Throughout the week, we update our Best New Songs playlist with the new releases that caught our attention the most, be it a single leading up to the release of an album or a newly unveiled deep cut. And each Monday, we round up the best new songs released over the past week (the eligibility period begins on Monday and ends Sunday night) in this best new music segment.
On this week’s list, we have Björk’s poignant seven-minute single ‘Ancestress’, a tribute to her late mother; Jamie xx’s infectious, Notting Hill Carnival-inspired new song ‘Kill Dem’; another stunner from Alvvays, ‘Belinda Says’, one of two tracks the band dropped from their upcoming album; Maya Hawke’s gorgeous Moss cut ‘Luna Moth’; ‘How It Ends’, the driving, Melina Duterte-assisted title track off TOLEDO’s debut album; ‘See You Better Now’, another soul-rousing preview of Wild Pink’s upcoming album, which features a guitar solo from J Mascis; and ‘Ghost Story’, a climactic, evocative highlight from Jackie Cohen’s latest album Pratfall.
The War on Drugs have released the deluxe edition of their 2021 album I Don’t Live Here Anymore. It features two previously unreleased songs, ‘Oceans of Darkness’ – a track the band debuted on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon in October 2020 – and ‘Slow Ghost’. Take a listen below.
“One night in LA, while we were many months into working on what would be I Don’t Live Here Anymore, Dave [Hartley] uncovered a stripped down demo in my dropbox called ‘Oceans of Darkness,’ and insisted we try recording it,” bandleader Adam Granduciel explained in a statement. “We were frustrated and exhausted at the time, but we set up in a circle after dinner and worked it out as the tape was rolling. It’s rare that a song of ours could feel this complete after only a few takes, but it had all the desperation and urgency that we had been looking for. Ultimately I didn’t include it on the record because I couldn’t find a home for it among the other songs, but we’re happy we can share it with you now.”
Rihanna has been confirmed as the headlining performer at the 2023 Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show. It will mark Rihanna’s first public performance since she played at the 2018 Grammy Awards with DJ Khaled and Bryson Tiller. Earlier this week, it was rumored that Taylor Swift would be playing this year’s Super Bowl Halftime Show, but sources subsequently told TMZ that Swift had turned down the opportunity. Super Bowl LVII takes place on February 12, 2023 at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, with Apple Music replacing Pepsi as the show’s sponsor.
“Rihanna is a generational talent, a woman of humble beginnings who has surpassed expectations at every turn,” Roc Nation founder Jay-Z said in a statement. “A person born on the small island of Barbados who became one of the most prominent artists ever. Self-made in business and entertainment.”
“We are thrilled to welcome Rihanna to the Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show stage,” NFL head of music Seth Dudowsky stated. “We look forward to collaborating with Rihanna, Roc Nation and Apple Music to bring fans another historic Halftime Show performance.”
Over the course of one sweltering summer in the UK, Singaporean 17-year old Lily, fresh out of high school, is trapped in a confined whirlwind of familial drama with her abusive mother May at the center. Lily is doting and kind, bringing May her favorite drink, spoiled juice, to appease her and prevent another torment of rage that the family fears. When Lily starts having visions of her mother’s past, though, she begins to unravel and decipher May’s backstory and why she acts this way.
Julia, Lily’s sister, does anything to antagonize May, picking fights at the dinner table and provoking intense reactions, while Lewis, a helpful family friend, tries to get to the bottom of Lily’s visions. As the summer wears on and May grows more jealous and vengeful, Lily tries her best to stay out of her mother’s orbit, all the while figuring out what’s really behind her facade.
Our Culture sat down with Ella King to talk about her debut novel, her anti-trafficking work that inspired it, and the psychology behind generational trauma.
Congratulations on having your debut novel published! How do you feel with the immediate success it’s seen in the UK as well as the US?
Really, really good! It’s always a strange experience seeing your work out there and actually being read. Seeing people’s comments on it, I find it really really interesting, because some people ignore the racial aspect, but for others, it’s really important. I feel like it lands in different places with different people, and I think it’s interesting what people pick up on. It’s difficult to articulate it, to see it externalized.
The novel takes place over one claustrophobic summer, and I think the heat and confinement of time enhance the story. Usually summer is associated with freedom, but here it has a dampening effect on Lily.
Yeah, I think it contributes to this really strange liminal space which Lily wouldn’t usually have, this space right before she’s about to go to college where she has to focus on what her position is like within the family and how that’s likely to change. The catalyst of her change is this searing, hot summer — which we actually just had in the UK — but this melting pot of new family drama which propels all the characters into the most extreme versions of themselves. I think the weather, to that extent, reflects the extremities of the characters when they’re put into this strained family situation.
I liked that you used the phrase ‘liminal space’ — I thought that the premise is almost fairytale-like. Apart from the daughter having visions after giving her mother juice, she’s in these eccentric places, like the Royal Observatory Garden and a place called The Polar Explorer House. Was this intentional or just how the story took shape?
It’s so interesting that you picked up on that, because when I originally wrote a couple of these chapters, the reaction from early readers in the Faber Academy was that this was pure young adult magical realism, and I had to say, ‘No, it’s not, that wasn’t its intention.’ I had to pull back from some of those elements to make it really clear.
But those places you mentioned are actually real! I wrote a lot of it when I just had my first daughter, and I would be pushing the pram because she wouldn’t sleep, and everyday I would walk through my own surroundings and I’d see things like The Polar Explorer House, which is real! It’s beautiful and I’d walk past it all the time. I’d also go to Greenwich Park and there were all the different museums, including the Royal Observatory Garden. So they’re real, and actually all close to each other. I think I was more literal than people think I was. I wasn’t intending to be that clever about it!
