AF 2021 In Review: A Year Of Divorce, Heartache, And Grief

Carly Pearce // Photo Credit: Allister Ann

The world might have opened back up in 2021, but it was still a year branded with heartache, sorrow, and grief. Even if you didn’t endure the death of a loved one, you likely knew someone who did 一 or perhaps you wandered through some of the biggest records of the year and found yourself replaying your own miseries. Last year, loss in all its forms, including divorce, seemed to permeate every corner of existence.

Through a series of several mainstream releases, including Carly Pearce’s 29 and Adele’s 30, 2021 was the unequivocal year of divorce, heartbreak, and grief. An outpouring of collective pain, whether from death or severed friendships, wormed into songwriting in a remarkable, cathartic way. Artists sought as much solace as everyday folks, marking the second year of an ongoing pandemic with deep, indelible scars.

Divorce albums are not a new conceit. Historically, singer-songwriters have long written about very public breakups as a way to compartmentalize and cope. Many of music’s greatest divorce records, including Willie Nelson’s Phases and Stages, Tammy Wynette’s D-I-V-O-R-C-E, and Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear, as well as more recent LPs from The Chicks (Gaslighter) and Miranda Lambert (The Weight of These Wings), served to reclaim the public narrative.

Tabloid headlines are nothing if not salacious in their details, frequently pitting one public figure against another in a way to sell magazines or get clicks. But behind those shiny veneers are living, breathing human beings simply trying to process their trauma. Yes, heartbreak is a form of trauma. In peeling back the emotional and psychological layers through storytelling, singers and songwriters find an agency they otherwise wouldn’t have.

Adele’s 30 was the most anticipated release of the year. Six years since her last studio record, 30 showcased the British performer making sense of her pain, flitting through the effects the divorce had on her son, their relationship in and out of the watery depths, and her desperate search to find herself once more. “To Be Loved” is the crown jewel of not only the record but her career so-far, as Adele gave her everything in a nearly-seven-minute epic best summed up with this refrain: “Let it be known that I tried.” Elsewhere, subtler yet still skin-scalding moments like “I Drink Wine” and “Strangers by Nature” permitted her to feel those emotions, raw and unfettered. While she’s felt anger in her divorce, 30 is not “an angry divorced woman” record; rather, it’s one of absolution from the past and the many tattered pages of resentment and misery.

Kelly Clarkson endured her own skirmish in the divorce spotlight, as well. A jovial person by nature, it seems fitting she funneled her heartache into a holiday album. When Christmas Comes Around… worked in much the same way as 30. The 12-song record dipped between jubilantly sashaying through her favorite classics, including “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas,” “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” and “Santa Baby,” and twirling through anguish like vibrantly colored ribbons. In the opening song, “Merry Christmas Baby,” Clarkson clued you into how she was feeling: “You can keep the charming lines/And you can keep your wandering hands and eyes.” Her thorny-laced lyrics coarse through the record, namely in two other originals “Christmas Isn’t Canceled (Just You)” and “Merry Christmas (To the One I Used to Know),” gloriously tinseled exorcisms. But in the end, as attested through standout “Blessed,” Clarkson emerged lighter and more self-possessed.

In the country world, Carly Pearce and Kacey Musgraves conjured up firestorms with 29 and star-crossed, respectively. Where Pearce soaked in modern-pressed traditional country, leaning upon fiddle, guitar, and other staple instruments, Musgraves stretched further into the pop world, using her much-acclaimed 2018 Golden Hour as a jumping off point. In both instances, the singer-songwriters expressed the sting of betrayal that’s now forever stamped into the emotional fabric of their lives. “So I ain’t gonna tell you everything he did/But I’ll tell you what he didn’t do: treat me right, put me first, be a man of his word/Stay home ’cause he wanted to,” sang Pearce. She seemingly flipped expectations here with “What He Didn’t Do” — but did plenty of tea-spilling later on with songs like “Next Girl” and “Should’ve Known Better.”

Conversely, Musgraves’ star-crossed unlocked a throbbing, emotional center through traditional instruments buried beneath magical production choices. The title cut is a cinematic conversation-piece, dazzling with distortion and synths, as if she’s escaping her heartbreak through a universe-defying expedition. “Let’s go back to the beginning,” she whispered on “good wife,” guitar peeking up like whack-a-mole. Staging the record as a chronological tale allowed the listener to experience the rush of burning love in those early days to the wildfire and the charred aftermath in almost real time.

My parents were never married, but when they split, it forever changed me. The night of their separation is among my earliest memories; I remember it like it was yesterday. My older sister Katrina held me tightly in her arms, tears streaming down my face and a throaty wail squirming from my lungs. I rarely cried so hard as a kid, and even now I can feel that pain rising into my chest. It’s something you can never forget. When I listen to 29, 30, star-crossed, and even When Christmas Comes Around… that memory flashes just as red and hot as it did then. In my adulthood, that moment certainly feels much different, but emotional memory can be a helluva drug.

Any sort of grief is physiological. It’s far more than simply reliving those flashing polaroids. It’s the ungodly physical pains that rip through flesh and bone like it’s happening to you all over again. And it’s not an exclusive experience to heartbreak and divorce.

You’re grieving when you feel your chest tighten and you can barely breathe. It’s not dissimilar to experiencing death. When Olivia Rodrigo is lamenting young heartbreak on Sour or Taylor Swift is recounting her own in the long-awaited release of “All Too Well” (10 Minute Version) or GAYLE is delivering the kiss-off to end all kiss-offs with smash single “abcdefu,” grief lies at their confectionary cores. Grief is grief. It doesn’t matter what the exterior looks like; the emotional and physical responses are the same.

