10 from March

Big thanks to Kimmie for this rec – she killed it this month with 3 recs coming on to March 2018.

Are You is a mid-tempo jam that’s all about seduction. It’s peppered with a head-bopping beatboxer-like beat, high chorus synths that hit like nails down a back, a male voice (we’ll call him Mr. “Okay”) that’s interwoven in the song and Julia Michaels’ vocals sung in a smoky, coy register that rises up only to punctuate the following lines with an “ooh”:

“Ooh, it’s getting so hot in here, ooh / I keep making it crystal clear, ooh”

It’s a well-produced song that’s happy, coy, and seductive all at once. It is from the Fifty Shades soundtrack after all!

I was immediately drawn to Lost in Japan by the intro piano melody (also the album art is gorgeous). I looked at my phone to double check that this was indeed a Shawn Mendes song, and yes, it was. Of course, I could have just waited to 0:23 in the song when the piano clears out, the beat comes in, and Shawn’s vocals hit but I’m impatient.

This song is jazzy and I dig it. The piano and guitar here team up to bring both jazz and funk to the track, the simple piano melodies are overlaid to brighten the whole thing up and then there’s that shaker! The shaker gets layered into the percussion and has a smoking effect on the song – suddenly it’s as if we’re in a small jazz bar with cigarettes hazing up the place.

In conclusion, good song.

Gabby on the rec here – merci!

This song is just clean. There’s a beat that ticks high here (like clinking on a whiskey glass) and adds an interesting layer to percussion mostly dominated by drums. This track drips in confidence as all three of Drake, Rihanna and Pharrell kill their verses.

Rihanna’s verse in particular is noteworthy. With lines like:

“Tell the paparazzi, “Get the lens right”/ Got the window down, top, blowin’ la / Got the hazard on, only doin’ five / You can catch me, Ri, in the new La Ferrar'”

Swag. She’s been playing with genres now for the last couple of years – from pop to hip hop to rap. Her evolution is fascinating – Swiss knife of female vocals.

When I first heard this song, it was Jessie Reyez’s unique vocals that got me. She pours emotion into each of her lyrics. Her voice in this song is so unrestrained, painful at moments, angry at others, and soft when she wants.

The intro lyrics:

“Figures / You say sorry once and you think it’s enough / I got a lineup of girls and lineup of guys / Begging for me just to give ’em a try”

Sets the stage of a couple going through problems. Jessie’s a hot commodity and could get with a lineup of men and women! But she’s held by something:

“Figures / I’m willing to stay / ‘Cause I’m sick for your love”

I love the use of the title word throughout the song: Figures. It’s such an English expression: “Hmmph, figures.” “Ugh, figures.” What is even the subject or the object here? This is a uniquely English phrase to me and rather hard to translate into other languages. It’s equally dynamic in the song, where it’s meaning shifts dependent on the verse.

In the intro, “figures” infuses a sense of being fed up with the state of the relationship – it’s an angry, huffing “figures”, but then right after, with “Figures / I’m willing to stay” there’s a sense of giving up, of helplessness.

This song pokes at a theme that I find rather interesting: the equilibrium in a relationship between two people. Jessie sings from a point of anger at her lover:

“Wish I could hurt you back / Love, what would you do if you couldn’t get me back? / You’re the one who’s gonna lose / Something so special, something so real / Tell me boy, how in the fuck would you feel? / If you couldn’t get me back / That’s what I wish that I could do to you, you”

This verse is so telling. To start, this is not how a functioning relationship should work, right? You shouldn’t “wish” you “could hurt them back”. The implication in hurting someone back is that you’ve been hurt, that you’re hurting. But why would someone hurt their lover?

I think a perfect equilibrium in a relationship – where each person is equally invested in the relationship, is equally in love with the other person – is hard to replicate in reality. If you think about it like a graph with two lines, each representing each person’s love for the other over time, it strikes me as something that will hover around a certain average line but that will still bounce up and down, only intersecting at brief periods of time. Perhaps in marriage the two lines equalize a bit more. I suppose this seems sort of natural and in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really affect the relationship terribly if the two involved are just chilling in that 45-55% give and take equilibrium. But when things get out of whack worse, like a 65-35% split for example, you get Jessie Reyez singing this song, Figures.

Because when the relationship is out of balance, you have someone feeling hurt that the other person doesn’t care as much, doesn’t love as much. That’s a sad feeling, painful. And on the other end is the knowledge that you don’t love the other person as much as they love you. And that’s sad too. Reyez epitomizes the first variety here in Figures.