I didn’t think it was too YA-oriented, but it did have this magical sheen over it that made it a bit outside of this world.
Yeah, that’s what I meant when I was saying before — I love when readers read into it. I just find that interpretation really interesting, because it isn’t what I thought when I was writing it. I love that when you write something, it takes shape beyond itself and it’s kind of fun to lose control, and for it to seep into other people’s thoughts.
Your other work as a lawyer and worker for domestic violence charities seemed to play a big role in this story, where we have this intense family story that’s oftentimes hard to hear about. Did your inspiration for the book follow the saying, “Write what you know?”
Yeah, it did. It really did. Lots of people ask me about the inspiration of the book, and I would probably say that the theme of intergenerational trauma is the key theme to the book. I was thinking about when I started really considering that theme, and it was quite a while back when I first started doing work for this and anti-human trafficking.
I was in Cambodia, in this small village supposed to be the epicenter of child sex trafficking. The charity had basically set up a school in the village and various establishments to try and end child sex trafficking. We were looking in a window of one of the schools they had set up, and one of the workers said, ‘50% of children are being trafficked.’ I was asking them why this was happening in this particular place, in this particular country, and the charity said this really strange line, which was that a mother had said, ‘If you love your daughter, sell her close, and if you don’t love your daughter, sell her far.’ They explained that this was a community and country that was under extreme post-traumatic stress. They had just gone through the Cambodian genocide, and they had witnessed these atrocities. These children who have witnessed these atrocities have become parents, and so they have normalized trauma. So selling their children was just not a big deal for them; they’ve seen so much.
When I came back to the UK and did some work with domestic violence survivors as well, I was seeing the same pattern. Even though it seemed extreme on the anti-trafficking side, it was really brought home on the domestic violence side as well. I really wanted to explore this slide from victim to perpetrator. I just don’t think that’s really understood or conveyed in media portrayals of abuse or domestic violence. I find the fact that we don’t talk about it enough interesting. Like, what are we doing in Western society that we think that this slide doesn’t happen? And we have this concept of what a ‘good victim’ is. In reality, this stuff happens all the time. I wanted to explore those things because I felt, particularly in fiction, there wasn’t this portrayal of abuse.
That’s so interesting — the book is obviously intense, but to hear it was based on a real-life sociological issue is something totally else. Let’s talk about May, the mother who embarasses her children in public, can turn on a person on the drop of a dime, and is prone to intense jealousy and rage. What inspired her? How did you write about a person so obviously flawed, but part of which is not their own doing?
I think because I’ve seen so many women that are like her. I was thinking recently about May when I was being interviewed by someone else — if you actually sat her down, and said to her, ‘What you’ve done is really really bad. Do you understand that?’ I don’t think she would at all. Because what had been done to her, she felt was just so much worse. She probably thinks she was a pretty good mother, because she hadn’t done those things. It’s about the normalization of trauma and violence, and how, to certain people, it can seem so normal that they don’t register they’re on this different scale of morality. May is obviously the antagonist, but she’s like the protagonist as well. The entire story is centered around her and discovering her trauma and how she confronts or doesn’t confront that in her own motherhood.
Several of the scenes literally had me with my jaw open, and I think it was smart to have the chapters stay fairly small in order to make each one a bit more palatable.
Oh, which ones?
Well, I just graduated from college, so the one scene where May insists on coming to Oxford with Lily, living in the same house, and then talking to people on the tour — my head was in my hands. If that happened to me, I’d be mortified. And, obviously, where she throws Lily out of the car. But were particular scenes ever too intense for you to write?
I don’t think the scenes themselves were that hard, because in the stuff that I heard, this kind of stuff happens all the time. What I found harder, actually, was the psychology behind it and the research I did with that. I had to take a lot of breathers, then, because actually seeing statistically how often this kind of thing happens and the effect that trauma has on the brain — it’s really interesting, but devastating. I don’t think we often connect psychology with the impact on the body and the physical impact it can have on someone. I was aware anecdotally of all these scenes, and how abuse can play out, but understanding how it had an impact on the brain was really hard.
One of the reasons why I introduced the character of Lewis is that I had read one of the main predictors of children coming out and breaking free of generational trauma is having a non-exploitative adult walking beside them and discussing what’s happening with them. I suddenly realized how important people like him are in breaking these cycles. It could be teachers, social workers, but having this adult that journeys with them is so important but also rare. That was one of the things that made me step back and go, ‘Wow. There’s so much that needs to be done.’
At first, we see May’s rage as this uncontrollable phenomenon, but it turns out to be somewhat explained due to how she grew up and the traumatic experience she had within her own household. Do you think she’s capable of change? Could Lily’s actions wake her up, so to speak?
Honestly, I think someone like May is unlikely to change. I don’t know. I sometimes think, ‘Is there too much damage?’ With someone like May, who was brought up in a time where therapists and counselors aren’t common, not familiar with inward introspection — I just think it’s very hard for people in that particular generation to feel the need or motivation to change. One of the questions I got asked in a different interview is ‘What happens to all these characters after the book ends?’ And I think May will just carry on. She’ll feel devastated that Lily isn’t there, because she’s a massive crutch for her, but she’ll probably repress everything that’s happened, just like she repressed her own childhood. It’s really weird talking about a character that doesn’t exist.
For sure. I think the familial dynamics were so intense, and it was heightened by this racial element that no three of the siblings are alike — Lily is more white, from her father, Julia takes after her mother and appears more Singaporean, and the brother is a mix of the two. May essentially covers up who Lily is with makeup in order to feel more connected to her, painting her to appear more Singaporean. How does this all interplay with Lily’s sense of identity?
