NEW SOUNDS

SADE 

Sade Adu, the reclusive pop artist who has largely been out of the spotlight since her last album, "Soldier of Love" with her band also called Sade and the world tour that followed to support the record about fourteen years ago. Without her long-time band, she has unexpectedly released a new song that is very important and meaningful to her. In 2016, Adu's only child, now named Izaak, came out as a transgendered man. Sade has contributed the song, "Young Lion" that will be a part of the compilation album, "Transa", which features forty-six songs from over one hundred musicians in celebration of the trans community. This moving song, written by Adu with Aaron Taylor Dean and Ben Travers, offers a mother's apology to her son for not giving enough support during his early days of transitioning. "Young Lion" is based on a letter Sade gave to her son on his 21st birthday. And after deciding the message was so important, especially during these fraught times with attacks on the trans community, the song was created to share with the world.



TYLA

Tyla burst on the scene with her breakthrough single, "Water" last year. This Afrobeat track helped build excitement for the debut album by the twenty-two year old South African performer. With her self-titled album released earlier this year, there is now a deluxe edition of the record, simply titled "Tyla +". There are three new track included; the African drum driven, "Shake Ah", the ballad, "Back to You" and the reggae-fused single, "Push 2 Start". The music video for this track delivers a visual vibe of r&b from the beginning of this century, bringing to mind the colorful styles of Rihanna and Beyoncé.



OMAR APOLLO

The pop singer, Omar Apollo makes his acting debut with a supporting role in director Luca Guadagnino's upcoming film, "Queer". Based on the novella by William S. Burroughs, Daniel Craig stars as William Lee, an American living in 1950's Mexico City and becoming infatuated with a younger American, played by Drew Starkey. Apollo appears as a hombre that Lee picks up in a bar and proceeds to have an intimate encounter. The singer has also provided a song for the soundtrack, "Te Maldigo" which is produced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. This mournful ballad (which roughly translates to "I curse you") is about damning a former lover for no longer loving him. Guadagino  as directed the music video for this song which is set, much like the film, in a smoky Mexican bar.

RANDOM SIGHTS + SOUNDS

Céline Dion's inability to sing properly due to a rare neurological disorder is absolutely one of the great tragedies for pop music. A fascinating yet heartbreaking new documentary (now streaming on Amazon Prime), "I Am: Celine Dion" from filmmaker Irene Taylor has Dion going into great detail about this secret she had kept from the public and her fans for many years. The film not only looks back on her illustrious career but Dion allows the camera to capture her struggles with this illness and her valiant attempt to rehabilitate enough to possibly make a triumphant return to the stage 

The film is broken down into sections: from explaining what her body goes through with Stiff Person Syndrome; her loving yet challenging childhood of being one of fourteen children; having her three sons with the love of her life, René Angélil who began as her manager then her husband before passing away in 2016 and the harrowing moment when Dion goes through a severe seizure. Open, vulnerable and very charming, Dion holds nothing back, revealing herself to be a determined, fierce fighter. There is a soundtrack for the film which highlights her career in song and six music scores by Redi and Ekland Hasa. A new remix of the ballad, "Love Again" also appears on the record which was the title track from the romantic-comedy released last year where Dion made her acting debut playing a heightened version of herself.

Here is a round-up of some new music that has caught my attention: "Aright", the new single from Victoria Monét's debut album, "Jaguar II" with a music video that shows off her incredible dance moves while paying a little visual tribute to Janet Jackson; Mette, a rising actor, dancer and musician, has released a dance-pop single, "Bet"; Another actor/musician is Moses Sumney who has dropped his latest project, an alt-r&b track, "Vintage"; the second album from Omar Apollo, "God Said No" is out now with an interesting video for the recent single, "Done With You" and Bronze Avery has a sexy new video out for his perfect summer song, "Heatwave":











Ariana Grande has a single called, "The Boy is Mine" off her album, "Eternal Sunshine". That title brings to mind to some people the classic '90's r&b duet that featured Brandy and Monica. Grande was very aware of that and cleverly had these two make a brief appearance in the music video for her song. And she has gone one step further by having Brandy and Monica performing on the remix of "The Boy is Mine". Also let's take a look back at "The Boy Is Mine" with Brandy and Monica from 1998:

Françoise Hardy, the French chanteuse and style icon, passed away on June 11th at the age of eighty. Hardy came to fame as a singer of the yé-yé musical wave that emerged in the 1960's. She didn't have a major impact here in America but in France, Hardy was an important and influential figure in pop music and fashion. She recorded over thirty albums during her career, singing not only in her native French but also in English, Italian and German. One of her most popular songs was "Comment te dire adieu (How To Say Goddbye To You)" which was released in 1968. Originally recorded by Margaret Whiting in English two years earlier as "It Hurts To Say Goodbye", Hardy heard an instrumental version of the song and had Serge Gainsbourg write French lyrics. Hardy made a few films, usually playing a singer, which includes cameos in the comedy, "What's New, Pussycat?", Jean-Luc Godard's "Masculin Féminin" and the Hollywood racing drama, "Grand Prix".

