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
Photo Credit: Beth Garrabrant Taylor Swift wrote her third album entirely on her own. This was partly a result of Swift getting her “best ideas at 3 am in Arkansas,” as she would tell Songwriter Universe, but it also served as a rebuttal to critics and other commentators who had previously doubted teenage Swift’s creative… Read more
Photo Credit: Stephen Ringer In 2020, Aly & AJ’s 2007 single “Potential Breakup Song” went unexpectedly viral on TikTok. It’s a testament to the duo’s artistic integrity that on 2021’s A Touch of The Beat… – their first album in 14 years – and now, on With Love From, they don’t shamelessly try to recreate… Read more
Photo Credit: Michael Schmelling The best song on Amanda Shires’ eighth solo album, “Everything Has It’s Time” is a kaleidoscopic collection of memories jarringly placed alongside dispatches from the present day. The song captures love in a state of irreversible disrepair and in doing so heart-wrenchingly captures all that has been. “There was a time… Read more
Photo Credit: Eliot Lee Hazel “Almost makes me wanna cry // The weather’s so beautiful outside,” cries Beth Orton on the title track, and lead single, for her newest album, Weather Alive. It’s a sentiment that echoes across the LP’s 45 minutes – how small moments of beauty can evoke such heightened emotional responses. The… Read more
Photo Credit: Sarah Doyle Badged “Irish alt-country,” this might turn you off. That would be a mistake. CMAT’s hilarious debut is one of 2022’s most remarkable achievements. 26-year-old Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson describes herself as a mix between Dolly Parton, Katy Perry, and Weird “Al” Yankovic. If that sounds like an unbelievable fusion, nothing could be… Read more
Photo Credit: Jimmy Fontaine / Atlantic Records While the cover artwork and a couple of the song titles (“Blood Runs Red,” “Lawless Dream,” “Twisted Tongue”) might suggest that it’s a heavy metal album, Matt Maeson’s second full-length album Never Had to Leave is instead a tight and compelling collection of well-produced alternative rock and folk… Read more
Photo Credit: Helen Kirbo Surely you haven’t heard a more ambitious album concept in 2022 than this: a 105-minute concept album – the first installment of a trilogy – that traces the journey of a character escaping a fundamentalist home only to meet a gruesome end at the hands of a cannibalistic psychopath. All of… Read more
Like everyone else living on this planet, successful artists also know what it’s like to be rejected – some better than others. Here are ten musicians rejected by record labels, the Army, classmates, and audition juries. #10. Tori Kelly Photo Credit: Elizabeth Miranda The Californian singer auditioned on season nine of American Idol back in… Read more
Photo Credit: Beth Garrabrant (All Photos) Taylor Swift’s re-recordings have, so far, been largely successful – beyond achieving their central aim of giving Swift back control of the masters of her first six albums, they’ve earned her another No.1 with “All Too Well,” as well as jumpstarting an overdue critical re-evaluation of her earliest works…. Read more