That’s such an interesting observation — I think you’re right in how you’ve identified how the siblings match up to the parents. Lily is more like her dad, she is like a blank page that May can just project on. May likes that, obviously, and she uses that, but because she has such a difficult relationship with Charlie, the father, she also resents that. And that results in her trying to redefine who Lily is with her makeup, and saying things like ‘You’re the same as me.’ But the character closest to May is Julia, but May can’t stand her because they’re too alike and volatile. It’s interesting how the dynamics and the conflicts between the parents overspill into the children and how May reacts to the children. She hates Julia, and loves Lily, but hates that she loves her, so she paints her to be something new.
And finally, what’s next? Are you looking to explore similar themes in your writing or something totally different?
I think I’ll always be a bit of a trauma writer. I think it’s just because it’s so important and something I’m familiar with. My next novel is kind of a feminist Lolita. In the original, Humbert Humbert says that Lolita dies when she’s 17 in a car crash, but I always thought that to be Humbert trying to preserve her in this teenage form just before she turns into an adult. In my version, that’s all just fantasy in his head, and he comes out of jail and she’s in her 30s. She has children, and she meets him for reasons he doesn’t understand, for a journey of confrontation and revenge.
Pharoah Sanders, the revered American jazz saxophonist, has died at the age of 81. Sanders’ label, Luaka Bop, confirmed the news on Twitter, writing, “He died peacefully surrounded by loving family and friends in Los Angeles earlier this morning. Always and forever the most beautiful human being, may he rest in peace.” A cause of death has not been revealed.
Born Farrell Sanders on October 13, 1940 in Arkansas, Sanders’ career began when he moved to Oakland, California in 1959, where he attended Oakland Junior College and first met John Coltrane. After relocating to New York in 1961, he practiced with Sun Ra, who is said to have encouraged him to adopt the nickname “Pharoah”, but experienced intermittent homelessness. In 1965, Sanders became a member of John Coltrane’s band and went on to play on multiple Coltrane albums over the next two years, including 1965’s Ascension and 1966’s Meditations, as well as A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle, which was recorded a few months after Meditations but was only issued by Impulse! Records last year.
A key figure in the spiritual jazz movement, Sanders worked with numerous influential artists across the decades, including Don Cherry, Kenny Garrett, Norman Connors, Tisziji Muñoz, McCoy Tyner, Ornette Coleman, and Randy Weston. He also collaborated with Alice Coltrane on her seminal 1971 album Journey in Satchidananda and 1968’s A Monastic Trio. He released his first solo album, Pharoah’s First, in 1965, following it up with Tauhid in 1966.
In recent years, Sanders reissued several of his previous records, including Tauhid, Jewels of Thought, Deaf Dumb Blind (Summun Bukmaun Umyun), and Live In Paris (1975). His most recent LP was Promises, a collaborative album with Floating Points and the London Symphony Orchestra, which arrived in 2021.
After learning of the jazz legend’s death, countless friends and collaborators took to social media to pay tribute, including Sun Ra Arkestra, Nigel Godrich, Badbadnotgood, Low, Strand of Oaks, and Yasmin Williams. Sam Shepherd, aka Floating Points, wrote on Instagram: “My beautiful friend passed away this morning. I am so lucky to have known this man, and we are all blessed to have his art stay with us forever. Thank you Pharoah.”
We are devastated to share that Pharoah Sanders has passed away. He died peacefully surrounded by loving family and friends in Los Angeles earlier this morning. Always and forever the most beautiful human being, may he rest in peace. ❤️ pic.twitter.com/pddaztyTLi
Toronto’s MorMor has announced his debut album, Semblance, which will arrive on November 4. To accompany the announcement, he’s unveiled the new single ‘Chasing Ghosts’, along with an animated visual by Otto Tang. Check it out and find the album artwork and tracklist below.
Talking about the ‘Chasing Ghosts’ video, MorMor said in a statement: “I felt that this character was from a similar world to the one that we had built for ‘Don’t Cry’; therefore I decided to use this medium to tell the story. There’s a certain limitlessness when it comes to animation that I deeply appreciate. It is possible to create worlds that are not confined to the same kind of logic that exists outside of this medium.”
Semblance will include the previously released singles ‘Seasons Change’ and ‘Far Apart’. MorMor’s Some Place Else EP came out in 2019.
Semblance Cover Artwork:
Semblance Tracklist:
1. Dawn
2. Seasons Change
3. Far Apart
4. Here It Goes Again
5. Days End
6. Crawl
7. Chasing Ghosts
8. Don’t Cry
9. Lifeless
10. Better at Letting Go
11. Quiet Heart
The Smashing Pumpkins stopped by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last night (September 23), performing their latest single ‘Beguiled’. Watch it below.
‘Beguiled’ is the first preview of the band’s upcoming project ATUM, a 33-track, three-act rock opera that acts as the sequel to 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness and 2000’s Machina/The Machine Of God. Act 1 will be released on November 15, with Act 2 to follow on January 31, and the final act arriving on April 21 along with a special edition box set.
Los Angeles singer-songwriter Jackie Cohen has been making records for half a decade, releasing her first solo EP, Tacoma Night Terror, Pt. 1: I’ve Got the Blues, in 2018. A native of the San Fernando Valley, Cohen moved to New York to study literature and creative writing at Marymount Manhattan College, using the poetry she had been writing in classes to experiment with songwriting. Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado and the Lemon Twigs’ Brian and Michael D’Addario co-produced her debut EP, which was then paired with the Tacoma Night Terror Part 2: Self-Fulfilling Elegy EP a few months later. Another full-length, the playful and vibrant Zagg, arrived the following year on Spacebomb Records.
