Photo Credit: Julia Jackson Irish musician and songwriter Hozier (full name: Andrew John Hozier-Byrne) didn’t quite score the same success on his last release, Wasteland, Baby! (2019) as he had achieved with his enormously successful self-titled 2014 debut album (or his debut single “Take Me to Church”). But continuing his apparent practice of taking several… Read more
“You have 20 years to write your first album and you have six months to write your second one,” said Elvis Costello in 1981. The best debuts bottle up and release decades worth of insight, feeling, and experience into a singular, captivating musical statement. From indie rock and pop to folk and country, below are some… Read more
Photo Credit: Brianna Capozzi Miley Cyrus has long been one of the 21st century’s most powerful and evocative vocalists, but it wasn’t until recently that she found an appropriate sonic palette for her powerhouse voice – abandoning the Top 40 pop stylings of her early work, the bizarre experiments of Miley Cyrus & Her Dead… Read more
As much as people seem to dislike the Grammys and distrust their perpetually scandal-plagued decision-making body, there’s no doubting the authority the awards body holds. Even as viewership remains far below the 20 million+ it once regularly enjoyed, the performances still have the power to make waves, who wins still makes headlines and who loses… Read more
Photo Credit: Getty Images for The Recording Academy (All Photos) Award show attendance has been reliably falling year-on-year and this year, the Recording Academy seemed less concerned than ever about doing anything to revert that trend, with an overlong, self-indulgent ceremony that ran for a seemingly never-ending 2 hours and 33 minutes. Beyond making a… Read more
Photo Credit: Gregg Kemp Earlier this year, Elton John and Lil Nas X came together to collaborate on the song “One of Me” (they also came together to record an ad for Uber Eats; a disappointing exercise in corporatism by two stars who’ve become known for subversion, but that’s beside the point). The collaboration –… Read more
Photo Credit: Neil Krug Brandi Carlile, an artist who’s generally considered a folkie but also shows leanings towards both country and rock, has been impressing an increasingly large following ever since her 2005 debut. Her seventh studio album In These Silent Days is another powerful and heartfelt collection of original songs that will no doubt continue her… Read more