Mixtapemotions

  • “I Love You Always Forever” by Betty Who (Donna Lewis cover), Thursday, October 6, 2022

    In 1996, Welsh singer-songwriter Donna Lewis released her debut single “I Love You Always Forever.” The understated, delicate pop song became an international hit. In the United State, it hit number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100, unable to take the top spot because of multiple versions of that counted as Los Del Rio‘s version of  “Macarena,” the dance track that plagued ’96. Lewis never matched the success of her debut single.


    SECRET MOMENTS SHUT IN THE HEAT OF THE AFTERNOON. Today’s version of “I Love You Always Forever” is performed by Australian pop star Betty Who, but I also recommend Mike Mains & the Branches version as well. Mike Mains & the Branches released their cover last year and is their most recent single. After an emotionally taxing record, When We Were in Love in 2019, “I Love You Always Forever” is a nice check in with the couple whose marriage was tested by events mentioned in the record. Betty Who’s version was released as a single between her debut record, Take Me When You Go and her sophomore record, The Valley. The single was so successful, though, that Who decided to promote the song as the lead single from The Valley and include it as the fourteenth track of the record. Who’s version topped Australia’s airplay chart, reached the Top 4o in New Zealand and topped Billboard’s US Dance Club Songs. Who told Spin about why she chose to record the song. She said, “It’s one of those songs that you don’t know, and when you hear it you go, ‘Ah I know this song.’” She went on to say in Vogue that she remembers the song being “everywhere” when she was 5 years old in ’96.  

    YOU’VE GOT THE MOST UNBELIEVABLE BLUE EYES I’VE EVER SEEN. Betty Who goes on to say in her Vogue interview listening to “I Love You Always Forever” she “got a lovely warm feeling about recollections of [her] childhood.” There is something instantly recognizable about this song. I don’t remember it from my sheltered radio days, though ’96 was probably my earliest popular music memories. Donna Lewis wrote the track inspired by the 1956 novel Love for Lydia by H. E. Bates, taking the chorus of the song from the novel. The lush imagery in “I Love You Forever and Always” transports the listener to “cloud of heavenly scent,” to a “windless summer night” to “the heat of the afternoon” or simply to look into “the most unbelievable eyes [you’ve] ever seen.” The Lewis version is lush and delicate, Mike Mains’ version adds masculinity to the track, but Who’s version adds sensuality absent on the other two versions. The harmonized a cappella start with soft, yet sharp vocals piercing the song combined with the music video in which Who is part of a throuple adds a bit of naughty with the nostalgia. Not there’s anything wrong with that.
    Donna Lewis version:

    Betty Who version:



    Dance version from To All the Boys I Loved: 
    Mike Mains & Branches version: 


  • “invisible string” by Taylor Swift, Wednesday, October 5, 2022

    Taylor Swift went from America’s sweetheart to a polarizing figure in her twenties. Feuds with Kanye West and then wife Kim Kardashian, Katie Perry, and others; a dating reputation; and self-deprecating and aggrandizing songs made Taylor’s star not for everyone. But in 2019, Swift was starting to change the narrative, patching up things with Perry in the video for “You Need to Calm Down,” reducing her reliance on hip-hop beats, and reducing lyrical narcissism. 
    SAID I LOOKED LIKE AN AMERICAN SINGER. Swift didn’t gain universal acclaim for Lover, though it did bode better with critics than Reputation. Swift shows her most mature efforts on 2020’s folklore and evermore. I’ve spoken at length about folklore this year, writing about the tracks “exile,” “august,” and “cardigan.” And my thesis about all of these songs is about how unlike Taylor Swift they are. I’ve argued that if you have bad blood with the pop star, you can listen to folklore with an open mind. You can sneak it into an indie singer-songwriter playlist sort of like how I played Switchfoot songs that sounded different from “Meant to Live” to the “gotcha moment” to convince my sister that not all Switchfoot songs are a lazy-voiced Jon Foreman, but I digress. But today’s song, “invisible string” feels like the most Taylor Swift song on folklore, yet it doesn’t overwhelm the listener. Swift feels like a present narrator on other tracks, revealing that she bought the house in “the last great american dynasty,” and the story about a friend who moved away in “seven” seems like it could be about Swift’s childhood. But it’s “invisible string” that gives longterm Swifties the Easter Eggs they crave. To a moderate Swifty, the verse about “Bad Blood” playing on the radio when the singer goes to LA, being identified on vacation with a boyfriend as someone who looks like “an American singer,” having a “ax to grind” with exes, but sending their “babies presents” now.

