LP cut

Pete Shelley, Telephone Operator 12” single 45 RPM

Kylie Minogue, Can’t Get Blue Monday Out Of My Head 12” single 33 RPM

Laid Back, White Horse 12” single 45 RPM

Coldcut Featuring Lisa Stansfield, People Hold On (Radio Mix) 12” single

Killing Joke, Follow The Leaders LP cut

DEVO, Turn Around 7” single 45 RPM

Snoop Dogg, Drop It Like It’s Hot 12” single 33 RPM

King Curtis, Jump Back 7” single 45 RPM

Otis & Carla, TRAMP 7” single 45 RPM

Abyssinians, Declaration Of Rights LP cut

Bobby Brown, My Prerogative 7” single 45 RPM

The Cure, Let’s Go To Bed 12” single (Fiction Records extended mix) 45 RPM

Michael Jackson, Rock With You 7” single 45 RPM

Naked Eyes, Promises Promises 7” single 45 RPM

Taste Of Honey, Boogie Oogie Oogie LP cut

Pet Shop Boys, West End Girls 12” single 33 RPM

Notorious B.I.G., Gimme The Loot LP cut

Vibrators, Keep It Clean LP cut

Bush Tetras, Too Many Creeps 7” single 45 RPM

Simple Minds, Promised You A Miracle 12” single (45 rpm cut, import)

Gary Numan, Cars LP cut

Gap Band, You Dropped A Bomb On Me LP cut

The Cramps, Domino Gravest Hits ep 45 RPM

Wreckz-N-Effect, Rump Shaker 12” single 33 RPM

Amii Stewart, Knock On Wood 12” single 33 RPM

Soft Cell, Tainted Love 12” single 45 RPM

David Bowie, Let’s Dance 12” single 33 RPM

KC & The Sunshine Band, Get Down Tonight LP cut

SKEE-LO, I Wish 12” single 33 RPM

Vince Staples, Big Fish LP cut

Patrice Rushen, Forget-Me-Nots 7” single 45 RPM

Human League, Sound Of The Crowd LP cut

Missing Persons, Words EP

UB40, King LP cut

Khruangbin, Evan Finds The Third Room LP cut

E.S.G., You’re No Good 7” single 45 RPM

New Order, Temptation 7” single 33 RPM

Junior Murvin, Police & Thief 7” single 45 RPM

0013

[rachelminetti]

room for squares, 9.18.2001

i have a few john mayer related rituals i (sometimes) keep up with over the year, but none as sacred as this one. why do i have john mayer rituals? probably in some attempt to tether myself to myself. i wrap my years around it, i measure time against it, i keep my clocks in sync with it. so every year on september 18th i listen to room for squares, start to finish, followed up with some favorite live versions. this is the week when i no longer wonder when summer will wrap itself up, when the humidity disperses and i want to be home by 7. my hands are starting to show signs of age this year, my sentimentality has waned, renewal feels less likely, more daunting. 

but this tradition persists, i reconnect, i let the new year begin. this album has been given the gift of context, 22 years to settle in as an early 2000s soft-pop-rock-coffeehouse-easy listening delight. it is by no means my favorite album of his, i do not think it is a masterpiece, and this is the only time of the year i listen to it in full. but it is a great comfort and there are some stellar live renditions of its songs, exemplary of their time, their longevity and lack thereof. so, here are some of my favorite versions of each song, dug up from my personal john mayer archive. 

no such thing, live sometime in 2001.they listen to phish, but they can’t find the answers. added to my library sometime before 12/26/2012 (the day i got my MacBook, lost date-added data for most of my music up to that point), probably ripped it from the youtube link above. my library would be nothing without clipconverter, mystupidmouth, that giant torrent, and, of course, the internet archive. you’ll get a lot from this version: long, fun intro, alternate lyrics, an everything she does is magic tease – all wrapped up into a 9 minute, pretty solid recording. essential listening for those looking to dip their toes into the world of live JM.

why georgia, go anywhere intro. i have no idea how i found a download of this, i can only find the lyrics online. it’s been in my library prior to 2012, i must’ve downloaded from mystupidmouth. it’s a different version than the portable intro that’s easier to come across. after about 30 minutes of trying to track it down, i’m led to believe that it is from 9.06.02, thanks to a reply from Humming6ird on this post. going to spend another 10-15 minutes trying to track down a download, we’ll see if i’m successful. side note: cool to stumble upon an old self while tracking this down, i’m all over this page. ok, no luck. it’ll find me one day.

my stupid mouth, probably 2002-2003. i’ve had this labeled in my library as (Soundstage 2005) but i think that that is very wrong. great improv intro to a song i’ve never cared for. this is like level 2 deep cut live john mayer.  

ybiaw, 3/11/23. there’s nothing worthwhile about this song, so here’s a link to a nice transition from HOME LIFE earlier this year. 

neon, live 9.24.05 with the trio. 10/10 must hear version of this song. now this really is one of his masterpieces, take some time and listen to its versatility over the years. i was also going to share a version from what i thought was from 05.18.00 but i cannot find confirmation anywhere that this actually exists. it’s wonderful and i have no idea where i downloaded it from in 2021. oh well.

city love, i don’t really care for this song so here’s a trio video of covered in rain. 

