January 2018

“You say you ain’t the one to jump in a relation / and I don’t mind but when we touch it’s elevation / up, up, up, up”

Tove Styrke delivers yet again with this pop banger, making her second in a row appearance on theMonthlyJamm to kick off the new year. It’s similar to Mistakes from December ’17 in all the right ways with a solid beat and lyrics like this:

“I’m not in love but I’m loving the situation / up, up, up, up, up / if you’re down, don’t dare to stop”

Brilliant!

This is a really timely (winter anyone?) song that’s really relaxing and cute. An interesting wrinkle gets added in to the acoustic-ness with the electric beat that gets mixed in around the 1:11 mark.

The xx is back and better than ever with their new album, I See You. On Hold is a cleverly put together song with back and forth lyrics between the two leads, Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim. When you’ve got a male and female vocal, you just have to take advantage of it from time to time, competitive advantage you know.

On Hold samples an old Hall and Oates track in its post-chorus that I love. There’s also these searing, high pitched chords that wane the track in and out and sophisticated lyrics like these:

“My young heart chose to believe we were destined / young hearts all need love / call it a lesson / the stars and the charts and the cards make sense only when we want them to / when I lie awake staring into space / I see a different view” 

Thanks to Rachel for playing this at our kegger!

Thanks to Ryan for playing this as I drove to breakfast I think? I can’t remember. He told me he loved this song so much he actually ended up visiting Sedona, Arizona. After listening to Sedona – a smooth, indie jam with an upbeat rhythm and cute choral chunks and solid guitars throughout – I think I may do the same.

This is my favorite song from this month. Yes, it starts off in French. But give it a minute and it’ll get to some English. The lyrics are beautiful in both French and English (better in French, of course) and I’ve translated them below because they’re enough. No more analysis needed other than these lines:

Anne Sila:

“Les yeux baissés, le cœur illogique
Eyes lowered, heart illogical
Et tous ces mots que je ne te dis pas
And all these words that I’m not telling you
Tu es un coup de cœur, un coup de panique
you’re a heart-stopper, a stroke of panic
Si j’avais l’cran de te dire que c’est toi
If I had the guts to tell you that it’s you
Tu t’endors quelque part
You fall asleep somewhere
Tu t’endors sans savoir
You fall asleep without knowing

J’trouve pas les mots
I can’t find the words
J’trouve pas les mots
I can’t find the words
Pour tout te dire
To tell you everything
Sans les défauts
Without faltering
J’sais pas pourquoi
I don’t know why
Ça tombe à l’eau
It falls to pieces
J’fais que m’enfuir
I’m just escaping myself
Toujours trop tôt
Always too early
Je te veux toi mais j’ai pas les mots
I want you but I don’t have the words
Oh je te veux toi, que toi, j’ai pas les mots
I want you, only you, I don’t have the words“

So I’d never heard of Roy Woods before this month, but it looks like he’s got a bright future ahead of him. The 21-year old out of Ontario is signed to Drake’s record label, Ovo Sound and his song What Are You On? showcases both his rapping and production chops. My favorite lines from the song are easily:

“I worked for everything I got / You don’t know how to treat a boss”

Ugh, I love WALK THE MOON. I heard Surrender during some movie preview. That movie, just for their trailer soundtrack taste, is worth watching and this song is worth listening to.

Miguel kicks this banger off by crooning:

“Are the trees high enough baby?”

The trees are always high enough with you, Miguel. The guitars, the snaps, the funky melodies playing high in the background, the lyrics luscious and full of “pineapple, purple skies” and Miguel’s sensual vocals – this song is like a sweet, sweet, pineapple snow cone on a beach in Cabo.

This is a chill indie song from the 18 year old Aussie, Mallrat. Keeping tabs on this one!

If you were wondering where Mumford & Sons has been the last couple of years, the answer is South Africa making awesome music with African musicians like Baaba Maal, Beatenburg and The Very Best.

This song: There Will Be Time must be watched live: Live in South Africa 2016

Oh my god.

I’ve gotta highlight Chace. He’s an 18 year old who started making tracks at age 12. He’s hustled his way to music relevance coming out of Shanghai, China – one of my favorite cities in the world. This article on Chace, how he convinced his parents to let him do music and his general background is well worth a read.

Bring the noise here for Sophie Rose, another 18 year old with a bright future ahead of her. Two Young Lovers is a light & catchy pop song.

This is a classic alternative/indie-y jam with solid guitars and a super singable chorus. Pack it along with your tent on your next road trip.