    TEAL WAS THE COLOR OF YOUR SHIRT. But “invisible string” is not a bragging tune, a fight song, or a forced pop banger. Instead it’s the musical equivalent to an indie rom-com. It’s the story of a young girl who sits reading in Centennial Park, a teenaged Taylor who has moved from Pennsylvania to Nashville to write and record. She feels that she will someday meet someone special in this park because it is such a special location to her. But across the world, in London, her eventual boyfriend actor Joe Alwyn, is working a job in a yogurt shop. Every image that Swift gives us in “invisible string” has a color mentioned with it, illustrating the season and making the details more vivid. But the overarching concept of the song is an Asian myth, the “red thread of fate,” an invisible string brings lovers together, no matter the distance. In “invisible string” Swift sees the events in her life as points on that thread that eventually made love make sense. Swift and Alwyn had been dating for over five years, three at the time of folklore, but the two have kept the details of this relationship quiet. And yes, sometimes when you are listening to songs about longterm relationships it can get a little bit stuffy; you don’t want it flaunted in your face, but one song on folklore is hardly gratuitous. Instead, we get a portrait of how healthy love can look. We get a portrait of how the seemingly random details of our lives can play out in something bigger. And we get a beautiful plucked guitar played under an oak tree on a beautiful fall afternoon. 

     Read the lyrics on Genius.

    Lyric video:

    Live recorded version:

  • "Lie" by Sasha Alex Sloan, Tuesday, October 4, 2022

    The first single form Sasha Alex Sloan‘s debut record Only Child,  “Lie,” continues to reveal the singer-songwriter as a voice of truth, even if the truth hurts a little. Sloan said in a Newsletter that the song came from a relationship that for the last two years turned into apathy. She said that while he worked a steady job, but she would stay at home, eventually starting to spend a lot of time on the Internet, talking to strangers during the day when her boyfriend was at work and after he went to bed. This unhealthy relationship fell apart, and Sloan met and started dating the producer of Only Child Henry Allen, better known as King Henry.

    TOUCH ME LIKE THERE ISN’T SOMETHING MISSING.  There are some interesting statistic to read about lying. Some surveys say that 7% of all communication is lying and 90% of all lies are white lies. Another survey showed that Americans tell four lies every day on average. But because all of the statistics are based on surveys, can we be sure that these people aren’t lying about their lies? We often think of white lies as innocuous. But I’m still a bit traumatized about my mom, Sabbath school teachers, and pastors saying that lying is the one sin that God hates the most. The pastor said that the one thing that God would never do is tell a lie. Except for the time that he God sent a “lying spirit” to deceive Ahab (1 Kings 22:22). When you’re growing up in a church that says that it’s the only true church and that every other religion and denomination is based on a lie and that only their church is based on sincere Biblical scholarship you tend to believe that church members and the theology is honest. And there were all the hypotheticals: what if you’re trying to save someone’s life, like in the case of Corrie Ten Boom’s family hiding Jews from Nazis. Rather than telling a lie, the family told the truth which sounded so crazy to the Nazis that the immediately left.