83, live 3.26.04. this whole show is great – early version of don’t trust myself and a back to you closer, can’t lose here. this song very much feels like early fall, light and crisp. “83 was the vibraslap.” 

3x5, yet another mislabeled live version in my library. downloaded BMB (before MacBook). well, here’s a nice one from july 7, 2003. full show video available, always nice. 

love song for no one, i was going to link the one i have from 3.29.00 (terrible recording, live at the 40 watt in athens), but, of course, i have no idea how i even have my hands on that. it starts with tell me what to say, so it’s a real deep cut. here’s one from eddie’s attic in 1999, same vibe. 

back to you, live any given thursday. bring back back to you! bring back FULL BAND back to you! an all time favorite, one of my atlanta songs. here’s a link to any given soundcheck. 

great indoors, i was going to link a mysterious undated 2003 version with a lovely intro, but of course i cannot find it. this one from tower records on 6.31.01 holds up nicely. 

not myself, a lovely version from THE eddie’s attic shows in 2005. it will all come around again…

[thisworldisablackhole]

This month in listening... 03/21/24

Been a minute since I've done one of these roundups, which is maybe for the best. More time for things to happen. This one is gonna be exclusively new releases because the last few weeks have been HOT. The year is really starting to cook up and I'm stoked.

New Waxahatchee album just dropped like 30 minutes ago (at the time of writing this), and I think it might be her best work to date. I've been a fan of the Crutchfield sisters since P.S. Eliot. Alison's band Swearin' is still one of my favourite pop punk bands ever, and Katie has been killing it with her solo work ever since American Weekend came out in 2012. I still have fond memories of running away from home in 2014 and singing Bathtub next to a camp fire, high on mushrooms in some dusty norcal weed town. The americana influence that she has been incorporating into her music recently suits her voice and style of songwriting so well, and I'm so happy to see it really flourish here. The collaboration with MJ Lenderman is just the cherry on top.

SeeYouSpaceCowboy dropped a new 2 part single recently. The first part functions as a short but beautiful piano intro featuring vocals from singer iRis.EXE. I do not know anything about this singer other than the fact that her voice is completely mesmerizing, even just the way she enunciates certain words scratches a weird itch in my brain. The intro cleverly transitions into the next act with the sound of a crowd clapping that slowly synchronizes into a single beat which lays the foundation for the rest of the instruments to come in. Silhouettes In Motion might actually be my new favourite SYSC song, and forebodes extremely well for how much I'm going to love the full album. The way the chorus swings in is so disarming and wonderful, I could just repeat that part over and over.

Last friday, Night Verses finally dropped the long awaited part 2 of their album Every Sound Has A Color In The Valley Of Night. There has been lots of clamor and confusion over why they released the album in parts like this, and I think the only real answer is that they wanted to end up on my year end list two years in a row. Seriously, the second part of this album rules and it starts off so strongly with this song Plague Dancer. This is one of the heaviest songs on part 2 and if full of intoxicating grooves, but the part that really sells me on it is that god damn breakdown where Nick DePirro throws in these muted harmonic strums that sounds pieces of sheet metal flapping in the wind in between chords. It's just so cool. Night Verses might be the only instrumental band I've ever really fallen in love with and I'm totally ok with that.

I should really just wait until Boundaries releases their new album next week, but YOLO. The three singles they have put out are just too good. Boundaries have double down on the heaviness with these tracks, and in doing so have maximized the contrast between the brutal and melodic parts of their sound. The heavy parts are blistering, and the choruses are succinct and effective in their ability to inject a quick blast of relief into the storm. Matt and Tim are also possibly my favourite duo of vocalists in metalcore right now. They are both just so distinct and powerful in their own right, and compliment each other so well. I didn't even realize that Tim is also the drummer until watching their music video a few days ago, so I have gained a whole new level of respect for his cleans.

