Lost this post to WordPress when it was the only one I wrote at the time, so it’s not down to the batch posting. So annoying to literally write a post, and then have it disappear immediately. You’re killing me WordPress! No more. I’m taking Michael Hollis’s advice and writing in Word then pasting.
I absolutely love when the beat comes into this song. Like pounding your fist on a table. It’s a vibe.
“Go ahead and wipe the hard drive, and all the good times, I’m the host that haunts your camera roll, let the credits roll tonight, we’ve got no chance of resuscitation, romance I rip from the pages, I let you go through the stages (I go through the stages), first kiss is under the streetlight, our greatest hits on repeat, I just can’t delete what it feels like, we just can’t be friends anymore (oh-oh, oh-oh), did I use you ’til you’re heart turned black, we just can’t be friends anymore”
Enjoy! I hope you have a great day! Be good, do good.
Lauren Mayberry and the rest of the Chvrches crew are an absolute delight to the ears.
Lauren has such an angelic voice IMO and that synths and sounds that the band produces are a treat. If you ever get a chance to see them live, jump on it, because they are mesmerizing.
I love the tone the beat sets. We’re moving from the get-go.
“Sometimes I just drive, ’til the night turns off my mind, I’m passing cars and crowded bars, never know until I go too far, confusing faith and fear, paint a smile from ear to ear, ’cause if I blink, I start to think, I feel nothing, I feel everything, I try my best to turn down the noise, and I tell myself that boys will be boys, it’s getting harder to breathe so, baby, put me to sleep, ’til it gets better”
Next time you can’t turn off your mind, like Lauren mentions, go take a drive. Toss this song on, and maybe just Chvrches in general, and just be with yourself for a while.
There is something magical about pairing Hozier with what seems like an entire orchestra.
God of War is a video game series that spans back to 2005. Tiny little summary below.
(From Wikipedia: Based on ancient mythologies, the series’ plot follows Kratos, a Spartan warrior who becomes the God of War and comes into conflict with various mythological pantheons. The earlier games in the series are based on Greek mythology and see Kratos follow a path of vengeance against the Olympian gods; the later games in the series are based on Norse mythology and see Kratos go on a path of redemption while also introducing his son Atreus as a secondary protagonist.)
Simply incredible songwriting on display in this song, and it honestly mirrors the quality of the game as well in the time I’ve spent with it. Hozier in his lane with a moving performance throughout. The music is awe-inspiring IMO.
“To all things housed in her silence, nature offers a violence, the bear that keeps to his own line, the wolf that seeks always his own kind, the world that hardens as the harsher winter holds, the parent forced to eat its young before it grows, every bird, gone unheard, starving where the ground has froze, the winter sun rise, red on white, like blood upon the snow, like blood upon the snow”
When those strings come in during that above part…my gosh. Not my favorite part but close. That honor belongs to this set of lyrics.
“It’s not my arms that will fail me, but this world takes more strength than it gave me, the trees deny themselves nothing that makes them grow, no rain fall, no sunshine, no blood upon the snow”
Put that in human being terms and it’s incredibly fantastic and deep advice on dealing with the good times but also with adversity, right? Everything that happens us, even that which forces us to bow and teeter on breaking, we are more because of it.
So that’s my advice to you today. Set an intention to deny nothing that makes you grow. This world can be cruel like Mother Nature. Remember Kintsugi.
Florence + The Machine is one of my favorite musical acts of all-time. Somehow…somehow…this one slipped through the cracks? I have no memory of hearing it before. Apparently this song was used for a Snow White movie?! Where in the heck was I in 2011? What was I paying attention to? I feel like I just got slapped in the face. This song HITS.
Florence Welch’s voice contains one of the biggest ranges I’ve ever heard. She can go so deep she croaks and sounds like she’s got gravel in her throat, and the very next second she’s hitting some sort of angelic high-note. She’s a Valkyrie screaming a battle cry at the beginning of this song.
Epic is the only word I can think of to describe it. Four minutes and eight seconds of epic. First off, they used every kind of instrument in the world in the song. You can hear it all in this one. Pretty incredible technical achievement if you ask me.
Then all of a sudden we have this choir part?! With this crazy bassline or synth? Who produces stuff like this? Is this all just in that person’s head? Is this how Florence hears songs when she writes them? Honestly no matter which way it happens, it sounds different than anything else.
Florence really is incomparable. I’m so excited to see what her and Taylor Swift are cooking up for The Tortured Poets Department!
“I was looking for a breath of life, for a little touch of heavenly light, but all the choirs in my head say, no, to get a dream of life again, a little vision of the start at the end, but all the choirs in my head say, no, but I needed one more touch, another taste of heavenly rush, and I believe, I believe it so“
I’ve listened to it like ten times in a row. It’s exhilarating. Enjoy!
WordPress clearly has an issue when I feel productive and try to knock out a few blog posts. It swallowed this one. At least in this case, it was a short post for a short song.
This song is BONKERS. I can’t even begin to try and describe what genres are here, so I’ll let the band do it themselves.
What I love about this track is that there’s a vibe like someone at some point made the mistake of calling Laura, “the dumbest girl alive”. She seems to have taken that and deftly turned it into a flex. A musical uno reverse card. no u.
It’s only 2:17 seconds, but it’s an all-out sprint as soon as the starting gun goes off.
No lyric highlights, because essentially the entire song is one verse. But the way they Frankenstein’d together genres and came out with something that WORKS as well as this? Color me impressed.
Impossible. It simply is an impossibility. Never happen. I don’t care who you are. Where you come from. How old you are.
This song makes you move. Anyone can move to this song. My mom can dance to this song and she only knows the “Mom Dance”.
