Though she’s garnered nine ACM Awards in the past, last night marked the first time Swift performed at the ceremony since 2013, when she joined Tim McGraw and Keith Urban for a performance of ‘Highway Don’t Care’.
folklore, Swift’s eighth studio album, was released in July, and became the top-selling album of 2020. It features contributions from the National’s Aaron Dessner, Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Jack Antonoff, and more.
Faye Webster has released a new song titled ‘Better Distractions’. Recorded at Chase Park Transduction in Athens, Georgia and produced by the singer-songwriter’s frequent collaborator Drew Vandenberg, the single arrives with an accompanying music video directed by Matt Swinsky and Eat Humans. Watch it below.
“I wrote this song kinda without knowing I was writing it,” Webster said in a press release. “It’s a kind of free association, just thoughts running straight from my head onto paper untouched. I also think it’s best my band has ever sounded on record.”
Along with the new single, Webster has also announced a full band performance scheduled for October 6, to be streamed via Noonchorus. Her last album was 2019’s Atlanta Millionaires Club.
Angel Olsen has shared a cover of Bobby Vinton’s 1962 classic ‘Mr. Lonely’, which appears on the soundtrack for Miranda July’s upcoming film Kajillionaire. A snippet of the cover, which was recorded with the film’s composer Emile Mosseri, was originally featured on the film’s trailer, but has now been released in full. Listen to it below.
“Suddenly there she was,” Olsen said in a statement about her involvement in the film. “THE MIRANDA JULY in my text messages. She was working on songs with Emile for the upcoming film Kajillionaire, which at the time I knew nothing about. I just so happened to be in Los Angeles. So I met with them both, and we talked about cadence and we talked about life and we talked about the film.”
“Miranda directed me to sing the cover in the way she and Emile thought it would represent the feelings behind the film,” she added. “It was a lovely experience. Later, Miranda and I went outside for a little break and we did a little improv with each other. Just us.”
Tim Heidecker and Weyes Blood‘s Natalie Mering have shared a new collaborative track from Heidecker’s upcoming album, Fear of Death. Check out ‘Property’ below.
The song marks the third single from the album following the title track and ‘Nothing’. Fear of Death, which also features contributions from the Lemon Twigs, Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado, and more, arrives on September 25th via Spacebomb.
The new single comes shortly after the release of the trailer for a Showtime series called Moonbase 8, which stars Heidecker, Fred Armisen and John C. Reilly. It premieres on November 8th.
Thom Yorke has shared a remix of Clark’s ‘Isolation Theme’, from the electronic producer’s soundtrack to the 2019 thriller Daniel Isn’t Real. Listen to it below.
“I took Clark’s score of ‘Isolation Theme’ and simply made it feel like the moment we were entering; being told to stay indoors, entering a new type of silence,” Yorke said in a press release. “I guess I simplified it in a way, into waveforms that were being disrupted. I was surprised how frightening it became.”
Clark added: “I started working on Daniel Isn’t Real around the time I was asked to remix Thom’s track ‘Not The News’, so it has a neat circularity closing the expanded edition of the score with him remixing me. I was surprised how well the midi translated to his remix. He got such a good pure electronic tone out of it. It amazes me how simple note information, if it has a nice shape, can transmit to multiple voicings. This isn’t good news for genres. It’s good news for me though.”
The remix comes ahead of the expanded release of Clark’s score for the 2019 film, which is set to arrive on December 6 via Deutsche Grammophon.
Haviah Mighty, the beloved Toronto hip-hop artist, won the prestigious Polaris Music Prize, just over a year ago for her well-received album 13th floor. Now a year later, she published a music video for one of the biggest tracks of the album ‘Bag Up’.
Talking about the song Haviah added: “‘Bag Up’ is the last piece of content from the album,’13th Floor.’ It’s amazing that we’ve had over a year of fun with this project! We collaborated with Rack & Pinion on this visual, depicting a selection of resilient women on different paths, dealing with different life hindrances, but bonding over and connecting with the go-getter energy that lies in all of us. With playful lines like ‘I just wanna get my M’s up … mmm mmm I’m a smartie though” and more personal lines like ‘They wanna gentrify dreads, but I’m the creme de la creme,’ I focus on my specific hustle – being a musician – and how I will remain true to the craft while growing this empire.”