A new album from One Step Closer has probably been my single most anticipated piece of news ever since their EP Songs for the Willow swept me off my feet in early 2023. That EP showed a distinct shift in their sound in a more melodic direction, and the result was three of their most memorable and interesting songs to date. This new album so far seems to indicate an even further push into pop punk territory and it is a welcome change for me. OSC are at their best when their hearts are on their sleeve, and this new track is oozing in heart. Honestly getting some Separation era Balance and Composure vibes from this song which I absolutely love. This album is coming out a week after the new Like Moths to Flames album which is insane. We gonna be eating good in May.

This new album by Irish folk musician Sam Lee really came out of left field and took me by surprise. I honestly only checked it out because the album art gave me weird Shire Hobbit vibes, and I was pleased when I played the first track and my initial thought was "yup... Hobbit music". I don't listen to a lot of folk music, and when I do, it doesn't sound anything like this. This album is just sounds very mature, and I don't mean that in an egotistical way. I mean it in the way where it sounds like there's some type of ancient wisdom or energy seeping through the cracks of Sam's deep storytellers voice and the thoughtfully dramatic arrangement of instruments. This is one of the most unique albums I'll listen to this year, and I'm glad I took a gamble on it.

A new Greyhaven single also dropped today, and good lord the reception has been nothing but praise. This band has not dropped the ball at all. This Bright and Beautiful World was one of my top 5 or 10 albums of 2022, and this new song is one hundred percent on par with, if not better than the best parts of that record. They are releasing a new 5 song EP on April 12th, thru their new home of Sharp Tone Records. I'm not even mad that it's not a full length, because the quality of this song is so promising. Spiritbox's The Fear of Fear honestly changed my perception about what an EP could accomplish, and now I am hyped at the prospect of a band I love putting out 4 to 6 tracks solid tracks with NO FILLER. The replay value is gonna be huge.

Poisoned Seeds are a local band, and I'm super excited about them right now. They are one of the few really good bands in the scene right now that are drawing more influence from 90s and early 2000s melodic hardcore and metalcore bands. I think it's fairly obvious by now that I love melodic bands, so I'm always hyped when there are people in my own back yard providing that sound at a local level. Guitarist and main song writer Avrinder Dhillon personally cited Shai Hulud as an influence, and I think they provide a great reference for how Poisoned Seeds implement melody into their riffs and vocals with a tasteful subtlety while maintaing an essence that is tough as nails.

[the-infinite-jukebox]

Lil Yachty - Let’s Begin Here. (Album Review)

Out of all of the pop-adjacent rappers out there over the course of the past few years, Lil Yachty has arguably been one of the most consistently underappreciated. After coming on to most people's radar in 2016 with his Lil Boat mixtape, Yachty has been putting out interesting mixtures of southern trap with fresh experimentation ever since. His 2022 hit single "Poland" provided a look into what was the musician's most unique side up to that point, as the aforementioned track was one of the most inexplicably mesmerizing songs of the year. While Yachty has continuously grown as an artist through his last few singles and records, no one could have predicted the shocking magnum opus that is Let's Start Here.

Let's Start Here is a total creative revamp for Lil Yachty. Although he has shown off some more left-field ideas and concepts in the past, this album doesn't feel like it was made by the same person that made a record like Lil Boat 3. The album title here is fitting, as it comes across as Yachty requesting that you look away from his preexisting discography to take a look at a new era of his sound. Let's Start Here ranges the artistic spectrum freely and hits notes that are just as rooted in space rock as they are neo-soul. This record is just as mystifying (if not at times more so) than anything that psychedelic and experimental acts like Tame Impala and even Beach House have put out in recent memory. It almost feels surreal hearing Lil Yachty tackle so many different musical concepts so successfully at such a rapid rate. Meanwhile, Yachty has never lost the vibes that have defined his persona in the past. He still has this earnest stoner-esque lackadaisicalness about him that sets him apart from many of his peers. This isn't an artistic turnaround for the sake of pandering to critics, Let's Start Here is natural progression done as supersonic speed. Yachty himself has grown as a performer alongside the breadth of his influences and aesthetics. While his flow and delivery style has remained the same in many ways, particularly in regards to his actual tone, the heartfelt qualities behind his voice feel so much more visible than anything else he has done in the past. Yachty promoted Let's Start Here as an open and honest record with live instrumentation, but that presence goes beyond the instrumentation itself. Tracks like "THE zone~" see Yachty get unusually genuine with the listener in a way that beautifully compliments the somewhat dramatic instrumentation. The spoken word cut ":(failure(:" provides an interlude with the potential to act as a cliché transitional piece, but it ultimately passes as a piece of heart-to-heart talk about Yachty's life and worldview from the man himself. Other songs like "The Alchemist." add a boost of fire to the album and demonstrate Yachty's charisma as a means to diversify the record's sonic palette. To ensure that his artistic ambitions were followed through to their fullest extent on Let's Start Here, Lil Yachty obviously took his game up several notches while recording this record. Everything just comes together beautifully on Let's Start Here. It can be rare for an album as forward-thinking as Let's Start Here from an artist as newly experimental as Lil Yachty to be as conceptually cohesive as his latest effort is. The record rises and falls in perfect synchronicity with the lyrical and aesthetic content. Let's Start Here can be just as lovesick as it is heartbroken while pulling off each feeling in a more than convincing manner. It isn't a stretch to call Let's Start Here one long song. Each track bleeds into the next as it breezes on by with the intensity ebbing and flowing appropriately. An album like Let's Start Here is a fragile thing, as it handles multiple qualities of reinvention for Lil Yachty artistically. Instead of letting his work unravel like a ball of yarn, Yachty's latest record is consistently successful to a shocking degree. In a world with solid but often underwhelming Lil Yachty projects, citing any full-length album of his to be an immediate contender for album of the year seemed beyond unlikely a mere few months ago. Here we are today, living in a world where Lil Yachty is a creative powerhouse that has created a work capable of toppling people's preconceptions of what he and similar artists are capable of creatively. Similar to my first reaction to hearing the album closing track "REACH THE SUNSHINE.," Let's Start Here has completely blown me away.

