Mixtapemotions

  • “I Need You” by Jars of Clay, Friday, March 31, 2023

    Jars of Clay‘s funky third record, If I Left the Zoo, was produced by Dennis Herring, which took the band in a different direction than their previous two records. Herring had also produced This Desert Life by Counting Crows the same year as If I Left the Zoo, which influenced the direction of Jars of Clay’s 1999 record. In the new millennium, Herring produced some of the biggest records for Modest Mouse, The Hives, Ben Folds, and Mutemath. 

    YOU’RE ALL I’M LIVING FOR. Jars of Clay, however, wanted to return to their acoustic roots on their fourth album, The Eleventh Hour. The band had tried to work with Herring again, but the producer was unable to schedule sessions with the band. Thus Jars of Clay again self-produced their record like they did for their eponymous record. The lead single from The Eleventh Hour, “I Need You,” was written during recording sessions for If I Left the Zoo, but fit better on the band’s fourth record. The song sees Jars of Clay experimenting in electronics, something lead singer Dan Haseltine would try later with a solo project in the 2010s called The Hawk in Paris. With Haseltine’s soft voice and the band’s worshipful melody, “I Need You” more clearly to God than the “Jesus or girlfriend” ambiguous lyrics on the band’s jabs at mainstream radio. Unlike the band’s first three records, which earned them general market rock and pop radio singles and/or movie placements, The Eleventh Hour mostly impacted Christian radio markets. The single “Fly” proved that Jars of Clay on rock or pop radio was a thing of the ’90s.  But this new marketing primarily to Christian outlets worked, and Jars of Clay won both a Grammy and a Dove Award for best Pop/Contemporary Gospel Album and best Modern Rock Album, respectively. 

    THERE’S A LIGHT FILLING THIS ROOM WHERE NONE WOULD FOLLOW BEFORE. A year after releasing The Eleventh Hour, Jars of Clay celebrated their tenth year as a band with a double disc set, furthermore: from the studio and from the stage. The record contained studio re-workings of some fan favorites and two B-sides from The Eleventh Hour. The live disc contained tracks recorded live on the band’s Eleventh Hour Tour, one of which was the album’s first hit “I Need You.” The Eleventh Hour was the turning point in Jars of Clay’s career, when they found that writing faith-based music for the general market was not a profitable venture. They realized they would never replicate the success of their 1995 hit “Flood.” But the faith of Jars of Clay as a group of three out of four men who met at a Christian college and started making Christian radio hits is a bit more nuanced, which became clear with Dan Haseltine’s Twitter controversy in 2014 when the singer defended same sex marriage. Other members have talked about their faith, doubt, and unbelief. And it’s that story of complexity that brings me back to Jars of Clay’s music even in the complexity of my own faith and doubt. It’s still comforting to cry out to God when I feel sick and tired and remember a time when I dramatically could say “You’re all I’m living for.”

  • "Swamp" by Mike Mains & the Branches [Content Warning: Discussion of Suicide], Thursday, March 30, 2023 (repost)

     Closing 2019’s heart-wrenching When We Were in Love, “Swamp” perhaps sums up Mike Mains & the Branches‘ third album in a single song: love, depression, and religion. Like the songs “Breathing Underwater” and “Around the Corner,”   Mike Mains gave an intimate insight into his writing process on Labeled. Mains talked about earlier Tooth & Nail releases from mewithoutYou and As Cities Burn,   which helped to inspire him to write darker Christian songs and push the genre of Christian Rock lyrically to open an honest conversation about mental health, depression, and questioning one’s faith.

