Unfortunately, Miss Jepsen's new album was released on the same day as Taylor Swift's Midnights. But somehow it was this song was the song released that day that I have continued to listen to. It's a fun disco jam, and it makes me want to wear my 70s best and dance around.
And it feels like a great winter bop. That seasonal depression hits and it can feel like the loneliest time, and I know this song is about a relationship, but we can expand that meaning to the winter blues. Just groove through it.
So, the entire cast album of Spring Awakening has never one that's been in rotation for me. I had never seen the show. My sister and I asked to see it in 2007 when we were 11, and our dad said he'd look into it, and a few days later he said no, it was, and I quote, "highly inappropriate". I never really sought a bootleg of it once they were being put on YouTube, and that was sort of that.
But, me being a theater nerd, songs seeped through and made it onto my showtunes playlist. Those were "Mama Who Bore Me", "Mama Who Bore Me (Reprise)", "The Bitch of Living", and "Totally Fucked". That was the extent of my relationship to the show. Then the documentary, Spring Awakening: Those You've Known, debuted on HBO, I watched it. And it sent me deep into the wormhole.
So, April 16th, my family went to the Mets game. It was a great game that we lost, but they played a bit of this song during the game. There was a mini sing-along going on with it, you could hear some of the crowd in like a chorus, and obviously they cut it short because of copyright. And it has been stuck in my head ever since. It has been almost two weeks, and I can't stop listening to it. Both the actual song and Kelly Clarkson's Kellyoke of it. So I have been listening to it a lot in hopes of it finally getting out of my head, to no avail. Now, I'm cursing those who read this to the same fate.
Oh this song is a good one. I first heard it in the season 2 finale of Love Life, a season of television everyone should go and watch. As soon as the episode had ended I immediately looked up the song and has been in regular rotation ever since. It soars and gives the feeling that I could fly whenever I listen to it. If I could dance I would dance to it.
It's also a very simple song, and I mean that in the best possible way. The fact that it doesn't have a traditional song structure allows it to build its end, like you're rising right along with it.
Just some good funky music. I love this lane Bruno Mars has carved out for himself. And I hate to admit that I'm not familiar with Anderson .Paak's music, but I know that he has the most popular Tiny Desk Concert, so he might just be my next deep dive on an artist.
The song I'm digging the most off the album at the moment is "Fly As Me" and I loved their performance at the Soul Train Awards. It's what a Soul Train performance looks like and it's awesome.
There are days when you need to listen to Darren Criss and The Warblers from Glee.
I watched Glee, but I wasn't a religious watcher so I missed episodes here and there. Because that has to be the only reason I didn't find out about this cover until a couple weeks ago. Also surprised to find out it's a Robin Thicke song from the early 00s that samples Walter Murphy's "A Fifth of Beethoven", a previous earworm of mine, which has since returned to my regular rotation thanks to this.
I do find myself listening to various Glee songs. Say what you want about the show, but I love a lot of the cast members' voices and the different spins on popular songs. With the Warblers, they really did the a capella version and every track is a great showcase for Darren Criss' voice, who really was one of the best performers on the series. But that was obvious from his very first episode with "Teenage Dream" becoming Glee's first Billboard Hot 100 hit.
I really just wrote this to say I love Darren Criss.
Have you ever just wanted to have your own private singalong? That’s what happens for me whenever this song comes on because you just can’t not reenact Almost Famous, even by myself. I don't even realize I start sometimes until I get to the chorus.
I was not expecting to like her music. I watched High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, and she's great on it, but the original songs that she performed in that show were very much in line with a Disney produced artist. But, this is not the music of a Disney girl in the best possible way.
How have I not written about an album that has gotten me through a lot of the last year of life on this planet? It came out a couple weeks into quarantine and it has been in constant rotation ever since. Truly, 11 tracks, no skips.
So the first of Taylor Swift's re-recorded albums has arrived, and I've got to say I'm excited about it. Fearless was a great album to begin with, so whatever the results of this experiment/getting back what's hers wouldn't be bad. But I was surprised at the result of Taylor's Version.
So the first track from Taylor Swift's mission to re-record all of her music that she doesn't own has been released. I was a bit surprised she started with Fearless, thinking she'd go in chronological order with her debut, but it makes sense. Taylor Swift may have been her first album, but Fearless was her introduction to superstardom.
