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thephantomofthe-internet · 5 years

Text

Charming Man

Steve Harrington x Reader

Word Count: 5, 618

Warnings: Cursing, Unwanted Male Advances

Author’s Note: I hit 2K!!! I had no idea I would ever get to such a milestone, much less in such a short amount of time! Thank you to everyone whose joined me on this tour of an ocean of flavor!

Tag List: @hotstuffhargrove @moonstruckhargrove @carolimedanvers @alex--awesome--22 @thechickvic @lilmissperfectlyimperfect @so-not-hotmess @agentsinstorybrooke @sunflowercandie @kaliforniacoastalteens @songforhema @spidey-pal @mickmoon

Steve Harrington was a nuisance. He didn’t know when to quit. If he asked you one more question about the stupid Wham! album, you were going to scream. But there you, with your big, fake smile that made the corners of your mouth hurt, nodding along to whatever Harrington was droning on about. You thought he was still contemplating the choice between the single and the whole record. He had made some comment about only needing the song Careless Whisper off the record and the salesgirl in you had tried to up sell him, suggesting buying the cassette and the single, to ensure that he didn’t need both. It was a terrible idea-singles were in essence, an awful to buy, but so was buying both the full cassette and the single, since it would cost twice as much than just buying the record. But you believed Harrington was just dumb enough to fall for the scheme. You’d gotten smarter boys to buy more than they needed. Last week, you’d been able to convince Keith to buy singles of a bunch of your favourite songs, purely because he was shamelessly trying to impress you. He failed to do so, but you might be getting a mix tape out of it, which wouldn’t be terrible. You collected mix tapes, especially mix tapes about broken hearts or first love. You planned to make an art installation with them, but for now they sat in a shoe box under your passenger seat.

“So, you think I should get the cassette and the single on record?” Steve asked, drawing you out of your thoughts. Your smile dropped slightly, trying to piece together what he was talking about.

You found it fast, nodding too enthusiastically “Yeah! I mean, between you and me, it’s a better deal...” you said, keeping your voice low as if it was a big secret what you were telling him.

“Is it?” Steve asked, crossing his arms over his chest, the record and tape still in hand, each poking out on either side of him. You stifled a yawn, nodding again. You’d been there since seven that morning and the mall was closing in an hour. You were beyond exhausted, but Tiffany Michaels called in sick, again, and so you had to cover again.

“Yeah!” you let your cheery tone fall away a bit, hoping the irritation slipping through would give him the hint to clear off. This interaction had been going on for a half hour now. It had started with him asking for record suggestions, which you took to mean ‘tell me the albums the popular hits on the radio are coming from’ and pattered off the top selling records from memory. You’d sold more copies of Madonna’s Like a Virgin in the past week than you could possibly keep track of, purely because people wanted the album with Material Girl or Like a Virgin or Into the Groove on it. Steve had gotten unsurprisingly interested in the album with Careless Whisper on it, as did most horn dog, wannabe players who came strutting into your store. You were more than happy to sell him the record and get on with your shift, but he wasn’t letting that happen.

“Cause, the full record’s like eight bucks.” He held up the tape “But the tape’s like six, plus three bucks for the single that’s like nine bucks, that’s more than the record.” He grinned, placing the tape on top of the single, handing them back to you as if they were yours.

You felt your face colour, in part because he’d taught you in your lie, but in part because he seemed genuinely proud of that mental math. “You’re...you’re right. I wasn’t thinking, sorry ‘bout that.” You said easily, shrugging as you placed the single back on the shelf and the tape into the plastic shopping basket on your arm. He’d caught you shelving tapes in the easy listening section half an hour ago and you weren’t allowed to shelf while talking to a customer, meaning you were forced to lug them around with you as Steve wandered, asking questions. And those things were heavy all lumped together! There had to be at least a hundred copies of Kate Bush’s Running Uphill and Whitney Houston’s Whitney Houston in your stupid basket!

“It’s cool, no biggie...I think I’ll just get the single, come back for the record if I like the song enough.” He decided with a small nod.

You grit your teeth. You wanted to scream about how singles were a waste of money and how you’d make no money on commission for that. Instead, you nodded “Great! If you just head to the counter, Michelle can check you. Enjoy your record!” you said, turning on your heel and practically rushing out of the stereo accessory section he’d dragged you to. You only had forty minutes to shelf all the tapes on your arm, or else you’d have to stay passed close to do it, which both your closing manager and you would hate.

“Hey, uh wait!” he called, chasing after you. You let out a small sigh, turning back with a painful smile. “I was sort of wondering, well maybe if you’d wanna maybe go out this weekend? They’re showing Dawn of the Dead at the theatre, I’ve heard it pretty good...” he rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly, eyes drifting to the ceiling instead to yours.

Your brows furrowed. You weren’t expecting this from him. But, of course, he was not the first boy to ask you out while you were at work. It was a distressingly common theme. You assumed that guys liked that you had to be nice to them, or that they didn’t realize that you had to be nice and assumed that you were flirting. “Oh...um I’m working this weekend...” you said, shuffling on your feet. Most of the time, when guys ask you out at work, they seemed so confident and cocky, it was easy to reject them. But Steve looked genuinely nervous and you couldn’t place why.

Steve’s smirk only grew, he leaned in closer, trapping you against a rack of blank tapes “Aw come on, have a little fun, come out with me instead.” He said. You’d heard this shtick before, Billy Hargrove had tried it on you just a couple weeks prior. Having it come from Steve ‘The Hair’ Harrington, made you want to puke. Because you knew exactly where he’d been. With Billy, it was unclear; lots of girls lied about what they did and didn’t do with that boy. But everyone knew who did what with Harrington. You weren’t too interested in being put on a list.

“Yeah, I actually need the money so…no.” you replied, pushing out from under his arm and away from him. Steve stumbled back, shocked and a little mortified by how you’d reacted to his flirting.

Steve’s head dropped, his gaze focusing on his scuffed converse before he looked at you again “Yeah...yeah no that’s cool, no biggie. Some other time then...” he said awkwardly, brushing the singular strand of brown hair from his face. You didn’t say anything, what were you supposed to say? That you thought he was a douche and had zero interest in doing anything with him? That kind of language could get you fired. And you needed this job, you desperately needed a car for next year.

“I’ll see you around?” Steve tried awkwardly, his smile turning into a frown fast as you didn’t respond.

“Yeah sure.” You nodded “I gotta go shelf this stuff before the mall closes.” You headed back towards the easy listening section, trying not to cringe at the awkward interaction you’d just experienced. It was so very awkward! It was more fun to reject assholes who treated you like a well dressed object to leer and gawk at. Sam Goody didn’t have uniforms per say, simply a dress code to uphold; it was encouraged to look cool, hip, and young. As long as your shoes were black sneakers, your hair wasn’t fully in your face, and you could see your bottoms under your tiny apron, you were good. Which meant you chose your clothes carefully. Generally, you went with a patterned button down, which you could pop as many or as few buttons on as you want. That meant that you could be remembered by your male and female customers alike could either remember you by your name or as the chick with the great tits. It worked well.

But it also meant that guys like Steve Harrington talked to your chest.

And it was weird for Steve to talk to your chest! Especially since you and Steve had never had a conversation. Like ever. If you weren’t wearing a nametag, you’d be utterly shocked that he knew your name. Because he was the proverbial king of Hawkins and you were a nobody. Well, a nobody until someone wanted to use your employee discount. Then, suddenly you were the most popular girl in school. Hell, you should’ve gotten a job sooner, maybe you would’ve had a date to the spring formal last year.

Steve did buy the single. Even though he hated singles. Who wanted to listen to one song over and over again? Even if it had a B-side, it wasn’t worth the price. He bought it, he made sure to say that you helped him, and then he left. The mall was closing down, save the movie theatre, and he wanted to get home as soon as possible. That was so embarrassing. He didn’t even know why he tried, it wasn’t as if she had any pretence to him. All the other girls he’d been hitting on that summer were his age, they knew him and his style. They also knew about the most humiliating moment in his life, a lot of them were even there to experience it second hand. But you had only the rumours of his dickish tendencies to go off of. That wasn’t enough for anyone to work with.

But stupid Dustin had gotten it in his head that he had to get a girl, that Robin was the right girl. But Robin wasn’t the right girl, no way in hell. So he went in harder on trying to get a date. Every girl his age got hit on, he’d nearly got his ass beat by Justin Gardner after hitting on his girlfriend in front of him, but how was he supposed to know Justin was dating? Justin was a benchwarmer who couldn’t get a date if he paid them in school. Now suddenly he could get a hottie? Unbelievable.

It didn’t help that Dustin had a girlfriend now. And yes, it was embarrassing that Steve was jealous of a thirteen year old for having a girlfriend, he would never admit it out loud. But even though he didn’t believe that Suzie actually existed, it was slightly annoying that his dorky little friend could get a girlfriend and he couldn’t. He used to be able to get any girl he wanted! What happened? Did Nancy spread a rumour about him that he hadn’t heard yet? Was it because he lost a fight to both Billy Hargrove and Jonathan Byers? Or was it because he wasn’t going to college in the fall?

He was almost certain it was because he wasn’t going to school in the fall.

That and the dorky sailor outfit he had to wear at Scoops Ahoy!

The dumb Dixie cup hat and sailor shirt were totally throwing off his game. That’s why he was looking forward to going to the mall that day, out of uniform, to scope babes. He didn’t have much success, but he was a little bit excited to see you out of uniform. He’d seen you about a dozen times, all while you were at work, leaned over the counter, sometimes chewing on the end of a pen, sometimes laughing with coworkers or customers. You always looked so...well beautiful. He had to see it up close. And you just a beautiful up close, but it was obvious that you were uncomfortable too. Still, you were cute. He wished that you were a year older, that you already had all the context to his life. But what could he do? He wasn’t going back in there, not with you wandering around with your judgy eyes. It would be humiliating.

And he was already humiliating himself enough that summer.

You finished shelving the tapes in record time, mostly because the shop was empty and Michelle was thoroughly annoyed by your usual slow closes. You wanted to do a good job with your work and not rush the job, whereas Michelle just wanted to leave as fast as possible. After Sean, your least threatening manager, locked up the shop, the three of you all headed towards the exit. You rode your bike to work, since your mother almost never lent you the family car, but at night you felt less and less comfortable riding home. Sometimes Sean would offer you a ride, but ever since he and Michelle started hooking up, the rides got less and less frequent and when they did happen, Sean would spend the whole time complaining about the ambiguity of his relationship with Michelle. You didn’t take the rides home too often anymore. Not that one would be offered tonight, Michelle had latched herself onto his arm and had nuzzled so deep into his neck that you wondered if she could even see where she was going.

“You want a ride, Y/N?” Sean called as you exited into the parking lot. Sean’s burgundy pickup truck was parked so close to the doors and your legs were so tired. But taking the ride home meant that you’d either have to sit next to them on the front seat or in the trunk part with your bike. And neither option sounded too much better than peddling home.

“Nah, thanks though, I’d rather ride home.” You said with a smile, heading over to the bike racks and pulling the key out from around your neck and off your head, jabbing it into the padlock and clicking the lock open, wrapping the chain around the neck of your bike.

“You sure? It’s pretty dark already...” Sean replied, looking around the desolate parking lot, more concerned than he really needed to be.

“Baby, she said she’s fine.” Michelle said, resting a hand on his chest. Sean didn’t argue passed that and you turned on your bright bike light, swinging your leg over the seat and propped your foot on the peddle, pushing off.

You sped home, making it back to your house in record time. Your mother had left you a note by the door, explaining that she’d taken your younger sister to ballet class and she’d be home late. You crumpled up the note paper, tossing it into the waste paper bin by the powder room door, climbing the stairs and heading into the bathroom, turning on the hot water in your tub and letting it start to fill up. You were rifling through the pile of magazines next to your bed, trying to find the latest issue of cosmo you’d nicked from the corner store just a couple days ago.

Across town, Steve was hiding in his room. His father had ripped him a new one. Again. Turns out, his sailor suit was still laughable a month in to him having to wear it. He still wasn’t over the fact that Steve hadn’t gotten into college and he couldn’t get a better job than ice cream scooper part time. His standards of jobs in Hawkins was a bit too high, in Steve’s opinion. Still, his degrading of him at every turn was getting exhausting. He flopped on his mattress pitifully.

“This whole summer has been a nightmare…” you both muttered, you as you slipped into the steamy water, Steve as he kicked off his thick white socks.

Working at Sam Goody had many perks, like not having a stupid uniform and not smelling like spoiled food all the time, but you spent your time surrounded by assholes. You wanted to meet one nice guy. One guy who didn’t leer down your top and talk to your tits, who didn’t smirk at you or call you ‘baby’, ‘sugar’, or ‘honey’. Just one descent guy who’d treat you like a person instead of a sex doll. God, you would’ve said yes to Harrington if you weren’t working, at least at first. Once he pulled the macho, ‘I know you want me baby’ shit you were out completely. But for a second, when he was rambling on about Dawn of the Dead, you felt like you could stomach a night out or two with him

Meanwhile, Steve just wanted to feel like himself again. His whole last year of high school had been hell on his confidence. First, Nancy dumps him, then Billy Hargrove takes over his team and steals all his friends, then he didn’t get into college, and then Scoops Ahoy? It was all too much. He’d never felt like a loser in his life. He used to be liked, he used to be popular. And yeah, being popular didn’t really matter anymore, but for one last summer before everything changed on him, he wanted to be someone again. Just for a minute. And maybe that’s why he was acting like such an asshole. Because he needed some control over his life. He wished he could’ve gotten in under control when he was talking to the pretty girl in the record store, he made himself into such a douche. That wasn’t who he was, but she didn’t know that. God, he wanted to curl up into a ball and die.