For a band entering the fifth decade of their career, American Head might sound like an obvious attempt at playing it safe. Eschewing the conceptual theatrics of last year’s King’s Mouth and the anti-pop experimentation that characterised much of their output in the 2010s, the Flaming Lips’ sixteenth studio album finds them pivoting back to the familiar mid-tempo balladry and grand orchestral swells that made much of their 90s material so iconic. Drawing shamelessly from the classic psych-rock playbook, they’ve come up with a record that has seemingly little in common with the Lips’ shapeshifting highlights even as it appears to be emulating them.
And yet, American Head is somewhat of a revelation. Frontman Wayne Coyne and company might be touching on the well-trodden themes of death, drugs, and the American dream against a backdrop of predictably beatific, 70s-inspired arrangements, but this grounded approach is a gateway to some of the band’s most personal songwriting to date. On the surface, the album might come off as a purely nostalgic affair as Coyne looks back on the formative years of his life as a kid growing up in Oklahoma, but it’s more of a sobering reflection on the dangers of romanticising a certain kind of lifestyle, and the ways in which that spark of youthful idealism fades with age.
Opener ‘Will You Return/ When You Come Down’ sets the stage by laying out a striking realization: “Now all your friends are dead/ And they’re ghosts floating around your bed,” Coyne sings pensively, accompanied by a chiming instrumental that taps into the haunting qualities of a lullaby. As epic introductions go, it feels like the band is signalling their slow descent back into Earth. Follow-up ‘Watching the Lightbulbs Glow’ channels Pink Floyd’s ‘A Great Gig in the Sky’ but seems to aim for the opposite effect; Kacey Musgraves’ vocals are plaintive rather than ecstatic, floating above the ether like a ghostly reminder of what’s been lost. Musgraves might seem like an unlikely choice for a feature on a Flaming Lips record, but unlike other pop stars who have found themselves into the band’s orbit, her dreamy cadence warmly complements the tenderness in Coyne’s delivery when it comes up on the elegiac ‘Flowers of Neptune 6’ and ‘God and the Policeman’.
American Head’s earthly, naturalistic tones seem to serve as a manifestation of the narrator’s change in perspective, a framing device that warns against the romanticism that governs the lives of the young characters that inhabit the album. The chorus of ‘Dinosaurs on the Mountain’ recaptures the innocence of childhood, but Coyne’s vocals turn into a distant croon as his older self paints a more unsettling picture of a memory that’s now riddled with fear and anxiety. On ‘At the Movies on Quaaludes’, Coyne recalls one experience of getting high as life-threateningly horrifying, even as he recounts it in the present tense: “We’re so high that we/ Forget that we’re alive/ As we destroy our brains/ ‘Til we believe we’re dead.” And on ‘Mother I’ve Taken LSD’, Coyne’s lyricism takes a devastating turn for the confessional: “I thought it would set me free/ But now I think it’s changed me,” he laments, adding, “Now I see the sadness in the world.”
It’s an eye-opening moment, but it’s not the last time that Coyne addresses his mother directly on the album. Where ‘Mother, I’ve Taken LSD’ is sung from the perspective of Coyne’s brother, ‘Mother Please Don’t Be Sad’, a sweeping piano ballad that arrives later in the tracklist, finds him opening up about his own near-death experience, laced with the kind of sentimentality that feels entirely earned and sincere. The song transitions seamlessly into the slow-percolating ‘When We Die When We’re High’, a stand-out instrumental that unfolds like the journey to the afterlife. More than a thin collection of melancholic ballads, there’s a clear narrative progression running throughout American Head, which makes it feel both purposeful and compelling.