Glam-pop newcomer Jake Wesley Rogers, taking cues from Bowie and Elton John in style and musical approach, dressed up themes of loss and moving on with his latest EP, Pluto. Songs like “Weddings and Funerals,” in which he muses that the small moments define our lives much more than the big ones, and “Middle of Love,” containing the apt line “my grandma died ’cause that’s what people do” bowl you over with their insight. The musical accomplishment of the tracks themselves give Rogers’ words even more gravitas, allowing for a universal clarity.

One-off releases, such as Lindsey Stirling’s “Lose You Now,” an electrifying plea to hold onto her father’s memory, pulled sorrow further into the conversation. Xenia Rubino’s “Did My Best” did the same, a moving centerpiece to the year, while Zara Larsson dissected her own heartbreak with Poster Girl, and Hayley Williams learned to let go on FLOWERS for VASES / descansos.

It’s hard to comprehend that 2021 is really over, now firmly in our rearview mirror. But as we take stock of yet another year lost to a pandemic, we can begin to reflect upon the common threads which connect our lives. Sadness flows much further than this feature will allow, also present in the work of countless other artists, including Joshua Bassett, Dashboard Confessional, Billie Eilish, Lil Nas X, James Arthur, H.E.R., and Julien Baker.

Perhaps through experiencing these musical masterpieces, we can understand the personal and universal significance of pain in songwriting and to our everyday lives. I know without a doubt that I’ve come closer to figuring out how continue on in a world so utterly destroyed by tragedy. I have plenty to learn still — but for now, I’ll listen, drink wine, and cry.

AF 2021 IN REVIEW: Our Favorite Albums & Singles of The Year

If you went into 2021 with high expectations, you weren’t alone. Even if it was hard to feel optimistic this time last year, it certainly seemed as if things could get no worse. Live music did return, after all – though with the appearance of Delta, and now Omicron, the joyful noise comes with a caveat. After sixteen months of having to livestream shows (fun, but not the same) little could stop me from attending shows in person; wearing a mask as an extra precaution felt like no big deal, even if no one else was doing it. But luck (and vaccines) feel like the real reason I emerged unscathed from dozens of risky experiences, and with performances on the horizon canceled once again, maybe it’s wise to enter 2022 with slightly lower expectations.

There’s always recorded music, anyhow. Maybe the tumult of the year just has me personally feeling a bit unfocused, but it seems as though I barely scaled the mountain of this year’s musical offerings without getting a bit buried in the avalanche of releases – ones that had been pushed back, ones that were created in lockdown. I’ll be playing catch up well into the new year, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t gems I connected with almost immediately, and very deeply. And that’s what I’ve heard across the board, from those in the industry as well as casual music fans – is that our favorites this year stayed on heavy rotation, as we latched onto music that accurately reflected our moods, which evolved moment to moment and of course happened to be different for all of us at any given time. What does that mean for year-end lists? Audiofemme has always compiled an eclectic list, including favorites from each of our contributors without overall rank – consider any repeats to be the best of the best. But this year, the list seems even more diverse, meaning there’s a wealth of weird and wonderful music below to discover, dear reader. Thanks for sticking with us through another wild year.

EDITOR LISTS

  • Marianne White (Executive Director)
    • Top 10 Albums:
      1) PinkPantheress – to hell with it
      2) Mdou Moctar – Afrique Victime
      3) Low – Hey What
      4) Jazmine Sullivan – Heaux Tales
      5) Julien Baker – Little Oblivions
      6) Dawn Richard – Second Line: An Electro Revival
      7) Indigo De Souza – Any Shape You Take
      8) aya – im hole
      9) Flock of Dimes – Head of Roses
      10) Tyler, the Creator – CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST
    • Top 5 Singles:
      1) Japanese Breakfast – “Be Sweet”
      2) Loraine James (feat. Eden Samara) – “Running Like That”
      3) Hand Habits – “More Than Love”
      4) Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen – “Like I Used To”
      5) Julien Baker – “Faith Healer (Half Waif Remix)”

  • Lindsey Rhoades (Editor-in-Chief)
    • Top 10 Albums:
      1) Low – Hey What
      2) Tirzah – Colourgrade
      3) Nana Yamato – Before Sunrise
      4) Emma Ruth Rundle – Engine of Hell
      5) Jane Weaver – Flock
      6) Tonstartssbandht – Petunia
      7) Arlo Parks – Collapsed in Sunbeams
      8) Squirrel Flower – Planet (i)
      9) Veik – Surrounding Structures
      10) Cassandra Jenkins – An Overview on Phenomenal Nature
    • Top 10 Singles:
      1) Sharon Van Etten & Angel Olsen – “Like I Used To”
      2) Special Interest – “All Tomorrow’s Carry”
      3) Squid – “G.S.K.”
      4) Julien Baker – “Bloodshot”
      5) Mandy, Indiana – “Bottle Episode”
      6) Remember Sports – “Pinky Ring”
      7) Cedric Noel – “Comuu”
      8) Gustaf – “Mine”
      9) June Jones – “Therapy”
      10) MAN ON MAN – “Stohner”

  • Mandy Brownholtz (Marketing Director)
    • Top 5 Albums (in no particular order):
      Spellling – The Turning Wheel
      King Woman – Celestial Blues
      Macy Rodman – Unbelievable Animals
      Marissa Nadler – The Path of the Clouds
      Kinlaw – The Tipping Scale
    • Top 3 Singles (in no particular order):
      Often – “Deep Sleep”
      Mannequin Pussy – “Control”
      Spice – “A Better Treatment”