You turned your head up to the ceiling, letting your sweaty neck stick to the cold tile behind your head. You didn’t want to go to work the next day, at least you had the morning shift. Tracey Lords would hopefully make into her shift that day. She hated opening shifts, so the pair of you often traded. You’d still have to stay behind if you got a bit of a rush, which you were expecting. Tomorrow was Friday, when the buses filled with the townies from the neighbouring towns and cities, all coming to bask in the free A/C and glorious shopping experiences. You hated Fridays, they always brought in the worst types of people, mostly shoplifters, who totally ruined your sales for the week. You vowed to stop stealing magazines from the Pick n’ Save after you saw your commission rates plummet after last Friday and a terrible group of greedy kids stole up your section.

Steve really didn’t want to go to the mall at all the next day, if only because he didn’t want to see you in his stupid sailor and hat, walking around like the geek of the week. He just wanted to hide away every shift. But the malls back hallways didn’t lead to any bathrooms, so he was forced to wander the mall like an idiot every time he needed to alleviate himself. He didn’t want you to see him like that. His confidence was already so low, he didn’t need to crumble up what was left of it.

Steve fell asleep that night with dreams of a face, undefined beyond a set of eyes, a nose, and a wide smile. No matter what he said in the dream, the person, a girl his dream decided for him, just smiled and laughed. The eyes were so deep and wide, they took up most of his memory of the dream, although he couldn’t even really place the colour of them, just that they looked at him so lovingly. The way he longed for someone to look at him. He woke up the next morning still in his sailor suit, with the eyes following him to work.

Across town, you woke up from a deep, dreamless sleep. You woke up well rested for the first time in weeks, it was as though someone slipped a sleeping pill in your bath water the night before and it sent you crashing into the pillow with your whole body ready and willing to sleep. You went into work happier than ever, high on the endorphins a good night’s sleep gave you.

Both you and Steve left for work at the exact same time that morning, unaware of your paths even crossing. You headed upstairs to meet Toby, who had the keys to unlock the store, and set to work straightening up the shop and opening your register for the day. Kim Rein sauntered in twenty minutes late, fifteen minutes before the mall opened and you tried not to give her too much side eye. Steve started his own open a level below, restocking cones and cups and filling his soap and sanitizer buckets under the counter.

Once the mall opened, you suffered through four hours of stupid people with stupid questions about terrible albums. You sold three copies of Kate Bush’s Running Uphill, which was an accomplishment for you, since her last album was the only popular due to the hilariously weird Wuthering Heights. You were bored by two in the afternoon, when Toby finally sent you on break. All you wanted was a damn Orange Julius and you’d pay any amount for one.

Likewise, Steve was very much over his shift around the same time when Robin finally agreed to let him go on his damn break. He just needed to get out of the stupid shop. He was going to go to the cheap vending machine, the one by the cafeteria bathrooms, to get a can of Coke. Both of you headed into the shopping mall, trying to avoid anyone you knew.

Unfortunately, you ran directly into Tommy Hanson.

Tommy Hanson was an asshole and a bully. He didn’t know how to treat anyone decently. He stepped all over people. Was it any wonder that Carol broke up with him at least twice a year? It just so happened that Carol dumped him during the summer.

And now he was standing in front of you, blocking your way to the sweet, sweet Orange Julius.

“Y/N, baby, looking foxy as always.” He said, running his tongue over his upper lip. He’d stolen that look from Billy Hargrove and it didn’t work for either of them.

“Tommy.” You replied, skirting passed him and into the short line, keeping your eyes on the board above the shop.

“Why you rushing off, baby?” he asked, following behind you “I just wanna talk for a second…” you didn’t reply, ignoring him as best you could. ”You’re stunning, you know that? Absolutely gorgeous…” his eyes ran over your body like a tongue; his gaze was thick and hot, it made you want to cringe and pull away.

“Thank you.” You said shortly, getting to the front of the line and ordering quickly.

“What’d you say we go into the back, fool around for a bit?” he asked in your ear. You grimaced, glaring at him before moving out of the way for the next person.

“Don’t make me puke, Hanson.” You snapped, grabbing your blended drink from the poor server having to watch the scene going on between you and Tommy.

“Aw come on, don’t be such a bitch, Y/N.” Tommy whined, grabbing your drink from your hands “You know you want to...”

You reached for your drink, but Tommy just pulled it away. God, he was such a damn child. “Tommy, give me back my drink.” You said sternly.

“Come with me, I’ll give it back when we’re done, you’ll need it more then anyway.” He replied cheekily.

Steve saw this scene going down from the vending machine. He contemplated going over there when Tommy first walked over; he knew that the guy had gotten pretty scummy since he started hanging out with Billy. But when he starting grabbing things from you and taunting you, Steve couldn’t help but go over there.

“Dude,” Steve said, grabbing the drink out of Tommy’s hand, hovering over him. “You wanna try to get a decent personality?”

You looked between the pair of them, trying to decide if you could run off while they were arguing. But you paid good money for that drink and you really wanted it. You realized quickly that Tommy wasn’t going to let this go, and you really couldn’t stand the kid as is. You made your move fast.

“Steve!” you gasped with a shrill giggle “There you are!” you walked over to him, taking the drink he offered shyly and wrapping an arm around his waist. “So are you gonna take me out this weekend or not?” you asked, batting your eyelashes up at him. Steve looked utterly startled, but he didn’t react poorly.

“Course, darling...” he cooed. Steve could’ve died; you made such a disgusted face at the nickname he would’ve happily melted into the tile and be mopped up by Larry the janitor. But you didn’t pull your arm away.

“Walk me back to work?” You asked sweetly. Steve nodded, not trusting himself to not say anything embarrassing. You waved to Tommy, letting Steve lead you away from him, taking a long sip from your drink. It was already melting, but it was still sweet and cold, so you didn’t mind. And Steve had helped you out, although somewhat unwillingly, which was certainly an improvement.

Steve looked back only once, but the look on Tommy’s face was priceless. He looked so annoyed and more than a little broken up about his snatching away of you. His ego hadn’t been this inflated since October of last year. He felt like he was on cloud nine, like he was finally himself again. And even when you let him go, he still felt good about himself.

“Thanks for the help, Harrington.” You bit out once you were far enough away from Tommy.

“Sure, no problem. You want me to walk you back upstairs or are you good?” Steve asked, cracking his can of New Coke. He didn’t love New Coke, but it was all the vending machine was serving and he was just desperate enough to drink it.

You sighed “No I’m alright, I’m still on break, so I’m just gonna go hide somewhere.”

“You can hide at Scoops.” Steve blurted. He mentally kicked himself in the ass, it was such a stupid idea. The upstairs stores had break rooms, you didn’t need to hide with him.

You raised an eyebrow, watching him carefully. Steve swallowed, finishing the thought “The place is busy enough as is and if Tommy walks in, well he already thinks something is happened with...us, he won’t try anything else.”

“Won’t your boss get mad if I’m in there, not eating ice cream?” you asked.

“Oh he’s never here. Me and Robin have keys so we switch between opening and closing. You’re totally good.” Steve explained, scuffing the toe of his shoe into the ground, making a black mark on the white and teal tiles.

“Robin...like Robin Buckley?” you asked, stopping dead in the middle of the hall.

“I think that’s her last name?” Steve replied, scrunching up his face in thought.

“Oh I can’t. She hates me. My friend Tammy told everyone in our sophomore year history class that she was weird and avoided her for like a month. I didn’t do shit, but you know, loyalties and shit.” You explained, running your hands through your hair, slightly embarrassed by the memory.

Steve thought for a moment, an idea slowly coming into view. “She won’t even know that you’re there, come on!” he said, grabbing your hand and dragging you off. You gasped, laughing as you ran to keep up with him.

Steve dragged you through the back halls and rooms leading behind the shops. You hadn’t been through the lower level’s back halls and they were much more expansive that the upstairs halls. The whole space still felt eerie, but much cooler than the upper level. Steve pulled you into one of the rooms and you spotted the nautical theming of the shop. Steve rushed and shut a divider themed with dark wood and glass bricks.

“There, she won’t know that you’re here and you can hide from Tommy. Easy.” Steve said proudly, hopping up on the ledge.

“Can’t she hear you talking to someone?” you chuckled, pulling out the awful plastic folding chair and sitting down.

“Eh, we’re busy enough for her to not notice or care. Probably think I’m talking to myself or something.”

You leaned back in your chair, letting the front legs of the chair raise into the air as you crossed your arms over your chest. “You talk to yourself a lot, Harrington?” you asked cheekily.

Steve shrugged “Only when I’m really trying to break something down.” He replied. You were surprised and a little refreshed by the honesty. You didn’t expect him to be honest with you; you expected him to lie or try to pull some cool line. It was nice that he wasn’t trying so hard.

“What about you? I bet you’re the stone silent type, keeping it all inside.” Steve added, leaning his elbows on his knees.

“You’re not wrong...” you grinned, cocking your head to the side. You let the front legs drop back down to the ground with a tinny smack, your arms unfurling themselves to balance yourself. “But I sing to myself all the time.”

Steve’s grin turned lopsided and you wondered what exactly what was going through his head. “Really?” he asked.

“Yeah...I find it calming. It helps me to focus my mind, sometimes it just a singular line of a song, over and over again until I get whatever I’m trying to do done.”

“Doing a lot of singing nowadays?”

You sighed “Pretty much...you doing a lot of talking?”

“All I do is talk now.”

You nodded to yourself, forcing the chair to turn towards Steve and centring yourself on it, resting your arms on your knees and looking up at him. “Alright, what’s happening with you?” you asked.

Steve turned away slightly “Ah geez...I mean haven’t you heard? I’m like the only guy who didn’t get into any colleges. I’m stuck here for another year, working and trying to get my shit together.” He ran his fingers angrily through his hair, ripping at the strands as if they hurt him personally.

“I mean...that fucking sucks. But you’ll be okay.” You replied “I mean, look on the bright side, you have another year to be something else.”

“What do you mean?” Steve asked, furrowing his brow.

“You get a fresh start in a world you already know. You don’t have to be the jerk everyone in school knew you as. And you don’t have to mope around either. You can just be...you.” You smiled to yourself over that answer. Steve had given you a hard puzzle to solve, and while you couldn’t solve it for him, you were glad to have an answer at all.

Steve chuckled, although he wasn’t sure why, nor did you. “Oh yeah? And who is me?” he asked.

You shrugged “I have no idea. I don’t think most people do.”

Steve’s expression changed to one you couldn’t read. He nodded to himself, leaning back onto the glass. He let out a deep sigh “Honestly? I don’t even know anymore...” That wasn’t a shock to you, but you didn’t say that out loud. Steve cracked a smirk “Who did you think I was?”

“Oh...I have no idea.” You leaned back in your chair, letting out a big breath “I didn’t really know you, just your reputation. I only knew the bad stuff, which made you seem like an asshole.”

Steve’s smile dropped and he looked away “Yeah...you aren’t the only one who thinks that...” he admitted sadly.

“But...I mean I didn’t have any proof till yesterday. That guy was a real asshole.” Steve’s face dropped further, but you didn’t try ease the blow you’d just sent him.

“Yeah...I’m sorry ‘bout that.” He muttered, looking up to finally meet your eye.

You nodded, sighing softly “It’s alright, no biggie. I get it now.” You said.

Steve found a small smile again “What do you think of this guy?” he asked, unashamed of the slightly embarrassing question.

You placed a finger on your chin, raising your eyes to the ceiling to truly think. “Hmm...I think I like this guy better.”

Steve smirked “Yeah?” he hopped off the ledge, inching towards you. You didn’t move, watching him stalk over to you.

“Just a little...” you pinched your finger and thumb together, showing an inch in between. “I’d like you more if you wore normal clothes.” Steve rolled his eyes, his hands coming cautiously to your face, pulling it up to kiss you. You didn’t resist his grab, easing yourself out of the chair, shoving your hands into your back pockets.

“Alright, what the hell is going on in there?!?!” The divider slammed against its sleeve violently and Steve snapped his head around. Robin was staring at you incredulously. She looked more than a little furious, but it melted away when you met her eye.

“Oh god, really dingus? Her?” Robin scoffed. Steve merely shrugged, turning his attention back to you without a word.

“You mind shutting the divider, Buckley?” you asked “Harrington’s a bit busy...” you grabbed his fake tie, pulling his lips to yours, the sound of the divider slapping shut the only sound left in the room.

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asbcblog · 3 years

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TOP SONGS OF 2020 WRITE UP!