After completing her tour in support of Zagg, like many of us at the start of the pandemic, Cohen found herself in a precarious situation. She was going through what she describes as a “horrible personal crisis,” and with no way to fight the pain, saw no choice but to disguise and crawl into it. Without the backing of a label, she started working on a batch of songs with no expectation that they would ever see the light of day. She ended up recording her third record, titled Pratfall and released today via Earth Libraries, with just two collaborators, her husband Rado and engineer Rias Reed, between October 2020 and January 2021 at Sonora Recorders. The result is an album at once haunted and bewitching, full of lush instrumentation and violent imagery that Cohen dives right into, allowing herself to be spiteful and irreverent and longing and hurt. “If I use my eyes/ I might recognize a bridge that’s been burnt,” she sings on ‘Some Days’, but in that moment, all she can do is stare at the flames.
We caught up with Jackie Cohen for this edition of our Artist Spotlight interview series to talk about growing up in the San Fernando Valley, the process of making Pratfall, the title of the album, and more.
How are you feeling with the release of the album coming up?
I’m really nervous, honestly. I’m nervous in a different way than I’ve ever been before, putting music out. It’s been three years, and it feels really strange coming back. I think a lot of people have been feeling that way, like there’s this huge gap, and you don’t really know what happened. Before the pandemic started, I was sort of in high gear, things had just started rolling for me. And I was kind of deciding, “What’s next? I’ve been touring my ass off for a year and a half, where do we go from here?” And then everything just stopped. And trying to pick back up a couple years later, and way more mentally ill [laughs], feels really weird and I don’t really know what to expect or how to feel about it. But I am excited to finally be getting this record out, because when I was making it, I was like, “Hell yeah, this is the best record I’ve made.” And so it’s this really weird feeling of, I’m very excited to share these songs, but I’m also really scared of putting it out.
The studio where you recorded Pratfall was just a 30-minute drive from the San Fernando Valley, where you grew up. Around the time you were making the album, and especially when you wrote ‘The Valley’, had you already been reflecting on your upbringing?
I think the reason why I felt compelled to write that song at that time was because I was suddenly stuck at home for the first time in many years. I grew up in the Valley, I went to school right away in New York, and before I was done graduating, I’d already started touring. When I left New York, I did technically move back to the Valley, but it was more of a crash pad than a home experience. I was touring so much for so many years, and there were always like nine dudes sleeping on the floor, and there was a studio in the backyard. And so we’d go for a couple months and then come back for a month, maybe I would get a holiday job or something, and then we’d be gone again. And it wasn’t really until the pandemic started that I had to sit around and be at home, in my hometown, for an extended period of time, and consider the possibility that I may be there for a while.
Right before it had started, I took a job at a bakery right around the corner from where my parents live, and I worked there for a couple of months. And I was trying to figure out what my next moves were. I had these delusions of becoming a baker, I thought I was going to go learn to be a baker at this bakery. But really, all they let me do was make coffee and work the cash register. My parents would show up and pretend to be anonymous customers, just when they were bored. [laughs] So I went from never stopping, being in constant motion all the time, we were back and forth internationally so many times in just a couple of years, and then suddenly I had to stop and be very still for a long time. It was sort of the first time I stopped and thought about where I came from.
You use the phrase “home experience.” Would you say you’re closer to understanding what that means for you?
I definitely understand a lot more about myself than I think I thought I did. Not everyone feels this way, probably, but I think a lot of people think that they did a good job of, like, not turning into their parents, or somehow you escaped the generational curse or whatever, the culture that you’re trying to get away from when you’re really young. A bunch of things happened over the past couple of years in my life, and I started therapy, like many have. And you find out that you’re like 99% made up of all the things you thought you’d avoided. You didn’t escape it, you didn’t avoid it. You’ve made all of your decisions throughout your entire life from a mindset that developed in your childhood home. So this year has been a really big year for me coming to terms with the fact that all of my decisions did not come from where I thought they were coming from. [laughs] I did not outsmart my genes. I did not outsmart my childhood.
Given the fictional nature of a lot of your lyrics, was it daunting to speak so directly from your experience on ‘The Valley’?
All of my songs are a little bit fictional and a little bit nonfictional. Not everything that I write is completely confessional, but it’s all based in real feelings and real experiences, often an amalgamated experience of many things that sort of add up to an emotion that is true. For this song, it’s not veiled at all, and I was legitimately scared to write some of it. I sort of asked my sister permission to use some of the verbiage that I used, because some of it’s direct quotes. And I felt really scared of putting it out or showing my parents – my parents always have something to say about whatever it is I’m doing, they always offer me their opinion. And I was really afraid of offending the family, even though it’s a tender song. I don’t think that I’m being mean, but I still felt weird about directly addressing my sister and my parents. But everyone really liked it. My sister thought it was really funny to talk about, you know, the family nose job culture. And my dad sent me a long text after the song came out – my dad’s really funny, he texts in long paragraphs, and he wrote this nice message about how he thought it was nice poetry or something. And I was like, “Okay, phew. I’m not exiled. Everything is gonna be fine.” [laughs]
The line that I feel like sums up all of it is, “The whole thing makes me dizzy.” At that point, it feels like you’re not sure if that whole thing is the past coming back to haunt you or the uncertainty of the future, or if it’s the present.
It’s really shocking sometimes when you realize how you’ve got a body part in so many different points in time in your life. People are always talking about being present, it’s like you find your peace by centering and becoming present in the present moment. But I don’t know, I feel like I’ve got my foot stuck in an elevator in the past, and then I’m also just attached to a couple years ago. That’s how people feel things and think about things. It’s not linear. And it can be really stressful, to feel your entire life all at once. But it’s also kind of important to do it at some point.