Jaymes Young was one of my biggest revelations of 2017. He has plenty of great songs worth listening to and Parachute is a haunting one that hits like a middle finger to an ex whose “diseased”. Damn Jaymes.

Thanks to Brooke for the song rec here!

I think I heard this on an ESPN or Apple commercial. Huh, corporate America does have some benefits after all.

One of my friends just sent in her application to teach English in Spain. This song and the lyrics:

“We’d dream of places that we could go / We left a life that’s ordinary from the start / … / Castles glitter under Spanish skies / Snow white mountains in a foreign state / But I’m just looking out for you tonight”

Remind me of her, the Spanish skies, the looking out for other people. I love when songs make you think of people you care about. Oh, this song is also a OneRepublic and Kygo collaboration sooooo…. impossible for it to have been bad.

This song is a banger. I love the analogy here between glue and Raye’s guy. She sings:

“You’ve been breaking me down since I saw ya / And now I’m broken, will you be my glue?”

It’s a cool lyrical spin on love – the idea of being totally fine and single before this guy comes into your life and then you realize dang, maybe it’d be even better with this kid. It reminds me of the line in Bleachers’ song I Wanna Get Better when he sings:

“I didn’t know I was lonely ’till I saw your face”

Raye continues in a similar vein:

“I never noticed that I was alone / until I picked up my selfie with you”

And then there’s this cute line:

“Never really cared about what I look like / now I’m putting on my makeup / the fuck?”

Interesting instrumentals (that horn, anyone?) and clever lyrics make Glue a great song.

Apparently everyone else has already heard this song. Well not me. It wasn’t until January 3rd, 2018 when I heard this song playing on a friend’s snapchat story that I was introduced to the greatness that is Body Like a Back Road. I have already been accused of falsifying dates of first listen with this song (aka the very filter which enables a song to make the list in a certain month) so let me just make it very clear that my first listen to this song was indeed in January of 2018!

Body Like a Back Road is such a satisfying country jam. The snaps, the kickbeat, and the short guitar chords make it addicting. Sam Hunt throws in a little bit of those “ay, ay, ay’s” in the chorus that we’re accustomed to in pop and rap songs for some cross-over flavor. His lyrics are fun:

“The way she fit in them blue jeans, she don’t need no belt / but I can turn ’em inside out, I don’t need no help”

But also really clever:

“Doing fifteen in a thirty, I ain’t in no hurry / I’ma take it slow, just as fast as I can”

I love his use of simile for his girl’s body and a back road. It’s simultaneously so country of him to value back roads over “them downtown streets” and so male of him to be into the curves.

“There ain’t no curves like hers on them downtown streets”

Love it.

The xx’s new album, I See You, is so incredibly good it was hard to pick just two songs from it to put on this playlist. We’re splitting hairs here with I Dare You and if you like this vibe and The xx, just go and listen to the entire album.

Love has a vibe that I couldn’t not include on this list. I particularly love this lyric:

“You get ready, you get all dressed up / To go nowhere in particular”

The Elverum family.

This song and the album it belongs to: A Crow Looked at Me, is heart-breakingly sad.

In his album, Phil Elverum, whose stage name is Mount Eerie, details his life after the death of his wife to cancer, leaving a house with him and their young daughter. The lyrics throughout the album stumble through Elverum’s life as he’s held in a state of grief that seems endless, infinite almost.

Music is supposed to touch us and this entire album did that for me. Real Death starts off here, plainly:

“Death is real / Someone’s there and then they’re not / And it’s not for singing about / It’s not for making into art”

Elverum’s walking through his house, places where his wife used to be and now she’s just not there. In his post-death grief, he grasps at the core of death – which is this sense of being there one moment and then just not the next. But he’s not trying to understand death, he’s not trying to make some poetic justice with it. He’s just broken. You can hear it in his voice as he almost mumbles lines together, weak in his vocals in spots.

He moves on to sing about picking up the mail. Getting the mail is another everyday routine just like walking through rooms in a house, but not anymore for Elverum. Now it’s another moment to be stunned by the lack of his wife, by her nonexistence in the world he and his daughter still reside in:

“Crusted with tears, catatonic, and raw / I go downstairs and outside and you still get mail / A week after you died / A package with your name on it came”

What a strange feeling: for a dead person to receive mail. What do you do with a dead person and the things they leave behind? Their possessions, their clothes, their social media accounts. What are you supposed to do? How quickly are you supposed to get rid of their things? When are you supposed to move on?