STAFF LISTS

  • Alexa Peters (Playing Seattle)
    • Top 10 Albums:
      1) Wye Oak – Cut All The Wires: 2009-2011
      2) Dori Freeman – Ten Thousand Roses
      3) Isaiah Rashad – The House Is Burning
      4) Fawn Wood – Kåkike
      5) Carmen Q. Rothwell – Don’t Get Comfy / Nowhere
    • Honorable Mention: Mike Gebhart – Co-Pilot 
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) Doja Cat (feat. SZA) – “Kiss Me More”
      2) Mitski – “Working for the Knife”
      3) DoNormaal – “Baby May”

  • Cat Woods (Playing Melbourne)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Deap Vally – Marriage
      2) Mod Con – Modern Condition
      3) Laura Stevenson – Laura Stevenson
      4) Joan As Police Woman – The Solution is Restless
      5) Black Country, New Road – For the first time
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) Black Country, New Road – “Sunglasses”
      2) Lana Del Rey – “Dealer”
      3) jennylee – “Tickles”

  • Liz Ohanesian (Contributor)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Hackedepicciotto — The Silver Threshold
      2) Saint Etienne — I’ve Been Trying to Tell You
      3) L’impératrice — Take Tsubo
      4) Pearl and the Oysters— Flowerland
      5) Nuovo Testamento — New Earth
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) Midnight Magic – “Beam Me Up” 
      2) Jessie Ware – “Please”
      3) Gabriels – “Love and Hate in a Different Time (Kerri Chandler Remix)”  

  • Gillian G. Gaar (Musique Boutique)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Dolphin Midwives — Body of Water
      2) Sarah McQuaid — The St. Buryan Sessions
      3) Low — Hey What 
      4) Witch Camp — I’ve Forgotten Now Who I Used to Be 
      5) Full Bush — Movie Night
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) Maggie Herron — “Sweet Lullaby”
      2) Sleater-Kinney — “High in the Grass”
      3) ONETWOTHREE — “Give Paw” 

  • Jason Scott (Contributor)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Jetty Bones – Push Back
      2) M.A.G.S. – Say Things That Matter
      3) Lyndsay Ellyn – Queen of Nothing
      4) Kacey Musgraves – star-crossed
      5) Christian Lopez – The Other Side
    • Top 5 Singles:
      1) Hayes Carll – “Help Me Remember”
      2) Jake Wesley Rogers – “Middle of Love”
      3) Adele – “To Be Loved”
      4) Carly Pearce – “What He Didn’t Do”
      5) Kacey Musgraves – “what doesn’t kill me”

  • Michelle Rose (Contributor)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Alex Orange Drink – Everything Is Broken, Maybe That’s O​.​K.
      2) Billie Eilish – Happier Than Ever
      3) Kacey Musgraves – star-crossed
      4) Magdalena Bay – Mercurial World
      5) Japanese Breakfast – Jubilee
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) Blonder – “Ice Cream Girl” 
      2) Mitski – “The Only Heartbreaker”
      3) Kristiane – “Better On Your Own”  

  • Victoria Moorwood (Playing Cincy)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Polo G – Hall of Fame
      2) Benny the Butcher & Harry Fraud – The Plugs I Met 2
      3) Megan Thee Stallion – Something For Thee Hotties
      4) Pooh Shiesty – Shiesty Sessions
      5) blackbear – misery lake
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) Benny the Butcher & Harry Fraud – “Thanksgiving”
      2) Lil Nas X (feat. Jack Harlow)  – “INDUSTRY BABY”
      3) 24kGoldn (feat. Future) – “Company”

  • Jamila Aboushaca (Contributor)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Kacey Musgraves – star-crossed
      2) Snoh Aalegra – Temporary Highs in the Violet Skies 
      3) Lil Nas X – Montero
      4) Darkside – Spiral
      5) Blu DeTiger – How Did We Get Here EP
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) Kaytranada (feat. H.E.R.) – “Intimidated”
      2) Kacey Musgraves – “simple times”
      3) Snoh Aalegra – “In Your Eyes”

  • Sophia Vaccaro (Playing the Bay)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Aly & AJ – A Touch of the Beat Gets You Up on Your Feet Gets You Out and Then Into the Sun
      2) Julia Wolf – Girls in Purgatory (Full Moon Edition)
      3) Megan Thee Stallion – Something For Thee Hotties
      4) Lil Mariko – Lil Mariko
      5) Destroy Boys – Open Mouth, Open Heart
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) daine – “dainecore”
      2) Julia Wolf – “Villain”
      3) Doja Cat – “Need To Know”

  • Sam Weisenthal (Contributor)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Indigo De Souza – Any Shape You Take
      2) Katy Kirby – Cool Dry Place
      3) Mega Bog – Life, and Another
      4) Ada Lea – one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden
      5) Olivia Kaplan – Tonight Turns to Nothing
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) Charlotte Cornfield – “Drunk For You” 
      2) Dora Jar – “Multiply”
      3) Joe Taylor Sutkowski, Dirt Buyer – “What Luck, Goodbye”  

  • Sara Barron (Playing Detroit)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) PinkPantheress – to hell with it
      2) Summer Walker – Still Over It
      3) Erika de Casier – Sensational
      4) Jazmine Sullivan – Heaux Tales
      5) Adele – 30
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) Lana Del Rey – “Dealer”
      2) Liv.e – “Bout It”
      3) SZA – “I Hate U”

  • Eleanor Forrest (Contributor)
    • Top 5 Albums:
      1) Arlo Parks – Collapsed in Sunbeams
      2) CL – ALPHA
      3) My Life As Ali Thomas – Peppermint Town
      4) Halsey – If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power
      5) Remember Sports – Like a Stone
    • Top 3 Singles:
      1) FKA twigs (feat. Central Cee) – “Measure of a Man”
      2) Sabriel – “Pulse”
      3) Lexie Liu – “有吗炒面 ALGTR”

ONLY NOISE: Adele Threads Together Regret and Growing Older from 25 to 30

ONLY NOISE explores music fandom with poignant personal essays that examine the ways we’re shaped by our chosen soundtrack. In this installment, Jason Scott soothes their growing pains with the balm of everyone’s favorite siren singer, who released her fourth studio album last week.