It’s not surprising to me that that’s one of the more collaborative songs on the album. All the different artists that you brought in – Natalie Mering of Weyes Blood, Shaun Fleming, and Marly Ludwig, who directed the video – are also from the Valley. I’m curious if you spent any time talking about your experience together.
The thing about people from the Valley is that we never shut up about the Valley. [laughs] We’re all completely obsessed with talking about the Valley and being from the Valley. It’s such a weird little town, it’s a strange area. And it’s right below Los Angeles, so we’re also really defensive of the Valley, because kids who are from LA proper hate the valley, like the Valley’s uncool or whatever. Valley kids are like, “Absolutely not, LA is horrible. We love the Valley.” And we spend all of our time talking about, like, little restaurants and frozen yoghurt shops that we’re not sure if they existed or not, but like, “No, we both remember that, that was real.” And, “There is a little restaurant that also had open mics, did you ever go?” “Yeah, absolutely, I remember going on the weekends after soccer practice” or whatever. We love our landmarks. We love the experience of growing up in that weird little bubble. It seems almost out of date. Everything in the Valley feels pretty unchanged. And so, getting all of those Valley kids in a room together to just talk about, like, a park that we all went to and probably bumped into each other at some point before we knew each other. It’s really nice to know some people who remember those things.
I think that the only reason why I’m even in music to begin with is because I like having community around me. I’ve been told a few times, like, “Maybe you should just work at a summer camp if that’s really all you’re after, you just want to be surrounded by your friends.” [laughs] But I think that because everything has sort of been like a summer camp experience for me, I think it’s made my records really fun.
Speaking of collaboration, I love that Peanut is credited with “rhythmic bark barks” on the title track.
[laughs] It’s so cute. We were at this studio – Peanut’s actually right here – and she was just a puppy, just a little baby girl. She was so small when we got her, I could carry her around in a tote bag. And she came to the studio every day. She’s in the background of so many indie rock records that came out of that studio, it’s crazy. And there was this big parking lot outside, gated off, and it was right off of a major Boulevard in Los Feliz, so there’s always people walking by and cars and a lot of commotion. And she’d go out there and bark, she’d just be losing her mind. And we couldn’t catch her, she was going through her rebellious puppy phase. We spent hours and hours over the course of this record just the three of us triangulating her in the parking lot, trying to catch her because she would just be out there barking her head off. And I think it’s so funny that on that song, we did not have to manipulate the barking at all. She was barking perfectly in time. And I feel like like when I tell people that, there’s a little bit of eyebrow-raising, like, “Really, you didn’t shift it at all?” No, she was singing along. [laughs] She’s gifted.
I mean, she’s been in the background of so many indie rock records.
I know. She would stand on the board and ride the faders, you know? She’s an indie rock dog.
I believe you, I’m not going to question that further. What got you thinking about the title of the album, Pratfall?
I think I decided on the title after I wrote the song ‘Pratfall’. I use that term in a lyric. And when I wrote that song, I kind of realized that that had been the theme of my life during that time, was just trying to learn how to fall down gracefully, or in a way that would not completely break my body. I went through a couple of years where I did take a pretty gnarly fall in my life, and I didn’t really want anyone to know. I didn’t want to be perceived as being injured or messed up or of having made a mistake. Pratfall means a lot of different things, but for me, at that moment, it kind of just meant trying to make a bad fall look intentional, so that people don’t panic. Because people get really upset and nervous when they see someone get hurt. And it’s always sort of been my role in my life, to be a person that keeps it together for everybody. And when I couldn’t do that anymore, I spent a lot of time just sort of limping around, trying to act like nothing had happened.
I also wanted to make something good out of it. I was trying to work through it by making the record. And so, I had this idea of like, “Yeah, I fell down on my ass really hard, but I’m gonna make it look good.” And that was sort of the thesis of the record, like, “Ow, but ta-dah!” So it worked in some ways, and in other ways it didn’t work. In other ways, I just didn’t tend to a really big boo-boo for a while. [laughs]
There’s a comedic aspect to the pratfall, and in the context of this metaphor, it makes me think about how a lot of times, when when you’re going through that fall, there’s an urge to kind of laugh it off. To make it seem like a joke, which isn’t healthy. But the relief from the actual rise can also feel funny in a good, cathartic way.
Yeah, sometimes something is just so messed up that it becomes hilarious. There’s often comedy and tragedy. I’ve always done my best to be silly or funny about the things that are stressful in my my life. I always try to laugh it off. And it is funny because the pratfall is like a slapstick term, and what was going on in my life, it did feel like slapstick. [laughs] It felt ridiculous. It’s like the entire world had just turned into a farce. And I think that these are also my least funny lyrics. For a long time, in my other records, I feel like I’ve always been sort of jokey, silly about it, and I think that I did hide behind humour a lot of the time. And it’s funny because in this one, I was just laughing at the ridiculousness of it the entire time, but the lyrics aren’t very funny. There’s, like, one funny lyric.
But there is something about the way you kind of deliver the lyrics vocally that often brings a kind of playfulness, almost a wickedness to it. Because you’ve said that a lot of your songwriting is lyric-focused in terms of the process, I’m curious how you went about mapping out some of the more animated vocal performances on the album, especially on a song like ‘Two Days’.
