Carly Rae Jepsen’s 2015 album Emotion is a rare bird — an audience-friendly pop confection considered a cult classic due to its low sales and small but devoted fan base.
This album is so bright and infectious, it should have been pouring out of radios and phones all over the world. Instead, it showed up on plenty of critics’ top ten lists but struggled to chart. The album sold better in Japan than in the United States or Jepsen’s native Canada.
I was struggling for a post to close out the week before I get to the 2021 movie-related content that will populate the blog for the next month or so.
Then I came across this Taylor Swift-assisted remix of the HAIM song ‘Gasoline,’ from their 2020 album Women in Music, Pt. III. That album was my favorite of 2020 and ‘Gasoline’ was my favorite song on it.
When writing recent posts about Michael Jackson and Meat Loaf, I had a chance to peruse the list of the world’s all-time top-selling albums. Most of the entries made sense, but one jumped out at me.
Apparently, the album that is second only to Jackson’s Thriller, with more than 55 million copies sold, is a 2006 release titled Aap Kaa Surroor by Indian actor/singer Himesh Reshammiya. It seems just about every one of those 55 million copies was sold in India, which explains why this is news to me. The album was Reshammiya’s first, and was followed up by his debut acting performance in a film of the same name.
I wrote about Elvis Costello yesterday, and now here’s another old-timer with a new album out. Sting released The Bridge in November, a month after his 70th birthday.
I have not kept up with Sting’s discography over the past 23 years. The last album of his I listened to was 1999’s Brand New Day, a triple Platinum hit in the U.S. that capped off a run of six excellent solo albums.
I never found time for the follow-up, 2003’s Sacred Love, which managed to go Platinum despite not producing a hit. After that came a grab bag of novelty releases, including two collections of alternate releases of his own material, a Christmas album, and an album heavily featuring a lute.
Elvis Costello released a new album a few weeks ago, and I still haven’t listened to it all the way through.
There’s a sentence I didn’t think I’d ever write.
Once upon a time, a new Elvis Costello album was a major event in my life, like a Christmas day that happened every three or four years. But somewhere along the line, I stopped getting excited about Costello’s new music.
Meet Me In Montauk 