Thanks to the award-winning talents of composer Ramin Djawadi, the show’s original score is as much a part of the series as its main characters are. Characterized by twisting string melodies and pounding drums, very often in a minor key, the show’s soundtrack has become iconic.
“Fearless (Taylor’s Version)” (2021) is an appropriate starting point for Swift’s journey to re-record her first six albums. She’s jumping “head first, fearless” into a creative project that she’s been hinting at for years, since she failed to secure ownership of her master recordings in 2018. There’s an unmistakable parallel between the breakups Swift mourned in 2008 and her breakup with her first record label, Big Machine Records.
Less than three years after her hospitalization for a drug overdose in 2018, Demi Lovato has returned to the studio stronger than ever with her April 2 release, "Dancing with the Devil … The Art of Starting Over" (2021). An album filled with empowering highs and heartbreaking lows, Lovato paints the trauma and recovery she’s endured since her hospitalization as a reawakening. She stakes a claim in her story, negating the tabloids and lies circulating in the media as a result of her hospitalization.
Despite a vinyl revival in recent years, classic vinyl records are still deemed obsolete in the mainstream, as modern technologies and the digital world sift them out. But they are still there, lining up quietly and unyieldingly, in boxes organized by genre, protected and loved by a small population of firm supporters.
“Femme Fatale” came at a significant moment in both American music and Spears’ career. Riding on the early rise of electronic dance music, the singer’s seventh album had one overarching desire: to commemorate Spears’ new era after her rise, fall and comeback in popular culture. Of course, that’s a simplification of what might be her greatest work to date. But at the time, “Femme Fatale” acted as a turning point.
Inspired by The Beatles, Jethro Tull formed in the U.K. to write music and cashed in on sounds that progressive rock bands like Cream, Led Zeppelin and King Crimson were pioneering in the mid-to-late 1960s. As lead singer Ian Anderson explained in a 2018 interview with Decades TV, “It was the beginning of that improvised music slipping into the popular format. It came via blues, it came via Black American blues and it had impacted a whole generation of young, middle-class, white British boys, most of whom went to art colleges.”
When asked about my music taste, whether during an awkward first date or during pre-orientation duck, duck, goose, my answer was always the same — “Anything but country, really.” But through the haze of the last year (carrying my clothes in trash bags and dozens of pies out of Latin Way), I found my music taste through much trial and error, not understanding what I liked, and chasing the goosebumps. So now, when asked what music I like listening to, I answer, “weird … psychedelic … funky.” I like my music to not sound normal, to put you on edge as much as it soothes you.
The place is also much bigger than I imagined. It's not just a single room but almost a maze. The hallway connects several rooms together. From roaming in and out of rooms, looking at the style of the arches and the bricks on the wall, I was drawn to its structure. It's like a part of a bigger picture.
While larger artists have stayed afloat, beloved venues have felt the impact of the end of live shows. In Boston, multiple local venues have been forced to close doors due to economic losses following the cancellation and postponement of live music. One such venue is Great Scott, which has hosted shows in the greater Boston area for more than 40 years.
I like nervous music, music that’s unsettled and unsettling, even when it’s in a major key, and this seems somewhere between pablum and dread. Over the last 12 months, I’ve found myself falling into repetitive music and listening loops. Maybe read this as my way of rocking back and forth, my sonic self-care at best or anesthetic at worst.
It seems like an understatement to call the media and music industry’s misogyny, harassment and deliberate destruction of Spears as “struggles.” But “Framing Britney Spears” comes at a moment when American culture is finally deconstructing this euphemism. We’re now grappling with just how terribly Spears was treated.
The lore of Eilish’s wildly successful album is well known among fans: Eilish and Finneas wrote and recorded it in Finneas's tiny bedroom in their parents' home in Los Angeles. “The World’s a Little Blurry” keeps this intimacy at the core of its filmmaking style, eschewing any “Miss Americana”-style sit-down interviews to instead capture the relationship between Eilish and her family.
The release of “Tyron” (2021) was on every fan’s radar, and Slowthai has once again delivered an excellent piece of work. A two-part album, Frampton’s sophomore record is chock-full of life-spilling details and streams of consciousness over a wonderful array of instrumentals.
To celebrate the duo’s 28-year career — including perfectly pounding albums, gorgeous visual storytelling and live concerts that fans were chomping at the bit to get into — let’s take a deep dive into their music. It’s a great opportunity to “Lose Yourself to Dance” (2013), as the duo would want.
The line of limited-edition cookies is inspired by Lady Gaga's latest release, “Chromatica” (2020), a dance-pop album exploring mental health and healing. Gaga’s Oreos are a spin on the classic sandwich cookies, with pink cookies and green icing in the middle.
Two massive albums dropped on the night of Dec. 11, 2020. Though many may have gone straight to Taylor Swift’s “Evermore,” “Man on the Moon III: The Chosen” was the true gem.
In “A Theory of Justice,” John Rawls discusses societal progress through collective creativity and labor. Rawls is correct that we gain strength and innovation by participating in the collective, but I would rather think of this idea as relevant to our lives and relationships on a smaller scale — reflected in 2020 Spotify Wrapped.
It’s certainly easy to list all the ways consuming music changed. But plenty of our normal listening activities remained. We still take walks around the neighborhood. We continue to listen while studying or ignoring our roommates and families. And as always, the shower is still the stage for our world tour performances.
Cyrus’ seventh studio album explores who she’s been and who she is. But that’s fairly difficult for an artist who’s always changing, especially sonically; it makes “Plastic Hearts” a statement of self-reflection.
“ARTPOP” became a larger-than-life era, even for pop’s most outrageous and concept-focused musician. That’s important context for revisiting the album seven years later and questioning its status.