‘Two Days’ specifically is a funny example, because that’s a scratch vocal. It’s the only scratch vocal on the record, and it’s the first song that we recorded. I had spent the most time plunking that one out on piano, and I played it the most amount of times, because I had written it pretty early on in the process. That one specifically has an interesting energy, because I wasn’t expecting it to be a final vocal. I was just laying down a layer so that we could build around it. I remember I was sitting on the couch, and Peanut had just had just been spayed. She’s a sensitive little puppy and she was sore, and I was sitting on the couch and kind of icing her tummy. Rado came and set up a mic so I could sit down on the couch and hold her and be icing her, and we just laid it down really quick. I think because I wasn’t really thinking about it all that much, I was just singing the song, we never got a better take of it. We tried a couple of times, and when I started thinking about it too much, I couldn’t deliver it again.
What I was trying to do for most of the record was sing the songs true to heart, how I imagined saying them. So I think that they’re animated in sort of the same way that I talk, and the way that I talk is like, I talk with my hands and I talk with a lot of affect. When I would go into the studio, I would warm up in my car on the drive there, and I usually had like a 15 or 20-minute drive. And I would listen to Judy Garland or Barbra Streisand and sing along. I love Funny Girl. I think that Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl probably has the most musical influence on me of anything. [laughs] She’s so silly and goofy, and I like that word you used, wicked. And I was also listening to a lot of Kate Bush and Tori Amos.
I think that all the songs in this record, I’m very much talking to someone. And so my vocal performances aren’t super vibey, it’s not vibey music. In a way it’s very conversational, and it’s also a little bit – I don’t like the word theatrical, but I like singers who are trying to communicate a feeling and a story through the performance. I had a lot of feelings going on when I was making this sucker, and I was angry. There’s a lot of anger in this record, and the anger comes paired with a little bit of comedy.
It feels conversational, but it’s also confrontational at times.
It’s a highly confrontational record. [laughs]
‘Ghost Story’ comes to mind, specifically the line, “He tells me I’m a teacher, I tell him he’s a fraud.” Can you talk about how that song came about?
[dog barks] Hey, Peach, no barking. That’s my other dog – she’s confrontational. So, ‘Ghost Story’ is the first song I wrote for the record. I wrote it in December of 2019, and I wasn’t even really writing for a record yet. The record is all about this time period that began in 2019, where my life started breaking down a little bit – well, not a little bit, a lot, in a lot of different ways. And I almost feel like I wrote that song kind of subconsciously, because it makes a lot more sense to me now than it did when I wrote it. I was going through something where I kind of knew that I was in a bad situation, but wasn’t really ready to admit it. But it’s a weird moment where something bad happens, I know that that happened, but I’m still in shock and disbelief and I’m just going to write that off as as a mistake. It doesn’t fit the rest of the story, so I’m just going to set it aside.
Over time, it’s become really clear to me that I understood more about what was going on in my life than I was ready to admit when I was writing the songs. Some of those lyrics, it almost feels like me screaming at me to listen to the content of those lyrics, and to take note and react. Because I was writing these songs that are deeply confrontational, and there’s a lot of grief and sorrow and shock and hurt. The record is essentially a record about betrayal and grief and mourning, and I didn’t really know that until way after the record was done.
Was there a specific moment where you felt that, the weight of the fall and all those emotions?
I think that it felt the heaviest when it was finished, and I didn’t feel better. There’s also a lot of pleading or bargaining going on in the record. I feel like a lot of the lyrics, I’m trying to make someone understand. And I think that I had all these high hopes for this record, like, This is how I become understood. And once I’ve explained myself, once I’ve said what I need to say, and I’m gonna say it beautifully, and in an interesting way, and with the most interesting arrangements I’ve ever made – like, look, I’m going to grow as an artist, and I’m going to grow as a person, and it’s going to be such a powerful statement, everything is going to feel better and everything will be healed and back on track, and it’s gonna right the ship.
And it didn’t. I made this record to fix my life in a lot of ways, and it didn’t fix my life. I like it. [laughs] I think it’s a good record. But I finished it in January of 2021, everything was said and done, and I was happy with it. I listened to it a million times, I shared it with a lot of people and everybody liked it. And my life didn’t – nothing happened. And that’s when it felt the heaviest. I had been riding on this idea that finishing this record was going to put everything back in place. And I realized it was going to take a lot more work and introspection than that to get there.
Music can’t do that, no matter how passionate you are about it.
Well, I think my intentions were just kind of deluded. You can definitely do a lot of healing in yourself through music. It’s one of the best healing tools we have, making music and expressing yourself. But you can’t change things that happened. You can’t change the past. You can’t make someone else understand you. If you’re gonna heal, it has to be between you and you. You can’t count on somebody understanding what you are saying and that’s going to fix everything. And I think that I really didn’t understand that. So, now all I do all day is get square with me. It’s so much better than trying to get square with the universe.
Looking back on the process of making the album, what are you most proud of yourself for?
I’m really proud of making this record even though I was fairly convinced I was never going to release music again. After I finished all that touring, my campaign for my last record was definitely wrapped up. I didn’t know what was going to happen next. My life was sort of falling apart in a weird way and it was really confusing. And I was working at that bakery and my parents were coming in to say, “Hello, miss!” [laughs] And I had to make a lot of decisions about my life really quickly. And then the pandemic started, I’d made all these decisions and suddenly the world froze. And then a couple of months later, I got dropped my by my label. There’s like a whole other record of demos that I made early pandemic that I don’t know if I’ll ever do anything with them – I don’t even know if they’re any good. I had made all of these decisions that were pretty hard to sit with in frozen time.