    YOU HAD ME AT MERLOT. “Swamp” is the conclusion and the title-bearer of the album. Mike Mains asks his wife, bandmate Shannon Briggs Bolanowski-Mains, “Do you remember when we were in love?” On the Labeled podcast interview, Mains talks about “Swamp” being about a fear that his wife were to leave him. Mains wrote “Swamp” after spending time in therapy and in couple’s counseling, when things were starting to pick up. The first line from the song was what his wife wrote on a Valentine’s card. While things seem to be getting better, Mains imagines that all the progress the couple made was for naught, and Shannon becomes fed up with him and leaves anyway. In this dark fantasy, after leaving Mike, Shannon finds a man who is everything that Mike is not: a fearless, strong Christian who satisfies her every need. Continuing the narrative Mains talks about in “Breathing Underwater,” “Swamp” sees the singer graphically imagining his suicide by “pull[ing] the garage door shut and let[ting] the engine run.” 

    DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN WE WERE IN LOVE? Speaking directly about “Swamp” in the interview, Mains quotes the song “Poison Oak” by Bright Eyes: “I’m drunk as hell on a piano bench/ And when I press the keys, it all gets reversed /The sound of loneliness makes me happier.” Mains says, “I wish it wasn’t, but it’s so true, but I love sad songs and they do make me really happy because they remind me that I’m not alone.” Interestingly, “Swamp” subverts the Christian art trope of writing a song in a minor key but ending on a major chord. “Swamp” ends with the lines: “Every day feels like waking up in the swamp/ Every day feels like waking up at the bottom.” Not only does the song end with that line and the sad, wandering piano, but the album ends with that line. Mains could have ended the album with “Around the Corner,” a song that could put the grief in a positive context, but instead, “Swamp” is a song about processing the grief and it’s our realization that we are not alone when a day just flat out sucks. Some days you don’t want to be told that everything is going to be okay. And that’s okay. Also, mental health is not always as simple as illness and recovery. And that’s not a spiritual illness, just reality. “Swamp” ends the Christian Rock record we all needed back in the ’90s, but wasn’t released until 2019. Better late than never.

  • “Solar Power” by Lorde, Wednesday, March 29, 2023

    Today, we have another offering from our Lorde and Saviour, Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O’Connor, aka “the prettier Jesus.” In January, we talked about the opening track on Solar Power, “The Path,” in which Lorde claims not to be, well a lord for her fans and followers. By the next track, the titular track, however, Lorde points to “Solar Power” but admits that she is “like a prettier Jesus.” The answer to the singer’s problems lies in the sun and ultimately in nature.


    NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, ONLY MY FEATURES. “Solar Power” was the summer anthem that never caught on.  Lorde released her third record Solar Power at the end of the second summer (winter for New Zealand) of the pandemic, 2021, with the titular lead single coming out on June 20th before the record’s release on August 20th. It’s hard for me to distinguish time during the pandemic, and each nation dealt with the pandemic differently, completely shattering any sense of monoculture the entertainment had created before the pandemic. In other words, how New Zealanders, like Lorde, dealt with the pandemic was completely different from how one of the single biggest markets for Lorde’s music, The United States, dealt with the pandemic. While America struggled with mis-management of the pandemic, New Zealanders endured lockdowns and were able to contain the virus for a while, which allowed the citizens a certain level of normalcy. While “Solar Power” should be heard as fond memory of getting out in the summer and shaking off the seasonal depression that comes with the colder months, Americans weren’t in the mood to be reminded of all the fun they were missing out on. 

    AND I THROW MY CELLULAR DEVICE IN THE WATER. Summer fun, though, may not be the only theme of the song. Some authors of the song’s Genius annotations (see below) have pointed out that Lorde has hidden ancient “sun worshipping” allusions in today’s song. If I were analyzing the song ten years ago, I might have noticed it too, but I don’t care too much for the simplistic Christian critique anymore. I was reminded, though, of how a college professor likened tanning to sun worship and made a racist remark about darkening own’s skin in the sun. Through reading the Romantics and the Transcendental poets, so-called sun worship and looking to ancient, non-Christian faith traditions was discussed at length in my literature classes. Adventists were much more likely to hold a church service outside on a beautiful day than evangelicals, but it was important to distinguish the difference between worshipping nature and worshiping the maker of nature. For Adventists, nature symbolized a return to the Edenic lifestyle, to which they believe they will one day return to in the new heaven and new earth. There are some who become obsessed with getting used to a Garden of Eden experience, reducing reliance on technology. Just never call them transcendentalists, although the motives may look the same. Lorde, however, is advocating the Eden experience without the Christian background. And it seems that for the singer, it’s a season rather than a weaning off of the world. 