    I REALLY CAN’T GET MY HEART BROKEN TONIGHT. While “Lie” sounds like it could be coming from Sasha Alex Sloan’s perspective, and it very well might be, it also sounds true of her boyfriend. However, dishonesty in a relationship is a major reason for a break up. Secret addictions, cheating, financial indiscretions, all begin with a lie. And if we grew up watching any sitcoms at all, we know that lie builds on lie until it gets out of control. But like Michael W. Smith reminds us, “Life ain’t the Brady Bunch.” The out-of-control lying doesn’t get laughed off in some rushed moral and next week another unrelated issue appears. No, a long-term relationship is at least a half-season on Grey’s Anatomy or something as equally dramatic. There was only one lie that was sanctioned by youth group leaders and that was the answer to “does this make me look fat?” from a girlfriend or wife. The answer is a categorical no. But if most white lies are told out of protecting the other person’s feelings, most of the time, no harm done. However, in Sloan’s case, lying became a tool to protect a relationship that had expired. When we start having to wager if the security of our relationships is worth the thrill of deceiving that person, the relationship is truly in danger. Heartbreak seems inevitable, but we can lie to ourselves and say that nothing’s wrong. 

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  • "Unholy" by Sam Smith ft. Kim Petras, Monday, October 3, 2022

    Somewhere between cleaning up at the 2015 Grammy Awards for In the Lonely Hour and 2020’s Love Goes, Sam Smith‘s music lost momentum with listeners. Of course a lot has happened to the singer since then. In 2015, Smith was an openly gay Grammy- winning artist. In 2019, the singer came out as non-binary, telling the BBC, “I do think like a woman sometimes, in my head. Sometimes I’ve questioned, ‘Do I want a sex change?’” Since coming out as non-binary, the singer has embraced both the masculine and the feminine in their videos, concerts, and album promotion. But not only did the singer’s sexuality evolve, but also their musical versatility, from a gospel-inspired second record (The Thrill of It All), a Bond theme (“Writing’s on the Wall“), featured in a Calvin Harris track (“Promises“), a dance pop record in 2020–nothing seemed beyond the scope of the singer, though never they quite matching the success of In the Lonely Hour.
     

    MUMMY DON’T KNOW DADDY’S GETTING HOT AT THE BODY SHOP. Sam Smith is yet to announce details of an upcoming album, but “Unholy” is said to be the lead single from the Grammy winner’s fourth record. It’s a shocking song and a shocking video, on that made our friends over at PluggedIn call it “next-level vile.” Writing about the song before the context of the music video, and taking the lyrics of the song quite literal as a “celebratory tone used to praise a man for lying to his wife, ignoring his children and visiting a prostitute whenever he so pleases,” the critic Kristin Smith lambastes the song. And even though the correctly points out the literal message of the song, it seems that there’s something else going on. But because our dear friends at Focus on the Family didn’t have the video at the time of the review, let’s start there. The video (see below) is truly an avant-garde statement complete with an introduction, elaborate costumes, and Cabaret–styled dance sequence. The Body Shop scenes–a dinner-theater styled sex club–aren’t too graphic to be censored on YouTube, but the viewers certainly get the idea about what is happening at this club, which is MC’ed by Smith. Famed Italian-Canadian music video and film director Floria Sigismondi directed “Unholy.” She has directed videos for Marylin Manson, The White Stripes, and Katy Perry and other artists as well as directing episodes of The Handmaiden’s Tale and American Gods. 

    DIRTY, DIRTY BOY. The experience for the viewer entering “The Body Shop” is not  unlike watching two newlyweds whose car has broken down in front of a Victorian mansion in the 1973 cult classic musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Tim Curry as the “Sweet Transvestite from Transexual, Transylvania” beckons Brad and Janet:”give yourself over to absolute pleasure.” While The Rocky Horror Picture Show  is still shocking today to the Focus on the Family types and even caused my parents to mutter about Tim Curry when my sisters and I watched Muppet Treasure Island and later Clue. But even some conservative types can see the artistic merit of doing the “Time Warp.” Fast forward to 2022, we can ask the question about the artistic merit of “Unholy” and whether or not it meets its goals to promote a conversation. I can think of several merits, though I’m not sure that these are the intentional statements. Both statements have to deal with sexuality and sexual/gender identity. In some ways, the video is styled like a sexy hip hop video–singer Kim Petras acting as featured singer. Smith is not rapping, but the lines feel like rapping. The video subverts the homo- and transphobia in hip-hop’s past. The video features dancers who are trans, non-binary, and sis-gendered, showing the spectrum that gender can display. And that’s the first point I think the video is making: that gender fluidity is shocking to many these days, but it’s ultimately something we have to come to understand. Drag and alternative gender expressions were once kept in very specific spaces–“The Body Shop,” for example, where people go to have a good time whether or not they are hiding their true identity from the world or even spouses. Now alternative gender expressions are hitting mainstream culture–from Timothée Chalamet wearing a red dress to the film premiere of Bones and All to Harry Styles wearing a blouse. The second point: why call gender fluidity, homosexuality “unholy” when “daddy” abandons his wife and kids in order to frequent the prostitutes. This may seem like a weak point but think about how historically true this is. The more conservative the preacher or politician, the more shocking the cottaging with an undercover policeman in a dimly lit rest area bathroom. I think the idea is that a culture built on repression, restricting desire and expression creates a more shocking reveal than if people were allowed to express themselves as they pleased all along.