RANDOM SIGHTS + SOUNDS

Darren Hayes first began his career as part of the Australian pop duo, Savage Garden with Daniel Jones, who found immediate global success with their self-titled debut album in 1997. "I Want You", "To the Moon and Back", and "Truly Madly Deeply" were hit singles from the record and their follow-up album, "Affirmation" brought them even more popularity with "I Knew I Loved You", a worldwide smash. However by the end of 2001, Savage Garden was no more. Hayes continued his music as a solo artist, releasing his first album, "Spin" in 2002. After his follow-up album, Hayes parted ways his major label, Columbia Records, later forming his own label, Powdered Sugar in 2006.

It was during this period that Hayes began his process of coming out as gay, beginning a relationship with Richard Cullen although he did not reveal any of this publicly at the time. The couple married in 2013 and announced their happy union to the world. With his fifth studio album, boldly titled, "Homosexual", the now fifty year old performer proudly proclaims that he no longer feels any shame for who he is with the goal to reclaim the word from something viewed as negative. This dance-pop album is filled with the type of love songs that Hayes had written since the start of career yet they are told from a point of view involving maturity, honesty and newfound joy. Here are two songs from Hayes' new album and one of my favorites from his time with Savage Garden with the video featuring Kirsten Dunst (!) as Hayes' love interest:

A "new" song from the original line-up of the rock band, Queen has just been released. Originally recorded back in 1988 during the sessions for their final album together, "The Miracle", "Face It Alone" features Freddie Mercury's singularly passionate vocals on this mournful ballad. This song came to be heard only by accident as band members, Brian May and Roger Taylor had found the tape recently but it was in such bad shape that they thought it could not be salvaged. But they did give the track to an engineering team who were miraculously able to piece the song back together. This really is an amazing song (recorded while Mercury had been diagnosed with HIV and in failing health) and it's really great to hear this band together again.



Here is a collection of some new songs I'm loving right now:

In 1990, Sinéad O'Connor, the Irish rocker with the shaved head, was a rising pop star, in part due to her wildly successful cover of Prince's song, "Nothing Compares 2 U" which was enhanced by the music video, played in heavy rotation on MTV, that featured a close-up of the emotive singer shedding actual tears while performing the ballad. But that momentum began to slow down first after she refused to have the American National anthem played before her concerts (enraging Frank Sinatra) before coming to crashing halt after her 1992 television appearance as the musical guest on "Saturday Night Live". O'Connor performed an a cappella version of Bob Marley's "War", then tearing up a photo of Pope John Paul II to protest his silence on the sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church. This act outraged many people at the time and even though she would be vindicated for her actions years later after the Church acknowledged the abuse, O'Connor's career, while she continued to make music, would not really recover.

The fascinating documentary, "Nothing Compares" by Kathryn Ferguson explores O'Connor's life before this troublesome incident, allowing for some explanation for behavior many might consider strange and erratic. She grew up in an abusive household as a young girl in Ireland who later suffered extreme trauma while staying at the Magdalene asylum for over a year as a teenager. Music was where O'Connor found solace and after the drummer for the band, In Tua Nua heard her sing, he had her record a song with the group. Although they decided she was too young to join their band, O'Connor was determined to continue on a music career, placing an ad in a rock magazine and meeting musician/producer, Colm Farrelly who would help her form a band and inspire her sound that would lead to her debut album, "The Lion and the Cobra" in 1987. O'Connor did not participate with this film, with Ferguson using off-camera interviews with people who had worked with the singer, previous interviews and plenty of performance footage by O'Connor to help shape the documentary. And you will not hear "Nothing Compares 2 U" in this film, just outtakes from the music video, as the estate of Prince would not allow the song to be used, most likely due to some of the unpleasant comments O'Connor had said about the late singer over the years.