    Music video:

    Rooftop Performance: 


  • "Sucker" by Jonas Brothers, Tuesday, March 28, 2023

    In 2019, The Jonas Brothers broke their nearly six-year hiatus and returned with first the single “Sucker,” an album titled Happiness Begins, and an Amazon documentary titled Chasing Happiness. The Jonas Brothers had been a massively successful band in the late ’00s and early ’10s, but had a niche audience of mostly teenage girls through Radio Disney and Nickelodeon as well as a few Christian radio stations. 

    I’M A SUCKER FOR ALL THE SUBLIMINAL THINGS. What was the demand for the reunited Jonas Brothers? Like countless childhood stars from the Disney or Nickelodeon universe, Kevin, Joe, and Nick Jonas grew out of their tween image. Nick’s solo career was the most successful of the brothers, but that success also included acting and modeling and ultimately becoming a thirst-trap for the gay community. The albums X2 and Last Year Was Complicated tackled mature material beyond anything he sang about with his brothers. Similarly, Joe found success with the sexually-themed saccharine hit “Cake By the Ocean” when he formed the band DNCE. Would a reunited Jonas Brothers return to the squeaky clean bubblegum of the band’s roots or would the group fully embrace adult themes? The answer was somewhere in the middle. Just as the Brothers had grown up so had their audience. But the re-assembled brother band from New Jersey wasn’t just a nostalgia act in the way that Covid band revivals or some TV show reboots only capitalize on the loyalty of old fans. “Sucker” debuted atop the Billboard Hot 100 chart, the first number one in the band’s history. 

    WE GO TOGETHER BETTER THAN BIRDS OF A FEATHER. Sometimes an artist’s name alone can make a number one hit, and when an artist comes back after a long hiatus there can be bump in popularity that a song wouldn’t normally receive. I think that both of those factors would push “Sucker” into the top 10. But what made “Sucker” a number one hit was its catchiness which lead to streams, downloads, and radio play. It’s not surprising to find that Ryan Tedder was the production genius behind the song. The band has a number of songwriters on the track, but all three Jonas Brothers are credited as writers. Younger millennials and early Gen-Z, now grown up found the perfect balance of nostalgia and contemporary pop sounds. Of course, the Brothers still in their late 20s to early 30s are as handsome as ever and the sex appeal of a colorful pop record modestly highlighting the siblings’ posteriors as they look wistfully into a pool certainly couldn’t hurt. But “Sucker” was a love anthem, much like what the boys had sang years ago. The difference this time is that all three brothers were married with Joe marrying Game of Thrones actress Sophie Turner shortly after the single’s release. “Sucker” is a song about the crazy things you do for love, and today, I’m a sucker for this song.

  • “Rings & Roses” by Dabin ft. Connor Byrne, Monday, March 27, 2023 (repost)

    Dabin is a melodic EDM music producer from Toronto who currently lives in Colorado and Conor Bryne is an Irish singer-songwriter known for his YouTube covers. I first heard this song last week when Apple Music played it as “music you may like based on the artists you just played.” It’s probably the most surefire way for me to discover music these days.  Based on the nursery rhyme, “Ring Around the Rosie,” “Rings & Roses” explores the career path of someone, a friend or a lover, who is pursuing fame. That person has become too popular for the singer, who warns that in the end “they all fall down.” Simple enough. 