The mail that came for Elverum’s wife, it’s a gift for their daughter:

“And inside was a gift for our daughter / You had ordered in secret / And collapsed there on the front steps / I wailed”

A gift from the grave to her daughter. Ordered while alive and delivered while not.

“A backpack for when she goes to school / A couple years from now / You were thinking ahead to a future you must have known deep down would not include you / Though you clawed at the cliff you were sliding down / Being swallowed into a silence that’s bottomless and real”

The imagery here of clawing at a cliff and sliding down it into a bottomless abyss is incredibly powerful. Elverum’s wife was fighting, clawing at the cliff – but it wasn’t a climbable cliff. And she knew that. Can you imagine being a mother and knowing deep down that you won’t see your daughter’s first day of school?

The song ends softly and not on positive note but that was to be expected in a song about death, real death. Elverum, in the stupor of his grief, finishes the song with an “I love you” to his late wife.

“It’s dumb / And I don’t want to learn anything from this / I love you”

This song isn’t just on this list to make you cry. Yes, music makes us feel things out of nothing – its lyrics and its melodies can move us to tears even if perfectly happy before hearing a particularly sad song. But it also lets us into musicians’ heads, their thoughts, their experiences. Death is something I’ve been fortunate enough to mostly avoid thus far in my young life, but in hearing people’s experiences with it – it can be incomplete, a “silence that’s bottomless and real.” When you hear people lose someone to cancer or a car accident or anything really, you can see their pain and you interact with them in giving them your condolences. But the true impact of the lack of someone, of the hole that can leave in other peoples’ lives, goes so far below the surface, below what we see. This song, Real Death, is one of the most gut-wrenching takes on death I’ve ever heard. I think it’s that way because of how real Elverum’s experiences seem, how understandable his feelings of emptiness are and how once-everyday activities can turn so quickly into an endless stream of grief-inducing memories.

Death, an experience all humans must live. Let’s be sympathetic towards each other and the losses we’ve each endured in our lives thus far.

Love Lauv. Paris in the Rain is a toned-down jam with really interesting instrumentation and plucked strings (cello, bass?) that carry the melody and jazzy drums that keep the whole track low and let Lauv’s vocals shine.

Thanks to Gabby for this song rec! This song is a total banger and should be played at pregames across the country.

The Very Best, a duo with roots in London and Malawi, kick this song off in Chichewa – a language of the Bantu family spoken widely in Malawi. Then Mumford & Sons come in with English and Baaba Maal, a Senegalese singer, hits us with some Pulaar – a Fula language spoken primarily by the Fula and Toucouleur people in the Senegal River valley.

Besides the wicked mix of languages here, this song is a really cool mix of styles and just feels like it must be listened to live. One day I’ll get to Joburg!

This was the first song I’d play right after workouts all of January. Such a victorious beat.

“This what God feel like / Laughing to the bank like ‘Ah haa’ / Flex on swole like ‘Ah haa'”

I love the beatboxing in this song and this line:

“You’re forgettin’ girl, you made your bed and didn’t want me in it”

Billie Eilish, 16 years old. Damn. What’s interesting is that her age doesn’t show at all in her music; I don’t feel like I’m listening to bubble gum pop here with super shallow lyrics. Eilish’s voice is rather mature, haunting at some points in her hilariously titled album dont smile at me, and this song Watch is well done. Clever use of the sound of blowing a match out going off as the beat. Excited to see what’s next for Eilish.

If you go to LSU, you’ve got to love this song (Baton Rouge reference!). I wish Columbus would get name-dropped in a song.

Thanks a ton to my little brother’s friend Nick for the song rec of Fake Denim. After Nick’s rec, I realized Quinn XCII had dropped a new album without me noticing! It’s called The Story of Us and it is awesome. I wanted to pick one song off of it and it came down to Fake Denim and this one: One Day at a Time. Both total jams, flipped a coin and here we are.

I’ve had Quinn on my radar since his 2015 EP of Change of Scenery. He’s another fantastic Midwestern musician from Detroit (remind you of a certain Mike Posner, perhaps??).

This entire album is great. One Day at a Time is a relatable jam about the up-in-the-airness of young relationships:

“I’ll be on the road and you’re going to school in Baton Rouge / And I promise you the world my love, but what’s the use?”

Quinn’s take on it is refreshing and real:

“Whatever’s meant to be, just hold your head up / No matter where we go, I’m on your side / There’s just no controlling when it’s time / … / We’ll find some way to get by / One day at a time”

You gotta get up and dance to this one.