    lyric video:

    music video: 


  • "It Doesn't Matter Why" by Silversun Pickups, Sunday, October 2, 2022

    Ten years after releasing their breakthrough record, Swoon, Silversun Pickups released their fifth record, Widow’s  Weeds. The band’s first two records contained fast, pulsating shoegaze tracks, but by their third record, 2012’s Neck of the Woods, the band started playing with their formula. By their fourth record, Better Nature, the band had gone against the rules they set for themselves for their debut record, Carnavas. That rule: to record a record relying mostly on guitar, bass, and some keys that the band could provide and relying mostly on organic sounds. 

    IS IT BETTER ON THE OTHER SIDE? NO. Working with famed the famed Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins producer and Garbage founding member Butch Vig, Widow’s Weeds is Silversun Pickups’ attempt at rock greatness. But rock greatness looks different in the late 2010s when the genre suffered its lowest point. Widow’s Weeds came four years after the band’s fourth record, Better Nature. The lyrics to the band’s first single from the record, “It Doesn’t Matter Why” are opaque like many of the band’s tracks. However, lead singer Brian Auburt told Prelude Press that the lyrics on Widow’s Weeds were more “open and exposed.” Some of the openness of the record has to do with Auburt getting sober in the middle of the recording process, a process that delayed recording for the album. “It Doesn’t Matter Why” seems to take a cue from the band’s second track “The Royal We,” on Swoon, which deals with drug addiction. Musically taking a cue from “The Royal We,”  which initially broke the band’s rules by including a 16-piece orchestra, “It Doesn’t Matter Why” also includes strings.  But the song sounds like a reconstructed version of the band. The song starts with a tinny bass riff that sounds almost like it could be an acoustic guitar and quickly becomes a catchy rhythmic song. Handclaps after the chorus relate the song to a primal energy that makes listeners even more engaged with the hypnotic rhythm. Like with most Silversun Pickups’ songs, except for the ones sung by bassist Nikki Monniger, Brian Aubert’s voice pierces through the wall of sound. 


    WILL IT HELP YOU SLEEP BETTER AT NIGHT? IT WON’T. Paste called  the minimal, eerie video (see below) in which the band and several actors perform stretches and various actions in front of the camera “unsettling” and the song itself had an “underlying sense of anxiety and nihilism.” I misheard the lyric as “It doesn’t matter why we’re numb, we’re just numb” which seemed to make more sense than the real lyrics. I’m not sure what Aubert means by the apathetic statements throughout the song. The speaker asks questions and answers them in the most negative way. The song seems to be dealing with someone who is pushing a concerned loved one away. And this pushing away could be related to the speaker’s addiction, as many times addicts don’t want to change and push away those who care about them. The song could also be dealing with life in the spotlight when someone is concerned about that person. While many might know about the addiction, there are always more who can find out and it’s shaming to the addict to confront his addiction. Unfortunately, the addict often has to hit rock bottom in order to confront it.
     

  • “Glass to the Arson” by Anberlin, Saturday, October 1, 2022

     

    When recording their debut record Blueprints for the Black Market, Anberlin spent time in Seattle writing the lyrics for the album. During their 2020 livestream We Are the Lost Ones, between songs and banter, the band told stories about where they drew inspiration for some of the most beloved tracks on the record. Viewers heard stories about using rhymezone.com to complete “Cold War Transmissions,” seeing their producer Aaron Sprinkle play a cover of The Cure’s “Lovesong” at a karaoke night—his arrangement would end up on Blueprints, and a story about an arsonist devastating Seattle at the time of the recording.

