After a fairly long drought when it comes to new music, I recently picked up four new albums that have received a lot of high praise. I’ll feature a song from each the rest of this week.
I didn’t “get” Lana Del Rey until the third time I listened to her new album, Ultraviolence. And during that third listen, I got her completely.
Taylor Swift is making it harder and harder to like her.
She’s a talented songwriter, no doubt, but it’s hard to argue that she’s using those talents wisely these days. Her last album was the uneven Red, which spawned a few clever, pop-infused hits but also caught her spinning her wheels.
Last week, Swift announced the upcoming release of her next album, 1989 (named after her birth year). And based on the first single, it’s a step in the wrong direction.
I was shocked to realize I’d never featured Justin Timberlake’s ‘Cry Me a River’ on the blog. It’s the one song on Timberlake’s solo debut, Justified, that I like.
In fact, it’s the only Justin Timberlake song I like, period. Or at least the only one I know well enough to like. He’s just not my cup of tea, musically (though I enjoy his work on Saturday Night Live and in the movies).
‘Winter Wooskie’ is the third track on Belle & Sebastian’s 2000 Legal Man EP, released back in the days when the band would put out new material on singles in between their full-length albums.
The 25 songs they released this way between 1997 and 2001 combine to rival any of their LPs, and in fact the whole lot were released on a double disc in 2005 with the title Push Barman to Open Old Wounds.
You could have predicted as early as 12 years ago that Richard Linklater’s Boyhood would be my favorite film of 2014. That’s when he started shooting this examination of a boy’s life from kindergarten through the start of college.
I’m a Linklater fanboy, for starters, and I’m a sucker for this sort of visual time travel. I’m the guy who takes a beach photo every year on my daughters’ birthdays so I can run them in a sequence and marvel at their growth.
Meet Me In Montauk 