I was in a coffee shop in Sinsa, a neighborhood near Gangnam in Seoul, when I first heard Kodaline. The Irish band’s debut album, In a Perfect World, and the EPs containing different versions of songs from around that time were perfect for a cup of coffee. Subsequent albums have made the band sound like they were striving to be another Coldplay, but they got it right the first time on their debut. I’m recommending the acoustic version of “Brand New Day,” featuring Nina Nesbitt.
I WANNA TRAVEL THE WORLD, BUT I JUST CAN’T DO IT ALONE. The lyricsof “Brand New Day” talk about “outgrowing your hometown” and wanting to “travel the world” with someone. As someone who could be said to be (still) on that journey, I remember the feelings of travel thirst. I got to the end of my bachelor’s degree and thought about the constraints of going back home to North Carolina. I thought about how it would be a few years of struggle in a career before buying a house. I thought about my very few trips overseas and how I wanted to get out of America and experience other cultures. I wanted to get away from the people I knew form new patterns and figure out who I was. So many friends who were older than me told me to do it. “When you settle you get roots, and it’s much harder to leave when you have the responsibilities of a mortgage and kids.” So I went to South Korea. And I started establishing roots here. It’s not exactly what I had in mind, but I’m enjoying life and learning something new every day that my younger self would never foresee myself doing.
WE COULD BE BIG IN JAPAN. While it’s nice to be nostalgic, this song also pushes me forward, but not in a way that makes me question my life decisions (have you really quenched your travel thirst?). It’s a brand new year full of possibilities. I felt that way last year and was off to a good start around this time. What’s different? I know how crappy things can get. My best years may be behind me. I mourn every day for the experiences I never had as a teenager or young adult. But that’s not to say that life has a limit on awesome experiences. Recently, I got on a plane for the first time in three years to go to Jeju, the Korean vacation destination. In ten years it’s been on my bucket list, but the barrier of getting on a plane and making a plan inhibited me from actually doing it. And I think about the opportunities I’ve missed because I was thinking about the logistics of them–an awesome layover in Seattle or San Francisco and most recently Munich or Frankfort. I’m so done with being ruled by the fear of enjoying myself. I’m so done with the guilt that I feel when I start to let myself go. I hope for a future in which I find myself drinking Rioja in Spain, admiring the sartorial aesthetics in Austria, nervously attending a fetish party in Germany if nothing more to engage in some voyeurism. Life is a series of brand-new days. It’s time not to waste them.
Waking Ashland was a band signed first to Tooth & Nail Records then Immortal Records. The band release two records, Composurein 2005 and The Wellin 2007 before disbanding. Lead singer Jonathan Jones went on to form the band We Shot the Moon with two members from Sherwood, Dan Koch and Joe Greenetz, who also played in Waking Ashland. As for Waking Ashland, Composure was a sleeper hit on Tooth & Nail Records similar to Watashi Wa‘s music. The two bands both relied on calmer, often organic sounds that failed to garner the audience to compete with the harder bands the label steered toward in the mid-’00s.
TO PROVE WE’RE SOMETHING, BUT WE’RE STARVING. Another comparison between Waking Ashland and Watashi Wa is that both bands went on to form other bands, moving from Tooth & Nail Records to the now defunct, often calmer emo label The Militia Group. In Watashi Wa’s case, the band formed first Eager Seas and then Lakes. Interestingly Tooth & Nail became the home of one of The Militia Group’s most successful indie bands despite them not being the pop-punk or hardcore sound that most succeeded on Tooth & Nail Records. That band was Copeland, and perhaps it was underdog releases by Watashi Wa and Wasking Ashland that had softened the ears of the label for Copeland to release their 2008 masterpiece, You Are My Sunshine. Perhaps it was the forgotten indie record of singable melodies and piano rock on tracks like “Shades of Grey” or the propensity on songs like “Rumors” or the colorful perennial favorite “October Skies” that prepared Tooth & Nail for Copeland. This of course is in no way to diminish the accomplishments or talents of Copeland, but it is interesting to see how it took Copeland to bring the scene to soft music, though they weren’t the only ones playing it.
DON’T GIVE UP, JUST KEEP SEEKING. “I Am For You,” has a musical comparison with the next track “Rumors,” and perhaps they are lyrically related. Whereas “I Am For You” has a driving piano melody, “Rumors” starts out with a frantic piano line. “I Am For You” is a kind of dying of passion, like Romeo and Juliet overcame their familial conflict, but in defeating the conflict they lost the spark in their marriage. “Rumors,” on the other hand, is all spark and conflict too. The songs in similar keys and similar musical textures seem to tell two conflicts in a romance: “your heart is frozen over” and “I’ve heard all of rumors; they all were true.” The joys and sorrows of relationships come in ebbs and flows. It’s unrealistic to be euphoric all the time. Not every day is main stage at Lollapalooza; some days are just about sitting on the tour bus. What causes our hearts to lose desire? Maybe we think that we can do better–that maybe we are entitled to better. I think I deserve arugula, but it turns out that I’m really just day old iceberg. I’m glad 2018 is over.