    INNOCENCE DERAILED. “Glass to the Arson” is the fifth track on Blueprints for the Black Market. It’s certainly not one of Anberlin’s most poignant lyrics: it’s not a storytelling song and the lyrics never made a deeper connection with me like later Anberlin songs; it’s the passion in Stephen Christian‘s voice along with the Joseph Milligan‘s guitar solo that show the band’s potential. The lyrics don’t even appear in the album leaf for Blueprints, as they did in future records, making the lyrics to the record feel secondary to the music. This is not say that none of the lyrics on Blueprints are good. The ends of the record see “Readyfuels” “running hot tonight” and “Cadence” “burning like Joan of Arc.” The middle of the record, though, sounds like a naïve pseudo-European band dreaming about life experiences foreign to them. The potential that was fully realized on Never Take Friendship Personal and Cities. Stephen Christian has talked about the difference in lyrical quality between the first and second Anberlin albums due to fans feedback, which inspired Stephen to write more emotional songs. “Glass to the Arson” certainly needed an English teacher to look over the song for coherence. It could have been a riveting true crime song through the eyes of an arson(ist), the CSI or even Seattle-based Station 19 fire investigators looking at the density of smoke on the glass of a mansion in Laurelhurst. Maybe there’s an incredulous look from the Sargent when a probationary firefighter raises a theory until investigators discover the D-ring from the arsonist’s harness on the second floor near the window where he climbed in or perhaps the blood when he cut himself on the window. 

    WE ARE THE ARSONS. When I was in elementary school, I was terrified of fire. The fire safety education assembly was so graphic that students had to have their parents sign a waiver in order to watch the video. The video talked about how houses had electrical fires, maybe someone left something on the stove and stepped out for a second, but one of my biggest fears was a log falling out of the wood stove in the late fall or winter or a chimney fire, like what happened to the neighbor down the road. As I got older and watched television programs about arsonists, I started to have the fear that someone perhaps hated my family enough to burn down our house late at night. And I wasn’t as scared about dying in a house fire as a family member dying, or us losing all of our things–stuffed animals, pets, toys–or even someone getting severe smoke inhalation and going crazy for the rest of their life like on the episode of Adventures in Odyssey about the burned down mansion. My nightly prayers were asking for protection from all the different ways that the house could burn down. I thought if I didn’t ask for all of them every time, perhaps a way that the house could burn down that I forgot to mention would happen. Sure, the fire in “Glass to the Arson” just signifies a passion to destroy and it’s not scary like my childhood trauma, but if we’re entering spooky season, I would say that fire was one of my biggest fears as a child.

    Studio:

    We Are the Lost Ones version:

  • "In the Cold" by Acceptance, Friday, September 30, 2022 (Partial Repost)

    We’re at the end of another month, now solidly into fall in the northern hemisphere. This month’s playlist has been the most repeats of any other month with 17 reposts and 13 new songs. And yet I don’t regret the choices because almost every song fits a certain autumny nostalgia. So today, despite the weather being a record high, I chose one of my favorite fall songs from an album I’ve talked about to death. But repeated listening is not the same as repeated reading. So, if you’ve read enough about Acceptance, skip today’s post and just go listen to Phantoms or “In the Cold.”

