Month: July 2021

New Music Friday: Steam by Leon Bridges

There a bunch of new music out this week that I’m interested in including albums by Yola, Billie Eilish, Bleachers, and Prince. I haven’t had a chance to really dig into any of those albums yet, so I’m rewinding to last week and talking about a song from Leon Bridges’ new album, Gold-Diggers Sound. I was at the Newport Folk Festival last weekend, so I skipped my regular New Music Friday post. I’ve been looking forward to this album for months, and it totally would have been my topic last week had I written a post so I’m going to talk about it today instead even though there are some other interesting things out today.

I adore Leon Bridges and his soulful smooth R&B sound. He recorded the new album in Gold-Diggers studio, which is also a hotel and bar in Hollywood where he spent the past two years living and recording this album. It is very recognizable as a Leon Bridges album while also incorporating some sounds of more modern R&B. I chose to highlight the song “Steam” because I feel like it melds together Leon Bridges signature sound with more modern sounds but also sounds of 80s R&B. There’s a female background vocal that sounds very 80s to me and that I almost think is a sample of something that I can’t quite put my finger on. Even if it’s not a sample it’s very evocative of 80s R&B music to me. I dig it.

Newport Presents Folk On

I spent the past three days in Rhode Island (sadly I’m still there as I type this waiting to get a tire replaced instead of on the road home) for this year’s modified version of the Newport Folk Festival, which they were calling Newport Presents Folk On. It’s somehow both a smaller and bigger affair. Smaller in that each day was only 50% of normal capacity, it started later in the day, and they eliminated one of the stages so there were fewer performances than usual. With 5,000 people in the audience it was still the most people I’ve been around since before the pandemic. I found out that back in June when things were looking really good instead of trending in the wrong direction Rhode Island told them they could lift the capacity restriction. I appreciate that they stuck with it and honored that they sold the tickets promising 50% capacity. No other festival would have done that, but that is the Newport way. They did require proof of vaccine or a negative COVID test for entry. None of that is foolproof, but it helps. Space at the main stage didn’t feel much different to me because of the fact that they pushed the stage out presumably for more room “back stage”. I still didn’t feel that close to other people most of the time and if anyone was within a couple feet of me I had my mask on. There was plenty of room at the other stage to be far, far away from people if you wanted, which I did. The changes they made also helped free up some of the bottlenecks in the travel lanes between stages so that there wasn’t a lot of crowding like there is most years. Hopefully between that and the fact the festival is all outside with a nice breeze off the bay it was reasonably safe.

Aside from the set up of the festival itself being different this year was different for me because I actually had friends there with me instead of just my begrudging husband who would never do this if I didn’t force him to. One of my friends has also been coming to Newport for years, but we didn’t really know each other before. She was friends with some of my friends and I knew who she was but we never really talked ourselves. We had just started to hang out a little before the last festival and said we’d look for each other, but not even enough to have each other’s phone numbers at that point, and we never did run into each other. Now it’s funny because we’ve become good friends since then and text pretty much every day. She convinced one of our other friends to come for the first time as well as one of her other friends who I had never met before. So the four of us ran around the festival all day and left my husband with our blankets at the main stage where he always just stays. My friend and I are both of the same mind that you should never be somewhere music isn’t playing and since the others were new to the festival they were happy to just follow our lead.

I was a little bummed going into the festival this year because due to the capacity restrictions they extended the festival to six days instead of three so they could still sell the same number of tickets over all. You could buy tickets for Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or both. We just stuck with our normal weekend tickets, but when they started announcing some of the artists who were playing it seemed like everyone I wanted to see was going to be playing one of the weekdays. I would still love to see Allison Russell, Hiss Golden Messenger, Lake Street Dive, Christopher Paul Stelling, Katie Pruitt, and Julien Baker, but in retrospect I’m also glad to have had the experience I did. My advice to people going to Newport has always been go see the people you don’t know and always go to the themed curated sets where you never know who will pop up. I feel like being there on the days I was forced me to do that a little bit more and of course it meant I got to see some wonderful things I would not have otherwise.

I felt like there were mostly (though this is not 100% true) two major things going on during the weekend sets. You had the theme of really trying to give the stage to Black artists (even more so than usual because I don’t feel like the artists are ever all that white even though the audience for sure is) and then sort of doing the opposite of when Bob Dylan shocked everyone by going electric at Newport and having a lot of artists do acoustic stuff. You had Pattersoon Hood and Mike Cooley of the Drive By Truckers billed as the Dimmer Twins doing acoustic DBT songs, Phosphorescent played acoustic for what they said was the first time ever, and although Jason Isbell switches back and forth he did an all acoustic set with just Amanda Shires and Sadler Vaden instead of his full band. It’s funny because he got way more into the electric rock than he has been on his newest album Reunions and now that he finally got to play some of it live for an audience he took all those songs and made them acoustic.