    WAITIN’ ON THE DREAM YOU BEEN SOLD. Pursuing a dream takes work and sacrifice. There’s something in our youth that makes us believe that anything is possible. But somewhere along the way, the novelist in us, the future basketball player, or the rockstar gives way to the backup plan. Of course, thanks to the Internet and Garage Band, anybody can become a musician. It’s good if you have some musical talent or ability. Dabin Lee, known by his first name Dabin,  had that musical background, beginning with playing piano and guitar from a young age. But in 2011, Dabin started producing electronic music. His 2019 album Wild Youth features ten tracks with a different vocal feature on each. These are not big name artists, but the lack of star quality on the album doesn’t take anything away from the tracks. If anything, it opens up a new world of indie singers. The tracks are vibey EDM, bright and nostalgic, though some of the tracks on Wild Youth (The Remixes) are a bit more distorted and dirty, presenting more of a barrier to those who don’t particularly like club music. And unlike artists like Alan Walker or Marshmello, Dabin incorporates real instruments into his live DJ sets. So, although you won’t see Connor Byrne singing with Dabin in concert, you’ll see Dabin playing the electric guitar live.

    I MISS YOU. I MISS YOU. WHERE ARE YOU NOW?  One of the questions this song asks is how much should you give up for a dream? At what point does what you’ve given up for that dream nullify it? And what level of selfishness in pursuing dreams or goals is unacceptable? A lot of people I knew when I was growing up were held back by an obligation either to family or place. It’s a prevalent theme in Southern literature, but I’ve seen this loyalty to place on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. It’s the question that Tracy Chapman grapples with in “Fast Car“: to “leave tonight or live and die this way.” The family values that I was raised with were to make sure you can pay the bills. That means working long hours in whatever will give you a steady income. That means moving to wherever you can get the best job and sacrificing so that you and your family can eat. It was for this reason my parents decided to move away from their families. This upbringing got me a college education and gave me a commitment to pay my bills. But I still dream of what I could have done if I just aimed a little higher. Maybe it wouldn’t have worked out. Maybe I’d be a starving artist. But maybe I’d be living closer to the family that I miss. Not too close, though.

    Lyric video:

     Live performance at Red Rocks:

  • "Lucky Strike," by Troye Sivan, Sunday, March 26, 2023 + Spring Vibes Playlist

     

    Today I present a playlist I’ve been meaning to make for a while. I want to put all of the songs that give me spring vibes in a single playlist. These aren’t just songs explicitly about this time of year, but also songs that mention the season. Of course we’re going with one song per artist, so unfortunately the equally springlike song  by Troye Sivan “Bloom” won’t be making the playlist. This is an ongoing project so expect more songs added as I find them. I will post the playlist below. Enjoy!

  • "Lilac" (라일락) by IU (아이유), Saturday, March 25, 2023 (updated repost)

    K-pop listeners have watched the once teen star IU grow up. Debuting at the age of 15, the star is turning 30 this year. The soprano singer has been called Korea’s little sister, and her (mostly) squeaky clean image has propelled her to lasting success in Korea’s music scene. Flowers and spring are no unfamiliar topic to this singer, and her sweet, yet powerful voice is perfect for a spring day. My first exposure to the singer was her song “The Meaning of You” (너의 의미)  and her feature on HIGH4‘s “Not Spring, Love, or Cherry Blossoms” (봄 사랑 벚꽃 말고) and she’s constantly played in Korea whenever the mood calls for easy listening.

    IT’S LIKE THE FALLING PETALS, OUR IVORY COLORED SPRING CLIMAX.  IU’s  Lilac album is a pretty spring album. And it’s no secret I’m a sucker for a good saxophone part in a pop song. “Lilac” offers that and more. Growing up in central New York, I always considered lilacs to be a late summer flower. However, the timeline for the blooming is sped up in the south. In Korea and Japan, cherry blossoms (벚꽃, sakura) are blooming earlier and earlier due to climate change. In 2021, the blossoms bloomed the earliest since 812, which has scientists worried about what this says about climate change. Earlier this week in my area, the cherry blossoms started blooming and most of them are out today. The peak may be Monday or Tuesday, but it felt cold today and the weather was cloudy. It’s still the cold part of spring and lilacs aren’t due until at least next month. But it’s that fresh feeling of spring that we can celebrate in today’s song. IU’s music celebrates youth and young love, and “Lilac” is no exception.