It’s difficult to pick a single track from You Are My Sunshine to represent a specific feeling. Although Copeland released the record in the fall of 2008, my first year off at college, it was really the dead of winter of 2009 that has burned this record into my memory. The winter of 2009 was particularly cold, even for East Tennessee. There were lots of gray days which had nothing particularly special but Easy Mac and fresh laundry. Saturday nights or Sundays some friends would drive into Chattanooga for dinner and then we’d just go back to the dorm to do our homework. Rather mundane stuff. This album was a soundtrack to those gray days. Songs like “Should You Return” was a song of hope that spring would finally come. “The Grey Man” was a song about wallowing in the uncertainty of things ever looking up. “Chin Up” was a melancholic song about the futility of trying too hard–though the song never actually makes you want to give up.
I’M AFRAID YOU STOPPED TO LICK YOUR WOUNDS. Then the flu struck in the middle of sixteen credit hours. A high fever. I couldn’t get out of bed for a couple of days. A couple of missed classes and a bunch of homework to catch up on, a nagging cough that lasted for at least a month. Songs like “The Day I Lost My Voice” and some other songs from the second half of the album really resonate with that time. And yet, I don’t hold any grudges to this album. I can still listen to it and fondly think of the time that I could be sick in bed, comforted by Aaron Marsh‘s voice and the collaboration with Aaron Sprinkle.
THE KINDEST LOVE IS STILL BLEEDING FROM THE LAST SHOT. So, today’s song is “Good Morning Fire Eater.” Rather than the You Are My Sunshine version, I chose the remake from last year’s Revolving Doors, a ten-track reimagined Copeland album complete with orchestration. The original version was illustrated through the music video: a mundane day in the office transformed into a pseudo-medieval battle. The Revolving Doors version starts out akin to the original version, relying on programming but slowly adds orchestration. Today’s song celebrates the slow feeling of simple days. For me today, it’s my last day of a trip to Jeju and the weather is moody. It’s a great day to sit inside a cafe, and “Good Morning Fire Eater” could be the soundtrack. Tomorrow it’s back to work, back to writing for me.
Following up their 2013 album Big TV, West-London-based post-punk band White Lies released their fourth album Friendsin 2016. The album continues on the band’s homage to the ’80s, though the synths are not always as prominent as their first and third albums. Lyrical themes deal with friendship deterioration, alienation, and loneliness, yet the ebullience of the music often disguises the sadness in the lyrics.
NO, I’M NOT GOING TO BREAK YOUR HEART. White Lies started their career on a high note in the UK, but never really crossed over to the American market. The band formed in 2007 after ending an indie rock band called Fear of Flying the three member members of White Lies played in high school. In high school, the boys enjoyed listening to groups like Talking Heads and Franz Ferdinand, but with the inception of White Lies, the band claimed musical influence from Joy Division, Echo & the Bunnymen, and The Killers. The band decided to take a gap year between high school and university in order to focus on their new band. After recording their first album, To Lose My Life… the band scored a UK radio single, and the band took off on tours with Snow Patrol and Coldplay. The band also played festivals in the United States including Coachella and Lollapalooza, and performed on Late night shows on Letterman and Carson Daly. The band’s only U.S. hit comes from their first album. “Death” hit number 4 on the Billboard Dance chart. Last year, White Lies released their sixth studio album, As I Try Not to Fall Apart.
BUT I MIGHT USE IT. “Don’t Want to Feel It All” is the fourth track on Friends and was the fifth and final single released from the album. The opening synth riff instantly reminds me of the chorus of Twisted Sister‘s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” and the chorus uses a kind of steel drum effect. The song seems to be about personal problems that get in the way when loving someone. The speaker is asking the listener to understand him, to bear with the “daydreaming.” He doesn’t want to feel the full weight of his relationship. He wants to be slightly divested. Perhaps, he thinks, if he feels it all, he will become unstable. Maybe numbing himself to what could make him feel the strongest emotions is a way of protecting himself from spiraling if he were to lose it all. Or perhaps, the speaker is just too self-absorbed. After all, if you can’t “feel it all” with a friend or significant other, that person might not be as important to you as you think they are, and they might start to think the same about you. But, maybe we’re just talking about a season. Just as “Winter is taking ages” so can a dark season take a while with our relationships.