I was dropped by label, no one was going to ask me to make music again. I thought that my career was over, but I kept writing all the songs because I didn’t know what else to do. I was trapped in my house with my piano and nothing else. I spent a lot of the pandemic completely alone, and I wrote all these songs by fall 2020, when I decided, “Hey, I think I want to make this record.” And Rado said, “Yeah, let’s record it.” I think that the reason why I liked this record so much is because I made it for nobody. I didn’t think it was going to come out. I didn’t think anybody was going to hear it. I made it completely to taste. I like this record because I made it without the pressure of wanting someone else to like it. And I am really glad that I did that, because it’s the first time I’ve ever felt like this is exactly how I wanted it to sound.
Rado plays almost every instrument on the record, but a lot of the arrangements, I would sit on the floor by his feet with headphones on and he’d have headphones and we’d talk through it. And I’d tell him, like, “Remember this reference? Can we play it again, but with that in mind?” And we would just work out every little piece of it until it made me like laugh or smile. Every single part of the record is something that I like. So, I think I’m proud of myself for pouring so much love into something that I didn’t think was ever going to come out. It was just to make it.
Can you share one thing that inspires you about Rado, and also something that you think he finds inspiring about you?
I’ve been working with Rado and also watching him make records for other people for a million years now, and I think that he legitimately works from a place of wanting to make people’s dreams come true. There are a lot of producers out there who people go to because they do a certain thing, they have a certain sound, they have certain equipment or tricks that they do, and you go there because you want them to do that thing to your music. Rado is one of the only producers that I know who wants to see your idea all the way through. Which is really special for someone like me, who came in completely untrained, almost no experience. I didn’t pick up a guitar until I was 20. But I liked writing, I was an English major and I’ve been a poetry major. And Rado is the only person I’ve ever worked with who didn’t have this energy of like, “You don’t know what you’re doing, but I do. So I’m going to come up with all these ideas and I’m going to turn your lyrics into music.” He’s always had this way of respecting and carving out the vision with me, instead of imposing his own vision upon it. And also, I love his visions. I think he’s one of the most playful musicians and writers that I’ve ever met.
I think that what he likes about working with me is that I’m not primarily a musician. And so, everything is kind of new and exciting and fun for me. And. I don’t know what I’m doing. [laughs] I mean, I say that now, I’ve been saying that for like five years, and I’ve been making my own records for five years. So, yeah, I know a little bit more about what I’m doing now. But, like, I didn’t go to music school. And I think it’s fun for him to work with someone who has ideas that don’t necessarily conform to songwriting form all the time. I think that when we collaborate, it does have a unique thing.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Almost every small business owner aims to increase their market share to improve sales and reap better profits. But to make this possible, it’s important to adopt the right market penetration tactics to push your products and services to more potential buyers. A market penetration strategy is any activity allowing you to break into any target market. One peculiar thing about a strong strategy is that it allows you to identify ways to push your product or services into a market filled with competing products with a significant market share.
This requires a good understanding of that target market and the existing products and services you must compete with. So, are you looking to increase the growth and sales of your product or service? Is there a target market you wish you could penetrate despite the presence of competitors? Then, here are six essential market penetration tactics you can use.
Consider augmented promotions
There’s a reason why businesses invest a lot in product promotions and advertising – because they work. In fact, the more you promote a product, the better results you can expect. Advertising, for example, can work wonders for product and brand awareness. But that in no way means throwing money into advertising campaigns, as that may backfire. The most important thing here is to have a well-thought-through plan, factoring in your long-term and short-term business needs and your budget. Also, consider the information you put into your advertising campaign, as a competitor can easily ruin an easy-to-counter product campaign. It’s also important to pair your product or service with promotional products that your target customers or market will find useful. You can work with a supplier of promotional products – one experienced in making a wide range of high-quality promotional products.
In exploring market penetration tactics, small business owners may find innovative promotional strategies effective, such as incorporating unique branded merchandise like custom socks from Custom Sock Lab to enhance brand visibility and engagement with their target audience.
Try adjusting your price
Price adjustment is one of the most commonly used strategies to penetrate a new market. In most cases, business owners reduce their prices considerably to attract a potential buyer’s attention. But this strategy requires judicious application as over-adjusting your price could lead to adverse results. So, before lowering the prices of your products and services, you need to analyze your competitor’s products to ensure that yours do not fall short in terms of quality. This way, lowering your price a little can make your products more appealing. But if you have a comparatively inferior product in terms of quality, your price alterations will barely have any results, as your product will still look inferior. And, speaking of product quality, the next strategy is also important.
Improve the quality of your product
If your product already falls short of your competitor’s in terms of quality, penetrating a market filled with competitors will be extra difficult. So, take the time to compare your product or service with those of your competitor and identify which areas of yours you need to improve to give you a comparative advantage. Next, market or advertise your improvements to your target customer in an effort to convince them about what makes your product better.
However, communicating your product’s advantages can sometimes be enough to do the trick with investing in any major product improvement. That means, even if your product falls short of quality, find other advantages about your product that you can market. For example, you can improve your packaging instead to make it more visually appealing. The truth is, most customers will pick a product for the first time simply because of appeal and not necessarily checking whether the product proves itself or not. But of course, if your product fails to prove itself after a customer purchases it, you’ll ikey lose that customer.
Look for new distribution channels
Adding new distribution channels is another effective market penetration strategy. And it focuses more on product growth. Here, instead of sticking with only one distributing channel, you look for new opportunities to give your product more visibility in your target market. For example, if you currently distribute only to retail shops, adding a new distributing channel could mean adding telemarketing, email marketing, online deliveries, and so on.
Another way to add more distribution channels to improve visibility is to make your products available at the foot of your target customer. Creating a stand at trade fairs is a good example. With this, it’s easier to directly meet potential buyers and showcase your products to them.