Final Rating: 4.5/5 (Absolutely Amazing)

[robotnuts]

red vs blue season 1 commentary (2003)

lets do some more commentary recaps! click here to check out the other ones i’ve completed! the season 1 disc actually has two different commentary tracks, the original one from 2003 and a new one they recorded in 2010. this post will just cover the 2003 track, recorded by burnie and geoff (all the way back when his name was still geoff fink)

the classic blood gulch intro was made for the release of the season 1 DVD. the original intro (please click this link and go watch the original, it’s a masterpiece) was scrapped because it didn’t actually fit the tone of the series since it’s much more action based, and also the limp bizkit song would have cost them tens of thousands to license

it took around 45 minutes to shoot the opening shot. if you’ve seen season 15 the way the shot is created has already been referenced by jax (to emulate a crane shot, they stood a cameraman on top of a tank turret and then raised the turret to get a smooth transition)

when they first made the show, they were staying up until 7AM to finish and post each episode on fridays, and then go to their day jobs right after 

they changed some parts of the original episode 1 they posted- they didn’t originally have sarge cast until the second episode, so it was burnie saying sarge’s line at the end of episode 1. burnie also tried to sneak some of grif and simmons’ conversations ontop of blue base because he figured people wouldn’t notice and he liked the lighting better there, and people “went nuts” so they had to go back and fix it 

burnie was the catch-all for whenever they didn’t have time to cast someone (lopez, tex’s male voice)

they got a ton of emails from people in the military who told them they really nailed the experience and asking if they had military experience because of how accurate the show is- geoff was the only person with military experience and he didn’t write the show. 

burnie says he didn’t watch a lot of military media or anything, it’s just shows how universal “bureaucracy” or office humor really is, and they were able to play with it even more because of how structured the military is. 

geoff makes fun of burnie for pretending hes smart and says he doesnt think burnie has any idea what hes talking about. Burnie liked using the word bureaucracy because it was long and fun to say :)

 the second episode was the actual spark for the entire series- a real conversation that burnie and co had while playing halo about “whys it called the warthog if it looks more like a cat?” lead to the entire show being made.

they never asked bungie if they were actually correct about the reason it being called a warthog being due to the tow hooks looking like tusks

they tell the vegas story to explain the “vegas quadrant” reference - you can hear it yourself with even more detail here. 

two differences from the RTAA story though- the note he left said “see you in austin, gus” (not assholes, though that’s burnie recounting the story so maybe gus just remembered it better) and geoff claims he didn’t actually end up going back to austin- though burnie starts speaking over him so I can’t really hear what he’s saying about it. 

 the shot of grif and simmons walking into the frame to watch donut run off into the distance towards the store at the end of episode 3 was redone over and over again at 4:30 AM and drove them crazy. the hardest shots were the ones when a character had to walk into frame, hit their mark and stand still, and then deliver a line.