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6WDeuRMOV8neAhU2zd193d?si=lZ9gDIp0TsCCEOeCS7_QGw

1. I remember everything - John Prine

I was going to write an incredibly earnest and long review of this song that outlined just how much John Prine meant to me. I can’t really do it and I think this song probably says enough alone. With only a few chords he always manages to express all the little things that make love what it is, all different kinds of love. Long lasting, short moments, love with places, sounds, going places and staying home, endless family ties, and the often fragile but in the end tenable love between all human beings in the face of catastrophe. The pandemic stole a lot of things from a lot of people this year, including John Prine, but he will remain one of the greatest songwriters of all time and his songs will live on forever.

2. Dream Palette - Yves Tumor

I can’t drive but let’s pretend I’m driving, I’m in LA and it’s night time or something, my elbow’s out the window, don’t know why I’m wearing sunglasses, this song comes on the radio, I’m the coolest person alive.

3. Boylife in EU- Yung Lean

Not to repeat my review of Garden but when the chorus comes I feel like I’m on top of a really big hill and its pouring it down with rain and im screaming but this time its because of a no-deal Brexit.

4. Garden- Joseph Futak

My review was already used as part of Joe’s promo campaign and it said: “feel like im on top of a really big hill and its pouring it down with rain and I’m screaming when the drums come in x x”

5. Circle the Drain- Soccer Mommy

I like this song because I too, am often alone in my room, and I have also become obsessed with subtle breakbeats to an extent where people around me have become very bored of the subject.

6. The Brothers William Said- The Innocence Mission

I listened to this song over and over when I was travelling round London in January just after my birthday, it felt like I’d been listening to it for years, like it was in a movie I’d forgotten. It felt at the time like I was saying a lot of goodbyes, recognising that things weren’t really like they used to be.

7. On the Floor- Perfume Genius

Say it with me ladies: I CROSS OUT HIS NAME ON THE PAGE!!!!

8. Shameika- Fiona Apple

She may not believe it but I bet Fiona Apple looked tough with a riding crop.

9. Song for Our Daughter- Laura Marling

Everything about this is fantastic, mellow and bright at the same time. Every part is brought forward individually and no part of this song gets left behind. A stunning vocal from Laura Marling and purposeful lyrics set to a cinematically emotive instrumental. Pure magic as always.

10. Building site outside- Piglet

Not going to lie, I was in a very vulnerable emotional state when I listened to this song for the first time, but I think that makes it no less powerful and just, sad. The lyric ‘she smiled at me so much last time’ is just so simple and devastating that you forget this would’ve been on every indie film soundtrack from 2000-2008 if Piglet was an industry plant.

11. I wonder- Shamir

One word: EPIC

12. Crimson Tide- Destroyer

Listened to this every time I came on my period this year.

13. In the Dining Room - Joe Pera talks with you

Adam showed me Joe Pera when I really felt incredibly sad at the very beginning of this year. It’s a show that’s made me feel good, no matter the circumstances. This moment in the show made me smile, and I love hearing Gene come in a bit too early.

14. Stupid Love- Lady Gaga

Shakin my little booty in the kitchen to this x

15. Might bang, might not- Little Simz

Livid we didn’t all get to go to End of the Road and see all the hot dad’s loving Little Simz.

16. Fire- Waxahatchee

A truly insane vocal. I listened to this song on my way to work almost every day from September to December and fantasised singing back up at some kind of outdoor gig in the summer and it made everything significantly less bleak.

17. Hannah Sun- Lomelda

This song is too nice and genuine for me to say anything other than, “really lovely song :)”.

18. Scroll of Sorrow- Machine Girl, guayaba

Listened to this a lot this year while sitting on my kitchen floor staring into an empty oven, wondering if I was ever going to go to a party again.

19. Build a nest- Jeff and Ruby Parker

Have put this on in the flat because the guitar solo reminds me of everything my dad listens to at home. A really great piece of music that kicks off a really exciting album.

20. Kiss me thru the phone- That Kid

Ned said yesterday that he thought it was funny how much the original of this song is so foundational to hyper pop and I agree. Also I’ve started saying ‘Bitch’ like That Kid does every time I stub my toe.

21. Cuckoo- Sam Amidon

I am punting down a creek, looking in the branches that hang over the water for the bird that shall lead me to my next clue.

22. Places/ Plans- Skullcrusher

Used this song to comfort myself in moments where I also just don’t understand why I’m not famous.

23. Sweetjoy- Jam City

Finally….. HAIM for dudes.

24. Clean Living- Slow Weather

I saw someone listening to this on the side of my Spotify so I decided to give it a go and it was a fantastic decision. It’s mental that half of this song is an outro.

25. Summer All Over- Blake Mills

Along with the music video visuals and the dampened piano tone, this wins the competition for least summer-y song with the actual word summer in the title.

26. Ready Cheeky Pretty- CHAI

All of my joy this year has been brought to me by CHAI. I have nothing negative to say about CHAI. If you have anything negative to say about CHAI you’re gonna have to go through me.

27. Diaphanous- Land of Talk

This band was recommended to me by a guy I was trying to flirt with at rough trade east but everything closed before I could impress him by saying ‘I think they’re really cool’.

28. Anything - Adrianne Lenker

Anyone who has ever attempted to write a song with me knows how much I simply love rhyming. Seriously though, every thing rhymes, brilliant stuff. (It’s also such a brilliantly full and constant song that still manages to move and remain exciting from start to finish. I imagine this is partially due to Adrianne Lenker’s almost nursery rhyme- esque structure and also due to her beautifully colloquial approach to family dynamics.)

29. Blow- Dj Gigola, Kev Koko

This song makes me wish I was Jason Bourne- just wanna jump really far while something explodes behind me.

30. Money Can’t Buy- Yaeji, Nappy Nina

‘Well I’ll buy some Yaeji tickets, they’re for NOVEMBER, there’s NO WAY they’re gonna get cancelled’.

31. Only the Truth- Johanna Warren

When I first listened to this song I felt like I was floating in the ocean looking up at the stars as the drums came in on ‘what more can I do’. An incredibly beautiful and careful song.

32. Gasoline- Haim

2020 could probably be summarised with the phrase ‘WHY AM I NO LONGER IN CALIFORNIA? WHY DID I LEAVE CALIFORNIA?’ And this song is the 3 minutes 13 seconds seconds of escapism I needed to not topple into a full spiral.

33. Mapuu - Ic3peak

No one can convince me that Ic3peak are real people. They are a collective made up of child ghosts.

34. Don’t Worry- Bladee

Whenever I have an anxiety attack in the night I wake up and see Bladee’s ghost of the future over my bed, he says ‘Don’t worry’ and mumbles for a bit as I fall back into a peaceful sleep.

35. The biggest tits in history- The magnetic fields

The most relatable magnetic fields song imo.

36. Sand Castle- nijuu

Yujin is a genius and my answer is yes, I do want to just walk for a while.

37. Curl Up- Darren Hayman

Ned reminded me how much I used to love Darren Hayman, and both of them have been a pretty big part of my year.

38. When Will Death Come- Sarah Mary Chadwick

‘Wow, mental voice’ - Ned, while doing the washing up.

39. Dear Dad - Sylvie Wiley

‘But I didn’t cry, you’d be proud’ Sylvie, I’m weeping forever.

40. 34+35- Ariana Grande

Hehehehehehehehehe

41. Garden Song- Phoebe Bridgers

Phoebe Bridgers is a pretty unparalleled lyricist and this song feels like a disconnected series of thoughts that somehow all make sense together and come to create something that doesn’t build, but all just kind of sits? What I’m trying to say is that I don’t really know what she’s talking about but like, I get it.

42. Ringtone (remix) - 100 gecs, Charli xcx, Kero Kero Bonito, Rico Nasty,

I love the way it sounds like everyone got just one take and had to improvise all the lyrics but it still bangs.

43. Changer- Andy Shauf

Thank you lord for another album about a smaller than average man overthinking all of his social interactions with lots of lovely clarinet parts.

44. What’s your pleasure - Jessie Ware

My pleasure jessie? Probably just sitting by the fire with a tough crossword and a glass of merlot x

45. Slime- Shygirl

Shygirl’s series of singles this year made me even more livid that I had to take out my eyebrow piercing for my new job this year.

46. Sears Tower- Salem

Perfect halloween release.

47. Title track- happyness

Ned turned to me and said: ‘so is their new thing that they sound like Elliot Smith’ and I said: ‘and that’s a bad thing?’

48. Cross-sound ferry (walk on ticket) - Hamilton Leithauser

Have found unbelievable joy in chopping veg and shouting GREEEEEEEN PORT, NEEEEEEWWWW YOOORK alone in my kitchen.

49. Lowswimmer- Hailaker

I’ve loved hearing Jemima’s voice when I haven’t got to see her much this year. I normally take the piss out of the Hambledon line but I haven’t seen that this year really either. I guess we find sentimentality in strange places.

50. XS - Rina Sawayama

This song made me feel very decadent on those days where I didn’t wash.

51. Emily- Clem Snide

Let’s be more kind and brave in the face of it all.

52. Building a fire- Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy

P.O.V you’re doing bushcraft in the garden with your husband Bonnie Prince Billy and he’s here to protect you.

53. Asexual Wellbeing- Okay Kaya

This song absolutely bangs but I am truly bewildered by the way they singled out the line ‘if they could put a pulse into a spinach leaf, can they turn the two of us into a tree?’ in the production as if that was a true piece of genius. As I say great tune tho.

54. Anthems- Charli xcx

The soundtrack to couch to 5k

55. Never Better- Kitty Fitz

A SE London queen bringing us huge pop tunes in 2020. So so excited to see what 2021 brings us from Kitty, she’s gonna be a real force!

56. Deep in Love- Bonny Light Horsemen

This is such a delightful song which (mainly due to the time I actually got around to listening to the whole record) for me really rang in the spring. A beautifully recorded testament to the feeling of love getting stronger meaning you have a lot more to lose.

57. Malibu- Kim Petras

My song of the summer, made me feel like I was at the beach when really I was in Lewisham.

58. Like I’m Winning it- Girlpool

I’m so delighted that the turn girlpool have made this year is towards dramatic goth music with breakbeats. Their voices both sound amazing and they look simply incredible.

59. Azad- Frazey Ford

I have no idea what she’s saying as always but I love it.

60. Helio- Charlotte Dos Santos

I’m literally so excited for what Charlotte Dos Santos is gonna put out next. The production is fantastic and her aesthetics are flawless.

61. Lost in the Country- Trace Mountains

‘I checked my email twice as I cried’. Safe to say we’ve all been there this year amirite girlies x

62. Unfold You- Rostam

I hated this at first, I thought, what’s this lo-fi beats to study to shit, but it’s now my classic ‘I’m just gonna pop to the shops, anyone want anything? x’ song. Huge.

63. Oh Yeah- A.G cook

One of 2020s realisations is that me and A.G Cook kind of look like we could be cousins.

64. Can’t cool me down- Car Seat Headrest

I would like to personally thank will Toledo for giving me a tune that got me off my ass when I was too warm to do exercise this summer.

65. Take back the radio- Katy J Paerson

In love with Katy J Pearson’s voice and the way this song builds. Just pretty flawless and feel good in my opinion. I think she’s such an exciting new artist who’s gonna be around for a very very long time.

66. Good Woman- The Staves

‘I’m a good woman’… speak for yourselves.

67. A Little Love- Jack Francis

Feel like I’ve been singing this song for about 5 years! It’s amazing and I’m so excited about what Jack’s going to bring out in 2021, he’s a genius and also the nicest man on the planet.

68. Lullaby No.4 - Snailbeach

This song makes me feel like I’m being hypnotised on a haunted carousel in a very relaxing way.

69. Boyfriend in every city- Roma Radz

Sucks that she can’t see any of her boyfriends cos of covid :(

70. Jaja ding dong- Will Ferrell

Get back in there and play Jaja Ding Dong !!!!

71. Highway- Jonatan leandoer96

Man, would be pretty sick to have 20 boys outside the club but alas the clubs are dead and I’ve only regularly texted about 4 people this year.

72. De nadie- Kali Uchis

Felt v sexy listening to this for the first time in a Morley’s in Honor Oak.

73. Weird Fishes- Lianne La Havas

This album was a pretty triumphant return for Lianna La Havas and me teenage self simply couldn’t be happier.

74. Micro Creature- Aya Gloomy

Love that despite everything about this song telling me otherwise, that the artwork for this single looks like Aya Gloomy is just chilling in the fields by my family home in Hampshire.

75. Si Ella Sale- Bad Bunny

Better get on the duolingo now if I’m gonna know what this guy’s saying at Porto next year.

76. Through my sails- Mountain Man

Truly gentle reimagining of an already incredibly beautiful song, mountain man make every word seem new!

77.Christmas Day (get me outta this funk) - Baggio and Blue 5 Years- Bath days

In joint 77th place are two banging Christmas songs that have soundtracked a pretty bleak Christmas period and have made me feel pretty joyous in their ways, despite one literally being called Blue Five Years.

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thesuper17 · 4 years

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Living proof

Fifth Harmony’s most successful alumnus has returned with “Living proof,” a bloated and cynical listening experience that indulges all the singer's most grating idiosyncrasies.