“My skeletons hand-me-down, my bones have been lost and found, I’m hearing a sacred sound, calling out my name, I’m covered in fingerprints, kisses of melanin, blessing my skin with the evidence, that I am made of you“
It’s also an incredible explosion of power and positivity. When we switch up the beat at 2:35? Perfection. She doesn’t just have a drop-your-jaw-voice either; she’s also funny.
This is such an ode to your ancestry, right? Being grateful for your own DNA, and trusting that you’re on the right path because of those who guided you for so long and forged who you are today.
Today I am grateful for your skeleton existing. Have a fantastic day. Do something that pays homage to yourself for making it this far.
This could have been the title track for the entire blog. 🙂
Here’s another band I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t give a real chance until last year. Probably even sillier for me to pick a super recent song too. Don’t yuck my yum. I arrived, albeit late. They are legends. I’ve heard their stuff. But this one resonated! Might have to do with the 90,000 minutes of music I listened to last year!
“I’m pillow drumming on the sofa, I keep rocking past the coda, and evn if the world is ending, as I go out, you’ll hear me singing, I don’t feel no pain, when people make me mad, I don’t hear a word they say, just the sound of scratches”
Then we launch into the fantastically catchy part! Earworms gonna earworm.
“I hear records in my head everywhere that I go, I’ve got records in my head spinning out of control, they go ’round and around, and again, ’round and around, and again, ’round and around and, oh yeah, records in my head”
Awesome album art shout-out
This song just kicks. The whole time. Start to finish. Top to bottom. Inside and out. The driving percussion and electric guitar take center stage, but that bass…
Cool coincidence that they shout out “she who was posted just before them”, Lana Del Rey, in the song. We’ll hear from Rihanna, (also shouted out) fairly soon as I glance at the playlist. We might have some Nirvana. I honestly don’t remember about that one.
I hope you rock today as much as Weezer rocks to this day. What a shelf-life that band has had. Keep kicking ass Rivers and Co.
Early on in this playlists existence, this song rated even higher than it is here. It stuck in the Top-10 for quite a while. It’s a great song, so I guess that goes to show how good everything is before it! 😉
This is a lemonade from lemons post. WordPress ate another one. I think something wonky is happening when I’m scheduling multiple posts back to back. I believe this happens when I “batch-write” posts. Anywho, I’ve decided to frame it as the universe saying “give that another guy, Tiger…not your best work!”.
I’ve decided to call it the universe, you might call it God, six of one, half dozen of the other to me personally. I don’t begrudge anyone their faith whatsoever, I just found it wasn’t for me.
A year ago April, the universe presented me with a stray black cat in the backyard. That cat was a black loaf of bread on my lap while I wrote this original post. I can tell you without hesitation we needed each other. I think the idea of reincarnation is dope, so I like to think he’s someone important to me from another life. Or it’s like the SpiderVerse and he’s just a multiversal me.
What in the hell does this all have to do with Lana Del Rey? This lead-in is twice as long as the original post!
“Meet you for coffee, at the elementary schools, we laugh about nothing, as the summer gets cool, it’s beautiful, how this deep, normality settles down over me, I’m not bored or unhappy, I’m still so strange and wild”
Lana Del Rey has an absolutely magnificent voice. Curated or not, there’s definitely some old Hollywood lady-crooner pipes. If you haven’t listened to the hits off her debut album, you are missing out. Bangers left and right. The title track. Video Games. National Anthem. Dark Paradise. Summertime Sadness. This Is What Makes Us Girls. Gods & Monsters. They are all great in their own way.
I hope you enjoyed the lemonade. Be good, do good.
It’s amazing to me that you can be a big fan of a genre and it takes you so long to discover someone this good. The entendres aren’t on display like they are in some Weezy rhymes, but there’s a HARDness to Wiley’s delivery. He has a bit of a growl and it does WORK on this song. This is on display during this section below and in the “hype time” at 2:08.
“Now I only put out good vibrations, I don’t even see the lows, tunnel vision to the paper, I don’t really need…”
The verse starting at 2:22 is just….sustained THAT. Speed, style, you can FEEL it.
That’s a lot of CAPS I guess, but you can hear it, right? This sounds different than what you hear as “Hip Hop” now. Produced by Hippie Sabotage too, which probably explains a lot of that different sound. They are worth listening to as well. I’ve known them for longer so I’m not sure there’s stuff on the blog playlist, but check ’em out for sure.
Do something creative today. Write a poem. Draw something cute. Stretch that right-brain a little!
This is one of the prettiest songs I heard last year. Lyrics are a little sad though, but do not take away from the beautiful whole. If you’re on TikTok, you may have heard this song already, because it was used in about a bajillion videos.
“But it’s over, then you’re driving me home, and it kind comes out, as I get up to go, you kiss me in your car, and it feels like the start of a movie I’ve seen before, but it’s not real, and you don’t exist, and I can’t recall the last time I was kissed, it hits me in the car, and it feels like the end of a movie I’ve seen before, before”
I was so heart-broken once I listened to the song enough times and focused on the lyrics to know that she’s just imagining this person in the end. That’s the hallmark of a good sad song to me, when it actually hurts you a little to listen to it every time. I guess the hallmark itself might be how acute you end up feeling the emotion that’s being expressed in the song, right?
There’s just something about McAlpine’s breathy delivery that makes this song sting all the more. You feel her loneliness, or the loneliness of the character in the song I guess, but she says “me” so, I’m going with this being a lived experience. It’s too authentic to not be honestly. When songwriters bare their soul like this, it’s special.
Homework for today is to check in with yourself. What’s working? What’s not? What change can we make for the better. I wish that for you. Be good, do good.
everything, etc. 