To rebalance things, she threatens leaving “love, what would you do if you couldn’t get me back?” She waves this threat over her lover in an attempt to get the hurting to stop, to get him to pay more attention, care more.

Her anger culminates in the line: “Tell me boy, how in the fuck would you feel?”

And yet, this track isn’t dominated by an angry tone, but rather a melancholic one because in the end she’s too in love to leave, she’s stuck:

“Figures / I’m sick for your love / I just can’t get enough”

One of my favorite things in music is storytelling. You see a lot of storytelling in country music, and that’s exactly what Greatest Love Story is: a story of a couple from high school separated by life and college who eventually find each other again and get married.

The song is sweet and warm – the low, soft percussion, the guitars humming in major keys, LANCO’s rustic country vocals. The motif here and the glue in the storytelling is this verse:

“Cause I was gonna be your forever / You were gonna be my wife”

In the first verse, its sung from the point of view of high school kids making big plans about life, not “knowing any better.” 

The next time around, LANCO repurposes it for use during those nights he spent drinking with her away at college: “When I was gonna be your forever / You were gonna be my wife” It’s nostalgic here, regretful.

The final time around though, LANCO’s lover’s returned. They’ve met up after a long four years and found that “deep down you had the same old feelings for me”.  And so this time, the motif is a marriage proposal:

“And I said I wanna be your forever / So baby, will you be my wife”

AhhhHhhhHhhhHh. What a sweet song.

This is such a cool, funky jam. Janelle Monae throws the production book at this song: pulling backup vocals, a tongue clicking, computer noises, synth guitars, and drums all into the fold.

Danseworthy.

Hesitate feels like a warm, white bulb of light to me. It’s hopeful and introspective. It also appears to have been made by a Viking: Emerson Leif.

Leif does a better job explaining his source of inspiration then I do, so I’ll pass the mic to him now:

I found myself feeling very alone and without purpose. I could not accept that we just exist: eat, sleep, work, repeat. We are sold a kind of ‘happiness’ like it’s something we can work towards but what’s on offer is fleeting, if at all.

I had many questions about life but the greatest question was one of God. Or better yet, one for God. “Are you there?”

Honestly, religion just felt so tired and insular. I wanted something tangible. I wanted to find truth. The idea of searching is perhaps most terrifying, because what if one finds nothing.

Jade Bird is a badass 20 year old from the UK with a guitar. Lottery is my first taste of Jade Bird, and it tastes delicious.

This song is lyrically interesting, with vocals and acoustics that you don’t hear that much these days. The whole song is a play on numbers. You win a lottery with numbers and Bird makes a metaphorical connection between love and a lottery here:

“You used to tell me that love is a lottery / But you got your numbers / And you’re betting on me”

She pokes fun at dating older guys:

“I was 19 and you were 23”

“I’ll tell you about a guy / That I’ve been with / And you ask how “old is he?” / And I laugh / ” 26, no but” / He’s 30 / How messed up is that?”

The first verse equally piles onto the numbers theme:

“We stayed in No. 4 Ferdinand Street / We spent five talking about our lives / But we’d talked like that about a thousand times”

Clever work from the up and coming artist, one to keep an eye on!

Wait by the River is a dreamy, light track gifted to us by Lord Huron. The lyrics are a bit melodramatic and remind me very much so of Romeo and Juliet.

“If I can’t change the weather / Maybe I can change your mind / If we can’t be together / What’s the point of life?”

Okay, Romeo.

“If we can’t be together, I will leave this world behind / If I can’t touch your body / Can I touch the sky?”

This has to be from some sort of Greek tragedy or drama. A boy, hopelessly in love, steals away to wait by the river for his lover and if she doesn’t come, one has to conclude from his thoughts that he will then throw himself to drown in said river.

The piano, Lord Huron’s vocals and the way the whole track just fits together though is just so nice. Smoothness defined.

So this song isn’t on Spotify yet because it starred in Apple’s latest HomePod commercial. Until then, you’ll have to content yourself with the really cool commercial (unless you’ve got Apple Music like myself):

What a gorgeous song and some really cool, really creative stuff going on in that video. THE HARPS. I love when harps get involved, that’s one of the main reasons I love Florence + the Machine. Anderson .Paak’s introspective lyrics, skittish percussion, electronic harps = reasons to love this song. It is musically complex and super interesting. A real jam.