Camila Cabello’s first solo release, Camila, was an inoffensive and even occasionally great collection of lean bubblegum pop, boasting enormous chart-topping hits like “Never be the same” and “Havana”. The latter track, lead single for the album, was a near-perfect Latin jam that leveraged Cabello’s honeyed voice in its lower-mid register for a sultry and self-assured debut. It was an expert riposte to concerns that Fifth Harmony’s showiest member would bring her flamboyant vocal tendencies, which occasionally spilled into oversinging, onto a solo release that couldn’t sustain their weight.

Leading up to Cabello’s second full release, “Living proof” is a frustrating realisation of these early concerns. From the song’s opening moments, the listener is subjected to a characteristically unnecessary ad-lib over a plodding, harmonically unadventurous instrumental. Each line of the ensuing verse is delivered with elaborate trembling vibrato and punctuated with dramatic intakes of breath.

The chorus attempts a similar soaring falsetto melody to “Never be the same,” but this time around the singer stretches so high, and leans so heavily on pitch-correction software, that any texture or character in her original vocal performance is sanded away. By the final chorus, multiple backing vocals, ad-libs and high runs contribute to a disorientating deluge of digital noise, and the song’s abrupt end comes as a physical relief.

It’s unreasonable to expect sparkling poetry from a production of this scope – intensely personal or dense lyricism simply wouldn’t be fit for purpose – but Cabello asking her lover to paint her like a Van Gogh (an artist famous for his struggles with mental illness and eventual suicide) just reads as convenient, lazy rhyming. The clunking reference drags the mechanics of the song into focus, immediately puncturing any fiction the listener might have bought into.

Religious imagery peppers the rest of the lyrics which, when combined with Cabello’s constant (albeit assiduously PG-13) allusions to sex, begin to feel lurid and even inappropriate. Exhortations to her lover to let her “make the angels come through” and offers to show them her “demons” if they show theirs, ultimately sound more bizarre than alluring.

It’s worth noting the double-bind female popstars face, in being afforded such little space to write about topics other than sex and relationships but simultaneously needing to sanitize that content for an audience of younger children.

Unfortunately, where that bind is often navigated deftly, (even by Cabello herself, for example, on Camila’s “Into It,”) here the singer merely oscillates between meaningless cliché and sleazy euphemism. Certainly, there’s fertile ground to be tilled in the space between the holy and the profane, but for all its signifiers, “Living proof” isn’t interested in breaking past the surface.

Everything I wanted

‘On the one hand, it’s hard to feel sorry for the very rich,’ begins John Darnielle on “Short Song for Justin Bieber and his Paparazzi.” Uploaded only to Youtube, the amusing, sub-two-minute tune ultimately conveyed a sincere critique of the invasive and dehumanizing culture of celebrity news.

Of course, at the time, Bieber had done very little to engender sympathetic feeling, and quite a lot to sour his already shaky reputation. In particular, his remarks that Anne Frank could have been a “Belieber” were seen as an impossible-to-parody confirmation of the singer’s unassailable self-regard.

Nevertheless, it was hard to disagree with JD’s assertion that sudden fame, especially when thrust on a teenager, is a double-edged sword. From age 16 onward, Bieber had been subject to equal torrents of slavering adoration and abject hatred, while being completely insulated from ordinary responsibilities and social structures. Without diminishing the harm his mistakes caused, it’s well worth considering whether any young person could deal with those conditions and maintain a healthy interior life.

At the same time Darnielle uploaded his video, an 11-year-old Bieber fan was busy cultivating her own musical talents. 6 years later, Billie Eilish is one of America’s biggest popstars, and judging by “everything I wanted,” the industry and structures that caused Bieber so much harm remain very much intact.

On the singer’s first release since her breakout debut, WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? Eilish has entirely dropped the precocious, sardonic humour that acted as counterweight to that album’s theatrically grim tone. Where tracks like “bury a friend” landed somewhere between jaunty circus and genuine creepiness (think Lana Del Rey in Luigi’s Mansion), the singer’s new release targets a much more authentic expression of darkness.

“everything I wanted” is a fantastic example of Eilish’s talent for restraint. The singer delivers her lines in a fragile, whisper-like cadence, convincingly portraying gloomy dejection over brother/producer Finneas’ gently warbling piano. For a 17-year-old to sing about the depression brought on by her own massive commercial success - and to do so without coming off narcissistic or melodramatic - is a major accomplishment in itself, but here Eilish manages go even further and affect real pathos.

For its vulnerability, the track isn’t exactly unvarnished, and production from Finneas is slick as ever. As Eilish recalls a dream of being “underwater”, her vocal track is submerged with a reverb-soaked fade, and the song’s rhythm section even subtly reprises the hip one-two beat from “bad guy.” All of this is accomplished with a light touch however, never undercutting the song’s bleak atmosphere.

A ray of hope is glimpsed in the track’s chorus, which describes the comforting quality of Eilish’s relationship with her brother, but this is unfortunately where the track is at its weakest. It’s wonderful that the singer has such a healthy relationship to rely on, (and, for what its worth, great she can sing about a platonic familial relationship rather than being restricted to romantic subject matter), but where the rest of the track displays unexpectedly mature emotional understanding, the chorus descends into more glib second-person encouragement.

This isn’t nearly enough to sink the song, which is among the best of Eilish’s short career. Unlike her teenage idol, she has thus far avoided doing anything incredibly stupid or arrogant. It’s difficult not to feel some sympathy when even though “everybody wants something” from her now, her primary fear remains letting them down. To paraphrase JD again: the industry doesn’t have to leave Eilish alone, but collectively, it should try not to be an asshole.

#camila cabello #billie eilish #camila #billie #when we all fall asleep tour #when we all fall asleep where do we go #everything i wanted #living proof #pop #review

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headlesshollis · 5 years

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i realized something

if there’s one thing y’all should know, it’s that i stan people from across a few different genres of music, one of them being billie eilish.

the thing about billie is, she likes to put her art out at the most random times. for example, she announced a song last monday, releasing two days later. her fans went absolutely wild about this, and so did the media outlets. there’s a ton of articles already written on the song, and it’s only been out for about four days.

lauren and More Than That, however, is a different story. now, before you get mad at me for something i posted on monday, and how i was angry that we didn’t get much promo or notice of lauren’s new single, when i didn’t say anything and was surprised and excited to get billie’s new track, hear me out real quick.

billie eilish and lauren jauregui have two completely different careers. sure, they have the same occupation, but their careers are quite different.

let’s start with some background information about the two artists.

billie eilish has become a seventeen year old alt-pop star. her breakout hit, ocean eyes, has over 1.2 million streams on soundcloud (where it was originally published in 2016), and over 194 million streams on spotify. billie signed with Interscope Records, whose parent company is Universal Music Group. she and her brother, finneas o’connell, write and produce all their songs together.

billie released her first EP, dont smile at me, in 2017. her most popular songs from her EP consist of idontwannabeyouanymore (168m streams), bellyache (157m streams), and of course, ocean eyes (194m streams). her most streamed song is lovely (with Khalid), with over 340m streams. billie’s newest song, WHEN I WAS OLDER, already has almost 3m streams in only four days. her debut album is set to release sometime this year.

let’s move to lauren.

lauren jauregui is a twenty two year old rising alt-pop star. the former member of ultra successful girl-group Fifth Harmony, signed with Colombia Records (parent Sony Music) after Fifth Harmony took hiatus in early 2018. she released her first solo (not featured) single, Expectations, in late 2018. lauren first performed her single as an opening act for Halsey on her hopeless fountain kingdom tour in mid 2018. Expectations has racked up almost 17m streams on spotify, and its music video has over 10m views. her most streamed solo song is All Night by Steve Aoki (feat. Lauren Jauregui) with over 45m streams. lauren’s newest song, More Than That, has collected a little over 1m streams in about 36 hours.

now, you may be wondering, “okay, we get it. billie eilish is way more popular than lauren, we know. but what does billie have to do with lauren, aside from the fact that they met at some event last year? and besides, how did billie get so popular so fast?”

i’m glad you asked! i’ll answer your second question first.

billie eilish came out of nowhere. her popularity seemed to skyrocket overnight. from 2017 to 2018, her Instagram follower count went from a little over 250k to over ten million. it’s absolutely insane, but what is it about her that makes her so... fascinating?

perhaps it’s that no two of her songs sound the same, lyrically or audibly. one of her songs, party favor, is an upbeat, ukulele-based track with almost dark but sarcastic lyrics. on the other hand, another one of her songs, when the party’s over, has become the favorite crying session tune of most of the internet.

maybe it’s that she has the most outlandish style. she tends to wear over-sized outfits, neck chains, and dyes her hair uncommon shades. her rejection of wearing typical “girl clothes” has gotten her lots of attention from critics and regular people alike.

“but what about lauren?” you ask. “she gets lots of attention, too!”

you’re correct! she does get attention, but not just because of her music. let me explain.

lauren jauregui is probably one of the most woke people i’ve ever seen. she has raised awareness for a multitude of issues, such as immigration or the US justice system. she has also evolved into an LGBT icon, coming out as bisexual in late 2016. she fights for what she believes in, which is shared by her existing fanbase as a result of her time in FIfth Harmony, which gets attention from news outlets, who report on lauren and her beliefs, which gain the attention of potential listeners, which gets her musical attention, etc. you get the idea.

“okay,” you say. “her woke-ness is a beneficial factor in this. but still! where is her ‘breakout single’, like Havana by camila or Love Lies by normani and khalid?”

those kind of things just come with time. i don’t know if y’all remember, but Havana was never supposed to be as popular as it was. camila’s fans just enjoyed the song, and it was eventually sent to radio! and now, they won’t stop playing it!

same kinda thing with Love Lies. it’s a track from Love, Simon. people love khalid, they love how his and normani’s voices sound together, they streamed in nonstop, it was sent to radio, and now the radios play it nonstop.

“you talk about radio an awful lot. Expectations is played on the radio!” you say.

and right you are! it is played on the radio, but it only seems to appear on the SiriusXM Hits1 station. SiriusXM is a satellite radio network that is not free. yes, millions of people are subscribed to it, but if Expectations was sent to regular, free radio stations, it would get so much more popular.

“okay, enough about this stuff,” you demand. “you still have yet to explain what billie eilish has to do with anything.”

okay, okay, i’ll tell you.

you know how earlier i told you not to attack me because i complained about More That That and how we got almost no notice of its release ahead of time, yet i was pleasantly surprised by billie eilish’s single? i’ll explain why.

i think lauren’s team is trying the approach billie eilish had. this is actually the second time billie has released a song out of the blue (that i can think of). the first time was with when the party’s over. that song was an overnight hit. millions of people instantly fell in love with that song.

lauren’s team thought that, maybe, they could try the same thing with More Than That. they’d give the fans about four days to prepare themselves for lauren’s new song.

but here’s the problem.

lauren needs all the promo she can get. as sad and unfortunate as that sounds, it’s the truth. her fanbase just isn’t big or strong enough yet. believe me, it’s definitely getting there, but at this point in lauren’s career, anticipation is going to do much more than surprises.

not all artists are gonna have billie eilish’s story, no matter how much we wish they would. halsey didn’t start to get super popular until Now or Never and Bad At Love, which were singles off of her second album. if anything, lauren has an advantage over most artists.

we, as a fandom, just have to remember that all artists have to start somewhere. i’m not saying that lauren’s team is doing all they can, because they’re definitely not, they’re screwing her over, but she’ll eventually get everything she’s deserved from the start.

just keep streaming lauren’s music, and eventually everything will fall into place :)

#lauren jauregui #billie eilish #more than that #comparison

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doomedandstoned · 5 years

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Gandalf The Green Returns with ‘A Billion Faces’

~Doomed & Stoned Debuts~

Hailing from Leeds, England, this is GANDALF THE GREEN. The stoner-doom trio is one of a handful of younger bands comprised of members in their late-teens and early-twenties that have been impressing us lately, joining company with Montana's Wizzerd, Toronto's Horse Lung, Portland's SAOLA and Ape Cave, as well as Witchers Creed from Sweden.

Something interesting I've observed about what I'll dub the Dopesmoker generation is their affinity for large-scale compositions. Horse Lung shot for Bach-like complexity with their fugal composition Rattenkönig and have just released a pair of tracks clocking in at 18 and 28 minutes respectively on 'ἔσχατον' (2019). Likewise, Ape Cave released the massive double album, 'Language of the Earth' (2018), with Sleep producer Billy Anderson, who actually invited these kids to come in and record it after hearing their 2016 album Pillars of Evolution.

With Gandalf The Green's latest single, we find them similarly thinking on a grand scale. The near fourteen-minute epic "A Billion Faces" is the foretaste of the glory to come, as the band readies to release their full-length via APF Records this fall. Staged in three interlocking segments, the track is a real trip and holds up well to repeated listens. Execution-wise, Andrew Flint (guitar, vox), Jack Walker (drums, vox), and Danny Wrigley (bass guitar) have never sounded tighter as a unit. Compositionally, the fuzz-trippers show they can achieve balance and depth within a big-picture framework, without betraying flow or nuance. Fans of Slomatics and Conan will surely find this a joy to listen to from start to finish.

I think the band describes it best: "A 13-minute psych-infused stoner doom filth fest. All the tone. All the distortion. Titanic-sized knuckle-dragging gnarly riffs amped into pure oblivion through a Matamp rig of doom. We are excited for you to hear it." Look for "A Billion Faces" out Thursday, March 28th, as a digital download via APF Records, with artwork by Dominic Sohor Design.