    THE WORDS, THEY TAKE THEIR MEANING. While “In the Cold” is a mid-album track that had very little potential to become a single, I feel that this song best encapsulates the “cooling” of interest Columbia Records had with Acceptance. I’ve talked about the anti-piracy CD recall that took the band’s record from the shelves. But there were more problems. Columbia Records signed Acceptance based on their incredible live energy. For rock bands, though, the label made most of its money through ballads. Hence, Phantoms starts out as a pop-rock album that eventually becomes a rock record. The podcasters on Finding Emo give many examples of rock bands needing a rock radio song before their pop ballad. Even the band Hoobastank‘s “The Reason,” whom Columbia was trying to capitalize on, didn’t release that song first. The Fray didn’t lead with “How to Save a Life” or “Look After You.” Yellowcard didn’t lead with “Only One.” Releasing a rock radio single first would establish the core fans of the band. The pop ballad would bring their girlfriends on board. And yes, the song “Different” might have been the biggest money-maker–like “Only One” or “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” the shortcut of skipping straight to the ballad made longterm, local band fans think that the band had completely sold out. On its release, Phantoms would seem like a pop album and would be lost in the anti-piracy/spyware shuffle. Maybe a song like “This Conversation Is Over” or “Permanent” on alternative radio would have helped the band survive. If it were super successful, “In the Cold” could have been a fourth single? Of course that didn’t happen, and Phantoms remains a cult classic. 

    I REMEMBER THE CHILL THAT CAME OVER. “In the Cold” is about looking back on a relationship that didn’t work out, but it gives me these autumn memories. I think about the frosty mornings, camping in the mountains over the weekend with my Pathfinder club. Pathfinders is the Seventh-day Adventist alternative to Boy and Girl Scouts. I think about friendships that I had that were everything before we all grew apart. The boys in the tent determined that sleeping in your underwear in the sleeping bag to use your body heat to stay warm through the night and one boy said that he was actually sleeping commando. There was the early morning scramble to put on layer upon layer of clothes and a smokey fleece zip-down sweater. You either were on breakfast duty, which meant getting the water or trying not to burn the pancakes, or mess duty, which meant washing the syrupy plates in the warm-to-lukewarm water. Then there was always a fear among the boys about the showering situation. You never knew what the showering situation was at the campground, and the wrong shower situation might make you gay. To avoid this, you had to go at different times of the day, ask a friend to stand guard while you shower at the end, or just not shower. After a clean up of the campsite or a shower, we were ready to start learning orienteering in the woods and other skills that would help us survive the end of times. Mostly, the camping trips were a time of ungodly conversations–making fun of weirder, more conservative kids, rebelling against one particularly tyrannical leader, sex and puberty, and music and movies–all while learning how to tie knots (I failed so many times). Wasn’t our Pathfinder group the worst?

     

  • “Edge of Seventeen” (Just Like the White Winged Dove) by Stevie Nicks, Thursday, September 29, 2022

    Fleetwood Mac might be one of the most interesting stories of rock sellouts of all time. The band had been around playing different genres of rock since 1967, but after tons of line up changes and minor hits, the band reformed with Lindsey Buckingham as lead singer and his then-girlfriend Stevie Nicks, playing a tambourine and sometimes the keyboard while singing back up and a few stand out lead vocals on songs like “Landslide” and “Dreams.”

    THE CLOUDS NEVER EXPECT IT WHEN IT RAINS. Despite Buckingham and Nicks solidifying the classic line up upon releasing Fleetwood Mac’s eponymous, tenth studio record and the band’s follow-up, Rumors, selling over seven million copies, the band’s inner-conflict was legendary. It was sex, drugs, and creative control that simultaneously made the band work and tore them apart. Buckingham left the band in 1987 and Nicks in 1991. But neither Nicks nor Buckingham had to leave Fleetwood to kickstart their solo careers. Fleetwood Mac’s follow up to Rumors, the ambitious but decidedly less accessible and commercial disappointment Tusk, had both Buckingham and Nicks writing a lot of material. Some of the extra Tusk material can be found on Buckingham’s and Nicks’ first solo records, Law and Order and Bella Donna, both released in 1981. Nicks released four singles from Bella Donna starting with the Tom Petty duet “Stop Dragging My Heart Around.” Next, she released a song with her then-boyfriend, former Eagle, Don Henley, “Leather and Lace.” Finally, on her third single, “Edge of Seventeen,” Nicks flies completely solo in one of her most iconic songs in her career. 