The Flaming Lips lay down a ream of great songs on the front half of the album, each of which builds steadily upon the other. But the record falters somewhat towards the back end: ‘You n Me Selling Weed’ should work in theory, but it lacks the nuance to really bring out the more violent undertones of its doomed love story, as other songs on the album do; ‘Assassins of Youth’ is another weak spot that attempts to offer a glimpse of the bigger picture but ends up feeling devoid of any substance. But American Head closes off on a fittingly high note with ‘My Religion is You’, which wonderfully underscores what the album is really about: not death, or God, or magic forests, but giving yourself fully to the ones you love. This, Coyne seems to be saying, is the only kind of devotion that’s really worth it.
Angie McMahon has shared an alternate version of her song ‘Soon’ as well as a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s ‘The River’. Both singles are set to appear on McMahon’s upcoming EP Piano Salt and arrive with accompanying music videos, which you can watch below.
For the ‘Soon’ montage, McMahon compiled footage of her home during lockdown as well as clips from various locations across the U.S., taken when she supported Hozier on their North American tour last year. “We were travelling around America, my sound engineer Jono and I, following the Hozier bus and having our own adventures every day,” she wrote in the video’s description. “I’m so grateful he kept the go pro on for that month, and that the audiences were so warm, and that I have a safe and comfortable home to slow down in now. Thank you to our friend Lewis Parsons who edited all of this together so flawlessly.”
About her decision to cover ‘The River’, she said: “I love the way [Bruce Springsteen] can tell a story as a writer, and I grew up listening to his music. I was going to learn the harmonica for this one, but I ran out of time, so I turned his harmonica solo into a whistle one. Sorry Dad.”
McMahon talked more about the origins of both stripped-backed recordings for an Origins feature at Consequence of Sound. “Like lots of Bruce songs, this is a song about longing and dreaming, and about injustice or being trapped, but there is so much strength and dignity in the voices,” she said of ‘The River’.
Piano Salt comes out on October 2nd. McMahon released her debut studio album, Salt, in July of 2019.
Cardi B has filed for divorce papers from Migos rapper Offset. The paperwork for a dissolution of marriage was filed in Fulton County yesterday (September 15), multiple outlets report, citing “irreconcilable differences”.
The couple had been married since September 2017. They have one child together, a two-year-old daughter named Kulture. In 2018, amidst rumours of Offset’s infidelity, Cardi revealed that the two had split up. “We’re not together anymore. I don’t know, it might take time to get a divorce,” she said at the time. “And I’m always going to have a lot of love for him because he is my daughter’s father.” They later got back together after Offset interrupted Cardi’s set at Rolling Loud with a sign that read “TAKE ME BACK, CARDI.”
Beyond their personal relationship, Cardi B and Offset have also collaborated on multiple songs: ‘Um Yea’, ‘Drip’, ‘Who Want the Smoke?’, and ‘Clout’. ‘Drip’ is taken from Cardi’s sophomore album, Invasion of Privacy, which largely deals with Offset’s rumoured infidelity. “Of course, it’s going to have my Lemonade moments, my personal relationship moments,” she said in a recent interview with ELLE.
A Madonna biopic has officially been announced by Universal Pictures, and it’s going to be directed by the pop icon herself. Madonna is also co-writing the film with Diablo Cody (Juno).
“I want to convey the incredible journey that life has taken me on as an artist, a musician, a dancer — a human being, trying to make her way in this world,” Madonna said in a statement. “The focus of this film will always be music. Music has kept me going and art has kept me alive. There are so many untold and inspiring stories and who better to tell it than me. It’s essential to share the roller coaster ride of my life with my voice and vision.”
The project is being produced by Amy Pascal, who previsouly worked with Madonna on the 1992 film A League of Their Own. “This movie is an absolute labor of love for me,” Pascal said. “I have known Madonna since we made A League of Their Own together, and I can’t imagine anything more thrilling than collaborating with her and Diablo on bringing her true-life story to the big screen with [Universal executive] Donna [Langley] and our partners at Universal.”
Though Madonna will be heavily involved in the making of the film, she won’t be appearing in it, Deadline reports. The lead role has yet to be cast, but Julia Garner, Riley Keough, Haley Bennett, and Florence Pugh have all been rumoured for the part.
The biopic won’t be the artist’s directorial debut, as she previously helmed 2008’s Filth and Wisdom and 2011’s W.E. Her last album, Madame X, came out last year.