Although I did love Friday and Saturday, Sunday is what really felt like the festival to me. One of the things I love the most about Newport is all the collaborations and people popping into other people’s sets including people not even on the bill and who are just there for the love. That didn’t happen much during the first couple days. I was honestly shocked that Amanda Shires didn’t join Natalie Hemby during her set to sing a Highwomen song since they were both there. All the themed sets where they were inviting artist after artist to the stage happened Sunday. It makes sense because that way some of the Newport die hards like Brandi Carlile, Jess from Lucius, M.C. Taylor from Hiss Golden Messenger, and Taylor Goldsmith from Dawes could be there and overlap both parts of the festival because I’m guessing they’re all going to pop again today aside from the ones that have actual sets to play.

The most Newport set of the weekend of course was the final set on Sunday called Allison Russell’s Once and Future Sound. Instead of having big named band X close the festival, Newport does these curated collaborative sets. And in this case they handed the reins to Allison Russell. I’m not sure how this all came about, but it seems crazy and so very Newport that someone who has been in the folk scene for awhile, but who literally just released her first solo album and is not someone who has been well known up until this point was not only given an open door herself but invited to bring as many other Black women as she could along with her. I thought there might be a little more torch passing and was 100% expecting Mavis Staples to be part of it. They paid homage to her, but she’s playing the Newport Jazz Festival next weekend and was saving herself for that. The final surprise guest of the night though was Chaka Khan because why not having Chaka Khan come out and sing two songs to close out the festival. It was just pure joy. If you could have seen my face behind my mask you would have seen the biggest grin on it. It was the best way to close out the night watching all these wonderful artists having so much fun on stage and the audience totally living it up to. I’m so glad that I got to be back and experience the joy that is Newport again.

Amos Lee at Wolf Trap

Last night I went to my first concert since the pandemic started. If you’ve been around here at all you know how desperately I love and missed live music. I’m trying to take as much as I can in now while there are a lot of shows outside because things do not seem to be going in the right direction COVID wise and I’m not sure how willing I’m going to be to go to inside concerts this winter when there will probably be a lot of young unvaccinated people crowded together.

This was a really nice reentry into the concert world. During June and July Wolf Trap was doing socially distanced shows. You had to buy pods, so we actually paid for a pod of four on the lawn even though there were only too of us. Sadly I don’t know any other Amos Lee fans to take the extra tickets. It’s a shame because he’s great. There was also no opening act so it started at 8 and ended at 9:30, which is just about perfect for me, especially at a Wolf Trap show. I was actually home before my bedtime instead of 12:30 am like usual. I wish all concerts were like that.

Amos is not doing a full tour yet. He just a few random dates here and there, so he was just playing acoustic solo rather than with his band which was a-ok with me. It just felt like a live version of the weekly Instagram Live concerts he did every Thursday night during the first year of the pandemic. It really did help keep me going, and I’m so thankful for him. It felt like the perfect thing that my first concert back was Amos Lee at my favorite Baltimore/DC area venue.

The concert was great. He is super funny joking a lot between songs. He also is one of the few artists I’ve seen that doesn’t come out with much of a set list. He just kind of decides what to play on the fly and also took a bunch of requests from the audience. He played a couple of new songs off his forthcoming album, which has been on hold since the pandemic started. One of the songs he played so much on the Instagram shows that I actually forgot that it’s not already been released.

Amos does a lot of work with Musicians On Call an organization that sends musical artists to hospitals to play for people, and he always seems to be attuned to his fans that are battling a significant illness. He befriended a kid named Jordy over the Instagram concerts and Jordy even came on and played with him one night. Apparently Jordy is from Virginia so he too was at the concert last night and Amos dedicated the song “Kid” to him because they used to play it together. It was a very sweet moment, and I love that song and it doesn’t seem to be one he plays a lot so I was very happy to hear it. He also ended the show with a song called “Charles St.”, which I’m not even sure I’ve ever heard before or at least paid attention to when I did hear it because the Charles Street in reference is actually the Charles Street in Baltimore. He said he had some friends from Baltimore who were also in the audience so he was singing it for them. Most of the song doesn’t have anything to do with Baltimore and you would never know he was referencing that until the very last night until it references Charles Street and I-83 when it definitely becomes obvious to anyone who knows. So that was kind of fun and just reinforced even more that this concert felt like a perfect live music come back.