    SOMETIMES TO BE NEAR YOU IS TO BE UNABLE TO HEAR YOU.  Some of us may relate to Joan Cusack‘s Ms. Mullins in the 2003 film School of Rock losing ourselves in an old song. For Principal Mullins, it’s the hypnotic guitar riff of “Edge of Seventeen.” But before the song could influence everyone from Destiny’s Child‘s “Bootylicious” to Miley Cyrus‘ “Midnight Sky,” “Edge of Seventeen” started as fragments of a story. The song’s title comes from mishearing Tom Petty’s wife at the time Jane say that she and Tom met at the “age of seventeen,” but her heavy southern drawl sounded like edge. But “Edge of Seventeen” isn’t a straight-forward love story. In 1980 Stevie Nicks’ uncle died of cancer the same week that John Lennon was murdered. After her uncle’s death, Nicks sought the comfort of her producer and lover Jimmy Iovine, and the story came together about a “white winged dove” mourning a lost love just as the speaker is coming of age. But just as Nicks misheard Jane Benyo, I misheard the lyric “white winged dove” as “one-winged dove” and I thought about that line for years. A one-winged bird can’t fly and can’t escape predators. A one-winged bird cries because she is doomed, grounded. But that tragedy besets the meaning of the song, focusing on the doom of the protagonist, rather than the one that the protagonist lost. But then again, what is the song about? The speaker says “I’m a few years older than you,” so who’s on the edge of seventeen? She or him? A seventeen year old crushing on a fourteen year old? Or a 19 year old crushing on an almost seventeen-year-old? Is it a ghost story? Is it a song of grief or sex or both? Whatever the truth is, the song makes sense in its own dreamscape; you have to feel “Edge of Seventeen” and when you try to grasp it logically, it might not work.



    Scene from School of Rock: 

    Live music video: 

    Studio version:

    “Bootylicious” by Destiny’s Child sampling “Edge of Seventeen,” video with a cameo with Stevie Nicks:

    Miley Cyrus “Midnight Sky”: 

    “Edge of Midnight” (Midnight Sky Remix) ft. Stevie Nicks
    Howard Stern interview:

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  • “September” by Spoken, Wednesday, September 28, 2022

    Spoken formed in 1996 and signed to CCM singer-songwriter Crystal Lewis‘s Metro 1 label the following year. The band’s early music was influenced by Rage Against the Machine and P.O.D., mostly consisting of rap-core and nu metal. After releasing three studio records and a greatest hits compilation through Metro 1, the band signed to Tooth & Nail Records in 2003 and released their fourth studio record, A Moment of Imperfect Clarity. 

    A CHANCE TO CHANGE THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT. Spoken’s fourth record, A Moment of Imperfect Clarity developed the band’s sound from a rap-rock, nu metal band to a melodic post-hardcore band. With the Tooth & Nail years during the explosion of the record label and the mass-marketability of Christian Rock, Spoken gained a greater audience. Also with the backing of the record company, the production on their Tooth & Nail albums increased significantly. On the first Tooth & Nail record for spoken, the band worked with Garth Richardson, better known by his nickname GGGarth. Richardson began his career working on the original Rage Against the Machine record and worked producing hard rock records from the ’90s to today. GGGarth produced The O.C. Supertones‘ Chase the Sun for Tooth & Nail Records in 1999 and then went on to produce Project 86‘s Drawing Black Lines the next year and later in 2005 their …And the Rest Will Follow record. But for the band’s second record on Tooth & Nail, Last Chance to Breathe, they worked with Travis Wyrick. While GGGarth may have produced a few Christian Rock classics, Wyrick certainly produced more records for bands like P.O.D., Pillar, Disciple, and Nine Lashes, giving a distinct hard rock sound to these bands. 
    YEARS AGO.  From wrought-iron metallic rap-rock to a kind of alternative post hardcore and then back to a faster-paced, almost thrash sound on their self-titled and final record on Tooth & Nail, Spoken is a band constantly in search of their sound. In 2005, screaming was de rigueur of rock music, so a screaming record would allow a band to join a motorcade of rock bands, Christian or secular, in buses and vans on tour until the economy tanked. Reviews for Last Chance to Breathe weren’t great, with the album fading into the background of the more successful Pillar and P.O.D. records. But this album will always have a place in my heart for the drives during college and for the times on Sunday walking to the library or cleaning my room before starting on a paper. At one point I sat down with my guitar to play along with the record. You could argue that all of the songs on the record sound the same, and they are certainly similar because they are all in the same key: E minor, at least that’s what I found out playing along to it. The opening track, “September,” was quite epic on RadioU–production with lead singer Matt Baird’s on-key screams. It’s the kind of Christian youth fall festival song, and by fall festival, I mean a party without booze and without Halloween costumes, but rather people dressed up as Bible characters. So, before fall gets out of hand and we’re camping out in the inglenooks in a ski lodge somewhere, let’s enjoy the changing of the seasons with a 2005 hard rock classic. 