I can’t listen to Adele’s 25 without crying. When her third studio record first arrived in the world, I was withering away in a grimy, cockroach-infested apartment in Washington Heights. I braved the sweaty A train downtown two or three days a week for a fruitless, unfulfilling internship. I ate ramen for dinner, meandered through garbage-laden streets to whittle away the evening hours, and didn’t own a mattress. From the prickly kiss-off “Send My Love (To Your New Lover)” to the serene, riverside haunting of “River Lea,” the 11-track torch collection nurtured me through one of the most transitional periods in my life.

Loneliness and sorrow pooled around my body, and 25 reflected, in moon-shaped puddles, a numbness back into my eyes. Mistakes and regrets rattled their chains, as I fell deeper into slumber 一 I’m speaking quite literally and metaphorically here. Around me, the world quivered with life and purpose, yet I felt nothing. Nothing. Nothing tears you apart more savagely than everything. Adele’s balladeering seared through skin and directly into my veins, becoming, in essence, a striking potion of what it means to feel lost and sad. I’d often put on 25, slip my earbuds in, and tumble like Alice fell into the rabbit hole, the hardwood doing a real number on my back.

Some albums have a way of worming into your soul so deeply that when you revisit them a million years later, you’re yanked through a wrinkle in time. Adele’s gaping and agile vocal tricks, from the devastating dexterity in which she combs such lyrics as “It feels like we’re oceans apart” in “Love in the Dark” and the simple, yet potently precise, refrain of “I Miss You” over bone-breaking drums, tear down your walls as a wrecking ball crushing a dilapidated building’s skeletal remains.

Her voice slides as a pelican dipping its webbed feet into shallow water, a cascading of ripples sent outward and vibrating into your cells. 25 affected me then, as it does now, on a molecular level. On November 24, 2015, I upheld my civic duty and headed to Target to grab a physical copy, listening to the record on Spotify all the way there and back, naturally. The way the Manhattan streets looked and felt, the wind tenderly caressing through the sparse, cadaverous trees sunken into cracked concrete and dirt, is indelibly on my mind. “When We Were Young” electrified me most, with Adele turning the emotional screws tighter and tighter until they popped. “Let me photograph you in this light in case it is the last time/That we might be exactly like we were before we realized/We were scared of getting old,” she flits through the air with swift, exact acrobatic swirls. “It made us restless/It was just like a movie/It was just like a song.”

Those truths speak even more profoundly now. When you get older, and more people fade out of your life 一 whether through severed relationships and friendships or the cold blade of death, you begin to feel that your youth was, in fact, a movie. It’s something intangible, like glittering images from some 1940s talkies like The Jazz Singer or Steamboat Willie, shadows galivanting across a silver screen. It doesn’t become real any longer. To speak honestly, it’s no longer yours. It belongs to the past, and those people, places, and things which once defined your life are nothing more than ghosts. “Everything just takes me back,” she later laments.

Emotion in musical memory is a peculiar creature. Almost everyone is unwittingly branded with a song, or an album, or a pleasing melody in such a way that it evokes the brightest emotions. It’s mostly positive ones, wistful and brilliant, but on the rare occasion, it’s much harsher, unearthing anger from scorned love. As Adele unfurls with “When We Were Young,” she’s “so mad I’m getting old” and taps into the dreadful existential march to old age and eventually death. It does feel like a lifetime ago, but as I work through my 30s these days, the anxiety seems pressurized in a way I couldn’t have predicted.

25 oscillates between the reverberating “Hello,” a mourning, graceful greeting, and the love-affirming “Remedy” before arriving upon “Million Years Ago,” a cruelly-devastating performance. “I know I’m not the only one/Who regrets the things they’ve done,” she tosses the chorus like a sacrificial lamb to slaughter. The regret and the shame tangles with a cutting vocal, leaving her to simply witness her life vanishing (like clockwork, perhaps) before her eyes. And there’s nothing she can do about it.

There’s that word again. Nothing. “I feel like my life is flashing by/And all I can do is watch and cry,” she blubbers, mourning lost life even in her youth. 25 isn’t old by any stretch, but the pummeling of these emotions is valid just the same. And she’s not the only one who has or will ever feel that way.

25 broke my heart into pieces, I realize. It’s been six years since the record release, and most of the album’s core themes of growing older and being at peace with reality burn like a hot iron. Looking back, I continued to obsess over the album, including “All I Ask,” among her most visceral vocals, in the coming months. I moved to yet another sublet that December, this time buried deep in Brooklyn. It was far more polished, a newly-renovated apartment, and my housemates were the creative sort, fluttering from social events to early-morning auditions.