When your first American hit is the second biggest song of the year, how do you follow that up? When your signature song has been called bubblegum and immature, how do you change your image to show that you’re an adult with adult relationships, without getting X-rated? These were two questions Carly Rae Jepsen answered in her follow up to Kissin E-MO-TION. If those two questions were on the interview, Jespsen would have the job on the merits of her 2015 effort. And as I enter the fifth year of my playlists and the third year of the blog, there are certain perennial favorites that show up maybe too often for some. I chose “Run Away with Me” at the beginning of the year for four of those years because of the fresh renewal this song gives me as my winter vacation begins.
YOU’RE STUCK IN MY HEAD, STUCK IN MY HEART, STUCK IN MY BODY. Sure, if your introduction to E-MO-TION was the first single “I Really Like You” turned you off as another “Call Me Maybe” so you never clicked “Add to Library” on the rest of the album, that’s an understandable mistake. The meme-able first single arguably is less dynamic in the wake of its massive hit predecessor “Call Me Maybe.” But while critics were divided on “I Really Like You,” E-MO-TION as a whole received mostly favorable reviews, holding a 77% on Metacritic and a 9.0, or “universal acclaim,” according to user reviews. Unfortunately, “I Really Like You” was the most successful single from the album, and that track failed to reach #1 as “Call Me Maybe” had. The album’s other singles didn’t do well on radio. “Run Away with Me”didn’t make the Top 40 in America, though it did better in Europe, and “Your Type” only charted in Canada. Still, critics praised the album, and though “Run Away with Me” didn’t chart well, it made many pop critics year-end lists and even end-of-decade lists.
OVER THE WEEKEND, WE COULD TURN THE WORLD TO GOLD. “Run Away with Me” is on my short list of songs–perhaps an upcoming playlist–that the moment I hear it, I know I’m going to have a good day. It’s particularly effective when my bags are packed, and I’m expecting something good to happen. E-MO-TION was the album I listened to in 2016 and 2017 when I was in need of an adventure. When I needed to get away from my on-campus housing and explore or figure out how to do something in Korea. The pandemic, of course, has taken that joy–the unexpected shopping trips or checking out a new cafe or restaurant. So what’s exciting about today? I’m on vacation in Jeju, the southernmost part of South Korea. It was the first time I’ve been on a plane since return to Korea at the end of January 2020. In a few weeks, I’ll be back in America for a few weeks, reconnecting with friends and family. In fact it was a shopping trip in that January that I heard “Run Away with Me” that made me chose this song early every year. It’s that feeling that bags are packed, we’re leaving tonight, and the weekend makes us feel young and alive. Covid restrictions are over, unless you’ve been to China recently. There will certainly be dark times this year, but let’s not think of them yet.
It’s a new year, time for NewJeans. Girl groups are killing it in South Korea right now, and NewJeans, formed by former visual director for SM EntertainmentMin Heejin (민희진). the visual director of some of SHINEE’s biggest albums including Luciferand View and most notably f(x)’s Pink Tape. NewJeans, Min’s latest effort are everywhere in Korea and making a splash outside of Korea as well. Maybe we’ll get into their story another day. Instead, I want to introduce my 2023+ playlist. This year, I’ll be including songs both from my blog and some bonus tracks not featured in my blog. Those bonus tracks will be new tracks by artists whom I cover an older track. Again, I will be focusing on tracks released or popular within the years of 2021-2023. Let’s enjoy some new music!
Coming off the heels of Years & Years‘ second album, Palo Santo, the group collaborated with British House DJ and producer Jax Jones for his debut album Snacks. The song “Play” was released as a single in November of 2018 and would find a place on deluxe editions of Palo Santo like “Up in Flames.” The two songs don’t fit into the story of the futuristic queer/ religious concept album. Instead, “Play” follows Jones’s concept. A colorful music video with nostalgic goodies, the sweets and toys of a millennial’s childhood, along with the single’s artwork, clearly inspired by Play-Doh, remind listeners of playtime and all of the goodness of a childhood full of sugary cereal, matchbox cars, and action figures. The disco beat and Olly Alexander‘s vocals take that childhood playtime nostalgia to a late-night dance hall.