     

  • “Danger Zone” by Kenny Loggins, Tuesday, September 27, 2022

    Kenny Loggins is known as the “King of the Movie Soundtrack.” Starting with the 1976 version of A Star Is Born, Loggins most recognizable songs are 1985’s “Footloose,” the titular track to the film in which Kevin Bacon rebelled against a backwards town that banned all dancing, and 1986’s “Danger Zone,” one of two songs he contributed to the Tom Cruise summer blockbuster Top Gun, and one of two major hits from the film, the other being Berlin‘s “Take My Breath Away.” Like many songs on the Top Gun soundtrack, “Danger Zone” ended up being performed by an artist the song wasn’t intended for.


    SHOVIN’ INTO OVERDRIVE. “Danger Zone” is a recurring song throughout Top Gun and even appears in the film’s 2022 sequel, Top Gun: Maverick, performed by alleged Yacht rocker Kenny Loggins. Originally Toto was asked to perform “Danger Zone,” but there was a conflict between the band’s lawyers and the studio. Next, Bryan Adams was asked, but the Canadian rocker declined, feeling that the film was pro-war and against his views.  REO Speedwagon and Corey Hart also declined because they weren’t permitted to feature one of their own songs in the film. Originally Toto’s “Only You” was supposed to be the film’s love theme, but just as the Toto recording of “Danger Zone” was legally blocked so too was their use of a slower song. After considering New Wave band The Motels who recorded a demo for the song “Take My Breath Away,” ultimately Berlin‘s version was used in the film and the song won an Academy Award. “Danger Zone” feels like that quintessential ’80s tune: simple masculine rhyming lyrics; comparing sex to something powerful, mechanical, and manly; a guitar solo with a faint sax solo; and that V-VIm-V-IV chord progression that feel like a aviators and possibly a mullet. 

    THE HOTTER THE INTENSITY. The viral Tweet below from this summer makes me wonder if we’ve completely lost our originality and that we’re doomed to live in a loop of ’80s and ’90s trends.


    I like to tell my students that Top Gun is older than me–the film came out the year before I was born, and somehow Tom Cruise still has it. But growing up in the early ’00s I had a cultural disdain for the ’80s, which I’ve talked about many times before. There was something about the hyper-masculinity of films like Top Gun —films that tried very hard to be the direct opposite of delicate femininity of say, the Radio City Rockettes —that had my friends calling it gay. There’s certainly a lot of queer theory surrounding this film reading into the nuance of Maverick and Goose’s friendship. But maybe the at the heart of this theory is a confused 13-year-old boy regaling his sexual fantasies after feeling something mysterious after watching the movie, much like me at a Pathfinder lock-in when the leader wanted to show his favorite movie. And the boys and I cracked jokes throughout the whole movie, but we ultimately watched it or fell asleep because we know that we couldn’t watch anything else and it was on. I think most of the boys did fall asleep but I lay in my sleeping bag enjoying the shirtless volleyball and the other shirtless scenes. And for years I replayed that scene of Maverick washing his face in his tighty whities (spoiler alert) just after Goose is killed. I felt so conflicted about Top Gun, and I didn’t know how to stand up for my… crush? Tom Cruise when my sister so vehemently hated him and his “cheesy smile.” And I couldn’t stand up for Top Gun because it was a guilty pleasure that really had no place in a young struggling closeted Christian teen’s life. In a way, Top Gun was a “Danger Zone” for my semblance of heterosexuality.