To boost your brand visibility, you can launch a postcard marketing campaign. Postcards allow businesses to engage with potential customers in a unique and personal way. Things like crafting a compelling headline, using high-quality images, and proper use of white space are all ways to make your postcard stand out. Additionally, you need to create an attention-grabbing call to action to get your customers to respond to your offers. Include your contact information or another specific way for the reader to act. QR codes can be very useful here. Make sure you add your company logo and colors to impress your business brand into prospective customers or clients.
Enter a new market in a different geography or location
Sometimes, your local target market may be too choked up with competitors to penetrate. In such a case, you can consider looking elsewhere for the same market but in a different geographical location. For example, instead of trying to penetrate the US market (if you’re a US business), consider focusing more on buyers in Mexico or Canada, who your competitors are yet to reach. You can also choose to go global, taking advantage of online solutions, international delivery services, etc. But before you consider entering any new geographical market, find out if you need to make any modifications to your packaging, prices, product, etc., to suit that new market. Also, ensure that your product meets all local guidelines and regulations in that market to avoid landing in legal hot waters.
Understand the risks involved in market penetration
Entering a new segment of the market is always risky. Therefore, before you consider any strategy, take the time to understand the risks, know your target market, and assess your product to identify how best to get the desired results. Also, it would be best if you were certain about your expectations, budget, and penetration strategy best suits your product or service. That means conducting in-depth research and creating a plan.
But probably the most important thing is to know and understand the needs of your target customers. That means knowing what they want in a product like yours, what requirements they have, and how best to communicate the benefits of your product, service, or brand to them.
“I hadn’t told anyone about it for 30 years,” confesses Marcus Mumford about the gut-wrenching source of inspiration behind his solo album – the sexual abuse he experienced as a child. The earnest 10-track debut project follows the journey of Mumford and Son’s lead singer after his acknowledgment of trauma during therapy. (self-titled) is a poignant artistic outpour addressing the whirlwind of betrayal, agony, fury, and gradual acceptance that accompanies confronting the darkest parts of your past.
Listening to the tender, even fragile murmur of ‘Cannibal’, the sudden heaviness of the lyrics might come as a surprise; there is no beating around the bush in (self-titled). An unmistakable anger permeates the opener, with the abuser addressed directly: “You took the first slice of me and you ate it raw/ Ripped it in with your teeth and your lips like a cannibal.” Confrontational and fearless, the track also sees the singer at his most vulnerable, contemplating the overwhelming wave of pain that devours you after the initial verbalisation of an unspeakable experience. “But when I began to tell/ It became thе hardest thing/ I ever said out loud,” chants Mumford. It’s the first of many lyrics illustrating how working through trauma doesn’t only spark suffering – it allows for the healing process to finally start. “Is this where we begin again?” Mumford asks on the slow-paced ‘Better Angels’ right before the cacophonous post-chorus kicks in, hinting at the possibility of a fresh chapter. ‘How’ even sees the singer explore his relationship with forgiveness amidst subdued strums and Brandi Carlile’s charming harmonies. “And I have reckoned with what you’ve taken from me/ And I killed that liar in my head,” Mumford belts in the pre-chorus, before expressing, in a way at once effortless and arresting, “But I forgive you now.”
The urgency of ‘Grace’, along with the song’s musical experimentation, renders it one of the highlights of the project. With the avalanche of guitars and the powerful beat of drums, at first the song seems to play with the theme of grace in a distinctly different manner to the Mumford and Sons hit ‘After the Storm’. The track, inspired by Mumford’s conversation with his mum, who only learned about his story through her first listen of ‘Cannibal’, is infused with a comforting folk-rock vibrancy, offering a glimpse of positivity without ignoring the complexities of coping with trauma. Mumford opens his heart to the prospect of eventual recovery: “There will come a time/ When it won’t feel just like living it over and over […] I hear there’s healing just around this corner”. Echoing the ‘After the Storm’ lyric “There will come a time/ You’ll see, with no more tears,” the two tracks, written more than a decade apart, reveal themselves to be wonderfully intertwined, and both stand testament to Mumford’s graceful frame of mind – even in moments where it would be the last thing expected of him.
At times, the album feels underwhelming in its repetitiveness (the refrain of the otherwise compelling ‘Prior Warning’, for instance, or the final section of haunting Clairo-collaboration ‘Dangerous Game’) and certain vague, forgettable choruses (‘Better Angels’, ‘Go in Light’). It’s a shame, given the precision and poetic talent that shines through in Mumford’s verses, revealing itself in ‘Prior Warning’ in a neatly incorporated reference to John 8:6: “You knew I couldn’t answer plainly/ Then you knеlt down on the ground like you were drawing in the sand/ And I surrender, I surrender now.” ‘Only Child’, the most stripped-back song of the project with only gentle guitar and piano providing background to the vocals, tastefully explores metaphorical lyricism, embedding delicate introspective and confessional moments: “I have nothing to show for the medals I’ve earned/ And maybе I mind”.
Marcus Mumford’s (self-titled) accomplishes much in relatively few tracks; the album is at once grounded in and helps make sense of the many faces of trauma. It takes the listener on a journey of an unfinished but promising search for peace, all the while skillfully drawing from folk, rock, and electronic pools of music with magnetic performances. Confirming what we already knew about Mumford’s creativity and storytelling abilities, the record also invites us to view the artist in a new, refreshingly unfiltered light. Perhaps most importantly, though, it demonstrates that it is never too late to start navigating and letting go of seemingly impossible burdens. Despite being the subject matter of so many tracks, the abuser is so small by the end of the album – and Mumford’s courage is monumental.