Winter descended in puffs of snow and a bitter, enduring cold. My life turned around for the better, and I began working as a staff writer for a ticketing company. Adele’s words, especially with this last song, are what I remember most, as I cozied into a nest of fleece blankets atop an air mattress. “If this is my last night with you/Hold me like I’m more than just a friend/Give me a memory I can use,” swoons Adele. I could do nothing but sob into my pillow.

I was 29, feeling time hiss its annoying tick, tick, boom! into my ear, and Adele’s 25 comforted me through it all. I couldn’t fathom how things may have turned out without it, and as hyperbolic as that sounds, it’s true. Albums are life preservers, cast into raging waters right when you need it most. “It ain’t no life to live like you’re on the run,” advises Adele with “Water Under the Bridge,” moments before shooting like a torpedo into the skyline.

I don’t feel much like I’m on the run these days. Sure, I still have no clue what I’m doing, but does anyone? I play pretend and pay my bills and snuggle my cats on the darkest days. I’m here and alive 一 and that’s enough.

Here’s where 30 comes sliding into the frame. Adele endured a painful public divorce and found herself treading water as she dealt with her son’s many inquiries and her own oppressive loneliness. “I’ll be taking flowers to the cemetery of my heart,” she sings with delicacy in the opening lines of “Strangers by Nature,” greatly inspired by the work of Judy Garland. A patchwork of stars glistens around her, with strings ebbing and flowing in colorful patterns, and Adele gives you a peek into the musicality and emotional voyage on which you’re about to embark.

30 bottles up Adele’s very personal experiences with divorce, but it also singularly captures the beautiful tragedy of growing into your 30s. It’s brutal out here. And there’s no escaping it. “I had no time to choose what I chose to do, so go easy on me,” she impresses with lead single “Easy on Me.” It’s an admission that sometimes, many times, life happens to you, and you go along for the ride whether you’re prepared for it or not. It’s a march, and we’re all beating our own drums, hoping to keep up.

“My Little Love” then cools the temperature with an exposing moment, in which she invites her son into the story via recorded audio. It’s uncomfortable, yet necessary. Divorce can damage a kid (I should know; my parents’ split hit me… hard), so to witness Adele guiding her son through unknown territory is refreshing. Later, she stitches in a voicemail she left for a friend to reveal her mental state, mid-panic attack. “I’m having a bad day. I’m having a very anxious day. I feel very paranoid. I feel very stressed,” she says in the audio track. “I feel like today is the first day since I left him that I feel lonely. And I never feel lonely. I love being on my own. I always preferred being on my own than being with people.”

Such vulnerability marks 30 as her best record to-date. “Cry Your Heart Out” masks honest lyrics (“I’ve never been more scared,” she admits) behind a Motown slink, jaunting over beats as a distraction to the vital catharsis occurring in private. Then, “Oh My God” finds Adele course-correcting, emotionally, and reclaiming her psychological condition. “Oh, my god, I can’t believe it/Out of all the people in the world/What is the likelihood of jumping/Out of my life and into your arms?,” she exhales, permitting herself to have fun again, even if it’s terribly fleeting.

“Can I Get It” is a flirtatious cry for a real relationship (finding the L.A. dating scene mediocre, at best), whereas “I Drink Wine” re-centers the record’s focus on probing what it means to heal, be a whole person, and unconcerned with “seekin’ approval from people I don’t even know,” she sings over Elton John-influenced melody and production. “I hope I learn to get over myself/Stop tryin’ to be somebody else,” she continues. “Oh, I just want to love you, love you for free/Everybody wants somethin’ from me, you just want me.”

As you get older, there’s a crossroads where you have to decide to show up for yourself and not for others. The things you fussed over don’t seem as fussy, and the things you took for granted become important again. Relationships are more precious, and you even reconsider what it means to be alive. “Sometimes, the road less traveled is a road best left behind,” she counsels.

Adele’s most astute and passionate moment arrives with “To Be Loved,” a six-minute epic about how she “built a house for a love to grow.” The sterling piano ballad roots itself in heartache, but its emotional appeal ventures into greater territory 一 like death and losing loved ones. My mother died two months ago, so forgive me if this song has completely shattered every part of me. “To be loved and love at the highest count/Means to lose all the things I can’t live without,” she spills out her heart and soul onto the piano. “Let it be known that I will choose to lose/It’s a sacrifice, but I can’t live a lie/Let it be known, let it be known that I tried.”

“Let it be known that I tried.”

Let it be known that I tried with my mother. I too “took some bad turns that I am owning,” as Adele confides. Let it be known that I cared and sacrificed and loved to the best of my ability, losing myself in the process. But that doesn’t make the sting of vanishing any less severe. It’s like your house being ripped apart in a hurricane and only walking away with a broken leg. It could have been worse, but it sure as hell could have been better.

Death surrounds you as you grow older, another terrible side-effect of aging. It never gets any easier. It gets harder, actually. “Let it be known that I cried for you, even started lying to you. What a thing to do,” Adele leaves you questioning existence, as framed within the universal experience of love.

What a thing to do: to love and be loved. What a thing it is to live and fail so many times. But we’re here and we have albums like 30 that are far more than a divorce album. It’s about life and death, passing into and out of love, forgetting to live and then remembering, and crashing recklessly through your experiences. And it’s joyous and fulfilling and wonderful and messy and devastating and sad all at the same time. And sometimes you may want to stay in bed. But at least you’re here. That is what matters most.

At least you tried.