    LIKE THE WARM BREEZE. “Lilac” symbolizes IU growing up, passing her 20s and entering her 30s. The music video is fun in every sense of a K-pop video. We see the singer boarding a train. The timetable at the station is a list of her previous releases. We see several looks for the singer, looking sweet and cute to sexy to tough, showing different eras of her career. The end of the video is a bit terrifying. The singer gets off the train. The cinematography of the video up until that point had been warm. The singer wearing vibrant colors and even the dark scene of the night club doesn’t feel lonely and the night on the train where she is fighting, the singer has a smile on her face. However, the last scene looks lonely. The singer is dressed in dull clothing and the expression on her face looks lost. Then another train arrives bathing the singer’s face in light. She smiles, but I can’t figure out if she is feeling excited or just pretending to be brave. The video ends with the words in English: “Spring is short, but it comes again.” The singer has commented on this album as being a transition to her thirties, so if springtime is a mindset, it can come again. But if it’s an age… Welcome to your thirties, IU. There are certainly benefits to casting off the cares of other people that weigh you down in your twenties. 


  • "Cold Air" by Acceptance + Wild, Free Track by Track, Friday, March 24, 2023

    When Acceptance released their 2017 record, 12 years after their cult classic Phantoms, the band’s fans had mixed feelings about Colliding By Design. On the hand, listeners thought it was great to hear the vocals of Jason Vena and the riffs of Kaylan Cloyd and the moody atmospheric rhythm guitar of Christian McAlhaney all produced by the band’s “sixth member” Aaron Sprinkle. But some listeners didn’t like the pop direction the band took. In 2020’s Wild, Free the band offers less guitar, but Sprinkle takes the band further into the pop world, making the band feel even more distant from their 2005 classic. 

    1. “Midnight.” The album starts with a slightly musically underwhelming track. It seems that the record deals with Jason Vena’s romantic history, “Midnight,” perhaps addresses his divorce and how the singer was put in the spotlight when his ex became a constant on The Bachelor. The band filmed a video for the song.

    2. “Cold Air” is by far the best track on the record. As the lead single, it shows the electronic direction the band has taken. Guitars are minimal as are lyrics. It’s all atmosphere, but a perfect marriage between the musicality of the band and Aaron Sprinkle’s Northwestern tones. 

    3. “Release & Let Go” returns the band to guitars, but the emphasis is on Vena’s lyrics and the keys on the chorus. This is one of the few Acceptance songs with female-backing vocals. The lyrics explain that rather than holding onto a relationship that is over just to release it and let it go.


    4. “Son of the City” is another interesting song musically with an ’80s-sounding off chord. Lyrically the song is vague. Although it paints a picture of a city and draws on the superhero crazy with the speaker saying, “I’m not a normal hero.”

    5. “Dark Age” is another track that seems to deal with Vena’s “only failure.” 


    6. “Bend the Light” is another etherial track on the record. It’s perhaps the softest moment full of mood. 

    7. “Wildfires” features guest vocalist Jessie Villa in the closest Acceptance gets to a duet. The song references the destructive wildfires in the Western states and draws a comparison to the damage done after love.

    8. “Wasted Nights” describes the time spent in a new relationship. The time seems wasted if you think of all the things you could be doing instead–gaining a skill, building a business–and the time feels especially wasted if the relationship ends. 

    9. “June 1985.” I’m not sure what the significance of this date is. I’m assuming that the band members were born in between 1979-1984(ish), so the timeline and lyrics may be about a divorce or losing a friend at a young age. Jason’s vocals on this record are more muffled in spots than any previous work the band has released and the verses of this song are maybe the least perfect.