It definitely reminded me of the joys of seeing live music. Even though it was a limited crowd due to the social distancing they had in place there was a lot of energy in the place. There was a lot of clapping and singing together. All the things that you just can’t experience watching concerts over a computer like I did so often for the past year. I’m so happy to have concerts back in my life. Please go get vaccinated if you haven’t yet, so that I can keep them.

New Music Friday: John Mayer and 98 Degrees

There is plenty of new music from my indie rock/American wheelhouse that I could write about today including new albums by Clairo, Lawrence Rothman, and Willow. Instead I’m going to step outside my wheelhouse and write about the new yacht rock album by John Mayer and a new pop single by 98 Degrees.

I do not like John Mayer. I have never liked John Mayer. He was starting at a disadvantage with me in that his debut album was one of the in-store plays back when I worked at Barnes & Noble. Even if you like music hearing it over and over again while you’re working is bound to make you hate it eventually. I really only ever liked the song “Neon” off that album, so it wasn’t the repetitiveness that completely ruined it for me, but it certainly didn’t help. I just don’t like whatever genre of music John Mayer, Jack Johnson, and Jason Mraz fall into. I once took an Uber from San Francisco to the Oakland airport in which the driver had a playlist of those three artists on shuffle and I really wanted to give him a bad rating because of it. Don’t worry; I didn’t.

Anyway, John Mayer has a new album called Sob Rock out today that is homage yacht rock. They were talking about it on NPR’s All Songs Considered podcast this morning and someone said “I regret to inform you that John Mayer’s new yacht rock album is actually good.” I like yacht rock a lot and didn’t completely hate the snippet of the song they played, so it made me curious enough to listen to the whole thing. So here’s the thing. The album does indeed very much sound like yacht rock in its musical style. Most of it does feel like an homage to the genre, but sometimes it also feels like it’s making fun of it. I mean if you’re going to make a song that sounds like Air Supply’s “Even the Nights are Better” with the chorus,

Why you no love me?
Why you no love me?
Why you no even care?
Why you no love me?
Why you no love me?
Why you no will be there?

it’s going to sound like a parody. My problem is that ultimately it still sounds like John Mayer. I had the same problem with Taylor Swift’s folklore. Yes, I like the music at the root of the songs better, but the voice is still the same and you can’t get away from that. There are a bunch of instrumental breaks in the songs that I would really be digging and then John Mayer would start singing again and ruin it all for me. Something about his voice is just not for me. If you are a John Mayer fan and you do like yacht rock, you should love this album. And I do have to give him credit for going all in on the aesthetic. I mean the music video for “Shot in the Dark” looks like it came straight out of the 80s.

I also wanted to talk about the new 98 Degrees song, “Where Do You Wanna Go” that I ran across last night. I was just slightly too old to be super into the 90s boy bands. I live in the world so of course I know plenty of songs by the Backstreet Boys and ‘NSync, but I was never a groupie and don’t even think I owned any of their albums. During my senior year of college my roommates and I were super into whatever Backstreet Boys album was popular at the time, but in a sort of ironic way, and I don’t think I’m the one who owned the CD (kids ask your parents). I also know that 98 Degrees was a band and I’m absolutely certain that I know one or two of whatever their hit songs were at the time, but I cannot tell you what they were without Googling, which I have not done.

This new song is a bop though. It’s got a great fun, summer pop song vibe that I’m digging. I do have to say that the video makes me kind of sad because it’s like these 40 year old guys still acting like they are 20. It’s a weird thing about being a boy band. People want you to look and sound like you did when they were all in love with you as teenagers, but now you’re old and it just seems like you’re sadly trying to recreate your youth even though what’s happening is that people want you help recreate theirs. So maybe just go listen to the song somewhere without the video and forget that these guys aren’t actually in their 20s anymore and just enjoy the music.

TV Diary

It’s time once again for my thoughts on some of the new shows I’ve been watching.