NEWS ROUNDUP: The Grammys, New Study on Gender Disparity in Music & More

  • The Grammy Awards

    On Sunday night, the music industry’s most momentous ceremony returns to New York City after ten years in Los Angeles. The 60th Grammy Awards will be held at Madison Square Garden and this year the pressure is on for the Recording Academy to prove that they are still relevant within the cultural zeitgeist. In 2016, Taylor Swift’s 1989 was awarded album of the year over Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly. The win prompted many, including Frank Ocean, to accuse The Academy of shutting out minorities. In a move that Ocean called his “Colin Kaepernick moment” he declined to submit his seminal sophomore album, Blonde, for 2017 consideration. This action was echoed by Drake who did not enter his immensely popular Views into the competition. A year later, at the 2017 ceremony, a collective “WTF!?” was felt across the music industry yet again when Album of the Year was awarded to Adele’s 25 (herself in disbelief) over Beyoncé’s Lemonade.

    This year, everyone is wondering if the Recording Academy will finally give artists of color the credit they are due. Will trophy wins match the Billboard charts, which have have proven that we are living in the age of hip-hop and R&B? If the nominations are any indication, all signs point to yes. Childish Gambino, Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, and Bruno Mars are all up for album of the year (no rapper has ever won the honor). The last time that four non-white artists were included in this category was in 2005. However, we still have to ask, “Where the women at?” Lorde is the single female nominee in the group. In contrast, the 2018 Best New Artist selection bodes well for racial diversity and gender equality. SZA, Khalid, Lil Uzi Vert, Alessia Cara, and Julia Michaels round out that category.

  • Gender Disparity In The Music Industry

    A new study by USC Annenberg’s School for Communication and Journalism has confirmed something we already knew: women are vastly underrepresented in the music industry. To make its conclusion, the study analyzed the gender make-up of songwriters, performers, and producers of top-charting songs on the Billboard Hot 100 charts for a five-year period. From 2012-2017, female songwriters counted for only 12.3 percent of those hits; 22.4 percent of the performers were women. The study found that different veins of gender inequality within the music industry are all linked. It’s a chain reaction – female artists tend to work with female songwriters more than male artists do. Less ladies on stage mean less ladies behind the lyrics. However, the biggest industry disparity is present in the recording studio. Only two-percent of producers credited for the Billboard hits were women. In other words, male producers outnumbered the ladies, forty-nine to one.

    The Annenberg school is hoping that by highlighting these numbers, the music industry will be called to action and put hiring practices in place that are more beneficial to women.

  • RIP Mark E. Smith (March 5, 1957 – January 24, 2018)

    On Wednesday, post-punk legend Mark E. Smith passed away at the age of sixty. As lead singer and founder of The Fall, the Manchester musician was a complicated figure whose immense talent and vitriolic disposition simultaneously captivated and repelled his greatest collaborators & fans. Smith formed the Fall in 1976 after seeing the Sex Pistols in concert. Before his death, he churned out thirty-two records with a rotating cast of band members. Despite a lack of commercial success, the Fall proved to be a defining influence for future generations of punks and indie-rockers. The Fall’s last release New Facts Emerge came out last year.

  • Other Highlights

    According to Prince’s estate adviser, Troy Carter, the world will one day hear new music from the late musician. However, there’s no telling when the unreleased material will be available to the public as it is tied up in legal battles between record labels, Prince’s legal heirs, and his estate. Sir Elton John has announced that he will retire from touring but you still have several years to catch him on the road. The seventy-year-old Rocket Man will bid his farewell by playing three-hundred shows over the next three years. Two pop heavy-hitters gave us videos this week: Lady Gaga released the clip for a piano-centric version of “Joanne” while Justin Timberlake prompted Bon Iver comparisons (and insults) with “Say Something.” JT’s vid is produced and directed by La Blogothèque, the French collective best known for their YouTube performance series, the Take Away shows. The #MeToo movement is quickly making waves in music industry. This week, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and rapper Nelly were accused of sexual assault. Simmons has vehemently denied the accusations; Nelly has yet to make a statement.

    The Misfits may be returning to NYC with their original lineup. On January 26, Live Nation tweeted “#ALLHELLSGONNABREAKLOOSE” accompanied by the iconic skull logo in the shape of New Jersey, the band’s home state. Amanda Palmer and Jherek Bischoff paid tribute to the late Dolores O’Riordan by releasing covers of The Cranberries’ hits “No Need To Argue” and “Zombie.” Due to overwhelming demand, indie darlings Haim have added a second Radio City date to their Sister Sister Sister tour. They also released a new video directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. This month has been great for new albums – Hollie Cook, No Age, and Ty Segall all released new material today. No Age will be playing in Brooklyn on May 2.

ONLY NOISE: Songs From Abroad

The plan was as simple as it was unprepared; utilize my two-week vacation in Paris and the UK to discover new music, catch some live shows, and, well…write about it. It would be a piece of cake (or, as the French say, a piece de cake). What I didn’t expect was that my innate aversion to planning anything while on vacation – even so much as Googling what concert to attend that night – was far stronger than my desire to potentially write off my entire trip (hiiiii IRS).

You see, I’m a big fan of the “stumble-upon;” those situations you find yourself in by complete accident. Like that time in 2013, when I somehow managed to wind up at a makeshift punk concert. In a cemetery. Attended by patients of a nearby psychiatric hospital and their families. You just can’t plan this stuff.

I like to think I have a particular knack for “stumbling-upon,” in part because I am a nosy journalist who is perpetually eavesdropping and looking for leads. The other part being my inability to read maps or best any skill related to cardinal directions. You’d be amazed at the things you can find when it’s taken you nine years to realize that Seventh Avenue turns into Varick Street, for instance.

