Saturday, August 1, 2020

NEW SOUNDS

TAYLOR SWIFT


While Taylor Swift had planned to spend the summer on a worldwide tour to promote her last album, "Lover" released last year, a nasty virus got in the way of her concert plans. With plenty of time on her hands (much like the rest of us), the singer spent the last few months creating new music and what came out of that is her eighth studio album, "Folklore". This collection does not feature the inflated, synth-pop production of her previous records. Yet it is also not a clear return to her early country music roots. 

The album offers something a little different; low-key and mature songs that look at our complicated, turbulent times that plays best to her strengths which is vivid songwriting. Swift uses classic folklore, which are stories that blur the lines between truth and fiction, to create songs that are far less self-referential than her music in the past. I must admit I've never been a huge fan of Swift's (more of an admirer) but I must say that I really enjoyed "Folklore" and think this is the thirty-year old superstar's strongest album to date. 

And clearly many others seem to agree. "Folklore" has broken streaming records with Swift having the biggest opening day for an album by a female artist on Spotify and the album has sold 1.3 million copies globally on its first day on July 24th. Swift has stated that the album "started with imagery" so the videos are just as important to express her ideas as the music for "Folklore". She even got behind the camera to direct the clip for the first single, "Cardigan".







KYLIE MINOGUE


After dipping her toes in to some down-home, country-pop with her last album, "Golden" in 2018, Kylie Minogue seems ready to get back to what she's best known for; dance-flavored, pop music. And the title of her upcoming fifteenth studio album says it all: "Disco". The fifty-two year old, down-under pop diva has just dropped the first single, "Say Something" and it is definitely a shimmering dance floor banger. The song (co-written by Minogue with Ash Howes and producers, Jonathan Green and Richard "Biff" Stannard) is about the never-ending quest for love and is just what we need to hear right now. Minogue worked on the album (due out on November 6th) while in quarantine and even learned how to record and engineer her vocals on her own using music software in order to help get the record completed.



And here are a few videos of new music I'm enjoying right now:





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