The last — and only — time I featured a song from Arcade Fire’s 2007 album Neon Bible was on April Fool’s Day in 2013.
I had just spent three weeks writing a song-by-song dissection of the band’s celebrated 2010 album The Suburbs (a surprise Album of the Year winner at the Grammys) and my regular readers were not happy. So I mischievously suggested I was about to launch into another couple of weeks analyzing Neon Bible. Good one, me!
For people who like throwing around the word “snowflake,” right-wing racists sure are a sensitive bunch. The latest news to get MAGA panties in a bunch is Disney’s announcement of Black singer-actress Halle Bailey as Ariel in the upcoming live-action The Little Mermaid remake.
Apparently racists believe there was an actual little mermaid who was white. Is that it? More likely, they just don’t like to see people of color get nice things.
At risk of turning this into a Miley Cyrus blog, I have one more of her songs to share. In this case, she is performing in character as Ashley O, a Britney Spears-like pop star at the center of the new Black Mirror episode ‘Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too.’
As with most Black Mirror episodes, the less said about the plot the better, so I’ll just note that Cyrus plays Ashley O, a teen idol who has just released an Alexa-like robot device called Ashley Too so her fans can have their own mini-Ashley companion.
I don’t know if Miley Cyrus’ collaboration with Mark Ronson will appear on her upcoming album, but the latest sneak peek at that release (in the form of an EP titled SHE IS COMING) suggests it will be worth listening to regardless.
SHE IS COMING is the first in a series of three planned EPs leading up to the album release. The next will be SHE IS HERE, followed by SHE IS EVERYTHING, all leading up to the album, titled SHE IS MILEY CYRUS. This is a similar release strategy to the one John Mayer used for his album The Search for Everything, when he dropped the album’s first eight songs over two EPs before releasing the full album.
I’m back from my family’s trip to Italy, battling jet lag and trying to get a couple of posts in the can on deadline.
One day on our trip, we rented a car for a day in Tuscany and drove around through some of the world’s most gorgeous scenery from small town to small town. My family all agrees that day was the highlight of our trip (I asked everybody for a top five). Today’s SOTD played during the drive.
As we enter the dog days of summer, here’s a sultry Lana Del Rey cover of Sublime’s 1997 track ‘Doin’ Time.’ That song was, in turn, a reimagining of the George Gershwin song ‘Summertime’ from Porgy and Bess.
Del Rey recorded this song for a documentary on the California ska band that was released earlier this year. I’m not sure what Sublime has done that warrants a documentary. I’m not a fan of the whole ska thing, generally.
Here’s a beautiful song from Rufus Wainwright’s 2010 collecton All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu, an album of piano ballads written in the months leading up to his mother’s death.
This very personal and classically-influenced album followed five baroque pop albums and hinted at Wainwright’s future direction. Though he did release another pop album, Out of the Game, in 2012, he then shifted his focus to recording and releasing an opera, 2015’s Prima Donna.