MY PHILOSOPHY DON’T LET NOBODY COME TOO CLOSE. The status quo of the song is defensiveness. The singer talks about guarding his heart. The emotional power is so strong in the singer’s heart that he fears that another person will either not be able to understand him or will hurt him. Many people find themselves in this situation. Past traumas from parents’ relationships, taunting by schoolmates, rejection when a middle school boy expresses his love to a girl in his class, realization that one is different from the others, repression of one’s sexual identity all build a wall around the young person. If you look closer at that wall, each brick is an individual situation where fear triumphed over autonomy. For years, I wondered why dating didn’t work out for me. At that time, many of the girls my age were reading I Kissed Dating Goodbye, Joshua Harris‘ book that messed up a generation of millennials, so much so that the author eventually pulled the publication and renounced his beliefs in everything it stood for. The premise, though, at the time was for young Christians to commit themselves to purity and abstinence until marriage. Younger teens had no business dating in the worldly sense. Dating, while it could be as innocent as calling each other up on the phone every night, talking at school, or even going to a movie, was a chance for ungodly lust to fester in the body. When teens got closer to an age when they could legally marry, they could begin courting, which was like what worldly preteen/early teen dating looks like, but with spiritual ramifications. But in a quest for holiness, Harris and the other proponents of early marriage failed to take in the statistical truth that early marriages result in more divorces. While eighteen to twenty-nine-year-olds are adults, their educational and life experiences can render two halves of a married couple incompatible. The late teens who are flooded with hormones often don’t make clear decisions about their future.
I WANT IT TO BE YOU, DIVING INTO MY OCEAN, A BRAND NEW EMOTION. I didn’t completely buy into the I Kissed Dating Goodbye ideas, but they certainly took a lot of Christian girls off the market. If you wanted to date in Christian high school, you had to be particularly aggressive. So I built a wall of excuses. But Alexander isn’t writing “Another Brick in the Wall.” Instead, he’s singing about the time when someone broke through his wall. It’s the moment when the song plays and he realizes that he wants to dance with this person all night. In his other songs, Olly Alexander explores the link between human sexual connection and spirituality. Palo Santo was an album that explored the spiritual experiences in the gay dance halls. Dance is a spiritual awakening for the singer, and the muse of the singer shatters the wall. I, however, built my walls thicker before they ultimately shattered. In college, I no longer had the excuse of I Kissed Dating Goodbye. I thought everything would fall into place, but it turned out that I didn’t actually like girls, but I couldn’t admit it to myself. So I built the walls thicker, choosing to attend a religious college, choosing to go into Christian education, choosing to become a missionary, choosing to fit in with the conservative missionaries. Every brick I added made me feel safer, until I realized that it was a prison. Until I came out to myself, I thought that I was broken and unlovable. But coming out made me realize that what’s true for other people may not be true for me. A brand new emotion entered my vocabulary–freedom to be myself.
For the third year, The Weeknd‘s “Blinding Lights” makes my playlist, although last year the song was represented by Sam Tsui with production by Kurt Hugo Schneider. I find the cultural discussions around the song fascinating: how a song from 2019 predicted the loneliness and isolation of the world, the greater concept in the record After Hours complete with thematic story-telling music videos and conceptual live performances leading up to and during the release of the record. “Blinding Lights” was the omni-present hit in 2020 that worked whether you were a drug or sex addict, a celebrity dealing with the dark side of the industry, or none of those things. A lot has been said about this synth pop track a lot better than I can prepare in an evening, so I’ll leave you with a podcast that talks about it pretty well. And for the rest of the post today, I’m going to leave you with a Spotify Edition of my Pseudo ’80s Hits from last year. Kids make sure to cover your ears, there may be some gratuitous sax.
Harry’s House, the third full length record fromHarry Styles, was one of the most anticipated records of the year, and it dropped late last month. In aninterviewwithZane Lowe, Styles talked about how the writing process for his third record was a continuation from his writing process forFine Line.Styles’ former record had been a surprising take on psychedelic pop akin to the ’60s and ’70s, and listeners and critics wondered what he would offer on his third record. It turns out that, so far,Harry’s House holds a high Meta-critic ratingthan either hisself-titled debutorFine Linewith a score of 83%.
LEAVE AMERICA, TWO KIDS FOLLOW HER. The similarity between Fine Line and Harry’s House, though, can’t be pointed out from the lead single, “As It Was,” alone, though. Many critics have pointed out the similarity between “As It Was” and A-Ha‘s “Take On Me“; often with the argument that Styles’ “As It Was” is inferior to the 1985 hit. While I’d agree that if we had to choose one synth-pop classic, “Take On Me” would win; however, I think that’s more of a valid pre-album comparison. While Harry’s House does have its fair share of synthesizers scattered throughout the record, “As It Was” is a bit of an outsider compared to the rest of the album tracks which feature prominent acoustic or electric guitars. “As It Was” is the album’s clearest homage to the ’80s, with most of the songs sticking in the sweet spot of ’60s and ’70s folk/disco influence. Furthermore, “As It Was” is a bit of an anti-“Take On Me.” Styles’ sad-boy post-punk melody and bittersweet lyrics on “As It Was” contrasts with the exuberant “Take On Me.” With “As It Was,” Styles picks an emotionally complex track to lead an emotionally complex album. While some of us were at home reading up on zymurgy since we were too scared to go to the liquor store, Styles was at home writing a new record. Many of the lyrical themes on Harry’s House deal with fractured relationships, death, and the pandemic, and how the pandemic made fractured relationships and death even more devastating. Today’s song is a reminder that the world is a different place from 2019, and it will never go back to “As It Was.”