Cruel Summer

This was a sort of fun little summer show on Freeform and Hulu. I’m not sure I liked it as much as everyone else seemed to as it sort of became the cult hit of the summer, but it kept me engaged enough. The premise is that each episode takes place on the same day during three different years: 1993, 1994, and 1995. I’m not going to lie I initially decided to keep watching the show because it starts on the 15th birthday of the one of characters who is exactly 3 days older than I am and also in high school in Texas in the mid-90s as I was. Kate is a popular girl who disappears during the first year. Jeanette is a socially awkward girl who wants to get in with the popular kids and manages to do so while Kate is gone, but then Kate returns and accuses Jeanette of knowing where she was being held hostage and not reporting it. Jeanette then becomes a pariah in the town. You bounce back and forth across the timelines trying to figure out what happened to Kate when she was kidnapped and whether or not Jeanette actually did know about it. I didn’t love the twist ending because I didn’t think it was as twisty as they thought it was, but it was decently entertaining if you can get past the horrible wigs and lighting they use to help distinguish the timelines. I will say I was never confused about what year we were in, but ooph that stuff was bad. Also I literally couldn’t tell any of the white guys in this show apart. I could never figure out which one was the boyfriend, which one was the brother, and which was another friend without the context clues of the scene. It’s been renewed for a second season. It will be interesting to see where it goes since the central mystery has been resolved.

Hacks

Hacks on HBOMax stars Jean Smart as a big name comic with a long running Vegas gig, Deborah Vance, who is starting to get pushed aside for younger and more subversive talent. Hannah is a television writer who basically gets canceled for some Twitter joke, but everyone seems to agree has a lot of talent. The agent that represents both of them and who is struggling with how to deal with both of their currently tanking careers convinces Hannah to move to Vegas and work with Deborah to bring a newer sensibility to her comedy. They are both unlikeable in various ways, but you also want to root for them. They eventually develop a grudging relationship and respect for each other. It’s a really good show. Jean Smart is really at the apex of her career in this role and should definitely win the Emmy she was just nominated for.

We Are Lady Parts

We Are Lady Parts is a Peacock show about five Muslim women who form a punk band. Amina is the lead character who is a somewhat socially awkward woman who loves playing the guitar but gets performance anxiety so bad that it makes her vomit. She is also a devout Muslim woman who trying to find a husband. It’s a really great show that shows lots of facets of Muslim women and has some fun rom-com elements. I was very sad when we finished the sixth episode and I realized it was the last one. Stupid Brits and their stupid short seasons.

Mythic Quest

We just finished watching the two seasons of the AppleTV+ show Mythic Quest, which is a workplace comedy surrounding people who work at a video game design company. I wasn’t sure about it at first, but it definitely grew on me. It also likes to play with it’s format and sometimes have episodes that don’t even involve the main characters at all. The characters can be a bit cartoonish, but they also grow as people so there’s a bit of a balance there. I will say that this show hands down had the absolute best “Zoom” quarantine episode created when filming still couldn’t take place in person. It used the format perfectly and I still get shivers thinking about the last couple of scenes. The show is almost worth watching just to watch that episode.

The Morning Show

The Morning Show is also on AppleTV+. It was their flagship show when launching the service. It stars Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and Steve Carrell. I have no idea how I got the misconception about what this show was about in my head given the amount of press that it got when it came out, but for some reason I totally thought it was a 30 minute sit-com about people who worked on a morning show. Not so much. It’s actually an hour long drama about people who work on a morning show. At least I got that last part right. It’s in the title, so you know I’m super on top of things. Steve Carrell and Jennifer Aniston are long time hosts of the show when he loses his job after his sexual behavior on set comes to light as part of the #metoo movement. It’s very much a take off of the real life scandal involving Matt Lauer. Reese Witherspoon is the reporter who winds up replacing him and who decides to try and dig deeper into who knew and how much was covered up. I’m a little annoyed that the last shot of the season was of Steve Carrell, but that’s really neither here nor there. I enjoyed it for the most part and will watch the second season when it comes out, though I’ll be interested to see where it goes from here given how things sort of wrapped up in way on the first season.

Starstruck

Starstruck is a quick six episode rom com type series on HBOMax. Jessie is sort of a screw up who doesn’t really have her life together who winds up hooking up with Tom on New Year’s Eve not realizing he’s a famous actor until the morning after. I didn’t love this show as much as I was expecting or apparently as much as everyone else based on what I’ve seen people say about it. There was some cute banter between the characters, but ultimately I didn’t necessarily think they should be together. The show is not a straightforward they meet and then their relationship progresses from there with various barriers. Instead it feels like it very much starts and stops with each episode being set in a new season over the course of a year, so they basically keep running into each other and then having that connection end badly so they part ways until they run into each other again. I’m like yeah every time you meet it is terrible so why does this show want to make me think you should be in an actual relationship with each other? There is going to be a second season and I will probably watch it, but this definitely didn’t hit me the way it did a lot of other people.

30 Rock

I never watched 30 Rock when it was on, but for some reason finally decided to take the plunge and watch all of it on Hulu recently. I know people still love this show and quote it all the time, but coming at it fresh in 2021 it felt very cringey and out of touch particularly in regard to race based jokes of which there were a lot. I know Hulu even pulled a few episodes that had blackface in them, so I didn’t even see the worst of it. I obviously enjoyed it enough to watch it all, but I definitely didn’t love it and in some ways don’t exactly feel good about having watched it.