Instead of making a thorough agenda to catch live local music, I would let the music find me. I would leave the details of this vacation up to fate – a concept I absolutely do not believe in, but often pretend I do for romantic purposes. Like Baudelaire’s flâneur, I would “walk the city in order to experience it;” though conceivably in less chic duds than the French poet, who rocked a cravat with the best of ‘em.

Despite my brief and faux dependence on “fate,” I did not magically stumble upon a small and dingy jazz club in the 18th arrondissement, or a searing disco dancehall in Belleville. I didn’t even see one accordion the whole time I was in Paris. What le fuck? Was the music angle of my trip stamped out for good? Not exactly…

There was one thing I hadn’t considered while embarking on my journey: music is unavoidable. It’s actually impossible to go anywhere without hearing something – a car radio blaring, a subway busker, a woman singing on the balcony next door. Or, in my case, a variety of mundane and accidental situations that perhaps don’t have the headline power of “In-patient Punks at Graveyard,” but are memorable nonetheless.

So here are my travel scraps; my sonic sampling platter that may seem unremarkable, but will always signify those two lovely weeks spent alone and abroad. The first notable event was a result of my traveling trademark: getting horribly lost. For like, five hours. During this unintentional excursion I somehow managed to wind up smack dab in the Paris Gay Pride Parade. Twice. Two times, separated by two hours, I turned a corner, and was wedged in a river of half-naked bodies covered in glitter and sweat. Not so bad, you say…unless you’re claustrophobic, such as myself.

Naturally music was blaring from every parade float, and there were moments when the mass of limbs felt like one big, mobile dance party. The playlist? Tous Américains. There was a strange call-and-response adaptation of Del Shannon’s 1961 number, “My Little Runaway,” a healthy dose of Riri, and 4 Non Blondes’ only hit, “What’s Up,” shouted by a throng of women holding hand-painted signs. My personal favorite parade song, however, was the Adele vs. Eurythmics mash-up that blared down Rue de Rivoli. The smash-hit hybrid expertly entwined Adele’s “Rolling In The Deep” and Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams Are Made Of This.” (According to the Internet, this version is called “Rolling In Sweet Dreams.”) The mash-up was oddly stirring, and admittedly gave me chills considering the context. The mash-up was empowering – which is a sentence I thought I’d never write.

Because I often experience music in a public sphere (concerts, clubs, and now parades), it is easy to forget that some of my most prized musical discoveries transpired in a private setting. So many songs and artists have come to my attention at small house parties, in the passenger seat of a car, or in this case, sitting in my French friend Mathieu’s petit apartment the day after the accidental parade attendance, playing that age-old game of “what should we listen to?”

This was tricky – Mathieu and I have diametrically opposing tastes in music. He makes beats and loves chart-topping rap. We also barely speak each other’s language. Fortunately, sharing and enjoying music has no linguistic boundary. The most polarizing aspect in this is exchange was the taste barrier; there’s something about playing music for someone with a different sonic palate that suddenly makes you question all of the songs you love. Perhaps it is a flaw of the over-empathetic, but I begin to hear my beloved music through their ears, predicting all of the things they might dislike about it. I squirmed while playing him Suicide (super accessible), Pavement, and Maribou State, and Mathieu seemed…politely disinterested. “Ok,” I said (which is fortunately the same in French), “your turn.”

Mathieu’s offering was the Belgian Congolese rapper Damso, who’s 2017 LP Ipséité struck me with its equal propensity for darkness and melody. Naturally I have no fucking clue what Damso is rapping about (though Mathieu assures me he is one of the few “self-deprecating” rappers), I can enjoy his music without the burden of words. Ipséité has been on heavy rotation ever since I left Europe.

Thinking back a few years, I realize that every time I visit Paris Mathieu manages to turn me on to at least one intriguing rap artist. In 2013 it was the oddball South African Okmalumkoolkat, and now, it’s Damso. I’d like to think that I’ve enlightened my friend to some more guitar-based tunes in turn – but I highly doubt it.

If Paris taught me I could be tenderized by a Top 40 mash-up and moved by a rapper I can’t understand, the UK would reveal far darker truths. Namely: my disturbing and newfound affection for DNCE’s “Cake By The Ocean.” DNCE is the dance-rock, Jonas Brothers’ spinoff group formed by Joe Jonas, drummer Jack Lawless, Cole Whittle, and JinJoo Lee in 2015.

Jonas was ostensibly the group’s sole namesake, just as 2015’s “Cake By The Ocean” was their only single verging on, dare I say, a quality tune. The song, or, as I like to call it, assault weapon, is terminally catchy. If Katy Perry’s “Chained To The Rhythm” is an earworm, “Cake” is an ear viper, wiping out every other song in your brain with its venom. The glittering, cross-genre (disco, Broadway musical… calypso?) hit has plagued me for the past five days.  FIVE DAYS of non-stop, constant rotation. I’m beginning to worry I have brain damage as a result, as repeating “Ya ya ya ya ya ya” too many times must surely stunt cellular growth. Should my cognitive abilities be compromised – should I suddenly manifest a secret adoration for Joe Jonas – I will know whom to blame: British Top 40 radio.

“Cake By The Ocean” bombarded every bus, convenience store, and cab I was in. It was following me (like a malicious viper!), slowly poisoning my eardrums, trying to dismantle my precious collection of “good music.” Jonas and Co. threatened to undo years of “good taste” with one insanely catchy song that on paper, I would hate. Those bastards.