One of my favorite songs that I discovered in 2017 was Rewind by Wingtip and Sophie Strauss. Wingtip makes an appearance here on the January 2018 list with Space For Us, a song that has a similar production style to Rewind.

The lyrics here are interesting and the album artwork is telling – a girl hugging this guy but we can’t see him, it’s just the space he should occupy, the outline of her body on what should be his.

“I got the space for us / Right here where we’re safe from love / Cuz feelings are dangerous”

He’s not committed and she’s not either, both avoiding love, trying not to get too close.

I adore Adore. One of my absolute favorites from January. It’s like the grown-up version of a teenage crush, super adult-angsty if you will. In it, our dear Amy Shark, details her time spent with this guy who just doesn’t get it.

“I’m just gonna stand with my bag hanging off my left arm
I’m just gonna walk home kicking stones at parked cars
But I had a great night ’cause you kept rubbing against my arm”

Sad Amy, a great night because of arm rubbing, damn. The chorus rolls in with some drums:

“Get me a drink I get drunk off one sip 
Just so I can adore you”

And her bridge into the final chorus:

“Watch me, watch him talk to girls
I’m known as a right-hand slugger
Anybody else wanna touch my lover?”

I think we can all identify with the sentiments Amy sings about in Adore and that’s one of the reasons this is a great song.

This song reminds me a bit of Space For Us (track 32) in the emptiness of the love Call Me Karizma sings about, but the lyrics here are better. Karizma goes deeper singing about friends that all of a sudden exist:

“At 12 I was losing my friends that I never got back / Now they hit me up and say Riz I knew you’d go far / Fuck you”

The money he’s just started to get with his early career in music:

“I don’t have shit / I have a little money now that I’ve spent”

All the girls that come with the money and fame but don’t actually know him, and vice versa:

“I have 100 girls on the list that don’t even know my real name / I have 100 girls on the list that have a city next to their name”

Medications and suicidal thoughts:

“At 15, I’m down in the dust that my doctor prescribed / At 20 I’m writing a song about wanting to die / Now I can’t get out of bed without taking a pill / What’s new?”

And admitting to his shittiness when he just rolls through cities to sleep with models and then flies off.

“I’m sorry I’m shitty / I’m just in this city tonight”

This song is absolutely gorgeous. Thank you Juke Ross. Here’s a video of him singing a different song since I couldn’t find something for this one: Shadows in the Dark – Juke Ross.

This is a really cool spoken word-feeling/rap song by Faith Marie, a 19 year old who clearly has no problems baring her soul through the lyrics she pens.

I love the way this song moves – quickly through her verses, pumped up with strings, and then broken apart by soaring choruses.

This song’s about Lauv falling in love as a freshman at NYU and then proceeding to being in love in New York City.

His music video for this song is adorable and must be watched. There’s an old couple in love in it! 10/10.

Everything Conner Youngblood puts out just feels so pure. His instrumentation, his vocals. The Warpath is no different and I’d highly recommend Youngblood if you’re into music that ought to be played in a forest.

This is an old song yes, but it wasn’t until Kyle played it after a Sunday night dinner with my roommates that I heard it. It received positive reviews from the house and after Kyle’s amazing month of December (3 recommendations!), he sneaks onto January 2018 with this total jam.

I love Lupe and this song is incredible. If you missed this one like I did when it came out in 2012, well, better late than never.

This tropical, upbeat song is on here for some hilarious lyrics:

“You’re so obsessed with yourself / Maybe you should undress with yourself / Hey, and get a table for 2, your ego and you / Take him home and make a move”

Question: Foster the People still make music?! Answer: Yes!! And good music like this funky jam, Sit Next to Me.

This song is really well-produced and I have such a conviction that Chloe x Halle (two sisters aged 19 and 17) are going to be huge. They’ve been on the “keep tabs on” list since their EP Sugar Symphony in 2016. Love the chorus in here and the interesting minor chords they play with to give this song another dimension.

Passenger’s a classic song you’d whistle to in the car. There’s a kickbeat that drives this entire song and keeps it upbeat, even as Noah delves into lyrics that go below the surface.

“I spend long nights, I question my self control”

I love Noah’s voice. It’s ironic this song is titled Passenger because he definitely has a little of Passenger, the artist, in his vocals. My favorite part for yelling in cars:

“Take me, my heart and my soul”