caboose didn’t originally have a character concept according to burnie- he just knew the blue team was going to get a rookie counterpart to the red team’s donut. donut’s character was much more planned ahead

the pink armor was actually one of the first jokes they wrote for the series. originally the entire series was only going to be 6-8 episodes and the pink armor was going to be the gag of the final episode. homophobic kings

they had to work with a lot of limitations and pace themselves with what they wanted to introduce-they had limited armor colors, limited vehicles, etc. so introducing them to the series at the right time had to be paced out, and donut’s armor joke kept being pushed back

if there is a flag in the shot, the only people that can be in the shot is anyone with red or blue armor (caboose, sarge, and donut for a bit), so they had to get creative with the plot and cinematography to make sure that they could just isolate those guys . this is because in the capture the flag gamemode, the only character colors are red and blue. so if you see a flag, that’s a shot that was sewn in from a whole separate game and recording session than the surrounding shots 

this is the reason donut shows up in red armor instead of being pink from the start

geoff says he loves the joke where church ignores caboose because he relates to being ignored by burnie when he tells burnie important information

the limitations of what the characters could do forced them to write around humorous scenarios so they can be envisioned by the audience, even if the characters couldn’t do it on screen, the big example being the fact that they can’t actually have church and tucker throw rocks for the teleporter to test it so they just reference the fact they already threw rocks through it earlier

to editorialize a bit, i honestly think this really helped the show have it’s unique identity and ended up being a plus for the show, not something it lacked. like, i don’t know if the visual humor of tucker and church throwing a rock through the teleporter and it coming out black would have been as funny as just the delivery of “WE THREW ROCKS THROUGH IT” “yeah, and they came out the other side didn’t they?”

the teleporter is another example of them having to give a bit of personality and new traits to the halo objects 

they reference lopez dancing in the background of a scene and say jason (tucker’s va) was the one to improvise it, but it doesn’t happen on the remastered graphics. i cross-referenced with the original upload and I think they’re referring to when lopez’s pixel in the background changes for a second at this timestamp, but the quality is so bad it’s hard to tell

there was absolute hysteria about tex on the RT forums because tex was in the original intro with the cloaking device, so for the first few episode before she showed up, people would claim any graphical glitch or weird amalgamation of pixels had to be tex, and insisted RT actually put her in the background of every episode. this wasn’t true at all but it’s funny to think of old RT fans furiously posting screenshots of nothing to the rvb forums insisting they found him. it was funny enough to them that they never shut it down

the warthog had rules that only characters of the same color could be in the same warthog in s1, so they used post-production to splice shots together whenever you see grif and simmons in the same car in halo 1

this broke one of their rules where they tried to make most of the series things that you could actually replicate in halo yourself if you wanted to

the shot of the warthog flying over the camera where you can see the underside when the reds ambush is one of geoff’s favorite shots in season 1, and also it was first take

geoff also really likes how the bullet casings from the machine gun fly off and frame the background of some of the shots when simmons is assaulting the rock the blues are behind. he said he thought it was really interesting and dynamic and then would log on to the forums and read a post from a 14 year old about how boring everything was and they were all just standing around and would want to strangle them

the original visuals would often have blood splatters or explosions going off where they weren’t supposed to be, because tucker’s va thought that blowing everyone up and ruining their work was funny (he was right)

the control for throwing grenades was really finnicky in general, if they set down a controller to stop using it there was a high chance that character would throw a grenade and blow up the whole shoot. “not a common problem in traditional filmmaking” says burnie

they kept tucker in the black armor for a while because burnie could never find a chance for the characters to have a chance to breathe and wipe off his armor

geoff likes how the scene with grif and simmons being targeted by a tank because its true to life, he loves gus as a friend but would sell him out in a second

its hard to get shots of explosions happening near the camera because the explosions would just kill the cameraman lol

they also ended up blowing up grif and simmons around 40 or 50 times, just for the shot where the two of them are crouched behind a rock while shelia fires at them, which got made into an outtake

burnie is very excited about the church’s death scene and called it an inspired choice, but then said it was also a horrible choice because it was hard as hell to make him semitransparent whenever he showed up

they tried to use the in-game engine shake whenever an explosion went off near a character as much as possible 

the shots you think would take hours and hours, like the warthog flipping up on top of the base and sliding into place, only took 4 tries. they seemed to get lucky with the stuff you’d expect to be hard like complicated actions and then got fucked by the stuff you’d think was simple like standing around and talking

sarge in a plane at command is the only shot they used from the halo singleplayer 

burnie had to avoid giving long lines to most of the characters because nobody was a professional actor (except for joel, so they gave caboose longer lines). matt hullum was great at making shit up on the spot though

sarge only had 4 lines in (episode 18? i think he says) and for those 4 lines matt hullum somehow ad-libbed 58 minutes of recording to be cut down. he was literally just obsessed with ad-libbing. god what i wouldn’t give to have those original recordings of sarge just being completely bonkers

blue command was originally played by someone called Randal Glass who originally made videos on his own website in halo of him exploiting the physics engine (for example, him using tons of grenades to propel a warthog 10,000 feet in the air) which ended up inspiring them for some of their shots of the warthog flying around as an homage to his stuff. 

