Elbow (and lead singer Guy Garvey particularly) are a sort of underground national treasure in the United Kingdom. They play shows for royalty, but they appear to be the kind of band you’d want to spend the afternoon in the pub with. Garvey himself presents a popular and very enjoyable regular radio show. But his real day job is as Elbow’s lead singer and songwriter. And with “Balu” they have put to bed their delicate and luscious previous album with a furious and groove-filled giant of a track which talks about… what? I had an initial fanciful idea that it could be about a pet, in the traditi ..read more

Every now and then I hear an artist who registers a 9.9 on the Wow! Meter – and Nashville’s Jaryn Jones is the newest to make the club. (Jaryn is pronounced like “Aaron” with a J, by the way.) Her music meshes the breathtaking beauty of great composers like Stephen Sondheim and Alan Menken with the pop-Broadway echoes of Sara Bareilles. Plus her voice is hypnotic, filled with qualities that bring to mind songs in movies like Aladdin and Pocahontas. The elegance and sophistication of Jones’ music provide a much-needed counterbalance to many of today’s catchy-but-discardable pop offerings. Some ..read more

One of the well-documented wonders of Fleetwood Mac’s seminal album Rumours is how all the members of the band managed to devote themselves to making the best music they possibly could whilst simultaneously ripping each other apart emotionally. Some of the songs on the album understandably have bitter, heartbroken, or regret-laden lyrical content. But one member of the band seemed to consistently cut through the heartache and make young lovers everywhere feel excited to be alive. That person, Fleetwood Mac’s secret weapon, is Christine McVie. Time and again throughout the band’s history, McVie ..read more

There’s a nice picked acoustic guitar. There’s the passing slide of an electric. And then there’s the most beautiful, resonant voice singing about porch swings and backyards. This is “Mudroom” by Tiny Habits. They are Maya Rae, Cinya Khan, and Judah Mayowa and they all sing a verse on this thrilling and meditative new song. But more than that, their equally beautiful (and dreamily similar) voices pick careful moments to harmonize with one another. There’s a lazy, hazy feel to the song that is quite addictive. All the instrumentation is muted to the essence of what is needed to let those ..read more

California duo Ships Have Sailed have a new single called “Walking Into Walls.” It belongs in the closing credits of a major motion picture. Ships Have Sailed is the brainchild of vocalist and guitarist Will Carpenter, usually configured as a duo with drummer Art Andranikyan. Although most people consider the phrase “that ship has sailed” to be a negative, this group has turned it into a positive. Life is an unpredictable voyage, and sometimes our ship comes in, full of unexpected wonder. Serendipity has indeed been a factor in SHS’s career thus far. For starters, the band found a simpatico p ..read more

Bracing for nostalgia, I was surprised to find that Robby Hecht’s “Old Radio” is as much about the future as the past. The chorus may sound like something you’ve heard before. Some of it you have. Hecht rhymes “fly/high/cry” and “long ago/low/radio.” These sets of words are frequent co-workers in song. One could call them clichés. But because Hecht’s topic is old songs, his use of overused rhyme acts more as callback than cliché. These rhymes, and the predictable pop-country melody of the chorus, give a feeling of familiarity even when you’re listening to the song for the first time. As the f ..read more

Remember when Spotify announced all those changes to their royalty systems? I’m guessing you do, because it was only a few months ago and because a lot of people (including the folks on this reddit thread, the guy in this video, and maybe, dare I say it, you) were very upset. It was a hot topic. So, naturally, I chimed in with a hot take. Based on my reading of the room, it seemed like most of the anger was directed at Spotify’s new threshold for payouts. So I condescendingly wrote that the threshold wasn’t that big a deal, then called the changes in general “overblown ..read more

I am addicted to checking my email. I am definitely not addicted to responding to my email, as you know if you’ve ever tried to communicate with me. I live clean there, thank goodness. But I don’t think I’ve gone a day without checking my email in like five years. I get a dopamine hit whenever I open Gmail and see a notification. So, naturally, like a rat pushing the button to get cheese, I refresh my inbox 452 times per day. In fact, in the approximately five minutes I’ve spent typing these three paragraphs, I’ve had to consciously restrain myself from opening my inbox in a new tab four diffe ..read more

There used to be a radio station in L.A. that dubbed itself “The Quiet Storm”, playing hypnotic-and-melodic songs by artists like Brenda Russell and Regina Belle. If that format still exists, Stephanie Michelle’s song “Waves” would fit right in. It’s elegant and unforgettable. Michelle is a Detroit songwriter who sings her own compositions, but isn’t aspiring to be an artist. That’s a shame, because her vocals on “Waves” are truly hypnotic. And she’s versatile, too. She recently covered European singer Nyv’s “Per Favore”, hitting all the trills in Italian just perfectly. Plus Stephanie’s late ..read more

Here are some words I wrote about a year ago: “I’m tired of artists calling things ‘scams.’ Most things just are not scams. Most people in this industry are trying really hard to do good work. I think our tendency to call things scams is symptomatic of an underlying cultural issue: We’re a grace-impoverished people.” Damn. Preach, Past Jon, preach. Here’s the full piece, if you’re interested. I just read it for the first time in like ten months, and darn if I don’t still think it’s pretty good (if a bit self-righteous). So I’m not out to eat my words in today’s post. But I do want to add some ..read more