IN THIS WORLD, IT’S JUST US. But I didn’t get this song at first. When I watched the Zane Lowe interview a few days before the album dropped, I started to respect what Styles was doing. Harry hints at dealing with a break up, the loss of a loved one–perhaps his step-father who died during the writing process of Fine Line–and being locked down in America, Japan, and the UK. But it was something much more personal that made this song connect. I’ve talked about being a bad music critic in that I don’t always listen to the new albums as soon as they drop; however, I did happen to listen to Harry’s House on Friday afternoon on the way to meet my friend and co-worker of six years and his wife. Having been very close for years, I finally decided to come out to them. It’s part of my journey toward honesty with meaningful friendships, rather than suffering the burden of keeping my life sub-rosa. Everything went well, but as I took the bus home and listened to the album, I thought about all those moments in life that you can’t take back. I can’t go back into the closet to the people I know. Then I think about the people who I still need to have that conversation with. Once we have that conversation, things will never be the same, for better or worse.
In early 2012 when Anberlin announced that they would be returning with an album produced by Aaron Sprinkle, longtime fans knew that they were in for a good record. While their prior major label releases had stretched the band and had proven how versatile their sound was, the band had not produced an album that matched the lyrical and musical depth of their fan-favorite,Cities. 2012’sVitaltook Anberlin to both familiar territory and reinvented their sound.
I CAN FINALLY FORGET A PAST YOU SAY YOU NEVER KNEW. Vital is a heavier album than their previous two. But, up to that point, the band did very little with electronic music.Vital, however, opened to the electro-heavy “Self-Starter,” complete with an autotune chorus, somewhat reminiscent ofAvenged Sevenfold‘s “Lost.” In fact, many of the the tracks incorporated electronic elements. The band admits to consuming a lot ofM83at that time. Critics and fans both loved Vital. However, the album failed to grab new fans because the record label, Universal Republic, had decided to stop promoting rock music. The lead single “Someone Anyone” failed to crack the Alternative charts, the first time that Anberlin’s lead single from a record since they had signed to a label had done that. The band had truly put their hearts and souls into the record. Vital was supposed to be a celebration of youth and energy. The band’s new electronic sound aimed to be marketable in a changing music environment. But just as the band had felt they had hit the glass ceiling at Tooth & Nail, they found that the big tours with The Smashing Pumpkins, Thirty Seconds to Mars, and Linkin Park were behind them. And while Vital may have been one of their best albums, “Feel Good Drag” would be the band’s one hit wonder as far as radio was concerned.
THERE’S A TIME AND PLACE/ AN UNKNOWN REGION OF SPACE. Perhaps the best example of the Anberlin’s marriage to electronics while keeping full guitars engaged is “Other Side,” a metaphysical song, wondering about the deeper understanding that will come on the other side of life, possibly death. Lead singer Stephen Christian sings passionately calling for someone to love him and hold him. Like the album cover artwork of the boy being consumed by a large wave, the speaker of the song is just at a precipice between him and being pulled into a deeper understanding of the universe. It could be a romantic song about death, like The Smiths‘ “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” also covered by Anberlin or the Albert King reference in “Hearing Voices” on Lowborn, which states “Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven / But nobody wants to die.” Is it Stephen Christian’s self-destructive streak, threatening to dismantle Anberlin? To me, though the album, and “Other Side” had another significance. Vital was released in my second month living in Korea, over ten years ago. While I loved the musicality on the record, I realized that, like its predecessor, Vital‘s lyrics were a little weak at times. “Other Side” works lyrically because the music is so strong. Like Adele‘s “Hello,”“Other Side” reminds me about the complications of living on the other side of the world. I reminds of me of the time and distance between the two groups of people I love. In 2012, it gave me comfort that what I was doing was meaningful. At the beginning of 2023 before I fly back to see my family after the longest ever being away, it makes me excited that for about $2000, you can love and spend time with friends and family anywhere in the world as long as there’s no pandemic.
Mixtapemotions 