(this is the cursed, wrong, strange vic that we see for a little bit before he ends up getting vicified by burnie in the second season. I’m not at commentary 2 yet but I’m pretty sure it’ll be because of scheduling errors, but honestly, burnie’s vic is funnier. sorry for the additional editorializing) 

in order to get church to be transparent, they would have to shoot every shot twice, one with church in it and one with just the background, and layer them on top of each other and turn down the opacity. this is a simple solution but ended up being a pain if there were any other characters other than church in the shot, or when they’d forget to shoot the background without church and have to go back and re-film everything.

the main questions asked on their forums was- will tex ever be in an episode, are you ever going to use another map, and then (after episode 8) will church ever come back? and they answered all of those questions at the same time with the sidewinder gag.

there were two real groups of people that worked on red vs blue- the austin crew, who worked on websites that failed like drunkgamers, and the LA crew, who worked on movies that no one saw, who then came together to “make the worst failure of their career” with red vs blue

12 people worked on season 1, and 8 of them were voice actors only, leaving them with only a 4 person production crew

the bullet holes they actually wanted for the shots (tex using caboose as target practice) would fade instantly, but if they accidentally made a bullet hole it seemed to stay forever and they couldn’t get rid of it, leading to them having to come up with Halo Engine Bullet Hole theories to figure out why (hours and hours of shooting walls trying to figure out a pattern that they never nailed down, according to geoff)

it is pretty funny hearing them talk about the reticle in the center of the screen when the graphics are completely updated. i have no idea what youre talking about lads this is full HD no UI what reticle

it’s very hard to make a character look like they’re talking if they’re holding a flag or, basically anything except for the pistol.

geoff makes fun of burnie for the pity party they’re throwing for themselves- hard to make a character look like they’re talking, hard to match up eyelines, hard to get shots with the camo unit because it runs out so quickly. geoff makes sure to also emphasize that they were drunk for most of the production

there was a line of several donut characters all ready for the part with the grenade on his head because of how tricky of a shot it was- they’d have a donut step into place, throw a grenade at him, kill him, have donut number two step up, throw a grenade, etc etc.

there was controversy on the forums over who died in donut’s explosion- people were certain one of grif or simmons had to be dead. burnie makes fun of them for thinking they’d just kill off all of red team 

the sniper rifle shots are mostly cheated to get a good shot- you don’t actually see those angles from halfway across the map where the character holding the sniper rifle is standing. it makes the sniper rifles look like they work really well 

the even numbered episodes were more popular than the odd numbered episodes, which made them debate if they should end the season on an odd episode

i believe they’re saying that episode 11 was originally going to end after tex ran off to get the flag 2 minutes in, but they ended up combining two episodes to beef up the runtime 

the question on the rvb forums was always “if you can see them with the sniper rifle why not just pull the trigger” 

the ‘twist’ of tex being a woman was their first big twist and it got guessed by a ton of people and they concluded that was a problem with trying to put twists in serial shows. burnie than pointedly says “we won’t try anything like that again, we won’t try to hide something” 

obviously they do try stuff like that again, thank god, seasons 6 and 10 thank them for it. however from the way burnie says it i’m literally pretty sure he’s being incredibly sly and referencing the fact that he’s already put in hints about church being an AI, since i’ve heard people say that he started planning that as early as season 1

they talk about what parts fans latch onto and make content for- an early psa tucker references a drawing he made of an octopus flipping you off 8 times, and apparently they got TONS of submissions for that. burnie says he made 40 of them his desktop background. they say they want to find their favorite and make it into a tshirt- i wonder if they ever actually did that. ultimate rare rvb merch

they gave away dvds to the original sponsors as a thanks for sponsoring

they needed 17 TB of bandwidth only 3 months in which was their biggest cost and challenge. a company called 01 communications donated a ton of bandwidth to them to help out

they looked at pennyarcade and homestar runner as references for delivering serialized web content and how they were able to support their site without running ads, which is what lead to them going the sponsors and merch monetization route instead

the yellow/orange joke seems to come from the fact that church refers to grif as the “orange one” in season 1 which lead to them getting fan emails of people telling them “actually, he’s yellow” 

hegahergerk was one of matt hullum’s improvs, he was just told to make a “possession noise” and he gave them a few options. hegahergerk was the best. 