High on the Hog

High on the Hog is a four episode mini-series on Netflix about the history of the African-American influence on food based on the book of the same name. Stephen Satterfield travels to various places around America and Africa to explore African-American food culture and it’s influence on American cuisine. If you enjoyed Taste the Nation or Somebody Feed Phil this show should be right up your alley.

Young Royals

Young Royals is a Swedish show tv show available on Netflix. It’s about Prince Wilhelm who after a scandal is shipped off to a boarding school he avoided attending in the first place. Now he’s told he needs to be on the straight and narrow, but he finds himself falling for a local kid named Simon. Their relationship would certainly go against royal protocol. This was an enjoyable teen drama type show. It is in Swedish with English subtitles so you can’t be adverse to reading your television if you want to watch it.

Lodge 49

I don’t even really know how to describe Lodge 49. Dudley is sort of a surfer dude bum type guy who has just been sort of lost since the death of his father and the loss of their pool cleaning business. His sister works a dead end job at a Hootersesque restaurant. He gets involved with a local lodge that has sort a Masons type vibe. There’s a lot of crazy stuff that happens that I can’t really describe. The show definitely had some Twin Peaks vibes to me because of the weirdness. It was okay. I’m not sure that I’d super recommend it.

The Underground Railroad

Unlike the rest of the world I didn’t really like Colson Whitehead’s book that this show on Amazon Prime is based off of, so I’m not sure why I thought I might like the tv show. I did not. It’s ten episodes. I made it through five and when my husband went to put on the sixth and I realized we were only halfway through I was like I really don’t want to watch this anymore. It’s sort of a fantastical story about slavery in that the underground railroad is an actual railroad. You follow a slave named Cora as she tries to escape slavery and the slave catcher that is determined to catch and return her to slavery. It’s sort of a disjointed story, which is one of the things that made it hard to connect to as well as just the depressing subject matter. I will say that episode one is worth a watch though. It really has the single most harrowing and horrific scene about the evils of slavery that I have ever seen. I heard a lot of chatter about a scene in that first episode and I knew it was what everyone had been talking about as soon as I got to it. Nothing else that I watched lived up to that scene and I feel like having seen that was enough.

Sex/Life

I did not even make it all the way through the first episode of this Netflix show starring Sarah Shahi as an unfulfilled housewife who dreams about the more exciting sex she had with some ex. This show is essentially soft core porn with the terrible acting and storylines to go along with it. Since this show has been talked about a lot and has been sitting in Netflix’s top 10 since it came out, I guess there are plenty of people that are into that. I am not one of them. I at least need some decent acting and story lines to go along with my explicit sex scenes.

New Music Friday: Wild Turkey by Amythyst Kiah

Earlier this week on Instagram I was sharing my favorite albums of 2021 so far in my stories. I realized that somehow I hadn’t actually written about anything off of Amythyst Kiah’s album Wary + Strange. It’s a roots and Americana album in which Amythyst Kiah opens up about being a black, queer woman from Tennessee who has faced some traumatic experiences in her life. The song I’ve chosen to highlight is “Wild Turkey”, which is about her mother committing suicide by drowning herself in a river. It’s an excellent album all around, and I highly recommend taking a listen.

Also in case you’re wondering the other albums that made my favorite albums of 2021 so far list are Amythyst Kiah’s fellow Our Native Daughters band member, Allison Russell’s Outside Child, Japanese Breakfast’s Jubilee, Hiss Golden Messenger’s Quietly Blowing It, and girl in red’s if i could make it go quiet.

New Music Friday: Pom Pom Squad and Liz Phair

I was listening to new music by Pom Pom Squad and Liz Phair and it was making me think about how iterative music is. You have Pom Pom Squad, which is an indie punk/grunge rock band founded and fronted by 23 year old Mia Berrin. Their sound on their first album, Death of a Cheerleader, definitely evokes a lot of 90s era female rock for me. Then you have Liz Phair who actually began her music career during that period of the 90s who just put out a new album as well. You have the song “Spanish Doors” off of the new album Soberish which does have more of that similar sound, but you also have the song “In There” that is more of an evolved sound that doesn’t feel like it came from the 90s. I’m just fascinated by the idea that young kids listen to older music and are influenced by that sound while some of those same older acts are taking cues from newer music being created by younger artists and incorporating it into their sound. Music is fun y’all.