Give ear...

An Interview with

Gandalf The Green

For those new to Gandalf The Green, tell us about how you formed and your history.

It started with Andy writing a bedroom demo for 'The Right' in 2015, we'd previously been in a deathcore band together (we know, we were 16, cut us some slack) and knew we all liked slow and heavy music, so got in touch and we started rehearsing with ghetto equipment in Andy's bedroom in Huddersfield. The name came from a friend who'd just bought a Gandalf style pipe and we found the pun hilarious for a Stoner Doom band, so we used it. We released our Debut EP 'King of the Ashes' in September 2016 as a 4-piece band with two guitarists, though soon after we split with our drummer and put Jack behind the kit as a trio. After that things began moving properly. Since then, we've been gigging more, collecting more equipment, and worsening our tinnitus by turning up louder. In the last year or so we've finally started getting proper slots on festivals and local gigs, though we're still yet to play a headline show!

What music has influenced your sound, and who are your musical heroes?

Our philosophy is that we want to play stupidly low-tuned, crushingly heavy music, but not in a way that sounds too evil or miserable, then combine that with trippy, ambient cleans for a huge dynamic change. Someone once put it eloquently as 'The brutality of Mordor with the serenity of the Shire.'

From a writing perspective, our main influences are Conan, Sleep, YOB and Elephant Tree. Though with all the spacey ambient bits it's quite difficult to pin exactly where a lot of that comes from, mainly just going a bit nuts with effects and seeing what comes out.

AF: My musical idol is forever Dave Grohl, even if this band doesn't sound much like his stuff. My favourite guitar players are the ones for the bands listed, plus Tony Iommi, of course.

JW: We all listen to very varied stuff, so there’s all sorts, but for this genre my influences are, Yob, The Body, Elephant Tree, Khanate, Om, Weedeater, Windhand, BongCauldron. Musical heroes? Fenriz, Willie Nelson, Hank Williams III, Mike Scheidt.

DW: My influences change around a lot but probably The Body, Sleep, Conan, Thou and Full of Hell. As for heroes the first that comes to mind is Jordan Dreyer.

What’s been your favourite gig to play so far?

AF: I'd say Gizzardfest 2018 as it was our largest crowd, but one of my amps blew up during sound check so I was a bit miffed. Other than that, the Holy Spider Promotions show Terence Larkin booked at the Mulberry Tavern in Sheffield last year was brilliant. A tiny, sweaty venue crammed with people who were really digging the music.

JW: Yeah Gizzardfest was really cool, but for me I'd say that Sheffield gig, it was Mulberry Tavern with Khost, Oak, Ritual King, Regulus and Stonelung. When we went onstage the venue was rammed so the atmosphere was great for us, it WAS proper sweaty but that's the best way.

DW: Got to agree with Gizzardfest I was amazed by the amount of people there and the reception we got cancelled out the problems by a long shot for me.

King of the Ashes by Gandalf the Green

How do you look back on your 'King of the Ashes' EP two and a half years on?

We recorded it for £0 in Andy's bedroom with whatever mics we had on hand and did the drums with some University students. Other than 'The One Ring', it's not very representative of our sound these days though, as we were finding our feet and trying lots of writing styles, with speedier Stoner Rock tracks like 'King of the Ashes' and 'The Right', which we don't really play these days.

It's fun to see how the tracks have evolved for our live performances though, 'The One Ring' now screams with feedback, has reverb swells and washed out cleans, while 'Old Toby' has a massively slowed down outro riff and stereo panning oscillating delay at the beginning. If you enjoy the debut, definitely come check us out live to see how it's evolved.

AF: I'm still pretty happy with it and loved the super DIY bedroom recording. I felt the production quality came out great, given the circumstances. Seeing how I’ve changed my vocal style and tuned my guitar down so much lower makes comparing the new and old material interesting.

JW: I have a lot of fond memories from that time writing and recording, but since we were so new to it all it doesn't quite have as good sound quality as I'd like. It's alright, but we've grown as a band and the stuff we're writing now has a way more unique sound and is better in every way I can think of.

DW: I still listen to it a fair bit honestly. I think it still holds up, but I'm excited to start showing how we've developed over the past few years and how we come across out of a bedroom. What music are you digging right now?

AF: Right now I'm on a massive hype for the gnarliest, darkest stuff I can find, such as Grey Widow, Coltsblood, Ommadon, Bismuth, and Glasghote, and I imagine these bands are going to work into my writing style for our next release.

JW: I listen to a shit load of country, like every day, maybe even more than I listen to metal. Artists like Benjamin Tod, Willie Nelson, Hank Williams III, Jesse Stewart, Crywank, The Native Howl, etcetera. But for this genre the stuff on rotation right now is bands like Windhand, Grime, The Body, Yob, Bell Witch, Ommadon, Bismuth, Sloth Hammer, Primitive Man, Elephant Tree, Goblinsmoker, Tuskar.

DW: I've been binging on grindcore and hardcore recently, a lot of Full of Hell and Wormrot on repeat. Other than that the new Body Void EP has been blowing me away every time I listen.

You’ve recently signed with APF Records. Which bands on the label do you share an affinity with?

AF: The reason we approached APF to begin with is because we love so many bands on the roster, it's hard to pick out a few! Personally, I'd say BongCauldron, Battalions, and Under, though there really isn't a bad band on APF.

JW: BongCauldron, since they were the main influence on me (and I think the others too) when starting this band. They were one of the first bands to help me get into this kind of music, since I found them when Andy's old band supported them in Bad Apples years ago and through that found more doom/stoner bands.

DW: Yes, BongCauldron, for pretty obvious reasons. Also I've been listening to Under- Stop Being Naive a lot since seeing them at Gizzardfest they've got such a unique and crushing sound.

photo by aevjohnston

Tell us about "A Billion Faces" -- what’s it about, and how did the track come together?

AF: It was the first track I wrote after we tuned down to drop F and bought a bunch of new effects, so I was really playing with all the new toys and trying to make something with a big dynamic change from the gentle intro to when it kicks in. We've been performing it live for a while, so the song's evolved over time to include the sexy wah solo and, because Jack and Danny love noise music, we added the noise/screaming section in the outro. The original demo was only 9 minutes compared to the final 13!

We were approached by a friend of a friend (Alex Tune, assisted by Jake Bonnett) who needed a band to record for his University coursework, it seemed mutually beneficial, and we'd get to record in the gorgeous Phipps Hall and borrow a bunch of Huddersfield Uni's Matamp equipment for free to use with ours, so we took him up on it. We live recorded the track in December 2018 and mixed and mastered the track ourselves, so again got away with paying £0 for the release. It sounded lovely in the room, but we really didn't expect the final product to sound quite as good as it did. Lyrically, the track is about parallel universes and how, if they exist, every different possible version of you exists somewhere in a big infinite tree of possible yous, experiencing the best and worst things all at once. I was wondering where I'd be if I'd taken a different turn in life and moved to a different city, and I realised that there'd be a version of me in a parallel universe where I did move there, wondering right now where he'd be if he took the turns I did. We're both thinking about each other amongst a billion different versions of ourselves, but unable to know who the other is and what their life is like.

The song comes with a cracking video. How did that come about?

A friend of the band, and vocalist/guitarist in Andy's other band, Andrew Johnston (he uses the moniker 'AEVJohnston' for music) offered to help. We thought it'd be a crime to not get video footage of us performing in such a beautiful venue, so he came along free of charge, brought his fancy lighting rig, bathed the room in green light, rented a couple of cameras from the University, and filmed us while we recorded. We edited the footage ourselves cut from various different takes we did. Again, we paid nothing for the video because we're cheap (do you see a theme?).

JW: Shout out Johnston for being a sick bloke, nice one mate it turned it really well, thank you. Sadly though, I don't think the video shows just how beautiful that room really was. Like the video is great, don't get me wrong, but actually being stood in that room with that lighting rig made it look gorgeous. Such a great atmosphere for it. Again, cheers Johnston, that was a huge help, I think the video of it really brings this release together.

What’s your plans for the rest of 2019?

We're working on our next release, of which we have over half an hour written already. Andy is busy with University, and the other two of us with real life things. Put simply, in 2019 we want to push to play more gigs and write more music. Hopefully we'll have another release done or out by the end of the year. We're aiming not to fuck about as much for it as we did for this one, because it took a long time to get going.

If your house was on fire and you could grab one thing from it before it burned down, what would that be?

AF: My Green Matamp GT1 amplifier, it's like my child.

JW: My bong, it's like my child.

DW: My cat, it's like my child.

Finally: anything to declare?

JW: Yeah, we just want to say how much we appreciate everything that's happened to us since finishing the single. We love every one of you who's checked us out or gave us a chance. Big shout out and lots of love to Andrew Field for signing us to APF, to every promoter for putting us on and every one of you for listening. It means the world to us, thank you.

AF: We also love all the sound guys who keep telling us to turn down on stage, even if you don’t love us.

☮

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#D&S Debuts #Gandalf The Green #Leeds #England #UK #Doom #Metal #Doom Metal #Stoner Rock #Music Video #APF Records #D&S Interviews #Doomed & Stoned

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kentremendousblog · 6 years

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Tom and Lin-Manuel: An Appreciation/Jealous Rant

Every writer has a golden period – a chunk of time when her brain is ripest, when the veins he is tapping are the richest, when the ideas, big and small, spill out over the sides of the bucket instead of having to be patiently collected like drops of rain off a leaf. This is true for songwriters, playwrights, novelists, screenwriters, anyone who writes anything in any genre. Go look at John Hughes’s IMDb page and marvel at his golden period, which I would bookend as 1983-1990. It’s outrageous. He wrote Vacation, Mr. Mom, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Some Kind of Wonderful, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Uncle Buck, and Home Alone in eight years. Eight years?! That’s absurd.

But then look at his next 20 years. You won’t find one movie that is better than the worst one he wrote in those seven years. The vein ran dry. It always does. That’s just the deal.

Tom Petty’s golden period never ended. Or, at least, the silver periods on either side of his golden period were seemingly infinite. No matter where you think he peaked -- Full Moon Fever, or Wildflowers, or Damn the Torpedoes -- the decades on either side were wonderful. He was great from the moment he released his first album in 1977 to the day he died last month. For forty years he wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and the songs he wrote were good or great or amazing.

Tom Petty wrote “Breakdown” and “American Girl” in 1977. He wrote “You Don’t Know How it Feels” seventeen years later, in 1994. He wrote “You Got Lucky” in 1982, “King’s Highway” in 1992, “The Last DJ” in 2002. He wrote “I Won’t Back Down,” “Runnin’ Down a Dream,” Free Fallin’,” “Love is a Long Road,” “A Face in the Crowd,” Yer So Bad,” and “The Apartment Song,” and “Depending on You,” all in 1989, and they were all on the same album, and that’s absurd.

He wrote “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” in 1981 and “Big Weekend” in 2006. He wrote every song on Wildflowers – and they are all great – in or around 1994. He wrote fifty other great songs I haven’t named yet, like “Don’t Come Around Here No More” and “Jammin Me.” He wrote great songs you've heard a million times, and great songs you've maybe never heard, like "Billy the Kid" (1999) and "Walls" (1996) which was buried on the soundtrack to She's the One. He took a break from the Heartbreakers and casually released “End of the Line” and “Handle With Care” and “She’s My Baby” with the Traveling Wilburys in 1989-90. He wrote “Refugee” in 1980 and “I Should Have Known It” in 2010. Is there any rock and roll songwriter alive who wrote two songs that good, 30 years apart? (Paul McCartney wrote “Hey Jude” in 1968, and only 12 years later he wrote “Wonderful Christmas Time,” which is so bad it nearly retroactively undid “Hey Jude.”)

He wrote about rock and roll things, like ’62 Cadillacs, getting out of this town, and dancing with Mary Jane. He wrote about love and loss and heartbreak. He wrote legitimately funny jokes, and moribund memories, and personal narratives, and imaginative flights of fancy. One of his characters calls his father his “old man” and it somehow isn’t cheesy. He was from Florida and California and wrote about both of them, and every time I’m on Ventura Boulevard I think of vampires, because the images he wrote are indelible.

Petty didn’t just write songs directed at women, like most rock stars. He wrote about women, and he wrote for women, and he wrote with women. He treated the women in his songs as lovingly and respectfully as he treated the men. He cared about them as much, he spent as much time thinking about them, and he liked them as much, and all of that is rare.

He wrote simply, but not boringly. He made his characters three-dimensional, somehow, in a matter of seconds. There’s a famous (probably apocryphal) story about Hemingway bragging he could write an entire novel in six words, then writing: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” I prefer the 18-word novel Petty wrote as the first verse to “Down South” –

Headed back down south Gonna see my daddy's mistress Gonna buy back her forgiveness Pay off every witness

When I was working on Parks and Recreation, whenever we needed a song to score an important moment in Leslie Knope’s life, we chose a Tom Petty song. It started with “American Girl,” when her biggest career project came to fruition. It was “Wildflowers” when she said goodbye to her best friend. It was “End of the Line” at the moment the show ended. For the seven seasons of our show, Tom Petty was the writer we trusted to explain how our main character was feeling, because he wrote so much, so well, for so long.