I think people were expecting radically different versions of these songs, but when this dropped I think people realized what this undertaking actually was. There will be some differences, because playing these songs night after night on tour, you'll find new ways to play them and that can be worked into the arrangement and not be a drastic change. I will say, I can't wait to hear how time has affected the rest of the album. One of my favorite Taylor deep cuts is "The Way I Loved You", so that is high on my list, and I don't have to wait that much longer for it.
I am on the record about not liking Reputation and Lover. While folklore and evermore were better than those two works, my hope for what she gets out of revisiting her older albums, and specifically her country albums, is a better sense of who she is as an artist. It's felt like the last few years she was trying so hard to be this mega pop star, that she lost a lot of her power as a songwriter. When she gets around to Red, that's the album that I think will reawaken what's been hiding from her the last few years. And "State of Grace" is at the top of my wait list because it's my favorite song of hers and it deserves more love and attention.
This song seems pretty applicable to the time we are currently living. Also it grooves.
And it's one of Christine McVie's songs, and the more I learn about Fleetwood Mac and who wrote what songs, the more she's becoming my favorite member. And her voice is one of my favorites in rock.
I just discovered this song in the last couple of months. It's just a blast of a disco inspired 90s jam, which is a combo I love.
I first head of the song in a Little Mix interview for a radio station in the UK. They were playing a song game or something and this came, and all four of them burst out into the chorus and I was like, "I need to find that song". And I did, and it's been in heavy rotation since.
So, Chloe x Halle have become queens of the quarantine music performance. From the BET Awards, the Global Citizen concert, the GLAAD awards, and the US Open, whenever they are booked to perform on television, it is a treat.
But the queen of all of their performances is the one they gave of "Ungodly Hour" at the VMA Pre-Show.
It's been a week, and I'm still struggling to understand why they weren't in the main show. They were up for a few awards, one of them being "Best Quarantine Performance", and with the list I opened with, you'd think you want that caliber of performance in the part of the night people care about. But it was still one of the most talked about performances of the night, and a lot of people sharing that same thought, too.
I don't know why this popped up in my head. I wasn't even listening to a lot of 80s pop when it did. But it has not left my head in a week. It's just pulsing. And the instrumental can easily be used to score a cool action setpiece, which I want to see happen now.
The Hamilton cast album has been in steady rotation since it came into my life in the fall of 2015. I was trying to hold off on listening to it because I had the pipe dream of being able to see the show. That line of thinking did not last long. So by Christmas of 2015, I had listened to the cast album, realistically, a hundred times over. But, my parents being theater loving people and good deal hunters, managed to find reasonably priced tickets to see the original cast on Broadway. Best Christmas/early birthday present ever. March 10, 2016. Best night ever.
And even though the general hype for the show died down and my own love was starting to fade, a good chunk of the cast album was still in rotation, especially when I listened to my show tunes playlist on spotify. I don't really listen to the sadder songs that much, mainly because I need to be in a certain "I need a good, big cry" mood. The songs that I still listen to pretty regularly are (in chronological order) "You'll Be Back", "Satisfied", "Wait For It", "What'd I Miss", "The Room Where It Happens", and "Washington On Your Side".
I think those songs are the highlights of the show. The character pieces of "You'll Be Back", "Satisfied", "Wait For It", and "What'd I Miss". The jazzy political intrigue of "The Room Where It Happens", and "Washington On Your Side". It all fits to tell some of the stories of the characters in the show and expose how they think and how they operate, all while being great earworms.
It is some of the best of musical theater and what it can do, and why theater is one of the greatest forms of art that there is.
For some reason, since I started doing my morning walks, this song has been stuck in my head.
I mean, "walkin'" is in the title, so that tracks. But walking at seven or eight in the morning is too far after midnight to qualify for the sentiment. And my walks are purely for exercise, so that doesn't track either.
But it's a classic song with a great little groove to it. If this pops up on shuffle, you can do a nice little strut to spice up your walk.
More classical music should be remixed into jams, especially disco jams. It's in the public domain so it's not gonna be expensive. This is just a really groovy song to have fun to. I want more!
It was also the theme song to Mrs. America on Hulu, which is a great miniseries if you want something to binge and learn about the women's movement and the fight to pass the ERA in the 70s.