    10. “At the Edge of the Earth.” Two of the songs on the record were co-produced by J. Hall. The last track on the standard edition of the album has an epic sound. It’s a kind of “Where the Streets Have No Name” closing, or on the record a neat wrap up to the issues presented in the record of lost love. In the end everything will be okay when “we meet in the fields at the edge of the earth.”

  • "Sad Boy" (Get Better!) by Henrik Heaven + Sad: a playlist for sad boys and girls, Thursday, March 23, 2023

    Henrik Heaven started his musical career at age 9, winning a talent competition at his school. A few years later, he began touring his home country of Norway. In 2013 he won second place to be selected for Euro Vision Junior. The singer-songwriter is also a dancer and has been releasing music since his 2019 EP, ALLSTAR.  In 2021, he released Sad Boy (Get Better!), three tracks including the title track. I’m not sure how this track showed up in my library, but I thought it would be a good jumping off point for a playlist that I’ve wanted to make for a while: sad: a playlist for sad boys and girls.

     

  • "Blue" by Taeyeon (updated repost) trigger warning: discussion of suicide, Wednesday, March 22, 2023

    When March comes, it either appears as a lion or a lamb.  I’ve also taken a more superstitious meaning to this saying. In Korea, it’s the beginning of the school year; however, March 1st is a national holiday. Will the school year start out smoothly or with its own set of thundershowers? If it starts out smoothly, is trouble ahead? So much uncertainty leans on this temperamental spring month as the air warms, clashing with Arctic blasts. And if you throw climate change into the mix, who knows what we’re going to get? March is almost half over and I wonder if it started like a lamb or a lion? And more importantly will it get calmer or more chaotic?


    WHEN I GET FARTHER AWAY, MY SIGHS GROW DEEPER. Taeyeon is one of the most successful female solo artists in Korea. From her start with the bubblegum pop girl group Girls’ Generation, she’s not the only singer to find success after the ending of her group. In 2019, Taeyeon bravely explained to her fans that she was battling depression. She had lost many fellow friends and colleagues to suicide in the years prior as many K-pop group members took their lives. Taeyeon’s admission that she too was battling depression broke rank with her training as a K-pop idol, which involves years of cultivating young stars’ images. K-pop singers have to be branded to appear fun and flirty, but innocent. They shouldn’t take stands in controversies. Lyrics also shouldn’t be controversial. And while American pop music gets political and deals with issues like sexism, homophobia, and depression, sad songs in K-pop tend to deal only with the sadness of a break-up, like the lyrics of this song. 

    I CALL YOUR NAME, BUT THERE’S NO ANSWER. Looking at the bigger picture, Taeyeon’s revelations of her battle with depression has the potential to start a long overdue conversation on the topic of suicide in Korean society. As of 2016, the World Health Organization listed South Korea as the 10th highest suicide rate in the OECD. In a country with some of the best, affordable healthcare in the world, a cut-throat world of competition is often the culprit leading teens and adults to take their own lives. Teenagers face pressure to do well on a single test to enter university. How they score on that test determines what opportunities they will have in the future. Will they live the Korean or American dream? Own a nice apartment in Gangnam, work for Samsung, and marry a beautiful or handsome spouse and have 1.5 children? Or will they be stuck in a small town delivering chicken to the ones who scored better on this test? The world of K-pop is also fiercely competitive. So many kids want to be a K-pop singer, but not all of them have the look. So mom and dad spend money on plastic surgery and put them on diets. K-pop stars train for their late teens and early ’20s for a future that’s not certain. Not every group makes it big. And only the wildly successful SHINees and GIRLS’ GENERATIONs can maintain fame into their 30s. Most stars will age out of music. And while depression is not an easy topic to talk about or listen to, it’s important to drop the facade that everything is okay, before it’s too late. 

    If you struggle with depression, talk to a trained specialist in your country. Seoul Counseling Center offers counseling in Korean and English and is located in Seoul and Pyeongtaek, South Korea. Also, checkout the crisis hotlines.