*******

It seems like a joke, Hamilton -- a joke in a TV show where one of the characters is a struggling New York actor, and is always dragging his friends to his terrible plays. Like Joey in Friends. There’s an episode of Friends where Joey is in a terrible musical called like Freud!, about Sigmund Freud, and you get to see some of it, and it’s predictably terrible. Freud! the musical is arguably a better idea than Hamilton the musical.

I’m far from the first person to say this -- I’m probably somewhere around the millionth person to write about Hamilton, and the maybe 500,000th to make this particular point, but it needs to be said -- a hip-hop Broadway musical about the founding fathers is an astoundingly terrible idea. Lin-Manuel Miranda should never have written it. As soon as he started to write it, he should’ve said to himself, “What the fuck am I doing?!” and stopped. And after he got halfway through, he should’ve junked it, gotten really drunk, and moved on with his life, and made his wife and friends swear to never mention the weird six months where he was trying to write a hip-hop musical about Alexander Hamilton. I literally guarantee you that when Lin-Manuel Miranda first told his friends what he was writing, every one of them reacted with at best a frozen smile, and at worst a horrified recoiling. Some of them might have been outwardly encouraging – “sounds awesome bud! Go get 'em!” But then later, alone, they would call each other and say What the fuck is he doing?

There is a moment, in Hamilton, when what you are watching overwhelms you. (It’s not the same moment for everyone, but most everyone has one, I suspect.) It’s the moment when the enormity, the complexity, the meaning of it, the entirety of it, overpowers you, and you realize that what you are experiencing is new – new both in your specific life, and new, like, on Earth. The first time I saw it, that moment was a line in the middle of “Yorktown.” Hamilton sang the line And so the American experiment begins / With my friends all scattered to the winds, and I burst into tears in a way I hadn’t since I was 10 and a baseball went through a guy’s legs in the World Series. Something about how casually he says that – And so the American experiment begins – just settled over me, like a collapsing tent, and this thing I was watching wasn’t in front of me, it was everywhere around me, and it was exhilarating and transformative.

(If I could put this part in a footnote, I would, but I don’t know how to, so: I should mention that I am very far from a musical theater aficionado. I have seen maybe eight musicals in my life. Not only did I not expect to cry, hard, during Hamilton, I did not expect to enjoy it. I saw it like a week after it opened on Broadway, kind of on a whim, knew nothing about it, and the last thing I said to my wife, as the lights went down, was: “We’ll leave at intermission.”)

The second time I saw it, that moment came much earlier (I knew what I was getting into, this time, so I was more ready to be subsumed). It came barely three minutes in, when the entire cast of the show, in a piece of choreography that can best be referred to as “badass,” all walk down to the very front of the stage and stand, shoulder to shoulder, and sing very loudly about how Alexander Hamilton never learned to take his time. The cast has, to this point, trickled on stage, slowly, one by one, telling you Hamilton’s origin story, and then suddenly there they all are, all of them -- maybe 20? 50? It seems like 1000? – as close to the audience as they can get, and they are every size and ethnicity and gender, and their voices are loud, and I thought to myself, oh my God, this is a cast of people descended from every nation on Earth, all singing about the foundations of the American experience, and yes I “knew” that, intellectually, but holy shit, now that I see them all, I know it, like in my stomach, I understand it, and what a thing that is.

The third time I saw Hamilton, that moment was during “It’s Quiet Uptown,” when this enormous, sprawling, improbable, otherworldly, multi-ethnic, historical, art tornado presses pause on all of its historical-cultural-ethno-sociological-artistic investigations, and spends four and a half spare minutes with a couple who are grieving an unimaginable tragedy. Specifically, it was the lines

Forgiveness Can you imagine? Forgiveness Can you imagine?

What a thing to do, for your characters -- to give them four and a half minutes in the middle of an enormous, sprawling, historical swirl, to just be sad. What a piece of writing that is.

(Again, should be a footnote, but: as long as I’m talking about writers here, I should point out that if the late Harris Wittels were alive, he would, at this moment, text me and hit me with a “humblebrag” for writing about how I have seen Hamilton three times, and he would be right. Miss you Harris!)

In the hundreds of hours of my life I have spent thinking about Hamilton since I first saw it – far more hours than any other single piece of art I have ever experienced – I have revisited that same thought over and over: he never should’ve written it. It was an absurd thing to do. It took him a year to write the title song, then another year to write the second song, and how did he not give up when two years had gone by and he’d written two songs? He must’ve known in his heart it needed to be a 50-song, 2 1/2-hour enterprise, and he had two songs after two years, and he kept going. How did he keep going? I've been trying to write this blog post about two writers I admire for different reasons since the week Tom Petty died, and I’ve almost given up five times.

At this point, the entire musical is that "moment" for me. It's the whole thing, now – the thing that overwhelms me is the whole thing. The conception of it, the writing of it, the rewriting of it. The music and the motifs and the themes and the threads and the dramatic shape and the characters and their inner lives, and the eagle-eye writer’s view it took to keep all of that in his head, all of it, the whole time. The writing of it. The utterly impossible writing of it.

#writing #hamilton #tompetty #lin-manuel miranda

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theloniousbach · 2 years

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ON JAZZ COMPOSITIONS, ESPECIALLY FRANK KIMBROUGH’SI

Early on in his notes to KIMBROUGH, Elan Mehler offers this rich observation:

“There’s something insubstantial about a jazz composition. Often just one page long, single notated lines over chord symbols — little translucent scraps of melody and harmony, a lens to see the world through — an opening. I struggle sometimes with the juxtaposition of process and import. Supposedly, Duke Ellington wrote “Solitude” in 20 minutes because his band needed one more tune for a record date. Wayne Shorter is one of the most remarkable musicians of the 20th century, but you wouldn’t necessarily be wrong in saying his greatest achievement was the morning he spent writing the 16 measures of “Nefertiti.” What a thought!”

KIMBROUGH is Mehler’s project to collect the compositions of Frank Kimbrough, the pianist/composer/educator, who died in December 2020 too young, particularly since he was 13 1/2 months younger than me. Mehler’s tribute—and the who’s who roster from the New York jazz scene I know far better thanks to these nearly two years of pandemic streaming—is a fitting one for a consummate song collector. Kimbrough with Ben Allison led the Herbie Nichols Project which recorded two CDs worth of tunes by that quirky undersung bebop generation pianist, many previously extant only in manuscript form. His monumental Monk’s Dreams: The Complete Compositions of Thelonious Monk from 2018 is just that—70 compositions by that even more quirky but far better known master.

Now we have 59 tunes with two repeated for 61 cuts from Kimbrough’s archives, as with the Herbie Nichols Project some extant, until now, only as manuscripts.

Manuscripts—usually a single page, a melody, maybe a second horn line, and chord symbols. I have two Fake Books and an electronic keyboard equivalent of an upright piano on which I try to discover the genius of the tunes I hear and love. Ancient and underutilized piano lessons have prepared me to pick out the melodies in the right hand. I don’t read the bass clef readily and at the same time, but I know enough theory to play triads for the basic chords (even 7ths are beyond me—and maybe not necessary given the way the basic chords are enhanced by the melody line). I get a glimmer of the logic of monuments of the Great American Song Book and the genius compositions of the heroes. Monk really does have a hamonic structure as disciplined as JS Bach’s, making putting my writings under the TheloniousBach heading actually rather appropriate. I can discern it in my own way. If music students whatever their instrument take piano lessons to get theory in their hands and jazz musicians often play composer’s piano to write. Occasionally it’s more: Charles Mingus recorded a very capable and really quite impressive solo piano album; Jack DeJohnette’s Pastel Rhapsody is driven by his lyrical piano; and I recall somewhere on the Charlie Parker Savoy recordings there’s a session with Miles Davis on trumpet and Dizzy Gillespie on piano. I don’t even aspire to composer’s piano; what I do is “listener’s piano” for understanding not performance.

But all this to say that there is magic in those maybe one page-s and the New York jazz community has rallied for the memory of Frank Kimbrough to capture his magic. That community itself is a further celebration here. Almost two years into my several times a week couch tour involvement with the New York jazz scene, I know not just the big names present—Fred Hersch, Dave Douglas, Joe Lovano, Craig Taborn; veterans a liner note junky like me recognizes—Rufus Reid and Billy Drummond; many new reliables who show up regularly and the streams and help convince me to drop in for that particular set—Dezron Douglas, Clarence Penn, Scott Robinson, Immanuel Wilkins, Helen Sung, Steve Wilson; and folks I want to get to know better (Alexa Tarantino, Kirk Knuffke, for example).

I will have to live with these compositions though I confess I don’t hear people yet play them like they do tunes of Cedar Walton or Mulgrew Miller. But already there is great range and coherence to them, whether they’re lyrical or frenetic, swinging or out there, balladic or driving. Perhaps that is in part the range of the interpreters here but also in general in the myriad interpretations of the same tune in the canon. Where does Kimbrough fit in the hierarchy of jazz composers? As with all such questions, it’s probably irrelevant at best, though I play the game often enough to be inclusive not exclusive, to appreciate by association.

I’d like to see other such tribute collections so that we don’t have to rely on all Ellington/Strayhorn covers or the Mingus Organization maintaining a repertoire or the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra/SF Jazz Collective programs. Jesse Markowitz organizes Wayne Shorter’s music with a shifting ensemble called Palladium. That we have something like this for Frank Kimbrough excites possibilities for more of the same.

But his sudden and early death make this particular tribute poignant and warranted. My Toledo jazz friend introduced me—and all his Jazz Spectrum listeners—to Kimbrough’s work and interviewed him on air. He was thoughtful and articulate and affable. To lose such a conversationalist whom he respected and had a rapport hit my friend hard.

I don’t have that same loss but celebrating KIMBROUGH and Frank and tunes and his community and the music is meaningful and worthwhile to me.

#jazz #2022

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acidwaste · 6 years

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hey so it seems i’ve forgot to do a l o t of tag memes, and i’m lucky i drafted a big bunch of them! lots of questions overlapped so i did my best to answer in different ways, sorry for the lateness! also @ the people that tagged me here, i wouldn't hesitate to kill for you

@natcaptor / @gayspaced

name: leon or lionel!

nicknames: literally the only nickname I’ve been referred to is “big gay” and like. word!

gender: im pretty sure im a guy, i have been kinda 🤔🤔🤔 abt my gender identity since around november-ish though

star sign: sagittarius!

height: 6’1! i’m told that I’m tall but my uncle is 6’7 so...

time: 3:36pm rn! ive been watching video essays and binging music all afternoon

birthday: december 9th!

favourite bands: animal collective, beach house, camp cope, car seat headrest, death grips, fleet foxes, florence + the machine, gang of youths, glass animals, gorillaz, hop along, iceage, idles, kero kero bonito, mgmt, miike snow, modest mouse, run the jewels, superorganism, the avalanches, the cat empire, the go! team, the mountain goats, the wombats, xiu xiu

favourite solo artists: alex lahey, anderson .paak, ariana grande, billie eilish, bjork, cashmere cat, charli xcx, courtney barnett, cupcakke, d.r.a.m, eric taxxon, frank ocean, gfoty, hatchie, janelle monae, jeff rosenstock, joanna newsom, jorja smith, jpegmafia, kacey musgraves, kali uchis, kendrick lamar, khalid, kimbra, lorde, mac demarco, madeon, mick jenkins, mitski, oneohtrix point never, perfume genius, ravyn lenae, rina sawayama, serpentwithfeet, sophie, st. vincent, sza, vince staples

song stuck in my head: caramelo duro | miguel // kali uchis! its a bop, miguel is one of the few singers that can convincingly make sex jams

last movie i watched: deadpool 2! it was even better than the first, which is a feat in itself ngl

when did i create my blog: december 2016??? i only started using it properly in february last year tho

last thing i googled: “im in my mums car broom broom.” dont @ me

do i have any other blogs: yeah, plenty actually!! i have blogs for aesthetic (@moltenstar), general inspo (@wverns), flight rising (@szarising, kinda inactive?), and overwatch (@blackhardts) tbh the vast majority of my ‘sideblogs’ are just saved urls H

do i get asks: when i say stupid shit like “rung has the ass of a dilf but the dick of a cockroach”

why i chose my url: that one panel where kobd have a vacation at the acid wastes because fuck its finally canon babey!

following: 1,767, which is kinda horrifying!!

followers: 890?? somehow??? thats almost One Whole Thousand and i don't even make content

average hours of sleep: around 6 or 7!! n e v e r more though

lucky number: 43 and 64!!

instruments: i'm too poor to afford music lessons or instruments jsbddsjknfs

what am i wearing: a grey shirt and nothing on my bottom half so my [redacted] is hanging tf out, i should put on some damn clothes

dream job: oooo uhhh, i’m studying to get an education degree rn because i’d love to teach children (around grade 3-4s preferably because i'm too jittery to handle anyone younger and older kids probs won't listen to me as much as i lack plenty of assertiveness), but!! i’d honestly love to be a musician, one of those underground ones that get lots of critical acclaim

dream trip: one day i wanna gather up some friends and just go on a road trip! idm where we go to, as long as we just have fun and just! adventure!