when church posesessed sarge, they weren’t sure if they wanted to have burnie reading the lines as church pretending to be sarge, or matt reading the lines pretending to be church pretending to be sarge, and they recorded both versions. they ended up going with burnie’s because it made more sense

matt’s voice acting was so strong with codifying the sound effects he used for being possessed that by the second time they were able to have it happen off screen and the viewer could still understand what happened

tex saying that sarge is pretty short to be church is a star wars reference to when luke rescues leia

the idea to have church and sarge in the spirit world was made on the monday, before the episode was actually released on friday. they said it took them forever to get the voice filter right

the wind sound effect was burnie. he’s proud of it. he wasn’t able to replicate it on the commentary though because he had too much whiskey

the heaven and hell jokes were a reference to a film burnie and matt had worked on called ‘the schedule’ (which is now lost media)

they were originally going to bring shelia back as a ghost tank like church coming back as a ghost but couldn’t figure out how to fit it in, so they put her in the purgatory sequence instead 

geoff says that its sweet that grif cares that sarge is dead considering how much sarge hates grif. they were originally going to have that scene be a turning point where sarge would like grif after he saved sarge’s life but it was ‘too big of a leap’ 

people didn’t understand that church offering less and less money to take sarge to heaven was, a joke, and they thought it was just them being inconsistent 

typically machinima wasn’t done on console, it was done in quake or half life- they were actually thinking about doing a project in half life 2 but the source code was stolen and leaked which pushed the release date back several months

the trailer for blood gulch chronicles was actually made for their drunkgamers website, which went under, so they gave up on the series for a while and didn’t release episode 1 until 6 months after the trailer

they said they made a conscious decision to “stop doing vulgarity” or at least try to limit it for their younger audience, after around episode six or seven

burnie says there are a lot of dumb vulgar jokes you could make about the pink armor but ‘why make them’ if you can be funny without it

they thought it was funny to use a huge rifle as the speech unit for lopez and pretend it could fit inside his head

lopez was originally just going to be a mexican guy and then they decided to make him a robot. it was also matt’s idea to make tex a woman

they weren’t sure if they should put in the “shock bracelet” joke because they weren’t sure if it was too outdated or if people will get it. i can say 20 years later, i have no idea what they’re fucking talking about

the spanish was just made with an online translator babelfish- burnie read it on his own the first time but gus (simmons’ va) ended up helping with the pronunciation

they lost a few concepts because they were busy wrapping up the season and focusing on developing the website and the dvd 

they wanted to have lopez’s introduction be a pov shot where you could see some text in the corner of his visor. they ended up reusing this gag in season 2 when they bring lopez back to fix shelia!

they got invited to some film festivals which ended up eating into their production time 

burnie recording his season 1 commentary voice: it was cool but we’re over the hey, aren’t we great, an internet phenomenon thing aren’t we? now we’re just focused on the episodes

no burnie. you will not be over it 

burnie and geoff both worked 45 hour a week day jobs and then would work for 30-40 hours a week on red vs blue when they got home

the hardest shot they did was one where caboose is turning around and talking at the same time tex was moving and fliping over the tank, and they got it on their first take

when tucker talks about caboose keeping an eye on red base, it cuts to caboose and you can see he’s actually staring back at blue base. burnie thought it was really funy but nobody got this joke when it aired lol

jason and gus moved out of town as soon as red vs blue started getting popular. halfway thru the series tucker’s lines start being recording over the phone instead of in the studio 

there’s also one episode where his brother plays tucker, since there was a huge blackout where he lived in new york, so they had to use his little brother instead 

in the final episodes people would complain about characters sounding different and insisting that the voice actors changed 

church was the boring exposition character- there was always a battle between pushing the plot along and making jokes

burnie: “i find it funny as tough as tex is, she’d actually be offended that she’s not considered a real girl”

a few lines from the original release were actually cut for the dvd- lines where there were big run ons of characters talking at the end of the episode over the black slate. for a few of the funny ones they went back and recorded more footage so they could include the lines in the dvd, but there are some that they ended up just getting rid of.

burnie also says he hopes people have it archived on their hard drives because after the dvd release they won’t be able to find them anywhere else?! so i guess those lines are lost to time

they considered calling caboose “omalley” in the new intro they made for the dvd

they tried using online sound directories but they usually ended up getting stuff that didn’t really fit, and they ended up doing their own foley work

they tried to end the season with a lot of shots that had been used throughout the whole season as a walk down memory lane

to get a cool effect, they used a shot of the warthog driving off from a distance that was just the halo camera focusing on other characters when your character had died and was waiting to respawn, which got a smoother camera motion and removed the reticle from the screen for a few seconds

the hissing noise of the bomb donut throws going across the gulch is also just burnie going hissssss

they would get some emails saying hey, really good webseries, you should get some adults to do the voices next time

[commaafterdearests]

A ✨Deep Dive✨ on The Baroness, Maria, and the Sound of Music Score

I’m genuinely in one of those moods again, so here’s an _ExpandedRevised.docx version of my thread! Buckle up! This is genuinely going to be so long. 