They say when you travel alone, you “learn about yourself.” While this may be true, it doesn’t account for the kinds of things you learn. Sure, I learned that I can in fact read maps, sleep anywhere, and have half-assed conversations with my high school-level French. But I also learned that deep inside me, there is a dark, shameful little place that loves, and I mean LOVES the song “Cake By The Ocean.” And that is something I can’t unlearn.

Op-Ed + Live Review: Klava Alicea + Adele + The Importance Of Music Education

Klava and liza

Having been fortunate enough to receive a robust, extensive and varied music education coming up through the Waldorf School system, I can attest to how it permeates every other aspect of learning: its power to shape and grow the brain and its ability to bridge every gap imaginable, be it culture, language or developmental differences. This isn’t a controversial idea whatsoever, as there’s plenty of data on the benefits of music and art in education that show how the advantages one receives from it extend to everything from math skills to interpersonal communication. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who lived in a labor camp for eight years, devoted his Nobel Prize lecture to this very subject. He proclaimed that “not everything assumes a name. Some things lead beyond words. Art inflames even a frozen, darkened soul to a high spiritual experience.”

I cannot imagine how different the world would’ve looked to me had I not learned to play instruments, and I owe much of my precarious sense of sanity and daily balance to the fact that I played music nearly every day of my childhood and young adulthood. With that said, I had the pleasure of getting to see the next generation of Waldorf kids in the throes of this process when I attended the school’s annual talent show with one of my very best friends from High School, whose daughter, Klava Alicea, is now in the 3rd grade. I hadn’t seen Klava for a few years when I went over to their house on a blustery winter day back in December. Her mother told me she had started learning the guitar about a week earlier. I asked her to play something for me and she bounced over to the couch without batting an eye, and performed the first verse of Katy Perry’s “Firework” with better execution than most adults I know who play. Maybe even Perry herself. What struck me the most was Klava’s self-possession with the instrument which matches what is clearly a natural gift. Knowing what I know about live musical performance, this kind of fearlessness is a requisite piece of the puzzle when you’re attempting to captivate your audience, almost more so than talent. Fast-forward to about a month ago, when I got to see these skills on display for the school’s talent show. Earlier in the week she had told me that she would be performing Adele’s, “Someone Like You”, as a duet with her mom on guitar. My first thought was how terrified I would have been if I were her. Just all of it. Mapping Adele’s vocal range; playing in front of a room full of my musical peers and entire extended family; Remembering the words…It’s the stuff of nightmares, really. Klava couldn’t have been more poised up there on stage, and sang the song perfectly, her beautiful little voice floating through the air like a butterfly. I’m confident that she will be able to have a career in music if she so chooses, but more importantly that she will become the kind of adult that this planet desperately needs: caring and open and confident. Unafraid of who she is and the world she inhabits.

All of the kids who performed that night were tiny little exemplars of Solzhenitsyn’s words, when he said that “falsehood can hold out against much in this world, but not against art”. I rest much easier at night knowing that there are adults like these in the making.

Klava Paris

 

NEWS ROUNDUP: Parquet Courts, Bernie Sanders, & Animal Collective

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  • Parquet Courts Debut New Songs

    The Brooklyn-via-Texas punks performed “Dust” and “Outside” on WFUV, and also announced an upcoming album titled Human Performance. “Dust” has a loping, cowboy Western feel, spacing tendrils of guitar riffs between suffocating lyrics: “It comes through the window, it comes through the floor/ It comes through the roof, and it comes through the door/ Dust is everywhere/ Sweep.” As you can see in the creepy video – which features dust personified- dust is a metaphor for the distractions of modern life. In a way, the song is a more subtle version of the band’s “Content Nausea.

 

  • Bernie Sanders Gets Musical Endorsements

    I’m not saying that anyone should base their vote on what celebrities think of the presidential candidates. But if they did, I think we know who would win; members of Vampire Weekend and Dirty Projectors  joined Bernie Sanders onstage to sing “This Land Is Your Land” during a Iowa City rally for the candidate on January 30th. If you live in Brooklyn, you may have also noticed a bunch of shows dedicated to raising money for Sanders. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has earned only the endorsement of Kid Rock, and the wrath of Adele and Steven Tyler for using their songs without permission.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEXAUZrMvSE&feature=youtu.be

 

  • Listen to Animal Collective’s “Lying in the Grass”

    On the cartoonish, slightly schizophrenic track, voices bounce around, occasionally running into a glitch or a saxophone lick as the song builds. Listening to “Lying in the Grass” is like following instructions to make an origami box, only to realize you’ve somehow made a crane. Maybe that doesn’t make sense, but it’s kind of pretty, which sums up the track. Check it out below:

 

  • Johnny Cash Lives On, In Arachnid Form

    Fourteen new species of tarantulas have been recently discovered in the United States, and one of those, Aphonopelma johnnycashi, has earned the namesake of the country singer Johnny Cash. Why? It lives near Folsom Prison, and is jet-black, the color that Cash was known for wearing almost exclusively. It’s almost too perfect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5Ts4M3irWM

 

RIP Maurice White

Maurice White founded the incomparable Earth, Wind & Fire. He passed away yesterday from Parkinson’s at age 74, six years after he was inducted into the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame. His band was one of the most renowned, universally liked musical groups- for a thorough obituary, see The New York Times.

 

  • Philly Musicians Bill to be Withdrawn

    Remember that bill we mentioned last week, the one that would require all performers coming to Philadelphia to register with the police? Maybe you even signed the petition to stop it. Well, a spokesperson for Mark Squilla, the councilman who proposed the bill, has said that he intends to withdraw it. That definitely falls under the category of “good news.”