favourite foods: rare steak, mashed potatoes, eggs, and energy shakes made with like. fruit / cheese / yoghurt / oats / chia seeds ! protein is a large part of my diet

nationality: new zealand, but living in australia

favourite song right now: best part | daniel caesar // h.e.r - gosh i need to re-listen to daniel’s album again, i don’t remember this beautiful song being there and that’s a crime

@damndesi / @novarebel / @luciform-philogynist

APPEARANCE - I am 5'7 or taller - I wear glasses - I have at least one tattoo (but I am getting a tā moko in December, I believe) - I have at least one piercing (planning to get a nose ring, like a bull!) - I have blonde hair - I have brown eyes - I have short hair - My abs are at least somewhat defined (b a r e l y) - I have or had braces

PERSONALITY - I love meeting new people - People tell me I am funny - Helping others with their problems is a big priority of mine - I enjoy physical challenges - I enjoy mental challenges - I am playfully rude to people I know - I started saying something ironically and now I can’t stop saying it - There is something I would change about my personality

ABILITY - I can sing well - I can play an instrument - I can do over 30 pushups without stopping (barely) - I am a fast runner - I can draw well - I have a good memory - I am good at doing math in my head - I can hold my breath underwater for over a minute - I have beaten at least 2 people arm wrestling - I can make at least 3 recipes from scratch - I know how to throw a proper punch

HOBBIES - I enjoy sports - I’m on a sports team at my school or somewhere else - I’m in an orchestra or choir at my school or somewhere else - I have learned a new song in the past week - I exercise at least once a week - I have gone for runs at least once a week in warmer months - I have drawn something in the past month - I enjoy writing - Fandoms are my #1 priority - I do some form of Martial arts

EXPERIENCES - I have had my first kiss - I have had alcohol (tastes like shit) - I have scored a winning point in a sport - I have watched an entire TV series in one sitting - I have been at an overnight event - I have been in a taxi - I have been in the hospital or ER in the past year - I have beaten a video game in one day - I have visited another country - I have been to one of my favorite bands concerts

MY LIFE - I have one person that I consider to be my Best Friend - I live relatively close to my school/work - My parents are still together - I have at least one sibling - I live in the United States - There is snow where I live right now - I have hung out with a friend in the past month - I have a smart phone - I own at least 15 CDs - I share my room with someone

RELATIONSHIPS - I am in a Relationship - I have a crush on a celebrity - I have a crush on someone I know - I’ve been in at least 3 relationships - I have never been in a Relationship - I have admitted my feelings to a crush - I get crushes easily - I have had a crush for over a year - I have been in a relationship for over a year - I have had feelings for a friend

RANDOM - I have break-danced - I know a person named Jamie - I have had a teacher that has a name that is hard to pronounce - I have dyed my hair - I’m listening to a song on repeat right now - I have punched someone in the past week - I know someone who has gone to jail - I have broken a bone (do fractures count?) - I have eaten a waffle today - I know what I want to do in life - I speak at least two languages (not fluently) - I have made a new friend in the past year

@smstransformers

age: 16

birthplace: auckland, nz

current time: 4:19 pm rn!!!

drink you last had: i just skulled half a liter of water whoops

favourite song: jesus etc. | wilco if we're talking abt an all-time favourite

grossest memory: accidentally swallowing a bee when i was seven years old (somehow nothing bad happened?)

horror, yes or no: not unless it’s an incredibly tame horror t b h, my threshold for scariness is very low

in love: i believe so!

jealous of people: lots of times, over really dumb things

love by first sight or should I walk by again: i believe that infatuation can exist at first sight but true love not so much. wish that could happen tho :C

middle name: shane!

siblings: my sister is eight years old, and my brother is seven!

one wish: EZ, make my anxiety disappear, i’d have a much more productive life

song i last sang: jupiter | haiku hands

time i woke up: 7:13, woke up immediately because i usually like to wake at 6:30

underwear colour: blue + purble

vacation destination: auckland / kingston / sydney!

worst habit: not remembering to make my goddamn bed, it looks like garbage

favourite food: mashed potatoes….

zodiac sign: sagittarius !!!

@alyonian

relationship status:

at the moment i’m single! and while being in a relationship sounds brilliant, the last two relationships i was involved in? didn’t work out to say the least, lucky i’m still young

favourite colour:

it’s been emerald green for the longest time but orange seems to be dethroning it at a steady pace

lipstick or chapstick:

i haven’t used chapstick since i was six but i probably should use it again, water is my substitute rn fdghdgh - and i haven’t ever used lipstick in any capacity? so i’d have to go with the former

last song i listened to:

the space traveller’s lullaby | kamasi washington - i’m trying to get through his second album rn (i left off on the second disk yesterday) and while everything he makes is undeniably amazing, it’s? a three hour album? i don’t have the attention span for his spiritual jazz, as great as it is

last movie:

monsters inc is playing on the television right now, i’ll go with that! the animation aged kinda badly but it’s still such a fun movie! sidenote: james p. sullivan? a childhood crush, so this gives me memories

top 3 tv shows/podcasts/comics:

i rarely, if ever, venture into these forms of media but! if i had to answer, i’d say;

unbreakable kimmy schmidt / parks & recreation / luke cage

taz / mbmbam (i havent like. watched a full episode of either but they seem cool,)

tf idw / …………. yeah that’s it, i’ve never read anything else. probably should!

additional favs:

my friends, writing (in theory), listening to video essays, learning music theory + instruments and understanding audio production software

top 3 bands / artists:

HHH okay if i had to limit my choices to just three artists, uh. lorde, the mountain goats, and sophie. i couldnt even fit janelle in i hate th is

----------------------------------

@alyonian

color(s): light colors are always nice and pleasant, though anything peachy and sandy are the best! orange (specially pastel orange) is like. the best thing

last band t-shirt i bought: usually merchandising is very expensive and i dont have the money to accommodate that, but like. i do recall having a wiggles shirt when i was five. i wore it all the time, shjdjgsksd im sure that counts

last band i saw live: i almost went to splendor in the grass last year with family, which wasn't only cool since i’ve never been out of the state since i immigrated - the festival was in queensland, which is around a two hour flight from victoria - but the lineup was pretty fuckin lit too! the xx, haim, peking duk, tash sultana, future islands, vallis alps, a.b original,, i was p excited! unfortunately my uncle fell ill and so they had to give the tickets to extended family :( otherwise, i haven't been to a single concert in my life

last song i listened to: street fighter mas | kamasi washington - up to this song on the album and i really fuckin dig this! also the video is hypnotizing

last movie i watched: monsters inc is about to finish and up next is monsters university! which like…. honestly, this is an extremely unpopular opinion but, i like it just as much as the original? my opinion might be skewed because i’m a monster [hugger], but i like everything abt the movie! except for the finale of the scare games and the last five minutes of the movie, both were just. dreadful.

last three tv shows i watched: if aggretsuko counts that’s the last series i watched of my own volition, which is a miracle in itself considering that’s legit only the second anime i’ve watched to completion (the first being shirokuma cafe, which i probably need to re-watch). otherwise, the last two shows i had beared witness to were thirteen reasons why and queer eye bc my cousin put them on! that first show i could completely do without but queer eye is iconique

last 3 characters i identified with: grimlock (legit. all of them), urdnot grunt (mass effect) and vector the crocodile (sth), i’m not sure what this says about me other than Big

book(s) i’m currently reading: i’m reading ‘maus’ by art spiegelman at the moment, for the third time i believe? i believe my classmates are supposed to be writing an essay on this next term and shit, this novel is heartbreaking, i haven't been this emotional when reading a book than… ever, really. it’s a recommendation of the highest caliber

@victorion

name: leon / lionel, i picked up the second name because i was in a server with an admin that was also a Leon™

nickname: besides ‘Big Gay’ i also have the nickname ‘lemon lion’ which is! nice!!

zodiac sign: archer man

height: Tall™

language(s) spoken: english / some maori + italian

fav fruit: watermelons (only when in season)

fav scent: the smell of a freezer tbh? it just smells Nice i don’t know how to properly explain it

fav season: spring! the breezes are welcoming without being overbearingly freezing

fav color: ornge,,,,

fav animal: SHARKS + CROCS + FERRETS

coffee, tea or hot chocolate: tea! with some milk tho

average hrs of sleep: too little

fav fictional character: One character?????? uhhhhhhh……. like. biggest cc right now is either idw skids or oz from monster prom

no. of blankets you sleep with: depending on my mood but i’d say the average is like, 3??

fav songs: i quickly whipped up some songs i listen to

fav artists: i came to the realization that i like acts that are considered ‘bad’ like maroon 5/drake/lil yachty etc in specific doses… i wouldn't call them good yet, but! i have no beef and thats good

fav books: remember ‘where the wild things are’??? that shit was like. literal childhood, man.. :happytears: i really need to look for a copy again

@thonany-klieme

name: leon / lionel, interchangeable really

gender: male, im probs an nb guy

star sign: sagittarius!

height: 6’1

sexuality: gay??? im not sure, im mostly attracted to other guys but i have had very brief crushes on girls + nb people? sexuality’s confusing so im gonna just latch to the gaybel (gay label) for now

lock screen image: its the album cover of 1992 deluxe by princess nokia, tho it was “T Hanos” a few days ago since i change it often - my home screen is venom but his torso says ‘fuck machine’

ever had a crush on a teacher: no??

where do you see yourself in ten years: ideally i’m teaching kids math n english, realistically i’m probably going down with the political climate

if you could go anywhere, where would you go: new zealand!! or the netherlands

what was your favorite halloween costume: halloween is not big at all where i live, the only time i tried trick or treating was when i was like 7?? i threw a bedsheet on myself and pretended to be a ghost, though since there were no eyeholes + the sheet was blue, it looked more like i was just a moving lump

last kiss: never had one

have you ever been to las vegas: nah and i dont plan to?? how do you handle regular days of 40C wtf

favorite pair of shoes: i have this pair of jandals that ive worn for a fair bit longer than my other pair of shoes, tho i only wear them in summer + very warm nights

favorite book: ngl its. ‘the very hungry caterpillar’ by eric carle. i just, love it alot and i cant explain w h y

#acid.txt #this took a while but :wahoo:

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ghostbustershq · 3 years

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Out Today, Randy Edelman's 1989 Ghostbusters II Score Album!

The wait is over! After 30+ years of fans wondering if they’ll ever get an official release of Randy Edelman’s bouncy and jovial score to Ghostbusters II, today is the day! Sony Masterworks has remastered and released 16 tracks, including three that have been newly recorded and one scored for the film but not ultimately used.

Stay tuned to the HQ for an in-depth analysis of the score, we’ll be doing our best impression of David Collins soon and trying to line up some of the cues with the film to see what and where material was unused or altered in post production.

And don’t forget the vinyl release hits October 16th. As previously mentioned here on the site, there are glow-in-the-dark Barnes and Noble and Mondo exclusives forthcoming. Stay tuned for more information on those as it develops.

In the meantime, here’s much more information from the good folks at Sony Masterworks:

GHOSTBUSTERS II

ORIGINAL MOTION PICTURE SCORE BY RANDY EDELMAN

AVAILABLE TO STREAM FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER & ON CD TODAY

SCORE TO THE 1989 FILM CLASSIC WILL ALSO BE AVAILABLE FOR THE FIRST TIME ON VINYL BEGINNING FRIDAY, OCTOBER 15 – PREORDER NOW

NEW YORK, NY – For the first time ever and 32 years after the film’s 1989 release, the Original Score to Ghostbusters II is now available to stream and on CD format today from Sony Classical – LISTEN HERE. Featuring score music by award-winning musician, producer and composer Randy Edelman, the 16-track album includes original recordings of the film classic’s score as well as 3 newly re-recorded tracks and an additional song originally recorded by Edelman for the film but not featured in its final production. The album will also be available in vinyl format beginning Friday, October 16, arriving as a gatefold set featuring photos from the film – PREORDER HERE.

Of the score, composer RANDY EDELMAN says, “In Ghostbusters II, the characters and storyline were expertly conceived and then acted in the sequel brilliantly. The story took place a few years later, but in a sense each character already had a distinct personality, which hadn’t changed a bit. In a way, they carried their own music and soul with them. Their interactions in each scene would determine if musical accompaniment was necessary, and, in most cases, it was not. The new storyline and menace the city of New York was facing, the dark nature of the evil Carpathian, that was where this score would be most urgent. That and the supernatural, explosive and inventive methods of the group of our forward-thinking pals, was where the heart of my score would and should lie. Though I had watched and thoroughly loved the original film several years before, I decided not to view it during my involvement with the sequel. I knew I needed to carefully sculpt a musical palette for this new specific screenplay and did not reference any aspect of the original movie, trying to give Ghostbusters II a well-deserved, new color all its own. I will always appreciate the fact that this decision of mine was never once questioned.”

Speaking of his collaborators to the project, Randy continues, “Upon looking back at any score after so many years, a composer is surely cognizant of those who they were surrounded by, in a process that is always so challenging in many ways. In the case of the sequel to Ghostbusters, I was working on one of my first large scale orchestral works and one that followed the great success of the first movie. I was assisted by the great orchestrator, Mr. Greig McRitchie, music editor Kathy Durning, and engineers Elton Ahi and Robert Fernandez. I have elsewhere here thanked [Director] Ivan Reitman for a stern, yet assuring hand, in his direction at all times, and his confidence in trusting me totally throughout the always delicate process. The large orchestra gave me a spiritual high at each session, and I thank all the wonderful players who participated and lent their talent to my efforts. I got to revisit a few thematic moments for this collection, and it was a blast to be able to do that. It brought back all those incredible memories, and made that magic happen right now, once more. How lucky to experience it over again – I am one fortunate piano player!”