Let’s begin at the confrontation scene: our characters, Maria and Elsa Schraeder. At this point, Elsa has broken the unshockingly shocking news that Georg is in love with Maria, and Maria is mortified. Before the scene starts, as Elsa enters Maria’s bedroom, we hear very faint strains of music only to transition from the party to the private-ness of Maria’s room. No music is actually heard in this scene -- no additional dramatics. The Goodbye Maria/How Can Love Survive Waltz - Medley (which begins with Edelweiss) begins only as Elsa exits the scene.

Now, for those who don’t know what How Can Love Survive is, it’s a song from the original Broadway Musical sung by Elsa and Max as they detail why she and Georg are yet to be engaged. 

As Elsa exits the scene and leaves Maria alone in the frame, in confusion and anguish, faint strains of Edelweiss plays. I’ll detail why that bit makes me cry later on, but let’s talk about how as the scene cuts to Elsa downstairs, looking smug as she walks into the ballroom -- smug and sure that Maria will be leaving them, the music transitions to How Can Love Survive. 

How Can Love Survive is a “champagne problem” sort of song. It talks about how money is usually in the way of romance and how utterly difficult it is to show your significant each other love when you’re rich -- but it’s alright, they’ll keep it alive anyways, as seen in this lyric.

Caught in our gold-plated chains are we, Lost in our wealthy domains are we, Trapped by our capital gains are we, But we’ll keep romance alive—

Personally, it details the shallowness of the relationship between Georg and Elsa, and also an insight on how different they are in terms of loving their significant other. The significant change of removing this in the film makes Elsa’s relationship with Georg feel much more natural -- as if drawn to each other through seeking companionship. But why use this now? It could’ve been placed anywhere within the film. Why choose this specific moment? 

It’s important to note that Elsa views Maria as a nobody -- an orphaned young woman who happens to be a postulant at Nonnberg Abbey, who also happens to be a governess in the Von Trapp home. But Maria also stands for everything that Elsa isn’t. Maria likes everything that Elsa does not -- all of which Elsa lists in How Can Love Survive. It’s a shallow song, again, sung jokingly. But in this particular scene, it answers Elsa’s question of “how can love survive?” 

Eliminate the competition, and perhaps then, Georg will learn to love her and only her. We see later on that this doesn’t happen, and if her bittersweet farewell is any indication, she’s just a woman in need of love but used so thoroughly for her money and influence.

But now the music changes again! (Bold text to keep us back on track because I got too sad about How Can Love Survive)

After Elsa’s finally in the ballroom and proposed a toast with Max because she’s gotten rid of Maria, the Edelweiss Waltz plays.

Now, I’ll be detailing why exactly I sob during these last few minutes before intermission! 

We know that the scene before The Grand and Glorious PartyTM  is the Edelweiss Scene. I don’t think I need to detail the fact that after Georg sings, he and Maria share a comfortable look -- she looks like she’s in heaven, and he gives her one of those unsure smiles... right before Elsa interrupts them with the idea of a party. And I always say that he looks at her at the very last “bless my homeland forever” unknowingly because she feels like everything home represents to him.

Edelweiss is like the oh. o h. moment when one of the characters finally realizes how much the other means to them. It, then, becomes an unspoken, subtler representation of their love -- or of love, in general, in the movie (Edelweiss sung to family = familial love, to Austria = love for country, etc.). 

To see Georg and Elsa dancing to Edelweiss -- a representation of love -- feels like a slap to our faces then. Because we know that Georg isn’t in love with Elsa -- at least romantically. We know that Elsa isn’t his homeland, but perhaps he’s pretending that she is, or making himself feel as if she’s the one that he wants or must want.

What about Maria and his mixed emotions, then?

This part feels most heartbreaking to me because this is where Georg -- who has chosen to stand firm in everything he believes -- chooses convention. 

Dancing to Edelweiss in a ballroom full of people, everyone watching them be the conventional couple -- as opposed the picture the Laendler paints, which is everything that this waltz is not.

He sets aside his feelings for Maria because how does he love her openly? 

And in this moment, Maria also chooses to leave, because it has to be the wisest choice. Why on earth would she stay when she’s “getting in the way?”

So, to answer the question: 

How can love survive? 

Before the Intermission begins, we’re all heartbroken because Georg chooses Elsa -- and we established that she got the answer to making her love survive. Making Maria leave. 

And Maria goes with this because how can her love survive anyways? To ask for the Captain’s love would be wrong. To leave God felt impossible, and she’d feel more confused with whatever she felt with every passing minute. So she chose to leave. 

Now I’m impossibly weepy over two songs, and will need to re-watch the entire movie. I’m afraid I rambled too much, but thank you for making it this far? Warm hugs!