ABOUT RANDY EDELMAN

Music royalty with a career challenging the longevity that rivals the Queen of England, composer, conductor, singer and celebrated piano phenomena Randy Edelman has long been given tribute as one of the most profound and recognizable film, television, and sports soundtrack architects on the planet. A hybrid fusion of Mozart and Bruce Springsteen, there seems to be a certain bedazzlement or wizardry connected to him and his music that leaves a trail of glitter behind never to be forgotten.

Raised in Teaneck New Jersey, Randy was born with the ability to hear music and transcribe it onto the piano. After a brief quarrel with fate where Randy was temporally thrust into the pursuit of pre-med, he moved into full-time piano and composition study at the Cincinnati Music Conservatory where he was then able to follow his unquestionable destiny. He eventually procured an arranging assignment at James Brown’s King Records. In 1970 Randy relocated to New York to work as a staff writer at CBS Records while simultaneously playing piano in Broadway pit orchestras.

Like a seductive alchemist Randy began to write and record his own albums transforming the world’s anguish into a narrative of truth and granting him a thriving audience in the UK and a television spot on “Top of the Pops.” After enjoying the triumph of the British collective effervescence at the London Palladium and Drury Lane Theatre, Randy began to pursue a new interest in LA where he became interested in creating the life, blood and essence of the movies through music, making the plainest faces come alive with promise.

Randy is responsible for creating an endless cascade of many of the world’s most known soundtracks including: Ghostbusters II, 27 Dresses, While You Were Sleeping, The Last of the Mohicans, Kindergarten Cop, Dragonheart, XXX, Twins, My Cousin Vinny, The Mask, Beethoven, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, Anaconda, Mummy 3, Gettysburg, Billy Madison, Leap Year, The Whole Nine Yards, EdTV, Daylight and an endless array of others. Some of the television shows and series he scored include: MacGyver, Mr. Sunshine, Backdraft 2 for Netflix, and Citizen X for HBO. These credits only touch the surface of his accomplishments. He has also created the music for “Dare Mighty Things” for NASA’s final Shuttle launch, “Wimbledon, Grand Slam Tennis Series” for ESPN, “ESPN Sports Century,” and even the NBC “on air” Olympic Theme, of which he has celebrated over 20 years of Olympic themed glory keeping the musical flame alive.

Aside from crafting and orchestrating the scores that gave life to the films, a myriad of artists have covered and recorded Randy’s original songs from his solo albums. Included in that catalog is Barry Manilow’s “Weekend in New England,” The Carpenters’ “I Cant Make Music” and Nelly’s “My Place,” reaching Number 1 on the Billboard Hip Hop charts. Others include Willie Nelson’s “Down in the Everglades,” Patti LaBelle’s “Isn’t it a Shame,” Olivia Newton John’s “If Love is Real,” Blood, Sweat & Tears’ “Blue Street,” Royal Philharmonic’s “Grey,” and a list that continues endlessly. Randy has also opened live in breathtaking arenas for icons such as Frank Zappa and The Carpenters.

Randy has also received some of the most prestigious awards including BMI Top Grossing Film Awards, BMI’s highest honor, the Richard Kirk Award for Outstanding Career Achievement, the Lifetime Achievement Award in Film Scoring and Composition, the Best Accolade from the Los Angeles Film Awards, an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts and an Emmy for the close of the Olympic Broadcast.

Like a musical Chameleon, Randy continues to compose and record, lighting up the world like fireworks plunging into the night sky and shattering the darkness. The grand composer of modern and future times has just released his highly anticipated anthemic song of hope and inspiration titled “Comin’ Out the Other Side.” The single is now available worldwide via Soho Records. The song promotes an epidemic of joy and happiness as a grand finale to a time best forgotten….

He continues to work on the score for his musical, “Short Cut,” telling of the construction of the Panama Canal. Most recently Sony Masterworks is releasing Randy Edelman’s orchestral score to Ghostbusters II in all formats....

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hillbillyhippiemusicreview · 4 years

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Post #45—Interview with Addison Lea Thompson

Hey all you hillbillies and hippies! I hope you’re doing well out there in Quarantine-Land. If you’re anything like me, I imagine you’re getting antsy for some live music to soothe your soul. Thankfully, during this time, a lot of artists have been putting out new tunes for us to enjoy and alleviate the blues. Speaking of new tunes, one of our favorite HHMR alums—Addison Lea Thompson—joins us today to discuss life and music during the shutdown and what the future holds.

L: Well, hey there King of Honky Tonk Loud Nation! How’s this quarantine been treating you with no bars to play on?

ALT: It has been a blessing and a curse. Any one that knows me, knows I live for road life and touring. My friends and family are probably going nuts being around me, having not been on the road for a while. However the upside is I am able to get back to my original love and help out on the family ranch, I have also been able to do a lot more writing recently as well as put a lot of effort into a new album that we have in the works. So, overall I’m doing well, but damn am I ready to be back on the road.

L: I love the road myself, so I can imagine you’re as stir-crazy as I am! How do you keep busy when you’re off the road?

ALT: I love the ranch life so you can usually find me perched on a tractor or fixing fence or one of the thousands of other things you need to get done on a cattle operation. When I am not doing either of those things I absolutely love to hunt and fish. I have been an outdoorsman my whole life, and I do my best to take time out of my schedule to go drop some flies on a river or go chase some Elk in the mountains.

L: So, you’ve been rather vocal on social media about your need to honky-tonk during this time of economic shutdown. Finally, it appears the music scene is opening back up. What was your first show post-quarantine like? Was it anything like you expected? Any remnants of days gone by left?

ALT: It was absolutely great to be back! There were some odd things that I am still getting used to, such as the social distancing guidelines in the venues and all. I’ll also admit that I was rusty as hell the first three songs, but man oh man I got into the groove on a “Dixieland Delight” cover around song number four and it was like being back on a horse you love to ride. I was back in the groove and back to doing what I love. I personally think we will be back to normal in the future.

L: Hopefully you are right and the scene will be hoppin’ again before long! When you’re able to tour regularly again, where would you like to play?

ALT: All over! Hahaha, in all honesty thats the answer. I have toyed with the idea of doing the western United States route I love doing so much, but I have also been super bummed that we had to cancel so many Midwest dates, and I really want to make those up as soon as possible because the folks out there have always been so amazing to me over the years. I also want to be able to share the stage with as many of my friends in this business as I can. I think some gigs with The Comancheros, Billy Don, Jeff Hopson, ole Uncle Dallas and so many more will be a well needed cure. Our plan is once its possible to set up a tour we are just going to hit as much of the U.S. as we can as quick as we can.

L: Most artists have their favorite venues to play whilst on the road and have that “Mecca” of a location they aspire to play. Where’s your favorite place to play and your dream venue?

ALT: I honestly don’t have a favorite, because there have been so many over the years that I have come to know and frequent. I will say the Moose Bar in Dillon, MT will always have a special place in my heart, because it is where I got my start, and it will always be my home bar. That was where it all started. My dream venue without a doubt is Billy Bobs Texas. I make a point to go grab a beer there every trip I make to Fort Worth. I’ll sit there and stare at that stage for damn near an hour and just keep saying “One day, Addison.” I know that sounds cheesy as all get out, but it’s sort of my cheesy moment I can always look at on a rough day.

L: That’s certainly a great—and reachable—goal, and I admire you for respecting your roots. What made you decide to start playing and writing music?

ALT: Music has always been a part of my life, I started piano at a very young age, I was in my school band, I was in the church handbell choir, church vocal choir, and the list goes on forever. I was the weird kid in high school wearing band tee’s and flannel, blasting classic country and rock through my headphones between classes. I was sort of just doomed from the get go. I’ve always written as well since grade school: short stories, comic books—I’ve got stacks of novels I never finished writing, poetry, again you name it! So, basically the two just came together somewhere in high school.

L: I can relate to the notion of being doomed from the start! The lyric “Way back on the radio dial, a fire got lit inside a bright eyed child” is my truth. When I started writing, I always made it a point to incorporate my life experiences. Can you elaborate on how your experience as a cowboy influences your writing and the stories you tell.

ALT: It’s my world. I have covered a lot of miles and met some amazing folks in my short life, all because of being a cowboy. It’s a unique world with its own culture, and that culture is so much of who I am and where I come from (Not to accidentally quote my own song there haha). You write what you know and I know the cattle ranching world and rodeo world. I always have felt if I tried to be anything other than myself and what I know in my music, people would know in an instant moment that it was fake.

L: It’s apparent from your music and lifestyle that you are very real—your music alludes to all things cowboy and western. So, what does the phrase “Heavy and Western” mean to you?

ALT: To me it means that I’m hanging out with my buddies “The Comancheros" and there will be a lot of talk about classic rock and Star Wars happening hahaha.

L: That’s a solid answer! Love those Comancheros! When I reviewed your most recent release, Western Sky, I focused a bit extra on two songs full of western imagery, yet with quite heavy undertones: “Towards the Light” and “Single Barrel Hell.” I was particularly drawn to the stories woven throughout the lyrics and I related deeply given my past with mental illness and suicide attempts. You mentioned I was the first to get the meaning behind them that didn’t know what they were about. Can you expand on your inspirations behind the songs?

ALT: For sure! Suicide awareness/prevention is a cause near and dear to my heart. I have lost several friends to it, I have my own personal experience with it, and I think there is a need to shine a light on what I personally think is a very “needed to be discussed subject”. I never went into the writing of either of those songs with the mindset of “oh, I’m going to make this big point about the subject”. I just wanted to tell both of these stories. One is the story of a combat veteran friend of mine, and the other is a collection of stories that are about a lot of people that have been through the same situation.

L: It’s a great cause to highlight and every bit helps to end the stigma. Where can your fans see you play those songs next? Also, where can they connect with you on social media?

ALT: Right now due to the current situation with Covid-19 we don’t have the normal solid schedule I like having, I will be trying to do more Facebook live feeds, and as soon as we get live shows booked everyone else will be the first one to know as soon as I know. You can catch me on the inter webs at Addison Lea Thompson on Facebook, @addisonleathompsonmusic on Instagram, and @AddisonLeaMT on Twitter. Or you can of course go to www.addisonleathompson.com

L: Speaking of social media, what’s your viewpoint on it and the effect it has on the music industry?

ALT: You know it is a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because unlike back in the day, you can access a large crowd very quickly and find your market very quickly. It makes it easy for people that enjoy your music to stay up to date on whats going on. You can get the word out about shows, a new record, new merchandise—you name it. The only downside is you don’t want to get carried away using it as a platform for things that might not really effect your music. I make it a pretty solid rule to not post about touchy topics, because at the end of the day, people should be able to believe in what they want to believe in and it has no effect on me.

L: I can get behind that. It’s been a blessing to stay connected with new music lately. I’ve heard through the grapevine, namely via you, that there are new tunes on the way. What can you tell me about this project?

ALT: It will be sonically unlike anything I have ever put out, but also reminiscent of both of the previous records. I wanted to go different than what we have done historically on this record, and we have made that point key in the process. We are drawing on a lot of influences and ideas I have always had, but never pulled out of the bag. It has been an absolute blast working on the project and it will feature some awesome co-writers on some of the songs, all who are good friends of mine. In my personal opinion lyrically, this album is the best songwriting I have done to date.

L: I’m excited to hear it! Now, time for some lighthearted questions to get to know you better. You’re obviously quite talented in the music realm, but what would you consider your most useless talent?

ALT: I know a lot of good dad jokes, and I am excellent at being one of the most technologically impaired people on the planet.

L: Dad jokes are quite nerdy, but other than that talent what is the nerdiest thing about you that fans may not know?

ALT: I am a HUGE American Civil War history buff. I can’t tell you how many damn books, documentaries, and artifacts I own from the era. When I was 13 my folks let ME pick a vacation destination for the summer, big mistake on their part because I totally picked three days touring the Gettysburg Battlefield.

L: That’s awesome! It’s one of my favorite eras in history, too. So, it’s time for the final question—think hard. We at HHMR love to ask artists is what they perceive their spirit animal to be. So, what is yours? And why?

ALT: North American Bison, the main reason I say that is that it is an animal I am obsessed with. The necklace people always see me wearing is a Bison necklace. They are an incredible animal that just enamor me so I am personally going to say Bison. Ask my family and friends they’ll probably tell you an old mule, since I’m so stubborn.

Well there ya have it folks—the man behind the music is quite the interesting feller! But, I think I may be able to outdo him on the dad jokes...

What did the buffalo say to his son when he left for college? Bison!

On that note, I gotta go, buffalo. Y’all be sure to stay connected with all things Addison Lea Thompson via his social media. In the meantime, brush up on your puns so you can challenge him to a Dad Joke Duel and tune into the Facebook live shows until we can meet again in person. Stay safe and healthy. I’ll see y’all down the road.

Peace, love, & music

—Lyssa

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